The Escape Read online

  ‘Wait, wait a moment. Slow down. What British prisoners? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Shut your mouth, Jean-Paul, look, there are soldiers coming,’ Henri said, slapping his friend on the shoulder.

  Detta turned. Tom and Gordon appeared through the thick air, but all you could see were two men in Wehrmacht jackets. Jean-Pierre muttered an expletive and began to pull the door to. Detta put her foot in the way. ‘Wait.’

  ‘What are you doing, you silly girl? We don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘You need to let them in!’

  ‘You’re crazy.’ The door banged against her foot, a hand shoved at her shoulder.

  Tom and Gordon were now almost at the doorway. A kick dislodged her foot, and the door was shutting. She jammed the fingers of her left hand inside as it slammed to.

  The pain was immense, despite the protection of her glove, and she cried out. At the sound, Jean-Pierre relaxed his grip on the door, and she managed to get her boot wedged back in the gap. ‘Show your RAF uniforms, they don’t believe me,’ she called out behind her, praying there was nobody walking up the path behind them to see or hear what was going on. ‘Regardez,’ she yelled, as the airmen crowded towards the sliver of open doorway to show their RAF badges hidden under the Wehrmacht jackets.

  Then the barracks door was flung open, and the two British men were welcomed in with back slaps and laughter. Jean-Paul, distraught at the pain he’d just caused her, ushered Detta away to run her bruised fingers under a cold tap. Henri spirited the escapees upstairs.

  Between apologizing for hurting her hand and forcing her to drink a tot of vodka to numb the pain, Jean-Paul explained that he and Henri were just on their way out to visit their Polish girlfriends up on the farmstead. He said they could leave their ID papers for Tom and Gordon. That way, if the SS searched the barracks, at least every man would have documents to show. Word was sent round, and Detta saw that the old Wehrmacht jackets were tossed on the kitchen fire.

  Tom, now wearing grubby worker’s overalls, came back downstairs with Henri (Gordon had been left to recover upstairs). Detta, already on her way to the door, quickly translated the plan about the ID papers. ‘I should go,’ she said, as soon as it was settled.

  Tom took her right hand as she made to leave. ‘You’ve just saved my life. Thank you.’

  ‘Nicht zu danken.’ She wrenched her hand away. Nothing to thank me for. If she said any more, she would have broken down. Better to leave now, while she still could. She pulled open the barracks door and ran out into the icy blankness, not looking back.

  Chapter 20

  November 1989, Devon

  Odette

  I touch the base of my neck, feeling the bare skin there. I notice my hands are shaking. I realize there’s only one thing I can do now. I pull on my camel coat and pluck my car keys from the hook. My Fiesta, my little old faithful, waits at the kerb. People always blame cars for being unreliable, I think, shifting in behind the wheel, but to my mind it is people who are not to be relied on. I slam the car door and twist the key in the ignition.

  I squint into the low autumn sunshine, negotiating the Saturday morning traffic queues on the bypass, chugging through the industrial estate, and out on to the dual carriageway. I push my foot down hard on the accelerator and change lanes to overtake a lorry on the hill. I exit the slip road and turn off onto the country lanes, flexing my fingers on the steering wheel. What is this feeling that is stuffed so far up my nostrils and down my throat that I feel as if I’m suffocating? There’s a sharp pain in my forehead. It flickers on and off like a loose connection. But I have driven this way so often I do not need to concentrate. It is almost reflexive, the points where I need to indicate, turn, get into a low gear for a sharp corner. The hedge banks are high, the road a twisted shadow pulled between. As I slow into second to negotiate a blind corner at the top of a hill there is a flash of red, a sudden lurch, and a thud as two vehicles make contact.

  I look up and see the startled chubby face of a woman, through the windscreen of a post office van. Her mouth gapes in a surprised ‘oh’. I switch off the engine, pull on the handbrake and turn on the hazard lights. I reach into the glove compartment and take out the photocopy of my insurance policy. I do these things slowly, deliberately, giving myself a chance to calm down. I get out of the car. The woman gets out too, wobbling under her too-tight polyester uniform. We face each other across bonnets. ‘Are you okay?’ she says.

  ‘Fine, I think,’ I reply, rubbing the back of my neck where it pulled with the momentum.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m so . . .’ The woman stops herself. ‘But you are okay, aren’t you?’

  I look at the position of the vehicles. The post office van is on the wrong side of the road. ‘I think we should exchange details,’ I say, and pass her the sheet of paper.

  ‘Yes of course.’ She gives me a Royal Mail business card. ‘It’s my first day,’ she says as she hands it over. ‘I’ve not been this way before and I didn’t realize how sharp the corner—’

  ‘These lanes can take a while to get used to,’ I interrupt, glancing at the damage to my car: the wing will need beating out. I look at the van: crumpled bumper, shattered glass. I think of all the sacks of mail in the back – bills, postcards, birthday presents, catalogues and love letters.

  I think of the postcard of Lossen: torn and fixed, lost for years. Miranda has it now. She has promised to go there, take photographs, find my necklace. She thinks this is a favour for her grandmother, but it is more than that, it is a chance for her to escape.

  And then I remember one particular letter, sent without a stamp, forty-four years ago. How it changed my life forever. ‘It was my fault. I was going too fast,’ I say to the post office woman. ‘You can tell your boss I’ve admitted liability. I’ll make sure my insurance company pays.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ I say. ‘The Royal Mail did me a favour, once, a long time ago. I’ll just think of this as payback.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ A hesitant smile begins to take hold on her anxious face.

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you so much!’ she says. I get back in, and manoeuvre my car into a niche in the hedgerow, letting the red post office van inch past. The woman mouths a final thank you as she drives away, and I drive on.

  The church is at the far end of the High Street. It is old, Norman, with a rectangular tower and castellations. A large yew tree casts long shadows across the gravestones, and the church itself is a solid silhouette against the fuzzy golden morning fields behind. I park the Fiesta by the lychgate. I follow the path around the side of the church, skirting the granite buttresses, and then strike off between the graves. Behind the church the long grass is still dew-drenched. Cold water seeps into my suede shoes as I walk towards the far corner, where a bramble-topped dry stone wall separates the graveyard from the fields beyond.

  I kneel on the rectangular patch of quartz aggregate in front of the black headstone. The stones dig into my knees as I reach across and stroke the cool marble with my fingertips. ‘We need to talk,’ I say aloud, confident that no one but the crows are listening. ‘I know I promised. No dragging up the past, no going back. But that was forty-four years ago, darling. And everything has changed, don’t you see? So I have had to break that promise. Can you forgive me?’

  There is no answer, just the distant cawing of crows and a rustle as the wind catches the branches overhead. But I know he’s heard, and I know he understands. For forty-four years I have been a British wife, mother, widow, business owner. But I can’t hide from the past anymore.

  Chapter 21

  January 1945, Nazi Germany

  Tom

  He went upstairs after she left. Not all the Frenchmen were as friendly as the two who’d given them the ID papers; most ignored them, but they’d been given a cup of black ersatz coffee, and he’d shared out a few cigarettes in return. Gordon lay under the covers of a thin cot bed. There was one other man i
n the room, with a drooping moustache, who looked up from the piece of wood he was whittling as Tom walked in, and nodded in his direction, before returning to his task.

  ‘D’you know what happened to our RAF jackets?’ Tom said.

  ‘Inside the palliasse – the SS boys are not likely to look there, not if I’m lying on top of it, asleep, anyway.’

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Is it sewed up?’

  ‘Chap over there did it, fast as lightening.’ Gordon had colour in his cheeks, underneath the scrubby week-long growth of beard. The rest, food and medicine had begun to revive him, despite the circumstances.

  ‘Merci,’ Tom said to the man with the whittling knife. It was just about all the French he remembered from school. He hoped to God the SS chaps had been as slack in French classes as he had.

  ‘C’est rien.’ The man parted his lips in a snaggletoothed smile.

  ‘Smoke?’ Gordon pulled out his almost empty packet of Pall Mall from under the bedclothes and offered them out. There were only three left in the packet, so Tom offered to share, but Gordon said no, he felt like celebrating with a whole one. So they all sparked up. ‘Did us proud, your girl, in the end,’ Gordon said, sitting up in the thin bed and sucking on his fag. ‘Made it seem like a piece of cake, getting us in here.’

  ‘Suppose she did,’ Tom said, swilling smoke round his mouth and turning towards the window before exhaling. He viewed the outdoors through a triple screen: the smoke, the frosted pane and the foggy air beyond. He could still see her, just about, a distant figure with a blue scarf over her head, hurrying down the track past the church. Beyond the line of trees that bordered the main road, army trucks flew past. His girl, Gordon had said. His – had she been his? Just for those few short hours? Tom narrowed his eyes, inhaled again, watching her get smaller and smaller, getting swallowed up in the grey-whiteness. At the point where the track met the path from the church, she was joined by another figure. It was the priest, coming from the other direction, going to church to prepare for the Sunday service, Tom supposed. He watched them meet, saw their heads bend, bodies lean inwards, momentarily, then pull apart.

  The priest has just whispered something to her, Tom thought. What has he said?

  This time when he exhaled Tom blew the smoke sideways, and moved closer to the frosted glass, wiping a patch away with his forefinger to see more clearly.

  She was just a tiny distant blur, now, approaching the beech trees that separated the manse from the road. Then, as he watched, shadows seemed to separate themselves from the tree trunks: dark silhouettes of men and dogs. The manse door opened like a mouth and gulped them all inside.

  Had her mother had enough time to erase all traces of their stay: wedge the loose floorboard back in place; push the bookcase against the wall – and what about the half-used medicines and the razor in the bathroom? Had they been well hidden, too?

  He’d almost finished his cigarette now, the ash was a toppling chimney in his shaking fingers.

  With the artillery sounds from the frontline, and the traffic from the road, he couldn’t possibly hear anything from the manse. He wouldn’t hear if there were barks, screams or gunshots. His face was so close to the cool glass that he could feel the kiss of frost crystals against his cheek. There was a huge barrage, then, and the windowpane shook.

  ‘It won’t be long, now, will it?’ Gordon said, in the momentary silence that followed. ‘How do you say “close” in French?’ Tom yanked his gaze away from the manse and looked at his friend, lying there on the bed, fag in his mouth. Gordon nodded at the Frenchman, and made a gesture with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, putting them so close that they were almost touching, with just a tiny chink in between. ‘Those Reds are this fucking close,’ he said, squinting through the gap at the Frenchman.

  ‘Oui,’ the man replied, pausing from his whittling to look up.

  Tom turned away from them and gazed back outside. The manse door was closed now. Who knew what was going on inside? But spilling up from the village street and towards the church were clusters of people in hats and coats. I should be happy, Tom thought. For two years, eleven months and two days, all I have wanted is to escape and get back to Blighty, and I’m almost there – this close – I should be over the bloody moon.

  The church bell began to toll, a baleful clanging adding to the symphony of war. The church doors opened, and he watched as villagers began to roll along the main road and towards the churchyard, pulled in by the sound. A starling suddenly fluttered in the bare tree branches, at eye height to his vantage point, making a sphere of mistletoe wobble like a Christmas bauble. Christmas mistletoe– they hadn’t needed that excuse last night. He remembered the touch of her lips on his and warmth rose up inside him at the thought.

  Tom inhaled the last vestiges of lit tobacco and stubbed the butt out in the cracked saucer on the windowsill. He turned away from the outdoors. She was gone, and it was too late. Gordon lay in bed, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. He caught Tom’s eye as he turned and raised quizzical brows.

  ‘Why didn’t I tell her how I felt when I had the chance?’ Tom said.

  Detta

  Her knees ached from kneeling. Father Richter was having them pray even longer than usual: forgive those who sin against us; deliver us from evil. The scent of damp clothes mingled with incense. Detta couldn’t think about God. She kept wondering what was happening in the French accommodation block.

  When they’d completed their fruitless search of the manse, the SS field police had allowed them to go to the Sunday service, but had followed them on the path, stalking up past the church towards the French barracks.

  Detta opened her eyes and lifted her head, unable to focus on the droning prayers. The church was fuller than she’d seen it in weeks. She looked out over the sea of bowed heads: the long-nosed pharmacist and his dumpling-faced wife; the singing teacher, who always dressed in shades of beige, and her frowning husband with his toothbrush moustache; the baker and his enormous tribe of boys, all dressed in brown, plumped like a batch of burnt rolls all along the pew beside him; the elderly couple from the corner house, who liked to leave out food for the half-starved farm cats. And the scrawny butcher’s wife, Frau Lipp, hard and sharp as a shard of glass – she had shrunk to half her size since they’d executed her husband for refusing to be conscripted. (He’d done his duty in the last war, he’d said, stony-faced, with brawny arms folded over his blood-spattered apron. He would do anything they asked, but he was too old to take up weapons and fight.) They shot him in front of her, right there in the middle of the village. Could Frau Lipp forgive, Detta wondered? And when would they be delivered from evil? When the SS were replaced by the Red Army – what kind of deliverance would that be?

  Father Richter’s prayers were momentarily drowned out by another ferocious volley of fire from across the Oder. The giant chandelier above the altar wobbled. Detta saw the priest mouth ‘Amen’, and open his eyes. He looked straight at her, over the still-bowed heads of the congregation, and made the sign of the cross.

  There was a pause, a shuffle, as everyone got up off their knees and sat back in the pew, and the guns were silent, just for a few moments.

  That was when she heard it: two clear shots, one after another, crack-crack, somewhere close by. Detta flinched, and her hand flew to her mouth. Two shots. A shot for each of the terrorfliegers.

  So, that was it. He was gone. They both were. It had all been for nothing.

  When they stood up to sing, she felt dizzy and had to reach out to the pew in front to steady herself. The words in the hymn book swam like minnows. Her throat was too dry to do much more than croak.

  Afterwards, she waited with her mother in the churchyard for Father Richter to finish saying goodbye to the congregation: holding hands and muttering words of comfort as they filed past through the open church doorway. Despite the freezing fog, everyone seemed reluctant to go home – the unspoken thought was that this would be the last time t
he whole village attended church together.

  The baker’s boys played tag amongst the tombstones with the Moll girls, who were dressed in identical red pixie hats, looking like swirling drops of blood against the snowy ground. Detta felt sick. She turned so that the French barracks weren’t even in her peripheral vision, tried to deliberately tune in on what people were saying in order not to think about what had just happened. She kept avoiding her mother’s gaze; Mother must have heard those shots, too, and would know what they meant. But even an exchange of looks could be enough to give their complicity away. So instead she looked at the gossiping villagers.

  There were flattened lips and head shaking, eyes rolling heavenwards as the skies reverberated.

  Those Reds can’t be far away – heartless Ivans!

  I heard those bastards even get their womenfolk to fight. Women, firing guns, commanding tanks, can you imagine?

  It can’t be true – but we’ll find out soon enough because it can’t be long now. I’ve been telling Norbert that we should leave this morning, whilst there’s still time, but he won’t listen.

  I think we should wait for the evacuation order. There will be a plan, and transport laid on. Let’s wait for the authorities to take charge, they’ll know when it’s time.

  Well, I’m not going anywhere, I’ve nowhere to go, and in any case, why would I leave and let the Russians smash my windows and rob my till. Over my dead body!

  It will be over your dead body. You heard what those refugees said.

  Ach, that’s just the big towns where that sort of thing happens. A little place like this, the front line will just pass through. We can go to the cellar for a few hours and it will all be over.

  You’re talking nonsense – they’ll ransack the place and you know it. And talking of ransacking, did anyone else get a visit this morning?

  What, from the SS?