One More River, page 12
He sat too long; the police came to a conclusion. Heavily loaded down with electronics, fire-power, crowd-control; only the dog was missing. The tread purposeful, weighty with decision, like we were going to squeeze in another cup of coffee before going off duty, but this will do instead. Majestic; handsome, if coarse of feature. God made them, male and female made he them, two of a kind. Went to opposite doors, just in case it were a funny-bunny. The female one tapped on the window.
“Would you mind?”
One can make a to-do. Their search-and-seizure powers are ill-defined, can be challenged, and maybe in court one will triumph, but can one be bothered? Easier to comply, or is that the story of one’s life? He had a friend in the police (not here though). Supposedly French, ex-PJ officer, with succinct advice to offer. Never, never have anything to do with them, unless of course you’re fucking forced to. And then no rebellion, no sarcasm, just go along, however silly; in the long run you’ll waste less time. They only want to be Quite sure you aren’t a terrorist, dealer in narcotics, illegal immigrant. You were, you know, Loitering.
“Just putting on the ventilator, you know, wait for the temperature to come back to breathable.” It might have been a help, he would think that evening, if they had taken me in, instead of a great telling-off for leaving the motor running. ‘Embarked,’ as the French police say (charming word for a disagreeable experience), one would have been safer.
“Where are you heading?”
“Arnsburg.” It really was the first name that came into his head. It didn’t have to be true; they would have been satisfied with anything.
“Very well then—there is your road—past Dusseldorf, direction Hagen—on your way.” Lucky to escape the summons for pollution, redeemable by a heavy fine? The car had French plates? He looked harmless, old? He had been humble? And the road—the road leads to a town he had known well in the old days. That had led to Sibylle. Then it was all half-cleared bomb sites, with the first tiny shoots of new life beginning to show, like the first snowdrops beside a soot-blackened trampled icy path through the wreckage. But basically the same path; the road leads to the Ruhrland. To Dortmund, Essen and Wuppertal. The names of the minesweepers! To Bochum, Oberhausen and Gelsenkirchen—’Claribel, Assyrian and Golden Gain.’
Arnsburg lies outside the immense industrial nexus. Even today these roads are a surprise. By hearsay one would picture it all as the same grim sprawl with nothing to show ends or beginnings. One is taken aback to find a country of sharp-pitched hills, thickly clothed in pine trees, bare outcrops of rock, steep narrow little valleys where one can trace the beginnings of two centuries before, when the mill was run by water power. Village roofs climb the hillsides, and in the middle a church perched with a high humped nave and a needle spire pointing up to God, and a churchyard full of simple faith and piety. Between Dortmund and Unna there are ploughed fields and solid roomy farmsteads where cows graze. Fierce village loyalties were to ‘the mill’, where one’s father, one’s grandfather, through all time … oneself went in to the mill as a matter of course at twelve, at ten years old. John, the raw boy, eighteen in the last year of the war, had never seen the Yorkshire mill towns. The pattern is just the same; here you go down the mine; in this valley it’s coal. There it’s iron, and you make steel: jump one further and you’re in the textile country that stretches up into Belgium, over into France to Roubaix and Tourcoing, but be the local language German-French-or-Polish we all understand it.
Climb the hill and you are among cowslips and the slender pallor of the wood anemone.
And here in 1946 soldiers, boys homesick for Barnsley or Workington, lifted singing voices in a sentimental tune nigh as constant as Lili Marlene herself–
That’s where I fell in love where stars above—
came out to play—
South of the Border—
Down Dusseldorf way …
And so had he.
Today the residential roofs have crept ever further like the lava on the slopes of Etna. It is the mills that stand desolate with pine seedlings growing from the tops of the tall magnificent chimneys. Swing out past Hagen and you are already in Iserlohn. You are following the Ruhr—a peaceful, winding little country river—upstream, to rustic, cow-and-colza origins. Arnsburg lies within a loop of the Ruhr, just south of Wickede. John had turned off the autobahn, for old sakes’ sake.
A mistake, this; of course the countryside would have changed, and over fifty years out of all recognition, but he had trusted his memories of the roads between villages, so often travelled he had known them by heart. Sentimentalist idiot, he was now astray, and signs pointing to once-familiar names made his path the more confusing: hereabouts they were cutting a new autobahn and roadworks forcing him to take a big loop northward. A once-famous name on an arrow—there at least he would know where he was. Woods made it invisible from the ridge but the road wound downhill and abruptly he stopped the car at the lakeside; his heart was beating noisily. The Möhnesee …
It was now a weekend playground. A couple of comfortable-looking hotels with glassed verandas, a rash of little beer gardens and Boats-for-hire notices. But there in the distance, the massive wall … He got back into the car to drive the five minutes along the lake shore and there it loomed up large. They had put it all back, in its monumental fortified Kaiserstyle of the 1900s, with the watchtowers and pretend-mediaeval gateways, and now there was a café selling ice-cream and crisps. Curious, he went to look. Surely there would be a memorial plaque, and perhaps postcards, with photographs of the ruins; as it was in 1945. There was nothing, and John smiled at their talent for obliterating the disagreeable.
“Didn’t the Brits”—falsely naïve—”bomb it or something?” The man was in his forties; uninterested.
‘That’s right. Knock it all down—Springbomben, oder.”
And standing here as a green little boy of a junior officer, John had seen a thoughtful figure, walking slowly with a silver-mounted stick. He had straightened up and saluted; it was a Wing Commander, unknown to him but ‘there were a lot of them about.’ An impressive one; pilots’ wings, a double row of medal ribbons, diagonal stripes of a DFC. God knew what he was doing here but such people were a law unto themselves.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Morning, boy,” morosely.
“Come to see for yourself, sir? Your own work, perhaps?”
“What? That? Dambusters!” With an immense contempt, and a startling bitterness. It would be prudent to keep quiet. The ‘Dambuster’ Squadron had been one of the great propaganda successes and a lot of clouds-of-glory, and some fine feathers, floated about those concerned. Like ‘Pathfinder’, about which myth collected. As a very young Pilot Officer (no wings, and no medals either) one took care, and John was silent. The ‘old man’ (forty perhaps but greying under his cap as many of them had) said nothing but looked at the immense, impressive ruin. Then he pointed his stick at John.
“Boy, let me tell you something. They tried to knock it down and couldn’t. Lot of heavies here in the mud at the bottom. They found a guru, one of those dam’ scientists. Made them a thing, spherical thing—would bounce, like a bloody pingpong ball, on the surface, run along, hit the dam, and bang.”
Yes, it was here. The Möhneseestaudam. A year or so later they would make a highly sensational sentimental movie, with Leslie Howard or somebody (no, not him, he got killed in the war) in the role of the Miracle Scientist.
Nasty pale grey, hard eyes the old man had.
“Just imagine, boy, if you can. How much money, how many millions, d’you think, they spent on developing a thing like that? Think about it. And then the risk, coming in low over the water,” pointing, with the stick. “What for? Great success,” with crude sarcasm. “Breach this big thing, deprive the civilian population of drinking water. A mighty blow at morale, they called that.
“Now I’ll tell you one of my heroic episodes, back in ‘forty that would have been, flying some bloody awful crate, dropping propaganda leaflets hereabout, don’t believe all Haw-Haw tells you, that sort of crap. Got flak, as was to be expected, some boys started saying Fuck-this, instead of scattering the papers began heaving them over in packets, quite heavy, may be twenty kilo at a time. That leaked out—as such things will. We got torn off a considerable strip for endangering a civilian population which was not, repeat, Not, the assigned mission. We took some pride, boy, then, in waging war. It was a Crusade. We were civilisation, out to stop the barbarians. And look at us now … Remember what I’ve said, boy.” Turning, walking slowly away.
A monstrous shock to poor silly John. He would get accustomed to this sort of cynicism. By ‘forty-seven, it was commonplace among the seniors; those who really had flown, over Germany. And those in the ranks, too, who had armed and loaded Lancaster bombers. The principal emotion felt by then was shame, and the tough exterior assumed scarcely bothered to mask it. Back in the Mess …
John knew his way, now, from here. The road through the woods still led to Arnsburg. The ‘Mess’ had not been there, but there had been—never mind, it was salutary, to retrace these steps, to call up these disjointed memories, which would tell him, at least, part of what he wanted to understand. For that, he had to relive whatever was still possible, from fifty years ago …
He stopped for a bite to eat, in Neheim-Hüsten; two villages now the one prosperous township (the autobahn piercing an underpass, at the bottom of the hill). Weird—a town of old women, and how many of his memories would they share—walking slowly, with sticks in the sunlight, towards the chemist’s to have their prescriptions filled: he wanted his own prescription renewed but it would take more than a Pharmacy to decipher this faded palimpsest.
All along the valley and the railway line were strung out depressed fragments of industry, like grey, never-quite-clean washing pinned to rusty wire. But everywhere on the slopes, in orderly lines as neat as freshly pruned and raked vineyards, suburban housing climbed, trim with fresh paint and toy gardens. ‘I’ve gone wrong again,’—and at that moment an arrow caught his eye. Arnsburg Altstadt, and he was climbing through narrow hairpins and this one he knew; this was as familiar as though he’d never been away: will Barbara still be alive?
Nothing suburban up here. This was Urbs, as it had been for centuries, and the Neumarkt a square of quiet dignified old houses, the heart of a traditional, historic German town. Even in ‘forty-six it had looked much the same; take away a few gaudy shopfronts. Bombs had fallen here but scattered, indiscriminate; a plane that had lost its way, flustered by flak—or a fighter after it. Unload quick, and get out of here. The gaps had been restored, lovingly. He left the car here; he knew his way. Cross and turn left, going on up the hill. The Altmarkt, cobbled as it had always been so that horses should not slip. these were really old, fifteenth century, trim and fresh-painted in their primitive, childish colours and the gothic lettering of prayers, blessings and conjurations against disaster (an intensely pious God-fearing people) lovingly kept up. The old Rathaus, emblazoned with the splendid, immensely complicated and elaborate arms of the prince and his city, quartering half the ruling houses of Germany and carrying the Wittelsbach label. And the New Schloss, dignified and unpretentious, now the Sauerland Museum.
He had to go on; memories crowded here, pressing on nerve points in his head, wakening sharp jolts of pain. The Schloss Strasse, steeper, narrower, through the Glockenturm gateway. Pleasure? He had taken Barbara up here, the first night. Up there at the hill top, in the bushes around the ruins of the mediaeval castle, the Old Schloss, he had peeled off pathetic and unresisting underclothes. Too steep now for the old man; he stopped to gaze at a lovely crooked house, brave in bright blue and gold lettering—’Burned down and restored by Michael (baker and brewer) and Maria-Sybille, 1975.’ A magnificent view, the valley and the hills across it.
In the lazy quiet of afternoon spring sunshine he pottered, lighting a cigarette and enjoying it. There was nobody about. A little boy rode a bicycle gleefully down the hill; one or two cars were parked in angles of the little old houses. They’d be worth a lot now. He was smiling, amused at the power of this antiquated nigh-instinctive pull of memory that had dragged the old man, breathless now from the hill—or from sentiment—all the way up here. ‘Gunther’s house’ was lower down, out of sight and he would keep it so. There, he had no wish to sentimentalise over the old days. A mistake, no doubt, to have come here at all. He would finish the cigarette, stroll back down—really it had been the spring sunshine, still a novelty this early in the year—climb in the car, sail back towards Essen. Fidelio was playing in the Opera and one might have a shot at a ticket. This had been an indulgence. One said to the police ‘Arnsburg’—could just as well have been Essen—and then one felt, superstitiously, obliged to make it come true …
And then it happened. Not at all surprisingly, all things considered. And as he had pictured that it would happen. Not even fast, and he had imagined that it would be fast and violent: even the violence was leisurely, unhurried.
A car came up, through the gateway, slow and careful, reversed and turned. Day-dreaming—stepping, scrupulous, on his cigarette end—he noticed only an old Mercedes model, shabby and in need of a wash, like his own. The vaguest of impressions of two youngish men. It stopped abreast of him and a man got out, exactly as one would to ask some tourist question, polite and confused. ‘Can’t one get further, on this path?’ Or ‘Isn’t the museum open?’ He was even opening his mouth to say, ‘No, it’s a dead end.’ And then he got a sharp push, in the back. Bundled or barged into the open doorway so that he fell off balance across the seat; he could not struggle and was too taken aback to cry out. His neck was gripped in the crook of somebody’s elbow, and as he gasped for breath a pad of cottonwool came down upon his nose and mouth. It reeked of ether. Nobody uses it now as an anaesthetic. One can buy it in any pharmacy. It attracts no attention. An old, simple, household product, used—if at all—to disinfect the skin. Much like hydrogen peroxide. A lot of people don’t mind the smell.
I suffered intensely. I was helpless, with an arm pinned under me and the other gripped, my head pushed down in a man’s lap and my legs doubled up against the car door. I dread and detest ether, for as a child I was held down brutally by nurses and anaesthetised by this abominable method.
When I came to I was sick. I vomited, several times, and my vomit smelt of ether and this made me retch, helpless. Someone had spread a coarse towel under my jaw. When, at long last, I was finished I was exhausted. My whole body ached. The joints were turned to water. “Go to sleep, now,” said a voice, and I did.
What can one make of these half-worlds; sleep and his brother? I have been dreaming; am now awake. Alive. Testing it by touching things. To be alive is no achievement but it’s a fact, to be noticed, perhaps thought of; the more since I have readied myself for death. So one should. At my age one thinks of death, of dying suddenly. By violence, but any death is a violence. To sleep and not to wake: will one know one’s moment? Readied one will still cling. I have just thought of the young witch, in The Lady’s not for Burning. A theatre, in London, that year following the war. She said, ‘I am such a creature of habit; I had quite got into the way of living.’ I am not young, nor pretty, but I agree, the habit is hard to shake.
Why (now that I am certainly awake) this memory, of that year? An evening at the play, and a good one. The still young John Gielgud and the very young Richard Burton: which of them delivered the line I should like to have written?—’Always fornicate between clean sheets, and spit on a well-scrubbed floor.’ I don’t much look like doing either right now. Alive, though.
He did little that first day but lie there (between clean sheets). Suffering from shock as he supposed, as well as from unpleasant after-effects of primitive anaesthesia in very likely an overdose.
His watch had disappeared, among other things. Towards evening, by the light, a young man came in. One of the two?
“Want something to eat?” Neither ‘kind’ nor the contrary.
“Not really.”
“Better have some soup.” He had brought a bowl, and a spoon. A sort of German minestrone. Smelt nice; a lot of work, to eat it, but he kept it down, felt better for it. Began feeling dozy again. Had there been a sleeping pill dissolved in that? Likely enough.
Born in 1927 John was ‘called up’ for military service at the war’s end. One felt a little humiliated about this. Elders, instructors, disagreeable sergeants with Africa and Italy ribbons on their battledress, tended to rub it in, inventing disciplinary chores for these lucky-little-devils: the expression ‘Get yer knees brown’ was heard a good deal. Most of these seniors were soured at their own demobilisation being held up, beyond as they felt the call of duty. With the general unwinding of tension and loosening of administrative screws came confusion, muddle and a slackening of discipline; a lot of what-the-fuck, and ‘Let the sprogs look after it’. Perhaps for this reason most of John’s early months were spent in ‘bullshit camps’, a great deal of square-bashing, heavy emphasis on boots and haircuts, and ‘If it moves salute it’ (if it don’t move paint it). The feeling of a world become meaningless was widely shared.
John had opted for Air Force service largely though filial piety; his father was dead of some vague cardiac affection but Robert had been in the RFC in the ‘last war’. From what one gathered this was still worse than the Army. Many months were lost in a Radio School learning about Wireless Transmission. The service was far-flung; one dreaded getting sent to some ghastly hole in PaiForce, formerly known as Mespot. Officially there were still fleets of bombers, squadrons of fighters, held in readiness for nobody quite knew what.
