Chapter 55
‘Wait till I get my knees straight,’ Megan said, exiting the taxi in a crouch, bunching her yellow dress around her thighs out of modesty.
Once inside the boundary fence the five of them walked or hobbled in single file along the shady, musty, tree-lined path, with the sun flickering through the branches, teasing them with warmth.
All of a sudden, the exciting, alarming noise of German marching music startled them, and they jumped, and looked at each other wide-eyed.
Cleverly, to enhance the camp’s experience, the past blared out of speakers hidden in the undergrowth and Cora swung her arms, tempted to march along to it.
It had a good, enlivening tempo that got the blood going.
‘Dew, it takes you back, doesn’t it!’ Gladdie puffed from behind her, her thoughts going down the same route and her face flushed as pink as her hair.
‘All that singing used to drive my father into a rage, you know, Lottie. He thought singing was the privilege of the Welsh, and in his mind they’d stolen our own best characteristic from us.
When they sang long into the night he thought that was deliberate, too, to keep us awake.
It tortured him. He took it personally, didn’t he, Cora? ’
‘I know,’ Cora said. ‘I remember.’
Megan turned to Lottie. ‘My father, Idwal, was a miner and a preacher. He lost his mind during the first years of the war with good reason, and found it again later. Some said it was the other way round, that he was in his right mind to begin with and then he lost it for the rest of his days. It depended on the viewpoint, of course.’
Lottie laughed.
‘I preferred the singing to the commotion the Germans made,’ Cora said, ‘banging pots and pans in protest and shouting Heil Hitler at the tops of their voices. As if their lives depended on it!’
The path through the woods led to the camp, which was surrounded by a wire fence.
The entrance gate was manned by an unsmiling sentry guard in khaki uniform who took their tickets and handed them over to a soldier who saluted them and escorted them across to the hut.
It felt seriously thorough and alarmingly authentic.
The present-day Hut 9 had its own NAAFI, and two women from the Re-Enactment Society, with aprons around their uniforms, were selling cakes and coffee through a hatch.
‘Wartime Favourites from Original Recipes’, announced a sign.
‘There’s thorough,’ Megan said to them, raising her eyebrows. ‘But it’s a mistake. From what I remember, even in wartime those recipes were a disappointment.’
Cora held onto Gwyn’s strong linen-clad arm to go inside the hut, any excuse to be close to her son. He had lovely arms and he was a good hugger. His arms were made for hugging and his mouth was made for smiling.
It had atmosphere, that hut; she felt it as soon she walked in through the door. She took a deep breath. It smelled of dry plaster warmed by sunlight. The whitewash was flaking off the walls. So this was where Frank lived!
The long corridor was shady, opening onto a series of small rooms.
Gladdie was humming ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ softly because Charles had lived here too, the GI she’d been scared to love.
There was no guide, and so they wandered along the corridor looking into rooms as the fancy took them. They were furnished just as they would have been during the war, a stove, drying laundry hanging from a clothes maid, two wooden chairs by the table, a desk.
Cora imagined the prisoners living here, locked up together far away from their homes, waiting for the time to pass.
She caught a glimpse of an old brown wireless through an open door. Her parents had had one just like it. It was like stepping into the past. ‘Look, remember that, Gwyn?’ she asked him.
‘No, can’t say I do.’
She let Gwyn’s arm go and turned to beckon Gladdie. ‘Come and see this!’
But further inside the room, three black-and-grey-uniformed SS officers were sitting at a table, and they looked up at them from their card game, sharp and large as life.
‘Sorry,’ she said, backing into Gladdie, her heart jolting.
Well, that was ridiculous when she knew very well they were historians and nothing more than that.
Gwyn popped his head in to look at the room after her, to see what had disturbed her. ‘Oh, hullo,’ he said to them amiably.
‘They look smart though, don’t they?’ Gladdie said, smoothing back her pink hair. ‘Better than our lot.’
‘You sound just like Enid.’
What Cora really wanted to see was the escape tunnel in Frank’s room. It had always fascinated her, the fact that he and other ordinary men with very little in the way of equipment could, over months, dig their way deep underground through orange Welsh clay to freedom.
Elisavet was walking along the corridor from the other direction, looking thoughtful, dark hair shrouding her shoulders. Like someone out of a fairy story, Cora thought.
‘It’s crazy,’ Lottie said, coming out of a small kitchen. ‘I don’t get it. They brought prisoners all the way from Europe just to lock them up here?’
‘Well – it was to save them from killing our chaps,’ Cora said reasonably.
‘Yeah, I know, but – who decides who is the enemy? I mean, who has a right to say that?’
‘Churchill did,’ Megan said, turning to look at her doubtfully. ‘You’ve heard of Winston Churchill, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, of course I have,’ Lottie said. ‘I’m talking about morally. Who decides who the good guys are? How are you supposed to know?’
Elisavet caught Cora’s eye and raised her eyebrows.
‘We all think we’re the good guys,’ Cora said. ‘That’s the problem.’ She pressed her palms against the cool wall to feel the past against her skin; the dust of the past powdered them.
She could sense the emotions in the walls: anger, discipline, boredom, homesickness.
Old places held memories in their fabric and she could feel the draught Frank made as he walked briskly up and down these corridors in his uniform.
She understood now why the place had the reputation of being haunted even though no one had died here.
Well, hang on, that wasn’t entirely accurate, was it? One man had died here, she knew that, because Frank had told her about him. Couldn’t remember his name, but it would come to her. Otto. That was it.
She was keen to see the escape tunnel under the bunk where Frank slept but the entrance to the tunnel had been boarded over.
The room was basic, furnished with a couple of wooden straw-seated chairs.
A grey uniform was hanging on the foot of the bed, a cap was perched on a bed post. The beds were neatly made, grey woollen blankets lacy with moth holes tucked under a thin mattress.
She stroked the blanket gently as if she was trying not to disturb him. She had the urge to lie on it.
‘Cora!’ Elisavet said with a sudden, thrilling laugh.
Cora looked at her in delight. Elisavet was happy! It was as joyful and as unexpected as a baby’s first smile. And she was the cause of it, even if she couldn’t for the life of her think why. ‘I was looking at the moth holes.’
‘Not moths, the painting,’ Elisavet said, pointing. ‘Look!’
‘Lor!’ On the wall at the foot of the bunks was a life-sized drawing of a pin-up girl with her hands behind her head, round breasts, a lavish amount of pubic hair, and one eyebrow raised quizzically.
That eyebrow. That was the giveaway.
Well, not just that. In neat, black, Gothic lettering, as if the suggestive eyebrow wasn’t enough to identify her by, was her name. Cora.
‘Bloody hell, Cora!’ Gladdie said, coming up behind her. She clapped her hand on Cora’s shoulder. ‘It’s you, girl. Look at you! Shameless, you are!’
Cora felt her mind jumping into a different dimension. She was twenty again, in love, and guilty for all sorts of reasons. ‘Come on, let’s get out, quick,’ she said, trying to push them out of the room. ‘Don’t let Lottie see it.’
‘See what?’ Lottie asked from the doorway.
Too late.
Lottie put her hands on her grandmother’s shoulders and looked at the drawing over her head.
Her mood changed to anger and she turned to them with a mixture of fury and indignation.
‘Why would anyone draw me like that? That is – that’s harassment.
Seriously, trust me, I didn’t know anything about it – I don’t even—’
‘Calm down, Lottie, it’s not you, it’s Cora,’ Megan said, pulling up one of the wooden chairs to get a better look and so that her wild grey hair wouldn’t block their view, because she was thoughtful like that. ‘Got her name on it, see?’
‘Oh! Wow.’ Lottie quickly fanned her flushed face with her hand. She wasn’t quite so appalled now. ‘Wow. Yeah. Yikes! How embarrassing for you.’
‘I’m not embarrassed,’ Cora said. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m rather proud.’
Although it couldn’t be described as an entirely accurate representation of her, it was too stylised for that and her breasts were round as apples but nevertheless the artist had caught something of her and although Cora felt she should be as indignant as Lottie, she also thought with a thrilling, secret smile: that’s what I looked like to him all those years ago. It’s how Frank imagined me.
Frank had never mentioned this mural of her, not in all their time together, but he had told her about the artistic sketches of girls they’d distracted the guards with as they dug their tunnel and she’d found it funny. She still did. And for all her faults, she wasn’t a hypocrite.
The distraction had worked, too. In her own small way, she’d helped him to escape. The thought amused her.
They looked at the drawing, and it was hard to know why it was so compelling. Apart from the arched eyebrow that promised all manner of earthly delight, it had an innocence about it, the rounded breasts, the neat navel, the pubic hair.
‘Doesn’t it bother you knowing that they were looking at you that way?’ Lottie asked.