Chapter 10 #2
Some kind of noisy argument was erupting in the station between the German SS officers and the British guards.
It had been hard to make sense of it at first, because the British guards were shouting orders in German and the Germans were protesting back in English.
The words ‘Geneva Convention’ and ‘sod the Geneva Convention’ were being batted back and forth.
‘Ructions!’ Cora said, curling her cold fingers up into the warmth of her sleeves.
Men were still pouring off the train, hundreds of them with their kit bags slung over their shoulders and cases in their hands.
The platform was crowded, and the SS officers stood firm at the funnel end of the station like a cork in a bottle.
When the guards ordered the prisoners to form ranks they did so smartly enough but there was nowhere to go.
Disturbed by the almighty racket outside his window, Mr Hill, the stationmaster renowned for his short fuse, came out of his office in a terrible temper to find out what was going on.
He was a fair man though, furious with both British and Germans alike, and he commanded them all to leave his station immediately with the power and authority that his status gave him.
The crowd held its breath.
But marvellous, it was! The SS officers picked up their bags and began to goose-step sharply out of the station. Dew, but their faces were hard and their eyes were cold. After Sieg Heiling energetically they began to sing some defiant marching song.
Behind them, also singing and marching but with less patriotic vigour, was the tired, motley rag-tag of ordinary battle-bruised soldiers. They stared straight ahead, eyes blank and faces set. Cora watched them from the pavements with despair in her eyes.
She hadn’t been prepared for the unexpected novelty of seeing so many ordinary men her own age trudging from the station, carrying their possessions, heads down, defeated, humiliated, lost in a world of their own misery.
Or trying to get lost in it, she thought; except for one man near the back of the line.
He didn’t look defeated at all. He was looking around with intense interest, like a sightseer, goose-stepping as energetically as the rest of them.
Fair hair showed beneath his grey cap, and his grey eyes were bright and keen.
Cora stared at him. There was no good reason why, out of all of the Heil Hitlering river of fifteen hundred marching men, this one should catch her eye. There was nothing particularly distinctive about his features – he had a bland, regular face – but he looked as pure and vital as an angel.
She glanced at Megan, but Megan didn’t seem to notice. Turning back, Cora saw him again immediately as if he was lit up, every thundering goose-step bringing him closer to her, until he was shielded from her line of sight momentarily by one of the guards.
As he came back into view, the German sensed her gaze, caught her eye and gave a sudden smile.
Instinctively Cora smiled back, woman to man, smile to smile, as if she knew him, body language familiar to them both, and then above the noise of jackboots, a familiar voice screamed in fury:
‘Murderers!’
It pierced the air with hate and there was a scuffle as Cora saw her mother knock his cap clean off his head.
‘You bloody, bloody murderers!’ Jane screamed, and was pushed to one side by a guard.
Oh, lor. Cora’s heart turned over clumsily in her chest.
The soldier stumbled and tried to get his cap back, and a murmur of approval rose from the crowd.
‘Your mam said bloody,’ Megan observed to Cora in sympathy.
‘I know.’
The young German’s grey eyes were desperate, then he was prodded onward by his marching comrades and now she could only see the back of the soldier’s bobbing bare head and ruffled fair hair.
Cora had the impression of the train pulling out of the station and curving around the track out of sight, taking him with it. Oh, Mam, she thought in despair, because she’d seen her mother’s naked agony for the first time.
The way her mother coped with trauma was to put her feelings into cold storage.
After Owen went away, their lives had gone on pretty much as usual and it was a blessing to Cora that Dio hadn’t been driven to wearing a sandwich board, and that her mother hadn’t taken to her bed like Megan’s mother had. Their normality had made her normal too.
But now she’d had a glimpse of her mother’s true feelings and she wished she hadn’t. It was like seeing her parading naked through the town and Cora was hotly ashamed on her behalf. And now she began to wonder what was going on in her father’s head that he didn’t want anyone to know about.
More uncertainty in an uncertain world.
Cora tried to push through the ranks of marching men to reach her mother but she was stopped by a guard who blocked her way.
In between the bobbing heads Cora caught glimpses of her mother like snapshots, as if she was seeing her for the first time: vulnerable, looking older than her years, her hair turning grey, chapped hands worn red by housework.
‘Get back, Miss,’ the guard ordered.
‘Can’t you let me through? My mother’s upset. They killed my brother.’
‘They killed a lot more people than him,’ the guard said tiredly.
Cora returned to her friends. They watched the procession of prisoners and guards until they marched out of sight.
‘So that’s the enemy,’ Megan said. She sounded puzzled, as if the enemy was a disappointment.
Gladdie was staring at the prisoners blankly and she started fiddling with her watch as if this was the kind of thing that happened all the time.
Cora saw the soldier’s cap on the ground, trampled and filthy now, and kept her eye on it.
The British guards were taking up the rear with their rifles, and one of them kicked it to one side.
Cora ran across, and picked it up. She pressed it to her nose, smelling the soldier’s hair oil in the fabric, and stuffed it in her pocket.
Her mother, Jane, was back on the kerb next to Idwal again, staring into thin air, her face stiff. Everyone was moving on except them.
Cold? Oh, she was cold all right. Jane had always had the ability to freeze people out, and now she’d frozen herself out. She was in a trance, as if she was hoping no one could see her because she’d made a spectacle of herself.
‘I never thought it of you, Jane,’ Idwal, the pacifist, said askance, and his gaze went back to the tail end of the noisy procession stomping past the shops on their way to Island Farm Camp.
Cora went to put her hand on her mother’s arm but she could feel the crackle of her mother’s mood icily close to the surface. ‘Let’s go home,’ she said.
‘I can’t forgive them,’ Jane said to her in a deep, throbbing voice, ‘and I don’t care if I burn in hell for it. You can’t forgive someone who doesn’t repent, can you? I looked into their eyes, Cora, and what I saw there—’
‘Shh, I know,’ Cora said quickly, because she too had looked into the eyes of the SS officers and what she’d seen there was contempt.
‘I knocked a German’s cap off,’ Jane said proudly, her mouth twisting with bitter pleasure. ‘He looked too pleased with himself by half.’
‘I know, I saw you do it,’ Cora said, keeping her voice neutral.
‘Good.’ They stared at each other nervously, eyes glittering, corrupted by their own anger.
‘Tell you the truth now, both of you, I thought it was uncalled for,’ Idwal said.
He looked down at his sandwich board as if to remind himself of its message.
‘Love thine enemy,’ he said, and his thin face was troubled.
‘But you know, having seen them close up like, I’m not at all sure they want to be loved, not by us, anyway,’ he said slowly, flattening his hair with his hands.
‘I get the feeling that to them, we are the enemy.’
‘Fool,’ Jane snapped.
Idwal lifted his shaggy eyebrows away from his honest brown eyes. ‘I know. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Here’s Megan. Hello, bach,’ he said brightly to his daughter. ‘I thought you hadn’t seen me from over the road.’
‘Hello, Tad. You missed an opportunity there,’ Megan said. ‘You should have written your sign in German and converted the lot of them.’
‘Have it bilingual, you mean?’
‘Yes. Works both ways,’ she said.
‘So I would be telling the Germans to love us.’ He thought this radical idea over for a moment. ‘That puts a different complexion on it altogether.’
‘I know, Dad. I wasn’t being serious.’
Cora felt different, charged, disturbed. She had expected to feel triumphant at the Germans being marched to prison but instead she felt sick, as if she’d fallen into bad company and was regretting it. ‘We’d better head back, Meg,’ she said to her. ‘Where’s Gladdie got to?’
‘She’s gone after them. Her dad said to keep an eye out because they’re duty bound to make a break for it, on Hitler’s orders.’
‘And Gladdie’s gone to put a stop to it, has she?
’ It was meant to be funny, but as soon as Cora said it she knew it wasn’t funny at all because they could see for themselves that the prisoners far outnumbered the guards and the guards looked tired, as if they’d seen too much of the war already and they’d had enough of it.
‘They’ll get shot if they try anything,’ she said.
‘Yes. Let them try.’ Jane’s eyes were hard behind her glasses, and in her new, deeply vengeful, unmotherly voice she added, ‘I’ll shoot them myself in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’
‘I know you would.’ Cora felt depressed. Her mother had been broken for the past four years and they had pretended not to notice the cracks. Well, she could see them now plainly enough and it was an ugly sight. She wanted to look away.
The war had tipped them up and spilled them out and it was hard to untangle themselves from who they had been before it.
From now on, she thought, they were always going to be uncertain about their own selves and who they were, and how they were capable of thinking and acting.
Cora had always thought she had a solid core of decency in her, that she knew right from wrong.
But how was one really supposed to know?
As they headed back home, she crushed the faded cap in her pocket and then she smelled her fingers.
The spoils of war, she thought. The cap was softened with wear and weather.
Her heart broke when she thought of the soldier’s bright smile, brief and so quickly erased.
She pondered on her mother’s choice of victim, kicking a man when he was down.
She would have been better taking revenge on the SS officers if she’d wanted to make a point, and sent their caps flying instead.
Maybe the idea didn’t occur to Jane straightaway, that was the best explanation, but to be honest those men at the head of the two columns didn’t look the sort to take violence lightly.
It was the soldier’s sudden happy smile that had caught the attention of both of them in different ways and for different reasons.
And even worse, the shouting and the well-aimed blow hadn’t settled the score for Jane at all. On the contrary, it seemed to have stoked her to a greater fury.
For a moment Cora shivered. She had a vision of Jane’s emotions as rampant, raging things, animals to be kept subdued as brutally as possible by whatever means available, with chains and whips to bind them and tie them down.
But it was too late now.
Jane had tasted violence and liked it, and she was hell bent on revenge.