Page 36 of The Dark of the Moon
She was quiet for a long time after that, and she closed her eyes again. So I didn’t think I could ask her the other questions I had, about what happened to Janina and Jakub and their baby. I left her sitting there for a bit, in case she wanted to sleep, and went off tolook at some more headstones. But when I was doing a rubbing ofArnaud LeblancLe 6 Juin 1922, she came up behind me and said once I’d finished it was time we cycled home.
It was very hot on the ride home, because we’d stayed so long in the cemetery in Ars-en-Ré, and after we got back and had lunch Philly said she definitely needed a lie-down after all that exercise. I spent the afternoon in my room, laminating my new rubbings and typing up everything she’d told me about the Polish codebreakers because I knew Mum would be very interested to read it when she got back. She might even put it in her book and so I would have helped her a lot.
Then I looked up Sachsenhausen on the internet because I wanted to add a bit about it to my project on concentration camps. Philly wasn’t exaggerating when she said it was especially brutal. More than 200,000 people were interned there between 1936 and 1945. As well as forcing them to work in factories and the local brickworks, the Nazis did experiments on them. They tried out drugs, which they hoped would make Hitler’s troops fight harder. And they also had something called ‘shoe testing detail’. They set out a track with different kinds of surfaces round the edge of the parade ground and prisoners had to march around it for days on end carrying heavy packs, wearing shoes with different materials making up the soles, testing which were the toughest so they could be made into boots for the German army. Some of them dropped dead from exhaustion. Overall, tens of thousands of the prisoners died, from starvation, bad treatment, disease, forced labour and medical experiments. I thought about Antoni and Gwido and Maksymilian who were there among those thousands of people and how brave they’d been.
And then I read about the extermination chambers. There was one they called the ‘neck shot unit’, which is pretty self-explanatory. But they decided it wasn’t an efficient enough way of killing people so they built the first gas chambers there. It was completely horrible.
I stopped researching about Sachsenhausen then. It was too upsetting and was making me feel a bit sick. I knew what I’d learned would probably give me nightmares and I’d need to jump on the trampoline for a very long time.
We made fish fingers and boiled potatoes for supper and Philly let me count out my own peas from the packet to put into a separate pan of boiling water, so I knew it was an even number and didn’t need to count them on my plate. It was a very good day, except for knowing about what went on at Sachsenhausen. I was glad Gwido and Maksymilian made it out of there alive when so many others, including Antoni, did not.
While we were eating our supper, I asked Philly if there could be any possibility that Ben had been sent to a concentration camp. ‘Those were the first places I checked,’ she said. ‘The Red Cross compiled lists of people who’d been there. It was awful looking through them – there were so many names. So many people who’d had to endure those hellish places. I think even the ones who survived never really recovered. But Ben’s name wasn’t on any of the lists, so as far as was possible I could rule that out. Of course, it’s still not impossible. Those lists could never be complete, and many families had to live with the not-knowing where their missing loved ones had ended up. But it seems unlikely Ben was sent to any of the main camps. I exhausted that line of investigation many years ago.’
I like having Philly looking after me. Dad was having his supper with the others at the sailing camp and Mum phoned to say she was really enjoying the writing course.
I think maybe Mum was right when she said it would do us all good to have some time apart, although it will be nice to have everyone back again.
Philly
I must admit, I’m quite enjoying my extra time on the island. Finn is an easy enough charge, even if he does ask a lot of questions. All that cycling too – who’d ever have imagined I’d be riding a bike again after all these years! Thank goodness the Île de Ré is as flat as a pancake. We make a very odd couple, I know, and we attract smiles and waves wherever we go, as well as shouts of encouragement from other cyclists as they go zipping past us on their much more serious bikes, clad in their Lycra shorts and their aerodynamic helmets.
The sea air and sunshine must be doing us both good. There’s a bit more colour in Finn’s cheeks and he seems to be sleeping a little better – at least, I haven’t heard much midnight trampolining. I’m sleeping well enough too, although the questions he asks have stirred up ancient memories. Spending so much time in graveyards probably isn’t helping either. It’s brought the dead closer. I keep having vivid dreams of Ben and Amy, Gwido and Antoni, Noor and Violette. Full-moon dreams. They say it has an effect. Almost eight decades have gone by since I last saw any of them and yet they appear in my dreams as if it were yesterday. Every one of them so full of life. I have aged, where they have not. They wouldn’t recognise me if they were to see me as I am today. An old woman, my body ravaged by the years. Better that than the alternative, though, as the saying goes.
I wonder whether that hobby of Finn’s, making those rubbings of the epitaphs on people’s headstones, is entirely healthy. But it serves my purposes well, the excuse to go looking in cemeteries. It’s rather nice having someone to help me with my search. A lifetime of searching. A fool’s errand, probably. Most people would have given up long ago. I’ve helped find so many others along the way, yet never found the one I’ve really been searching for down the years. Finn seems genuinely interested in hearing about my life as well though. He takes his task of recording my memories very seriously.
‘I’m helping Mum write her book,’ he told me as he set things up to record the next instalment. ‘Then we can make some more money and Dad won’t have to be so worried that we’re spending too much, without him doing a proper job anymore because of looking after me.’
The expression on his pinched face makes my heart ache at times. What a funny combination he is of naivety and wisdom beyond his years. It must be hard for him making friends of his own age when he’s simultaneously older and younger than them.
‘Right then, are you ready? Chocks away, all systems go?’ I asked. And that made him smile as he gave me the thumbs up and hitrecord.
In the wake of Ben’s disappearance, I sleepwalked my way through the next few months in a state of shock. All I wanted to do was to crawl away into some dark cave and be alone with my grief. But I had to keep going, the twins gave me no choice. The Bertrams took me under their wing, both Tony and Barbara, and I spent every day I could at their farmhouse with my babies, where there were lots of extra pairs of hands only too willing to cuddle them and help withthe endless routine of feeding them and changing their nappies. I suppose it was a welcome distraction for the French agents who’d been brought over, playing with the children in between their training sessions. Maybe for some of them it was a reminder of happier times with their own children back home.
I hated not knowing where Ben was. How he was. His German captors knew he was a pilot. Would they treat him with respect, or would they torture him? Would he be sent to a proper prisoner-of-war camp, or to one of those grim-sounding work camps somewhere in Germany or Poland? I couldn’t get the thought of Noor out of my head and what we knew of what had happened to her. The passengers in Ben’s plane had been three French agents being returned to work in one of the Resistance networks. Would they have been able to withstand interrogation and torture? Would the whole circuit have been compromised?
It was a bright April morning and I’d gone over to the farmhouse to help Barbara with the cooking. I’d had a sleepless night with both twins. They were fractious and unsettled, perhaps beginning to teethe or maybe just picking up on their mother’s mood. I was relieved to be able to hand them over to Barbara’s boys, who loved being given the responsibility of pushing the babies up and down the road in front of the house in a big pram. Tony’s car pulled into the driveway. Barbara glanced up from the pastry she was rolling out and frowned. ‘I though he was going to be busy over at the airfield all day today,’ she said.
Through the window I saw him ruffle his sons’ hair and bend down to smile at the twins, then he came into the house, calling my name. I hurried to meet him in the hall.
‘Philly, there’s some news. I wanted to come straight over and tell you. Here, let’s go into the drawing room.’
I perched on the edge of the sofa, nervously wiping my hands on the hem of my apron. ‘Ben ...?’ I said, scarcely daring to hope.
‘We brought back one of our agents this morning. In fact, you might remember her – her cover name is Louise.’
I nodded, recalling a pretty, dark-haired girl who spoke with a cockney accent. Her real name was Violette, she’d told me. Like me, she’d been given a poem to learn, which would be the basis for the codes she’d need to use to transmit messages from France. She’d needed a bit of extra help with her Morse code to get up to speed before her first deployment. We’d practised, using lines from her poem, which bore a striking similarity to mine. I wondered whether the original author had been the same for both.
Tony continued, ‘Well, she was dropped in a few weeks ago but was caught by Vichy police and interrogated. She was released, though, and found her way to a local Resistance cell, who managed to get a message out. One of the Special Duties boys picked her up last night.’
He cleared his throat before going on. ‘One of her contacts over there spoke of a British pilot who’d been captured by the Germans in the western area of the Loire, near Tours. It has to have been Ben. He was taken to Poitiers to be interrogated by the Gestapo but gave nothing away. He’d attempted to escape from the prison there, but was recaptured. When he was last seen, though, he was in good health.’
He stopped. My heart lurched with a jolt of simultaneous hope and despair.
‘That’s it?’ I said, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I’d hoped for more. I was always hoping for more.
‘Yes. I appreciate it’s not much, but at least we know for certain that he’s still alive. And we’ve moved the focus of our search to the Poitiers area. There’s a circuit operating there. We’re asking them to try to get us more information. He’s most probably being held in a prison in the area.’
I knew I should have been grateful that they were going to so much effort. Ben was just one of many who’d gone missing. Once I’d been able to swallow my disappointment that they hadn’t found him yet, that he still wasn’t coming home, I did give thanks for the news he was still alive. But if he was in the hands of the Gestapo, his future was uncertain. He was incarcerated somewhere. He could still be executed on a whim, or sent to the camps at any moment. The news had punctuated the not-knowing with a glimmer of hope, but the clouds of doubt and grief soon obscured it once again.
