Somewhere Over England (12 page)

‘It’s that bloody Hun.’

‘What you doing ’ere, boy? You should be over with that Hitler.’

The other children were turning now, staring first at the boys from Highlands, then over to Chris.

Around them women were looking, talking, pointing.

Helen moved again, pushing forward and this time Heine was with her. She passed the woman she had talked to in the park.

‘Please let us through,’ she said and the woman looked at her and then at Heine. Her own face was blotched with tears.

‘Please let us through. I have to reach my son,’ Helen said, clutching her arm.

The woman wrenched away. ‘I didn’t know you were one of them,’ she said, her mouth twisted in her face. ‘If it wasn’t for you, our kids wouldn’t have to go.’

Her words were taken up then and Helen was pushed and so was Heine but they got through, somehow they got through
into the station, and saw Chris yards and yards away, standing with space between him and his friends who were no longer his friends. A teacher was there, his face cold, his hand on Chris’s shoulder. A train was pulling in now and there was hissing steam and shrieking brakes and the harsh engine smell all around them.

A guard came towards them, his hat large, shouting at them to go back.

‘You’ve made your decision. Stick by it.’ His teeth were rotten and his breath smelt. Heine put his arm out and pushed on by. Chris was crying now, watching them but moving, always moving towards the train, the children still shouting, the teacher herding his column onwards.

A WVS woman in a hat intercepted them. ‘Go back, please, behind the barrier. If we let you through they’ll all come.’ Her voice was loud but the shrieking brakes were louder and Helen pulled free of the hands which held her, dodging past the children as they turned to look for their parents one last time, and now there were tears from many children and they were on her face too.

Still she could hear the calls of ‘German’ ‘Hun’ ‘Murderers’, and she wanted to scream at them and at Heine because it was all his fault.

A boy with red hair shouted at her, ‘Bloody Hun.’

‘Stinking German.’

Christoph’s column was moving now. His face was white and pinched but the tears were still there and they were too far away. He was getting on the train and suddenly she saw that he must not because now she knew what it was going to be like being German when England was at war.

A teacher was taking Chris’s shoulder, pointing to the door, and she wasn’t going to reach him, there were too many children, too many teachers, too many hands pulling at her but then she was through and Heine was with her. She reached Chris and he felt her hands on his arm, her voice.

‘Chris, come home.’

He turned and pressed his face to hers. The boys were shouting at him because he wasn’t Dutch as he had said, he was German. The teacher told her that there were many who would be kind, it was only a few and she knew that he was right but a few was too many and so the three of them went home to a city almost without children.

That night she whispered to Heine, ‘I’m sorry, my darling, because she couldn’t forget that she had blamed him and part of her still did.

At eleven-fifteen a.m. on Sunday 3 September, Chamberlain announced over the wireless that Britain was at war with Germany, and fifteen minutes later Helen heard the air raid siren and stopped with a duster in her hand, fear making her mouth drop open, making her scream come as though she were a child in pain. Heine picked up the gas masks and turned her, pushing her towards the stairs, calling Chris, shouting at her to hold her son’s hand, get him to the shelter, get him to safety, and then she moved, pulling her son, her head down, waiting for the whine of bombs, the crash and splinter of glass.

She ran down the garden, hearing nothing but the siren, hearing their neighbours rushing down their path, hearing Heine running behind. Her mouth was open and saliva ran down her chin. She felt a fear deeper than anything she had ever known. She looked up but could see no planes, no black crosses, no falling bombs, but they would come. She thrust aside the curtain and went down into the dark, the bloody dark which she could not bear, which her son could not bear. She took the masks from Heine, watching as Chris put his on, his chin in first and then the mask over his face, the straps wrenched over his head, and still the siren filled the air.

She pulled hers on; it was hot and smelly and pulled at her hair. She felt that she could not breathe, that she would die here and now in the noise and the fear. She held Chris to her, watching Heine who sat with them but then the mask clouded up with her breath and she could not see his face. They waited but no bombers came that day though the liner
Athenia
was sunk on the third and then the letters from German-haters began to drop through the letterbox, harsh, cruel and accusing.

Internment also began. Men were taken from their homes, locked away where they could do no harm to Britain. Their friends went, those who had come to escape the Nazis and who loved Britain. They went in police cars, handcuffed, interned without trial but no one came for Heine and they dared not think of it or even talk.

There was no school now because there were so few children, but Helen asked Dr Schultz who ran a small private school a
quarter of a mile away if he would have room, and because he knew of Heine’s work and was Austrian he took Chris. He would only charge half the fees because Heine had been visited by the police and told he could no longer use a camera because he was an alien and they soon found that he could find no other work for the same reason. Dr Schultz offered to approach a bank manager he knew who might find essential work for him so that they could live once their savings had gone. They felt exposed, impotent and afraid.

Each morning Helen walked Chris to school past alley-ways where children who had not been evacuated and who did not now go to school waited. They never hurt them, just shouted and Helen told Chris to ignore their talk because they knew no better, but they made her tremble and see only greyness around her. Even the rockery had bloomed then faded.

In the afternoon Heine collected him and walked back to the swings but Chris did not want to stop where people could see him with his father because his father, Herr Weber, was German, wasn’t he, and the British were fighting the Germans, weren’t they? So Grandfather and Grandmother were their enemies and planes would come and blow them to bits and those planes were flown by Germans, by people like his father. So one day he went screaming from the park and when Heine ran after him he shouted, ‘Leave me alone. Why can’t you be English? I hate you. I hate you, you’re a Hun.’

In November they heard that Heine had to appear before a tribunal which would decide whether he was to be imprisoned.

That night they did not sleep but then neither of them slept any more. Helen listened to their son crying and she could not do anything to help because nothing could be altered. Heine had cried too because he was the cause of all their tension and she had held him and said, ‘Sshh, it doesn’t matter. It will be all right. Everything will be all right.’

But she wondered how it could be because already he was not allowed to travel more than five miles from the house. Already they had swept up shattered glass from the stones hurled through their window. Already their son was weeping because he did not want his father to bring him home from school but neither did he want him to be kept from them in a prison camp.

In the morning there was a letter from the bank manager that Dr Schultz had spoken too. He offered Helen a job, not Heine. It would be deemed war work and keep her in London with her family. Heine had kissed her as she left for school with Chris holding her tight, looking at her face, the lines, the eyes, and loved her more than life itself and tried not to feel humiliated, just as she was trying too.

His son would not kiss him but pulled away and went from the house but then ran back and hugged him.

That night Heine was home again. He was not considered a danger to the country, he told Helen over a glass of wine, sitting Chris on his knee, explaining to him about Category A and Category B but how much could a child who was not yet seven understand? He looked back to Helen.

‘I’m Category B, my love. I’m not dangerous enough to be interned immediately but unfortunately I didn’t merit refugee status, Category C. I was not deprived of my occupation by my government or deprived of their protection. I merely ran away from them.’ His laugh had no humour in it.

Helen gripped his hand. ‘But they must know how hard you’ve worked to save people. They must know you won’t do anything to hurt this country.’

Heine hugged Chris to him but the child pulled free and went across to Helen.

‘I want to go to bed, Mummy. Will the German bombers come tonight?’ He did not look at his father and Helen could not either because of the hurt she would see there.

Heine was not allowed to register at the Labour Exchange and so Helen earned for them while he washed their clothes, swept the flat and made sure their supplies were ready to take into the shelter if there was a raid. But there was no raid. There was no real war. Just hostility, just fear and pain. He was refused as a warden. He could only walk his son home and try not to feel that his life had no worth any more.

In the evenings the lights were dim, the voltage reduced as a wartime measure. The blackout was in force. Helen asked her mother to come and stay because she felt she should but Mrs Carstairs refused because Heine was at home all day and he was a German, wasn’t he? She told Helen that she did not want to be whispered about, did not want a brick to be thrown at her.

Helen met Marian one day and smiled but she walked straight past, the collar of her coat drawn up, her gloved hand holding it together at her throat. Her brown shoes scuffed the leaves which lay on the path outside the park. Emily was with her because Marian had not been able to face the thought of evacuation either.

‘Hello,’ Chris said.

There was no answer because Marian dragged the child along too quickly. Helen didn’t watch her go, but took her son into the park and watched him on the swing. It was so quiet with no children.

At the end of November her mother came to stay and Helen was surprised.

‘It’s Chris’s birthday and he must have a party,’ her mother said. ‘For the children at that nice little school.’ Helen looked at Heine and smiled and was touched at her mother’s efforts.

Her work at the bank was not interesting but it kept her from the war factories outside London and earned them just enough for party food but not enough for a present for Chris. So each night she sewed in the dim light of the sitting-room lamp as her mother drew up plans for games and made hats out of cardboard with Heine, sticking the seams while he held them together.

Chris came out of his bedroom looking at his father as he drew coloured circles on the paper hats and then he walked over and leaned against his leg, taking up a pencil, colouring in the circles, and Helen turned away because she did not want him to see the tears which would not stop running down her face and into her mouth. It was the first time he had touched his father for weeks.

All that week she came home from work into a house full of secrets and excitement and voices which stopped when she entered the room. The first of December was a Friday and so the party was planned for Saturday.

In bed on the night when their son was seven, in a room guarded from the moonlight by the blackout, Heine held her, telling her that he wanted to give her something to show how much he loved her, how he would never, ever stop loving her. That tomorrow he would be away for the morning but would be back in time for the party and Helen said he must because it
would be the first one he had attended and they loved him so much. She stroked his smooth skin. His warmth and his lips were on her body and as the night wore on they loved one another as though there was no tomorrow.

Helen baked on the morning of the party, while her mother talked and her son played in the cowboy outfit Helen had sewn during the evenings while her eyes ached with the strain of wartime Britain. He drew his cap gun in and out of his holster, firing at Mrs Simkins in her garden and then at his grandmother. She would not play dead but Helen did, gurgling and groaning until he shrieked with laughter.

Before lunch her mother put on her coat and hat and said that she would walk for a while in the fresh air to build herself up for the next few hours. She had a slight headache. Helen laughed and watched her mother walk down the street, her gas mask in a tin box hanging from her arm. The war had pulled them together, she thought, watching through the windows which were criss-crossed with strips of sticky paper to protect against stones as well as bombs.

The children arrived at three o’clock and her mother’s head had cleared. She was laughing and joking in a way which Helen had never known. There was a happiness in the older woman which warmed the daughter. Some of the children who came were English, but some were the children of refugees and it was good to hear laughter from other children, not hissed profanities. It was good to see Christoph’s face loosen and hear his laugh too.

At four o’clock Heine had still not returned and Helen could not watch the children for more than a few minutes before going to the window and looking down the street. Dusk was falling, a chill mist was settling and soon the parents called to take their children home before dark. They were friendly and kind before they left and Helen wished that Heine could have been there to feel the warmth of friendship. She must talk to him, they must meet these people again, but where was he?

She walked again to the window, wiping her breath from it with her hand. Beads of moisture remained. Worry tore at her. She looked towards the High Street and then towards the Church but no one stirred. Chris stood by the window now, watching, crying, and her mother said, ‘He’ll be fine. He’s just been held up I expect.’

‘But where has he gone? Where would he have gone?’

Then Chris turned. ‘Grandma knows. I heard her tell Daddy what you would like more than anything.’