When It's Over

by Barbara Ridley

  The freckles flickered on her cheekbones as she spoke. She took a hefty bite out of one sandwich and offered the pile to Lena.

  “Where are you going?” asked Lena.

  “Reaseheath Agricultural College in Nantwich. One month of training before my assignment. Don’t know where they’ll post me yet.”

  “Post you?”

  “Women’s Land Army,” Jane replied, pointing to the initials WLA on her green tie. “I have to do something for the war effort. But I can’t stand the thought of being cooped up in an office or a munitions factory. This way, I’ll be out in the fresh air.” She leaned forward in her seat to add, “And I’m going to be earning forty-eight shillings a week, plus room and board.”

  Lena accepted a sandwich and discovered Branston pickle. She learned about the WLA and childhood summers spent on an uncle’s farm in Devon and arguments with parents who were convinced that a girl’s moral fiber would be undermined by going far from home to work in the fields. Lena laughed with a stranger and shared her sense of adventure as they both embarked on journeys into uncharted territory. And she knew this conversation would never have happened if she had traveled with Otto or any of the others. This experience was all hers. She did not have to filter it through anyone else’s commentary. She was on her own out here in the world, traveling through England to a Czech army base. To face her father again after all this time. She could do this. Other young women were doing extraordinary things; she could, too.

  In Nantwich, she inquired about the route to Cholmondeley Park. At first, no one understood her.

  “Chol-mond-er-lee Park,” she said, reading from her brother’s letter.

  “You must be wanting Chumley Park, love,” said the woman in the newsagents on the High Street. “Where the army base is? Yes. That’s how we says it, love. Chumley.” She turned and shouted to an unseen person in the back room, “Stan! When’s the Ramsey lad making his run up to Chumley? Young lady ’ere needs a lift.”

  A portly man emerged, dressed in a tweed jacket and cap, cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth. He gave Lena a quick nod and then engaged the woman behind the counter in a rapid exchange that Lena could barely follow. He spoke in one of those incomprehensible accents; to make matters worse, he mumbled around the cigarette, which dangled like a loose tooth. But when a young boy was summoned from the inner recesses and sent on an errand, Lena was given to understand that travel arrangements were being made on her behalf and that she was to stay put.

  She browsed the racks of magazines, amused at the articles exhorting women to do their patriotic duty by maintaining all their efforts to look attractive. After several minutes, the door swung open with a clang of the bell, and in bounced the boy, with a young man in tow.

  “There you are, Jim,” the shopkeeper said. “Got a young lady ’ere needs you to take ’er out to Chumley.”

  The young man threw nervous, furtive glances at Lena and shuffled from one foot to the other.

  “Go on, Jim,” the woman said. “She ain’t got all day.”

  “Thank you very much,” Lena said, moving toward him with a smile to the rescue. “It’s very kind of you.”

  He nodded and took her overnight bag. Without a word, he led her up the main street to the Post Office, where he motioned for her to wait while he went inside. Lena was once again left wondering what was happening, but he quickly reappeared, carrying a large canvas sack of letters, and approached a motorcycle leaning against the side of the building. A motorcycle! Good heavens!

  Moments later, she was riding astride a motorcycle for the first time in her life, her valise installed behind her in a pannier, one arm around the waist of a silent stranger; the wind billowed her hair, as she tried to wedge her skirt down with her free hand to maintain some sort of decency. They sped past the rest of the town and into the countryside. The air was chilly now on her arms, and her teeth began to chatter. She was nervous and excited and slightly nauseous.

  What was she going to say to Father? After she had sworn never to speak to him again, after he had beaten her a few weeks before she’d left Prague, she’d crept around the flat, peeking around corners to avoid bumping into him in the hall, maintaining a stony silence at the dinner table. She had never dreamed then that she would travel the length of a foreign country to seek him out.

  The motorcycle banked around a curve, and the army base came into view. Lena was astonished. She had expected tents: Ernst had written that they were sleeping under canvas. But here, spread out across a huge meadow, were hundreds of small, pointed tents that reminded her of pictures she had seen of American Indian tepees. They were nestled in groups throughout the field and under the trees at the perimeter. But what really surprised Lena was the castle—there really was no other word for it. The imposing structure dominated the scene from its perch atop a rise to the right. There were three tall towers with turrets and narrow windows and a lake in front; all that was missing was a moat and drawbridge and knights in shining armor. The stone walls glowed in the afternoon sun, and from the largest tower flew the British and Czech flags side by side, their matching red, white, and blue colors flapping in the breeze. Standing firm together.

  She dismounted at the gate and presented her identity card, together with the letter and invitation from Ernst. The young guard saluted her.

  “Vítám vás, slečno. Welcome, miss,” he said. “Please wait here.”

  The guard lifted up the telephone in his little cubicle and waved the motorcyclist on to complete his delivery. Lena shivered. It was cool in the shade of the trees lining the driveway, and she pulled her cardigan out of her bag. As she crouched to readjust the clasp, she heard the crunching of gravel and a shout, and looked up to see a gangly young man in uniform, all arms and legs, running up the drive toward her. Could this be Ernst? And then he was upon her, towering above her, hugging her, pulling her against his rough army tunic, with a laugh two octaves lower than when she had last heard it, flinging his head back and losing his cap. He laughed again and stooped to retrieve it, and picked up her valise.

  “You made it! How was your journey? Did you have trouble finding it? How are you? It’s so good to see you!” he babbled, giving her no chance to answer. “Come to the officers’ quarters. That’s where Father is. He’s a lieutenant colonel, you know.”

  “Goodness!” Lena had no sense of where a lieutenant colonel stood in the order of things, but it sounded impressive. “What about you?” she asked. “What’s your rank?”

  “I’m just a lowly private,” Ernst said. “I was lucky they let me sign up at all. You’re supposed to be eighteen. But Father talked them into it when we got to Belgrade.”

  Lena had so many questions; she didn’t know where to start. So much had happened in the two years since she had last seen him.

  “Are you all right?” she managed.

  “Yes.” He smiled. “I’m all right. Things are a lot better now that we’re here. It was terrible in France, a real fiasco.”

  He led her up to a two-story building behind the big house. There were soldiers everywhere, all looking alike, with broad Slav faces, shorn hair, peaked caps, and green tunics. They huddled in groups, leaning on mud-splattered army vehicles, smoking, talking; some whistled as she passed.

  “Dobrý den!” called out one, raising his cap in salute. “Moc dobrý!” said another. “Very beautiful!”

  The Czech language: the comforting sounds of home. Lena laughed, very conscious of being the lone female in this man’s world. Ernst opened the door and motioned for her to enter. The room was large, full of tables and officers, smoky and noisy but stunned into silence at her appearance.

  She saw Father immediately; his back was to the entrance, but she recognized his prematurely bald scalp, with its rim of cropped, dark hair, and his strong, broad shoulders. He gave a startled, almost embarrassed look as he turned and his eyes fell upon her. He approached with a smile and reached out to hold her upper arm. This was as close as they would come
to an embrace, Lena knew.

  “Lena,” he said, with surprising warmth in his voice. “I’m so glad to see you. I was very relieved to know you left Paris before the invasion.”

  He led her to a table, called for someone to bring drinks. Three officers, who had been studying a map at the other end of the table, nodded to Lena and withdrew in silence, taking the map with them.

  “Father,” Lena said, leaning forward, her fingers interlaced in front of her. She suddenly remembered the thin gold band on her finger and hastily covered it with the other hand. She wasn’t sure it was real gold. They had found it in a pawnshop in Lewes; Otto thought they should avoid rousing any suspicions about the legitimacy of their marriage. But she didn’t want Father to see it until she was ready to give him the news. “Tell me about Máma and Sasha,” she said. “Where are they? How will they manage on their own?”

  “They’re still in the flat. I made arrangements. There is some money. The Nazis confiscated the business, but . . .” He gave a little shrug after his hallmark trailing but, which was both strange and familiar at the same time. “Your uncle Victor is going to keep an eye on them.”

  “Why couldn’t you have brought them with you?” Lena asked.

  “Your sister would never have made the journey,” Father said. He looked around, scanning the room for something.

  “What do you mean?” Lena said, her voice rising in alarm. “What’s the matter with her?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with her, Lena,” he said, turning back to her. “She’s nine years old.” He started to use the sharp, patronizing tone she knew only too well.

  “Ten,” Lena said.

  “What?”

  “She’s ten.”

  “Right,” he said. “Last month . . . her birthday.” He looked at Lena and softened. “We considered it, us all going together, but . . .” He shook his head. “It was just as well. We had no idea how dangerous the border crossings would be.”

  “So, how is she? What is she doing?” Lena said.

  “She’s going to school. There’s not much food, but . . .” He gave that shrug again. “She’ll be all right. No one’s going to bother them. They’ll just lie low until this is all over.”

  I should ask him about himself, she thought, and asked, “How are you, Father?” She looked at him full-on now and took in his face. There were wrinkles at his temples and a crease in the center of his brow, a new weariness she had not noticed before. “Tell me about your journey.”

  “We made it,” he said. “We had a close call crossing into Hungary, but . . .” He looked around for the drinks. “You must be thirsty, Lena,” he said, waving to someone across the room.

  Ernst said, “We had to run for it, under fire.”

  Lena turned quickly to her brother. For an instant, she thought he must be joking or exaggerating, like when he used to embellish some playground adventure or classroom prank. But she saw he was deadly serious.

  “It was terrifying,” he added. “We had to crawl through the mud to dodge the bullets.”

  “Oh my God,” Lena said.

  A young officer arrived with three cool glasses of blackcurrant squash. Lena had tried this drink once before at Muriel’s and not cared for it, but now it tasted sweet and delicious; she was indeed thirsty. They sipped in silence for a few moments.

  Lena said, “Then what happened?”

  She listened intently as they described the arduous journey: not knowing whom to trust, whom to bribe; the days without food, the nights without sleep; the rigmarole of paperwork at the embassy in Belgrade; the arrival in France and the total chaos in Agde.

  “Ernst was sent off to the front in the first batch,” Father said. “To face the might of the German army, with no training, nothing. And I, an experienced soldier, was kept behind in camp.”

  “Luckily for me, if not for France,” Ernst said, “we were soon met by the French army in rapid retreat, and so we all turned around and ran with them. Right back to the coast.”

  “Everything’s different now that we’re here,” Father said. “Things are much more serious. We’re getting new weapons. And President Beneš is coming to inspect us next week. We will make him proud.” He lifted his shoulders and puffed out his chest, as though standing on parade already.

  Lena looked around at the other officers in the room. A few were her father’s age, but most much younger. She saw him through their eyes and knew that he must command respect. Those very qualities that she had come to fear—his tenacity, his brute strength, his rigid self-assurance—would all bode well for him here.

  “You did the right thing coming here, Lena,” he was saying. Lena was unsure whether he meant coming to this country, coming to Cheshire, or both. Before she could ask, he continued, “I need you to do something for me: I want you to write to your mother and tell her we’ve arrived safely.”

  “How would I do that?” Lena said. “I thought there was no way of getting letters to Czechoslovakia.”

  “Thomas Cook is taking correspondence through Portugal,” he replied. “You can send a letter through the London office.”

  “Why don’t you write to her?”

  “It would be far too dangerous for her to receive anything from the army base here. It would attract too much attention. Everything out of here is heavily censored and covered with official authorization stamps.” He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “Write to her, saying you have seen us. Don’t say anything about the army. I just want her to know we made it.”

  How could she not do as he asked? It wasn’t simply a newfound willingness to do something he asked of her—she, too, wanted Máma to know that they’d arrived. That they were all here, in England. Safe, for the time being. Now that she knew there was a way to get a letter through to Prague, it seemed simple enough. She would write to her mother.

  But it was a decision that would come to haunt her in the years ahead.

  CHAPTER 25

  CHESHIRE, JULY 1940

  Dinner was held in the castle’s great hall, a cavernous room with a massive stone fireplace at one end and swords and shields decorated with coats of arms displayed along the walls. Lena was seated opposite her father and next to Ernst, who squirmed with excitement at being permitted to join them in the officers’ quarters. On her other side, to her immediate left, was a handsome young captain from Brno. There must have been fifty seated at the long, narrow table. The vast space echoed with voices and laughter and the scraping of cutlery on plates. Lena looked across at her father and saw her reflection in the long mirror on the opposite wall. She looked anomalous in her light blue cotton dress, sitting in a sea of army tunics. But there was color in her cheeks; she had caught some sun in the recent fine weather. Before dinner, she had freshened up in the cloakroom, and her hair was behaving itself; she looked presentable.

  At first, she exchanged pleasantries with the captain. He asked her about her departure from Czechoslovakia and the time she had spent in Paris.

  “I loved Paris,” she said. “I was reluctant to leave. Good thing I did, of course.”

  “What did you like best about Paris?” he asked with a smile.

  He offered her more bread from a large pewter bowl. Father was deep in conversation with a gray-haired officer to his right, but he turned now to hear Lena’s response.

  “Oh, goodness, so much,” she said. “The street markets, the cafés, the Left Bank. And the people. I really liked the people.”

  “Humph!” Father said from across the table. “They proved to be completely useless in the face of the Nazis. I’ve never seen such panic and disorganization.”

  “I hardly think—”

  “Imbeciles!” he said. “They behaved like a nation of imbeciles.”

  “You can’t blame the French for being overrun by the Blitzkrieg,” Lena said. “Everyone has been overwhelmed: the Dutch, the Belgians. And the Czechs,” she added.

  “But France is a great power!” He was raising his voice now,
attracting attention from several neighbors. Other conversations petered out. “It was that damn socialist government that destroyed them. Made them completely defenseless, undermined their morale. Spineless cowards.”

  “With all due respect, sir . . .” The gallant young officer at her side was trying to intervene, but Lena could see where this was headed.

  “For heaven’s sake, Bartoš,” Father said, “you saw it with your own eyes. That’s what socialism will do for you.”

  The arrival of the main course provided a brief distraction: two serving boys passed out plates of steaming goulash and mashed potatoes. It smelled good. Lena hoped this might lead to a change of subject.

  But then Ernst jumped into the fray.

  “Father’s right about that,” he said helping himself to a mass of potato. “The way they retreated in the face of the enemy. No leadership. The highest officers drove back to the coast as fast as their fancy cars could carry them, followed by the lower-ranking officers and then, behind them, the men on foot.”

  “Exactly,” Father said, pointing at Lena with a forkful of meat. “No moral fiber.”

  “I would have thought, if anything, that demonstrates a failure to follow egalitarian principles,” Lena said. Captain Bartoš turned to her with a startled expression; whether he was surprised she had answered back or surprised that she might have a sensible idea in her head, she couldn’t say.

  Father ignored her comment. “The Bolsheviks have shown their true colors now,” he continued. “The Hitler-Stalin pact. Fascism and socialism. One and the same thing. I always said so.”

  She should change the subject. Or just keep quiet.

  “Actually, at one time you said the best thing about fascism was that it would stop the spread of socialism,” she heard herself say. “I see you’ve changed your tune.”

  His fist slammed the table, and Lena flinched.

  “Damn it, girl!” he shouted. “I see you’ve lost none of your insolence. You should be ashamed of yourself. You will not speak to me like that!”