When Lubji Hoch had finished telling the tribunal his story, they just looked at him with incredulous stares. He was either some sort of superman, or a pathological liar—they couldn’t decide which.
The Czech translator shrugged his shoulders. “Some of it adds up,” he told the investigating officer. “But a lot of it sounds a little far-fetched to me.”
The chairman of the tribunal considered the case of Lubji Hoch for a few moments, and then decided on the easy way out. “Send him back to the internment camp—and we’ll see him again in six months’ time. He can then tell us his story again, and we’ll just have to see how much of it has changed.”
Lubji had sat through the tribunal unable to understand a word the chairman was saying, but at least this time they had supplied him with an interpreter so he was able to follow the proceedings. On the journey back to the internment camp he made one decision. When they reviewed his case in six months’ time, he wouldn’t need his words translated.
That didn’t turn out to be quite as easy as Lubji had anticipated, because once he was back in the camp among his countrymen they showed little interest in speaking anything but Czech. In fact the only thing they ever taught him was how to play poker, and it wasn’t long before he was beating every one of them at their own game. Most of them assumed they would be returning home as soon as the war was over.
Lubji was the first internee to rise every morning, and he persistently annoyed his fellow inmates by always wanting to outrun, outwork and outstrip every one of them. Most of the Czechs looked upon him as nothing more than a Ruthenian ruffian, but as he was now over six feet in height and still growing, none of them voiced this opinion to his face.
Lubji had been back at the camp for about a week when he first noticed her. He was returning to his hut after breakfast when he saw an old woman pushing a bicycle laden with newspapers up the hill. As she passed through the camp gates he couldn’t make out her face clearly, because she wore a scarf over her head as a token defense against the bitter wind. She began to deliver papers, first to the officers’ mess and then, one by one, to the little houses occupied by the non-commissioned officers. Lubji walked around the side of the parade ground and began to follow her, hoping she might turn out to be the person to help him. When the bag on the front of her bicycle was empty, she turned back toward the camp gates. As she passed Lubji, he shouted, “Hello.”
“Good morning,” she replied, mounted her bicycle and rode through the gates and off down the hill without another word.
The following morning Lubji didn’t bother with breakfast but stood by the camp gates, staring down the hill. When he saw her pushing her laden bicycle up the slope, he ran out to join her before the guard could stop him. “Good morning,” he said, taking the bicycle from her.
“Good morning,” she replied. “I’m Mrs. Sweetman. And how are you today?” Lubji would have told her, if he’d had the slightest idea what she had said.
As she did her rounds he eagerly carried each bundle for her. One of the first words he learned in English was “newspaper.” After that he set himself the task of learning ten new words every day.
By the end of the month, the guard on the camp gate didn’t even blink when Lubji slipped past him each morning to join the old lady at the bottom of the hill.
By the second month, he was sitting on the doorstep of Mrs. Sweetman’s shop at six o’clock every morning so that he could stack all the papers in the right order, before pushing the laden bicycle up the hill. When she requested a meeting with the camp commander at the beginning of the third month, the major told her that he could see no objection to Hoch’s working a few hour
s each day in the village shop, as long as he was always back before roll-call.
Mrs. Sweetman quickly discovered that this was not the first news-agent’s shop the young man had worked in, and she made no attempt to stop him when he rearranged the shelves, reorganized the delivery schedule, and a month later took over the accounts. She was not surprised to discover, after a few weeks of Lubji’s suggestions, that her turnover was up for the first time since 1939.
Whenever the shop was empty Mrs. Sweetman would help Lubji with his English by reading out loud one of the stories from the front page of the Citizen. Lubji would then try to read it back to her. She often burst out laughing with what she called his “howlers.” Just another word Lubji added to his vocabulary.
By the time winter had turned into spring there was only the occasional howler, and it was not much longer before Lubji was able to sit down quietly in the corner and read to himself, stopping to consult Mrs. Sweetman only when he came to a word he hadn’t come across. Long before he was due to reappear in front of the tribunal, he had moved on to studying the leader column in the Manchester Guardian, and one morning, when Mrs. Sweetman stared at the word “insouciant” without attempting to offer an explanation, Lubji decided to save her embarrassment by referring in future to the unthumbed Oxford Pocket Dictionary which had been left to gather dust under the counter.
* * *
“Do you require an interpreter?” the chairman of the panel asked.
“No, thank you, sir,” came back Lubji’s immediate reply.
The chairman raised an eyebrow. He was sure that when he had last interviewed this giant of a man only six months before he hadn’t been able to understand a word of English. Wasn’t he the one who had held them all spellbound with an unlikely tale of what he had been through before he ended up in Liverpool? Now he was repeating exactly the same story and, apart from a few grammatical errors and a dreadful Liverpudlian accent, it was having an even greater effect on the panel than when they had first interviewed him.
“So, what would you like to do next, Hoch?” he asked, once the young Czech had come to the end of his story.
“I wish to join old regiment and play my part in winning war,” came Lubji’s well-rehearsed reply.
“That may not prove quite so easy, Hoch,” said the chairman, smiling benignly down at him.
“If you will not give me rifle I will kill Germans with bare hands,” said Lubji defiantly. “Just give me chance to prove myself.”
The chairman smiled at him again before nodding at the duty sergeant, who came to attention and marched Lubji briskly out of the room.
Lubji didn’t learn the result of the tribunal’s deliberations for several days. He was delivering the morning papers to the officers’ quarters when a corporal marched up to him and said without explanation, “’Och, the CO wants to see you.”
“When?” asked Lubji.
“Now,” said the corporal, and without another word he turned and began marching away. Lubji dropped the remaining papers on the ground, and chased after him as he disappeared through the morning mist across the parade ground in the direction of the office block. They both came to a halt in front of a door marked “Commanding Officer.”
The corporal knocked, and the moment he had heard the word “Come,” opened the door, marched in, stood to attention in front of the colonel’s desk and saluted.