Page 65 of Last Letter Home
His roommate, Wolfgang Horst, quickly became a friend. Horst was Jewish, a fellow countryman four years younger than him who’d been dispatched to a British foster home by his far-sighted parents five years before. He’d attended a Midlands university and spoke fluent English. Horst had often visited Hamburg as a boy, for his grandmother had lived there, and he and Paul sometimes reminisced in a mixture of English and German, though they found it unbearably sad to talk of home. Horst had no idea where his parents were now, or his grandmother. He wrote regularly to his little sister, who was at boarding school in Shrewsbury, and if he was granted leave he went to visit her either there or at the home of the teacher and his wife with whom she stayed during school holidays.
Paul wrote to Sarah every week. He sent her a postcard of the lighthouse, which was an unusual building because it was set into a disused church on the clifftop above the town. There was so much to tell her about daily life and he found the writing came easily to him. Horst is trying to teach me the violin, but I’m afraid he is wasting his time. The seagulls think I am one of them because of the noise I make.
He thought of her in quiet moments, trying to keep her face in his mind. He had never been in love before like this. He hadn’t met many girls in Hamburg, but at the university there had been a self-possessed young woman named Gisela, with thick fair hair cut into a bob and dancing dark blue eyes. She had let him take her out a few times and for a whole term they sat together in lectures, but then the trouble happened with his father and she started to avoid him. Sometimes Paul had used to wonder whether otherwise it might have gone further. He’d been fascinated by Gisela’s determination to succeed, her eager way of turning questions inside out to make one see a problem differently, not to mention her handsome, sturdy figure. She was a talented artist, could draw neat, detailed pictures of flowers and trees. He, on the other hand, knew best how to grow them.
It was Horst who awoke in Paul a love of music, for he’d brought with him his treasured violin, and many evenings he’d rehearse with the camp orchestra. Paul often attended the concerts in the village hall or, on one occasion, in the foyer of a grand hotel out in the countryside.
There were lectures, too, because many in the camp were older men, distinguished professionals in their pre-war lives: lawyers, doctors, university professors, writers. Once, he found himself volunteering to give a talk about growing flowers for cutting, and as he explained how spikes of gladioli, though unfashionable, were invaluable as they remained fresh in a vase for several days, he felt his love of growing things flood back. If he’d had with him some of the botanical slides he’d collected in Hamburg then he’d have delivered a more academic lecture about the wonder of plants, but he had neither the resources nor the time to research or to produce his own drawings.
Six weeks passed, two months. Christmas had not been a religious festival for the large Jewish element of the camp, but was nevertheless celebrated by a performance of Cinderella. Come January, work was hampered by the freezing winter weather, but eventually, in early February, Paul and Horst’s company was told they were sufficiently prepared to be sent on their first mission.
‘Clearing rubble, so the corporal says. I want to go and fight,’ Horst said fiercely as he wrapped his precious photograph of his parents in newspaper and fitted it into his haversack.
‘I do, too,’ Paul said from the window. He’d miss this view. ‘Maybe one day they will trust us enough. At least in the meantime we’ll be doing something to help, and London will feel more like the centre of things.’ And, he hoped, he’d be able to see more of Sarah. That would a great advantage.
Three weeks later, Paul felt less optimistic as he wheeled his heavy barrow along the plank towards the truck and began to shovel its contents into the dumper. The dust this raised set him off on another coughing fit, but he carried on, trying to ignore the cough, just as he tried to ignore the boneshaking pounding of Horst’s pneumatic drill. Thankfully, after he threw in the last shovelful, the corporal shouted for a break and he hurried to join the queue for hot drinks at the nearby van.
It felt as though they’d been here for ever. The work involved clearing rubble from the bombed areas around the docks; grim work, ‘stone-breaking’ as Horst called it, ‘old-fashioned hard labour for convicts’, but he spoke with a flash of humour. After all, as Paul remembered Sarah saying, most people in this war were having to do what they didn’t want. Their lives had been interrupted. Nobody dared speak about the future. Getting through the present was all they could do. He thought about this as he drank the thin hot soup a woman had served him and cupped his palm protectively round his cigarette. In order to fight for freedom, everyone was having temporarily to give it up, that’s how he should see it. There was no choice. It was so frustrating, though, to be stuck here shovelling concrete when the fighting was elsewhere.
The corporal shouted for them to return to work. Paul seized a sledgehammer and clambered back over the hills of shattered concrete, plasterboard, twisted girders and brick that he’d been mining, sinking some of his frustrations into the blow he delivered to a ruined flight of steps.
Paul had been astonished when they’d first arrived in what Corporal Brady told them had once been a street of houses. Most of them had been obliterated and the road was cracked and cratered. Only a few jagged elevations remained, reaching up defiantly, the shapes of windows and electric wires hanging like torn tendons, indicating their identities. God knows what it had been like for the rescue teams in the immediate aftermath of the bombs. He didn’t like to think about that. It was bad enough now, turning over a girder to find the pieces of a little girl’s doll, an engagement diary or a photograph in a smashed frame, precious belongings of the people who’d once lived there. Anything deemed valuable in any way was handed in, though whether its owner would be found alive to reclaim it was a different matter.
He’d heard that another team had uncovered something more gruesome the week before when they’d lifted up a broken dining table, but his lot had found nothing like that, though they knew to be prepared.
As Paul worked, a sharp wind blew up, stirring the dust and muffling the others’ voices. What with the mist, the sullen sky overhead and the deadened sound, he was disoriented and reminded for a strange moment of that fierce winter in Norfolk, the Christmas when the Baileys had arrived in Westbury. How the snow had changed everything, making the world alien and forbidding. The moment passed, but as he filled a basket with the crumbling lumps he’d split he was left with the lingering memory of Sarah.
He had a day’s leave starting this evening and he’d be meeting her at Liverpool Street train station. Usually if she came to the city she’d stay with her aunt, but tonight would be different. The thought of seeing her gave him renewed energy and he began to dig again almost cheerfully, suddenly not minding the cutting wind or the dust or the pain in his left forefinger where he’d wrenched it on a loop of wire the day before.
Paul’s heart filled with love and desire as he saw Sarah in the dim, evening glow of the station, alighting from the train, smart in a soft felt hat and belted coat, purposeful in her movements as she turned to help down an elegant old lady with her suitcase and summoned a porter to her. Then she spotted Paul and hurried towards him, her face open and alive. They clung together briefly and the warm, solid reality of her, her flowery scent, the sparkle of her kind eyes, made everything feel all right. They looked one another up and down and laughed.
‘Still the same Sarah?’ he teased. It was what he always asked.
‘Same as ever.’ Her habitual answer.
‘And I too.’ His anxiety was quelled, but not the thrill of nervous excitement.
He took her small case from her and waited while she located her ticket. ‘The journey was fine,’ she said in answer to his question as they walked together to the barrier. ‘That lady you saw me helping got on at Ipswich. She’s off to meet the man her parents wouldn’t let her marry forty years ago! She hasn’t seen him all that time, just think of that! It’s the war, you see. It brings people together as well as driving them apart.’
Paul smiled at her cheerfulness, but saw she was on edge, too. He steered her to the station café where, they agreed, they would sit in the warm fug to drink tea and discuss their plans for the evening. Inside it was so full, the windows had misted up. It smelled of frying and wet wool. Someone was leaving and they pounced on the table. Paul watched her bright face as she enquired of the waitress about cake, and with his eyes he traced the strong lines of her features, the pale shine of her wavy, shoulder-length hair, her wide-spaced gaze. It was impossible to see her without being assured of her honesty and reliability. She was his lodestone in a world in which he had lost his bearings. When she removed her gloves he captured her hands, touched to see that they were as calloused as his. He stroked her fingers tenderly.
‘You work too hard.’
‘So do you,’ she laughed. ‘You look so strong now. Stronger than ever, I mean.’
‘The work is not so bad.’ He’d decided not to complain. Their short time together mustn’t be wasted. ‘You look so well, a healthy colour. Tell me, how are your mother and sister?’
‘Oh, they send their regards.’
‘Even Diane?’
‘Of course.’
He laughed. It was a joke between them that Diane didn’t approve of him. Sarah insisted that this was nonsense. Paul suspected that she was wrong and she knew it.
‘How is she, Diane?’ he asked in a low voice, but at that moment the waitress arrived with a tray and began to lay out a piping hot teapot, cups and saucers and a plate of rather small and unappealing rock buns.
When she’d gone, Sarah said, ‘Let’s not talk about her now. Where are we going this evening?’
