Jenny put her arm around his shoulders and asked me to explain, to relate as much as I could remember more about the memoranda I had read in Paris.
‘Because they have the atom bomb, these people and their perverted, obscene ideas will now dominate Europe and perhaps further afield,’ I said. ‘They truly believe they are the master race, and that events have proved that. From the jaws of defeat, they snatched victory over us, the Russians and the Americans, and they dictate to the Italians and the Japanese. Now I think they won’t hesitate to do terrible things in pursuit of what they call racial purity.’
Without saying a word or asking a question, Robert MacDonald had been listening intently to these exchanges. He put forward a simple proposition: ‘Jamie, your position as an officer in the Vigilantes is not going to save your wife’s family, or indeed yours, from whatever the Germans are planning. But it might help us to understand what is going on here in St Andrews.’
*
After more than two hours of continuous hosing, pumping water up from the Kinnessburn, the fire at the Bute had been extinguished. At that point, the firemen forced their way into the main building to ensure that there was no structural damage, so far as they could judge by torchlight. But when they attempted to move through to the laboratories, Colonel Kritzinger sent soldiers in to prevent them going any further. With Feldman, he himself would make a full inspection in the morning. They agreed to meet at first light.
‘One more thing, if you would excuse me, Colonel,’ said the professor as Kritzinger made to leave. ‘May I wish you a happy new year.’ The colonel whirled round but before his scowl could become an insult, the little professor went on, ‘No, I mean it. Nineteen fourty-four was terrible for all of us. All of us. I hope that somehow we can make this year a better one.’
Kritzinger grunted, refused Feldman’s proffered hand, and climbed into the staff car without offering to take the professor back to North Castle Street. He would not be able to sleep. A report for Berlin needed to be written. Perhaps the use of the phrase ‘minor setback’ would mitigate their wrath? No, it would not.
Although he was not surprised at the German’s routine rudeness, Feldman walked up Westburn Wynd sensing that something had changed, something in his own head had shifted. Even in the midst of the madness of the world, the old town he now found himself in was somehow consoling. Its stones spoke of generations, of the ebb and flow of events, the passing on and the getting of knowledge, the acrid smoke of religious martyrdom, the wash of history on the cliffs below the cathedral ruins and, above all, of continuity. A New Yorker for most of his life, the professor had been surprised to find moments of peace and reflection in St Andrews, in the chapel and amongst the ruins. But it was the streets and alleyways he especially liked and felt comfortable in. Unlike the hard angles of the grid, the numbered avenues and the skyscrapers of New York’s cityscape, this town had not been organised or planned. Instead, it had grown like an organism, edging westwards from the cathedral and the university and petering out on the edge of the farmland beyond. Feldman had no faith, his Judaism departed long ago, but as he walked down the pleasingly awkward cobbled pavement of North Castle Street, he realised that he believed in something, that somehow the upside-down world would right itself. But he had no idea how.
*
Robert MacDonald was thinking aloud. ‘Your rank and uniform means that you have access to the town through the West Port, but does it allow you to penetrate the cordon around the Bute and the old library quadrangle?’
Griffith-Smith shook his head.
‘All right. Jimmy MacRae told me that the Americans were billeted in the university houses in North Castle Street and in the Principal’s House. Can you find out where Professor Feldman and his family are living?’
When Griffith-Smith agreed that he could, he went on to make the excellent point that the American might immediately contact the Germans and betray him. After all, their families were here, probably as hostages of some sort. Feldman would always choose them.
I had been watching Griffith-Smith closely, his face and his gestures. He seemed accepting and receptive. If the Germans discovered, as they probably would, that his wife and children were Jewish, they could in turn blackmail him into revealing our whereabouts. ‘There’s a risk everywhere,’ I said. ‘It’s a risk to contact Feldman, but if we do don’t know what it is the Americans and the Germans are doing at the Bute – what they’re going to great pains to hide – then what do we do? Run and hide? Frankly, we’ve been doing rather too much of that recently.’
Alan Grant laughed, somehow releasing the tension of the moment.
1 January 1945
Both the Vigilantes and pairs of German soldiers had toured the streets of St Andrews, both inside and outside the perimeter wall. Through loudhailers at each corner, they had demanded attendance at St Salvator’s Tower in North Street at midday when Colonel Kritzinger would address them.
A few minutes before the appointed time, Professor Feldman, his wife and several colleagues, two of them with a child, left their houses in North Castle Street, curious to know what announcement they would hear. By the time they reached the cobbled area below the tower, hundreds had gathered, spilling into the street, including Katie Grant and her parents. At the back of the main body of people, their breath pluming into the January air, stood Jamie Griffith-Smith.
When Kritzinger appeared from under the arch, Katie noticed that he did something generations of students had avoided. Set into the cobbles are the letters ‘PH’, marking the spot where Patrick Hamilton was martyred in 1528, burned at the stake. To stand on the stone letters was reckoned to bring the worst of bad luck and, as the German set foot on them, Katie prayed that superstition would turn into fact.
‘Some of you were in the quadrangle yesterday evening when we demanded that the traitor David Erskine should give himself up. This morning he was arrested and condemned to death.’
Katie shivered. She knew that this was not true but nevertheless the words gripped her heart.
Kritzinger continued, ‘Your presence here is important. You should understand that we are protecting your community vigorously. You should witness justice being done, see for yourselves the fate of those who, like Erskine, threaten the peace that Germany has brought to your country. Look up. Now!’
Katie put her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. Her mother gasped. With his hands tied behind his back and a noose around his neck, John Campbell was standing on the parapet at the very top of St Salvator’s Tower.
‘Now!’ shouted Kritzinger, and a soldier pushed Campbell in the back. The fall at the end of the long rope must have broken his neck. Alan Grant prayed it had broken his neck.
John Campbell’s body swung obscenely, like a pendulum, across the red face of the clock on the tower. At the back of the crowd, Jamie Griffith-Smith grimaced. All around him there were cries of distress, some from children whose parents had not reacted quickly enough. Since the days of the martyrs, nothing like this had happened in St Andrews. Professor Feldman put his arm around his wife as they walked away. And Griffith-Smith followed them.
*
‘Mind your head, Professor MacDonald, Mr Erskine. The roof is very low.’
Feldman sat on a stone block at the sloping entrance of a mine. Almost four centuries before the appalling events at St Salvator’s Tower, violence had flared only yards from the professor’s front door, where the ruins of St Andrews Castle clung to a headland of steep cliffs above the waves of the North Sea. In 1546, the castle had been under siege. Protestant lairds manned its walls while Catholic forces, many of the soldiers French, bombarded them with artillery, but to little avail. Frustration had led to a spectacular attempt to tumble the walls by other means. Through the living rock, a mine was dug to undermine the gatehouse, but the defenders foiled this subterranean attack by digging a countermine above it that would allow them to rain down all manner of things on their enemies. This relic of the tumult of the Reforma
tion fascinated Professor Feldman.
When Griffith-Smith asked him to meet me and Robert MacDonald in secret, he did not hesitate to agree and immediately suggested the mine – to our amazement: Feldman was not permitted to go beyond the walls around the town without an escort, and in any case he was often followed. But the entrance to the mine was very close to his house, and he was certain the Germans had no idea it was there and he could easily get to it before us and wait.
‘I was sorry to see your fiancée witnessing your supposed execution, Mr Erskine. I’ m assuming you knew the poor man who died,’ said Feldman as we shook hands again and I introduced him to Robert MacDonald.
‘A dreadful, terrible exhibition of cruelty,’ I said. ‘Something I fear will become a feature of our daily lives.’ Griffith-Smith had told me that, in exchange for any information Feldman might be prepared to divulge, I would have to tell him all I knew about the Eichmann memoranda. Knowing Feldman was Jewish, I had unashamedly used what I had read in Paris as a lure, certain that he would want to know what was going on in occupied Europe.
‘Yes. Thank you, Mr Erskine. For some reason, none of that comes as a complete surprise. We knew that the Nazis had enacted legislation to remove all sorts of freedoms from Jews and that widespread destruction and beatings in the street had taken place. That sort of thing has, sadly, been part of our history for centuries. But we began to hear stories in America, what seemed like wild tales of mass murder and state-sanctioned brutality. The scale of what these memoranda hint at is vast. Why would the Nazis need a list of the number of Jews in each country if they weren’t to be a target of some kind?’
*
More than fifty miles west of St Andrews, in the foothills of the Highland massif, the villagers of Comrie had watched lorry after lorry arrive at Cultybraggan Camp. For more than a month, they had been coming to what was better known as the Black Camp. It was a sprawling network of paths, roads and rows of Nissen huts where the most fanatical of the SS prisoners of war had been held. But after the destruction of London and the capitulation of British forces, all prisoners were released to form the core of the army of occupation in Scotland. Now it seemed that they had returned.
Long trains began to arrive at the railway station carrying soldiers who marched through the village to reoccupy the camp. Soon afterwards, the first prisoners came. Clothed in black-and-white-striped uniforms that more resembled pyjamas, they were set to work even in the worst of the winter weather. Some of the villagers thought they recognised several of the men; they were sure they had been the Polish soldiers who guarded the camp before the surrender.
When rainstorms and snow blew over the Perthshire mountains and down into Strathearn, gangs began digging a cutting, a spur from the railway line that came west from Crieff. Using only picks, shovels and barrows, they shifted many tons of muddy soil before reaching the banks of the River Earn. Winter spates meant that the construction of a new bridge would have to wait. It seemed clear that the Germans intended there to be a railway that reached right into the camp.
South of the Earn, more digging went on at Cultybraggan. In a new compound between the old camp and the river, long rectangular pits were excavated. Thousands of bricks were unloaded from lorries at the sides of the pits to wait for better weather in the spring when building could begin. The camp was extended far beyond its original perimeter, perhaps tripling in size. Trees were cut down and farm fields appropriated. Local people were not permitted to come near the new camp, but they could see developments closer at hand. Around Comrie station, on the eastern edge of the village, a high barbed wire fence was erected that left a gap only for the track that led westwards towards Lochearnhead and the West Highland railway lines. The prisoners also made a sign above the main gate out of the station. It read, Welcome to Comrie Resettlement Camp.
No one in the village dared to ask what that meant.
*
‘The Germans brought us here to St Andrews not only because you have a university with laboratories and some facilities, but also because the town lies on the North Sea coast,’ said Feldman. ‘And I assume that, unlike the city of Aberdeen and its university, they thought that this place was easier to defend and could be made very secure. They also chose to bring us here, I imagine, because the south-east of England is said to be little more than a desert. Thousands are dying of a sickness caused by the atomic explosion and the cities of northern England have been flooded by refugees.’
I had brought a torch since I remembered that the smooth rock of the floor of the mine could be slippery. Robert and I had come at gloaming, and now a dense darkness had fallen. The beam of the torch lit us all very theatrically, but there was already sufficient drama in these exchanges, and plenty of jeopardy if we were discovered. I offered Feldman a cigarette and for some reason the tobacco smoke seemed to introduce a note of normality to this strange tableau.
‘I believe that I now work in your office, Professor MacDonald, but I can assure you that all of your papers and your notes have remained undisturbed.’ With that, Feldman sighed and his train of thought seemed to peter out.
Robert MacDonald leaned forward and touched the little professor on his knee. ‘Thank you. I appreciate your consideration in leaving my things untouched. It must be difficult for you, too. But I sense that you yourself are a little disturbed.’
Feldman looked up at us both and nodded. ‘Yes. Perhaps I should tell you a little more.’
The professor went on to explain that he and his colleagues had been instructed to leave their laboratories and travel with their families to Scotland. To refuse to do so would have left the Germans with no option but to carry out their threat to destroy New York City. They would have detonated the bomb carried in the U-boat that had surfaced in the Hudson River and they promised that the devastation would have been even greater than in London. ‘I have family and friends in New York. What else could we do but agree to leave?’ He talked about how he and his colleagues and their wives had tried to make the best of things, and indeed some, like himself, had become genuinely interested in the old town of St Andrews. It was unlike anywhere else they had ever been.
‘Why does it matter,’ I asked, ‘that we’re on the North Sea coast?’
Feldman replied that it was because ships from Norway could reach us directly and quickly, as though that was somehow obvious.
Robert MacDonald was nodding but I persisted in my puzzlement. ‘What comes from Norway that you need?’
‘It’s heavy water, isn’t it?’ interjected Robert, and Feldman nodded.
‘Forgive me, but what is heavy water?’
Between them, the two scientists explained that it contains more deuterium, a kind of hydrogen, and that heavy water is manufactured in Telemark in southern Norway. ‘One of the main reasons why the Germans invaded in 1940 was to gain control of production,’ said Feldman. He told us that since its discovery in 1934, it had become clear that it was easier to split an atom of deuterium and control the chain reaction. ‘That is the important thing. Splitting an atom serves no purpose, indeed it’s very dangerous, unless you can control it,’ said the professor.
‘So what you’re doing at the Bute,’ said Robert, ‘is building a nuclear reactor?’
There was a moment of hesitation and Feldman said nothing, looking at both of us, perhaps weighing an answer, or no answer. Suddenly remembering his cigarette, he dropped it on the stone floor and ground it out. ‘If the Germans knew I was here, talking to you about our work, they would not kill me or even beat me. But they might do to my wife what they did to your friend today. As we have seen, they’re capable of anything.’ He stood up to leave.
But before he could move past us to the entrance to the mine, Robert MacDonald asked if he would wait another minute or two. ‘What do you think will happen to you and your wife when your work here is complete?’
The little professor made no comment.
‘You won’t be allowed to return to the United States. By the
time your work is over, you’ll both be expendable, perhaps even a liability. And by then the Germans will have whatever it is that they want from you. I know this is an appallingly difficult business. It is for all of us. I think I know what you’re doing at the Bute. But we need you to tell us. Please, please do not leave.’
*
‘May I use your telephone, please?’ Instead of barging in brandishing a pistol, Jamie Griffith-Smith had rung the doorbell at the MacDonalds’ house. ‘I am sorry to bother you, Mrs MacDonald, but I need to make an urgent telephone call. I tried on our phone but there was no ringing tone at the other end. To be honest, I also wondered if someone was listening.’
Jenny brought Griffith-Smith into the hallway, but before leaving him to his call, she said, ‘You seem very anxious. Come and talk to us when you’ve finished.’ But he had already picked up the receiver and had begun dialling. Jenny left him to it, saying, ‘Join us in the sitting room when you can.’
*
As the wind freshened and began to whistle around the ruins of St Andrews Castle, I shivered in the damp of the mine and, as he sat down again, I offered Professor Feldman another cigarette. Cupping a match in my hand, I leaned over to light it.
The Night Before Morning Page 16
