‘I wonder where they are going,’ Natalia said.
‘Up to one of the army camps in the North, I expect,’ David answered. ‘They say there’s another miners’ strike coming.’
She looked at him in the mirror. ‘You were in the army yourself in 1939–40, I think?’
‘Yes. In Norway.’
‘What was it like?’ She smiled but her eyes were sharp.
‘For the first few months nothing happened, and I spent the winter in a camp in Kent.’ He turned to Geoff and said jokingly, ‘You were all right, nice and warm out in Africa.’
‘They wouldn’t let District Officers like me join up. I wanted to.’
David continued, ‘Then the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway out of the blue. My regiment got sent to Namsos, up in the north.’
‘I heard it was a chaotic campaign,’ Natalia said.
‘All the 1940 campaigns were.’ David remembered after they finally set sail, the troopship ploughing through massive, heaving seas, all the soldiers seasick, then blizzards that turned the decks white. Their first sight of Norway, giant white peaks rising from the water. ‘When we arrived we disembarked and marched out immediately to meet the Germans. We had on thick army greatcoats, you’d get covered with sweat inside and then during the night it would freeze. Our boots just sank into the snow as soon as you stepped off the roads. But I heard at other landing points the soldiers didn’t even have winter clothing.’
‘The Germans must have had the same disadvantages, yet they just smashed their way through,’ Geoff said.
‘They’d planned for it. We hadn’t. It was the same in France.’ David remembered marching down a Norwegian road, mountains and forests and snow on a scale he could never have imagined. He saw again German bombers and fighters roaring down on them, the fighters coming so low he could see the pilots’ set faces; gunfire smashing into the column, fallen men lying on snow that turned red. The picture in Natalia’s flat had reminded him of that. ‘The Germans seemed invincible,’ he said quietly. ‘I got frostbite, I was back home recovering when they served up the same medicine in France. I didn’t see how we could fight on after that.’
‘Nor me,’ Geoff agreed. ‘I remember thinking, if we don’t surrender London will just be bombed to annihilation, like Rotterdam or Warsaw was.’ He frowned, a guilty look.
‘They are not invincible,’ Natalia said, her tone certain. ‘Russia has shown us that. In many places there they do not even have a front line, the Germans control one village and the partisans the next, and it all changes from season to season. They are completely bogged down.’
‘But Russia hasn’t beaten the Germans either,’ David replied. ‘It’s a stalemate. I think it’s going to boil down to who runs out of men first,’ he added bitterly.
‘Not just through the fighting,’ Geoff added, ‘if what we hear about the cholera and typhus epidemics on both sides of the line is true.’
Natalia shook her head. ‘There are more Russians than Germans. And they have General Winter on their side, Russians deal with the climate better than the Germans. They know what to wear, how to survive in the forests, what seeds and mushrooms you can eat.’
David thought the remark cold. ‘I expect you have hard winters too where you come from.’
Natalia nodded. ‘Yes, long winters with a lot of snow.’
They passed an ancient country church where the service had just ended, the warmly dressed congregation talking in groups beside the porch. A red-faced vicar in his white surplice was shaking people’s hands. David said, ‘They look a contented bunch.’
‘Yes,’ Geoff agreed. ‘They’ll be with Headlam’s lot.’ The Church of England had split two years ago – a large minority opposed to the government forming their own church as the German Confessing Church had – but this prosperous-looking congregation was more likely to have stayed with the pro-German Archbishop Headlam.
‘Were you brought up an Anglican, Geoff?’ Natalia asked.
‘My uncle was a vicar. I believed for a long time, that’s partly why I joined the Colonial Service, going out to help the poor benighted natives.’ He gave his sharp little bark of laughter and ran a finger quickly over his fair moustache in an oddly cross, peremptory gesture. ‘David and I used to argue about religion at university. He won the argument in the end, so far as I’m concerned.’
‘You would have been brought up a Catholic, David, with your Irish family.’
‘My parents had had enough of religion in Ireland.’ He turned to Natalia. ‘What about you?’
‘I was brought up a Lutheran, though most people in Slovakia are Catholics. But I also became disillusioned with religion. Did you know that our little dictator, Tiso, is a Catholic priest? His Slovak nationalists were glad to help Hitler break up Czechoslovakia, and now we have our own little Catholic Fascist state, just like Croatia and Spain. Our Hlinka guard, the equivalent of your Blackshirts, loaded the Jews onto trains when the Germans wanted them deported in 1942.’
There was an anger in her voice David had never heard before. Geoff said, ‘I thought all Czechoslovakia had been occupied by Germany.’
‘No. We are a satellite state with our own government, like Britain and France.’ She looked away, concentrating on the road as a little sports car passed them, a young couple out on a Sunday drive.
Geoff asked, ‘Are your paintings of your home town?’
‘Mostly of Bratislava, the Slovak capital, where I lived before I came here.’
‘And the battle scenes?’ David asked.
‘Slovakia sent soldiers into Russia with the Germans when Hitler invaded. We were the only Slav country to join the invasion. Only a token force.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘My brother was with them on the Caucasus front. He was badly wounded. Later he died.’
‘I’m sorry,’ David said.
‘It was ironic, because in the thirties he was a Communist. He went to Russia for a while, full of hope, but came back disillusioned. Russia was the graveyard of his hopes and then it took his life, too.’
‘And then you came to England?’
‘A few years later, yes. And here I am,’ she added, a note of finality in her voice.
Beside the motorway they passed one of the agricultural settlements for the unemployed. The government’s propaganda preached that the countryside represented the British soul, that the people needed to be brought back in touch with it. David saw shabby prefabricated huts set in mud, plots all around marked off with chicken wire and sagging little fences, like a city allotment on a larger scale.
‘Recreating our glorious medieval past,’ Geoff said with angry sarcasm.
People were working there, bent double, planting spindly trees. A tired-looking woman in coat and headscarf carried a muddy toddler between the shacks.
‘It is the same all over Europe,’ Natalia said. ‘Countryside worship. The heart of the nationalist dream. Look at it.’
Geoff suggested they put the radio on, and for a little while they listened to Two-Way Family Favourites, records requested by soldiers’ families for their loved ones serving in India and Aden, Malaya and Africa. After a request from a mother for her boy in Kenya, Geoff asked Natalia to turn it off, the programme was depressing him.
The place where they stopped for lunch was an old coaching-house, but the interior had been modernized, all black-painted oak beams and whitewashed walls gleaming with horse-brasses, a shield and crossed swords nailed above the fireplace. There was a television set at one end of the bar, showing a display of morris dancing. During the week it would have been full of travelling salesmen but today there were only a few elderly people at the tables, a couple of retired military types propping up the bar. David went to get drinks and order lunch.