Imminence had returned to the world.
She watched him cycle away, whistling as he went. When she turned round she nearly bumped into a man who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and was hovering, waiting for her. He tipped his cap and muttered, ‘Evening, miss.’ He was a rough-looking fellow and Ursula took a step back. ‘Tell me the way to the station, miss?’ he said and she pointed down the lane and said, ‘It’s that way.’
‘Care to show me the way, miss?’ he said, moving closer to her again.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no thank you.’ Then his hand suddenly shot out and he grabbed her forearm. She managed to tug her arm away and set off running, not daring to look behind until she reached her doorstep.
‘All right, little bear?’ Hugh asked as she flung herself into the porch. ‘You look all puffed out,’ he said.
‘No, I’m fine, really,’ she said. Hugh would only worry if she told him about the man.
‘Veal cutlets à la Russe,’ Mrs Glover said as she put a large white china dish on the table. ‘I’m only telling you because last time I cooked it someone said they couldn’t begin to imagine what it was.’
‘The Coles are having a party,’ Ursula said to Sylvie. ‘Millie and I are invited.’
‘Lovely,’ Sylvie said, distracted by the contents of the white porcelain dish, much of which would later be fed to a less discerning (or, as Mrs Glover would have it, ‘less fussy’) West Highland terrier.
The party was a disappointment. It was a rather daunting affair with endless games of charades (Millie in her element, needless to say) and quizzes to which Ursula knew most of the answers but was left unheard, beaten by the ferociously competitive speed of the Cole boys and their friends. Ursula felt invisible and the only intimacy that she shared with Benjamin (he no longer seemed like Ben) was when he asked her if she would like some fruit cup and then forgot to come back with any. There was no dancing but piles of food and Ursula comforted herself picking and choosing from an impressive selection of desserts. Mrs Cole, patrolling the food, said to her, ‘Goodness, you’re such a little scrap of a thing, where do you put all that food?’
Such a little scrap of a thing, Ursula thought as she tramped dejectedly home, that no one even seemed to notice her.
‘Did you get cake?’ Teddy asked eagerly when she came in the door.
‘Masses,’ she said. They sat on the terrace and shared the large slice of birthday cake doled out on departure by Mrs Cole, Jock receiving his fair share. When a large dog fox trotted on to the twilit lawn Ursula tossed a piece in its direction but it regarded the cake with the disdain of a carnivore.
The Land of Begin Again
August 1933
‘ER KOMMT! ER KOMMT!’ ONE of the girls shouted.
‘He’s coming? Finally?’ Ursula said, glancing at Klara.
‘Apparently. Thank goodness. Before we die of hunger and boredom,’ she said.
They were both equally bemused and amused by the younger girls’ hero-worshipping antics. They had been waiting by the roadside for the best part of a hot afternoon, with nothing to eat or drink except for a pail of milk that two of the girls had fetched from a farm nearby. Some of the girls had heard a rumour that the Führer would be arriving today at his mountain retreat, and they had been waiting patiently for hours now. Several of the girls had taken a siesta on the grass verge, but none of them had any intention of giving up without a glimpse of the Führer.
There was some cheering further down the steep, crooked road that led up to Berchtesgaden and they all jumped to their feet. A big black car swept past them and some of the girls squealed with excitement but ‘he’ wasn’t in it. Then a second car, a magnificent open-topped black Mercedes, came into view, a swastika pennant fluttering on the bonnet. It drove slower than the previous car and did indeed contain the new Chancellor of the Reich.
The Führer gave an abbreviated version of his salute, a funny little flap of the hand backwards so that he looked as if he were cupping his ear to hear them better as they shouted out to him. At the sight of him, Hilde, standing next to Ursula, said simply, ‘Oh,’ investing the single syllable with religious ecstasy. And then, just as quickly, it was all over. Hanne crossed her hands over her chest, looking like a rather constipated saint. ‘My life is fulfilled,’ she laughed.
‘He looks better in his photographs,’ Klara murmured.
The girls were all in remarkably high spirits, had been all day, and under their Gruppenführerin’s orders (Adelheid, a blonde Amazon, an admirably competent eighteen-year-old) they now quickly formed themselves into a squad and started cheerfully on the long march back to the youth hostel, singing as they went. (‘They sing all the time,’ Ursula wrote to Millie. ‘It’s all a little too lustig for my liking. I feel like I’m in the chorus of a particularly jolly folk opera.’)
Their repertoire was varied – folk songs, quaint love songs and rousing, rather savage, patriotic anthems about flags dipped in blood, as well as the obligatory sing-songs around the campfire. They especially liked Schunkeln – linking arms and swaying to songs. When Ursula was pushed into rendering a song she gave them ‘Auld Lang Syne’, perfect for Schunkeln.
Hilde and Hanne were Klara’s younger sisters, keen members of the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel – the girls’ equivalent of the Hitler-Jugend (‘Ha Jot, we call them,’ Hilde said, and she and Hanne fell about giggling at the idea of handsome boys in uniform).
Ursula had heard of neither the Hitler-Jugend nor the BDM before arriving in the Brenner household but in the two weeks she had been living there she had heard little else from Hilde and Hanne. ‘It’s a healthy hobby,’ their mother, Frau Brenner, said. ‘It promotes peace and understanding between young people. No more wars. And it keeps them away from boys.’ Klara, like Ursula a recent graduate – she had been an art student at the Akademie – was indifferent to her sisters’ obsession but had offered to be a chaperone on their Bergwanderung, their summer camping trip, hiking from one Jugendherberge to the next in the Bavarian mountains. ‘You’ll come, won’t you?’ Klara said to Ursula. ‘I’m sure we’ll have fun and you’ll see some of the countryside. And if you don’t you’ll be stuck in town with Mutti and Vati.’
‘I think it’s like the Girl Guides,’ Ursula wrote to Pamela.
‘Not quite,’ Pamela wrote back.
Ursula was not intending to spend long in Munich. Germany was no more than a detour in her life, part of her adventurous year in Europe. ‘It will be my own grand tour,’ she said to Millie, ‘although I’m afraid it’s a little second-rate, a “not quite so grand tour”.’ The plan was to take in Bologna rather than Rome or Florence, Munich not Berlin and Nancy instead of Paris (Nancy Shawcross much amused by this choice) – all cities where her tutors from university knew of good homes in which she could lodge. To keep herself she was to do a little teaching, although Hugh had arranged for a modest but regular money order to be sent to her. Hugh was relieved that she would be spending her time ‘in the provinces’, where ‘people are, on the whole, better behaved’. (‘He means duller,’ Ursula said to Millie.) Hugh had completely vetoed Paris, he had a particular aversion to the city, and was hardly more keen on Nancy which was still uncompromisingly French. (‘Because it’s in France,’ Ursula pointed out.) He had seen enough of the continent during the Great War, he said, he couldn’t see what all the hullabaloo was about.