Glynnis dropped by to see me.
Clive came by to see me and then to see Niny, until soon he ceased looking for me as much and really only sought out my cousin, and during this period my thoughts of joining the Royal Air Force would be waylaid.
Glynnis needed my help. Her mother had taken ill. Glynnis had been raised in Knightsbridge. Her mother still maintained a home there, but in the early days of the Blitz she had traveled out of London to a town to the north and west of Stanhope, the Goldring family’s ancestral home. The Goldrings had lived in Kent since the late fourteenth century. They could trace their lineage to a vassal whose work on that land could still be seen in certain stone fences that wended deep into the deciduous forests native to that land. There was a famous story of a church deep in a wood where an imp had been carved into the cornerstone, an attempt to replicate something similar found in Lincolnshire. Glynnis felt pride that her forebears had been responsible for it. But none of that was the reason for Mrs. Goldring’s having absconded to Kent at the start of the air war, as I was soon to discover. Her mother was living in a cave she’d told me. I didn’t know even what to expect when we saw her.
We both secured weekend leave, and on a Saturday mid-March we found ourselves aboard a train east, staring off into the verdant hillsides of the area east of London. It bore the occasional mark of Luftwaffe attack. Every dozen miles we might see space in the far horizon where earth had been upturned, a brown gash in the grass. Sometimes there was water lying in the fields. Glynnis pointed out where a flock of brown geese had stopped to wet their feathers.
We stood by a window smoking. My arms and chest felt filled by some kind of acid in the first moments of this solitude — the anxiety that had underlain my thoughts all those days of falling Luftwaffe bombs now seeking exit. That reprieve was granted only in my looking at Glynnis’s face as standing water and swaying rushes passed outside our window. Tendrils of cigarette smoke surrounded her lovely plump face.
Not thirty miles later we detrained. The air was fecund and still and the distinct lack of carbonite in my nose felt a presence for its absence. Glynnis and I walked for what felt like an hour until the straw-thatched houses gave way to deciduous forest, maple leaves like palm fronds overhead. Soon the road took on steep declivities.
There was nothing before us but granite boulders lifting up from the ground like bunkers, covered in flat, wide leaves. I followed Glynnis into the woods. With each step it felt I was somehow moving further back into time. This was evident at the very least from the clouds of black midges, which grew in density as the vegetation thickened until they seemed to envelop our heads. We had no such dense forest anywhere near Leitmeritz. Alongside the Elbe trees might offer protection, but I was used to the swish of tall grasses. I don’t believe I’d taken in so many smells in years, if I’d ever smelled so much before — deep rich loam kicked up beneath our feet, the tickle of spores from toadstools lifting up sharp like mustard. I’d been looking at my feet so long — the breaking of toadstools, the overturning of thick leaves, all of this so different from that rigid cobblestone order of my youth and memory — I didn’t realize Glynnis had stopped.
“We’re here,” she said. We went in through the mouth of the cave. It was far smaller than what I’d imagined. Having never seen people living in a cave before, I don’t know that I’d imagined much of anything. Glynnis stooped down and I stooped behind her. We squeezed through a dank passageway, alongside which walls jabbed at my hips, until I heard a sound ahead. At first I thought it was the babbling of a brook, but as we walked farther in, I saw light flitting in the distance. By then we were standing, and the babbling of the creek was the sound of voices, voices growing louder until I could see the back of Glynnis’s brown hair and ovoid shapes materialized alongside voices and then we were in a room with a cave ceiling twenty feet above our heads. Ahead of me were hundreds of people, all sitting on stools of stalactites and blankets dark and shadowy amid light produced by candles and an occasional kerosene lamp.
“It will take us some time before we’re able to find my mother,” Glynnis said. “I’ll ask around.”
She went forward to find a familiar face. I wandered. When they were children, Glynnis told me some time later, she and her brother had come to see their grandmother, and they came to spelunk in these caves. What we’d seen at the Leicester Square station only weeks before was nothing compared with this small village belowground. In a far recess of this enormous cavern, in the soft darkness of the cave’s shadow, men stood before large cauldrons, cooking for the masses. It was almost impossible to see where door openings led off into the farther recesses of the cave. For a moment panic gripped me as I couldn’t see where I was going and I felt I heard someone calling my name, and then a hand was on my arm.
“It’s confusing in here until you’ve learned your way,” Glynnis said. “Stick with me.”
“You’ve found your mother?”
“She doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
We walked from the few light sources until I could feel cool moisture lifting off cave walls. We were squeezing again through a passageway just wide enough to let others past. Bodies pressed against me without a word of apology. Someone was breathing heavily behind me and soon he was pressed up against me. I thought to turn and say something when light came before us again and we were in a smaller cavern, this one with ethereal white planes covering the ground ahead.
“This is where Mother sleeps,” Glynnis said. She took me by the hand. We crouched alongside a mattress nested on the cave floor. Mrs. Goldring was lying prone. When Glynnis announced our presence, her mother did her best to prop up on one hand.
“Mother, this is—” Glynnis said. But she stopped there as I’d already begun speaking.
“My name is Poxl Weisberg, Mrs. Goldring,” I said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The English and the accent I’d acquired in the previous months were a source of pride for me.
“Wherever are you from?” Glynnis’s mother asked.
It was impossible to tell if she was looking at me, as a bright kerosene lamp cast light behind her, obscuring her face in deep shadow. I told her I lived near Bermondsey now, in Corbett’s Passage, where I worked as a squaddie.
“Not what I meant,” she said.
“Well, Mother, I told you that Poxl is Czech, come to help with the war effort,” Glynnis said. She had, she had, Mrs. Goldring said. She was sorry; she’d forgotten.
Glynnis’s mother was suffering from the very earliest stages of dementia. At first the frankness of her ramblings caused me great discomfort. While Glynnis worked to set up her linens and to see what needed to go back with us to London for cleaning, I did my best to engage her mother. At times she rambled about poisonous snakes she believed were populating the latrine cave, or old Mr. Lovelace whom she knew from childhood and whom she feared might take liberties with her in her sleep. But soon a kind of honesty arose amid her bellyaching.
“It’s about impossible to sleep in this cave,” Mrs. Goldring said. Before I could ask her why, she continued. “Isn’t a single flat spot anywhere in this whole room. I’ve put my bed down everywhere I could and one space is bad as the next.”