No, thank you, Ursula didn’t want to stay home with Vati and Mutti Brenner in hot, dusty Munich so Klara rummaged through her wardrobe and found a navy skirt and white blouse that suited requirements and the group leader, Adelheid, provided a spare khaki battledress jacket. A three-cornered scarf drawn through a braided leather Turk’s-head knot completed the outfit. Ursula thought she looked rather dashing. She found herself regretting never having been a Girl Guide, although she supposed it was about more than just the uniform.
The upper age limit for the BDM was eighteen so neither Ursula nor Klara was qualified to join, they were ‘old ladies’, alte Damen, according to Hanne. Ursula didn’t think that the troop really needed to be escorted by them as Adelheid was as efficient as a sheepdog with her girls. With her statuesque figure and Nordic blonde plaits she could have passed for a youthful Freyja visiting from Fólkvangr. She was perfect propaganda. At eighteen she would soon be too old for the BDM, what would she do then?
‘Why, I will join the National Socialist Women’s League, of course,’ she said. She already wore a small silver swastika pinned to her shapely bosom, the runic symbol of belonging.
They took a train, their rucksacks stowed on the luggage racks, and by evening they had arrived in a small Alpine village, near to the Austrian border. From the station they marched in formation (singing, naturally) to their Jugendherberge. People stopped to watch them and some clapped appreciatively.
The dormitory they were allotted was full of two-tier bunks, most of which were already occupied by other girls and they had to squeeze themselves in, sardine fashion. Klara and Ursula elected to share a mattress on the floor.
They were given supper in the dining room, seated at long trestle tables, served with what turned out to be the standard fare of soup and Knäckebrot with cheese. In the morning they breakfasted on dark bread, cheese and jam and tea or coffee. The clean mountain air made them ravenous and they wolfed down everything in sight.
The village and its surroundings were idyllic, there was even a small castle that they were allowed to visit. It was cold and dank, full of suits of armour and flags and heraldic shields. It seemed like a very uncomfortable place to live.
They took long walks around the lake or in the forest and then they hitched lifts back to the youth hostel on farm lorries and hay-carts. One day they hiked all the way along the river to a magnificent waterfall. Klara had brought her sketch-pad with her and her quick, lively little charcoal drawings were much more appealing than her paintings. ‘Ach,’ she said, ‘they’re gemütlich. Cosy little sketches. My friends would laugh.’ The village itself was a sleepy little place where the houses had windows full of geraniums. There was an inn on the river where they drank beer and ate veal and noodles until they thought they would burst. Ursula never mentioned the beer to Sylvie in her letters, she wouldn’t have understood how commonplace it was here. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have approved.
They were to move on the next day, they would be living ‘under canvas’ for a few days, a big encampment of girls, and Ursula felt sorry to be leaving the village.
A fair was taking place on their last night there, a combination of an agricultural show and a harvest festival, a lot of it incomprehensible to Ursula. (‘To me too,’ Klara said. ‘I’m a city girl, remember.’) The women all wore local costume and variously garlanded farm animals were paraded around a field and then awarded prizes. Flags, again with swastikas, decorated the field. There was plenty of beer and a brass band played. A big wooden platform had been set up in the middle of the field and, accompanied by an accordion, some boys in Lederhosen gave a demonstration of Schuhplattler, clapping and stamping and slapping their thighs and heels in time to the music.
Klara scoffed at them but Ursula considered it rather clever. Ursula thought that she would quite like to live in an Alpine village (‘Like Heidi,’ she wrote to Pamela. She wrote less to Pamela as her sister was so aggravated by the new Germany. Pamela, even at a distance, was the voice of her conscience, but then it was very easy to have a conscience from a distance).
The accordionist took his place in a band and people began to dance. Ursula was led on to the platform by a succession of terrifically shy farm boys who had an odd clodhopping way of moving around the dance floor which she recognized as the rather awkward 3/4 time of the Schuhplattler. Between the beer and the dancing she began to feel quite light-headed so that she was confused when Klara appeared, dragging by the hand a very handsome man who was clearly not local, saying, ‘Look who I found!’
‘Who?’ Ursula asked.
‘None other than our cousin’s half-cousin’s cousin once removed,’ Klara said gaily. ‘Or something to that effect. May I present Jürgen Fuchs.’
‘Just a half-cousin,’ he said, smiling.
‘Delighted to meet you I’m sure,’ she said. He clicked his heels and kissed her hand, she was reminded of Prince Charming in Cinderella. ‘It’s the Prussian in me,’ he said and laughed, as did the Brenners. ‘We have no Prussian blood at all,’ Klara said.
He had a lovely smile, amused and thoughtful at the same time, and extraordinarily blue eyes. He was undoubtedly handsome, rather like Benjamin Cole, except Benjamin was his dark polar opposite, the negative to Jürgen Fuchs’s positive.
A Todd and a Fuchs – a pair of foxes. Had fate intervened in her life? Dr Kellet might have appreciated the coincidence.
‘He is so handsome,’ she wrote to Millie after that encounter. All those awful words used in trashy romances come to mind – heart-stopping, breathtaking. She had read enough of Bridget’s novels on idle wet afternoons to know.
‘Love at first sight,’ she wrote giddily to Millie. But of course such feelings weren’t ‘true’ love (that was what she would feel for a child one day), merely the false grandeur of madness. ‘Folie à deux,’ Millie wrote back. ‘How delicious.’
‘Good for you,’ Pamela wrote.
‘Marriage is based on a more enduring kind of love,’ Sylvie cautioned.
‘I am thinking of you, little bear,’ Hugh wrote, ‘so far away from here.’
When darkness fell there was a torchlit procession through the village and then fireworks from the battlements of the small castle. It was rather thrilling.
‘Wunderschön, nicht wahr?’ Adelheid said, her face radiant in the light of the torches.
Yes, Ursula agreed, it’s lovely.
August 1939
DER ZAUBERBERG. THE magic mountain.
‘Aaw. Sie ist so niedlich.’ Click, click, click. Eva loved her Rolleiflex. Eva loved Frieda. She is so cute, she said. They were on the enormous terrace of the Berghof, bright with Alpine sun, waiting for lunch to be brought out. It was much nicer to eat out here, al fresco, rather than in the big, gloomy dining room, its massive window full of nothing but mountains. Dictators loved everything to be on a grand scale, even their scenery. Bitte lächeln! Big smile. Frieda obliged. She was an obliging child.
Eva had persuaded Frieda out of her serviceable English hand-smocked dress (Bourne and Hollingsworth, purchased by Sylvie and sent for Frieda’s birthday) and had arrayed her instead in Bavarian costume – dirndl, apron, knee-length white socks. To Ursula’s English eyes (more English every day, she felt) the outfit still looked as though it belonged in a dressing-up box, or perhaps a school play. Once, at her own school (how long ago and far away that seemed now), they had put on a performance of The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Ursula had played a village girl, clad in much the same get-up that Frieda was now attired in.