A Possible Life Read online

  There was a further roll call at the end of the day, followed by a watery soup of swede or turnip in the bunkhouse. For the hours of darkness they were left alone by the Germans with only the Polish dormitory prefect, or ‘DP’ as Trembath called him, telling them what to do. The ablutions room had a stone floor, a row of basins and yards of overhead pipework for showers. What it lacked was water. The lavatories were overflowing; a kind of pit had been excavated behind them, though many prisoners were too enfeebled to make the journey.

  In the middle of the third night, there was a commotion as a group of six SS men came into the room for what they called a ‘fitness test’. The prisoners were lined up naked and shivering while the Germans walked between the ranks. Those incapable of standing were hauled out by the DP and two other trusted prisoners. From outside, a few moments later, came the sound of gunshots; but it seemed a further cull was needed.

  Geoffrey puffed out his chest and stood tall, though he was confident that even after the meagre food of occupied France he was in better condition than most. The concrete floor was cold on his bare feet. A further twenty men were taken out; others were pointed back to the bunks; but a line of fifty naked, shivering men remained. There was a laughing confabulation among the SS men, after which one with a long whip flicked it at the first naked prisoner. It grazed his side, leaving a weal below the ribs. The plaited leather was about six feet long with a metal-weighted tip; it took considerable judgement and wrist action to land the snap exactly – and this was their sport. When they had tired of legs and torso, their gaze turned to the men’s genitals, a difficult target, but one that would cause the most pain. There was no gambling or sense of competition; the inflicting of agony was amusement enough. The guards were allowed three turns each before passing the whip on. Geoffrey turned his eyes to the ceiling where a row of dim electric bulbs was strung, wondering whether it was better to be prepared for the bite of the whip or to be taken by surprise. A man three along from him fell howling and shrieking to the ground while the guards laughed. Geoffrey, when his turn came, escaped with no more than a flick across the upper thigh, shortly after which the guards tired of the game and went to their own beds.

  That night, lying close between Trembath and the Pole, Geoffrey thought how he might take his mind off where he was – off the pain in his thigh, the hunger in his belly – and open the gateway to sleep. He pushed his mind as far as he could from his surroundings. There was a particular cricket ground that had meant a great deal to him when he was growing up. It had a cedar tree in one corner, near the pavilion, a hedge that ran along the road and could be cleared with a mighty heave over midwicket, a bowling green at one end and cow pastures at the other. It was, for a club ground, remarkably flat and true; it was a place to score hundreds, though it never played quite as easily as might be expected, and you had to work for your runs. Now he imagined himself going out to bat on a bright Saturday morning in July, with perhaps a hundred people watching from deckchairs and benches at the side of the ground. There would be picnics on rugs laid out on the grass; boys practising their own games with smaller bats and balls; women in floral cotton print dresses; but above all there would be the concentration of the players in the middle – the intensity of struggle that was never sensed from the boundary.

  He liked games with a morning start so he could make his mark at the crease with a stud from his boot in the brightest possible light. He talked to himself all the time he was facing, his lips moving, as he urged himself to watch the ball. That was all his self-instruction: watch it, fasten it to your eye like a fish on a hook. Once, against a slow left-armer, he had gone down the wicket, and as he swung through the ball, dispatching it high over long on for six, he swore he had seen at the moment of impact the slight mark made by the risen seam as its tough stitching met the soft face of the willow.

  And to go into lunch undefeated on 48 or 55, to the congratulations of his teammates and the shy smiles of sisters and mothers and girlfriends; to sit at the long trestle and attack his plate of ham and tongue salad, biscuits and cheese, but not eating too much and drinking only a half-pint of beer from the barrel knowing that in the afternoon heat much more endeavour would be required of him because he so passionately wanted his side to win. Outside the pavilion he sucked on a cigarette and gazed up at the sky to re-accustom his eyes to the light as the umpires walked out again to the middle. He would turn to his partner. ‘All right? Shall we?’

  After they had been there a week, the Pole who shared their bunk died from typhus, and this gave them more space. They slept head to toe, and Geoffrey began, in a way he found ridiculous, to see the few square inches of space about his head as his own territory, and to resent any intrusion from Trembath’s large feet. Once he concealed a rare piece of sausage that had come with breakfast in a small crack in the wood to give himself something to look forward to when the day was through. All afternoon he thought about it. Saving the ‘unexpired portion’ of the day’s ration was the military term by which he dignified his action; in fact, his hoarding reminded him of his mother’s dachshunds, who would take any prized bit of leftover from the human lunch that had been thrown in their dog bowl and carry it off to their baskets.

  Before adopting their sleeping positions, he and Trembath would whisper plans to one another. There were tens of thousands of prisoners and only a few hundred guards. Among the prisoners there were many women, living in separate blocks, who might not contribute to a fight, though some looked desperate enough; many of the men were too enfeebled by sickness and starvation to be of use. However, there were still able-bodied men – many of the Russian prisoners of war, for instance – and there were skilled tradesmen: electricians who could help neutralise the fence, carpenters, blacksmiths and others who might help to arm them. It would be possible to overwhelm their tormentors by weight of numbers. They would at first take casualties from machine-gun and rifle fire, but were easily numerous enough to push on, capture the SS firearms, turn them on their owners, tear down the watchtowers, cut the wire and go free.

  Trembath was becoming impatient. ‘Listen, Talbot,’ he said, ‘it’s important that we don’t let ourselves descend to the level of some of these people. They’ve lost their dignity.’

  ‘They’re refugees,’ said Geoffrey. ‘They’ve lost their family, their homes, their money – their children in some cases, I think. But for us … It was certainly a bit rough in occupied France, but nothing like—’

  ‘That’s exactly it. They’re civilians. We’re soldiers.’

  ‘Irregulars. That’s why we’re here and not in a proper PoW camp. Back in London once I heard that the girl who landed with me on my first drop by Lysander – she got captured and taken to some women’s camp called Ravensbrück. They heard nothing more. The Red Cross doesn’t function there.’

  ‘Are you saying they killed her?’

  ‘I think so.’

  That night at roll call, the SS officer asked if anyone spoke French, and, without thinking, Geoffrey raised his arm. No sooner had he stepped forward and been pushed at rifle point towards the administrative buildings near the camp entrance than he saw that he had made a mistake. What had he been thinking? A better job, some interpreter’s office work, an end to ditch-digging and beating … The collaborator’s comfort? There was no such thing as ‘better’ in this place; there were only faster or slower roads to the same end. The smile on the face of the SS guard who accompanied him to the office was that of a man who knows but will not tell.

  Geoffrey was given a new ‘Special Unit’ uniform with thicker stripes and told to wait. It was past midnight when they heard the distant sound of a train approaching through the pine forest. All trains sound the same in the night, thought Geoffrey: forlorn – and for a moment, a line from a Charles Trenet song sounded in his head. The rails rattled as the clanking wagons came closer; there was the outline of smoke and steam against the moonlit clouds, then the shape of the locomotive nosing through the night, slowing as it n
eared the terminal point, until the train of twenty wagons came juddering to a halt beside the platform and the engine let out a final gasp of steam. For a moment in the night all was silent.

  Then the sides of the cattle trucks were unlocked and wrenched to one side, squealing on their metal runners, by willing striped prisoners of the Special Unit of which Geoffrey was now part. Inside there were no cattle or horses, but hundreds of people – children, women, men, old, young, jumping or falling down on to the platform, eager to leave behind the excrement and the dead bodies in the trucks. With an Alsatian dog snarling at his heels, Geoffrey urged and encouraged the people to dismount. They were French. ‘Descendez. Vite. Messieursdames! Vite, s’il vous plaît.’ How pathetic it was, he thought, that he could only dignify his part in what was happening by saying ‘please’. The French so loved their please and thank you and monsieur, madame; his mother and her Limoges family would be proud of him.

  The members of the Special Unit pushed the people into lines while the SS officers screamed at them to hurry. ‘Les hommes à droite. Les femmes et les enfants à gauche,’ Geoffrey called out, translating the German order. The prisoners’ suitcases, bags and in some cases mere bundles of belongings were ripped from their hands and taken to large piles at the end of the platform, where other prisoners, many of them women, emerged from the darkness and took them swiftly back inside a building, like mice taking cheese through a hole in the wainscot. The new arrivals were haggard and startled, yet many still looked hopeful; there were men in good coats with yellow stars stitched to the lapels, women with neat dresses and hair they had managed to keep tidy through the journey from the west. Some of them held the hands of children purposefully to them; others were already like beggars, vagrants, living on the last scraps of energy; they looked to Geoffrey as though they would welcome any development that would let them rest. The majority, though, were stoical; they seemed hopeful, despite the dogs, the whips and the screaming, that some natural justice would prevail; Geoffrey saw them looking towards their future home, its strong brick buildings, its orderly air, with something like optimism.

  The mothers and children came forward first. They were pushed and piled on to the backs of lorries and driven off to one side of the main gate. The other women were divided, so far as Geoffrey could make out, by age and physical attributes. Those who seemed fittest for work were herded along the same route as he and Trembath had been, presumably to shaving and disinfecting; the older and frailer were loaded on to more motor transports. Some of the Special Unit were now pulling corpses from the train, while others began to hose out the reeking wagons. Geoffrey ground his teeth and tried not to breathe too hard.

  He was told to join a motor lorry and to expect orders at the other end. He stood on a metal plate above the rear bumper, holding on to the tailgate as the truck trundled over an unmade road towards a white house beyond an orchard. Here there was a makeshift holding area, a sort of stockade, in which Special Unit prisoners, screamed at by SS guards, were struggling to deal with the multitude of people.

  ‘Schnell, schnell!’ the guards kept shouting.

  In German, an officer who seemed calmer than the others told Geoffrey what to say. ‘Tell them they must remove their clothes and leave them in piles here. Then they must go through that door. They will then be allowed to take a shower in this building. After that they will be given clean clothes and something to eat.’

  But the words would not come to Geoffrey. He seemed dumb. He had lost all recollection of the French language. He cast his mind back to school, to home, Limoges, his mother … French, French. God, he was bilingual, but where were the words? Ôtez les vêtements … Déshabillez vous … Demain, tout sera bien … He cleared his throat and called, ‘Attention!’

  There was the sound of a pistol being fired. A Special Unit prisoner lay dead beside him, shot by a guard impatient at his slowness. Women were beginning to cry, children to howl. No one knew what was going on or what to do. The guards began to scream louder, sensing the uprise of hysteria. Geoffrey felt a rifle stuck into his back. ‘Schnell! Heraus mit der Sprache! Schnell!’ Speak up! Geoffrey’s throat was swollen. He ground his clogged foot into the ground. It was speak or die.

  ‘Messieurs dames, attention, s’il vous plaît!’

  None of the Germans could understand French; that was why he was here. He could say anything. ‘Je ne sais pas ce qui vous attend.’ I don’t know what awaits you. He felt a hundred eyes on him. At last the French had in him what they had wanted: an insider who could explain.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I’ve heard rumours … Why are you here and not in the camp? Are you old? Are you young? Are you dying? This place is not like any other. I have heard screaming …’ Geoffrey found the words were coming in English. He didn’t know if they passed his lips or whether they formed only in his mind.

  But somewhere in the dark a French voice was speaking. It was telling them that there were clean clothes and, on the other side, hot food for them. Don’t let that voice be mine, Geoffrey thought; dear God, don’t let me lead them on.

  They were starting to undress; some were going into the building. The tide of hysteria was beginning to ebb. The SS officer nodded at him and told him to keep talking. Through a gate in the perimeter wire he saw a flatbed lorry piled with pine trees driving towards a sawmill. He thought he heard the screech of metal teeth on sappy wood, too young to burn well, and saw another lorry leaving from the back of the mill with its load of pine logs cut to length, heading towards a building with a tall chimney that was pouring black smoke into the night.

  The prisoners of the Special Unit were told to turn their backs on the white cottage, to avert their gaze, and, as dawn was seeping through the forests, Geoffrey was ordered back to D block. He clambered into his bunk alongside Trembath, too tired and ashamed to speak. He had lost his bearings, didn’t know in any case what he might say.

  ‘Listen,’ said Trembath. ‘Listen.’

  There were wails and screeches coming from a building nearby.

  ‘What the hell …’

  ‘Oh God. It’s the Frenchwomen.’

  ‘Did you see?’

  ‘No, once they were inside, we were sent away. The SS took over.’

  ‘What happens?’

  ‘They lock them in a shower room. An SS man puts in pellets through the roof. I saw a guard in a gas mask. We’re not meant to see what they do. For fear that one day, when the war’s over …’

  Headlights of the trucks swept over the walls of the bunkhouse; they could hear the individual cries of children, men and women. Normally a lorry would have revved its engine loudly to drown the noises. All through the night was the sound of screaming and, closer to home, of men in the bunkhouse who had lost control. In the morning it was impossible to get into the ablutions room for the number of them hanging from the pipes in the ceiling.

  It was a relief to march to the work site the following day, to dig with head lowered. Geoffrey wore the uniform of the Special Unit and feared that it made him conspicuous and liable for further ‘special’ duties. He did his best to keep his eyes on the frozen ground.

  That night, he tried to understand what he had seen. He tried to place it, without feeling crushed by it. He had no idea what reserves he had, how great his desire to live at any price. The French people, he heard, were all Jews, some refugees from Eastern Europe, but most of them French nationals from Poitiers, Paris or Limoges.

  Geoffrey was not sure he had met anyone Jewish in England. There had been a mathematician called Isaacs in the college next to his and, when he came to think of it, a physicist in his own college called Levi. Perhaps old Samuels, the psychologist who had given such a good report on him to Mr Green in London, was Jewish. These were names he recognised from the Bible, which furnished almost his entire idea of Jews, their history and beliefs. ‘Heroic’ was the word he would have used to describe them – frequently enslaved or exiled, yet able to draw on a limitless supply of soldiers
, prophets and commanders: Saul, David, Solomon, Elijah, Moses, Daniel, Joshua, Gideon … Their stories had been repeated to him in Scripture lessons at his Hampshire school a hundred times; he had thrilled to the lions’ den, the fiery furnace, the fall of Jericho and the parting of the Red Sea. What on earth was the point of taking a French seamstress from a backstreet in Lyons and transporting her across Europe to be murdered, on the grounds that some distant ancestor might once have plied his trade from Dan to Beersheba?

  He turned on his side. The bunk now had a paper mattress that Trembath had bartered from an old Slovak. Geoffrey fixed his thoughts on England, certainties, and the life he had led as a child. He remembered his excitement on the September day he went to the village school and first encountered other children. His time at home was pleasant enough, but his parents didn’t understand what a boy’s world was like. Yet as soon as he met the children of the surrounding villages he found they all had the same enthusiasm for anarchy. There was no need to explain; once the bell rang and they roared into the yard, they all knew what to do. He was a pack animal who had found his place. Some of them won form prizes, some were good at football, others at art or adding up, but among themselves they made so few distinctions that they were surprised when life later seemed to push them into different channels. Geoffrey did not notice his own distinction in lessons or on the playing fields until his last year, when on seven occasions he went past fifty for the First XI and found himself steered once more toward the exam room, this time for university entrance.

  Trembath was a bit of an ass in many ways, Geoffrey admitted to himself, but while he was still there, with his attachment to the proper way of doing things, it was possible to believe that the life he had known while growing up was not a mirage but a substantial and continuing thing; that it was the camp that was the chimera.