Shuttlecock

[25]

And when I got home I took out Dad’s book and dipped straight into it (those final chapters), with scarcely a word, not even an ill-tempered one, to Marian and the kids.…

Marian is sulky and smouldering with silent resentment. Another Sunday has passed by — another beautiful sunny Sunday — and once again we haven’t gone out, because I have taken the car and spent the afternoon with Dad. Yes, I know what she would say, if she had half the chance, about our ‘wasted’ Sundays. That I am the one who has this thing — or used to have — about going out into the open, about the countryside. I am the one who wants fresh air and hates skulking indoors. Yes, yes. As I turn the pages of Dad’s book I have to brush aside a momentary vision of the weekends we used to have. Marian and I stripping hurriedly in the ferns. Wasps in the picnic basket.

Tonight we are unusually quiet and by ourselves. The kids are having a special treat tomorrow: they are going on a school outing to Chessington Zoo. They have to be away sharply, and this has given us the excuse for sending them early to bed. It’s nearly ten now, and we ourselves could have an early night. But you know those Sunday evenings, when the weekend has been a failure and you’re conscious that tomorrow is Monday, and you just try to mark time. The evenings are long and light; and there’s just a hint of something magic in the sky which only now, when it’s too late, do you notice, and which says: Fools! What do you want to go to sleep for, only to wake up for work? Marian has been pottering in the garden, and now she’s going round with her plastic watering-can, watering her house-plants. I can hear her muttering to the peperomias and the sweetheart vine: ‘Here you are then — I expect you’re thirsty. There, that’s better. We want to make you grow up big and strong, don’t we?’ I think she kisses them goodnight. It makes me jealous. I watch her through the open door of the living-room, bending over the rack of plants in the hall. She wears a pair of faded jeans and a thin, short-sleeved top that stops inches from her waist. I think: if she put down the watering-can and I put down my book we could lock up the house and go to bed and make love, hotly and deliberately, and lie awake for a while afterwards. Then everything would be clear and resolved between us. But we haven’t made love of any sort for weeks. Instead, Marian makes love to the house-plants. ‘… we want to keep those nice green glossy leaves.…’ I watch her through the doorway. There is something less provocative than disturbing about that chink of bare flesh above her jeans.

… The Gestapo officers, despite their air of icy efficiency, were all nervous. They knew they were conducting operations which at any moment might be cut short by the arrival of the Americans or by the command to withdraw. Every so often in these last few days, when the wind was right, we had heard the distant sound of shell-fire. This was a factor in my favour. But it worked both ways. The nervousness of the Germans might make them act with ruthless haste.

As we drove, we had to pass, some of the way, along the Belfort road where bedraggled sections of German divisions were already retreating. There was irony here (not greatly felt at the time): an army in retreat and one, self-important staff-car determinedly conveying a single prisoner. The driver sounded his horn to clear a way through the lines of battered trucks, field-kitchens, commandeered wagons and lumbering men. The two officers in the front seat visibly stiffened and, doubtless for my benefit, put on an air of not acknowledging what was happening. I sat between two guards. I had been handcuffed but my feet were free. At every halt, junction and slow section of road, I had wild thoughts of knocking one of the guards aside, crashing through the locked car door and running for it. But I knew that even if I got free of the car, in twenty yards I would have as many bullets in my back.

I did not need to be told we were heading for the Château Martine. I thought to myself: when we get within a certain distance they will blindfold me. But I already had a mental picture (how well it was to serve me later) of the roads and the lie of the land around the Château and Combe-les-Dames. I had got to know the area with Mathieu at the time when that ambitious plan had been formed, then shelved, to organize a mass-escape of the Château’s prisoners. The Château Martine was where the SS now held ‘priority’ captives. Not ordinary Maquisards who had little to impart before being shot, but operators with special information and ‘intelligence value’. A British agent was for them a real prize. Before me lay the fate that every agent knows may await him and which he tries to push to the back of his mind. Capture, interrogation … execution.

I had nothing to give away which, in German hands, could possibly alter the course of the war. But I knew enough about the overall pattern of resistance activities, about resistance cooperation with the Allies and even about the specific tactical objectives of the British and Americans to lend a possible sting to the German retreat and claim unnecessary extra lives. I also knew the whereabouts of four other British agents. I could not make mathematical calculations on the importance of my information. I was unlike the general in the field who consciously estimates and anticipates so much loss of life, so much damage to equipment for the sake of an overall victory, and therefore wittingly yields so much to his enemy. The spy’s duty is to tell nothing, no matter how slight the strategic value of what he knows.

Sure enough, after we turned off the Belfort road, the blindfold came out. One of the officers said, in German and in English, ‘Can you see?’ And, to test the point, a pistol barrel struck me hard under the chin without warning.

I could tell we were climbing up into the hills, away from the river. The Château was only a matter of four kilometres away. It got cooler. I had dried out a good deal after my night in the water tank, but my clothes were still damp and I began to shiver. At the same time, with the blindfold on, the movement of the car round the hillside bends was making me nauseous. At length we took a turn and drove along a straight level stretch of road — the Château drive (between, as I remembered it, an avenue of chestnut trees). There was a crunching of gravel; the car wheeled and stopped. Barked orders and the noise of stamping boots. The officers in front and the guard on my left got out. Then the remaining guard, grasping me by my handcuffed arms and my collar, pulled me roughly through the right-hand door. I guessed we were in the courtyard of the Château.

There was a clipped ‘Nehmen Sie ihn heraus!’ And I was dragged by the pair of guards across a few yards of gravel and through a door which I heard closed and locked behind us. Then to the left along a short, flagged passage, through another door, apparently manned by a guard with keys; along a corridor, wooden-floored and narrow (I felt myself squeezed between my two guards and heard their tunics brushing against the walls); sharply to the right (all these details I was making a conscious effort to remember), perhaps through a hundred and eighty degrees; through another door, heavy and narrow, and, again, unlocked, opened and relocked by a separate guard, and down a flight of stone steps. The steps took me completely by surprise. The two guards, who could no longer walk abreast of me, half let me tumble by my own weight and half dragged me, my legs tripping against the stone. All the time they had said nothing, except to the guard at the top of the steps, who merely replied, ‘Drei — auf der linken Seite.’

At the foot of the steps I heard the click of a switch and, even behind my blindfold, sensed an electric light come on. We moved on several yards down another flagged, musty-smelling passage. A third guard seemed to come from somewhere. Then a door was opened to my left — a door with a slow, ominous creak, like every true cell door — and I was thrust inside. I fell against a rough brick wall. My guards began to beat me up at once; not, it is true, a severe beating-up, but bad enough. Then my blindfold, which had already slipped, was pulled away. I had time to take in that I was in a windowless cellar with mould-covered walls, empty of furniture and with a heavy, metal-barred door, and that the only light came from the electric light in the corridor. Then the door was slammed in my face, a lock turned, bolts drawn. I heard the guards’ boots down the corridor, watched the band of light under the door disappear. Then there was nothing — absolute darkness (I might as well have still been blindfolded), and a moist, permeating smell that was strangely familiar.

I thought to myself (it is strange how I scarcely felt the injuries of my beating-up — my one instinct was to think fast): they do not have much time themselves — they won’t lose any with me. At any moment I will be hauled out for interrogation. But it was a long while before anything happened. I say ‘a long while’, but I had no real way of measuring time. My wrist-watch had been taken from me (not that I would have been able to see it) along with everything else save my clothes. Someone should make a study one day of the effects of a completely darkened room on one’s ability to estimate and make judgements. I sat with my bruises. There were no sounds. The walls of an old French Château must be very thick. Sometimes I seemed to hear muffled voices and shouts and the sound of car motors from the direction I supposed the courtyard to be. I tapped the walls. No answering tap. They were indeed thick; or I had no neighbours. There was only one other way of putting this to the test. I groped till I felt the door, stood up and shouted at the top of my voice (stupidly, as I afterwards realized), ‘Il n’y a personne?’ No reply; but almost immediately, to my surprise, light appeared beneath the door and someone came along the corridor from the left. My door was opened. A round-faced, small-eyed German like an outsize schoolboy stood in front of me. He held a long stick. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?’ he said in an atrocious accent and, before I could answer, struck me hard across the chest with the stick (it was actually a polished truncheon, made for the purpose). I crumpled against the wall. ‘Vous avez faim?’ he added (words which I did not understand till later), then locked the door on me. The electric light went out. I did not attempt to utter another sound after this.

It had been perhaps four in the afternoon when I was deposited in my cell. After what seemed at least three hours, I heard the noise of opening doors and then of footsteps descending the steps down which I had been previously dragged. The light was switched on and showed through the crack under my door. I was already learning to make use of that thin, fleeting beam as a means, however feeble, of discerning something of my cell. The footsteps stopped; a door some ten yards away on the other side of the corridor was unlocked and opened, and, to judge by the sounds, someone dragged out. There was much ‘rausing’ and ‘schnelling’, then footsteps and scuffling going away; the outer door being shut and locked; then silence again.

This silence seemed more set to last than the first. I guessed it was now night. I sat propped against one of the walls. The sheer pressure on the nerves of waiting for something to happen was beginning to tell. I was cold and nearly every bone in my body seemed to have taken a sharp knock. I took consolation by reminding myself that I had spent the previous night in a water tank. I reflected that they were deliberately letting me stew before they questioned me, and therefore I should stop myself from stewing. I began to combat negative thoughts by methodically exploring my cell with my handcuffed hands. I started at a corner near the door and worked round in a clockwise direction, beginning at floor level, working up as far as my hands would reach, then down again, and so on. Then I began on the floor, working from the wall furthest from the door.

My hands confirmed what my eyes had briefly seen when the blindfold had been removed: a brick room about eight feet square, containing nothing and with no outlet save the door. The floor was strewn with a thick mixture of what I took to be dust, grit and sawdust. The smell of the sawdust, and of damp wood generally, was what pervaded the room, but why this smell was so peculiarly familiar I could not tell. The brickwork of the walls was rough and coated with dust and cobwebs. Here and there, there were sections where the mortar had crumbled between the courses. My fingers groped, in vain, in the gaps. But they found something that, in due course, was to prove invaluable. Sticking into one of the walls, high up, was a single, long, straight-sided, rust-covered nail. I made a note of the position of this nail. By persistent efforts, I managed to pull it free, and placed it, lengthwise, in one of the mortarless gaps in the brick courses, for safe keeping.

I must have fallen into a deep sleep. I was woken by my door being unbolted, by shouts and the entry of two guards (not those of the day before) into my cell. I suffered the exquisite pain of believing for a moment I was not where in fact I was. The guards pulled me on to my feet and I was shoved along the corridor. I thought to myself: the moment has come. But I also considered: better for it to happen like this, suddenly and even after having slept than to sit and wait for it. My body was stiff and ached cruelly. We took the same route, in reverse, as the day before: along the corridor, where now, with my eyes uncovered, I noticed, on either side, other doors, doubtless to cells like my own; up the stone steps, and through the outer door, on the other side of which a guard was posted. Here, for the first time, daylight, subdued and indirect though it was, stabbed my eyes. I was marched round a corner to the left and then, not left again, which would have accorded with my route of entry the day before, but right — and face to face, all at once, with a magical vision. We were in a narrow hallway, painted in delicate duck-egg blue, with gilt cornices and hung with two or three gilt-framed pictures. At the end of this hallway — about eight yards ahead — was a tall, stately, deep-casemented window opening on to a view of a classical French garden bathed in the light of a September dawn: terraces, urns, statuary, long ornamental ponds between lawns silvered with dew; a low sun looming over misty trees. As unreal as some painting by Watteau or Claude.

We walked towards this mirage, the sun streaming through the glass on to our faces, and I had a brief, preposterous notion that I was going to be flung into it. But I was jerked abruptly to the right, round a corner. During the second or two in which we passed the window I had rime to notice that the ground sloped away quite steeply from the back of the Château, that the window was several feet above ground level and that below it was a long, balustraded terrace which at least one sentry was patrolling.

We climbed up two flights of grand, carved stairs and emerged on to a landing in front of an ornate double door behind which, I instinctively knew, were my interrogators. An officer, whom I recognized as the dark-haired, fat-cheeked officer present at my capture, was lounging on the landing, his black tunic unbuttoned, a coffee cup in his hand. He looked at me with distaste and motioned to one of the guards. I was taken along a side corridor and ushered, almost considerately, into a cubicle containing a large marble wash basin, a mirror and a lavatory. In the mirror I became aware of the filth — dust and dried blood — that had collected on my face. The sentry removed my handcuffs. ‘Waschen Sie sich.’

Marian is finishing watering her plants. She straightens up and rubs a palm on her hip. She does not know I am looking at her. She is a creature undergoing scientific scrutiny: her sandy hair, slightly hunched shoulders, her slim, almost too slim body, her exposed midriff. She turns and catches my clinical stare. A bewildered look crosses her face. I return my eyes to the book and do not look up again until she speaks. ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she says, as if I’ve implied she’s unclean.

After I had washed (it seemed my handcuffs were not going to be replaced), the guard jostled me back towards the double doors, which had been partly opened. The second guard was standing on the landing. He jerked his head as a sign to his companion, who shoved me through the doors and pulled them shut behind me.

Here description must be blurred. Not through any weakness of recollection, but because events themselves at the time were blurred. The first step towards breaking the resistance of a spy is to confuse and disorientate him, and deprivation, isolation, hunger, sleeplessness, as well as the spy’s own ignorance of the next move of his captors, normally achieve this — even before other methods are employed. The room into which I was pushed was large, thick-carpeted, with a marble fire-place set in one wall, and the wooden scrollwork and gilt which characterized the corridors and staircase. Another door, in one corner, led off it. Blinds were drawn over the windows and although light filtered in, electric lights, set in chandeliers, were switched on. Before me was a large, leather-topped desk, strewn with papers, and behind it, sitting in heavily upholstered chairs, were the fat-cheeked officer and a second officer, in the uniform of an SS colonel, with neat grey hair and a long, delicate, almost scholarly face, like that of some amiable civil servant. Up to now my journey up from the cell had had a strangely reassuring quality, as if nothing worse were going to happen to me than happens to some refractory schoolboy. But I noticed that on the small wooden chair in which, if I was lucky, I would be told to sit, there were dark stains of blood, and the chair itself was placed on a large piece of canvas material, over the carpet, on which there were more obvious stains of blood, and, if my nostrils did not deceive me, urine.…

‘Do you want one?’

‘What?’

‘A bath.’

‘Why?’

‘I mean, do you mind if I take all the hot water?’

‘No, no.…’

She stands in the doorway, like some subordinate, waiting to be told she is dismissed.

… I was to sit in that chair, on that piece of filthy canvas, many times in the ensuing few days. How many times exactly, I could not say, nor for what duration, nor with what intervals in between; nor, were it not for certain regular daily procedures, could I have said at the time that what was involved was merely a matter of days, not weeks, months — an epoch. My recollection compresses into a series of dream-like, constantly recurring impressions: the darkness and silence of the cell punctuated (as you sank into exhaustion) by the tramping of boots, lights, shouts, the rasping of locks and bolts and the slam of doors; the journey, on which your own legs could scarcely convey you, along the passage-way, up the steps, along the upper corridor, past that incredible window, which every time became more and more like an illusion; the staircase, the double doors, the guard shoving you into the cubicle, and that persistent command: ‘Waschen Sie sich’. Perhaps there is much about my days at the Château which I simply do not remember. They say that you only recall what is pleasant. Or perhaps the truth is that certain things defy retelling.

When grey-hair and fat-cheeks had finished with me that first time, I was taken back down not, at first, to my cell, but to the room at the end of the cell corridor where the podgy German with the truncheon officiated. I was detained here for perhaps an hour.

What was it like, Dad? What was it really like?

Dumped back in my cell, I was roused again, almost immediately, this time by a general activity in the corridor. What was about to take place was a regular event which occurred every morning; for the first time I was to see some of my fellow captives. In the corridor the cell doors were being opened and the prisoners were automatically forming a single file. I counted seven, excluding myself. Some of them were hardly able to stand. The doors to the cells either side of my own were unopened. I assumed from this and my previous unanswered tapping that they were unoccupied. Each of the prisoners in the corridor held a battered metal can — obviously provided for his needs of nature. I had none myself, but one was to be ‘issued’ to me during the proceedings that followed.

When all the prisoners were lined in the corridor a command was given by one of the guards and we shambled forwards towards the exit steps. I was last in the line and was denied, for the moment, the opportunity to look for faces I might know. We passed through the door at the top of the steps and then turned left, along the passage-way through which I had been bundled, blindfolded, on my arrival. I made a mental note of everything. From the outset, and as the only conceivable positive course in the circumstances, I had resolved on escape.

We filed through another doorway, at which guards were posted, turned right, and suddenly emerged into the fresh, blinding air of the Château courtyard. A staff-car, two motorcycles with side-cars and a light truck were parked on the gravel. Sentries were posted at the gateway into the courtyard, and, dotted around the courtyard itself, standing casually but with rifles at the ready, were soldiers of the SS — I counted over a dozen — looking at us with an air of somewhat listless mockery. Doubtless, this was their morning’s entertainment.

I copied the actions of the prisoners in front of me. The line moved along to the left, flanked now by several guards with pointed rifles. We passed in front of a pump, below which was a large, metal-grilled drain. As each prisoner reached the pump he emptied the contents of his can down the drain with the aid of a sluicing from the pump. My lack of a can caused ribald laughter amongst our onlookers. The line then moved on towards a long, low trough, filled with water and fed by another pump. The file broke up and we took up places on either side. The trough itself was not clean, but every man, before washing (that was clearly the purpose of the trough), dipped his face in the water and drank deeply. I did so, without hesitation, myself. I could not help reflecting on the apparent obsession of our captors with a token cleanliness. We were given a full five minutes to scrub and rinse ourselves, and the touch of the water, though it stung and stabbed at bruises and scars, gave a sort of bitter pleasure.

I had an opportunity now to study my comrades. They were a pitiful sight. Dressed in ragged clothes, hollow-eyed, unshaven, and bearing, without exception, the marks of heavy beatings — if not of more precise and calculated injuries. Some seemed so feeble it was a wonder they had made it to the courtyard. One, in particular, was unable to wash himself and had to be helped by his neighbours. His nose had been sliced and all the fingers on his right hand systematically crushed.

As we bent over the washing trough the guards encircled us and it was obvious that talking was forbidden. But while stooping low, and with the noise of slopping water and the pump, it was possible to exchange a few words that went unnoticed. French was the only language I heard amongst the prisoners; as far as I knew, I was the only Britisher at the Château. I found myself opposite a stocky figure with a ragged beard whom I vaguely recognized as one of the group from Dôle. Without any preliminary introductions, he whispered through the cupped hands with which he washed his face:

‘You shouted last night.’

‘Shouted?’

‘When they brought you in — “Il n’y a personne?” If we make a noise in the cells we get no food. That is the rule. We will not eat now till tomorrow.’

He spoke without the slightest trace of friendship. I was beginning to realize that in prisons there is as much suspicion and enmity between the prisoners as between captives and captors. But I understood at last the odd question of the truncheon-wielder.

‘You are in one of the back cells — in the dark?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re lucky.’

It was not clear to me why being confined in the dark was lucky. But with the slightest movement of his head my neighbour indicated the base of the Château wall on the side of the courtyard where we had emerged. There were tiny, semicircular, barred openings at and (because of a sort of gutter which ran round the perimeter of the courtyard) just below ground level. I realized that these must mark the row of cells on the opposite side of the corridor to my own. While my own cell, perhaps, adjoined the outer wall of the Château, these adjoined the courtyard and were equipped with these small apertures which allowed light to enter.

‘They look in on us like animals in cages. They watch us all the time.’

A guard drew close; we had to cease whispering for a moment.

‘You have visited “le goret”?’

Again, I followed a slight movement of my companion’s head. Our chubby acquaintance from the room at the end of the cell corridor had emerged into the courtyard and was sauntering up and down. ‘Goret’ is French for ‘piglet’. An apt word.

‘Yes.’

‘Too bad,’ he said, without feeling. He was evidently trying to gauge my qualities as a prisoner. I vaguely knew who he was, and he, most likely, had a clearer idea who I was. Many Frenchmen I had met had an ingrained distrust of captured Englishmen. They believed that the Gestapo treated them more leniently.

We spoke no more. My companion’s last remark had been detected. He was seized by the shoulder, knocked with a rifle butt, and when he fell, kicked several times in the ribs. It could just as easily have been me.

After washing, we were made to form into a line again. By this time another ten or so prisoners, with their cans, had been led out from another wing of the Château towards the first pump. So we were not the only ones.

It was clear we were not to be returned to our cells directly. At a command our party was made to parade in single file, several times, round the perimeter of the courtyard. This, perhaps, had the spurious purpose of ‘exercise’, but was really only a sadistic diversion. We were forced to march in mock drill fashion, arms swinging high, at a pace neither too slow nor too fast. One of the guards even stood calling out the time: ‘Links!… Links!’ Any failure to keep in step, to maintain the pace or to hold the head up was immediately dealt with by blows and kicks. For some of our number, who were tottering even as they stood by the washing trough, this ‘exercise’ was torture. I wondered how long it would be before I was like them. In such a condition you would not be able to escape.

But, as yet relatively fresh, I was able to take in, during this bizarre ritual, the scene around me. There was something cruelly incongruous about the Château itself — its solid, creamstuccoed walls, its tall windows capped with rococo scrollwork, its little French corner turrets, its air of tranquillity and gracious, harmonious living. Up above, on the weathered tiles of the roof, which was bathed in sunlight, there were even doves preening and cooing. And, all around, I could sniff (as though I hadn’t been living amidst it for the last four weeks) the tangy, woody, late-summer air of Eastern France. These things seemed impossible. It was the same inside: the carved woodwork, the gilt, the elegant stairways — and, below, the dungeons. As we paraded round, I noticed that four or five officers, one of whom was ‘grey-hair’, had emerged from the portion of the Château which lay opposite the arched gateway. Here there were large glass doors and a series of shallow, wide steps. They stood at the top of the steps or just inside the glass doors, smoking cigarettes and coughing behind raised hand. They looked at the proceedings in the courtyard like inspectors approving some project in hand.

‘Schauen Sie geradeaus!’ I was struck sharply on the side of the face.

One section of the courtyard wall, to the right of the gateway, I could not fail to notice. On it there were smears of dried blood, and on the ground beneath, darker, denser blood-stains. The wall itself was pitted with bullet marks.

We were now halted and made ready for being led back to the cells. First, each man had to collect his can from beside the first pump. I acquired one of my own in the following way. Since I was the last in the line and had brought no can with me up to the courtyard, I was empty-handed. One of the guards, however, snatched away the can belonging to the prisoner with the crushed hand and presented it, almost with courtesy, to me. ‘Prenez!’ he said. Then added, in German: ‘Er hat die letzte Scheisse gehabt.’ Guffaws arose from the other guards. Later that day (if day it still was), shots were heard — the first of several fusillades I was to hear from my cell — and at the next morning’s ‘muster’ the prisoner with the crushed hand was missing.

(I remembered a story Mathieu had once told me about another Gestapo establishment in Dijon, which I had thought was a joke: ‘They only have so many cans. So when there are not enough to go round they shoot one of the prisoners.’)

We were now marched back to the cells. I was anxious to know if they would return us to the same cells from which we came. They did — now and on subsequent occasions. They made a mistake here.

After only a brief respite in my cell, I was dragged up again by the guards to grey-hair and fat-cheeks; then to ‘le goret’s’ room; then back to my cell for another brief period; then to grey-hair and fat-cheeks again. And so on.

At some time later — how long I could not say — I found myself mercifully left to languish. It was then that I heard the shots from the courtyard. I was so numb and fatigued that I heard them almost with indifference. I slept — not the deep, oblivious sleep of exhaustion, but a fitful sleep, broken by the noise of scuffling in the corridor and screams from ‘le goret’s’ room. Then — at dawn again, as it turned out: grey-hair and fat-cheeks.

During those twenty-four hours, as my neighbour at the water-trough had predicted, we received no food — at least, I received none. On the second day a bowl of something was shoved into my cell. An unspeakable swill. We were given no drinking-water save what we gulped at the trough.

At the next muster in the courtyard my companion murmured under his breath: ‘They shot Fernand’ (the name, I gathered, of the prisoner with the broken fingers). ‘Now he is out of his misery. Sometimes they shoot you in the courtyard; sometimes they say, “Please, take a walk in the garden.” Among the roses, a machine-gun.…’

I could not help forming a dislike for this friend of mine and his grim brand of phlegm. His remarks did nothing to help morale, and I even suspected him of having some sort of double role. But then I realized that his way of seizing on me like a new boy and attempting to scare me was his means of gaining a little power and authority, and this in turn gave him the will to survive. A brief lesson in prison psychology.

Sometimes during these morning musters we would hear, on the air, the distant sound of shell-fire. Our captors put on unperturbed looks and so betrayed inward unease. The sound gave us all a flutter of hope, but, at the same time, if anything, it loaded the balance of fate against us. The chances of our captors abandoning the Château without first herding us all together and executing us were a thousand to one.

On the fourth morning (I believe it was the fourth morning) the Germans adopted a new ruse. In the courtyard, by the washing trough, we were told to strip. Our clothes were put in a heap. We were made to parade in the usual way, unclad, and were led back to our cells naked. From then on, at all times and in all circumstances, we were without clothes. A small matter, on top of so much; but of all the humiliations and cruelties — more intricate, more painful — we had to endure, none, I think, was more demoralizing, more appalling than this nakedness.

This was the pattern — but pattern is hardly the word — of our life at the Château. What remains? What more can be added? Memory provides its own, thankful censorship. If one dominant impression stays with me, it is that — the everyday man in everyday circumstances does not know what it means — of being absolutely in the power of another. This ought to be a condition of the utmost seriousness. But it is not. You feel yourself to be the mere pawn, the mere dehumanized toy that you are. Many times as I huddled naked in the dark in my cell, when even the redeeming will to escape had deserted me, I thought, nothing matters, I am in their hands: all this is a game.…

I look up from the book. Outside, the long June evening has grown dim and I realize that for some time, in my absorption, I have been straining to read without a light. But it is as though I have been straining not so much against the dark but to discern some hidden things behind the words. I switch on the light. From upstairs I can hear the sounds of Marian’s bath running and the noise of the water in the pipes. What happened in ‘le goret’s’ room, and in those interrogation sessions with fat-cheeks and grey-hair? Why do I need to know these things — to eavesdrop on my Dad’s suffering? So as to become like one of his tormentors? To become like Dad? With so much of Dad’s book I have to struggle to make it real, to wrest it out of the story-book realm into the realm of fact. Because I know I could not have done half those things Dad did in France, and so for me it has always seemed not wholly real. And yet in these last chapters there is more of the flavour of reality, because there is also more mystery — and more misery. Why should that be? I can believe in these scenes of cruelty and deprivation. I can believe that they happened. Is that shocking? Sometimes they can actually seem one, that silent dummy in the hospital ward and that figure in his pitch-dark cell. And not only this, but because I believe in these passages, I can put myself into them, I can imagine myself in that dark cell, in those passage-ways, that courtyard. Why does it seem that I know that Château? So that sometimes in my mind — it is like this tonight — it almost seems that Dad and I are one too. But I must know everything. I must know every detail. So whatever Dad endured, I will know if I could endure it too; what is expected of me too.

But that is not the only mystery. There is the mystery of X. This only makes things more tangled and obscure. Dad doesn’t mention him. He even says explicitly at one point: ‘French was the only language I heard amongst the prisoners … the only Britisher at the Château.’ Perhaps X was not there, or there but at a different time — or in some part of the Château where Dad would not have seen him. Perhaps it is all the work of my over-ripe imagination: X, ‘Arthur’, the golf course.…

But I have been making notes while I have been reading — just as I would when going through one of Quinn’s files at the office. I have been jotting down those words, those little additional comments, those inconsistencies, which most seem to draw me into the mystery — and closer to Dad:

I made a mental note of everything.

I only recall … there is much I simply do not remember.

Memory provides its own censorship.

From the outset I had resolved on escape …

… the redeeming will to escape …

… in such a condition you would not be able to escape.

The spy’s duty is to tell nothing.

All this is a game.

… lawns silvered with dew … doves preening … tangy,

woody, late-summer air …

… impossible … mirage … illusion …

… a way of gaining a little power and authority, and … in

turn … the will to survive …

… absolutely in the power of another … in their hands …

mere pawn … mere dehumanized toy …

… of all the humiliations …

And now, suddenly, I think I am there –

… of all the humiliations and cruelties … none … was more demoralizing, more appalling than this nakedness.