The Tunnel (8 page)

He took Peter to the washroom halfway down the corridor. It was next door to the toilet, but he had never been allowed there before. He saw a row of basins along the wall and, opposite them, a shower bath. The guard gave him the razor, a piece of soap and a brush.
‘Schnell, schnell,’
he said.

The blade was blunt, and shaving was a torture. He scraped off as much of the stubble as he could, and was washing the soap away as the gaoler returned. Peter pointed to the shower. ‘May I have a bath?’ he said.

The German shook his head.
‘Nein, das ist kaput. Kalt
,’ he said. ‘Cold!’

‘Good!’ Peter said; a cold bath was better than nothing.
‘Kalt
good,’ he repeated.

The gaoler looked anxiously up and down the corridor, and nodded his head.
‘Ja – schnell, schnell,’
he said.

Peter undressed as quickly as he could while the gaoler turned on the shower. The cold water was agonizing, but glorious. He scrubbed his legs and feet, and managed to get off most of the dirt. The gaoler kept urging him to hurry, and did not seem happy until he was dressed again and on his way back to the cell.

After the bath he felt more energetic and began to explore the cell. He saw that if he could get some sort of lever he would be able to open the window. The electric light cable was secured to the wall by stout metal clips and after much hard pulling he was able to loosen one of these and prise up the window catch. The window opened inwards, and outside there were strong iron bars sunk deeply into the woodwork.

He leaned his elbows on the window frame, put his head between the bars, and breathed the cool damp air. There was a faint tang of pines and the elusive incense-like odour of burning brown coal blocks. Immediately in front of him was a football pitch, muddy and neglected, its goal posts standing at drunken angles; while beyond this the pines, tall and pink, glowed warmly in the sun. He stood looking at them for a long time until the woods merged into dusk and he shivered by the open window.

From now on he opened the window whenever he was alone in the cell and, more than once, he was only just able to close it before the door opened to admit one or other of his interrogators.

The young German pilot had been back several times, but his visits had been short and unproductive. A more frequent visitor was a bespectacled
Feldwebel
with a clipped moustache, who said that he had been a waiter in London before the war. He spoke at length on social matters, on art, on national characteristics; and of how Germany did not hate England, but was surprised and hurt when she declared war. All this again was pure Pop Dawson, and Peter was able to enjoy it without being trapped.

One day the
Feldwebel
brought him a small piece of sausage on a slice of bread. ‘It is time you were moved to the camp’, he said. ‘You are losing your strength lying here.’

‘When will they move me?’ Peter asked.

‘My friend,’ the
Feldwebel
said, looking at him through his heavy glasses. ‘My friend – it is all a matter of red tape. Of form filling. All the officers here are professors from a university. They have narrow, one-track minds and cannot see things as men of the world. They have been instructed that they must get those forms filled in – but once the forms are completed they will be forgotten. Absolutely forgotten. They will be put on a file, and nobody will ever see them again. My friend – for your own sake I ask you to fill in these forms. And then you will be sent to the main camp, where you will meet your comrades. There is too much form filling in Germany. One has to fill in forms to obtain anything. And if you do not comply, my friend, I can see that you will lie here and rot!’ There were tears in the large brown eyes behind the spectacles, and Peter had to think hard of Pop Dawson to avoid giving in and completing the form, which he guessed the
Feldwebel
had in his inner pocket.

At intervals during his confinement the nocturnal heating and light switching routine was carried out, but he never discovered whether this was a deliberate third-degree method or merely heralded the arrival of another prisoner.

He soon learned that it was advisable to save one of the three lunchtime potatoes to eat in the evening. He kept it warm by putting it on the top of the metal radiator at the end of the cell.

One day he found he had a neighbour – by his accent an American or Canadian – and he obviously wanted to go to the toilet very badly indeed. Each time the red signal fell – Peter could hear it in his cell – he heard the man walk furiously up and down, cursing loudly, until the gaoler arrived with his customary,
‘Toilette besetzt – Kamarad,’
or literally, ‘Toilet occupied – friend.’ The fifth time that this occurred Peter heard the prisoner shout in exasperation, ‘Say, who is this guy Conrad? He seems to live in that place!’

His neighbour also had trouble with the interrogators, and once, at the height of an argument, Peter heard a loud thump that might have been caused by a man falling. Soon after this the American was moved away.

Slowly he became accustomed to his cell. There were times when he would have done almost anything to get out of it – times when he paced restlessly up and down like a caged animal and had to fight hard to restrain himself from shouting and banging on the door. But there were also times when he lay on his bunk lost in daydreams of his own effortless spinning; daydreams of escape more thrilling than any book, daydreams from which he had to wrench himself to deal with one of the interrogators or to eat his slices of black bread. His appetite had almost gone, his blood ran slowly through his veins, and he lived more and more in the daydream world of his narrow bunk.

He had moments of exultation too, moments when the lack of food and outside stimulus turned his thoughts inward and he caught an echo of the ecstasy of the monk in his cell or the hermit in his cave. At these times he would walk up and down the narrow cell, filled with strange joy, fostering the integrity of this single individual life which burned so brightly in that grey and cheerless place. But the mood would soon pass, and he would be cold and miserable again, anxious only to be moved into the main camp where he would discover what had happened to his crew, meet his fellow prisoners and learn something of the possibilities of escape.

Every morning he piled the table and the stool on to the bed, stripped to the waist and carried out his own routine of physical training based on a combination of Yogi breathing exercises and Swedish drill. Once an interrogator came into the cell while he was in the middle of this solemn performance and, to his delight, called in the guard and had the cell thoroughly searched.

Lying on his bed one afternoon, he noticed the shadow cast by the centre bar of his window on the wall above his head. After idly watching it move along the wall as the sun moved round the sky, he thought of making a clock. When breakfast came the following moming, he made a mark on the wall under the shadow with the heel of his boot. He did the same for the midday and the evening meals. He subdivided the sections between these meals, and the clock was complete. Then he discovered that the meals did not always arrive at the same time; sometimes they were an hour early or an hour late. So he destroyed the clock.

He made a jigsaw puzzle by tearing a sheet of paper into small irregular pieces and trying to fit them together again; but this occupation was so pointless that he threw the paper away in disgust.

And at intervals the interrogators came and questioned him, or engaged him in apparently innocent conversation which always seemed at last to lead back to the forbidden topic.

On the tenth morning – he had counted them by scoring lines on the windowsill with the metal clip that he had torn from the wall – the gaoler brought him a book. It was a long book, and he began to read it carefully. He felt that he would be there for a long time, so he read every word, refusing to skip to get the sense as he usually did. He lingered over every line, seeking the author’s intention, appreciating his choice of words, living intensely the lives of the characters in the book.

He had just finished the fourth chapter when a guard came to return his uniform and tell him to get ready to go across to the main camp, and he was surprised to find that he did not want to go. The cell had become a known, familiar place, had changed imperceptibly from a prison into a refuge. He asked if he could take the book with him, but was told that this was
‘streng verboten.’

Standing in the corridor, ready to go with him to the main camp, were some dozen other prisoners. He glanced swiftly at their faces, but saw none of his crew nor anyone he recognized. They were dressed in every sort of uniform from RAF blue battledress to khaki bush-shirts and shorts, from flying boots to wooden clogs; but they were alike in their pallor and unkempt appearance.

After some shuffling about they were all assembled in a long straggling line and marched between armed guards out into the strong light of the open compound.

It was exciting to be out in the open air again, after the close disinfected atmosphere of the cell. The air was hard and cool, strong with the scent of the pine forests which surrounded the camp. Surprisingly, the ground was covered with snow, and shouting children on skis swooped round them as they marched the few hundred yards down to the camp in the valley below. There was a lot of talking among the prisoners. Peter heard snatches of excuse and explanation. ‘So we just nipped across to look at Hamburg on the way back—’ ‘—pumped us full of lead—’ ‘—navigator took us smack over Cologne.’ ‘There we were, light as bloody day—’ ‘—tried to fight our way out of it but—’ ‘Absolutely useless—’

For himself, he did not want to talk. The spell of solitary confinement had dried his flow of speech instead of damming it. For the moment he did not care if he never spoke of flying again.

By his side a young Army officer, a captain in khaki battledress, wearing a fringe of soft dark beard, hummed quietly to himself, also withdrawn from the crossfire of verbal cannon shells.

Lining the road were wooden houses built like Swiss chalets, with balconies extending the whole length of the house. They were toylike with their high-pitched roofs and carved wooden gables, and Peter would have liked to stop and look inside. He imagined what the interior would be – the chequered linen and the honest wooden furniture.

The new arrivals were met at the gates of the compound by a small reception committee of older prisoners. There were three of them, three uncouth figures standing in the black slush of the compound waiting to welcome the new unfortunates. The first - he seemed to be in charge – was a portly middle-aged man wearing a round knitted hat, a khaki cloak fastened at the neck with a metal clip and wooden clogs. He introduced himself as the British adjutant; the other two, he said, were the doctor and the padre.

While the others were shaking hands Peter looked round him at the long green wooden huts, with their snow-covered roofs, the high double-fenced barbed wire and the raised sentry boxes above the wire. As they stood there, a British soldier, brawny in his collarless khaki shirt, came from behind one of the huts, dragging a strange-looking wooden cart piled high with empty boxes. He spoke in German to the greatcoated guard at the gate. He spoke abruptly, obviously telling him to open the gate and to look sharp about it. The guard obeyed with surprising docility.

‘Come in, boys, come in,’ the padre was saying with practised heartiness. He was lean and wore an RAF tunic with pilot’s wings, khaki breeches and flying boots. He was a squadron leader. ‘You’re just in time for a cup of tea.’

He led them to the nearest hut, which seemed to be the camp theatre. It had a raised stage at one end, but was now set out as a dining room with forms and long trestle tables. They went through this to a smaller room, also a dining room but with smaller tables and white tablecloths.

‘This is the officers’ mess,’ the adjutant told them. ‘The men eat in the larger room.’ He hastily corrected himself: ‘The transit officers’ mess, that is. The permanent staff feed in another hut’ It had a familiar ring to Peter; even here, in the heart of the enemy country, the racket system seemed rife. He half wished himself back in the cell again.

They each took a thick pottery mug from the table and drew tea from a large enamelled urn. The tea was strong and sweet.

‘Good Lord, real tea,’ someone said.

‘It comes in the Red Cross parcels,’ the adjutant explained. ‘Helps to keep the cold out. The grub’s not bad really. We don’t get enough of it, but what there is isn’t bad. We have communal messing here’ – he seemed rather on the defensive about this – ‘the food is cooked by orderlies and served in this hut. You’ll be here for about ten days, then you’ll be sent on to a permanent camp. This place is only a transit camp.’

‘What are the chances of escape from here?’ It was the young Army officer.

‘Not a hope, old boy. Even if you got out of the camp, this snow would give you away. You’d leave tracks wherever you went. No – I shouldn’t think about it from here. Wait till you get to the permanent camp. Wait till summer – you’d not get far in this weather … What are things like in England? Where were you shot down?’

‘Libya.’

‘What were you flying?’

There was a gleam of amusement in the dark eyes above the downy beard. ‘A BSA.’

The adjutant looked nonplussed for a moment. He looked at the slim figure in khaki battledress, and slowly realized. ‘Oh – you’re in the Army!’ There was a world of condescension in the fruity voice. ‘How on earth did you get here?’ The blue eyes stared frostily from above the small nose and bristling moustache.

The captain shrugged his shoulders.

‘Oh, well, you are here now,’ the padre said. He turned to Peter. ‘When were you captured, lad?’

Peter told him the seventeenth of December.

‘So you had Christmas in the cooler, eh?’

Peter thought over his time in the cell, trying to disentangle one day from another, decide which of them had been Christmas Day. They all ran together, forming a long chain of eventless monotonous days and nights. He could not get them into their proper sequence, and eventually he gave it up. ‘I suppose I did. But it wasn’t any different from any other day.’

‘No days are any different here,’ the doctor sighed and sat straddle-legged on one of the benches. ‘I’ve been here for eighteen months. Sometimes it seems like eighteen years, sometimes only eighteen days. It’s amazing how the time flies once you settle down.’

‘I thought this was a transit camp.’ It was the Army captain again; his tone was cool.

‘We’re the ‘Permanent Staff’. We pass you chaps on to the pukka camp. We were the first to arrive, so we got the job.’

The captain looked at him over the rim of his cup, but said nothing.

‘What are the pukka camps like?’ Peter asked.

‘Some good, some bad,’ the adjutant told him. ‘If you go to a good one you’ll get games, theatre shows, decent huts to live in – they’re not at all bad, really.’

‘Have you ever been in one?’ the captain asked.

‘Er – no, we get reports. Er – have another cup of tea?’

‘We had a very good attendance on Christmas Day,’ the padre had Peter by the arm. ‘Are you a regular communicant?’

‘I’m an OD,’ Peter said, and lost himself in the crowd.

When they had finished their tea, the adjutant took them to a locked room where military clothing was stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling. He gave them each a toothbrush, a cake of soap, a towel, some woollen underclothes, a pullover and an RAF greatcoat. He parted with these things reluctantly as though they were his private property. ‘They’re sent out by the Red Cross,’ he explained. ‘I’ll get you to sign for them, as I expect they’ll be entered against your account at home. Now I expect you’d like a bath.’

The water was hot. Peter stripped off his dirty underclothes and stood under the shower for about twenty minutes, soaping himself and letting the hot water run over his head and down his back. The room became full of steam from the dozen showers. Pink figures ran shouting across the slatted floor. The sound of falling water mingled with snatches of song. He felt happy again. If they could get a shower like this every day things wouldn’t be too bad. He made the most of it, fearing that it would be a weekly affair. He stood under the hot water until he was thoroughly soaked and pink all over from the heat, then turned on the cold water until he was gasping and spluttering. He dried himself on his new towel, and went across to the washbasin standing against the wall and cleaned his teeth with the new toothbrush. He brushed for about ten minutes; and then he shaved, shaved as carefully as he would have done if he had been going to a dance in the Mess. It was grand, this shave with a new blade, grand to feel the stiff bristles melt into nothing before the razor. After shaving he dressed in the clean underclothes and went back to the room where, the adjutant had told him, he would find a bed.

There were six beds in the room, and on one of them the Army captain was sitting, drying his hair.

‘Is there a spare bed?’ Peter asked.

‘They’re all spare, I think.’ He stopped rubbing his head. ‘I thought I’d have this one. But I don’t mind, if you’d rather be near the door.’

‘No, it’s all right, thanks,’ Peter told him, ‘I’ll take this.’ He put his clothes on one of the beds near the window. ‘My name’s Howard, Peter Howard.’

‘I’m John Clinton. I say – what sort of dump is this?’

‘In what way?’

‘This “permanent staff” business. I’ve been talking to one of the chaps who’s been here a few days. He says that they feed in a mess of their own – special rations and everything. Permanent staff! They look it too, I must say. That bloody adjutant was fairly dripping with fat.’ He sat, young and indignant, holding the towel between his slim brown hands. He seemed too warm, too vital to be kept for long in this sterile atmosphere.

At first Peter felt an impulse to defend his own service against this attack from the Army, but the captain’s indignation was without rancour. He grinned instead. ‘I thought you didn’t altogether approve.’

‘It’s his damned defeatist attitude,’ Clinton said, ‘telling us not to escape from here, indeed. Frightened it’d upset his precious routine, I expect.’ He sat on the edge of the bed, his black hair standing on end, angrily tying the laces of his suede desert boots. ‘Permanent staff, indeed.’

‘He’s right in a way, you know,’ Peter said. ‘We wouldn’t get far with all this snow on the ground.’

‘That’s just an excuse, but it becomes an attitude of mind if you’re not careful.’ He rose to his feet and began to rearrange the blankets on his bed. ‘I’m getting out of this as soon as I get the chance.’

‘I wouldn’t be too optimistic,’ Peter said.

As he walked along to the end hut where, the adjutant had told him, he would find his crew, Peter thought of John Clinton and his youthful indignation. He had been like that himself, once. But now, at thirty, he had grown more tolerant. He found it difficult enough to drive himself at times without the added task of driving others. Clinton could not be more than twenty-two or three, he decided. Straight from school into the Army, probably.

He found his crew crowded together in a small room with ten other sergeants. The place seemed full of two-tier metal bunks and had a fire burning fiercely in the cast iron stove. It was unbearably hot and smelled of old socks, drying uniforms and closely-crowded humanity.

Mac, the New Zealand rear-gunner, was the first to see him. ‘Pete!’ he said. ‘Hey chaps, look who’s here!’

Peter went in. All his crew were there, and he was glad to be with them, but embarrassed because as an officer his living conditions were so much better than theirs. He had felt this embarrassment in England where – although they had shared the same crewroom and flown in the same aircraft – social distinctions had ordained that they should eat and sleep in different Messes. Here, surrounded by their enemies, it seemed even more absurd.

Wally made a place for him near the stove. He was cooking something in a tin, which he stirred at intervals with a piece of wood. ‘We were just talking about you, Pete,’ he said. ‘We thought you must have made it.’ He turned back to the tin again; earnest, methodical Wally, as interested in the brew he was making as he would have been in flying his aircraft. A man without much humour.

‘Or bought it,’ the wireless operator said.

Peter felt their friendliness wash round him, stronger than any difference in living conditions or perquisites of rank. ‘I jolly nearly made it,’ he told them. ‘Got into Holland, but got nabbed by the police. It was my own fault for walking about in broad daylight. What happened to you chaps?’

‘Junior didn’t get far,’ Wally said, ‘did you Junior?’

Junior grinned. He was a Canadian and the oldest member of the crew. He was lying on one of the lower bunks, both his feet swathed in bandages.

‘His boots fell off,’ Wally explained. ‘His boots fell of as the parachute opened, and the silly clot walked for two nights in his socks.’

‘Shucks, I didn’t walk very far.’

‘When they caught him they made him walk seven miles in his socks,’ Mac said it as a joke.

‘The ground was pretty soft though.’ Junior sighed and wriggled himself more comfortably into the mattress. ‘I did better than Mac anyway.’

Mac had an ugly red cut on his forehead, and one of his eyes was turning yellow. It had obviously recently been black.

‘What on earth happened to you?’ Peter asked.

‘It wasn’t on the – earth,’ Mac said. ‘I came down in a – tree. The ’chute got caught in the top branches and left me hanging about fifteen feet from the – ground.’

‘What did you do, bang the quick-release?’

‘My bloody oath – then landed flat on me back.’

‘That’s how you got the black eye!’

‘No it – wasn’t. I cut my head open as I came down through the branches – but I got the black eye from a silly bastard of a farmer … I thought I was in Holland …’

There was a hoot of laughter from the listening airmen. ‘Typical rear-gunner,’ one of them said. ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t think he was over England.’

Mac ignored the interruption. ‘I thought I was in Holland, so I walked up to a farm and asked them for a meal.’ He looked resentfully at Peter. ‘What d’you think happened then? The silly bastard hit me in the eye! I sort of realized that I wasn’t wanted, and came to the conclusion that I wasn’t in Holland after all. He started to scream at me in German so I – off as hard as I could. I’m going back after the war though – I’ll get that farmer …’ Tenderly he stroked his swollen eye. ‘My bloody oath …’

‘I got into the woods after that, and started to go west. I kept going for a couple of days, and then got picked up by some jokers in green plus fours. I made a dash for it, but they started popping off shotguns at me. Then I tripped over a root and thought I’d better stay where I – was. How long’ve you been out of the cooler, Pete?’

‘Came out today.’

‘I’ve got some tucker here.’ Mac ducked under the clothes line heavy with damp washing, and crossed to a row of wooden lockers. He returned with a few biscuits and a piece of cheese. ‘Got these from an Aussie in the cookhouse.’ The biscuits looked dirty, and the cheese had a semicircle bitten out of one end, but Peter took them gratefully.