Mr Churchill put down the drink, took up his pen and returned to the papers. I waited for a few seconds but once again it was clear that he had finished with me. I opened the door behind me and returned to the outer office. One of the secretaries was waiting and she handed me a folder containing several pieces of paper and card. She explained what they were, where I should sign them and when I would be expected to show them.
A few minutes later, reunited with Group Captain Dodman and Mr Strathy, I went back to the car waiting on the gravel drive outside the house. The WAAF driver was asleep, hunched forward uncomfortably over the steering wheel.
15
Joe was tense and silent as he drove away from Berlin. He checked the rear-view mirror constantly and reacted nervously if any other vehicle overtook us. Of course I asked him what the matter was. As before, he would say nothing.
We left the huge sprawl of the city behind us and were driving along the autobahn through the dark countryside when I heard a muffled knocking from the back of the van. It sounded like a mechanical problem to me, but Joe shrugged it off.
‘Hold on, will you?’ he said to me harshly.
A few minutes later we approached a turn-off, signposted to a place called Kremmen, and after further checking in the mirror Joe slowed the van. There was no traffic around. We left the autobahn and joined a narrow road, leading across hilly country and through tall trees. Joe drove for another two or three minutes before he spotted a narrow lane that led off to the side. He pulled into it, switched off the engine and doused all lights.
I said into the sudden silence, ‘Joe, what’s going on?’
‘I sometimes think you must be blind, when so much occurs around you that you don’t see. Come and give me a hand.’
Outside the van we were in almost total darkness. Whatever light there might have been from what remained of the dusk was blotted out by the canopy of trees. There were no sounds of traffic, no lights from houses, no sign of anything happening anywhere. A warm, piny smell embraced us. Over our heads we could hear the branches brushing lightly against each other as the breeze soughed through the forest. Our feet crunched on dried needles. Joe opened the rear double doors of the van. He reached in, felt around for a moment, then located what he was looking for. It was our torch, which he switched on and passed to me.
‘Hold it steady,’ he said.
He clambered up into the van compartment, bending double, and pushed our bags of kit away from the side where they were piled up. There seemed to be several more cases and boxes than I remembered bringing with us when we left home.
‘Over here!’ he said, waving his hand with an annoyed gesture. ‘Don’t point the light at me.’
A mattress had been placed on the floor of the van, concealed until now by the bags and cases Joe had stacked alongside it. The mattress itself was covered by a wooden board of some kind, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle against the wall of the van to make a cramped, triangular space beneath. Joe was kneeling on the edge of the mattress, pulling the board away. As soon as he did so I realized that there was someone lying underneath it. The figure exclaimed loudly in German and made an irate movement, pushing at the board from below and sitting upright as soon as there was enough space to do so.
It was a young woman, but because of the angle of the torch beam I did not recognize her at first. Joe took her hands and helped her out, and as soon as I was able to see her properly I realized it was Birgit, the daughter of the family we had been staying with in Berlin.
Joe tried to embrace her but she pushed him away angrily.
"[Why have you taken so long?]’ she cried. ‘[I’ve been trapped for hours! I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, I’m dying of thirst!]’
‘[I stopped as soon as I thought it would be safe,]’Joe said. ‘[I was held up in Berlin, waiting for him.]’
He jabbed his thumb in my direction. At least some of Joe’s earlier impatience was explained, but many other questions remained glaringly unanswered. For a few minutes there was a noisy scene between the three of us, there under the darkness of the trees, with Birgit angry and Joe defensive, while I was thoroughly confused and unable to get replies to the string of questions I felt had to be asked.
Birgit’s unexpected appearance caused an explosion of feelings in me that I could never explain to Joe. I had never discussed her with him, so I assumed, partly because it suited me to assume, that he had no interest in her. However, thoughts of her had haunted my every moment since we had arrived in Berlin. She was the most beautiful young woman I had ever seen or met. Her lively, amusing personality had smitten me, provoking wild fantasies which I reluctantly suppressed. When she picked up the violin and became absorbed in her music I simply doted on her. I managed a few short conversations with her, but most of our contact had been during the family meals. I had not been able to take my eyes off her. She ravished me with her looks, her laugh, her sensitive intelligence. When I was away from that apartment in Goethestrasse I could hardly dare think of her, so turbulent were my feelings about her, yet I could barely think of anything or anyone else.
Things eventually quietened down. My eyes began to adjust to the gloom so that it was no longer so profoundly dark around us. I could see that Joe and Birgit were standing side by side, leaning back against the van.
I said, ‘Would you mind telling me what’s been going on, Joe?’
‘[Speak in German so Birgit can follow what we’re saying.]’
‘She speaks English well enough,’ I said, sulkily.
‘[We’re still in her country. Let’s make it as easy for her as possible.]’
‘[All right, Joe. What’s happening?]’
‘[Birgit is going to travel back to England with us. She has to leave Germany as soon as possible.]’
‘[Why?]’
Joe said to Birgit, ‘[It is exactly as I was telling you. People like JL haven’t the faintest idea what Hitler has been doing to the Jews in this country.]’
‘[You needn’t patronize me,]’ I said, stung by his words, but more so by the way he tried to belittle me in front of Birgit. ‘[I can read the newspapers.]’
‘[Yes, but you don’t act on what you read.]’
‘[How can you say that?]’ I retorted. ‘[If you felt as strongly as that, you wouldn’t have come to Germany for the Games.]’
‘[I couldn’t tell you before,]’Joe said quietly. ‘[I was going to try to convince you we should stay away. After all the training we’ve done I wasn’t sure how I could tell you, or what I could say to persuade you, but that’s how I was feeling. Then Mum told me about Birgit, how desperate the situation had become in Berlin for Jews, and that she was desperate to help. You know she and Hanna Sattmann were brought up together. The truth is that the main reason I came to Germany was not to race, but to try to bring Birgit out with us.]’
‘[JL, he’s right about the situation,]’ said Birgit, her head turning from one of us to the other. ‘[You can’t know what it’s been like for us. But neither can you, Joe. No more than any of the visitors who have come from abroad for the Games. The Nazis have been pulling down their banners, cleaning slogans off the walls, allowing Jewish shops and restaurants to open up again, to make foreigners think that what they’ve been told about the persecution of Jews is untrue. As soon as the Games are over, they’ll start up on us again.]’