That evening Stern said he was a navigator on one of the Luftwaffe’s medium-sized bombers, a Heinkel He 111, which had been dropping mines along the east coast of England in April 1940, when the plane had been hit by ack-ack. With his clothes on fire he’d parachuted from the blazing bomber, and the rush of air had extinguished the flames, although not before his back and neck had been severely burned. The He 111 had crashed at Clacton, a few miles away, killing (he’d learned later) two civilians and injuring a hundred and fifty others, and he and the rest of the crew were captured and shipped off to Island Farm POW Camp down in Wales. That, he told us with an almost apologetic smile, was the extent of his personal war on Britain, although in March ‘45, a week or so before the fatal V2s were launched, he and sixty-five other German POWs had escaped from the camp (I vaguely remembered reading something about the breakout in the British newspapers at the time). It was while Stern, who had become separated from his Kameraden, was trying to make it to the Welsh coastline, where he hoped to steal a boat that would take him across to neutral Ireland, that the world about him changed.
The dead were everywhere and he couldn’t comprehend why. Deciding to keep away from the towns – now for two reasons: as far as he knew his country was still at war with Britain and America, and he was still a prisoner on the run; and he thought the plague that had killed everyone, including most animals he’d come upon, must be contagious – he scavenged from farmhouses and empty cottages. He survived almost a year that way until the harsh winter of ‘46 forced him to venture into a town.
He told us he must have gone into shock because of what he found there, since he’d lost all memory of those first weeks. When reason eventually returned he left the town, heading east, travelling in cars and abandoning each one when it ran out of gas, finding another to continue the journey in, determined to make it to the opposite coast, there to find a boat and cross the English Channel to mainland Europe. From there he would return to his homeland, perhaps to die, for at that time he did not know how widespread the plague was, whether the Continent itself had been devastated. On his journey he had come upon an army base and had steeled himself to enter it. With nothing more than a scarf covering his mouth and nose, Stern had located a battery-operated radio transmitter and, using fresh batteries, had tried to contact his own base in Germany. There had been no response. All night he sent messages, praying for some reply, from anyone, from anywhere, but still there was no contact.
Giving up all hope, he’d sunk into deep despair, unable to understand what had caused the disease and why he had survived it. The whole of the next day he had contemplated ending his own life – not only did there seem nothing to live for, but his personal guilt at having lived while everyone else appeared to have perished was crushing. That thought evaporated with the next dawn when he realized it was his duty to live on, he owed it to his people and to his Führer. He made no mention of the Master Race, but it was in my mind. I figured Stern thought the fittest had survived, so affirming Hitler’s attitudes on breeding and the natural order. Stern was living proof of his leader’s theories and to die now, especially by his own hand, would refute all that.
So, he wandered on, looting grocery stores for food and sleeping in empty houses. And then he had chanced upon other survivors, a kind of community living in a tiny village. They’d treated him with suspicion and, on hearing his accent and learning he was German, they’d driven him off, almost killing him in the process. It seemed they blamed him in full and personally for what they called the Blood Death, and he was lucky to get away with his life. For a long time after that he had lived on a remote farm near the New Forest, first clearing it of its corpses, then cultivating a few crops as best he could. The winter of ‘47, even worse than the previous year’s, had put an end to that.
His food had to come from village stores and shops, and so he lived on the fringes of these places, alone and, he admitted to us, ‘somewhat insane in the head’. With the summer of ‘48 the desire to return to the ‘Fatherland’ returned and his journey began again.
The vehicle he was travelling in soon broke down – lack of maintenance rather than shortage of gasoline – and it was while he was trudging down a country lane looking for another means of transport that the two girls came upon him in their Ford.
Their greeting was different from the kind he’d received two years before, and he was grateful for that As far as Cissie and Muriel were concerned, well, they were just overjoyed to find another live and healthy human being. His nationality meant nothing to them, not after all this time, and he certainly felt no enmity towards British civilians. He agreed to accompany them to the capital, although he told them that from there he would continue eastwards, possibly using the River Thames to reach the estuary and the English Channel. Stopping only once to refill the Ford’s tank from a garage handpump along the way, they soon reached London. And hit trouble. Namely, me.
I put the question to the two girls, not the German. ‘Like Cissie said before, for all you knew, I could’ve been the bad guy, and the Blackshirts the only law and order left. So why help me?’
‘It was Cissie’s decision,’ Muriel replied, indicating her friend. I stared at the dark-haired girl.
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t like their uniform. I had bad memories of Mosley’s Blackshirts before the war and that lot this morning didn’t look any different.’ Another sip of gin and peach juice. ‘I told you my mother was Jewish. Besides, you looked desperate and I like desperate types.’ She grinned at me.
It wasn’t enough, but I didn’t push it. Before Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and Jew-hater, had been interned at the beginning of the war and his vicious party of bigots broken up, he’d led marches into the very heart of Jewish ghettos in London’s East End just to provoke the people into riots. He was one bad man and later, as the Allies were taking back Europe, grim stories of the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jewish race reached the rest of the world and the British public finally understood the full horror of the ideals Mosley – along with his more discreet ally, Sir Max Hubble – had aligned himself with. Those ragbag black outfits had meant only one thing to Cissie and, as she’d been driving the car at the time, her companions could only go along with her. She was a gutsy lady.
A little juiced by now, they had begun to ask questions about me, but I ducked them. We still hadn’t heard the warden’s story.
Albert Potter, his nose a deeper shade of red by this time, was only too pleased to gab, three years of loneliness and a good few measures of Grouse loosening his tongue some. Too old to join the British army, he’d volunteered as an ARP on the very day Neville Chamberlain had mournfully declared war on Germany, and he had dutifully served through both Blitzes on London, twice being buried beneath rubble himself. His home was in an LCC block of flats in the Covent Garden area and when this, itself, was eventually demolished by the Luftwaffe, he and his family had moved into the basement of a school that was being used as a Civil Defence HQ. (It was here that he first learned of the secret bunker beneath Kingsway, where he later became ‘door watcher’.)
He had won three commendations for heroic action during the war years, we were proudly told, once for single-handedly clearing an entire building of office workers when a DA (delayed action bomb) was discovered on the rooftop, the second time for reviving an unconscious woman who had choked on a stale (she later claimed) piece of Battenburg cake in the Lyon’s Corner House on the Strand, and thirdly for preventing a bus carrying several passengers from toppling into a bomb crater during the Blackout by dashing in front of it waving his flashlight at great risk to life and limb. He’d served King and Country as well as any man could, despite the taunts and jibes from the public, who tended to regard all ARPs as jumped-up little Hitlers, mad with the tiny powers given them. Well, that had never bothered him. Like Stern, Potter knew his duty, knew it then, knew it now. And when his wife died of the blood disease, ‘Gawd bless ‘er’, and his daughter, Kati
e, thirty years of age, still single, and serving as a gun site operator near Cheltenham, had never got in touch so was presumed dead too, he had only one purpose left, and that was to continue with the job he’d been given. Only when the war was finally over would he hang up his helmet, collect his medals, and retire to the countryside.
We’d looked at each other uncomfortably, but none of us felt like breaking the news. At least believing the war was still raging had given Potter a reason for carrying on, misguided though it was. Besides, the war never had been officially declared over. Sure, it had ended when those last V2s fell, but there had been no one in high office left to say, ‘Okay, enough is enough, let’s call it a day.’ Or if there was, they were off somewhere, either living away from the cities or deep down in some secret Blood Death-free bunker. That got us onto other topics, like what had happened to the governments of the world, why hadn’t the scientists or medical profession been able to contain the disease, and what the hell was in Adolf Hitler’s mind when he released such destruction (assuming he still had some kind of rational mind left after his dreams of world domination were shattered)? Had the Vergeltungswaffen been one cataclysmic mistake? All big questions, to which we had no answers.
Perhaps the biggest question though, because all the others meant nothing as far as the future was concerned, was this: How many of us were left? Just how many ABnegs were there in the world? Muriel said someone at the sanatorium had told her that AB negative blood types amounted to only approximately three per cent of the global population, and it might be that their Rhesus Factor (whatever that was) was hostile or non-submissive to the virus or gas released from the rockets. The problem, this person had gone on to say, was that not enough was known about different blood types and time itself was running out too fast for new research to be mounted, intensive though that research might be. The truth was, doctors and scientists were a swiftdying breed, along with the rest of mankind, and no matter how concentrated their minds, oncoming death brought about certain disabilities.
There was a silence for a while after that, all of us lost in our own thoughts. Cissie collected the dirty plates and dumped them in the bathroom sink; then she was back in the doorway, yet another question in her eyes. She voiced it: ‘Does anybody know what happened to the Royal Family?’
Potter made a sound, a kind of heavy rumbling sigh, as he poured the last of the Grouse into his glass. His rheumy eyes watched the liquid, but I don’t think he saw it; his mind was on other things. We waited for him to speak, aware he was preparing to tell us something that we wouldn’t like. Well to me one tragedy was as bad as another, and they were all part of the grand catastrophe; all except my own, that is. The German was of the same mind, because there was only interest in his cold expression and none of the fearful apprehension revealed in the eyes of Cissie and Muriel.
It was Muriel who prompted the warden. ‘Did they die of the disease, Mr Potter?’ she said.
‘I suppose so,’ he replied, ‘but not in the way yer might think.’ He took a long swallow of whisky and wiped his shiny lips with the back of his hand. ‘Yer know, Queen Elizabeth, Gawd bless her poor soul, was never more pleased than when the bombs fell on Buckingham Palace durin the Blitz. She could look them poor people who lived down by the docks in the eye and say, “We’re takin it too, we know what it’s like.“’
He let the empty whisky bottle slip to the floor as he drained the glass. Shaking his head as if in both admiration and regret, he continued, ‘Do y’know, them little girls, them little princesses, used to knit socks for the Red Cross in the evenings. Princess Elizabeth – Lilibet she was called by the family – she joined the ATS, like this lady said.’ He gave a nod towards Muriel. ‘Worked as an engineer, got her hands dirty on engines and suchlike. And King George, he spent evenings makin parts for RAF aeroplanes, just like a common man. The King and Queen never left us, not even when the Blitz was at its worst, never even thought of sendin their youngest, Margaret Rose, out of the country to some safe place. They stayed together and stuck it out, an example to us all.’
I studied the faces around me, curious to see their reactions. Muriel’s expression was rapt, a mixture of emotions like the warden’s; both pride and sorrow shone in those grey-blue eyes as she waited to hear the tragedy that was about to unfold. Cissie’s eyes were a little unfocused, as if tears were about to roll.
‘The public didn’t know for sure,’ Potter went on, ‘but the rumours spread almost as fast as the plague itself. Some said the Royal Family was dead within the first hour of those rockets landin. Others said the whole lot of ‘em, includin old Queen Mary, was given cyanide pills by the King’s Physician when reports came in of how horrible the Blood Death was and how fast it was spreadin. But I’d got into the Kingsway shelter when I found out what was happenin out there, and I heard the true story first-hand, because even though the Civil Defence personnel were droppin like flies all round us, reports were still comin through on the wires.’
‘You really know?’ Muriel was leaning forward, hands clasped over her knees.
‘Yes, miss, I think I do. On that terrible day the Royals was rushed down to Windsor and as soon as the authorities knew what was goin on, a single-engine aeroplane was sent to take ‘em out of harm’s way. There’s a wide and very long road that runs through the park up to Windsor Castle itself; the public was never aware, but it was there as an emergency runway in case the country was ever invaded.
‘They got on the plane all right and, so we heard, they even took the Crown Jewels wrapped up in newspaper with ‘em. But the plane had barely took off when it came crashin down again, explodin into houses outside the town.’
There was a tiny, shocked gasp from Muriel and I saw that Cissie had closed her eyes.
‘Radio contact broke off just as the pilot was reportin a safe take-off, and the authorities reckoned he’d been struck down by the disease right at that moment. No other explanation, y’see. ‘Course they was all killed, bodies burned in the wreckage, but there was no public announcement Hell’s bells, there was enough occurrin without demoralizin the people completely.’
I could’ve smiled, I could’ve wept, at the absurdity of his last remark. But it was Stern who broke the silence that followed.
‘Do you know what happened to your Winston Churchill?’ he said, and I could see the ‘Vinston’ annoyed Potter as much as it did me. He glowered at the German.
Then he raised his empty glass in salute and said, ‘Old Winnie.’ He shook his head, looking down at the floor. ‘They say he topped hisself, shot hisself dead. All too much for him in the end, y’see. He’d put everything into winnin the war for us, and he’d finally done it, it was almost finished. Then Hitler sent his secret weapon over and had hisself the last laugh. It would’ve been too much for any man.’
And that quietened us a whole lot more. Tears were running down Cissie’s cheeks and Muriel had her head bowed. Potter rummaged among the bottles on the coffee table for fresh whisky and Stern sat stiff-backed, his face a mask. Me, I just poured another Jack Daniel’s.
Grief is only finite, you know? Sure, over the past years I’d thought a lot about death and those I’d lost, about the major players, the little guys too, friends, acquaintances, kids I’d gone to High School with, good pilots I’d fought battles with. You don’t forget, but you hold down the memory; or at least, the emotion that goes with the memory. After a while it fades, the emotion, because the soul can only take so much. The numbness eventually sets in, although, if you’re really lucky, that can happen right away. Generally though, it’ll take months, maybe years, before you begin – and only begin – to pull through and start to think straight again. In my case I only had two people to really grieve over, because my folks were dead before the war even started, Ma in ‘38 of cancer, Dad soon after in ‘39, of heart disease. I had no brothers or sisters, and other relations were too distant to cause much concern. Those two people closest to me, wiped out by the Blood Death, took up most, if not
all, of my mourning.
As I looked at the strained faces around me, I realized my new and unwanted companions were still in a state of shock. The girls had been cloistered from the worst excesses of the disease for some time, and the warden had taken his own mental route for dealing with the situation. Now Cissie and Muriel had ventured beyond the confines of the sanatorium and local villages to witness the full horror of the V2s’ legacy for themselves, and Albert Potter had finally come into contact with other survivors, and their sanity, such as it was, had to be nagging at his own delusions. As for the German, well, even he had to have had family, people to weep for, so he had to be suffering too. Maybe guilt – it was his countrymen who had unleashed the final holocaust – figured in his emotional state also; race responsibility for such annihilation would have to lay heavy on any man. Unless, of course, the only person he really mourned over was his Führer, whose actions he considered to be both appropriate and heroic.
I watched Stern and tried to guess what was going on behind that mask; he remained inscrutable though, despite hitting the juice and chain-smoking along with the rest of us. Funny thing is, he never got soused, nor maudlin, no matter how much he drank. But then, neither did I that evening.
10
DIVING, DIVING, DIVING…
The two Fw 190s had chased me to thirty-eight thousand feet, and the air was thin up there. I’d had no choice, there was only one way to get away from them, because they were like angry hornets on my tail, relentless, dogged, and out for revenge. They’d watched me shoot down one of their buddies at twelve thousand feet, and that’d made them pretty sore, because their buddy, in his superior plane, should’ve finished me. I’d been in his sights, sure enough, but had flipped over just before he’d fired and gotten behind him, winging him with my own guns. I’d followed him down, giving him another burst, and the Fw 190 had gone into a spiral, an entrail of white smoke marking his descent. He didn’t bail out and I’d hoped he was already dead.