The Tunnel (4 page)

At first the policeman looked at him with owlish astonishment. Then, surprisingly, he recognized the tune. (It was not until some time later that Peter learned that the Germans had their own marching song to the same tune.) The policeman sang with him in German. The foresters joined in. Peter’s tuneless voice was drowned in a roar of Teutonic fervour. It was magnificent. It was just what he wanted. He beat time with his mug on the table, shouting at the top of his voice, while the policeman, the present forgotten, sang in an older war; a war in which he too had fought as a soldier.

Surely enough the door opened and a forester armed with a rifle looked in. He shouted something in German, pointed up the stairs, and withdrew.

Then the policeman passed out. Without any warning he fell flat across the table, his hands sprawling out in front of him, his absurd helmet rolling across the floor and coming to rest against the bar. Suddenly he seemed pitiful to Peter – an old man in his cups, his scanty hair lying in the spilt beer on the table top.

The foresters would have left him there – continued with their song – but Peter lifted the old man’s head from the table and leaned him back in the chair. His head fell forward with a loose heaviness, his whole body limp and sagging.

‘Water!’ Peter said, and made the motion of throwing water in the policeman’s face.

The foresters grinned. The one with the pipe took the old man’s head, the other his knees, and they carried him across the room and into the lavatory at the back. For a moment Peter sat alone in the smoke-filled room. This was his chance and he must take it now. He crossed the floor silently in his socks, retrieved his boots from behind the bar and quickly climbed the stairs to the floor above. Which was the girl’s room? He knew that if he went in there her screams would attract the attention of the man outside. Would there be a bathroom? If so, it was probably immediately above the lavatory.

Quietly he opened the door on the far side of the landing. This must be the back of the house; he knew that there was a guard on the front. The room was a bedroom. Inside, he could see the gigantic wardrobe and a high bed heaped with eiderdowns. There was a figure in the bed and he hesitated in the doorway for a moment listening to the heavy breathing and wondering what to do. He thought how terrified the sleeper would be, should he or she awake – and how harmless he actually was.

The window was open, its lace curtains blowing into the room, and he decided to climb through. There was no time to waste. He went in, carefully closing the door behind him. The figure in the bed was moving restlessly. He paused by a bundle of clothes lying on a chair by the bed, hoping that their owner was a man. They were women’s clothes. He thought of changing into them, but the awful possibility of being caught half-dressed in this woman’s room made him dismiss the idea.

He climbed out of the window, dropped on to the roof of a lean-to shed, and down into the yard below. So far there had been no alarm. He crossed the yard, clambered over the fence and landed heavily on the ground outside.

Swiftly he made for the bridge near which he had been caught earlier in the afternoon. After a brief reconnaissance, he found that it was not guarded. The barrier had obviously been for him.

He ran as fast as he could for about a mile, keeping dangerously to the road but wanting to get as far into Holland as he could before daybreak. The countryside on both sides of the road was the same flat waterlogged marshland that he had crossed the night before, now intersected by wide dykes; and he knew that he could not travel fast away from the road. He knew also that the Germans would be out in full force by the following morning, and he decided to declare himself to a Dutch farmer and ask to be hidden for the next few days.

The rest and the food had done him good, but his energy was short-lived. When he could run no more he lurched on painfully, his only desire to flop into a hollow in the ground and sleep.

Now that he was in Holland he could not help feeling that he had played the policeman a dirty trick. It was stupid to think this way, he knew, but his conscience troubled him. He had been drinking with them all night and had not paid for a single round. He must have become lightheaded again, because he kept seeing the policeman’s face. The old man seemed to be looking at him reproachfully. They could have locked him up, but they had given him
schnapps.
He was worried that the old man might be shot for letting him get away.

Just before dawn he came to a small farm behind a windbreak of trees about a mile from the main road. He hid among the trees and watched the farm for signs of German occupation. He saw two young girls of about eight or nine years old, and a woman with a shawl over her head. There were no signs of men about the place. Once, as he lay there, a German Army lorry passed swiftly along the main road, but apart from that there was no activity.

He knew that he must take the risk. Travelling like this would get him nowhere. He must get civilian clothes and, if possible, papers. His boots were soft and shapeless, useless for walking, and he did not feel capable of another night on the road.

Before approaching the farm he examined the surrounding country in all directions. With his heart beating high inside his chest he came out from under the trees, walked to the back of the farmhouse, and knocked on the door.

The door was opened by one of the small girls. He could see the fear plainly in her face as she looked at him.

‘RAF,’ Peter said, and made signs of a parachute falling.

The child ran back into the house and he followed her quickly into a large stone-flagged kitchen. Standing in the centre of the room was the woman he had seen earlier in the day. She too seemed frightened and looked at him without speaking.

‘RAF,’ he said. ‘British –
Englander.’

Still the woman did not speak. It seemed to him that she did not want him there – that she was trying to will him out of the house again.

He smiled a reassurance. ‘Peter Howard!’ He pointed to his chest,
‘Englander – Flieger.
Parachute.’ And made signs as he had done for the girl.

There was a slight loosening of the woman’s stricken immobility.

‘Food,’ he said, and pointed to his mouth.

She crossed to a cupboard and brought out some cheese, butter, black bread and a large bowl of pickled cabbage, which she put on the table. He sat down and began to eat. He heard her talking to the girl, who presently ran down the path and across the field towards the wood where he had hidden. He wondered whether she had gone for the police. There was nothing he could do about it now.

The woman had come back into the kitchen and was watching him eat, watching him and glancing nervously out of the window in the direction the little girl had gone. He desperately wanted to make some sort of contact, to find out what her sympathies were.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Good!’ And he patted his stomach. He was rewarded with the ghost of a smile, that made him wonder whether he had eaten their evening meal.

He finished the food and rose to his feet. The woman backed towards the door. He noticed that she was younger than he had thought, but pale and very thin. When she smiled she was almost beautiful. He wanted to make her smile again. The only way to make contact was to ask for something.

‘Shave,’ he said, ‘Razor,’ and went through the pantomime of shaving the five days’ stubble from his face. The act must have been good, for she smiled again and ran to the inner room. She came back carrying an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, a shaving brush and a cake of soap. She put these down on the table and brought a bowl of hot water, a mirror and a towel.

He looked at his face in the mirror. His dark hair was thickly matted, and the lower part of his face was covered in black stubble. There were pouches under his eyes, and the eyes themselves were bloodshot. No wonder the child had been afraid. He grinned a reassurance into the mirror and was surprised to see how white his teeth appeared against the darkness of his face.

He had not removed his clothes since the night before he had been shot down and, stripping to the waist, he washed thoroughly and began to shave. The cut-throat razor was difficult to handle, but the half-unconscious routine of scraping the familiar jaw was comforting.

He wiped the residue of soap from his chin and tried to ask the woman for civilian clothes. When he pointed to his uniform and made what he thought were the appropriate signs she merely nodded and smiled, as though he had asked her to admire his appearance. He gave it up and decided to ask the farmer when he arrived home – if indeed it were the farmer and not the police the girl had gone to fetch.

In the meantime he sat on a stiff wooden chair by the peat fire drying the legs of his trousers. His battledress blouse was steaming on the hearth. I’ve ruined my boots, he thought. Most of the polish had been washed off, leaving the leather white and dry-looking. Moved my some impulse of caution he took the small brass compass belonging to the escape kit from his pocket, and slitting the sheepskin lining of the left boot with a penknife he slipped the compass between the sheepskin and the outside leather. It would be safer there.

He sat in the warmth and security of the kitchen, conscious of the busy movements of the woman in the next room, wondering whom the girl had gone to fetch. The woman had seemed friendly enough, but had she really understood? Was it possible that she thought he was German? He made a movement as though to call to her, but the language difficulty was too great. His head fell forward on to his chest and he slumped down into the chair, too tired to worry any more.

When he awoke there was a man in the kitchen; a middle-aged man who stood in front of his chair, holding a grey felt hat in his hands and peering at him through steel-rimmed spectacles. ‘I am the schoolmaster,’ the man said, ‘I speak a little English.’

Peter stood, and they shook hands.

‘Where have you come from?’ the schoolmaster asked.

‘My aircraft was shot down in Gemany. I have walked from there.’

‘Has anyone seen you?’

‘The Germans caught me on the border, but I got away.’

‘No one saw you come here?’

‘No.’

‘When were you shot down?’

‘Last Friday night.’ He thought, as he said it, how long ago it seemed.

‘Ah, that was the big raid.’ The schoolmaster looked relieved. ‘An aircraft crashed not many miles from here. It was burning in the air, I saw it come down like a burning torch.’

‘What time was that?’

‘A few minutes after midnight.’

It may have been ours, Peter thought. ‘What sort of aircraft was it?’

The schoolmaster was vague. ‘A bomber,’ he said. ‘A big aircraft. The pilot was fortunate. He was alone in the aircraft when it landed in a great lake not far from here. He was not hurt at all. He was taken by the Germans – they arrived before I could get there.’

It must have been ours, Peter thought. Good old Wally. And this chap had tried to help him, too. ‘Have you helped many airman?’ he asked.

The schoolmaster smiled and lifted his hand in a typical classroom gesture. ‘No – it is better that you should not ask me questions.’

‘The Germans will guess that I have crossed into Holland,’ Peter said.

The man moved to the fireplace and stood looking into the fire. ‘I will move you as soon as it is dark. For the time it is best that you should sleep. The woman will dry your clothes and this evening, when it is dark, I will come for you.’ He spoke to the woman in their own tongue, giving her instructions; then he turned to Peter again and held out his hand. He had an odd, professional manner – more like a doctor than a schoolmaster. He bowed from the waist, said something to the child and took her mother with him out into the yard.

When the woman came back into the kitchen she motioned Peter to follow her, and took him to a small bedroom at the top of the house, a room whose sloping ceiling reminded him of his bedroom at home. She said something in Dutch and he understood that she would return in a few minutes for his clothes. At first he felt reluctant to let them out of his sight, particularly the boots, knowing that he would be helpless without them; but he realized that he could not go on alone, that he was warm and dry, and that he could sleep now while plans were being made.

He undressed completely and as he climbed into the high bed with its soft feather mattress and bulky eiderdown, he felt ridiculously safe. It was as though he had come home again.

He was asleep before the woman came to take his clothes away.

Then it was night and the woman held a candle in her hand.
‘Kommen Sie!’
She was shaking him by the shoulder.
‘Kommen Sie! schnell, schnell!’
She left the candle on the chest by the bed, and he could tell by the way she ran down the stairs that he must hurry. His clothes, dry and neatly folded, were on the chair by the bed. The woman had even mended the tear in his trousers.

As he dressed he felt that everything was going well. He was convinced that it was Wally who had escaped from the crashed aircraft, and he was glad that he was safe. For himself, he was as good as home again. The schoolmaster had seemed to know what he was about. Quietly confident. Peter grinned as he dressed. He and his brother had never been ‘absolutely certain,’ but always ‘quietly confident.’ It had been part of their private language.

When he got downstairs the schoolmaster was not there. Instead, he saw a young woman dressed in a blue-belted raincoat with a dark scarf round her head. The scarf and the hair that escaped from under it were covered with fine raindrops that glittered in the light of the candle. She seemed excited and spoke to him in English.

‘My husband has been arrested. He was stealing a car. They must not know that it was for you, or they will shoot him. You must go.’

‘Who are you?’ he asked, losing in that instant all his former confidence, feeling that he had made a mistake in coming here.

‘I have come to tell you that you leave the house.’ She turned to the woman and spoke to her in Dutch, and then to Peter in English. ‘This woman is already a widow and if they find you here she will be shot – and the children will be orphans. The farm will be burned. My husband … If they know that he was helping you … Please go!’