Life after life

April 1945

THEY HAD LIVED for months in the cellar, like rats. When the British were bombing by day and the Americans by night there was nothing else for it. The cellar beneath the apartment block in the Savignyplatz was dank and disgusting, a small paraffin lamp for light and one bucket for a lavatory, yet the cellar was better than one of the bunkers in town. She had been caught with Frieda near the zoo in a daylight raid and had taken shelter in the Zoo Station flak tower – thousands of people crammed in, the air supply gauged by a candle (as if they were canaries). If the candle goes out, someone told her, everyone has to leave, out into the open even if a raid is in progress. Near to where they were crushed against a wall, a man and a woman were embracing (a polite term for what they were doing) and as they were leaving they had to step over an old man who had died during the raid. The worst thing, even worse than this, was that as well as being a shelter the enormous concrete citadel was a gigantic anti-aircraft battery, several huge guns pounding away on the roof the whole time so that the shelter shook with every recoil. It was the closest to hell that Ursula ever hoped to come.

An enormous explosion had shaken the structure, a bomb dropped close to the zoo. She felt the pressure wave sucking and pushing her body and was terrified that Frieda’s lungs might burst. It passed. Several people vomited, although unfortunately there was nowhere to vomit except on one’s feet, or perhaps worse, on other people’s feet. Ursula vowed never to go into a flak tower again. She would rather, she thought, die out in the street, quickly, with Frieda. That’s what she thought about a lot of the time now. A swift, clean death, Frieda wrapped in her arms.

Perhaps it was Teddy up there, dropping bombs on them. She hoped it was, it would mean he was alive. There had been a knock on the door one day – when they still had a door, before the British started their relentless bombing in November ’43. When Ursula opened the door she found a thin youth standing there, fifteen or sixteen years old maybe. He had a desperate air and Ursula wondered if he was looking for somewhere to hide but he pushed an envelope into her hand and ran off before she could even say a word to him.

The envelope was creased and filthy. Her name and address were written on it and she burst into tears at the sight of Pamela’s handwriting. Thin papery blue sheets, dated several weeks ago, detailing all the comings and goings of her family – Jimmy in the army, Sylvie fighting the good fight on the home front (‘a new weapon – chickens!’). Pamela was well and living at Fox Corner, she said, four boys now. Teddy in the RAF, a squadron leader with a DFC. A lovely long letter and at the end a page that was almost like a postscript, ‘I have saved the sad news to last.’ Hugh was dead. ‘In the autumn of 1940, peacefully, a heart attack.’ Ursula wished she hadn’t received the letter, wished she could think of Hugh still alive, of Teddy and Jimmy in non-combatant roles, living out the war in a coal mine or civil defence.

‘I think of you constantly,’ Pamela said. No recriminations, no ‘I told you so’, no ‘Why didn’t you come home when you could have done?’ She had tried, too late, of course. The day after Germany declared war on Poland she had gone through town, dutifully doing the things that she thought you were supposed to do when war was imminent. She stocked up on batteries and torches and candles, she bought canned goods and blackout material, she shopped for clothes for Frieda in Wertheim’s department store – one and two sizes bigger in case the war went on for a long time. She bought nothing for herself, passing by all those warm coats and boots, stockings and decent frocks, something she bitterly regretted now.

She heard Chamberlain on the BBC, those fateful words We are now at war with Germany, and for several hours felt strangely numb. She tried to phone Pamela but the lines were all engaged. Then towards evening (Jürgen had been at the ministry all day) she suddenly came back to life, Snow White awake. She must leave, she must go back to England, passport or no. She packed a hasty suitcase and harried Frieda on to a tram to the station. If she could just get on a train somehow everything would be all right. No trains, an official at the station told her. The borders were closed. ‘We’re at war, didn’t you know?’ he said.

She ran to the British Embassy in Wilhelmstrasse, dragging poor Frieda by the hand. They were German citizens but she would throw herself on the mercy of the embassy staff, surely they would be able to do something, she was still an Englishwoman after all. It was growing dark by then and the gates were padlocked and there were no lights on in the building. ‘They’ve gone,’ a passer-by told her, ‘you’ve missed them.’

‘Gone?’

‘Back to Britain.’

She had to clap a hand over her mouth to stop the wail that rose up from deep inside her. How could she have been so stupid? Why hadn’t she seen what was coming? A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past. Something else that Elizabeth I had said.

She wept on and off for two days after receiving Pamela’s letter. Jürgen was sympathetic, came home with some real coffee for her and she didn’t ask where he had got it. A good cup of coffee (miraculous as that was) was hardly going to assuage her grief for her father, for Frieda, for herself. For everybody. Jürgen died in an American raid in ’44. Ursula was ashamed at how relieved she felt when she was given the news, especially as Frieda was so upset. She loved her father and he loved her, which was a nugget of grace to be salvaged from the whole sorry business of their marriage.

Frieda was ill now. She had the same gaunt features and sickly pallor of most people you saw on the streets these days but her lungs were full of phlegm and she had terrible bouts of coughing that seemed as though they would never end. When Ursula listened to her chest it was like listening to a galleon at sea, heaving and creaking through the waves. If only she could sit her down by a big warm fire, give her hot cocoa to drink, a beef stew, dumplings, carrots. Were they still eating well on the Berg, she wondered? Was anyone still on the Berg?

Above their heads, the apartment block was still standing although most of the front wall had been taken away by a bomb. They still went up there to forage for anything useful. It had been saved from looting by the almost insurmountable difficulty of getting up the staircase which was filled with rubble. She and Frieda tied pieces of cushion to their knees with rags and wore thick leather gloves that had belonged to Jürgen and in this way clambered over the stones and bricks like inept monkeys.

The one thing there was nothing of in the apartment was the only thing they were interested in – food. Yesterday they had queued for three hours for a loaf of bread. When they ate it, it seemed to contain no actual flour, although it was hard to say what it did contain – cement dust and plaster? That was what it tasted of anyway. Ursula remembered Rogerson’s the baker’s in the village at home, how the smell of the baking bread would waft through the street and how the bakery’s window was full of lovely soft white loaves burnished with a sticky bronze glaze. Or the kitchen at Fox Corner on Mrs Glover’s baking days – the big brown ‘health’ loaves that Sylvie insisted on, but also the sponges and tarts and buns. She imagined eating a slice of the warm brown bread, thickly buttered, with the jam made from the raspberries and redcurrants at Fox Corner. (She tormented herself with memories of food the whole time.) There was to be no more milk, someone told her in the bread queue.

This morning, Fräulein Farber and her sister Frau Meyer who had lived together in the attic but who now rarely left the cellar gave her two potatoes and a piece of cooked sausage for Frieda, Aus Anstand, they said, out of decency. Herr Richter, also a cellar resident, told Ursula that the sisters had decided to stop eating. (An easy thing to do when there was no food, Ursula thought.) They have had enough, he said. They cannot face what will happen when the Russians get here.

They had heard a rumour that in the east people were reduced to eating grass. Lucky them, Ursula thought, there was no grass in Berlin, just the black skeletal remains of a proud and beautiful city. Was London like this too? It seemed unlikely, yet possible. Speer had his noble ruins, a thousand years early.

The inedible bread yesterday, two half-raw potatoes the day before that was all Ursula had in her own stomach. Everything else – for the little it was worth – she’d given to Frieda. But what good would it do Frieda if Ursula were dead? She couldn’t leave her alone in this terrible world.

After the British raid on the zoo they had gone to see if there were any animals they could eat but plenty of people had got there before them. (Could that happen at home? Londoners scavenging in Regent’s Park zoo? Why not?)

They still saw the occasional bird that was clearly not native to Berlin, surviving against the odds, and on one occasion, a cowed, mangy creature that they had taken for a dog before they realized it was a wolf. Frieda was all for trying to take it back to the cellar with them and making a pet of it. Ursula couldn’t even imagine what their elderly neighbour Frau Jaeger’s reaction would have been to that.

Their own apartment was like a dolls’ house, open to the world, all the intimate details of their domestic life on view – beds and sofas, the pictures on the walls, even an ornament or two that had miraculously survived the blast. They had raided anything truly useful but there were still some clothes and a few books and only yesterday she had found a cache of candles beneath a pile of broken crockery. Ursula was hoping to trade them in for medicine for Frieda. There was still a lavatory, in the bathroom, and occasionally, who knew how, there was water. One of them would stand and hold up an old sheet to protect the other’s modesty. Did their modesty matter that much any more?

Ursula had made the decision to move back in. It was cold in the apartment but the air wasn’t fetid and she judged that on balance that would be better for Frieda. They still had blankets and quilts they could wrap themselves in and they shared a mattress on the floor, behind a barricade formed by the dining table and chairs. Ursula’s thoughts strayed constantly to the meals they had eaten at that table, her dreams full of meat, pork and beef, slabs of it grilled and roasted and fried.

The apartment was two floors up and this, combined with the partially blocked staircase, might be enough to put the Russians off. On the other hand they would be the dolls on display in the doll’s house, a woman and a girl ripe for the plucking. Frieda would soon be eleven but if even a tenth of the rumours coming from the east were true then her age wouldn’t save her from the Russians. Frau Jaeger never stopped talking nervously about how the Soviets were raping and murdering their way towards Berlin. There was no wireless any more, just rumour and the occasional flimsy piece of newssheet. The name Nemmersdorf was rarely off Frau Jaeger’s lips (‘A massacre!’). ‘Oh, do shut up,’ Ursula said to her the other day. In English, which she didn’t understand, of course, although she must have heard the unfriendly tone. Frau Jaeger had been visibly startled to be addressed in the language of the enemy and Ursula felt sorry, she was just a frightened old lady, she reminded herself.

The east moved nearer every day. Interest in the western front had long since died, only the east was of concern. The distant thunder of guns now replaced by a constant roar. There was no one to save them. Eighty thousand German troops to defend them against a million and a half Soviets, and most of those German troops seemed to be children or old men. Perhaps poor old Frau Jaeger would be called upon to beat off the enemy with a broom handle. It could only be a matter of days, hours even, before they saw their first Russian.

There was a rumour that Hitler was dead. ‘Not before time,’ Herr Richter said. Ursula remembered the sight of him asleep on his sun lounger on the terrace on the Berg. He had strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage. To what avail? A kind of Armageddon. The death of Europe.

It was life itself, wasn’t it, she corrected herself, that Shakespeare had fretting and strutting. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage. They were all walking shadows in Berlin. Life had mattered so much once and now it was the cheapest thing on offer. She spared an idle thought for Eva, she was always blasé about the idea of suicide, had she accompanied her leader into hell?

Frieda was so poorly now, chills and fever and complaining almost constantly of a headache. If she hadn’t been sick they might have joined the exodus of people heading west, away from the Russians, but there was no way she would survive such a journey.

‘I’ve had enough, Mummy,’ she whispered, a terrible echo of the sisters from the attic.

Ursula left her alone while she hurried to the chemist, scrabbling over the debris that littered the streets, occasionally a corpse – she felt nothing for the dead any more. She cowered in doorways when the gunfire seemed too close and then scurried to the next street corner. The chemist was open but he had no medicine, he didn’t even want her precious candles or her money. She came back defeated.

The whole time she had been away from Frieda she had been anxious that something would happen to her in her absence and she promised herself that she wouldn’t leave her side again. She had seen a Russian tank two streets away. She had been terrified by the sight, how much more terrified would Frieda be? The noise of artillery fire was constant. She was gripped by the idea that the world was ending. If it was then Frieda must die in her arms, not alone. But whose arms would she die in? She longed for the safety of her father and the thought of Hugh made the tears start.

By the time she had climbed the rubble staircase she was exhausted, weary to the bone. She found Frieda slipping in and out of delirium and lay down beside her on the mattress on the floor. Stroking her damp hair, she talked in a low voice to her about another world. She told her about the bluebells in spring in the wood near Fox Corner, about the flowers that grew in the meadow beyond the copse – flax and larkspur, buttercups, corn poppies, red campion and ox-eye daisies. She told her about the smell of new-mown grass from an English summer lawn, the scent of Sylvie’s roses, the sour-sweet taste of the apples in the orchard. She talked of the oak trees in the lane, and the yews in the graveyard and the beech in the garden at Fox Corner. She talked about the foxes, the rabbits, the pheasants, the hares, the cows and the big plough horses. About the sun beaming his friendly rays on fields of corn and fields of green. The bright song of the blackbird, the lyrical lark, the soft coo of the wood pigeons, the hoot of the owl in the dark. ‘Take this,’ she said, putting the pill in Frieda’s mouth, ‘I got it from the chemist, it will help you sleep.’

She told Frieda how she would walk on knives to protect her, burn in the flames of hell to save her, drown in the deepest of waters if it would buoy her up and how she would do this one last thing for her, the most difficult thing of all.

She put her arms around her daughter and kissed her and murmured in her ear, telling her about Teddy when he was little, his surprise birthday party, about how clever Pamela was and how annoying Maurice was and how funny Jimmy had been when he was small. How the clock ticked in the hall and the wind rattled in the chimneypots and how on Christmas Eve they lit an enormous log fire and hung their stockings from the mantelpiece and next day ate roast goose and plum pudding and how that was what they would all do next Christmas, all of them together. ‘Everything is going to be all right now,’ Ursula told her.

When she was sure that Frieda was asleep she took the little glass capsule that the chemist had given her and placed it gently in Frieda’s mouth and pressed her delicate jaws together. The capsule broke with a tiny crunching noise. A line from one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets came into mind as she bit down on her own little glass vial. I run to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday. She held tightly on to Frieda and soon they were both wrapped in the velvet wings of the black bat and this life was already unreal and gone.

She had never chosen death over life before and as she was leaving she knew something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed. Then the dark obliterated all thoughts.