A Possible Life Read online

  Working his way to the edge of the wooden bunk, his face away from Trembath’s feet, Geoffrey began to hope that some divine intervention might come to their assistance. A Pole called Tomasz, who spoke a little English, told him that most of the prisoners candidly prayed for a miracle and that many of them had come to believe that one day the pine forests would part and that a shining chariot would sweep through, pluck them up and bear them all to safety in a place above the clouds.

  The God of the Church of England was a vague and biddable person in Geoffrey’s mind, not one that he had ever been encouraged to imagine closely. If Jesus was his son and Jesus was a Jew did that mean that God was also Jewish? He knew this speculation was childish, but his idea of religion was based entirely on the exemplary lives of Jews, including Christ, and it was difficult to think of God and religion in the framework of any other people. The questions of divinity and incarnation or of a life beyond this one were all posed in Hebrew; the odd meeting of universal and particular had found a pure expression in the black smoke from the chimney.

  ‘For God’s sake, Talbot. Are you afraid of something?’ said Trembath. ‘I’m not going to put up with much more of this. It’s my duty as a British—’

  ‘I know. But this is not a prisoner-of-war camp. The guidelines for officers don’t apply here. I want to escape, too, but we need help. We need organisation.’

  ‘You’re like that bloody Roman general we had to read about at school. The Delayer. Cunctator. The chap who was always putting off the action. What was his name?’

  ‘Can’t remember. I think he was victorious in the end, though,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘I don’t want to stay any longer in this place.’ Trembath had raised his voice and Geoffrey placed a restraining hand on his arm. ‘I tell you, Talbot, I’d rather be killed outright than murdered on the quiet. Stuffed into a gas room with the Jews and the “nancy boys”.’

  Trembath’s face was so close to Geoffrey’s that he could feel his breath on his cheek.

  ‘Even though I am one,’ said Trembath.

  Geoffrey was not sure that, despite their proximity, he had heard properly. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, “Even though I am one.” A nancy boy, I mean. Not a Jew. A queer.’

  There was a silence while Geoffrey tried to digest what he had heard. He thought at first that Trembath must be joking, but soon saw there could be no reason for such an odd jest. Eventually he said, ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘I didn’t tell. It’s not something you go round shouting about. I wasn’t always sure myself. Then something happened. There was a young corporal at Colchester. He seemed to have got my number. He was a very knowing young man. I used to sneak out and meet him every night. He made me see I’d always been like that, really.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘I won’t tell you any more. I can tell you’re embarrassed. But I couldn’t see much point in keeping it to myself.’

  ‘None at all. I’m … glad you told me.’

  They were sitting in their bunk while many of the other prisoners had gathered round to hear Tomasz tell them a story. He could keep a hundred of them entertained with folk stories, legends or the entire plots of books his memory had stored. Geoffrey began to wonder if he ought to contribute something from his own education; he could pass it on to Tomasz to translate. His night-time discipline of forcing his mind into a better world now took the shape of trying to remember the various novels he had read. It was shocking how little had stayed with him. Moby-Dick, for instance: a sailor bent on killing a white whale that had bitten off his leg. Little else came back to him. Or Jane Eyre. A poor and ill-treated governess who eventually marries the man she wants, Mr Rochester; there was also someone called St John Rivers. The Poles with their taste for woodland spirits, angels and magical transformations were hardly going to be uplifted by that. So it would be Great Expectations, and he would do it serially, as Dickens had published it. He was pretty sure he had the plot by heart, until the end at least, when some of the revelations that ought to have been unforgettable had proved the opposite. Had he dreamt it, or did Estella actually turn out to be the daughter of Magwitch? He went over the story again and again in his mind, dividing it up into chunks that might take an hour to tell.

  Somehow he fell asleep.

  The next day at roll call, a senior guard told Geoffrey to step forward and asked why, if he was in Special Unit uniform, he was not on a special detail. Geoffrey replied that he was a French interpreter, on special duties only when required. The guard pointed him towards the administrative building and told him to go at once.

  ‘Nein,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Ich bin Dolmetscher französisch. Interprète français.’

  There was the sound of a safety catch coming off a revolver. The process of trial and justice had reached its usual rapid conclusion and Geoffrey did as he was told.

  For a day he helped sort belongings taken from those who had arrived by train from the west. There were baskets for currency or jewellery and great piles of clothes that were sent on to clothe German citizens at home. Some of the men’s woollen items were destined, he was told, for infantry at the Eastern Front, and he wondered what the men would think if they knew they were wearing Jewish socks. Better that, perhaps, than the Jewish blood that was transported to Stalingrad for transfusions, taken by syringe from prisoners kept in cages for the purpose, so the superior soldiers of the Reich survived on the borrowed vigour of the Underpeople. Many of the other workers were women who had volunteered for a task that was at least indoors, away from the freezing ground and the Alsatian dogs. Glances were exchanged between some of the women and the SS guards; they were looks that made Geoffrey think there was a black market in sex, as in so much else inside the camp. What might go through the mind of a man who made love to a woman he viewed as less than human, of a lower species, Geoffrey wondered. Did it alter his opinion of himself, did it make him in his own eyes a bestialist?

  The work lasted only a couple of days until a senior guard, noticing his still robust physical condition, sent him to join the Special Unit in the crematorium. A row of eight furnaces at knee height had to be kept roaring day and night with logs cut from the pine forests. Men shuttled to and from the doors where the trucks from the sawmill delivered the wood, unloading them on to wheeled wagons that were then pushed up to the ovens.

  The corpses came in on trucks with chutes at the back that could be tipped on to slides that joined the mouth of the oven. Some of the stokers were given metal poles and detailed to prod the corpses down into the fire in groups of six or eight at a time, urged on by the screaming SS officers. Then the slide would be switched to the next oven. Geoffrey imagined the life of a crematorium worker at home, in Winchester or Andover; it might not be so very different, though of course there would be no more than a dozen corpses a day.

  There were too many bodies. The lorries were backed up outside and he could sometimes smell their exhaust over the stench of the ovens. The delays drove the SS men to fury. Two guards took hold of a slow prisoner, held his hands behind his back and thrust his head into the oven. After a few seconds, they pulled him out again, demented and screaming, his head on fire. Geoffrey wondered if they did these things in order to keep their nerve up. It was as though the guards dare not risk lapsing back into the kind of life they must once have known. They needed to set an example to one another. ‘Schnell!’ they still shouted. ‘Schnell!’ No fire burned hot enough for them.

  Geoffrey had a water bottle tied to his waist with string, though feared to drink from it. The intensity of labour was so great that when they stopped for half an hour at midday their places were immediately taken by others on rotation. There were no ablutions, and the men, many of whom had typhus, used the tin dinner plate for two purposes, chucking the waste into the flames as best they could. Those who collapsed or rebelled at what they did were thrown straight into the furnace.

  At night, Geoffrey slept in the Special Unit block, outside the mai
n camp, where his apparent composure meant that he was put on suicide prevention duty. The room was smaller than D block, and here the men were tortured not only by thirst and by the guards, but by the memory of what they had seen and done. Few were able to lie down in their wooden bunks to sleep. They had surprised a hunger in themselves for living, had found a will to survive so deep that it had taken them to madness. Some sat against the wall holding their heads in their hands, scratching themselves raw. Some rocked back and forth, wearing away the skin on their backs against the cold wall. Some jabbered and screamed, or ran up and down the freezing barrack room; the most agitated were tied up to the ends of the bunks by their friends.

  Geoffrey did what he could to calm them, though he lacked the languages needed, and most were in any case beyond words. He stuffed pieces of straw and paper into his ears to cut out the noises of Bedlam and turned to his memories of living. That night, nothing of England would come to him: no river, almshouse or cricket ground. It was these places that had now taken on the vague outlines of something he had dreamed.

  Trembath had been right, Geoffrey thought. Better to die as a fighter, whatever reprisals the Germans took. If a hundred innocent men were shot to punish his revolt, it would only hasten what was inevitably coming to them. He wondered if ‘Tiny’ had made any progress with his plans, if he had connected with his doubtful French and schoolboy German to some other prisoners or whether he would make his stand alone. The thought of Trembath grabbing an SS gun and creating havoc even for a few moments was life-sustaining.

  In the crematorium, Geoffrey met a Russian called Sergei who could speak a little English. He was a prisoner of war, not Jewish, and assured Geoffrey that all the Russians were determined to escape in order to get back to Moscow and help the Motherland repel the Fascist invader. As a result of two failed escapes, the SS had appointed Search Units from among the prisoners; these enthusiastic men were allowed to range over both camps to look for signs of planned escape. As well as personally searching their comrades and the barracks, they overturned stockpiled building materials, crawled into attic spaces, pipes and ducts – ostensibly to search, in fact to reconnoitre. A group of Russians had volunteered for search duty because it gave them so much freedom of movement; they had identified a weakness in the perimeter fencing where the Special Unit went in and out to tend the pyres in the forests.

  The signs were discouraging. At intervals along the wire lay what Geoffrey had at first thought were bundles of rags that no one had picked up, but which were in fact the bodies of would-be escapers, shot from the watchtowers and left as a warning. Sergei believed that an escape was nevertheless being planned by a group of Search Unit Russians on the anniversary of the Great October revolution which, for reasons Geoffrey did not probe, fell on 7 November. He had less than a week in which to have himself transferred from the crematorium, though the chances of his being accepted into a Search Unit were remote.

  Later that day the lorries from the gas chambers brought a consignment of dead women and children. After a week, Geoffrey had taught himself not to look at any aspect of the people who came in, especially their faces. He was not in any case on duty at the chute when the women came, but was carrying the cut logs in rapid relays to the furnace mouth. It seemed from shouts he heard from fellow-workers that some of the corpses were still living. When the number of people being killed was more than the gas chambers could process, the gassing time was cut to a barely sufficient ten minutes; then some last protective gesture had caused the women to hold the faces of their children tight against them and this perhaps had spared them the full effects of the gas.

  Geoffrey latched his eyes on to the wooden logs and redoubled his efforts, beneath the, for once, silent stare of the guards. He had lids of skin that he could bring down over his eyes. He closed them when he could; at other times he fastened his gaze to the backs of his hands – to the veins, the pores – to keep the eyes from straying.

  He heard the rumble of the chute and wished he had had lids with which to seal his ears.

  He decided he would rather die now than go on. There was an SS man in the crematorium whom he had noticed eyeing him as he worked. He was a slight, feral creature with small black eyes. His name was Muller. An instinct told Geoffrey that the way this man stared at him was personal. At the end of his twelve-hour shift, as he was leaving the crematorium to return to the asylum of the Special Unit barracks, he asked Muller if he might transfer from the crematorium to the detail that worked in the woods outside the fence.

  Muller looked him up and down. He seemed almost amused. ‘Are you English?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. You speak my language?’

  ‘Yes. I study before the war. Why do you wish to move?’

  ‘I’m fit. I’m strong, I can do more work outside.’

  ‘Those prisoners there live a few days only. It is the worst.’

  Geoffrey felt Muller’s gaze on him, sliding over his torso.

  He said: ‘If it would please you, Lieutenant. I would like to please you.’

  The man’s face froze over suddenly. ‘Go, then. You disgust me.’

  ‘Will you arrange my transfer?’

  The fear left Muller’s eyes. Contempt returned. He smiled a little. ‘You want to die? You are a … coward?’

  ‘You will authorise it?’

  ‘Go and die.’

  Geoffrey was dismissed. He went with a group of twenty prisoners through the wire to a clearing in the woods, where they exchanged their striped uniforms for rubber boots and waterproof overclothes. The job was to clear mass graves where the land had subsided, leaving ponds and pools of such fetor that even the Alsatian dogs would not go near.

  They were near the section of the wire that the Russians had chosen for their escape, which was due in thirty-six hours’ time. Knowing that his end was near, Geoffrey hurled himself into the work. He would have to complete only two shifts. He could do it.

  ‘Schnell!’

  The dogs for once cowered and whimpered. Geoffrey had an implement like a boat hook that he fished with in the swamp, hauling viscera and limbs out and carrying them to the pyres.

  The quantity of ash cleared from the crematoria and dumped among the trees meant that nothing would grow; it looked like the surface of another planet. All the SS wore gas masks. One thrust a bottle at Geoffrey. It was vodka. He drank. The guards lifted their masks for a moment to drink. They passed the vodka round from guard to prisoner, from prisoner to guard.

  There was continual screeching from the Germans. More. Faster. Harder. The prisoners were screaming, too, in Polish, Russian, Yiddish. Geoffrey’s throat was raw with retching, raw with screaming. He shouted all the words he knew. Parts of human were dropping on him.

  A prisoner turned on his guard, and was shot. Two men threw themselves on the pyre to die. One was hauled off and made to work again. Geoffrey pressed on with his eyes shut. His belly was empty, there was nothing left to retch. He took more vodka, more and more, then set back to work in blindness.

  A day, a night in the asylum, a day again, bright sun over the pine forest, meaning thick ground mist tonight, back into the rubber boots, the clothes from the last crew dripping and he is in the woods again. This must be the last he knows of it, so he works in fury. Chloride of lime, meant to quell the stench, runs powerless from spleen and womb. An hour, another hour, a day. Inside the wire there is evening roll call and amid the clamour a column, fifty, sixty men, a Search Unit going out from the camp into the building site, their guards shouting. They are searching under planks and peering into pipes, secretly their pockets jammed with rocks and bits of masonry. From the watchtower a complacent guard looks down on them. The Pyre Crew is returning now as the sun sinks behind the woods and the men can barely pull their bodies home.

  And the Search Unit is at the gap in the fence. There is a shot, there is always a shot. A body. More commands, a moment of confusion. Search Unit and Pyre Crew are crossing at the fence. The sentry is suddenly nervo
us in the watchtower and there comes a roar of Russian, fifty men hurling iron and rocks and rushing the wooden tower, which tips over, snapping on its legs, and Geoffrey is turning on his heel, with them now, with the Search Unit, running into the woods, scattering among the pine needles, through the lunar ash, running as though fresh from two weeks’ rest, limbs free; steady, Talbot, pace yourself, leave something for the later stages; at least a minute gone before they hear the siren and the gunfire and the dogs.

  In 1946, the autumn term at Crampton Abbey began on 17 September. The day before, Mrs Little knocked on her husband’s study door before entering.

  Mr Little’s closest companion, a clumber spaniel called Heep, was asleep in front of the unlit fire, his aroma mingling with that of his master’s Sir Philip Sidney pipe tobacco.

  ‘We’re at least three boys short,’ said Long John, looking up from where he was making some calculations on a piece of graph paper.

  ‘Doddington’s not coming back. His mother can’t afford it now his father’s dead. And the price of coal, food, electricity … I shall have to cut the salaries. I wondered if I could sack Garrard as well.’

  ‘But who’ll look after the games pitches?’

  ‘We’ve got this new chap starting. Franklin. I could ask him to do some mowing and maintenance as well as taking junior games.’

  ‘How much do we pay Garrard?’

  ‘The equivalent of one boy’s fees for a year.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Little, sitting down and absently stroking Heep’s head. ‘Are we in a pickle, dear?’

  ‘I think so. There seems to be no end of rationing in sight. The ministry says it’ll last for at least five years. And now the parents are worried about what the boys are eating.’

  ‘Matron wrote off to the ministry and they suggested Radio Malt to build them up a bit.’

  ‘Could we get rid of some of the maids?’ said Long John.