Shuttlecock

[29]

… At night (but by ‘night’ I mean any period when I was shut up in the dark) I tried to identify the smell that pervaded my cell. It is strange how imprisonment affects the memory: the mind is confined as much as the body. I knew what the smell was: it was the smell of damp, partly rotten wood. But I did not know what kind of wood or where it was that I had smelt it, so distinctly, before. Another thing puzzled me. The air in my cell, though odorous and fully enclosed, was never fetid.

Then I made an important discovery.

In those snatches of exhausted sleep I would lie huddled at the foot of one of the walls. Once, lying against the wall opposite the door, I felt about my face a tiny but distinct trickle of air. Not only this, but borne on this faint draught was another, incredible but unmistakable smell: the smell of lavender.

I put my hand to the brickwork and began exploring the mortar joints. It was then that the identity of the first smell — the wood smell — came to me — and along with it a series of inferences which made my imagination and my heart race.

My grandfather on my mother’s side had lived in a handsome eighteenth-century house not far from Winchester. It was equipped with cellars, accessible from within the house but with openings, covered with heavy cast-iron plates, at the foot of the outer walls, through which materials for storing could be passed. My grandfather still used one of the cellars for what was perhaps its original purpose — the storing of fire-wood. Nearby, there were extensive fruit orchards and my grandfather had a standing arrangement for supplies of logs. It was the smell of apple logs in my grandfather’s cellar in Hampshire that I was smelling again in the Château Martine. As a child, staying with my grandparents during the summer, the cellars had always intrigued me. I liked to explore them and I regarded them as places of refuge whenever I had incurred adult displeasure. I was never frightened of them. Perhaps, in a remote way, I owe my ability to endure the Château to my boyhood experience. To have existed in those cells and to have suffered at the same time from claustrophobic fear of the dark would have been too much to bear. To me, the smell of apple wood in the dark (and this perhaps was why I could not place it, in such hostile surroundings) was the smell of sanctuary.

But this was not the time for nostalgia. My returning memory had highly practical implications. If my grandfather’s Hampshire home had had openings in the exterior wall which connected to the cellars by a brick chute through which logs could be tipped, was it not possible that the same system applied in a Château in eastern France? Was it not possible that at some time the purpose of the cellar had been changed — or the cellar had become disused — and that the opening to the chute had been sealed up, inexpertly — by a wall of only single bricks perhaps? — from the inside? And the Germans, in converting it again to to a cell, had overlooked this? One begins to believe in strange, benevolent miracles of fate.

I set to work with the rusty nail I had extracted from the wall. It is perfectly true, not a mere adage, that hope gives you strength. By testing with the nail I ascertained that there was indeed an irregular section of brickwork, perhaps two feet across, slightly different in texture from the rest of the wall, and for which a different, weaker mortar had been used. Tapped with a knuckle, this section gave a more resonant sound.

I began immediately to scratch away at the mortar with the nail, close to where the air, through some unseen crack, was periodically infiltrating. Even as I did so I was hastily working out possibilities and precautions. When next my cell door was opened I must look quickly at this part of the wall to make a visual note of what I could only, so far, feebly gauge by touch. But if I did this I would draw the attention of the guards. I must therefore hide my work. But how? The latrine-can. This was about eighteen inches tall. Placed against the wall, it would hide some of the patch in question; as for the rest, I must make do. To conceal my chipping and scraping I must rub and scuff the area worked on with dirt from the cell floor. This would still show, but I could only hope the guards would not notice. To darken the mortar-dust made by my chipping I must use the only means available to me: my own urine. They would not think twice about a leaking latrine-can. I must hide the nail in between two bricks where it can be readily placed in a hurry but remain invisible to someone standing in the doorway. I must work in short, concentrated stints so as to be able to conceal my activities before visits by the guards. I must chip away not individual bricks but a complete section of brickwork so that even when I am able to remove it, it will stand in position. Will I possibly have the time? And the luck?

But all these methodical, if hasty conjectures I do not remember applying — not consciously at least. Perhaps, when your life is at stake, practical measures are implemented instinctively and automatically — since the cost of omitting them is so great. I only remember that I worked away feverishly with my nail. My universe — my existence — depended on that piece of rusty metal and that small patch of brick. My precautions for concealing my work must have been effective, for when the guards came, a first time, a second, they detected nothing. This went on — I cannot say how long. Scratching, chipping with the nail; interrupted by sessions with grey-hair and fat-cheeks. It was a race against time, and against my own dwindling physical resources. At any moment I might be the target for one of those fusillades that came from the courtyard. Or before I could finish my work I might lose the strength to continue. I might crack, before then, under interrogation. And yet, in fact, the merest chance of escape, the slenderest factor in my favour, renewed, double-fold, my power to resist and endure. I was carried along, despite all, on a wave of almost exalted emotion. I was not powerless. I had found a means of escape.