Birgit was there, in a desperate mood. She dashed across the lawn, snatched the little girl up, shielding her head and face with her hand, and moved quickly back into the house. She did not look at me once.
As the door slammed behind her, I heard the child starting to wail in protest at the rough way in which she was being handled. The door did not catch properly but swung back open. I could see a short distance into the narrow hall that lay beyond. I heard Birgit’s voice again, shouting: ‘Harry! Harry! There’s someone out there!’
So I had a name for the child. I held the knowledge to me like a coveted prize. Angela, her name was Angela. My daughter -I felt a thrill of intoxicating excitement - my daughter was called Angela!
A moment later the door opened fully again. A man stepped through with a rough movement of his shoulders. I had never seen him before in my life: he looked to me as if he was about forty or fifty, with a weather-beaten, unshaven face. In the house behind him I could still hear the child crying. The man stood there on the threshold of his house, staring steadily at me, his silence and the resentful set of his head radiating a stubborn aggression.
I backed away, returned to the car and drove away down the hill.
The following week my ship sailed from Southampton and I set off on my fresh start in Australia. During the six-week voyage, itself an adventure like nothing I had known before, I made a conscious decision that if I was going to make a go of my life in Australia I must leave the old emotional baggage behind. Of course, such a decision is easier to plan than to carry-through, but I sensed that many of the people who were on the boat with me, emigrating for similar reasons to mine, were undergoing something of the same feeling themselves. We talked about our hopes and plans, about the challenge of starting again in a new and young country. We were silent about our past lives.
As we sailed across the calm swell of the Indian Ocean, I felt all that starting to slip away.
I arrived in Australia. In that beautiful and exhilarating country I lived my new life, working hard and long. First I was a part-time pilot for a crop-dusting concern. There was a great deal of work available because Australia had vast fields. Soon I graduated from part-time hired pilot to full-time salaried pilot; later I became a manager in the company; within fifteen years I owned the whole firm. After that I moved into other aviation businesses, usually involving the chance for me to keep flying, something that burned up energy if not always my own.
I returned to Britain in 1982, when I reached sixty-five. By then I had earned and saved plenty of money and I bought the flat where I have lived until recently. I settled down to retirement, not really thinking what it would mean until I had time to sit still long enough. Sitting still long enough turned out to be what I was least good at.
I went through a period of physical restlessness, endlessly travelling, constantly trying to meet people and make new friends, opening up possible non-vocational interests and projects. I made tentative contact with some of my colleagues from the RAF and prison camp days, even visiting one or two of them. I realize that this can be predictable behaviour in some recently retired people, those whose lives have been full of activity. In my case it achieved little and anyway it was brought to a sudden end by a minor heart attack. Whether one thing led to the other is not for me to say but the result was that since then I have been taking things much easier.
In the time of reflection that necessarily came while I recuperated, I started thinking back over my life. Reflection was something that seemed timely, now that I was in my seventies, living with a heart that had given me an unwelcome reminder of my own mortality. It was time to think matters through.
Writing this down, looking back on my life, it seems plain to me that I am one of that generation whose lives were permanently marked, perhaps blighted, by involvement in the Second World War. To be young and to live through a war is an experience like no other. It was enough experience for a lifetime, but if you survived, as I survived, there was more life to come but it was not the same thing at all.
For me the war, and therefore my early life, ended in January 1945, as I stood there in that freezing prison compound, somewhere in Germany, waiting alone.
It was the last time in the war that I saw a bomber stream flying overhead, as Bomber Command went about its deadly business. I did not know which city the planes were visiting that particular night, but I do know that it was not to be the last of their visits. Great and terrible bombing raids still lay ahead, of which I was to know nothing until long after the war ended: the devastating raids on Dresden, Pforzheim, Dessau, many other towns and cities, now almost without defences as German resistance collapsed, lay in the weeks ahead.
I sensed some of this as I shivered in that bitter night - I wanted to see the planes for the last time. The other prisoners had returned to their huts, the guards had moved away. There was no reason why the aircraft would fly back by the same route they used on the way in. Usually, in fact, to avoid the risk of night fighters the planes would scatter and take different routes. But at this stage of the war, every crew probably chose the shortest, most direct route. The long silence continued.
Then, as I was about to give up, I heard at last what I was waiting for: the sound of distant engines. I scanned the sky and before long I was able to pick out the first of the bombers returning. More followed, then more. Soon the same hundreds were flying overhead. They were no longer in a stream but were flying at different heights, most straggling alone, sometimes in pairs or small groups. It took more than an hour for them to go by. They were heading towards the west, back to their bases, home to England. Somewhere behind them, a German city whose name I did not know was lying overwhelmed in the night, glowing and smoking.
Part Three: 1999
1
Five months after he met Angela Chipperton at his signing in Buxton, Stuart Gratton finished work on his latest non-fiction book, Empty Cities of the East. It was another oral history, this one dealing with the experiences of the men and women who had been sent to Ukraine between 1942 and 1948 to build and populate the new German cities, as part of the Nazi Lebensraum policy. He sent the manuscript and a floppy disk to his literary agent, caught up with the usual backlog of messages and mail, then took a short holiday. He went first to visit his son Edmund (twenty-seven, working for a telecom provider in Worcester, married, pregnant wife called Hayley, child expected in October) then after a few nights drove across to Yorkshire to see his other son Calvin (twenty-two, completing his doctorate at Hull University, single, living with a young woman called Eileen). Ten days later he was back home. The agent acknowledged his new book but said she hadn’t yet had a chance to read it all. The editor at his publishers was meanwhile said to be reading the book: on an impulse Gratton had e-mailed it to him before he went away.
So far he was following his normal post-book pattern. What he usually did next was to start work immediately on a new project, a kind of psychological bulwark against the possibility of some kind of problem with the one just delivered.
As he drove back across the Pennines from Hull, he was trying to decide which book to start. He had two projects in mind, but both were problematical, if for different reasons.
One would involve a major investment of time and research: he planned to write a social history of the USA since 1960/61, when Richard M. Nixon was elected to the US presidency after Adlai Stevenson’s term of office. The Nixon administration, voted in on a bring-our-boys-home ticket, in fact more than doubled the size of the American military commitment to Siberia during its term of office. Nixon’s over-ambitious, ill-judged and corruptly financed foreign policy measures were widely regarded as a principal cause of the economic stagnation which still afflicted the USA to the present day. Gratton’s idea was to travel to the US and carry out detailed interviews with the surviving main players, illustrating their testimony with an up-to-date profile of the present state of the country. He knew that the book could be sold without any problems: he had already received serious offers from three publishers, and the Gulbenkian Foundation had committed itself to providing a lucrative financing package for the many months of research it would entail. All Gratton had to do was instruct his agent to set up the deal from the best offer on the table and he could start whenever he liked.