by Michael Dean
‘Are you still dead set on going back, Robert?’ the Queen asked him.
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Robert smiled. The smile was genuine enough, but he knew its effect on ladies, young and old, regal or plebeian. ‘I’d better get a move on, while I can still do the parachute drop. I’m getting on a bit in years, ma’am.’
‘You are flagrantly fishing for compliments, Robert. I shall not respond. Now, Captain, I have a name to give you. Tell me what you think of him.’
Wilhelmina trusted Robert’s judgement of people. That was one reason she did not want to lose him, even for a short mission back to Holland.
‘Hein Broersen,’ she said. ‘You know him, do you not?’
‘Hein!’ Robert looked pleased. ‘Is Hein …?’
‘He’ll be here in five minutes. So hurry up.’
‘He made it!’
‘Yes. Via Ijmuiden in a twelve-foot open-hull dinghy, apparently.’
‘In a dinghy! Oh, well done, Hein!’
‘I’m waiting, Robert.’
‘Yes, ma’m. There are certain types of people who do well in wartime,’ Robert began, carefully. ‘One type is a success because they are so ordinary, so overlookable.
Hein’s like that. If I had to choose anybody I know to work in an occupied country, I’d choose Hein. Because nobody would notice him. He’s also practical, clear-thinking, limited, self-sufficient, and loyal as a dog.’
‘Ideal for sabotage work, then?’
‘None better, ma’am.’
‘Good. He wants to go back with you.’
‘Well, he can’t. I’m going tomorrow. Hein hasn’t started training yet. And I’m not waiting for him.’
‘I’ll leave you to break that to him yourself. Here he is.’
Hein Broersen, in an ancient grey flannel suit, was being lead across the lawn by a Dutch ADC, in the uniform of an RAF lieutenant. When he was introduced to the Queen, he blushed scarlet and stammered out that he was honoured.
There is a saying that when any two Dutchmen meet, they have only to talk for a minute or so, before they discover people they both know. Hein and Robert knew each other, as acquaintances, already, and soon the air was thick with news of people they had in common.
The news from home was mixed; resistance was increasing, but so were German reprisals.
‘I have something for you,’ Hein said to Robert, when they had finally run out of gossip.
‘Oh, really!’
‘With your permission, ma’am?’
Wilhelmina gave her permission, by tilting her head. Hein handed over two pieces of paper. One of the them was a letter from his son, Manny. Robert glanced at it with no great interest. The other piece of paper was a sketch, perfectly to scale. It showed the shipyard where the cruiser Armenius was being built .
*
As the Lysander crossed the North Sea, across a nearly full moon, Robert Roet took a slug of oude jenever from a hip flask. He stretched his legs out, pressing his back against the fuselage, as best he could with a bulky parachute strapped to his back. Then he took another slug of the jenever – feeling the viscous gin tickle every vein in his body.
It surprised him how sad he was to be leaving London. The swanky meals at Browns Hotel, with ministers of the Dutch government. All those drunken revelries at Oddenino’s, in Piccadilly, with Chris Krediet and Gerard Dogger. Oddenino’s kept a few crocks of jenever under the counter, especially for the Dutch.
But, nevertheless, as they say, ‘East or West, home is best.’ He was heading back to Holland. He had missed the Dutch sky. It’s different from anywhere else in the world, though England’s East Anglia comes closest. He had begged a staff-car and driven all the way to Norfolk, one weekend, just to look up at a near-Dutch sky.
Robert thought back to his training, on attachment with the British SOE. He remembered Beaulieu mainly for Charlotte Black, a fellow trainee, about to be parachuted into France, in search of her boyfriend. Demure in her Scottish tweed skirts, woollen pullovers, and purring Edinburgh accent, she dropped her drawers for anybody who asked, and for one or two people who hadn’t. Humiliatingly, he couldn’t keep up with her - either in desired frequency or duration.
He had gone completely bananas when he discovered she was relieving France, in the form of one of the Free French, at the same time as him: After an evening getting sloshed on pints of Bass at the Royal Oak, he had staggered back across the heath to Boarmans, the country-house where the SOE trainees were being put up. He had then unwisely attempted to roger Charlotte, who was up for it, as ever. The result was mediocre – OK, make that disastrous.
Charlotte had waited for him to fall into a drunken stupor, left his bed, and tiptoed off, along the draughty corridor, to her Free Frenchman. He, Robert, had woken up, found her gone, followed her scent. When he heard her at it, he banged on the chap’s door, burst in, and pulled her off him. He then started an ineffectual fight with the French chap, both of them stark naked, while Charlotte, also naked, sat on the floor and laughed her head off.
He had ended up under arrest, briefly. They searched his room and found his stash of Gordon’s gin bottles – some drunk, some full. Only his connection with Prince Bernhard saved him from being thrown off the course – though he said he would leave, rather than have the Queen told. He was hit by the Black Birds, as he called them – dark depressions lasting weeks. They were getting worse as he got older.
He must have dozed for a while. An extraordinarily young-looking RAF Flight Lieutenant made his way along the lurching Lysander, and touched his arm. It was time to go. Time to put his parachute training into practice. He knew they had crossed what the RAF called the Kammhuber Line, a ring of anti-aircraft guns, radar stations and night-fighter bases. They were approaching Holland from the north, over the Afsluitdijk and the Zuyder Zee. The drop was to be at Noordwijk, north of The Hague and Scheveningen.
Robert took a last swig of jenever, to the RAF man’s utter horror, and stepped from the Lysander into a Dutch sky, albeit a black one. He tumbled down, then heard, then felt, his parachute opening. He caught a glimpse of the parachute containing his kit, reassuringly close. He dropped down, just into the surf, and frantically gathered up his chute, before it got waterlogged. It was silent and the beach was reassuringly empty. He buried the parachute as deep as he could, in the soft sand of the dunes, beyond the tide-mark.
In the darkness, it took him twenty minutes to locate the parachute with his kit. There was no sign of his welcoming committee, who were supposed to help with this. But he knew how difficult things were for the Geuzen. They would have to break curfew to get here; that was not always easy.
He began to bury his kit, near his parachute, but not in exactly the same place. He buried the radio-transmitter first. Though not that much bigger than a car battery, it weighed a ton. With it, he buried his gun, the Belgian FN 6.35 he had asked for.
They had issued him with a silk map of the whole of western Europe. It was in a small waterproof canvas bag, marked Maps Only, in English. He shook his head, ruefully, then buried it, deep. In the same hole, he buried his Escape Kit, containing a compass in a matchbox, twenty Horlicks tablets, a fishing line with a hook, and a phrase card in French, Spanish, German and Dutch. None of this was the slightest use.
He had heard from Dutch agents in the field, that the SOE’s habit of issuing everybody with Camel cigarettes was known to the Germans, so he buried the cigarettes, too.
He kept only the four Benzedrine tablets – to stay awake for long periods – and his suicide tablet. Sitting on the ground, he carefully pulled out a hollowed-out tooth, fitted by a dentist called Beryl in Wimpole Street, just before he left. The SOE, so slapdash in so many ways, had insisted that Beryl replace his recent English fillings with continental-style Platarcke. Beryl had hollowed the tooth at the same time. He pushed his cyanide pill into the hollow, then pushed the tooth back in. It was working loose – nothing to be done about that now.
There was also nothing he coul
d do about his clothes – the SOE bought them in bulk, so all agents had the same brown shoes, the same striped shirts, and so on. He had thought of mentioning this to Fat Laming, the head of SOE’s N (Netherlands) Section, but after the Charlotte Black business, anything that smacked of trouble from him would have had him out on his ear.
He glanced at his papers, by moonlight. His persoonsbewijs – ID card - was in his field-name - Jan Veen. He cursed softly, in Dutch, as he noticed the lions on the ID card’s watermark - they were facing the same way. They should be facing each other. He also had a noodkart – a food ration book – which he hoped was current issue. If it wasn’t, it could be a death warrant.
Robert made his way over the powdery sand, ghostly in the moonlight, to the boardwalk. A voice behind him said ‘Hey.’ He wheeled round, but with a smile already forming on his face. The voice sounded like a child. But more importantly, it was unmistakeably Dutch.
There were two of them, obviously brother and sister, aged thirteen or fourteen – the boy looked older. They had flaxen hair, blue eyes and serious expressions. They were dressed as if for a party, the boy in a smart suit and tie, the girl in a pretty pink dress.
That was clever, Robert thought.
The boy said ‘Come mister’ slowly, in English. Robert smiled and said ‘I’m Dutch,’ softly. It pleased him to say that, on Dutch soil. He showed the youngsters where the transmitter and his gun were buried, so they could help him find them, next morning.
They led him down a lane, over a rickety wooden bridge over a canal, to a prosperous looking farmhouse. The farmer and his wife made him welcome, without introducing themselves. The woman silently presented a meal of grey bread, cucumber and tomato, a slice of ham, and artificial coffee. Robert ate thankfully.
‘How are things?’ he asked.
‘You’ve been in England?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not easy. They are taking more and more. Wireless sets. Now bicycles.’
‘Ducks!’ the boy piped up.
‘Yes, ducks.’
‘You look done in,’ the woman said, sympathetically. ‘Get some sleep.’
Next morning, he was still eating breakfast when the farmer brought his transmitter, and his gun. As soon as he finished eating, Robert went out into a field behind the farm, to set up transmission.
His contact was called Huib Lievers. Transmitting on the agreed frequency, 6677 k/cs, Robert sent his call-sign, TBO, and his codename - beetroot. Lievers replied, setting up a meeting in Amsterdam - at the Café Sterrebos, off Leidse Plein, at five o’ clock.
The transmission was over in two minutes, not enough time for German intercept vans to pick it up and trace it.
*
The whole of the top floor of Sipo/SD headquarters at the old Colonial Building was an Operations and Communications room. There were senders, receivers and wireless sets on tables all round the walls. In the middle of the room, trestle-tables held code books, telephone directories, the bible in English and Dutch, and novels and poems used as the basis of codes. Volumes of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe were particularly well-thumbed.
Rauter had a reputation for hard work; he had been seen in this room in the early hours of the morning, many times. He was formal with subordinates, so the atmosphere in the Operations Room was restrained. He was talking to Hermann Giskes, who headed Section III F, Counter Espionage for the Low Countries. The other man in the room was tapping out Morse in Dutch into an English-made transmitter. He had headphones on. Rauter and Giskes were ignoring him.
‘And he’s just landed?’ Rauter was saying.
‘It’s his first broadcast,’ Giskes said. ‘He’ll have landed last night. In the Scheveningen area.’
‘And what’s his field name?’
‘Jan Veen,’ Giskes said.
Hanns-Albin Rauter nodded. ‘When is he being met?’
The man at the transmitter took his headphones off, and turned to face Rauter. ‘Five o’ clock this afternoon,’ Huib Lievers said.. ‘At the Café Sterrebos, off Leidse Plein. I’ve just set it up.’
9
The tenement buildings in Batavia Straat tapered so much that on the third floor there were only two cramped one-room flats. The one next to Tinie was occupied by one of the few non-Jews in the street. She encouraged everyone to call her Tante Riek, but there was nothing aunt-like about mevrouw Kuipers.
She could have been anything between forty and sixty, broad in the beam, dressed in all weathers in a pinafore over a brown or black woollen dress, with her blonde to grey hair forced back into a severe bun. Tante Riek’s entire being was centred on finding out as much about the rest of Batavia Straat as possible.
Hirschfeld’s tread on the stairs was a cue for her to emerge from her room, and attempt to engage him in conversation. Hirschfeld’s responses were minimal, and after a while even the insatiably inquisitive Tante Riek had given up trying to get any information out of him.
But the walls in Batavia Straat were thin. Tante Riek could be in little doubt what was going on. And she found endless sly ways to let Tinie know she knew: There were frequent references to contraception – ‘Don’t forget to douche afterwards, dear.’ There were even leering offers to put Tinie ‘in touch with a woman, dear, in case there’s a little slip, you know.’
When Manny moved in, Tinie decided to go on the offensive. She knocked on Tante Riek’s door and introduced Manny as her brother, Johannes - an optimistically non-Jewish name. Tinie then pushed Manny back into her room, before the interrogation could get started. This was only partially successful. Tante Riek, Tinie thought, swallowed the brother story, but she found even more excuses to knock on Tinie’s door than she had before.
There was a limit to the number of times this brother, who had suddenly appeared on the scene, could be found in Tinie’s room. So Manny had to dive behind the curtain every time she knocked. He hid there, too, whenever Hirschfeld came for Tinie. The stench in the niche was vile. Cooped up, Manny longed for fresh air, dreamed of meadows, streams, open clear skies.
He thought of the sea, as he started to take his boots off, ready to tip-toe down the stairs, to avoid alerting Tante Riek. Because this morning he was going out to sea - to his great, great joy.
‘Manny, I still don’t see why Joel and the others can’t do this without …’ She stopped, seeing from the look on his face that she’d hurt him.
‘Yeah. They don’t want the runt of the litter there, either. That’s what my dad used to call me, you know. Runt. On the rare occasions he was there to call me anything.’
Tinie put her arms round him. ‘Just be careful,’ she whispered. ‘This is dangerous. And I’m worried about you.’
‘I love you,’ he said, as he left.
*
Manny breathed deeply, out in the street. It would be risky to catch a tram – people who looked Jewish were being thrown off trams by the NSB. So he walked toward the Osterdok, following his old route to work, when he worked at the shipyard.
The sealing-off of the Jewish Quarter was proceeding fast. In the distance, he saw a checkpoint where the Binnen Kant joined the Oude Schans. It was manned by two NSBers. They were checking the papers of people going into or out of the Quarter.
Manny felt a shiver of fear. More and more public places were being closed to Jews – cinemas, bathhouses, the zoo. Non-Jewish children at school in the Jewish Quarter were being transferred to schools elsewhere. The ever-obliging Tante Riek was gleefully keeping Tinie informed of every new measure against the Jews. Where would the next blow fall?
He ducked into a doorway, assessing the checkpoint. There were a couple of rolls of barbed wire near the barrier itself, but after that just red-and-white striped square poles, running into the distance.
He walked back the way he had come, crossed the Oude Schans canal at Korte Konings Straat, then headed in the direction of the Oosterdok again. Sure enough, further up the Binnen Kant there were just the two horizontal striped po
les. He glanced to left and right. There was nobody about. He ducked under the top pole, and walked on his way.
After walking up and down the Oosterdok for a bit, he finally found the ship, the Aagtekerk - a motorboat. She was bigger than he had expected. There was a chain across the gangplank. Nobody about. He didn’t know what to do. He wondered if there should be a password, or something. He struggled with the chain, finally unhooking it and going aboard.
A stocky old sailor in a blue pullover, blue overall trousers and boots came down from the top deck and looked at him, questioningly.
‘Joel Cosman?’ said Manny, ‘I’m er …’
The sailor jerked with his thumb at a narrow stairway, leading down. Manny made his way gingerly down to the lower deck, then yelped. Three NSBers! A second later, he recognised them as Joel Cosman, Ben Bril and Lard Zivilberg in NSB uniforms. The enormous Lard was bursting out of his.
‘Hello, Manny!’ Joel said. ‘Here, change into this.’ He threw an NSB jacket and trousers at Manny – the uniform wrapping itself round his head. Manny pulled it off, beamed at Joel, and started to get changed.
‘Why don’t you take our one and only gun, Manny,’ Joel said. ‘As you can’t fight, it might even things up a bit.’
‘Thanks for the compliment!’ Manny said, as he took his coat and cap off and inserted himself into an NSB uniform at least three sizes too large for him.
‘None of us wants the gun,’ Lard said. ‘It’s got three bullets left in it.’
‘How did you get it?’ said Manny, now dressed as an NSBer.
‘Nobody can remember,’ Joel said. ‘Some WA-man must have got hold of one, then dropped it, running away.’
‘Agh! Leave it on the ship.’ Ben Bril was staring at the gun in disgust.
The boat’s engine spluttered into life. They set out along the coast. Opposite Schipol Airport they were hailed, then stopped, by a Mof motor launch. Joel was still grinning, even when Moffen boarded. Manny could hear a conversation, up above them on deck, but not what was being said. The exchanges sounded cordial. After a while, the Germans went back to their launch.
