The bomber stream passed over us for twenty minutes, rocking us with the deep, pulsating sound of their engines, a terrifying armada in the moonlight, until finally the tail-end bombers flew on and out of our sight. Silence slowly returned.
I stood in the dark, feeling as if I was straining to catch the last particles of the engine noise, the last tiny pressure of the droning sound the planes had made.
One by one the other men returned to the warmth of the huts, but I stayed put. Soon I was alone, standing in the open space at the end of the ranks of huts, my head tilted back, searching the sky. I was shaking with cold.
How many more cities did Germany have, that the Allies might visit to destroy? What was left? Who could still be alive in those flattened ruins, those acres of turned-over wreckage and rubble, cold and broken, overwhelmed?
Once again, thinking of the war’s futility, I remembered the prisoner everyone thought was Rudolf Hess. I had not at that time forgotten the man I met at Churchill’s behest, half out of his mind, a captive in a foreign country, clinging to the past, offering a kind of future that no one wanted, that no one was prepared to discuss with him. I had not solved the mystery he presented - perhaps no one ever would.
I was to glimpse him again in the months ahead, though only in the newsreels. Towards the end of 1945, by which time I was back in England, the Nuremberg war crimes trials began and the man who looked like Hess appeared in the dock with the other surviving Nazi leaders. He sat in the front row between Goering and Ribbentrop, wearing an inane, friendly expression - there is film of Goering openly mocking Hess, who sat through most of the trial without the translation headphones, quietly reading books. Whereas most of the Nazis received the death penalty, Hess was given a life sentence, his crimes mitigated by his attempt in 1941 to forge a peace. He vanished from public gaze after the end of the trial, going behind the walls of Spandau. Once there, he was not seen again. He was never again in his lifetime called by his own name: from the moment the sentence was handed down he was addressed invariably as Prisoner 7. When his death was reported in 1987 I was shocked to discover he had remained alive until then, but shocked as well that I had all but forgotten him until the news broke.
By January 1945, it was irrelevant whether or not he was an impostor, or even whether he had tried to bring a genuine peace proposal to Churchill. Peace was not made in 1941 and the war went on, becoming immensely more dangerous and complex than it was when Hess flew to Britain. In that long winter of 1945 the war was at last heading towards its bitter end, and for people like me all that really mattered was how soon I would be able to return home.
Dreams of escape, which had once charged the thoughts of the prisoners of war, became dreams of repatriation. After the Americans finally arrived to free us from the camp we were soon being transported by trucks to the north of Germany, where the British army held the ground. From there we were flown back in small groups, crammed uncomfortably into the fuselages of the same bombers in which many of us had flown.
Home turned out to be a state of mind rather than a reality in which I could live. Everything I knew had gone or was going. As soon as I reached my parents’ house I learned the truth about Dad that my mother’s intermittent letters had deliberately skirted: he was in the advanced stages of prostate cancer and he died at the end of July, shortly before the atomic bombs were used against Japan. My mother’s own death from angina followed soon afterwards. Joe of course was dead; Birgit had remarried.
I tried to obtain a job in civil aviation, thinking that I should put my flying skills to use, but there were many ex-RAF pilots around with the same idea, and flying jobs were few. A small number of dead-end jobs followed but I was only twenty-eight. I still felt youthful, still able to look forward to a future. I took a decision that many men of my age and background were taking at the time and in March 1946 I bought an assisted-passage ticket to Australia. I had to wait four weeks before the ship left.
With one more week to go before I sailed, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove across to the Cheshire side of the Pennines. I entered the village, drove down the lane and passed the house where Birgit and Joe had lived, where she had still been living on the day she wrote me her final letter. I halted the car a short way down the lane, turned it around so that I could look back at the house and switched off the engine. It was a fine day, with thin clouds and intermittent periods of sunshine. From the quick glances I took as I drove past, and from this more distant but steady look, the house had not changed much. The roof still needed retiling and the flashing I had amateurishly fixed in place against the chimney stack was the same.
The sight of the house evoked in me a strange mixture of feelings: it had become the love nest where Birgit and I spent those still memorable weekends, but it was also Joe’s house, a place I should have been forbidden to enter. I sat there in the car for an hour, wondering all that time whether I should stay or leave. If Birgit was there, then one thing; if she was not, then another. Both seemed likely to hurt. To be honest, I really had no idea why I was there at all. I had finally decided to drive away when I saw a movement by the front of the house.
Birgit appeared at the front door, reaching back inside to hold the door open, looking downwards. She was smiling. Her hair was short and she had put on weight. I stared at her, my feelings suddenly awoken by the sight of her. She was facing towards my car but apparently had not noticed me. A small child ran past her and out into the garden and promptly sat down, out of my sight. Without even glancing towards me, Birgit went back inside the house, leaving the door ajar. She had been in sight for only a few seconds.
I left the car and walked down the lane. As I approached the house I saw that a chicken-wire fence had been put up to create a play area. Someone had dug a shallow pit in one corner of the sloping lawn and filled it with white sand. The child, a small girl dressed in brown dungarees, was sprawling in the middle of the sandpit, making tiny shaped piles with her hands. Her hair fell forward across her face, as Birgit’s had often done when she concentrated on her violin. As I reached the fence and stared down at the little girl, she glanced up once, looked straight at me, then immediately lost interest and continued with her game.
I was thunderstruck by the child’s appearance. She had the look of my family: I could see my father’s face in hers, his eyes, his mouth. Her colouring, her hair were the same as mine. The same as Joe’s. She had the Sawyer look, whatever that was, but it was instantly recognizable to me on some instinctive level. I tried to guess the girl’s age - I was inexperienced with children but thought she might be about five. That would mean she was born in 1941, which itself would mean that she must have been conceived in the latter part of 1940.
I was still standing there, mentally reeling, my gaze locked on the playing child, when the door of the house burst open.
‘Angela!’