Later, Max dropped in with a bag of chestnuts to roast in the stove. Neither thought of making incisions in the shells. The explosions rattled and banged in the heat like a trapped farmer with a shotgun. They ran for cover, crouched behind her desk with their hands over their ears, and Grace thought, if only Morten was here: he would know what to do.
5
When the pond thawed, the sons and daughters of the Baltic stripped off their pullovers and splashed into the cold fresh water. Max said he was an excellent swimmer, had swum half the length of the Rhine once, but would wait until the weather was warmer before sampling the ponds.
‘There is no need to be ashamed,’ Grace said, and splashed water at him with her foot. ‘I can’t swim, either.’
He wagged his finger in mock outrage. ‘I once swam from Munich to Berlin!’
‘Berlin is not on the Rhine.’
‘You’re right. Neither is Munich.’
Then he wrapped himself in a woollen blanket, sat on the grass with his back against a tree trunk, pushed his horn-rimmed glasses down to the tip of his nose and began to read a newspaper.
Grace dipped her toes back in the water and shuddered.
Little Inge said swimming was good for the constitution.
‘I’m surprised you even needed a boat to come to England,’ Grace said. ‘You swim like a duck. Much more elegantly, of course.’ She lowered her voice so Max could not hear and added: ‘I’m going to take swimming lessons, you know.’
‘Swimming lessons? With a teacher who draws waves on a blackboard?’
‘That’s where the fishes learn how to swim,’ Max called over. ‘At swimming school.’
Inge loved that. ‘Will you be taught by a trout or a goose?’
‘Geese don’t swim, actually,’ Grace said, though she was not too sure.
‘You mustn’t be very annoyed with Mr Hoffnung,’ Inge whispered suddenly. ‘At home, we always had butter or jam. It’s true. He didn’t invent it.’
‘Inge! Were you eavesdropping on us?’
‘Only by accident.’
‘Well, that was weeks ago. We are all good friends now.’
‘The only time my brother and I were allowed butter and jam was on the morning when Mama took me to the train station.’
And then Inge, true daughter of the Baltic, ran to the end of the wooden pier and jumped straight into the pond.
*
Grace preferred to take her lessons at the ladies’ pond, where Max Hoffnung could not see her. The swimming instructor, a ruddy and cantankerous retired seamstress, made Grace wedge an inflated rubber ball between her knees, which seemed the surest way to tilt her, duck-like, head down, legs up, into the water. She pushed weeds and feathers out of the way with her arms as two ducks glided past, ignoring the giant invader. When she dipped her head underwater without closing her eyes, she could see their frantically paddling feet.
In her mind she was teaching Morten to make pebbles skim across the pond. The trick was to give them a hard flat spin with your fingertips just before you let go. She managed three hops and Morten was duly impressed.
Swords and Ploughshares
1
Mary Pye had taken to putting her hat in the icebox and the butter dish on the book shelf between the Bible and the dictionary.
‘Which was the right place from an alphabetical point of view,’ said Charlie.
She put her confusion down to war nerves and announced at dinner that it would be best if she moved back to her old cottage in Ulverston. The idea sounded reasonable. Everyone felt frayed and jittery because of the pesky false alarms, and she was not bound to London by work.
‘And Charlie will be going up there, too,’ his father said.
Charlie dropped his fork on his plate, a trick he had recently adopted to register wordless protest. He had easily passed his tribunal, moving the lay judges with his pure and eloquent Christian steadfastness and dedication to the Quaker faith. He had rejected arguing for exemption on political grounds as too risky: most of his comrades had failed their tribunals. The judges exempted him from military service on the condition that he make himself useful on a farm or in a hospital.
‘He might as well do his land work in Ulverston,’ their father continued, looking at Mary Pye. ‘There are some conchies at Swarthmoor Hall.’
‘Land work?’ Charlie’s knife hit his plate right next to the fork.
‘Or you could be a stretcher-bearer, like I was. But I wouldn’t recommend it.’ Their father kneaded his lean fingers. ‘Prison would be another option. I wouldn’t recommend that, either. They make you work in there. You might not enjoy that.’
‘I work!’
‘Do you?’ His father raised both eyebrows in a great show of astonishment. ‘When?’
‘Every day.’
‘But that’s wonderful!’ He turned to their mother. ‘Margaret, did you hear? Our firstborn has grown bored of being idle!’
Their mother ignored him. She took Charlie’s hands in her own.
‘Land work is not the worst, dear. Three boys from Hampstead Meeting have signed up for human experiments at the hospital. Now they’re all down with yellow fever.’
Mary Pye muttered something about the hardest service being the most rewarding. ‘Think of our Saviour on the cross.’
‘That’s just the sort of life I have in mind. Crucified at thirty-three.’
‘Charlie!’
‘Mother!’
‘He’s quite right, Maggie, he’s quite right, it is a wonderful life to emulate,’ said Mary Pye.
Paul wished his family would talk about his own tribunal for a change.
‘Land work is supposed to be all right, you know,’ he told Charlie later that evening. He took the Book of Christian Discipline from his shelf and leafed through it in the hope of finding a useful line for his tribunal. They were still sharing a bedroom. Paul had dropped out of Bentham College after his failed statistics exam and was working as a sculptor’s assistant in Hampstead; neither his nor Charlie’s more obscurely sourced income stretched to their own digs.
‘It’s not the land work I mind. It’s Ulverston.’
‘At least you won’t have to help out in the soap shop.’
At this, Charlie leaped up from the bed, seized the Book of Christian Discipline and threw it across the room. ‘Not another word about the soap shop.’
Paul went to pick up the book, smoothed the pages and wiped down the cover with his sleeve.
‘It’s not the fault of the Book of Discipline that you don’t like soap.’
‘I hate soap. And I hate the Book of Discipline.’
‘There’s no reason to hate it.’ Paul held on to it tightly in case there was another outburst, but Charlie merely sighed.
‘Don’t worry about tomorrow,’ he said, and boxed Paul’s arm. ‘Come out tonight, have a few drinks, get a good night’s sleep and you’ll be fine.’
2
Charlie’s friends were waiting by the pier. Flasks of cider and gin circulated, and Paul took a few sips for courage. A group of girls arrived with torches and impatiently switched them on and off in the twilight. The local air-raid warden would no doubt have put a stop to the whole thing, had she not been busy fighting through the undergrowth with a scrawled map in her hand. She stepped into the circle of torchlight, and Paul looked at her face and realized that nothing else mattered, neither his tribunal nor Charlie’s land work nor the worrying news from the Continent, because he was at a twilight bathing party, and there was Miriam, ready to change into a swimming costume and glide into the pond.
A line from a poem or a song came to him: ‘She wants to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world’. Yes, that was exactly how she looked.
*
She reached the bank on the other side of the pond first and climbed up into the tangle of foxgloves, ferns and marsh marigolds. Paul burned his leg on some nettles when he joined her. Someone jumped in from the pier and there was much s
hrieking and whooping, but in the darkness of the night they couldn’t see who it was.
‘This is my favourite moment,’ Paul said, ‘when the daylight’s gone and you see all the windows in the distance light up one by one.’
‘Sorry to spoil it, but you’re sitting next to an air-raid warden. I’m personally responsible for all that darkness.’ She leaned back and propped herself up on her arms. ‘That vicarage next to St Matthew’s? I had to fine them three times. After the third time I went down there with some black tape and sealed the window myself.’
‘I’m surprised they didn’t stop you.’
‘They were out. I climbed in through the bathroom window, which was the one they refused to seal. Then I sealed it. Then I realized I’d sealed my way out. Luckily they hadn’t locked the front door.’ She lowered herself all the way to the ground and folded her hands over her stomach. ‘The thing I ask myself is, is this really the best I can do? Is this what I should be doing, going round Hampstead with a roll of sticky tape?’
He did not answer because he was too dazzled by the spectacle of light and dark that unfolded itself above them. ‘Look! I told you the lights would come on.’
Someone had picked up a bucketful of stars and poured them over the night sky. They no longer competed with streetlamps and chandeliers, and their light flooded the darkness, so brilliant and dense that Paul could not even make out any constellations.
He thought: Now. I’m going to tell her all about my tribunal right now, and she’s going to tell me it’ll be fine, and that’s all I need to hear.
Just then, Miriam sat up and pulled her knees to her chest.
‘There’s the Plough!’
‘Where?’
‘There. See, the handle, the blade . . .’
‘I can’t find it.’
‘Just follow the line of my arm.’
Their cheeks almost touched. He could feel her shiver with cold.
‘Can you see it now?’
‘Yes.’ He let his cheek touch hers, and she did not move away.
‘I don’t want to be like that,’ Miriam said with sudden, intense fierceness. ‘Millions of them, and you can’t tell one from the other. We have to make up patterns to even remember which is which. Don’t you sometimes think that at the end of one’s life, one must lie there and think: I hope I counted? Do you know what I mean? I so desperately want to count. That’s why I wanted to study art, because – don’t laugh – because I thought it would be so wonderful to sign my name on the canvas, and then it would be there for all eternity. It’s why I had to join every single student society at Bentham, and then volunteer as an air-raid warden as soon as I could. I thought that surely being part of some greater idea, some movement, surely that was a way of . . . of mattering. Of being seen. But now I’m thinking that it isn’t, really. It’s more like being that star on the bottom right of the Plough. Everyone knows the Plough and no one knows the star.’
She rested her chin on one knee and the warm connection between their cheeks was broken.
‘I want that, too,’ Paul said quietly. ‘I want to count.’
‘I know you do.’ He could almost hear the concentrated frown and he knew what her face must look like now in the dark, that almost scowling look she had when she was thinking hard. ‘And I envy you, because you’re going to make a choice that matters. What’s there to do for a woman in a war, really? Knit socks for the boys, tape up the vicarage. Stir the stew for when the boys come home. And give birth, of course, give birth to lots of boys who will go out and defend us.’
‘Well, being an artist is also a way of counting.’
She let out a quiet laugh.
‘Is it? It makes me think of that cartoon of a man in a beret standing behind an easel, and the caption, “Hampstead at War”. Because I’m not sure it is, you see. King David played the harp and smote the Philistines, didn’t he? I’m not sure I’d think of him quite so highly if he’d only played the harp.’
‘You might if he’d played the right song. Or written the right song. There’s a famous woman columnist at Peace News who often writes about—’
‘Peace News?’ She pronounced it exactly as she had that first time they met, somewhere between incredulity and contempt. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but when I listened to Charlie and his friends rant against the war machine just now, well, they don’t know anything, do they?’
‘But I’m not Charlie. This isn’t my set, either.’
‘Then what is your set?’
‘Why do I need to belong to a set? Why can’t I just have my own beliefs?’
‘Fine, but what are they? You can’t still believe what you said in that debate – that everything will be fine as long as we’re nice to the Germans.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I mean, I just assumed . . .’ Her voice grew a little uncertain. ‘I suppose I assumed you’d changed your mind since the war started. I don’t know why I assumed that.’
Because you wanted it to be true, Paul thought. And at that moment, it was what he wanted, too. He wanted to sit here with Miriam and feel that they were one, that they had the same beliefs and the same fears and the same notion of right and wrong, and he wanted them both to mean the same when they said, ‘I so desperately want to count.’
‘If you want to know what I believe in . . .’ he took her hand, ‘. . . I believe in this. I believe in the two of us sitting by a pond at night. I believe that everyone has a right to sit by a pond at night without being shot at, without being attacked or robbed. There is a scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the German protagonist spots an English officer sitting at an easel in a crater from a blast, painting with watercolours, and he retreats, rips the ring off his hand grenade and throws it into the crater. If you talk about the choice I’m facing, well, it’s that. Do I want to be the Englishman at the easel, or do I want to be the soldier with the grenade? Do I want to be the victim or the perpetrator? I tell you what, I don’t think for a moment that the German soldier drew the better lot. From the moment the grenade explodes, he’s as dead as the Englishman. It’s just a different sort of death.’
There was a rustle in the undergrowth behind them. Miriam sat very still, then suddenly clapped her hands, and with another quick rustle whatever had been hiding there scurried away.
‘The way I see it,’ she said calmly, ‘is that we’re in the crater, we can see the German with the grenade peering down at us, and you’ve got a rifle. And you’re about to throw it away.’
‘But I’m not.’ Two forces were tearing at Paul, two entirely contradictory thoughts. The first one was, I renounce war. The second one was, What sort of man would refuse to protect his own? There was no conceivable way of reconciling those thoughts. No, there was only one way to avoid being torn apart, and that was to separate them. The first thought belonged to the world of First-Day meeting, and a pledge signed in a crowded hall, and – oh, he almost laughed at the absurdity of it – his tribunal in the morning. The second thought was all that mattered right now, here, with Miriam by his side.
He told himself that he wasn’t about to lie to Miriam, he wasn’t about to represent views that were not his own. He was merely letting one side of his character breathe a little. He was only giving a little more room to the side of his character that wanted the English officer to turn round, shoot the invader, and finish his watercolour.
‘I’m against war,’ he said carefully, ‘and I would never volunteer to pick up a rifle. But if there was no other choice – if someone put a rifle in my hand and asked me to help defend our country – then of course I wouldn’t throw it away.’
It astonished him how easy it was. The words slid so effortlessly off his tongue. There was something about the image of him defending their crater that felt natural and instinctively right. And it was such a relief not to have to be complicated, contrarian Paul any more. It was such a relief not to have to sit here and tell Mi
riam that it was certainly bad luck for her relatives on the Continent, but bombing Germany wouldn’t make their luck any better. It was such a relief to believe, at least for this night-time moment by the pond, that his choice really did matter, and that he would go off and fight and be heroic, and come back to find Miriam waiting for him with loving admiration in her eyes.
‘Of course you wouldn’t.’ She leaned into him, and he put his arm around her. ‘I’m sorry. It was a horrible thing of me to say.’
The clouds parted and they looked up at the stars. He could see the Plough very clearly now. He took her hand and lifted it towards the sky.
‘Merak,’ he said. ‘The star on the bottom right is called Merak.’
3
NATIONAL SERVICE (ARMED FORCES ACT)
—-
APPLICATION TO LOCAL TRIBUNAL BY A PERSON PROVISIONALLY REGISTERED IN THE REGISTER OF CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS
—-
Name in full . . . Paul Jeremiah Ezekiel Lamb
Any statement you wish to submit in support of your application should be made below:
‘I object as a Quaker to war and have dedicated my life to abolishing the horror and futility of violence. I cannot, when my soul cries out against war, take up a rifle and fight bloodshed with bloodshed. God has taught us not to kill but to love all men, even the Germans. On battlefields do not grow vines! As an artist trained in print-making, I have expressed this sentiment in a sketch of a crippled vine that was published by the Peace Pledge Union, which I joined in 1937. Enclosed is a copy of the sketch and some other samples of my work as a pacifist artist, guided by the conviction that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’. My most recent design, which aims to depict the true nature of war in the guise of an all-consuming sea-monster, was published in Peace News, a publication I also support. I plan to devote my life to art in the service of peace, but given the limited scope for using draughtsmanship to save lives in this war, I would be willing to serve in a Friends’ Ambulance Unit, binding the wounds of war.’
Of Love and Other Wars Page 8
