Hannah & Emil (37 page)

‘What difference does it make?'

I wiped my hands on my apron and walked the length of the common room, all the chairs empty where our young people ate and sang, and the knock came again, a little sharper, more business-like.

On the steps in the courtyard were two policemen. Navy blue uniforms, bobby helmets. I knew them—we knew everybody in Winchester, running the hostel—and yet suddenly I did not know them. The younger, PC McIlray, coloured to his ears. ‘Mrs Becker,' said his partner, PC Baldwin. Baldwin, according to Emil, was as often as not in The White Lion in the evening before dinner; he generally left late, the worse for wear. You could see the evidence of it here in the spring light: a mottled nose, pink threads in the whites of his eyes.

‘It's Miss Jacob, actually,' I replied. It really was a beautiful day. The blue of the sky above the rooftops was deepening and the wisteria that spilled over the brick walls of the courtyard was just beginning to open its lilac blooms. The stream glistened in the sunlight. Everything was fresh. I felt as though my heart had stopped.

He looked puzzled. McIlray gazed at his shoes. Emil appeared at my shoulder. ‘Mr Becker,' Baldwin said, glad, I think, to be past the moment of dealing with the woman. ‘There's time to collect a few necessaries, but you must come with us now.'

Emil stepped out from behind me. He was carrying my suitcase, the one I used for work. He did not have his own at that time in his life. He possessed almost nothing. He sighed deeply as he set down the case on the street and took me in his arms.

‘How long is this for?' I asked Emil, as though he were the one in charge.

‘Just a few days, Mrs—' Baldwin said. ‘It's for his own good, with the way things are just now.'

I found myself shouting. ‘And how will they be different on Friday? Will Hitler have seen sense by then?'

‘Write to your friends,' Emil whispered into my hair, and released me. And they were opening the car doors on the little bridge, and guiding him into the back seat, and driving away from the river towards the guildhall, around the corner, gone. I stood on the steps in the sunlight for several moments, dazzled, thinking nothing just for a moment, before my mind began its frantic whirring.

I wrote, I wrote to everybody, of course, and one thing about wartime: there's no time to wallow. The day after he was taken away, twenty Land Girls arrived to dig for victory for the rest of the summer. And so I worked from the second I woke until I fell into bed exhausted, legs aching, to feed them, clean up after them, shop, do the accounts, help the laundrywoman who was now spending most of her time on her husband's farm where they too were growing wartime supplies. It was as well the girls were here, nevertheless. The last of my translation work had dried up and the Home Office had not yet replied to my second application to do translation work for Intelligence, which I had, I confess, sent accompanied by a long and rather angry letter. If the hostel closed I should be destitute.

If I found a moment, I wrote yet another letter, or occasionally the odd note in my journal, feeling that I must keep a record of the injustice unfolding in our lives. If I sat idle, I would think about the conditions in which they kept the men, whether there was ill treatment of the Germans, with Hitler's armies sweeping through the Low Countries. And if I thought about that, I would imagine those soldiers landing at Southampton, coming over the bridge in their trucks, requisitioning the hostel, and what would happen to me then? I mostly forced myself to stop my imaginings when they had been allowed to reach this point. What good would it do Emil? England had not been invaded. The only people being rounded up were refugees, a situation I must set myself against with any weapon at my disposal.

At my desk, the paper blank in the typewriter, shoulders aching from my hours at the laundry mangle, I heard the door slam downstairs, the girls' thunderous boots on the kitchen tiles, their cacophony of accents. They were the noisiest, most vigorous young women I had ever come across. I could hear them now, teasing each other about their beaux, soldiers at the nearby barracks, idle since Dunkirk, creating havoc in the town in the evenings. ‘You don't mind them big, do you, Lorna?' a girl called Evelyn was shouting from below. ‘I thought you were going to jump on him right there and then!' Most of the ribbing was kind. I could not help but like them, though they seemed slightly intimidated, in spite of towering over me. I think they thought me a little posh, intellectual. The knowledge of my German ‘fiancé', gleaned in the town, made them additionally wary, and so when I was in the room there was among them a slightly remote respect, a thoughtful watching. It was quite clear that when I was not in the room I was the frequent subject of their tireless gossip.

At first they had been more forthcoming with me, more inclusive, but soon after they arrived there had been a procession of the evacuated soldiers from France through the town. One morning in late May as I waited for news, and began to give up hope of hearing anything amid the frenzy of the evacuation, a gaggle of the Land Girls returned at about eleven, banging the front door, hurtling into the kitchen to find me. ‘Miss JACOB! You must come now or you'll miss them! The boys are coming!' I took off my apron and stepped outside with them. Out on the bridge I could hear the tooting of horns and cheers from up around the bend, coming down towards the town. And then there they were, truck after truck filled with khaki-garbed men, shyly grinning, waving to the swarm of girls risking life and limb to run among the vehicles. My girls could not help themselves. They too ran after the lorries, cheering and shrieking. The streets were filling with the townspeople, come out from the shops and houses. The young men's faces, in the weak sunlight of southern England, looked tired, slightly disbelieving.

I stood at the side of the road with a couple of the shyer girls as the men passed. The girls waved and smiled and I, deeply glad that these soldiers were safe, wished that I could see that Emil was too, with the evidence of my own eyes, as I saw these men now, solid and real, out of danger, at least for now. Jostled by the crowd, I felt a wet drop on my face though the sky was clear and blue. I looked to my left, where it had come from, and there was a tall, thin woman staring at me, hands on hips. I sensed from this woman's demeanour, and from the gasps of the Land Girls beside me, that she had spat on me. I drew my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my face, waiting for an explanation. ‘You've got a nerve,' the woman said. I did not know how to defend myself, not knowing what I had done, though a twisting in my stomach gave me a clue. There had been hints of this even before the arrest—sudden silences in the post office when I entered, an abrupt cessation of invitations to the Women's Institute meetings, not that I'd ever attended them.

‘Here!' piped up one of my girls. ‘What'd you do that for? That's filthy, that is!'

‘She's a German's tart,' said the woman. ‘And that's what we think of that sort of thing round here. She ought to be strung up.'

‘Now just listen,' I began, and faltered. It was no use. The throng around us were all looking at me now. The Land Girls were waiting for me to say it wasn't true. The faces of people I recognised, all around me, had become the faces of strangers. I tried again. I had been taught to stand up for myself, not to be bullied by the mob. I knew how to speak to a heckling crowd. You remembered that they were human, that individually each had a heart, and conscience. ‘Emil is a refugee. If you knew what he has suffered—'

‘She goes to Germany all the time!' the woman told her audience. ‘Wouldn't surprise me one bit if they were spies.'

There was general assent in the grumbles of the crowd. Everyone was standing very close. I feared that if I tried to speak further, I would go to pieces, and I refused to do that in front of these people. I knew that they were ignorant before they were hateful, but what was the difference when you were at the centre of a pack of them, having the air squeezed out of you? I stepped onto the road and walked alongside the procession, chin up, until I reached the bridge and home. It is their experience of the last war, I told myself. It is their lack of education. But you could not say that for the vicar's wife, Mrs Bantree. She had been to Cambridge. I was not used to being actively disliked, and it set the tone for the months to follow while I waited for news of Emil. I felt something settle around my shoulders and over my head, like a widow's shawl, that cast me into a dim silence.

The weeks passed with no news, only the drudgery and occasional amusement of caring for the Land Girls. My past began to feel unreal. Sometimes I had to find a quiet moment to go upstairs to look at his medal, his clothes, the pair of work boots, the packet of letters from Germany he had left behind, to furnish myself with proof. His clothes were losing the smell of him, his tobacco and cologne. The streets were quiet as everyone waited to see what would happen when the war began properly. No one looked at me, and I knew that it was brave and decent of the laundrywoman to keep coming. One day, battling along the high street in the rain with umbrella and shopping bags because the grocer would no longer deliver, I saw a woman, the wife of a refugee, Mrs Schlindwein. It seemed that she had already seen me and was eyeing me warily from beneath her rain bonnet. Surely
you're
going to give me the time of day, I thought. And then: Well, I will give her no choice. ‘Hello, Dora,' I said loudly as the woman approached. ‘Any news of Isaac?'

She stopped and looked into my face wordlessly for a moment. Then she said, ‘Hannah, they are going to send them away.'

‘What on earth do you mean? They are already sent away.'

‘Away from England. Away from Europe. To other continents.'

‘How do you know this? What have you heard?' My hand I realised, because she looked at it, was gripping her forearm.

She shook her head, looking away from me. She had some source she would not reveal. ‘You must see,' she said. ‘It is so unfair for us. How can they trust the other Germans? I'm sure your Emil is decent, but how would anyone know? But the Jewish men . . . Isaac was in a camp. This will kill him.'

I said no more but bustled away down the hill towards the river with my umbrella and baggage. I had never felt more alone, though the hostel was filled with noisy young women taking a day off in the rain. I could not walk down the street without people staring at me, not giving a damn now, apparently, whether I noticed them doing it or not.

That night I sat at my desk, back aching, staring at a piece of writing paper—on the desk, not in the typewriter—on which at some point I had written
Dear Mother
and nothing else. It was smudged. A cold mug of coffee sat before me. I must have dozed off with my hand on the paper. One of the girls was singing. The sound of her voice, and of the other girls' sudden silence, was what had woken me. I did not know the song and could not make out many of the words but it sounded like an old folk lament for a faraway love. One of those heartbreaking things where the woman is left with a baby on the shore waiting for the fishermen to find his body at sea. I undressed as quietly as I could so as not to miss any of the song, but she was soon finished, her voice replaced by the rush of water beneath the building. But not for long. The girls started up singing all those songs they drag out in wartime, songs from my childhood.

As I laid my head on the pillow I remembered the singing of the German boys from before the war, their pure voices, wide smiles. There were several groups of them in the first year or so of the hostel. They were all now old enough to fight and die, those hundred or so boys we had looked after. Hans was still just fourteen, though more than old enough for the Hitler Youth. I could not bear these thoughts that came at night. I pushed them away from me and fell into sleep.