The Aftermath Read online

  Then, one day in the spring of 1942, a stray offloading of an unreleased bomb from a Heinkel He 111 returning from a raid on the refineries of Milford Haven killed her fourteen-year-old son Michael, destroyed her sister’s house and hurled her across the floor of the sitting room like a rag doll. Even though she herself had walked from the wreckage unscathed, some spirit shrapnel lodged itself deep inside her, beyond the reach of surgeons, poisoning her thoughts and causing her to think with a limp. That absurd bomb shattered her faith in the essential goodness of life and blew it into the ether like so much dust, leaving a ringing in her head that had got louder with the war’s end.

  Even though, within the narrow circle of her own acquaintance, she’d been outdone in statistical loss – the Blakes had had two sons killed in the D-Day landings; George Davies had returned from a POW camp to discover that his wife and children had been killed in a bombing raid on Cardiff – Rachael could find no solace in other people’s tales of woe. Pain was uniquely one’s own, and undiminished by a democracy of suffering.

  Blaming Germans brought only temporary remission, though. In the aftermath of the blast she had looked to the skies through the still-smouldering, roofless rafters and imagined the airmen laughing as they flew back to Germany, but it felt empty blaming men who were doing their duty. She had, for a second, thought of their leader’s culpability, but thinking about that man seemed degrading to her son’s memory.

  After a few weeks, feeling returning, she found herself unable to pray, as she had always done, and with this came the unexpected sensation of wondering if God was there at all. This God, whom she’d always imagined to be on her side, felt suddenly as remote and generalized as a Führer. Her response was not the engaged anguish of someone who believed (to shout at God required faith); it was more the silence of someone who wondered if they ever really had. The words of Reverend Pring, that ‘what we learn from sorrow will increase us’, served only to compound the strange sensation of divine absence. When the priest tried to console her that they believed in a God who had also lost a son, she replied, with unexpected sharpness, that ‘He had at least got His back after three days.’ The startled priest let this hang in the air for several moments before telling her, in the most reassuring cadence he could muster, that all who believed in that resurrection shared the same hope. Rachael shook her head. She had seen her son’s broken body, pulled from beneath the beams, his blameless face white with dust and death. There would be no resurrection for Michael.

  In austere times, self-pity was a heavily rationed commodity, a thing no one should be caught indulging in public. And yet, Rachael’s sense of having had a bad war, of being more sinned against than sinning, did not diminish. Without a God to blame she returned to earth in search of a culprit, and she found one. It was not who she expected, and at first she tried to suppress the idea, thinking it further proof of her ‘fragile nerves’, as Dr Mayfield had put it. Lewis – who had had a good war, a heroic war – had been miles away, training recruits in Wiltshire, when it happened, and even though it was his idea that they head from Amersham to the safety of the west, ‘far beyond the reach and interest of the Luftwaffe’, and he who had insisted the boys go with her, he could not possibly have anticipated this lazy unfurling of bombs by a German aircrew just trying to get home quickly. But grief, stirred with other unspoken resentments, can set loose a flock of squawking thoughts which, once out of the cage, are hard to put back. It was Lewis’s face that loomed largest when she railed loudest, and his absence had served only to compound his guilt. If she blamed anyone, she blamed him.

  ‘Mother? Who are you talking to now?’ Edmund asked her. The reverie had taken her off again, and again it was poor Edmund, her youngest and only surviving son, who had to call her back. The taboo of her grievances had driven everything inside, to the private realm, taking her so far from the world that she sometimes lost all sense of time and place. Rachael tried to relocate herself.

  ‘No one, Ed. I’m just thinking …’ she said. ‘I was just thinking … that I have another card for you.’ She reached for the packet of Wills in her handbag and lit the cigarette which Dr Mayfield had suggested would be ‘good for her nerves’. She handed the cigarette card to Edmund, who took it enthusiastically then rejected it.

  ‘I’ve already got that one,’ he said.

  Rachael looked at it. It showed an illustration of how to protect a window against a blast. ‘Those still have all the boring war-information cards,’ Edmund explained. ‘Can’t you smoke different ones?’

  ‘Your father will have new ones. I think he still smokes Player’s.’

  Rachael flicked the ash into the ashtray and brushed some flakes from her tweed skirt. Today was the first time she had dressed herself with Lewis in mind in over a year; the first time, in fact, since she had seen him for those three brief, peculiar days after VE Day, when she had felt like the only person in all of Britain unable to let herself go. She was wearing the tweed which he had, uncharacteristically, said she looked ‘gorgeous’ in, as well as the Je Reviens Worth (‘a bomb’) perfume he had brought back from France. After years of curtains for coats and beetroot juice for lipstick, her get-up felt almost ostentatious.

  As Rachael caught her reflection in the train’s carriage window, she noticed the woman and child – a girl of about ten – sitting opposite her, respectively reading booklet and comic. The woman seemed to be tut-tutting with her eyes.

  ‘I think this is important, Lucy,’ she said to the girl. ‘It’s a message from Prime Minister Attlee.’ The woman read from the booklet: ‘“British wives will be looked upon by the Germans as representatives of the British Empire, and on their behaviour and that of the children, far more than that of the armed forces, the Germans will judge the British and the British way of life.” We must remember that,’ she said, and although she looked at her daughter as she said it, Rachael felt the words were directed at her. No doubt this exemplary British wife had come to the conclusion that the overdressed, self-absorbed and distracted lady opposite, who barely seemed to register her son’s presence and muttered arguments to herself, must be a selfish wife, a very bad mother and quite the worst kind of person to represent her country.

  ‘After the bomb landed there was a sort of delay when everything stood still …’ Edmund paused for effect. ‘And then all the sound and air was sucked away and my mother was thrown … thirty feet across the house.’

  Edmund was an eleven-year-old boy living in exciting times: riding a converted German troopship across the North Sea to be reunited with a father who was a living war hero, to live in a land that once contained the most powerful and evil regime in history; better still, he was a boy armed with war stories that were more than a match for anyone’s.

  The bomb that had killed Edmund’s brother had also thrown his mother – ten, twenty feet (thirty, if he had the right audience) – across his aunt’s sitting-room floor. The incident might have left her with a slight tremble and quick tears (she cried at the slightest thing – a piece of classical music on the wireless, a limping bird in the garden), but he could forgive her these tics. They had an obvious source in Michael’s death and her own narrow escape. Her dodging of death had given him a sort of pride and a good story to embellish.

  And he was embellishing it now to what he felt was a sure-fire ‘thirty-foot audience’ consisting of a girl of about thirteen with a beauty spot, a red-headed boy who looked about eleven and an older boy, maybe sixteen, in a dogtooth sports jacket. While class distinctions had been temporarily neutralized by the excitement of transit, it was impossible not to mentally calculate one’s relative place in this new society, and even before the disclosure of
their fathers’ ranks, Edmund had guessed that he was at least equal to Red Hair and Beauty Spot in class, and almost certainly superior to Dogtooth, who sat apart, feigning disinterest in Edmund’s mother’s survival story, tapping a cigarette end and brushing back his Brylcreemed satin hair.

  Despite the boy’s showy indifference, Edmund could feel his story drawing him in. He had just described the moment the bomb had hit the house, complete with ‘the crump’ of the impact, the strange ‘push-pull’ sensation of the explosion which his mother had tried to explain to him. It was accurate in most respects, except for the ‘wam! wam! wam!’ of the anti-aircraft gunfire that hadn’t actually existed in the rural Welsh market town of Narberth. Nor did he feel the need to mention that he was at a neighbouring farm the day the bomb had hit.

  ‘Thirty feet? That’s nearly … three times as long as this cabin.’ Red Hair traced the imagined arc of the Flying Mother with a rotation of his head and punctuated her landing somewhere beyond the deck with a confirming ‘Gosh’. Edmund, as if seeking to seal off any doubts, ended his story with the indisputable fact of Michael’s death, the details of which needed no amplification:

  ‘My brother was not so lucky.’

  Having won their respect with How His Mother Defied Death, Edmund had their sympathy with And His Brother Died.

  It was said that everyone had ‘a bomb story’, but Edmund had not yet met anyone who could match his. He waited to see if any of the three would make their move. Red Hair cleared his throat and tentatively mentioned a cousin who had died while watching Gone with the Wind at the Alhambra Cinema in Bromley along with ten other people, but he hadn’t known him very well. Dogtooth stayed silent, but Edmund guessed his smirking look indicated that he was now going to trump his tale with one of his own: Death by Doodlebug? German Pilot Caught in a Tree? No matter. He had another story up his sleeve if he needed it.

  Edmund produced his pack of playing cards. ‘You know how to build a house of cards?’ he asked. He spread the cards and set out the foundational pyramid on the pull-out table. The pitch and roll of the ship would add an extra challenge.

  ‘We have to share our cabin with another family,’ Beauty Spot said. ‘My father is only a captain.’ She had already noted the layout of Edmund’s quarters, a space commensurate with his father’s rank. ‘But my mother hopes he will become a major soon, then we will get a better house in Germany. What rank is your father?’

  Edmund glanced quickly at Dogtooth to make sure he was listening. Here was an easy, modest way to play his best hand. If How His Mother Defied Death was a full house, How His Father Won a Medal was his royal flush.

  ‘At the start of the war he was just a captain. He quickly made major and won a medal and got promoted again. Jumping from major over lieutenant colonel straight to colonel.’

  ‘What did he get a medal for then?’ Dogtooth was hooked and Edmund noted the accent: aspiring grammar school. No amount of elocution lessons could disguise it.

  Hardly needing encouragement, Edmund told them how his father had jumped into the River Ems to save two sappers trapped in a lorry and how he had to fight off the attentions of a German sniper to do it. It wasn’t the first time he’d told the story, and he had learned to pause just before the part where his father, having dived beneath the surface and freed the trapped men, managed to resurface and take out the sniper with a grenade. Afterwards, there was awed silence, until Dogtooth asked:

  ‘What medal did he get?’

  ‘The DSO. The Distinguished Service Order.’

  ‘Did Something Ordinary, you mean.’ Dogtooth tutted a laugh and, with that, doubt seeped into the room like water filling a truck in a river. Edmund felt his story sinking. Beauty Spot restored some unity with a statement all could agree on:

  ‘The only good German is a dead German.’

  Edmund and Red Hair nodded, while Beauty Spot offered more insights into the true nature of Germans, as learned at her grandmother’s knee:

  ‘My grandmother said that if you look into their eyes you can see the devil …’

  Red Hair had done his research, too:

  ‘We can’t talk to them or even smile at them. And they must salute us and do as we say.’

  ‘And we can’t fraternize,’ Edmund added, pleased to use this new word.

  Dogtooth lit up and shook his head. Edmund secretly admired the way he blew the smoke through his nostrils and believed absolutely nothing anyone said.

  ‘Listen to you lot. You’ve got no idea, have you? There’s only one thing you need to know about Germany …’ He held out his cigarette. ‘Just one of these buys you a loaf of bread. One hundred will get you a bike. Enough of these and you can live like a king.’

  And, with this, he took an exaggerated drag and blew smoke at them, forcing everyone to blink, except for Edmund, who kept his eyes wide open long enough to see his house of cards collapse.

  The Wives of the Men Already in Germany had gathered in the ship’s lounge. Much effort had been made to disguise this vessel’s provenance; any trace that it had once carried Waffen SS to the newly conquered ports of Oslo and Bergen had been erased with lime and cream paint and cheery bunting. Only the most eagle-eyed passengers would have noticed an old graffito still on the deck railings telling the world that Private Tobias Messer had stood there long enough to knife his name into posterity.

  The SS Empire Halladale was the showboat of Operation Reunion and its cargo representatives of a still-great global power, a nation that, even in lean times, was capable of providing perks for its citizens. As far as the ‘cargo’ was concerned, it was a good time to be sailing away from England, away from Potato Pete and Dr Carrot, gravy stockings and relentless parsimony. This little floating corner of the Empire seemed to mock all that and suggest a life of largesse ahead.

  Rachael sat with three officer’s wives, comparing household inventories. As she was a colonel’s wife, her list ran to three pages; Mrs Burnham’s (major’s wife) ran to two and a half; Mrs Eliot’s and Mrs Thompson’s (captains’) to two. It was testament to the miracle of British bureaucracy that even in these bankrupt times it could find within its broken and bust self the wherewithal to decide that a captain’s wife did not need a four-place tea set, that a major’s needed a full dinner service, and that only commanding officers’ wives should have a port decanter.

  Rachael was the ‘senior-ranking wife’ in this party, but Mrs Burnham was the natural leader here and Rachael was happy to defer. This confident, glamorous woman was something of a know-all, quick and crude, but she brought a sense of the conspiratorial to the gathering that made them all feel that going to Germany was an adventure, an opportunity to be grabbed with both hands. Mrs Thompson, a clipped snob of a woman, was hanging on her every word. Only Mrs Eliot seemed uncomfortable. She had been sick ever since the ship had set out from Tilbury and her pallor matched the routine grey-green of their cups and saucers.

  ‘Feeling better?’ Rachael asked her.

  ‘This tea is helping.’

  ‘Make the most of it,’ Mrs Burnham said. ‘The Germans may well be experts with coffee but they don’t know the first thing about making tea.’

  Mrs Burnham had already scanned her list, noted the lack of condiments, napkins and goblets, and she now turned her attention to Rachael’s.

  ‘Everything there?’

  Rachael had few complaints, but Lewis’s double-rank promotion had elevated her into new and unfamiliar realms of entitlement and there was pressure to show that she was to the manor born.

  ‘Sherry glasses would have been nice.’

  Mrs Burnham launched into a mock-serious complaint: ‘Well, I don’t know wh
at to say! The governor’s wife simply must have sherry glasses, or there will be questions in the House!’

  All of them laughed, and Rachael felt glad to have someone make her laugh. Mrs Burnham articulated what Rachael felt but could not express. All that was drab and restrained and stiff was to be left behind in grey, burnt-out England. Back there, Mrs Burnham might well have been classed as brash and vulgar, but here, free of protocol and in unknown territory, she could talk with the unchecked confidence of a New World explorer.

  Sensible Mrs Eliot’s question went against the mood. ‘Is it true there’s a shortage of suitable family housing because of the bombing? George wasn’t sure where we were going to live when he last wrote.’

  Mrs Burnham quashed the doubts. ‘They’ve started requisitioning houses. There’ll be plenty of room.’

  ‘I hear their houses are well made,’ Mrs Thompson chipped in. ‘Especially the kitchens.’

  ‘It’s not the kitchen I’m worried about,’ Mrs Burnham said, ‘it’s the bedroom. And I’m rather counting on a large, comfortable bed.’ As she laughed, Rachael noticed a red flush at her throat like a wanton brooch.

  But Mrs Eliot was still worried about the ramifications of the housing shortage.

  ‘But where are they going to put them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The German families … the ones whose houses are being requisitioned?

  ‘Billets,’ Mrs Burnham said, shooting the word out like a pellet.

  ‘Billets?’

  ‘Billets,’ she repeated.

  Mrs Eliot tried to picture billets and German families living in them. ‘How awful,’ she said.

  ‘I hardly think we should be feeling sorry for them,’ Rachael said, with surprising force.

  ‘Quite right,’ Mrs Burnham applauded. ‘They can jolly well move over and make room. It’s the least they can do.’