An enormous explosion had shaken the structure, a bomb dropped close to the zoo. She felt the pressure wave sucking and pushing her body and was terrified that Frieda’s lungs might burst. It passed. Several people vomited, although unfortunately there was nowhere to vomit except on one’s feet, or perhaps worse, on other people’s feet. Ursula vowed never to go into a flak tower again. She would rather, she thought, die out in the street, quickly, with Frieda. That’s what she thought about a lot of the time now. A swift, clean death, Frieda wrapped in her arms.
Perhaps it was Teddy up there, dropping bombs on them. She hoped it was, it would mean he was alive. There had been a knock on the door one day – when they still had a door, before the British started their relentless bombing in November ’43. When Ursula opened the door she found a thin youth standing there, fifteen or sixteen years old maybe. He had a desperate air and Ursula wondered if he was looking for somewhere to hide but he pushed an envelope into her hand and ran off before she could even say a word to him.
The envelope was creased and filthy. Her name and address were written on it and she burst into tears at the sight of Pamela’s handwriting. Thin papery blue sheets, dated several weeks ago, detailing all the comings and goings of her family – Jimmy in the army, Sylvie fighting the good fight on the home front (‘a new weapon – chickens!’). Pamela was well and living at Fox Corner, she said, four boys now. Teddy in the RAF, a squadron leader with a DFC. A lovely long letter and at the end a page that was almost like a postscript, ‘I have saved the sad news to last.’ Hugh was dead. ‘In the autumn of 1940, peacefully, a heart attack.’ Ursula wished she hadn’t received the letter, wished she could think of Hugh still alive, of Teddy and Jimmy in non-combatant roles, living out the war in a coal mine or civil defence.
‘I think of you constantly,’ Pamela said. No recriminations, no ‘I told you so’, no ‘Why didn’t you come home when you could have done?’ She had tried, too late, of course. The day after Germany declared war on Poland she had gone through town, dutifully doing the things that she thought you were supposed to do when war was imminent. She stocked up on batteries and torches and candles, she bought canned goods and blackout material, she shopped for clothes for Frieda in Wertheim’s department store – one and two sizes bigger in case the war went on for a long time. She bought nothing for herself, passing by all those warm coats and boots, stockings and decent frocks, something she bitterly regretted now.
She heard Chamberlain on the BBC, those fateful words We are now at war with Germany, and for several hours felt strangely numb. She tried to phone Pamela but the lines were all engaged. Then towards evening (Jürgen had been at the ministry all day) she suddenly came back to life, Snow White awake. She must leave, she must go back to England, passport or no. She packed a hasty suitcase and harried Frieda on to a tram to the station. If she could just get on a train somehow everything would be all right. No trains, an official at the station told her. The borders were closed. ‘We’re at war, didn’t you know?’ he said.
She ran to the British Embassy in Wilhelmstrasse, dragging poor Frieda by the hand. They were German citizens but she would throw herself on the mercy of the embassy staff, surely they would be able to do something, she was still an Englishwoman after all. It was growing dark by then and the gates were padlocked and there were no lights on in the building. ‘They’ve gone,’ a passer-by told her, ‘you’ve missed them.’
‘Gone?’
‘Back to Britain.’
She had to clap a hand over her mouth to stop the wail that rose up from deep inside her. How could she have been so stupid? Why hadn’t she seen what was coming? A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past. Something else that Elizabeth I had said.
She wept on and off for two days after receiving Pamela’s letter. Jürgen was sympathetic, came home with some real coffee for her and she didn’t ask where he had got it. A good cup of coffee (miraculous as that was) was hardly going to assuage her grief for her father, for Frieda, for herself. For everybody. Jürgen died in an American raid in ’44. Ursula was ashamed at how relieved she felt when she was given the news, especially as Frieda was so upset. She loved her father and he loved her, which was a nugget of grace to be salvaged from the whole sorry business of their marriage.
Frieda was ill now. She had the same gaunt features and sickly pallor of most people you saw on the streets these days but her lungs were full of phlegm and she had terrible bouts of coughing that seemed as though they would never end. When Ursula listened to her chest it was like listening to a galleon at sea, heaving and creaking through the waves. If only she could sit her down by a big warm fire, give her hot cocoa to drink, a beef stew, dumplings, carrots. Were they still eating well on the Berg, she wondered? Was anyone still on the Berg?
Above their heads, the apartment block was still standing although most of the front wall had been taken away by a bomb. They still went up there to forage for anything useful. It had been saved from looting by the almost insurmountable difficulty of getting up the staircase which was filled with rubble. She and Frieda tied pieces of cushion to their knees with rags and wore thick leather gloves that had belonged to Jürgen and in this way clambered over the stones and bricks like inept monkeys.
The one thing there was nothing of in the apartment was the only thing they were interested in – food. Yesterday they had queued for three hours for a loaf of bread. When they ate it, it seemed to contain no actual flour, although it was hard to say what it did contain – cement dust and plaster? That was what it tasted of anyway. Ursula remembered Rogerson’s the baker’s in the village at home, how the smell of the baking bread would waft through the street and how the bakery’s window was full of lovely soft white loaves burnished with a sticky bronze glaze. Or the kitchen at Fox Corner on Mrs Glover’s baking days – the big brown ‘health’ loaves that Sylvie insisted on, but also the sponges and tarts and buns. She imagined eating a slice of the warm brown bread, thickly buttered, with the jam made from the raspberries and redcurrants at Fox Corner. (She tormented herself with memories of food the whole time.) There was to be no more milk, someone told her in the bread queue.
This morning, Fräulein Farber and her sister Frau Meyer who had lived together in the attic but who now rarely left the cellar gave her two potatoes and a piece of cooked sausage for Frieda, Aus Anstand, they said, out of decency. Herr Richter, also a cellar resident, told Ursula that the sisters had decided to stop eating. (An easy thing to do when there was no food, Ursula thought.) They have had enough, he said. They cannot face what will happen when the Russians get here.
They had heard a rumour that in the east people were reduced to eating grass. Lucky them, Ursula thought, there was no grass in Berlin, just the black skeletal remains of a proud and beautiful city. Was London like this too? It seemed unlikely, yet possible. Speer had his noble ruins, a thousand years early.