Tying Down The Lion (8 page)

***

Contrasts Project

Bridget (My Mum) in Berlin, November 1938

Part One - Disorientation

Friends used to stream into our house every day. Always, always, music would echo through the rooms, following everyone up the central sweep of stairs, even outside into the gardens and further down to the fountain and orchard. My father was a gifted composer and taught me to play the piano when I was still small enough to need three cushions on the stool. My mother was always setting out dishes of silvered almonds and rows of crystal glasses sparkling with champagne.

In 1932, when I had just turned twelve years old, I was invited to join the waltz for the first time. My rustling gown was the bronze of autumn leaves. Over the next six years, my parents gave me dresses in spring green, poppy red and silver white. I wore out a dozen glittering pairs of dancing shoes.

But the parties gradually became less frequent as friends with wealth or connections slipped away from Berlin. Overnight, yet another house would fall silent, yet another group of guests would be missing from our gatherings. My home grew darker, as if endless rain was falling.

Whenever I passed Father’s study, he was sitting, not at his piano but in the tall wing-chair, a tiny, defeated man who no longer beckoned me inside to play duets. Once his room fell silent, our home became a strange, uneasy place, not only because of the unsettling hush, but because I knew my father was afraid.

One day, he hurried into the ballroom where I was playing a Mendelssohn sonata.

“Stop,” he shouted, trying to grasp my music from the piano. His hands were shaking and the sonata skated across the polished floor.

From someone so quiet and modest, almost afraid to shine, this sudden forcefulness was a shock.

“Forgive me,” he said, packing the offensive sonata into a sack along with all the other sheets of music from the pile on top of the piano. Afterwards he closed his eyes for a moment, as if order might be restored while he was not looking.

“No one can risk keeping this music in the house, let alone playing it.”

“But why?”

“Apparently Mendelssohn’s music is degenerate. It has to be rewritten.”

He sounded weary, unable to find any logic in pretending the composer had never existed. But this was life in the Third Reich. People either obeyed or fled.

We took the sack into the freezing night. The wind was hurling leaves into the air. After many attempts, Father struck a match that lit up the fear in his eyes and Mendelssohn’s work soared into flames. I had tried so hard to master Piano Concerto Number One and knew every crease in the paper that blazed to nothing in seconds.

Father stood so close to the fire the charred fragments flew into his face, but he remained still, watching until not a single note remained. He flashed his torch at the embers, searching for stray crochets. At last, we left the ashes and walked inside, back to the piano.

My mother came in, elegant as always, her clouds of perfume drifting through the room and the lace edge of her handkerchief foaming beneath her silk cuff. Whether trying on picture-hats, arranging flowers or dancing in the ballroom, she radiated joy. But that day, her smile was a thin, tense line.

“Please play Beethoven for us, dear,” Father said to me.

“Beethoven?”

Father cupped my face in his cold hands as if to press the point and restrain me from defying him. “Please understand.”

“All right. I promise to fill this house with the heroic German spirit,” I said, not understanding at all.

After lighting the candles on top of the piano, I thumped out the music we were told was the essence of the Germanic soul, while my parents sat close together in the shadows. When my mother cried, Father held her tight and told me to play louder.

In the autumn of 1938, the three of us celebrated my eighteenth birthday with an elegant meal in the dining room. I had always imagined an enormous party, a gold ball gown and a small orchestra, but the miserable tap of forks on fine china was the only sound. After the cake was cut, a suitcase appeared in the hall.

“You are going to visit your aunt and uncle and the two girls. Just until this madness is all over. You can be their third daughter,” Father said, as if it were customary to send daughters out on loan.

“Just until it’s over,” my mother repeated, twisting the sudden separation into a mere inconvenience, like a burst pipe or a lost glove.

Father tried to hold me, but his thin arms felt like old string. I pulled away, frightened of his hoarse voice. Fathers shouldn’t cry.

I was to become someone else’s third daughter, not my parents’ only child anymore. I ran from them, trying to hide, but they caught me in the orchard, marched me to the front of the house like an intruder and bundled me into the cold back seat of a waiting car.

The driver’s face seemed carved from pumice stone, his voice like gravel. “Your poor mother is crying, look,” he kept growling. “Come on, you. How about sending her a smile through the window, eh?”

They were standing on the steps in a downpour. Hail pelted the car roof, lashing at the windows. Crisp leaves that had skimmed across the ground in the wind the day before lay sodden and still. My birthday present, a tiny dog, cowered on my lap. I pulled off the red ribbon round his neck and ground it under my shoe.

“Give them a wave,” the driver said. “Who knows when you’ll see them again?”

I refused to look up. “No,” I said. “This makes no sense.”

“Nothing makes sense now,” he said.

The car reeked of damp cloaks and tobacco, reminding me of our vanished party guests, and my own coat had absorbed my mother’s perfume, the scent of mauve roses after rain. As I was driven away, I heard my father playing Debussy’s banned “Clair de Lune”, the defiant notes following me through the open door, down the steps and into the car.

My legs shook, battering against the cold leather seat, making the dog whine throughout the journey into the heart of Berlin.

The city was too quiet, the shops shuttered and the streets empty, apart from small groups on corners. The pavements shone from the rain and the sky was still swollen with clouds like enormous, tender bruises.

“You get out here,” the driver said, stopping at the corner of Unter den Linden. “Someone is waiting for you under the trees.”

I stood alone after the driver had gone, my case between my feet and my dog in my arms, listening to the unsettled, metallic rustle of the leaves until my uncle, glancing around, stepped out from the shadows.

After we had walked along a side-street for a few minutes, we heard windows smashing. As we came around the corner, youths armed with bricks and sticks surrounded a beautiful shop that sold fine leather goods, screaming, “
Juden raus
!”

Jews out.

One stubborn spike of glass stuck fast in the frame. On it, I could see part of a white-painted letter J for Jew. By this time, there were many of these on the shop-windows of Berlin, a sign for German people not to buy goods there. I watched the young men destroy the shop and take as much as they could carry. No one would be able to buy from it now.

Six policemen stood nearby, closer than us, just watching. One of them was grinning.

“Quickly,” my uncle said, grasping my arm.

The thump of heavy boots echoed in the alleys as the Hitler Youth joined the rampage. A huge explosion from a building behind us made the dog squeal in terror, struggle out of my arms and scurry into the night.

“Let it go,” my uncle said, steering me away from the flames. “Someone might take him in. We can’t get caught up in this. These streets will flow with blood tonight.”

The dog had no name to call. I never saw him again.

We tore through the streets, my uncle pulling me along. I thought my feet would leave the ground.

“What the hell is happening here?” I asked, gasping for breath. I knew it was wrong to speak that way, but he was not angry. We stopped running for a moment. His face was in shadow, but I heard him weep. All good men were breaking down, their spirits exhausted after such a long time of assuring wives and children that reason would win through.

He took a shaky breath, holding my arm with great tenderness. “Hitler has fascinated us for an age,” he whispered. “We’ve all watched him like a bird watches a snake, knowing he will strike without knowing when. But I think we know now.”

“So what is happening tonight?” I asked again.

He swallowed hard before he said, “This night is the end of hope.”

We ran faster through the smoke, followed by the stench of burning and the splintering of glass. While we paused to catch our breath in a quieter street, a linnet began singing.

“Do you think he’s trying to explain?” I asked in a small attempt at cheering my uncle.

“No, my dear girl, it’s just song,” he replied. “Not an answer.”

But we listened anyway, while the moon that had crossed the sky behind the sun, sank with it, and left the raging fires to light the sky.

We listened while Nazi stormtroopers attacked Jewish homes, stores and schools. Not even hospitals were spared. A hundred synagogues were burned to the ground. Thousands of Jewish men were rounded up and sent away. Afterwards, those brutal hours were called Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

3.
Pacification

Cars slide out of the boat like the release of a slow zipper, one tooth at a time, nose-to-tail in the hope of rolling faster off the gangplank, or whatever it’s called. Our car protests at first but coughs into life at last. Most of us inside it are flagging too, but Dad, fully car-coated and driving-gloved, is plugged in and switched on. During the long wait to go back to the car, he fell into conversation with the bushy-browed waitress, who had changed into a mini-skirt.

“Very nice girl,” he says. “She’s studying car mechanics.”

“I bet she is,” Grandma says, opening her box of Newberry Fruits.

“Very substantial legs,” Mum says, pursing her lips.

While the queue comes to a standstill, Dad insists on moving Victor into the front seat, muttering, “Bloody women.”

The waitress was wearing Sunflower stockings. “Captured from the Riviera. The in-shade, the fun-shade, the sun-shade.” And all for three pounds eleven. I might not stand a chance of walking about with Sunflower legs, but there’s no point watching commercials about gravy or baby-food that slot you into the kitchen. Television should take you at least as far as the Riviera, wherever that is.

I might become a ship’s waitress, travelling the seas, then peeling off a silk stocking to repair Paul McCartney’s fan-belt before purring to a Belgian restaurant in my tangerine Beetle.

“Do you think the waitress lives by the sea when she’s not on the boat?” I ask Dad. “I wouldn’t mind waking up to the crash of waves on the sand.”

“She’s got digs over the fish-gutting sheds in Macclesfield,” Dad says.

“Ah.”

Ring-roads scoop us around darkening towns and villages. Narrow slip-roads draw us off onto motorways. Occasional jams and delays overheat the car to boiling-point as we ooze into the heart of Belgium. The landscape thickens into navy-blue fields merging with enormous sky. We try to admire it, but it looks a lot like England. The rain has a foreign smell that none of us can explain. It becomes one of those rare, family-uniting holiday moments.

We pull off the main road for Dad to shine his torch on the map and piddle out the car door.

“Roy, please be discreet,” Mum pleads, her hands over my eyes.

While we’re listening to the hearty stream of wee hitting the grass, Mum shares out the last of her lettuce and piccalilli sandwiches. Like us, they’re limp and soggy, but we can’t rely on a food-stop later.

“Will Roy park somewhere for my ten o’clock cup of tea?” Grandma asks. I feel almost sorry for her because she sounds small and lost, uprooted from Audette Gardens, parted from her parrot and her rituals.

“I bet he won’t,” Victor says, lording it from the front. “And guess what, we all have to sleep in the car tonight. Except Dad.”

Excellent. Maybe I can take the night off from filing Grandma’s verruca.

“Belgium smells funny,” Grandma says, spitting out a Parma Violet and going back to her fruit-jellies.

“Try sleeping, Nell,” Mum suggests.

“I have to lie flat, Bridge. It’s only those ruddy great carthorses that drop off upright, duck.”

“You could try.”

“And they keep their eyes open. Mind you, I had to do that when my Bill was alive. Otherwise he’d be ferreting for ale-money faster than a rat up a drainpipe. In the end, I tied bells on my handbag.”

Sleeping in a Morris Traveller sounded like an adventure when we were at home, but it really isn’t. You convince yourself your head is comfortable jammed up against the window, but however tightly you close your eyes, you never actually sleep. There are no owls hooting. No velvet darkness. Nothing out there except the slim, sinister crescent of invisible moon we are towing. And inside the car, just the smell of well-sucked, synthetic orange sweet flavouring mixed with clouds of smoke, the sound of matches being struck and a strange creaking that could be the car’s death-rattle, but turns out to be Grandma’s stays staging a protest.

Mum tries to keep awake to read the maps, but she’s hopeless, partly because Grandma keeps snatching the torch to avoid the tongue-puckering green Newberry Fruits, but mostly because her navigation skills are even worse than Dad’s. His rule is Never Go Back. No matter how lost he is, he presses onwards, even if that is the wrong direction.

“How you and Bridge found your way back to England after the war is a mystery to me,” Grandma says.

“We used the Tardis,” he says.

“Did you?” Victor shrieks.

“Oh yes. Bumped into William Hartnell in the console room and rematerialized in Oaking High Street.”

Victor sighs, wanting to believe it. Grandma sniffs, licks her finger and gathers up all the fallen sugar scattered in her jellies box.

My eyelids droop against the irritation of sugar-crusted seats, the grumbling engine and the deadliness of being bound to people I have looked at too long and smelt too much. Even their rumpled clothes are too familiar. I discover that an air-deprived car-family is connected purely by stench.

I open the window for something to do and close it because of the roar in my ears. Mum snaps because I’m fidgeting. Dad reaches back to cuff my leg when actually both are folded under me on the seat.

“Where the hell are your legs?” he shouts in a panic.

“Thought you didn’t want shoes on your console. Now I’m in the wrong for not having them there.”

Being a back-seat passenger is so dismal I even miss school and find myself thinking back to Miss Whipp’s lesson the other day, when she told the class to choose topics for our projects. It became Day One of my mission.

***

The Project

Piles of magazines and newspapers thump onto our desks. Miss Whipp has raided her home, her elderly mother’s magazine rack and the launderette on the Parade. We were all supposed to contribute, but she put an embargo on the
Daily Mirror
and I’m not admitting to
Mandy
in public.

The
Grocer
,
Angler’s Mail
and the
TV Times
are our inspiration. I wanted to carry on with my spider-webs project, but Miss Whipp is the type to shudder if she spots the tiniest
frontinella communis
. I’ve explained how they hang from an upside-down dome woven above a lacy flat sheet for minuscule insects to fall onto, instant picnic food spread out on a rug. But she sees no beauty in that.

After the Head took her to task for not encouraging us to make mature distinctions, Miss Whipp was forced to give this year’s project the theme of Contrasts. Light and Shade. New and Old. Pretty and Not So Pretty—Miss Whipp won’t say ugly. If she had her way, we’d be studying the rise of the Genoa cake or the rebellion of the Bourbon biscuit.

“Did Miss actually steal these?” Gillian asks, leafing through a
National Geographic
with someone’s biro sketch of a bitten sandwich over the headline “Pakistan: problems of a two-part land”.

“She can’t have,” Lynette Margolis replies, snipping out a picture of fungi clustered on a silver birch. “They’re for anyone to take, aren’t they?”

“Of course she didn’t and of course they’re not,” Gaye Kennedy scoffs, huffing on her Form Captain’s badge and giving it a polish with her cuff. “Pamela and Derek asked our dentist for all the dog-eared mags he would have thrown out of the waiting-room and put a donation in his Blind Dogs box.”

“Your dentist’s dog’s blind?” Gillian says.

“It’s Guide Dogs,” Lynette chips in.

“Same difference,” Gaye says. No one argues. She knows everything because she has progressive parents. They told her the labels ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ were costing them their identities, so now she has to call them Pamela and Derek.

“It’s a good job those are their names then,” I said.

She didn’t get it. People who know everything never get it when someone else comes out with a gem.

Gillian spots an article about Jean Harlow’s new husband being found dead. “It says here he killed himself because of im-po-tence. Fancy them spelling that wrong. But why would someone die from that? I mean, Jesus might have been too important for this world, but I shouldn’t think Jean Harlow’s husband was.”

We all agree.

Gillian peers at me through her fringe, her eyes like two sequins in a magpie’s nest. She’s burning to find about my project. That makes two of us.

“What’s yours about then, Jacqueline?”

“What’s yours?”

“Promise you won’t copy?”

“Cross my heart.”

She sits up straight. “I’m doing Naomi Sims.”

Who the hell’s that?

“I’ve already got a fab picture of her. Naomi won’t be in this lot of rubbish,” she says, poking her ruler at the motley magazines. “My picture’s from the
New York Times
. My father got it from his members-only club. It’s so secret the street isn’t even on the map and the blinds are made of black rubber.”

“I told my dad I had to write about ‘something nice, but with darker shading’, as Miss Whipp puts it, and he thought I should do Nobby Stiles,” I tell her. “Dad said there was nothing more bafflingly beautiful than Nobby dancing on the pitch with the World Cup and his teeth out.”

“He’s not Naomi though,” Gillian says. And I have to agree with that.

Projects are the worst invention ever. Teachers make us do them when they run out of proper lessons or want a bit of peace to get on with their shopping lists. My project on the gruesome pig-and-poultry farm we visited in the first year earned me third prize and a book token worth two-and-six. Gillian scooped the booby prize, a Quality Street chocolate, but she didn’t deserve the Montelimar. Her project wasn’t even worth the solid toffee that pulls your fillings out. It was only half a page and most of that was a sketch of a pork chop.

But after the pig-and-poultry assignment, she turned into a gladiator and kept coming top. I had to congratulate her over and over again. It’s so much easier to sympathise with a friend’s defeat than applaud their success. A prickle of excitement crawls up my spine. This time, I want to beat her.

I imagine going home with the news that I’m top. Mum would sit up and take notice if I struggled through the front door with the big prizes—a two-layer box of Contrast chocolates and an inscribed copy of
Selected Poems of Inspiration
, co-edited by Miss Whipp herself.

Gillian’s mother has cut out the hallowed Naomi Sims with pinking-shears and curled her up in a Toni Home Perm box for protection. I imagine her tucking it, along with a Bandit and a red apple, into Gillian’s briefcase.

Once I stopped feeling quite so much like a child, Mum seemed disappointed I was changing, although I keep willing her to understand. I can’t help wanting a girdle, preferably a Berlei Gay Slant, and every girl reaches the point when
Twinkle
comic is just for catching clippings when you nail-scissor yourself a Marianne Faithfull fringe.

When I first showed an interest in clothes, Mum used to sit on my bed when she came up to say goodnight and ask me what colour I’d like for my winter coat. But the next morning, when the coat still mattered to me, she had already forgotten about it. Sometimes, when we have to ask Stan if he can spare a few chops or Victor has to scrabble among Grandma’s toe-nail trimmings under the sofa cushions for a sixpence to pay for school dinners, I suppose Mum has to forget about things that cost money.

But I would like her to notice that growing up scares me. I have changed quietly, like wallpaper peeling. Without a sound, the pinkish plaster underneath becomes exposed. I have somehow shed a layer of skin and I miss it.

The trouble is, Mum’s past has risen to the surface the way her hefty bagels float up to the top of the pan. “I prefer me bread without a ruddy great hole in it, thank you,” Grandma always says, reaching for the Sunblest.

Grandma thinks Mum should have a job to “shake herself out of the mess of Berlin.” A few mothers work part-time on the parade or do earlies at the mop-and-brush. Pamela works all day at BOAC. Gaye thinks she’s still an air-stewardess, but Grandma says, “Pamela Kennedy? Tch, she’s past being a dolly-bird now. She just minces down the aisle after the plane lands and fishes the false teeth out of the sick-bags.”

Derek spends hours helping drug addicts when they’re shaking all over and their insides are falling out, but he won’t help Gaye with her French, even though he used to pick figs in Fains-la-Folie.

Pamela and Derek swan in at all hours with frozen tubs of mousse, which is all Gaye ever gets for her pudding. She wears a house-key on a length of shirring-elastic round her neck. “It has to have some give,” she explained. “Pamela and Derek thought someone might try to strangle me if we used string.”

“Bagsy first go,” I muttered, watching her suck on the key like a dummy.

My mum watches me drop my bag in the hall when I come home. She has the tea brewing and she lets down the let-down, ready for us to eat her gritty cake with plums that taste of penicillin. But then she disappears to wash the stairs or clear the grate. It’s Grandma who remembers I’ve had a geography test or notices my hem unravelling. She sits down and looks at me when I talk, even though she interrupts all the time with essential matters in hand, such as, does Deborah need a bigger mirror so she’ll think she has a beefy companion, or do I think the Queen eats dates.

The other day she said, “Project? Can’t they just teach you how to turn a cuff and make a fatless sponge?” But she bought me a pad of yellowish ruled paper and a soft rubber from Woolworth’s when she went into Oaking for her surgical stockings.

Mum’s brain disintegrates into fluff when I ask for help with Venn diagrams or the point of ox-bow lakes. She lays down the handkerchief she is embroidering for Beate, stares into space and mumbles about life thirty or forty years ago. Ancient times anyway. Nothing makes sense. Once, she remembered being sent to the back of the class even though she had mastered her Latin pluperfect. Her mind is muddled, the memories drifting about like dandelion seeds in the wind.

Grandma says to her, “Pull yourself together, Bridge, and make the dinner. Berlin’s got bugger-all to do with Bisto. You need to think more English or you’ll always be a foreigner, duck. You know, there’s a gap between what we dream of and what life gives us. So, come on. You invited yourself here. And you’d settle down better if you learnt how to make a decent hot-pot.”