The sodden blankets we wrapped around us are heavy with ice, so we tie them on top of the sledge, and that makes it easier to walk when the call comes down the line for us to get up and move on.
Ralph winces as he puts his left foot to the ground, and though we all look worriedly at him, he dismisses us with a flick of his hand. Bill rubs his wrist from time to time. I alternate between sliding my feet as if I’m skating on the compacted ice and walking in the slushy snow to the edges, which soaks through the eyelets of my boots. I’m so tired that I don’t know how I’m continuing to walk, but too afraid of being left behind to stop.
As the sky lightens for dawn, the line comes to a slow stop. We stand for a long time, banging our hands on our sides, stamping our feet, clouds of steam around our heads. We’ve perhaps said five words to one another in as many hours. The raggedy queue shuffles forward for a few hundred yards and comes to a halt again, and a rumor is passed back to us.
“They’re billeting us in farms. We’ll be inside soon and able to sleep.”
I think it’ll take a lot of farms to fit us all, but at last I can lift my head and take in the lightening world around. Snow-covered fields rise toward woods. A deer walks out from the trees. It looks down on us for a long time before the bald guard spots it and raises his rifle. The crack of the shot echoes all around us, but the deer’s unhurt, and it leaps back into the woods. The gunfire sends ravens shooting into the air, cawing their outrage, black against the snow-heavy sky.
On the trees nearest to us are great clumps of mistletoe, just like home. Farther up the hill, in the dark wood, the snow on the uppermost branches of the trees is the purest white, lighter than the sky. Tall firs have their branches weighed down to the ground. The birches glitter.
It’s completely light before we’re in the yard of a farm. We are among the first being counted into a large barn. I point up to the hayloft.
“Up there,” says Bill for me. “Might be less cold, and hay to bed down in.”
It’s very awkward to pull the sledge up the ladder behind us, and men below shout loud complaints to us.
“Fucking idiots. Leave it down here.”
“You’re holding us all up. Get a move on.”
But we are determined not to be parted from either our belongings or the sledge itself, and so we heave and haul until it’s up in the loft. We manage to get it into a corner and start to pull hay into our area to sleep on, wringing out our wet blankets and hanging them in the rafters above our heads. More and more men keep coming up the steps of the hayloft, until there isn’t enough space left for us to lie down.
“Move that fucking thing,” growls a heavily bearded man, pointing to the sledge. We stand it on its end, so it takes up less room. Then we lie down next to it, claiming the minimum space we’d need to sleep.
All around us, pressed close, men are trying to gather their possessions into little nests of frozen, wet clothing. Many men light up fags or set their blowers going to make a brew, and I’m horrified. My mother would sack a man who smoked in the hay barn. It could all catch light and go up in minutes, and we’d never be able to get out.
Bill sees my agitation. “Any of us could roll on a fire and put it out,” he points out. “We’re all soaked through. Now, then, a brew before we sleep?”
I remember the raisins and the plum brandy Berta gave me and we share them out. The brandy warms our insides if not our extremities. Ralph unlaces his boots, and I dry his feet with straw while he rubs some of the cream into them. They look swollen and raw.
The barn is locked from outside, and men carefully extinguish their cigarettes. There are no toilet facilities, so people pee next to the places where they’ve made their beds. Angry cries come up from beneath us. I haven’t drunk much in the last nine hours, so I think I’ll try to hang on until they let us out again. Cigarette smoke hangs in the damp air, mingling with the smell of urine, and steam rises from our wet clothes and our breath. Some men are gorging on the food from their parcels, but I’m too tired for once to feel hungry.
“We ought to ration the food,” says Ralph, watching them. “God knows if we’re going to get anything from the guards.”
We all nod miserable assent.
Part sitting and part lying, Bill and I lean against each other in our wet clothes.
I sleep fitfully, for only a few hours, and when we’re woken by the sounds of the barn being unlocked, I’m stiff. My clothes are still thoroughly wet and very, very cold. I didn’t think it was possible to be so chilled and damp and still live. The ice is unmelted on the skirts of my coat.
Some men have eaten too much of their Red Cross rations while we slept and the reek of sickness and diarrhea is added to the strong ammonia scent of urine. I cover my nose and mouth with my frosty, wet scarf.
We stand and stretch, and the ache in my legs and back from yesterday’s long march makes me feel like an old woman.
As we shake our arms and legs, trying to get some warmth back into our limbs, Max shouts, “Thieving bastards! Who is it? Come on, who is it? Low, bloody scum. I hope you choke on it.”
While we slept someone has untied a corner of our sledge and taken a whole food parcel. And above our heads in the rafters, Bill points out that one of our blankets is missing.
“Not me mate,” protest all the men around us.
I try to read their faces to see who’s lying, but all I see is desperation.
Some clean air enters from the open barn door, and I can’t wait to get out. Two men have been bitten by rats while they slept, but there’s no antiseptic for their wounds.
In the snowy farmyard, there’s been a Nazi army truck delivery, and the tall guard gives us a dense black loaf to share among six. The four of us team up with two other prisoners, and Max carefully measures the loaf before cutting it with his identity tag. He lets the two men we don’t know choose their portions first. Ralph has some margarine in his kit bag. It’s too frozen to spread on the bread, so we hack off slivers to suck. I rub some margarine on my cracked lips and chapped face, and the others do the same. Ralph gives us each a thin slice of Spam, which only makes me hungrier. For a second I see myself grabbing the whole square and running off to ram it into my mouth. I see other men eyeing it hungrily. What will happen when we’ve eked out our rations but others have nothing left?
Bill heats snow for tea.
“Always find the cleanest, whitest snow and make sure it boils properly. You don’t want dysentery,” cautions Ralph.
The tall guard tells us we covered twenty-nine kilometers since leaving Lamsdorf, and Max protests. “But the Geneva Convention says prisoners can’t be made to march more than twenty kilometers a day.” The guard shrugs expressively. What can he do about it?
“How far is twenty-nine kilometers?” Bill asks Max.
“Eighteen miles, I think. Leicester Square to somewhere like St. Albans.”
“Blimey, it felt like Leicester Square to Manchester.”
This is the first time they’ve spoken to each other since the Cable Street row.
• • •
Then we’re on the road again, putting weight gingerly on our sore feet, stretching the aching muscles in our thighs, calves and backs. For the first time, I think we aren’t fit enough to survive this, and I look with panic at my companions: three young men bent and limping like pensioners.