Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  At Wimbledon station he changed on to the trolleybus. Gazing through the window now as it took him down Kingston Road, the tune still lingered. He held the button tight in his palm and watched the windscreens of passing motorcars blinking in the heat.

  The streets became more familiar still, remembered images turned real again, like: the buildings of Hawker Aircraft, and the window propped open by someone’s shoe, and inside a figure that might once have been him, leaning over a drawing board and drafting out a future in nothing more than pencil lines.

  Then they were curving right at a junction and heading towards Caversham Rise, where outside a gate almost two years before she had patted his breast pocket and, taking his hand, had kissed his knuckles and palm, closing his fingers around it. Come back, she had said. She had then put his other hand to her belly. We need to tell Max.

  On the trolleybus that had taken him away from her that last time, his RAF bag on the seat and her silhouette on the pavement at the top of the hill watching him go, he had looked out the window – just as he did now – and outside the street and people had blurred, washing down the glass as they turned to liquid in his tears.

  Now here he was again. The trolley whirred to a stop and he stepped off and waited as the wire sparked and the bus surged forward once more. Nothing much had changed: on either side just a line of terrace houses on an ordinary street. He set off up the hill feeling rather anxious as a boy on a pushbike came freewheeling past him. He had no idea, he realized, what to expect from her, what she looked like now, what she might say. She probably didn’t even know that he was still alive. The official report had stated ‘presumed dead’.

  He slipped his hand in his pocket, expecting to find not a button or a map or a scrap of paper but, perhaps, a forgotten key; and with it he would go through the gate and up the steps, past the pots of geraniums, and he would unlock the door and step inside and she would be there to meet him and he would see her face again. What if Max was there? What would he say? He tried to think of all the things that should have been said. He could feel his heart racing.

  As he drew nearer to the house, though, and its single gate and wooden steps leading up to the door – the door and steps he had so often imagined, the round-bellied bowls of the ceramic pots and geraniums scattering their petals – it wasn’t there. He couldn’t see it. He picked up his pace. It wasn’t there. No, he thought. No! But there was just a gap. He reached the spot and stopped sharply, his heart beating so damned hard now that he thought he might pass out. He stared, horrified, across the empty space: nothing but the piled remains and juts of wood; nothing but bricks and rubble.

  Oh God, no. He looked at where the house had always been, then scrambled over the debris.

  ‘Connie!’ he shouted. ‘No, Connie! No!’

  He clambered over the piles helplessly looking for her.

  This was their retribution. This, he thought, was for Hamburg. With a single bomb and pinpoint accuracy, they had blown out his heart.

  ‘Connie!’ he yelled.

  After all these miles, all these days . . .

  She had been nothing when he had woken in that field, not even as much as a thought, but he had searched and searched until he had found her, and now he was here; miles and days and infinite lifetimes later, he had come all this way for her, because she had said it – Come back – and he had. He was here now. He was here.

  He felt that bomb drop again through him, breaking every bone within him as it fell and blasted, and he crumbled until he was on his knees in the bricks and timber, in all the dust and shards of glass. He strained out a voiceless cry, retched, and then shouted. He couldn’t help it. He tugged at his stomach and wept so hard – for there among the shattered pieces of blasted terracotta were pale and washed-out petals. They looked like shreds of skin.

  The car provided by the Ministry bore him along the lane as he stared blindly through the window at the stark yellow oilseed rape, the field burning so bright.

  When they finally arrived, his mother was standing in the doorway, already crying just seeing the car pull into the drive. She bustled him through. She was kissing his cheeks again and again; she couldn’t stop touching his arm. Everything was strangely familiar: the wooden boards that Cedar used to skitter across; the kitchen floor his mother fell on; the stairs his father had come down that day; and the light shining through the stained glass window, the way it fell across the floor, leaving pools of different coloured light that he and Max had lain beside, passing their hands through it to see the colours chase across their skin.

  She led him through the dining room and out the double doors to the garden.

  ‘Your father is doing the usual. He hasn’t changed. Oh, darling, I can’t believe that you’re back. I prayed for you every night.’

  And there he was standing at a flowerbed with a large floppy hat. He nimbly snipped the dead head from a rose, pocketing it in his summer jacket, while Cedar scrambled up from his sleep and came padding across the lawn.

  ‘Oh, jolly good, there you are,’ his father said matter-of-factly, as if Owen had been gone for no more than an hour.

  ‘And what of Max?’ Owen later asked.

  His mother tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. ‘It’s short, you know, but lovely handwriting. They must have taken some care.’

  He had died on the second of May. Pneumonia, as reported by a German doctor in a town called Sagan – somewhere in the east of Germany, his mother had explained. He had been transferred to a camp for aircraft pilots that, it had been written in the letter, had been evacuated, but he was found to be too ill to make the walk.

  That was indeed why Owen had been going back, he realized – the sense that he had left Max there, the pull coming from a memory that he had felt all along but still couldn’t unearth; going back for the love of a brother or as a final act of atonement for the guilt of an affair. Either way he had sat on a train, watching a girl in red sandals and white socks being settled into a seat opposite by a kindly aunt before she’d kissed the child goodbye and handed her a teddy bear.

  Sometimes now – in his memory or his imagination or a dream – he saw his brother stumbling out of a truck, newly arrived from somewhere or other, or in a hospital bed in a camp about to be emptied, as the snow battered the windows and men gathered outside in the dark, stamping the cold from their feet.

  At that bed he had slipped a promise into Max’s ear, and sometimes, in his dreams, an apology too. He would feel Max press a watch into his hand, and then closing Owen’s fingers around it as if, like her kiss, that might somehow keep it safe.

  Now this watch that had once been stolen – unfastened from him in a field in the dark, six hundred miles away – had been returned to Owen and was on his wrist once more, fixed and no different from how it had always been but for a small engraving on the back-two tiny ‘v’s that were only visible when you turned it and they sparkled in the light.

  So much was lost and yet every day something would come back to him – a snatch of dialogue or a name or a face, blowing through his head like leaves, that he would see for a moment but couldn’t quite catch. Other things returned and lingered, as if he had opened curtains to a view that now could not be closed. He thought about Max and their final minutes together, and the long trudge away from him through the forests, the biting cold and driving snow. Sheltering that first night in a brick factory in Muskau with thousands of other men, he had cried. In the flickering light of a gas lamp, seated among the shivering bodies, and with his jacket in his lap, he had chewed through the threads and unpicked the heart that she had sewn there, trying to unpick everything that had happened, everything that he had done. Then, without thinking, he’d slipped the threads into his pocket, where they were now and had always been, and only when the square of material was left in place had he realized what he had done.

  ‘I’ll take you down the garden,’ his mother said.

  She led him across the lawn to where his father was still
among the flowers, secateurs in hand. It was as if nothing had changed. Owen felt the warm sun against him, the first scents of summer already pervading the air.

  ‘Ah, here he is,’ said his father. He called into the nearby potato plants. ‘Leo. Come on, out you come.’ A small face appeared between the stalks. ‘Come and say hello.’

  They walk out across the Hampshire fields, heading away from The Ridings and the clip of his father’s secateurs. The day is warm and sunny, with the scent of pollen in the air, bumblebees and dragonflies, and vapour trails pulling like fraying threads across the sky.

  Sometimes the child wants to walk, so progress is slow and meandering as he grasps Owen’s finger in his hot hand and totters slowly forward, but mostly the child is content to sit and ride in Owen’s arms. They watch Cedar lolloping ahead, disappearing in and out of the long grass so that every time he is found again, the child points and laughs.

  Eventually, in a field overlooking the Downs with a slope just like he has been looking for, they stop to sit and rest. Cedar nuzzles scents out of the soil and the boy stumbles around, still finding his feet. He finds wonder in the smallest things, like ladybirds opening up their mechanical shells and folding out their wings.

  Owen lies back in the grass and the child eventually clambers on him and, before long, is asleep. He holds him close, enjoying his weight, his smell, his warmth and, above all else, the sense that he is his. Sometimes, in his head, he can hear Irena telling him that he is good with him – not Little Man but this Little Miracle, this little infant found alive in the rubble when all else around him was lost. He listens to the child’s breathing now as he had done on that first afternoon, sitting on the bench at the bottom of his parents’ garden and holding the child tight to him as he cried at all the confusion of his desolation and his thanks.

  All the clues he needs to remember Connie by she has left for him in this face – her eyes, her nose, the shape of her chin, the soft pinkness of her cheeks. And there she is vivid once more, more vivid than she has ever been, so that when he shuts his eyes – as he does now – she is with him. She is kissing him at a party down a darkened corridor, or potting geraniums on a step, or sitting beside him on the remains of a train engine writing him letters, every word of which he now knows. Or she is at the top of a street waiting for him, or turning to glance at him from the back of an open-topped Austin that is disappearing down a lane. Either way, she is not lost any more. She is in his head and heart and everywhere that he looks. He just has to close his eyes.

  Author’s Note

  Devastation Road is a work of fiction. The only historical figure to feature in the story is Sir Sydney Camm, Chief Designer at Hawker Aircraft. All the other characters have been imagined, as have the events of Owen’s journey. That said, much of the background detail is true.

  Although not named, the camp that acts as the main location in the final third of the novel is Belsen, south-west of the town of Bergen, near Celle in northern Germany. As the war entered its final phases and the Reich found itself being squeezed from every side, the death camps were evacuated and the inmates moved. Many of these ended up at Belsen – among them its most famous inmate, Anne Frank. In February 1945 the population of the camp had grown to 22,000, but by 1 April this had exploded to 43,000. To make matters worse, in February a typhus epidemic had broken out as well, then the food supply failed and the water was cut off. The camp was reduced to chaos and the situation was so dire that there were even reports of cannibalism.

  When the British 11th Armoured Division finally liberated the camp on 15 April 1945 the sights that met them must have truly horrified them. By this point the camp’s population had reached a staggering 60,000, disease and starvation were rife, and the bare dusty grounds were littered with a further 13,000 bodies lying unburied where they had fallen. One of the first to enter the camp over the following days was a young BBC reporter, Richard Dimbleby. His report and film footage shocked the world.

  Slow responses and some ill-advised decisions meant that despite their best efforts a further 14,000 inmates died after they had been liberated, including an estimated 2,000 dying from being given the wrong food. The main concentration camp was called Camp 1 – or the ‘Horror Camp’ – while the barracks of the nearby Panzer training school became the location of Camp 2. This was where the hospital was established. As Haynes says to Owen, they took 500 patients out of Camp 1 into the hospital every day, the equivalent of three blocks. Even with the help of various relief and aid agencies, including the International Red Cross, they were woefully under-resourced. Those deemed healthy enough were then housed in the smaller facility at Camp 3 awaiting deportation home, the first group to leave Belsen being a group of French and Dutch on 24 April. The ‘Horror Camp’ was fully evacuated and the last of its barracks burnt down on 21 May. It had taken over a month just to clear out all those who were sick.

  While none of the characters portrayed really existed and some of the geography and environment of the camp has been altered, some of the smaller events did occur. German nurses brought in to assist were indeed ravaged by hospital inmates; ninety-six London medical students volunteered to assist in the evacuation of Camp 1; former inmates such as Nurse Joubert, many of whom were themselves recuperating from typhus, were drafted in to help in the hospital barracks; and a delivery of lipstick indeed took place, causing consternation among those desperate for medical supplies. In fact, the lipstick proved to be a considerable turning point in the recuperation of many of the patients, returning to the women a sense of worth and humanity – which their Nazi incarcerators had been hell-bent on eradicating.

  For more information on Belsen I highly recommend Ben Shephard’s After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945.

  The second camp featured in the novel is at Żagań, western Poland (formerly Sagan in eastern Germany before the borders were realigned). Anyone with much knowledge of World War II or Hollywood war movies will recognize it as Stalag Luft III, the location of the Great Escape. Although the camp was evacuated at the end of January 1945, in reality it was taken over by the Russians when they arrived the following month and, in a stroke of irony, used to house German POWs. That said, many other camps were left abandoned by the Germans and so the sight that Owen finds himself facing was not at all unusual.

  Stalag Luft III was one of many POW camps run by the Luftwaffe and used to hold captured aircrews. Camps run by the Luftwaffe were rather more relaxed than their Wehrmacht counterparts. At Stalag Luft III there was a theatre, library, and the opportunity to play sports, and from spring 1943 captured airmen were allowed to keep their uniforms. If you want to find out more about Stalag Luft III there are countless books available on the Great Escape, and I would recommend Stalag Luft III: The Secret Story by Arthur A. Durand.

  Leipzig suffered aerial attacks by the Allies in July 1944, with the United States First Army capturing the city on 19 April 1945, just over a fortnight before Owen’s arrival. In autumn 1944, the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union had agreed to divide Germany into occupation zones for administrative purposes come the end of the war; however, when peace was at last declared, the US Army had pushed far beyond the boundaries that had been agreed. In July 1945, the US Army was forced to withdraw from the city and the Russians moved in.

  A word or two should be said about Hawkers. The company had originally been named Sopwith Aviation Company (founded in 1912) with its premises, even back then, in Kingston-upon-Thames, on Canbury Park Road. The firm became H. G. Hawker Engineering Co. Ltd. in 1920 and Hawker Aircraft Ltd. in 1933. Sydney Camm joined the company in 1921 as a draughtsman. However, by the time Owen was there, Camm would have been Chief Designer. It was during this period that Camm designed some of the most innovative aircraft of the twentieth century, including his most famous fighter plane, the Hawker Hurricane. Owen would have been in the Experimental Drawing Office during the development of the Hurricane, which went on to defend England during the Blitz. Indeed, on 18 F
ebruary 1941, an article in the News Chronicle went so far as to claim that Sydney Camm was the man who had saved Britain. The company closed its doors in 1992. It is sad that its significance in British history and the defence of England is almost forgotten; if you would like to know more about the history of Hawker Aircraft I thoroughly recommend you visit the Kingston Aviation website: www.kingstonaviation.org

  Janek says to Owen of the British people: ‘You give Czech land away.’ There is an element of truth in this. Since the formation of the first Czechoslovak republic in 1918 there had been tension over the border regions where a significant German population lived, and whether the areas should be part of the Czechoslovak republic or affiliated to Germany. One of these border regions was known by the Germans as the Sudetenland. The situation there was exacerbated in the 1930s by the rise of the Sudeten German Party, and in a congress of the Nazi Party in September 1938 Hitler accused the Czech government of suppressing national rights and promised to ensure the liberation of the Sudeten Germans and the annexation of the Czech border regions to the German Reich.

  What happened in Munich on 29 September 1938 will be well known to most readers – the four-power conference instigated by Neville Chamberlain and the French prime minister Édouard Daladier, along with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the German Führer. Wrongly thinking that the Munich Agreement would appease Hitler and that all he wanted was the reclamation of what he considered to be German lands already populated by Germans, Chamberlain and Daladier signed an agreement on the ceding of Czech border territories. Chamberlain famously stated to the British people that the agreement meant ‘peace for our time’. How wrong he was. Representatives of the one government this most concerned – the Czechs – were not invited to the talks, and, as a result, they felt they had no choice but to capitulate. On 1 October 1938, the Czech army evacuated the border areas and the German units moved in. Then, on 15 March 1939, Hitler finished what he had started: the German Army moved into the rest of the country and the next day an order was issued on the formation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.