PART THREE
1945
29
SAM
9th February
‘I love you,’ I told Ruby, taking her hands in mine. We were back in the old lodge at Bartonford Hall, which had been restored, its mildew-speckled walls painted a bright white, the wooden floors gleaming, hazy sunlight pouring through the windows and turning her hair to spun copper.
She smiled at me – that smile I saw for the first time on the beach. ‘I love you too, Sam. I always will. But I have to go. They’re waiting.’
‘Who’s waiting? No – don’t!’ As she stepped away from me, I grabbed at her hands, trying to hold on to her. But there was no longer any substance to her; she was dissolving into the dust that danced in the shafts of sunlight, and even those were dimming to a dull, lifeless grey.
‘Ruby!’ I cried. But I was alone. The sun had gone, and all around me the lodge had become a ruin. The roof was gone, the walls reduced to piles of rubble as if they’d been shattered by a bomb. The smashed stones were dusted with frost, the air bitterly cold. A crow cawed, the sound harsh and rasping.
The sound turned into someone coughing. Slowly, the dream left me as I woke, drifting back to reality: not the lodge, but a squalid tent in a Nazi prisoner of war camp somewhere in Germany.
I was coughing too. Everyone in the camp was sick, thanks to a combination of the cold weather, the harsh conditions and lack of food. I rolled over on the pile of straw that I used as a bed, shivering. I felt wrung out and exhausted, even though I’d just woken up, as if a heavy weight was pressing down on me. Part of it was this damn flu or whatever it was that I couldn’t get rid of; mostly, it was despair.
I’d been here for almost eight months now. When the Germans had caught me and Gardner at the farm, I’d tried to put up a fight, but one of them had wrestled me to the ground, tearing off my jacket and punching me in the face. Then the soldiers had killed the farmer and his family and ransacked the house, setting it on fire. I’d thought they were going to kill us too, but they’d taken me and Freddie to another farm where there were other American prisoners waiting, rounded up like sheep. A few hours later, we’d been on the move again. Gardner and I had been separated, and I’d not seen him since. Not that I cared; that chicken-shit bastard could go rot in hell.
The Germans had marched the captured troops – hundreds of them – along miles of country road with no food or water. As we passed one house in a tiny, bombed-out village, an old woman had emerged with a basket of apples and handed them out to us. They’d been last season’s, old and shrivelled, but I’d never tasted anything so good. I’d been the last person to get one before a guard shoved her roughly back into her house, swearing at her in German. She’d jutted her chin out defiantly and slammed the door in his face.
Finally, we’d reached a railroad, where they locked us in boxcars for the slow, seemingly endless second leg of our journey. They’d let us out once a day to relieve ourselves; the rest of the time we’d had to use a steel helmet as a latrine, sharing it between eighty of us. The stink was terrible. As for food, if we were lucky we’d gotten dry bread and brackish-tasting water; most of the time there’d been nothing. The trains had only moved at night – I guess the Germans were afraid of them being spotted by the Allies and bombed – so it had been over a week before the train finally arrived at the prisoner of war camp. I’d been expecting to see rows of huts; instead, after we’d been interrogated and the officers separated from the privates, we’d been marched to a collection of big, circular tents.
‘What is this, the goddamn circus?’ one of the guys had joked, earning himself a crack across the head from one of the guards. It had turned out the huts were so full that there was no room for us. There were already thousands of prisoners at the camp, not only Americans but British, Dutch, French and Polish soldiers too. Each tent held around four hundred men, with nothing but our body heat to keep us warm.
At first, everyone had been scared to death. We all knew what the Nazis had been doing to the Jews, and others, too – how they’d been enslaving and murdering people. Some of the guys here were Jewish, but it turned out the camp was run by soldiers from countries the Germans had annexed, so a lot of the men who had been put in charge of the camp’s day-to-day workings were prisoners who were Allied officers, mostly British. I guess the Germans wanted to keep their own guys to send into battle rather than have them stuck here doing all the boring jobs. The guards were German – kids mostly, all of them as miserable-looking as we were – but the officers running the place helped keep the Jewish prisoners safe and tried to keep things ticking over for the rest of us, too. There wasn’t much anyone could do about the living conditions, though; from day one, I was dreading the weather getting colder. If it hadn’t been for Davy Manganello, who I’d bumped into on my second day here, I’d’ve gone half crazy by now.
This morning, after breakfast – the usual crusts of bread and pale brown water they called coffee – I went back to the tent to wait for the work orders. It wasn’t any warmer inside than it was out, but at least in here I was out of the wind. I sat down and took the book I used to sketch in out of the waistband of my pants. God knows how I’d managed to keep hold of it, but I had. I tore out a page and began to write.
Dear Ruby, I scrawled, muffling a cough with my sleeve. How are you? I am fine and being treated well.
I didn’t tell her the truth; I knew better than that now.
What’s been happening back in Devon?I continued. Are you still working at the newspaper? I wish I could send you a message to let you know I’m OK. I hope that father and grandmother of yours aren’t driving you up the wall.
Can’t write more now – no time. But I love you and I will make it back to you one day. Hang in there.
Sam xxxxx
I tore out another page.
Dear Ma,
I am sorry it’s so long since I last wrote to you and that I haven’t been able to send any more money. I hope you and Meggie are OK and managing to get by and that Mr Addison is still helping you. If you can, tell him I am not dead and that when I get out of here I will pay him back for any assistance he gives you with interest. I hope my letter gets through to you this time. I am OK and being treated well.
Sam xx
That was all the time I had. Another siren began to wail, signalling that we had about thirty seconds to get out into the yard and line up. I folded up the letters, scribbling addresses on the outsides, and scrambled out of the tent after everyone else.
A guard came down the line, stamping through the slush to collect letters from the prisoners who had them ready. Thanks to an agreement between the camp and the Red Cross, prisoners were allowed to write to their loved ones back home. Please let them take them this time, I prayed. PLEASE. I was desperate, especially about Ma and Meggie. I knew Ruby was probably OK, but the thought of Ma and Meggie not knowing what had happened to me – of the money I’d been sending home drying up – sent me half crazy with worry at times.
The guard took the pieces of paper I was holding out and unfolded them. He read them with one eyebrow arched – they read everyone’s letters here, which is why I was so careful not to say anything bad about the camp. Then he shook his head. ‘Not you,’ he said, and tore them up, letting the pieces flutter down into the slush at my feet.
Anger and despair surged through me. Damn. It happened every time, no matter how many lies I filled my letters with. Down the line, I saw Davy watching me sympathetically. They always did the same to him when he wrote letters home, too. It had taken me longer than it should have to realise we were still both being punished for last year when, a month or so after getting here, we’d tried to escape while we were on a work detail in a nearby town, clearing rubble after a bombing raid.
It had been Davy’s idea. They’d only sent out one guard with us and after Mittagessen our group had gotten spread out, so when he left us alone we’d started walking, not looking back. We’d joined the railway tracks to the east of the town, planning on following them to the Czech border, but that night we were caught by a patrol and brought back to the camp, where we were beaten and put on latrine duty for a month as punishment. At first Davy had wanted to try again, but then winter came and with it, heavy snow. Davy got sick, and then I did. A couple of other guys, two Brits, had made a break for it anyway and were found about a mile away, drowned, in the middle of a frozen lake they’d tried to cross, not realising the ice was too thin. The guards had brought their stiff, blue, frozen bodies back to the camp and thrown them on the ground in the yard as a warning to the rest of us.
This morning, I was expecting to be sent on clean-up detail – a few nights ago there’d been a bombing raid on the railway yards in the middle of the city and I’d been part of the group sent out to clear the rubble, under careful watch from the guards this time. Instead, I was ordered to join a smaller group at one side of the yard with Davy, a Scottish guy called Harvey McLean who we were both kinda friendly with, and a couple of others.
I was about to ask if they knew where we were going when another prisoner joined our group. Shock jolted through me. It was Freddie Gardner.
I stared at him. I’d not seen him since the day we were captured. There were so many of us here, and when we weren’t out working we spent most of our time in our tents, sticking in little groups and trying to keep out of the way of the guards. Freddie looked very different to the guy who’d tried his best to make my life a misery back at boot camp and in England. His swagger was all gone, his cheeks hollowed out, his shoulders stooped. There were painful-looking sores at the corners of his mouth.
I tried to catch his eye, but the guard was ordering us into formation. I stayed with Davy and McLean. Gardner was at the back of the line.
Davy glanced back at Gardner too, and raised his eyebrows. ‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ he murmured, while my mind raced. If Freddie was here, what about Stanley? He wasn’t here, so had he managed to escape the farm? Or was his absence because—
No, no. I didn’t want to think about that. ‘You know where we’re going?’ I asked Davy out of the corner of my mouth as we started to march, trying to distract myself.
‘Soap factory,’ he muttered back. ‘Been there a coupla days already.’
‘Damn.’ I’d been hoping that we might get sent to a farm. You could scrounge vegetables sometimes – swedes or turnips or potatoes – and if you shared a few of them with the guards they’d look the other way while you filled your pockets.
We were marched through the melting snow to a collection of huts and buildings at the edge of the city, surrounded by tall barbed wire fences. It took us over an hour to get there and by the time we arrived my legs felt weak, my stomach already gnawing with hunger. I thought I’d gotten used to being hungry when I was living on Kirk’s farm, but it had had nothing on this.
Me, Davy, McLean and Freddie Gardner were taken to a huge shed at the edge of the factory complex. ‘What the hell’s this? Are they making soap out of Goddamn cement?’ Gardner said, scowling at an enormous pile of fine, grey grit. There was another pile of the stuff on the other side of the shed, two guys working away at it with shovels and piling it into barrows.
‘Pumice,’ McLean said. ‘There’s no fat to make soap the normal way anymore so they’re using this instead. That’s cement.’ He jerked his head at the other side of the shed. ‘Better not get ’em mixed up, eh, laddie?’ He and Davy exchanged a glance.
I soon fell into a trance, shovelling pumice powder into barrows with Davy. Freddie and Harvey fetched the barrows and tipped them into the mixers. It was hard work, but the skin on my palms was thick with calluses and I’d learned to ignore the pain in my arms and back that set in after a few hours. Do; don’t think was the only way to survive here.
‘What’s the cement for?’ I asked Davy after a while. He was acting strangely – not nervous, exactly, but like he was on edge, watching for something – or someone.
‘They’re building some more sheds.’
He glanced round again. I knew that look.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked him when we stopped for Mittagessen. The guard had his back to us, smoking a cigarette, and Freddie Gardner and Harvey McLean were sitting apart, not speaking to each other. Our skin and clothes were dusted grey from the pumice and I could even taste it in the bread we were eating, particles crunching between my teeth.
‘Nothin’, nothin’.’
‘Pull the other one. It’s got goddamn bells on it.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’re jumpy as a jackrabbit. Just like you were when we were planning to escape.’
He looked over his shoulder at the guard, then said, ‘Keep eating,’ and bent his head close to mine.
‘That cement—’ he indicated to it with a flick of his eyes ‘—at about twelve hundred hours, one of the guys outside is gonna create a distraction. If it works, and the guard goes out, I gotta fill one of these barrows with it instead of the pumice.’
I frowned. ‘Why?’
He grinned at me. ‘’Cause when they shut down the mixer tonight, it’ll set and gum it all up. I know it sounds pretty dumb. We’ll probably get a lot of flak for it, but it’s worth it if it pisses the Krauts off and puts this place outta action for a coupla days.’
‘You’re nuts.’ I was shaking my head, but I was smiling too.
‘If anyone asks, you never heard nothin’ about it.’
I nodded.
True to his word, about an hour later, there was a commotion outside: shouts, and a crash. The guard went running out.
Davy grabbed the nearest empty barrow, wincing as he did so; his back was bothering him.
‘Here, I’ll do it.’ I ran with it over to the pile of cement and shovelled it into the barrow as fast as I could, choking as the fine dust rose into the air. I made it back to Davy’s side just as the guard came back in, followed by Gardner. I was still breathing hard, and saw Gardner shoot me a narrow-eyed glance as he took the loaded barrow. He blames me, I realised. He thinks us being here is MY fault because of the fight that got us caught by the Germans.
Davy noticed the look too, and scowled after him. ‘That sonofabitch. You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for him.’
We worked for the rest of the afternoon in brooding silence, gathering outside the shed in the early evening with the other prisoners to begin the long march back to the camp. ‘Did it go OK?’ Davy asked McLean quietly, when the guard wasn’t watching us. I remembered the glance I saw go between them earlier; he was in on it too.
McLean gave a brisk nod. ‘Aye. Stuff wasn’t mixing too well to start with, but we convinced the overseer it was a problem wi’ the machines. He switched them off and we mixed the last few loads by hand. It’ll be well set by the morning.’
‘Great.’ Davy grinned, his teeth very white in the middle of his dusty face. ‘We’ll do the other one tomorrow.’
The guard was looking at us again. Davy clamped his mouth shut.
*
The next morning, we were marched back to the factory. This time, Davy and I were sent to work the mixers, and Freddie and Harvey McLean were ordered to load the barrows. The overseer, a short guy wearing wire-framed glasses with little round lenses that flashed in the cold winter sunlight, ducked into a little outhouse next to the mixers to switch on the power. Davy and I glanced at each other, taking care to keep our expressions neutral. The first machine groaned into life. The second made a strange crunching sort of sound, then stopped dead. We heard the overseer swear. He hurried over to the machine and peered into it, and swore again. ‘Nutzlose Maschine!’
That was when I noticed curls of smoke drifting out of the outhouse doorway. I nudged Davy. His eyes widened.
A few moments later, the overseer saw the smoke too. He went running in there and came back out straight away, shouting ‘Feuer! Feuer!’ I didn’t speak much German, even after all these months in the prisoner of war camp, but you didn’t have to be a genius to know what he meant.
Fire.
‘Shit, the machines jamming up must’ve shorted out the wiring.’ A mixture of panic and glee was fighting across Davy’s face. ‘Guess they didn’t have proper fuses or something.’
The overseer had disappeared, to fetch help I guess. Smoke billowed out of the little outhouse, thick and dark and acrid-smelling.
‘It’s gonna blow.’ Davy sounded nervous. We stepped back, out of the way. Behind us, Gardner and McLean came out of the shed and stared at the smoke. ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ McLean asked as, from within the little outhouse, I heard a pop and a roar. Before I could answer him the roof was on fire, flames leaping into the air.
‘Unexpected developments.’ Davy was grinning now, but he still looked kinda worried.
The fire quickly spread to the other buildings. They were all built close together, the spaces between them barely big enough for a man to squeeze through. The place erupted into chaos as guards and the overseer ran about yelling, making prisoners fetch buckets of water. We might as well have been pissing on the flames for all the good it did. There didn’t seem to be any hoses, and the heat was immense. When the guards realised it was hopeless, they hustled me, Davy, McLean, Gardner and the other prisoners into a small, fenced yard in the middle of the factory complex.
‘If they ask who did it, don’t say nothing,’ Davy murmured in my ear. ‘I’ve already talked to some of the other guys who’d guessed we’d got something to do with it. They ain’t gonna say nothing either.’
I nodded. ‘No fear.’
I hadn’t taken more than two steps forwards when a guy in a boiler suit strode through the gates, flanked by four guards. Davy’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Here goes,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth.
‘Who’s that?’ I muttered.
‘The boss. Kommandant.’
The man barked an order in German. Everyone fell quiet. All I could hear was the roaring and crackling of the fire as it continued to tear through the factory complex.
‘Who is responsible for this?’ the foreman said in English. ‘I know this was no accident.’ Although his voice was level, his jaw was clenched.
A few people coughed and shuffled their feet, but no one said anything. I stared at the ground.
‘I said, who is responsible? If you do not come forward now then you will all be severely punished.’
Still, no one spoke.
‘In that case, you will all be beaten,’ the foreman said. ‘After that, you will give me your boots and march back to your camp in bare feet through the ice and snow. And you will have no food for the next two weeks. Not even stale bread.’
‘It was them.’
My head jerked up. Freddie Gardner was pointing at me and Davy. ‘They put cement powder in the mixers yesterday instead of pumice. I saw ’em do it.’
‘You piece of—’ Davy snarled at him. He lunged forward, but a guard grabbed him, pinning his arms behind his back. Another grabbed me. A few of the guys called out in protest but were quickly silenced. We were hauled out of the yard and locked up in separate rooms in a little building off to one side of the main complex, which was far enough from the other units to have escaped the fire.
I slumped to the floor, holding my head in my hands. Shit. Shit. We’d burned down a whole goddamn factory. I didn’t think the Germans were going to be content with giving us a telling-off and a few weeks on latrine-clearing duty this time.
I heard a tapping on the wall to my right. ‘Sam, you in there?’ Davy called.
‘Yeah. Right here.’
‘Shit, man, I’m sorry. I had no idea those fuses were gonna blow, honest to God I didn’t. I thought maybe we’d jam up the machines and piss ’em off, is all.’
I let out a humourless bark of laughter. ‘Well, we managed that, all right.’
‘I’ll tell them it was all my idea, OK?’
‘Don’t be dumb. I helped you. This is my fault too.’
‘Shit, man. If it wasn’t for Freddie fucking Gardner—’
Someone hammered on the door. ‘Halte den Mund!’
Shut up.
Half an hour later, the local Gestapo arrived. As we were dragged outside again, there was a tremendous crash behind us. The main factory building had collapsed, throwing fountains of sparks and debris up into the air.
‘Yee-ha!’ Davy yelled, punching the air, a wild look in his eye.
We were slung into a van, the doors slamming closed in our faces.