Bay windows, too, and a solarium full of hothouse plants—a jungle—on the ground floor at the back, overlooking the gardens.
Yes, it was lovely, and yes, Hamish had bought it especially for her, but was it not also, like the land, inherently sad?
Royal George Morton had been well settled by his family, with land holdings in excess of some 582 acres most of which he’d all too soon gambled or drunk away. In the end, he had died of a bullet to the brain from a horse pistol. Not suicide, nothing so grand as that. Murder, foul murder but ‘justified, the Lord God willing, for debts unpaid,’ Mrs. Haney had said often enough, ‘and the dishonouring of a young girl.’
The next owner and the next had apparently fared no better—did Ireland do that to its immigrants or was it simply the flowering of Mrs. Haney’s velum-bound Celtic mind?
It had to be true. And now? she asked but refused to speculate. She knew that Erich Kramer wanted desperately to escape, but that there must also be some very important reason for him doing so and that every day, every week now only made it worse not just for him but for the Reich. It had been Mrs. Tulford at the White Horse who had arranged everything, the disconnecting of the odometer and its reconnecting later, a goodly supply of petrol too, and the meeting with Brenda Darcy late on Sunday out along the coast road to the west of Kinsale. Three cigarette butts in the ashtray and grim last words, cold, so coldly given. ‘You’re in it now, Mrs. Fraser. Don’t ever think you can get out.’
Hamish had introduced her to Erich some seven, or was it eight—could it really be eight months ago? Hamish loved to play chess. As the castle’s doctor he’d taken to spending an hour or so in the prisoners’ common room, formerly the great hall, or in the library, polishing up on his German and filling himself in on the other side of the war: what was past and what they thought might happen, especially now with the Russian campaign going so well for them. Like herself, he was starved for intellectual companionship which the German officers could supply. A dangerous thing perhaps, but tolerated by Major Trant and encouraged by Colonel Bannerman.
‘Anything to keep them peacefully occupied,’ the colonel had said once and it had stuck with her.
Because she had a smattering of Deutsch from college—long forgotten, most of it—Hamish had encouraged her to help out with the library. She had borrowed books from his own and had been buying them in the flea markets of Armagh and Newry when occasion allowed, but it had been Hamish who had started it all by introducing them. ‘Erich, this is Mary, the light of my life.’
All castles have names and histories but the truth was, there was little to this one. It was situated in a parklike setting of large trees surrounded by lawns and formal gardens overlooking a small, man-made lake, a damming of the Loughie, hence the name Lough Loughie.
Tralane Castle wasn’t really a proper castle—not in the ancient ruins sort of way. It was, however, one of the largest castle-country houses in Ireland and had been built between 1798 and 1812 or thereabouts, so well after the house.
It had its crenellated battlements, its round towers of pale grey granite, a square Keep some eighty feet high, the Union Jack flying proudly above both it and the towers. There were the chimneys, a ground floor and three storeys with tall, windowed rooms—caverns some of them. Its rambling corridors and narrow passageways sometimes led to equally narrow, hidden staircases. There were dungeons, too, and cellars like she’d never seen before.
Milk rooms and tack rooms and stables and lots of places where there could be pallets of straw and the quick rush of forbidden things done in secret while a comrade or comrades kept a lookout and you knew this and yet you did it anyway, lying half-naked on that pallet while betraying both husband and country. A half-hour, forty minutes once and the sheer terror of being discovered, but of course it hadn’t begun in the castle at all, but in that beautiful Georgian house.
And only then, later, in the castle’s infirmary once, and later still, why Erich worked things out and they had used other places in there. Clever … he was always so clever with these. Erich had his people, his men, and they did exactly as he said. Orders always, though she’d not thought of them as that at first, but of course he’d been their captain and still was.
There were barbed-wire enclosures—two rings of these, with guard dogs and torch beams in the night, and searchlights too, if necessary, and a single pass gate with barrier bar and armed sentries.
Hesitating now, Mary approached the opposite shore of the lake. There was a small clearing here, the tall trees of a woods on the other side and a view of the castle across the water. Standing alone as nearly always these days, she got a grip on herself. Three swans, ever white and majestic, yet serene, cruised gracefully by.
One hundred and eighty-two German officers were prisoners of war in that castle. Some, like Erich, had come from U-boats, others from downed aircraft, ships at sea or armies on land. Mostly they were guarded by men of the last war, by Anglo-Irish of Scottish descent, Protestants too, and therefore reliable, or so it must be thought.
And of course there were the regulars from the British Army. Guards with more than one purpose: Captain James Allanby and his commanding officers, Major Trant and Colonel Bannerman. They had the garrison at the castle and did other things like watching border crossings when needed or searching out fugitives in the hills and houses.
There were four British divisions stationed in the North because it was still felt necessary. Jimmy had been right, though. ‘Not bloody likely,’ he’d said. To escape from Tralane Castle wouldn’t be easy. One had, however, the whole of Ireland in which to hide, the temptation of it and the IRA who might, given the right incentives, be willing to help.
Hamish had been right, too. In the North, the IRA were still quite strong and well disciplined. In the South, a series of reversals had left most of their leadership in prison and the rest in a shambles. Brenda Darcy hadn’t said this. One picked that sort of thing up as it seeped out of the ground at your feet or dripped from the skies above.
When 10.00 a.m. came, Mary started out again. There were 915 acres of grounds attached to the castle, all of it in the hands of the British Army on a lend-lease basis, hence a lonelier than usual road whose verges had been mown by work gangs of German officers.
Under guard, of course, with Thompson submachine guns, Lee Enfield rifles and sometimes Webley service revolvers.
All the furnishings had been sold at auction in 1922 to pay the taxes so the castle wasn’t that pleasant a place, if one was looking for that sort of thing.
At the entrance she was told plainly enough, ‘You can’t go in, Miss. Tralane is out of bounds to all civilians.’
The warning signs had said as much. ‘But … but I’m looking after the library? I’ve brought some more books. Look, I know you’re new here, Sergeant, but I’m Mary Fraser, the doctor’s wife.’
She might just as well have been Saint Jude or Joan of Arc for all he cared.
‘I’m sorry, madam, but we have our orders.’
‘Is it because of what happened last night?’ She’d forgotten about the Second Lieutenant Bachmann and should have remembered. Had Hamish tried to warn her?
The sergeant, tough, hard and in his late forties, gave her the once over and, unsmiling, un-anything, simply said, ‘I wouldn’t know about that, Mrs. Fraser. My orders are to turn away all civilians until further notice.’
‘Even the greengrocer’s van and the butcher’s?’
He waited, saying nothing further. She was up against the British Army again, and hadn’t it taken special permission to get her in here in the first place? Hadn’t it only been because this was Ireland and the prisoners were officers and gentlemen to whom honour was their bond, or should have been, Colonel Bannerman wanting to keep them content, or had he? Hadn’t he and Major Trant seen in her presence a means of finding things out, she naively repeating what she’d overheard at times eve
n to Jimmy?
They’d given no hint. None whatsoever. Sickened by the thought, Mary tried to calm her voice. ‘Sergeant, please ask Captain Allanby to let me know when things are back to normal.’
Turning at his nod, she began to walk the bike away, only to remember the books, but she couldn’t tuck a note into any of them, couldn’t chance asking that they be given to Erich or one of the others, since she’d mentioned Jimmy’s name.
‘Sergeant?’
‘Yes, miss?’
‘Mrs. Could I ask that you see that these books are delivered to the library?’
‘Library’s off limits until further notice.’
All recreation, such as it was, must have been cancelled, but had it all been for nothing, the trip South, the meeting with Brenda Darcy, the crossing of the border?
Back at the house, Mrs. Haney didn’t wait. ‘A hanging, m’am. A hanging!’
Bridget Leahy, all of seventeen, was jumping. ‘By the neck it was, m’am, and he one of their own!’
‘But not one enough, I’m thinking,’ said Mrs. Haney with a grim, sharp nod, she waiting for some response while Bridget remained wild-eyed and all over the place, but Mrs. Haney chose not to discipline the girl in front of others.
‘Sure and didn’t I tell you they’d be up to no good in that place and you being turned away like that,’ the woman said, fiercely clucking her tongue. ‘You was turned away, Missus Fraser? Am I right now, m’am? Sure it is that I am.’
‘Mrs. Haney …’
‘M’am?’ and she looking pale and bleached about the gills and coming into the kitchen like that for answers now. Answers!
Wanting to shout at her, ‘Don’t you dare insinuate such things!’ Wanting to wipe that brooding Celtic look from that thick, brown-brow of a face with its swift brown eyes that saw everything, Mary said, ‘Nothing … It’s nothing. Bridget, would you do a bit of tidying up in the doctor’s library for me, please?’
Ria reached for the long-handled iron spoon that hung above the cast-iron range but paused. ‘Bridget! You bring me them taters from the garden like I asked you.’
‘Mrs. Haney …’
‘M’am?’
‘Oh never mind! Just never mind!’ Retreating quickly, visions of the woman followed of their own accord. The front, the back, the side—all were nearly of the same dimension—a tower of strength, a pillar of it, the woman standing firmly in her kitchen, her territory where others, the owner’s wife and mistress of the house, her employer, for God’s sake, were persona non grata, the jade-green skirt being hitched up, the off-white blouse with its bits of lace her mother’s likely, and two bulky knitted cardigans, the outer being unbuttoned always, the inner, the newer, being buttoned and of a deeper green!
The carpet slippers were for around the house because they ‘eased,’ spelled aized her feet, her bunions, spelled boonians and the sagging woollen socks were ‘of the army,’ and, ‘for the warmth of a morn.’
‘Oh damn that woman, damn her anyway!’ swore Mary under her breath as she stopped in the foyer to check the morning’s mail.
There was nothing from Dublin, thank fortune, but there was a letter from Canada, from home. Opened by the censors and then resealed. Posted a good four months ago and come all the way across the Atlantic by convoy to England under threat of German U-boats and then by packet across the Irish Sea.
Nothing stopped the Royal Mail, not even a war.
It was a letter from Frank Thomas’s mother, but she’d leave it for a moment, and climbing the stairs, went along to the bedroom Erich had used, to stand in its doorway feeling lost and alone.
Erich had needed to have his appendix out early in March. Things had gone well but he’d been run-down and after some weeks in the castle’s infirmary, still hadn’t been right: a fever that doggedly came and went. A low-grade thing that would suddenly flare up for no apparent reason.
Puzzled by it, Hamish had gone to the colonel, and Erich had been brought to the house. He’d spent a fortnight here—over a week in bed and then a few days around the place, but had Hamish seen it coming? He had had to go out on a call. She’d gone downstairs with him, hadn’t been sleeping well and had heard him get up. It had been late—nearly 2.00 a.m. She’d asked if he’d like her to come with him but he had only shaken his head in that way he always did, and had told her to go back to bed, Mrs. Haney and the others never sleeping in the house. Erich … Erich had caught her all but in darkness on the upstairs landing. Her back had hit the wall as he’d kissed her and she’d tried to pull away.
‘Don’t lie about it. You wanted him,’ she said. Even now she could still feel how her nightgown had slipped from her shoulders as it had fallen to the floor.
But to understand how it could happen in the castle—in a prisoner of war camp—one had to understand the workings of the place. The British and the Anglo-Irish of the British Army were always about, but there were no armed guards within those parts of the castle that had been assigned to the prisoners—just guards without their guns. At any moment one or more of them could come into the library and often did—everything was always more or less in a state of flux and she was always accompanied in any case, and always there would be at least one of them standing at the door.
Being officers, the prisoners weren’t locked into rooms or anything like that. They were fully responsible for their own well-being and had duty rosters organized, even their own cooks. They organized their own recreation and had the run of the central courtyard—acres for soccer, which they played nearly every day after their calisthenics.
There were lectures, too, on history, on bridge building or making wine, even on things like fishing and tying flies for salmon or trout—oh, they had them on any number of subjects and were a very diverse group. They built beautiful model ships, played cards, wrote letters home, received Red Cross parcels and had somehow managed to acquire two Ping-Pong tables.
Music was a favourite, of course, but mostly a choral group for which she was always trying to find new scores. They had a piano the Catholics in Armagh had sent along with two accordions, a gramophone and stacks of records. Hence the ‘parties’ now and then when things were going well and they were especially behaving themselves, which was exactly what Colonel Bannerman wanted most, of course. Even a bit of beer and once … why once, a drop of whiskey—she’d mentioned the absence of a bottle to Hamish and he’d only touched his lips and said, ‘Sh!’
Many of the men simply walked and talked among themselves or to her if they could, using up their precious tobacco rations and trying to follow the war without news beyond what they were allowed to be given or learned from the clandestine radio they’d built—they must have. But the guards could not be everywhere at all times, and they could be distracted, singled out, cut off, isolated. One of Erich’s men would keep a watch. Another would act as a discreet relay, a third watching yet another approach, their exit if needed.
Together, she going first or following at a distance, they would manage to slip away. It hadn’t happened that much—five times, that’s all. Just five since here, since when it had first happened. Well, since Erich had left the house. Each time there had been the apprehension, the terror of discovery, the shame of such a thing, but the incredible sexual tension that fear and darkened corridors and empty rooms could bring, the presence of others close by. Had they listened? They must have.
She’d been a fool, a terrible fool.
When Fraser found her, Mary was sitting on the edge of the bed. The last of the sunlight caught her and he wondered why she’d come in here to read a letter from home, and he thought he knew the reason.
‘Lass, what is it? What’s happened?’
Awakening to his presence, she didn’t want him to see that there were no tears. ‘Frank’s been killed. Four months ago. April twenty-fifth, in Egypt, at a place called the Halfaya Pass.’
Hami
sh had been told that she’d been engaged to Frank Thomas, an up-and-coming lawyer from Orillia, in Ontario, Canada, and that they’d broken it off for some reason, but he had never once asked that of her.
He took the letter from her; Mary let him read what there was of it.
If only you and Frank had married. If only you hadn’t thrown him over like that and run away.
It had taken her more than three-and-a-half years to make that crossing to England, an interlude she’d have on her conscience for the rest of her life, but he’d say nothing of it now, though he’d waited long enough.
1 Southern Armagh being predominantly Catholic.
2 Believing it too difficult and troublesome, the British government did not introduce conscription in Northern Ireland.
3 Official rationing began in Britain in July 1940 but was never as strict in Northern Ireland. In southern Ireland, it began later, in May 1942, and again it was not as harsh. Although private motoring was banned in the South on 30 April 1942, it didn’t completely cease until early in 1943. September 1941 thus gives a ‘window of opportunity,’ though this was fast closing. Early on in the war, tea—which had become scarce in southern Ireland and rationed in the North—led people to travel into the North to obtain it, while those there travelled south to buy sugar. There was also, of course, a vigourous, if clandestine, black market, the border being almost impossible to thoroughly police.
4 This change from Hydra to Triton began in the late autumn of 1941 and was essentially complete by February 1942, but was only done with the Atlantic U-boats, though it resulted in huge increases in convoy losses there. Elsewhere, Hydra continued to be used by surface naval vessels and Arctic U-boats and was read by the British, who eventually mastered Triton.
5 Southern Ireland never had a blackout, but rather a dim-out later on in the war.
6 Pilot-navigator error during this raid saw two bombs fall on Dublin, they thinking they were over Belfast where, in addition to the 700 in April, another 150 were killed.
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