The postcard, p.20
The Postcard, page 20
That night, she sat in the dark damp fusty cell working through everything she’d said and withheld. The networks were ruined and there was nothing she could do to warn HQ. She had achieved nothing but a few weeks’ respite before they started on her again.
Next time, they stripped her, took away her good clothes and left her half naked, but she’d given them some half-truths, stayed true to her training. By a stroke of luck, they’d given her back her bag, emptied of cash and the compact, but the cheap cigarette lighter in which her paper was hidden remained inside unexamined. She would ditch it as soon as she found a safe opportunity.
Callie wondered how long they would feed her and keep her here, and if she gave them nothing more, what next? Would London realize she’d been betrayed and arrested? She knew she must keep fit and exercise even on the cell’s stone floor, doing a routine of stretches the instructor had taught her. How long did she have before they sent her to a place where she’d never see daylight and freedom again?
The postcards kept coming but there was something not quite right about them, Phoebe decided. They weren’t real, just a few lines of, ‘I am well and missing you all. Kisses from Mummy.’ Every time she wrote to Primrose to ask her if she’d heard from Caroline there was never a satisfactory answer. ‘She’s doing splendid work with her team.’ It didn’t take a genius to work out she was somewhere in France now that D-Day had dawned and Jerry was on the run. Once France was liberated she’d come home at long last.
Caroline had not seen her son for over a year and he no longer asked about her at bedtimes or kissed her photo with any enthusiasm. I might not have been the world’s best mother myself, Phoebe thought, but this absence is ridiculous. She was watching Desmond playing snap with Jessie. They’d managed to keep her at Dalradnor even though she was now engaged to Bob Kane and planning a life in Australia. Bob called in when he could and played football with Desmond and Jacques. ‘This boy needs a man about the house,’ he laughed ruffling the little boy’s mop of dark curls. ‘He’s turning into a Sheila with all you women at his beck and call.’
Desmond was enrolled at the village school and got plenty of stern teaching from Miss Armour-Brown, but the more pliable females of his home were soon to be reduced in number. A long overdue Red Cross postcard arrived for Madame from her husband: not the usual twenty-five words this time, but real news. There were plans for their repatriation back to Guernsey as soon as it was safe. This sent the Laplanche family into a flurry of sewing and buying presents to take back.
That left only Jessie and the boy living in with Phoebe, and if Jessie upped sticks, just the two of them. Sometimes in the silence of the night, Phoebe wondered if Caroline was ever coming back to them. It was time she made more enquiries at the address she had been given in London. It was time for some honest answers.
Her ENSA engagements continued, but she found them tiring. Sometimes she fell asleep between acts and there was no spring in her step on stage. Her agent kept trying for new character parts at the film studios but there was always some crisis in Dalradnor to attend to: the coke boiler breaking down, the cart needing attention. The strain of keeping everyone clothed, fed and warm through a devilishly cold winter was taking its toll on her. Old Dr McClusky said her blood pressure was too high and she must rest more. Sir Lionel had died and Verity moved south, leaving Phoebe feeling more isolated. They had little in common except the link to Arthur and Caroline, but they exchanged cards at Christmas, this, Phoebe’s only link with Arthur’s family now.
It was hard going back to London to face all the ruins. The mansion apartments were still as she’d left them, but picked over by looters and now with weeds growing through the rubble. There was no one who really mattered to her in town. Billy had found somewhere near Brighton to live.
Phoebe wrote to the Ministry demanding more information, but all she got in return were assurances that Caroline was doing important work and would contact her as soon as she was free to do so. She felt she was being fobbed off yet again, and the uneasy feeling that Caroline was not as safe as they made out wouldn’t leave her. When will we ever see you again? she cried, but there was no one to answer her.
24
St-Gilles Prison stood like a fortress on the outskirts of Brussels, a grey forbidding place. Few sounds from outside penetrated its thick walls: the occasional muffled hum of night bombers and the horns of prison traffic through the gates. Callie felt the gloom of incarceration closing round her, the endless monotony of routine with day following dragging day as she watched the summer shaft of strong light beam through the high window on the cell wall gradually turning into the thin glimmer of winter as the days shortened.
She marked off the days of the week with scratches on the stone floor. Nine months she’d been left to rot, and after those first intense bursts of questioning when she’d stuck rigidly to her story and given nothing more away, they’d shut her up in solitary confinement. There had been a brief interlude of company when they had introduced a pretty prisoner with a sympathetic ear, imprisoned for black marketeering – or so she said. All smiles and sympathy, she was trying to ferret out information – a set-up if ever there was one – and when Callie refused to discuss anything with her the prisoner disappeared as quickly as she had arrived. A change of company had its comforts – another voice, another story – but now she was left to moulder over her coming fate.
Every sound became familiar: the changing of the guard, the morning slop-out, the spy hole in the door opening as a torch beamed in on her face as the shadows fell. The food was basic: hard bread, thin soup, slops, and never enough to drink to slake her constant thirst. She felt her body weakening.
If only she had a photograph of someone she cared for to stare at, instead of bare walls. She invented stories about the old couple standing under an apple tree in her cover photo.
Surely, if the Gestapo were going to dispose of her, they would have done so already. Were they playing a cat-and-mouse game? She had no useful information to give them now. She tried tapping messages in Morse code on the heating pipe that ran around the wall, but so far had had no response. There were whispers that the Allies were on the march and it wouldn’t be long to Liberation, but she didn’t believe them. Hope was dangerous. She must prepare for the worst. In the exercise yard she gleaned what she could about other political prisoners as they paced feet behind each other, watched by guards if they drew too close. All she heard was that many men had been sent to the Tir National to be shot. She thought of Edith Cavell, a heroine every schoolgirl knew. Her last days were spent in this very prison and Callie took courage from the story of her bravery in her final moments.
Getting from one day to the next without falling into that ever gaping pit of despair was what mattered most. It was hard to live with fear and hunger gnawing in her gut. She heard sobs and screams in the night but so far no one had tortured her, though the threat hung over her like a silent menace, as did the fear of going insane in this isolation.
There were some redeeming acts of kindness. A Flemish wardress brought her a Bible, blunt scissors to cut her toenails, and some tattered books. She looked into her face as if Callie was a human being worthy of respect. Sometimes her soup had extra meat floating in it, enough to chew and feel the nourishment. To survive, she must find a sanctuary in this dark place. Survival of the spirit was its own form of resistance. Her training had briefly touched on how to survive in prison. She kept on tapping her Morse code but no one answered. Was she alone on this upper floor? She had a pencil to make notes in her Bible margins. She even asked for a priest, but none turned up. Every night she did battle with the bugs that would feed on her if not caught. There was a whole army of them in her straw mattress that she would never overcome.
Each day, she retreated into a form of mental exercise, taking one bit of her life, stripping it into minute detail and recalling every pleasant part she could. How the loch shimmered in the sunlight at Dalradnor and the snow on the hills glistened in the sun. She visited every room of the house, the stables, the gardens where the roses were in full bloom. She rode Hector again and relived her childhood sitting in a tree with the twins from the farm, Niven and Nairn. She took the train from Milngavie into Glasgow and visited all the famous department stores, pausing to admire the Argyll Arcade full of jewellery shops. She smelled the chalk and ink in Miss Cameron’s classroom. In this way she could leave the four walls and roam at will into the Scottish countryside.
This treat had to be earned by an hour of stretches and poses to flex her slack muscles and calm her breathing. How she’d cursed the PT trainer for increasing repetitions and making her sweat, but now the exercise was a lifesaver. She pressed her arms against the wall to strengthen her upper body, ran on the spot, but with so little decent food she knew not to exhaust herself. There were occasional showers when she relished the icy chill to cleanse her body and got rid of her lice-ridden clothes. Her periods had ceased, which was a blessing, but she was wasting away in this place.
There were good days, but also bad days with too much time to dwell on all that she was missing. What had she achieved? Only failure and betrayal, and there was always the terror that she’d never see her son again. At night, it took all her willpower and bloody-mindedness not to go mad with these dark thoughts. There had to be hope that the Allies would arrive one day.
Bombing raids were more frequent. It was after one such night raid that the door opened and the wardress shouted at her to get dressed: ‘Schnell. Alles einpacken!’
What a joke; all she had was a ragged pillowcase with a change of underwear, a Bible, and a stump of a toothbrush. Did this mean the end? She hardly dared to hope after all this time.
‘Am I free?’
The wardress laughed. ‘Agents like you will never be free. Special orders from Berlin, you are to be sent to somewhere safer in Germany. Your escort is waiting.’ For once, the woman did not look her in the face but whispered as she left, ‘You will need more than good luck where you’re going.’
Callie was amongst a group of women bundled into a truck with no windows, escorted by guards onto a train and sealed in a darkened compartment with more guards. They travelled east through the darkness for days and nights. Eventually, exhausted, starving, aching, they were pushed off the train in a siding with their luggage and marched for many miles under female guards before being shoved through the large iron gates of a labour camp north of Berlin at a place called Ravensbrück. Little did Callie know that she was entering L’enfer des Femmes, the Women’s Hell.
25
Desmond blew out the six candles on his birthday cake. Mima had made a sponge rolled into an engine shape, covered in real chocolate powder and dotted with dolly mixtures. Jessie had given him magic colouring books and knitted him a new jumper made from unravelling the wool from one of Mummy’s old ones, kept in her trunk for when she came home again. Granny Phee gave him a pound note to spend on anything he liked, and some sweetie coupons too. He’d invited three boys from school for tea and they played football and tag in the garden until the gong rang.
He liked being six but he wished Jacques and the girls were still here to play with him. They were now back in Guernsey, and the house wasn’t the same. Jessie was going to leave him too as he was too old for a nursemaid now. When Mummy came back, he’d be sent away to school, Granny said, but he liked the little school in the village and he was now in Mr Pearson’s class. He could read all the posters in the shop and on the church notice board. He didn’t want to go away.
When he grew up he wanted to be in the Royal Air Force like Sergeant Kane, Jessie’s special friend. He was tall and wore a scratchy uniform with stripes on his arm. He brought him bits of a Jerry plane, which he swapped for marbles in the playground. The sergeant teased him about his curls and threatened to cut them off. He told him he looked like a ‘Sheila’, but Sheila Prentiss in his class didn’t look a bit like him.
Jessie would be going to Australia after she was married and he would be a page boy at the wedding. Bob Kane said boys shouldn’t dress up, but Jessie said he was going to wear his kilt and jacket, and that kilts were worn only by the bravest of soldiers. She said that she’d not marry him if Desmond couldn’t wear his kilt and carry the ring.
Granny Phee came home from the theatre for the Easter wedding in the parish church. It was exciting seeing all the other airmen, their uniforms making an arch up the path and the villagers standing by the gate to watch the bride going in. She did look pretty in a pink frock and carrying a bouquet of flowers, and on her head she wore a pink hat covered with net. All her sisters wore dresses and carried posies. The church was so full of flowers it made him sneeze. He wore heather on his jacket for good luck.
They had a special tent in the garden for the guests to have tea and photographs. How could Jessie ever leave him and go so far away? He couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t there at night to tuck him in or comfort him if he had a bad dream. Granny Phee said when the war was over Jessie would go on a big ship across the world to make her home with Sergeant Kane and meet his family, who had a farm just like Jessie’s family had, but he didn’t want to think about that now.
‘Why can’t I go with her?’ he asked.
Granny looked shocked. ‘You don’t belong to her. When your mummy comes home, she’ll be looking after you,’ she replied, pointing to the photo in the silver frame.
He didn’t know who that lady was and he didn’t want her to come back. He wanted to go with Jessie on the big ship and be a pirate on the sea and live with Jessie for ever. It was bad enough after the wedding when she went on holiday with her husband to Edinburgh for a few days in a hotel. It was such a relief to see her back in the house again, and she brought him some Edinburgh rock and a tie to match the tartan of his kilt. He had run to meet her, clinging to her. Granny had been kind and kept showing him pictures from her stage book and school pictures of his mummy with pigtails and school uniform. Sometimes they had lived in London, but that house was bombed and now Granny had to live here when she wasn’t with the Stardrop Troupe, but she didn’t run around or play games outside like Jessie. She liked quiet games and listening to the wireless while he played ludo and snakes and ladders with Jessie before bedtime. Granny was always making trunk calls about Mummy to people he didn’t know.
There’d been trouble at school when someone said his dad must be a conchie. That meant he didn’t fight in the war. He told them to shut up and he hadn’t got a father – he didn’t need one – and the older boys laughed at him and called him ‘a right wee Jessie’. ‘You can’t have a baby without a dad!’ He didn’t understand what they meant so he kicked out at them and it turned into a fight. Mr Pearson came into the playground and called them into line. They all got six from the tawse on the palm of their hands for fighting.
Although it hurt, Desmond didn’t cry until he got home. There was no one to tell what had happened. Jessie had gone to see her husband off on the train to the docks and came back all teary-eyed, so he couldn’t tell her. Everyone was sad. Granny Phee was sad because there had been no more postcards from Mummy for months. Everyone was whispering in corners, behind doors.
One day, Granny came into his bedroom and said Mummy wouldn’t be coming home for a long time so he must be brave and not cry. They were trying to find out where she was, but he didn’t mind her being lost. All he could think about was if Jessie left him behind when she went on the ship. Then suddenly there was a holiday from school and the bells were ringing everywhere to tell them war was over and won. They flew flags from the top of the school hall and had a tea party in the village street with buns and sandwiches, jelly and pop, even though it was raining. Then they went into the parish room for dancing while Jimmy Baird played his accordion. Miss Armour sat at the piano and they had a sing-song, and everyone was laughing even though there was still fighting far away.
Jessie said Sergeant Bob was going to have to carry on over there until it ended but once it was finished she’d be on a list of sailing brides to be with him, and Desmond started to cry.
‘I want to come too. Don’t leave me here. I want to stay with you.’
She cuddled him. ‘I know, hen, but it wouldn’t be right. You belong to Miss Caroline. She’ll come back soon to be your mammy.’
He shook his head. That was no comfort at all.
26
In the half-light of dawn the women were corralled through the gates by snarling dogs and armed guards. All Callie could see was row upon row of barrack huts. The women were pushed into one hut for processing, stripped and deloused with powder, all their body hair shaved in front of men eyeing their nakedness. Callie was given a faded uniform of blue shirt and a skirt that might once have been red, a headscarf to cover her bald head. There was no protesting at this humiliation. They were all too stunned and weary by the long journey. All her belongings from the outside world were taken from her, but she managed to hold onto her boots. She was registered as Charlotte Blanken, a Belgian political prisoner, this status indicated by the red triangle badge on her sleeve along with a number. They were marched out into the cold and taken to more wooden huts, told to find a space for themselves by female warders with black armbands, who walked up and down with whips to keep order.
The hut had a central aisle and three-tier bunks jam-packed with human beings, crammed like animals in cages. The smell made her want to vomit – a rank odour of urine, sick, sweat and fear – but she was too shocked to do anything. Her one thought was: how do I survive this?
After almost a year of solitary confinement, to see this teeming mass of humanity overwhelmed her: stick-thin females dressed in rags, staring at her with hopeless eyes, hollow cheeks and white skin. She had heard rumours of such camps, but to find herself forced into such a place made her shake with horror. Panic rose as she searched for a single face that looked alive with a little hope left. No one said anything, showed much interest in her arrival. She was just one more body to squeeze work out of until she gave up or was disposed of.
