The Fourth Estate

Love,

Keith

Once term had ended, Keith started off in the same direction as many other students. He drove his MG down to Dover and took the ferry across to Calais. But as the others disembarked to begin their journeys to the historic cities of the Continent, he swung his little open tourer northeast, in the direction of Berlin. The weather was so hot that Keith was able to keep his soft top down for the first time.

As Keith drove along the winding roads of France and Belgium, he was constantly reminded of how little time had passed since Europe had been at war. Mutilated hedges and fields where tanks had taken the place of tractors, bombed-out farmhouses that had lain between advancing and retreating armies, and rivers littered with rusting military equipment. As he passed each bombed-out building and drove through mile after mile of devastated landscape, the thought of Deauville, with its casino and racecourse, became more and more appealing.

When it was too dark to avoid holes in the road, Keith turned off the highway and drove for a few hundred yards down a quiet lane. He parked at the side of the road and quickly fell into a deep sleep. He was woken while it was still dark by the sound of lorries heading ponderously toward the German border, and jotted down a note: “The army seems to rise without regard for the motion of the sun.” It took two or three turns of the key before the engine spluttered into life. He rubbed his eyes, swung the MG round and returned to the main road, trying to remember to keep to the right-hand side.

After a couple of hours he reached the border, and had to wait in a long queue: each person wishing to enter Germany was meticulously checked. Eventually he came to the front, where a customs officer studied his passport. When he discovered that Keith was an Australian, he simply made a caustic comment about Donald Bradman and waved him on his way.

Nothing Keith had heard or read could have prepared him for the experience of a defeated nation. His progress became slower and slower as the cracks in the road turned into potholes, and the potholes turned into craters. It was soon impossible to travel more than a few hundred yards without having to drive as if he was in a dodgem car at a seaside amusement park. And no sooner had he managed to push the speedometer over forty than he would be forced to pull over to allow yet another convoy of trucks—the latest with stars on their doors—to drive past him down the middle of the road.

He decided to take advantage of one of these unscheduled holdups to eat at an inn he spotted just off the road. The food was inedible, the beer weak, and the sullen looks of the innkeeper and his patrons left him in no doubt that he was unwelcome. He didn’t bother to order a second course, but quickly settled his bill and left.

He drove on toward the German capital, slow kilometer after slow kilometer, and reached the outskirts of the city only a few minutes before the gas lights were turned on. He began to search immediately among the back streets for a small hotel. He knew that the nearer he got to the center, the less likely it would be that he could afford the tariff.

Eventually he found a little guesthouse on the corner of a bombed-out street. It stood on its own, as if somehow unaware of what had taken place all around it. This illusion was dispelled as soon as he pushed open the front door. The dingy hall was lit by a single candle, and a porter in baggy trousers and a gray shirt stood sulkily behind a counter. He made little attempt to respond to Keith’s efforts to book a room. Keith knew only a few words of German, so he finally held his hand in the air with his palm open, hoping the porter would understand that he wished to stay for five nights.

The man nodded reluctantly, took a key from a hook behind him and led his guest up an uncarpeted staircase to a corner room on the second floor. Keith put his holdall on the floor and stared at the little bed, the one chair, the chest of drawers with three handles out of eight and the battered table. He walked across the room and looked out of the window onto piles of rubble, and thought about the serene duckpond he could see from his college rooms. He turned to say “Thank you,” but the porter had already left.

After he had unpacked his suitcase, Keith pulled the chair up to the table by the window, and for a couple of hours—feeling guilty by association—wrote down his first impressions of the defeated nation.

* * *

Keith woke the next morning as soon as the sun shone through the curtainless window. It took him some time to wash in a basin that had no plug and could only manage a trickle of cold water. He decided against shaving. He dressed, went downstairs and opened several doors, looking for the kitchen. A woman standing at a stove turned round, and managed a smile. She waved him toward the table.

Everything except flour, she explained in pidgin English, was in short supply. She set in front of him two large slices of bread covered with a thin suggestion of dripping. He thanked her, and was rewarded with a smile. After a second glass of what she assured him was milk, he returned to his room and sat on the end of the bed, checking the address at which the meeting would take place and then trying to fix it on an out-of-date road map of the city which he had picked up at Blackwell’s in Oxford. When he left the hotel it was only a few minutes after eight, but this was not an appointment he wanted to be late for.

Keith had already decided to organize his time so that he could spend at least a day in each sector of the divided city; he planned to visit the Russian sector last, so he could compare it with the three controlled by the Allies. After what he had seen so far, he assumed it could only be an improvement, which he knew would please his fellow-members of the Oxford Labor Club, who believed that “Uncle Joe” was doing a far better job than Attlee, Auriol and Truman put together—despite the fact that the farthest east most of them had ever traveled was Cambridge.

Keith pulled up several times on his way into the city to ask directions to Siemensstrasse. He finally found the headquarters of the British Public Relations and Information Services Control a few minutes before nine. He parked his car, and joined a stream of servicemen and women in different-colored uniforms as they made their way up the wide stone steps and through the swing doors. A sign warned him that the lift was out of order, so he climbed the five floors to the PRISC office. Although he was early for his appointment, he still reporte

d to the front desk.

“How can I help you, sir?” asked a young corporal standing behind the desk. Keith had never been called “sir” by a woman before, and he didn’t like it.

He took a letter out of an inside pocket and handed it across to her. “I have an appointment with the director at nine o’clock.”

“I don’t think he’s in yet, sir, but I’ll just check.”

She picked up a telephone and spoke to a colleague. “Someone will come and see you in a few minutes,” she said once she had put the phone down. “Please have a seat.”

A few minutes turned out to be nearly an hour, by which time Keith had read both the papers on the coffee table from cover to cover, but hadn’t been offered any coffee. Der Berliner wasn’t a lot better than Cherwell, the student paper he so scorned at Oxford, and Der Telegraf was even worse. But as the director of PRISC seemed to be mentioned on nearly every page of Der Telegraf, Keith hoped he wouldn’t be asked for his opinion.

Eventually another woman appeared and asked for Mr. Townsend. Keith jumped up and walked over to the desk.

“My name is Sally Carr,” said the woman in a breezy cockney accent. “I’m the director’s secretary. How can I help you?”

“I wrote to you from Oxford,” Keith replied, hoping that he sounded older than his years. “I’m a journalist with the Oxford Mail, and I’ve been commissioned to write a series of articles on conditions in Berlin. I have an appointment to see…” he turned her letter round, “… Captain Armstrong.”

“Oh, yes, I remember,” Miss Carr said. “But I’m afraid Captain Armstrong is visiting the Russian sector this morning, and I’m not expecting him in the office today. If you can come back tomorrow morning, I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you.” Keith tried not to let his disappointment show, and assured her that he would return at nine the following morning. He might have abandoned his plan to see Armstrong altogether had he not been told that this particular captain knew more about what was really going on in Berlin than all the other staff officers put together.

He spent the rest of the day exploring the British sector, stopping frequently to make notes on anything he considered newsworthy. The way the British behaved toward the defeated Germans; empty shops trying to serve too many customers; queues for food on every street corner; bowed heads whenever you tried to look a German in the eye. As a clock in the distance chimed twelve, he stepped into a noisy bar full of soldiers in uniform and took a seat at the end of the counter. When a waiter finally asked him what he wanted, he ordered a large tankard of beer and a cheese sandwich—at least he thought he ordered cheese, but his German wasn’t fluent enough to be certain. Sitting at the bar, he began to scribble down some more notes. As he watched the waiters going about their work, he became aware that if you were in civilian clothes you were served after anyone in uniform. Anyone.

The different accents around the room reminded him that the class system was perpetuated even when the British were occupying someone else’s city. Some of the soldiers were complaining—in tones that wouldn’t have pleased Miss Steadman—about how long it was taking for their papers to be processed before they could return home. Others seemed resigned to a life in uniform, and only talked of the next war and where it might be. Keith scowled when he heard one of them say, “Scratch them, and underneath they’re all bloody Nazis.” But after lunch, as he continued his exploration of the British sector, he thought that on the surface at least the soldiers were well disciplined, and that most of the occupiers seemed to be treating the occupied with restraint and courtesy.

As the shopkeepers began to put up their blinds and shut their doors, Keith returned to his little MG. He found it surrounded by admirers whose looks of envy quickly turned to anger when they saw he was wearing civilian clothes. He drove slowly back to his hotel. After a plate of potatoes and cabbage eaten in the kitchen, he returned to his room and spent the next two hours writing down all he could remember of the day. Later he climbed into bed, and read Animal Farm until the candle finally flickered out.