D Section have not been able to confirm the marriage, saying that the register office where the records might have been found was destroyed in an air raid in September last year. They maintain Sawyer is not married to the woman but is merely cohabiting with her. There is evidence from neighbours which I have disdained to read. Taken in all, though, the matter and the circumstances surrounding it give rise to disquiet.
What makes the case unusual and worthy of attention is that Sawyer was registered, at least for a time, as a conscientious objector with links to the British Red Cross, for whom he has apparently been working in some capacity. How he rationalizes this while being a serving officer in the RAF is central to the mystery. I have no rooted objections to any of such behaviour, but not all in the person of one man, all at once or at all in wartime. He cannot be allowed to continue in this multi-faceted role, especially as a substantial portion of his life appears to be usefully involved with our bombing offensive against the Nazis.
The report obscures more than it clarifies. It seems likely to me there has been some confusion of identity, but I require it to be cleared up. The German woman under suspicion should be left to her own devices, as I have an abhorrence of young people being locked up without good reason.
15
Holograph notebooks of J. L. Sawyer
xiv
After Lisbon, I returned to my life in Rainow with a sense that at last the war was about to finish. Granted leave of absence by the Red Cross, on full pay, the only memento I had of that extraordinary meeting in Portugal was a brief handwritten letter from Dr Burckhardt. He passed it to me before I boarded the aircraft for the long flight home. In it he asked me not to involve myself in the normal day-to-day work of the Red Cross, but to hold myself ready to travel at short notice.
During those days at Boca di Inferno I had come to think of myself as a neutral in the war. I was an intermediary, a Red Cross official, someone who composed or translated important documents that could, quite literally, change history. But within a few hours of returning to Britain I felt myself become partisan once again: English, British, not neutral at all. I found it an enlightening experience. I had assumed, before I went to Portugal, that by being a pacifist I counted myself out of partisanship, but when you are in a war you cannot help but identify with your own people. It gave me a lot to think about.
I slipped back into something that felt similar, but not identical, to my old life. Birgit was in the last weeks of her pregnancy, a situation which took on a whole extra level of meaning now there was the prospect of peace. While I was away, Birgit had become much more dependent on Mrs Gratton, the elderly woman who lived in the cottage down the lane. She seemed to be constantly in our house, often bringing her strange, middle-aged son with her. When I first returned from Portugal I felt I was almost an intruder in the house. Mrs Gratton was always fussing around, seeing to the laundry and washing up the dishes, making Birgit drinks and snacks, while Harry busied himself with odd jobs: cutting logs and bringing them in, cleaning windows, sweeping out the kitchen floor and that kind of thing.
Perhaps for these reasons my first weekend at home, after Lisbon, was not a happy one. A distance had opened up between Birgit and myself. I wanted to be a loving, dutiful husband, involving myself in the last weeks of her pregnancy, but Birgit would say little to me about how she felt, or about her hopes and fears, or indeed anything about the plans she was making for when the baby arrived.
I helped her clean out and paint the small spare room, which would eventually become the child’s own bedroom, but because of her condition I ended up spending most of the time working on my own. The off-white distemper, which like all house paint was normally almost impossible to obtain because of the war, had been provided by Harry Gratton. He called round a couple of times to remind me of the fact, while I was putting the stuff on the walls.
People in Rainow were still talking about the night of the heavy bombing in Manchester, which had happened while I was away. After two big raids in December the city had been left alone, but the previous week the bombers had returned. Harry Gratton told me that at the height of the raid the fires were so intense that the people of Rainow, watching from their hill many miles from the city, could feel the heat on their faces.
Irlam Street, where the Red Cross building had been, no longer existed. While waiting for the Red Cross to find alternative premises, I hung around the house, hoping in a vague way to make amends to Birgit for my long absences, trying to forge something like our old closeness together. I still felt cut off from her, but I reasoned that once our baby was born our lives would change for the better. Of course, once the secret I was carrying became a reality, life would be different for everyone.
The prospect of that burned in me like a beacon. When I heard people complaining about the constant difficulties they were having in feeding their children, or their worries about their sons or husbands in the forces, or even the endless problems of simply travelling around, I knew I had it in me to reassure them with the greatest news of all. Another week, I could say to them - put up with it for another week or two, maybe a month, then it will be over. The broad, sunlit uplands Churchill promised last year are in sight at last.
But the weeks were starting to slip by. When I returned from Lisbon I expected to be summoned back to the next round of talks almost at once. Surely everything was in place and agreed? The terms for peace had been comprehensively negotiated: both sides had given way on several important elements of the original proposals, but in the end a realistic agreement had been reached, one that gave both Britain and Germany a way out of the war. One side could emerge with honour intact, the other with strategic freedoms in place.
Clearly there was an obstacle. Once I was back in my humdrum life, undergoing the same inconvenience and hardships as everyone else, overhearing conversations in buses and pubs, listening to small talk in shops, it was obvious where that obstacle lay. It was in Churchill himself. He had identified himself, or he had become identified, with a plucky British determination to fight on and on, whatever the odds. Churchill was the symbol of everyone’s hopes. It was not only inconceivable that Churchill would step down, it was inconceivable to millions of ordinary Britons.
I could not even imagine what the parallel situation in Germany would be like, in the way Hitler himself had come to personify the German nation.
The German night-time Blitz on British cities continued. During the five weeks in which I waited for Dr Burckhardt’s call, cities like Bristol, Birmingham, Plymouth, Liverpool, Exeter, Swansea, Cardiff and Belfast had their hearts blasted out of them by concerted bombing attacks. The Blitz on London continued at the same time as the attacks on the other cities, almost without a break. In the Atlantic, U-boats were sinking British ships every day of the week. In the North African desert the fight for Egypt and the Suez Canal went on, much more dangerously for the British since the arrival of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. In Greece the British were being beaten back.
All those deaths. All those losses. All that destruction.
The war was being prolonged when it could have been halted at any moment.