*
It’s nearly 11 a.m., the time we’re due to meet Krystof back at the road. He’s there, pacing up and down, smoking a cigarette. He greets us warmly. We’re greatly relieved to see him, now being certain of making our connection back to Berlin. He gestures to the official museum here, a small, dark wooden building by the road, ‘Ja, kein Problem!’ He points to his watch. ‘Zehn Minuten, OK?’ So we make a rapid tour of the little museum. Photographs of Roma families. Photographs of some of the eighty-two children of the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia:
These boys and girls were murdered here in June 1942 in reprisal for the assassination of Heydrich in Prague. He took eight days to die – perhaps there is a God after all. Heydrich, of course, was the dominant force at Wannsee, as we’ve seen, and co-ordinator-in-chief of the extermination process. We buy two publications about Chelmno, take some leaflets and soon we’re in the taxi, speeding towards Konin and the train that will take us back westwards to Berlin (and then on to London). We leave Krystof at the station with warm handshakes and smiles and all our remaining Polish money. Our train, which started in Moscow, is only a few minutes late, and on the platform we reflect on how far we’ve travelled since we left Berlin ten days ago.
On the train, reading one of the Chelmno books, I stare at a photograph of a primary school class from the village of Lidice. And then at another, a small black and white picture of a brother and sister from the same village. Four, maybe five years old in 1942. With no inkling of what was about to happen a few months later. The random moving of a hand over a map in an office in Prague or Berlin. The selection of their small village for total extermination. I count back, these two would have been born in 1937 or 1938. They would have been sixty-five or sixty-six years old today.
And as our train picks up speed, and the forests flicker past, I’m remembering something told to me long ago. It’s the memory of a girl who also would have been four, maybe five years old, at the time. And I’ve found it disturbing and inexplicable in equal measure, and it’s troubled me for many years.
The girl was an only child then, born in London in 1937, so she was only two when the war broke out. Her father, Sid, was blind (from the First World War); he was also a proud socialist who, with any excuse, would wear in his lapel the largest red rose he could find. She was less close to Dolly, her mother, who seemed to worry for all three of them. And when war broke out seriously (after months of the so-called ‘phoney war’), and the bombing started, there was even more than usual to worry about. She remembered (this perhaps her earliest memory) the drama of the bomb alarms wailing and being carried downstairs, through the garden in her ‘siren suit’, grey on the outside with a beautiful, bright red lining, which she loved, to the Anderson shelter. There the three of them would wait, hearing the thuds of the bombs on the docks a couple of miles away, and the shattering of glass being blown out. The skies blood red over Petherton Road; she not scared at all. For her the amazement of new sounds, a child’s excitement in midnight interruptions of sleep; for her parents a debilitating fear.
When the bombing intensified the family was evacuated to the small village of Newton Longville, now a suburb of Bletchley, but then a mile outside, to the south. They were housed on a farm at the edge of the village, and her mother became the housekeeper. The farm’s owner, Lesley, was from a religious family; his parents had bought the farm for him at the outbreak of war, because they were pacifists and farmers were exempt from military service, because farming was regarded as an essential occupation. The girl and her parents were happy here, despite Dolly’s complaints about the state of the place and how hard it was to clean. Later, a cousin and an aunt joined them, and they lived in the other end of the farmhouse. For the daughter it was an adventure. She was fascinated by everything – the farm, the animals, a sheepdog that became a loved pet for her, and the wild flowers that she first came across on walks, guiding her father, and which she’d then bring back for the neighbour Mrs Lovell to identify, who would then teach her the names. And her garden was simply miraculous for the girl. What were those ones, the pink and white lovelies? ‘Japanese hon-ey-moons’ is what she heard, only realising years later that Mrs Lovell had been pronouncing ‘an-e-moans’ – her phonetic reading of ‘anemones’. They would pick baskets of cowslips together to make wine, and after the harvest they would go gleaning, as country people had done for centuries. It was the right of all villagers to gather any ears of wheat or corn that were left after the farmer had cut the fields, and Mrs Lovell would then feed whatever they found to her chickens. Mr Lovell kept ferrets in a sack, which terrified the young girl, but he also showed her a magical trick with a pumpkin: if you wrote your name, quite small, with pin pricks when the pumpkin was just beginning to grow, within weeks it would swell and your name would swell with it! All of these experiences sowed seeds in the young girl, which germinated a lifelong passion for the natural world, and flowers in particular. One of the numerous and strange by-products of war.
But the shadow of the war reached the village; how could it not? The three of them would listen to the Home Service around the radio in the kitchen, Sid keeping up a commentary on the need for ‘opening up a second front’ to help our Russian allies who seemed to be fighting fascism alone in the middle of the war. And there was terrible news of the death of ‘Little Burt’, killed serving in the Far East – the nephew who had been more of a son to Dolly, who she’d raised after her sister-in-law had died young. The shock of the news was so severe that she lost the child she’d been carrying. From London there was more grim news – Dolly’s brother’s house in Queensbury Street was heavily bombed, killing Uncle Burt and the lodger upstairs.
Then one day her parents took her down to the village green, where, next to the church, a large lorry was parked. They explained that there was going to be a test of the gas masks, and there was nothing to worry about. Other parents and children were there as well. The children were given gas masks decorated with cartoon animals; she was handed a black and white one with a smiling Micky Mouse on, and it was soon fastened tightly with the rubber straps on the back of her head. The girl started to panic, as parents and children began to walk up the planks that led into the back of the van. Her father tried to reassure her: ‘Don’t be silly! If something’s wrong it will just make your eyes a bit sore.’ His grip was tight on her hand. Against her will she was pulled up the ramp and into the back of the lorry. An ascending terror. Going into that darkness and the gas. An instinctive, overwhelming No. But now she was inside. The doors were then closed, and she was crying, gulping frantically under the mask. Minutes that lengthened with the relentlessness of nightmare. Shaking and traumatised. A five-year-old girl. My mother.
Postscript, Pembrokeshire
This chapter, which I finished today, looking out over the bay where I’ve been writing, was hard to complete. Partly due to the fact that it was half written when I broke off from the first draft some years ago, and so going back to the exact place where I’d left the writing felt strange, considering the complexities of life that have intervened in the last years; I don’t feel I’m quite the same person who started the chapter.