That evening there was a lot of activity in the camp. Staff cars came and went through the gates, delivering staff in SS uniforms, and boxes of equipment marked with swastikas and Gothic script which they carried into the assembly hall. The men were excited by all this activity, and the escaper types speculated on what they could steal.
But underneath the excitement Gary sensed tension. Whenever there was any break in routine you always worried that what was already a bad situation was about to get worse. Especially when the SS showed up. Even the regular Wehrmacht guards seemed nervous.
Gary made his way to Ben's barracks. It was just two old classrooms knocked together. The school gear was long gone to be replaced by the stuff of a POW camp, bunk beds and stoves and light bulbs dangling from the bare ceiling, and little cupboards made by the prisoners out of bits of scrap wood. But you could still see the mark on the wall where the blackboard had once hung, and sometimes, Gary was sure, you could smell the chalk.
Gary found Ben. He'd hoped to get a chance to talk to him. But Ben, 'Hans', was holding court at the centre of a little group of men, banging on about Einstein, general relativity and the life and death of the universe. Even Willis was sitting on a bunk, smoking a skinny cigarette and listening.
It was always like this inside the camp. The kommando system split the prisoners into two groups, two subcultures. In the kommandos you had the work, and a change of scene, and some fresh air, and the comradeship of those you worked with. The housewives, stuck in the camp, had turned it into a kind of talking shop. They painted and sketched; they kept diaries; they put on stage shows and choral concerts; they organised seminars on everything from German military insignia to surrealism to quantum physics. They even paid each other in lagermarkenfor their performances. It was just another sort of escape, Gary supposed.
And then, too, there were the love affairs. There was a lot more of that than Gary had expected; the stalag queens who painted their faces and dyed their lips with beetroot juice were just the surface. This was what you got, Gary thought, when men could only turn to each other for comfort. Now he watched Willis watching Ben, and he wondered what the truth was between the two of them.
He waited a bit, but seeing he wasn't likely to get a chance to talk to Ben before lights-out he cleared off, went for a piss and to brush his teeth, and made for his own barracks.
When lights-out came Gary was lying in his bunk. He listened as the stalag creaked its way into the night, a crowded ship. The twenty or so men in the room with him snored and sighed; you slept badly, no matter how tired you were, and only a few of them were asleep at any moment. Sometimes during the night you would hear soft sobbing. But there was no bunk-hopping tonight.
The school's old sash windows had been wallpapered over for the blackout, but the paste was cracking now and the paper peeling, so that Gary could see something of the night outside. There was an occasional splash of brilliance as a searchlight beam crossed the face of the building. The noises of the camp continued, the sharp clip of a patrolling guard's boot, a cry as some whackie or other failed to find peace. But as the hours wore on his senses seemed to expand to fill the night, and he could hear the call of an owl, a rumble of distant traffic, the drone of a Messerschmitt patrolling somewhere over Kent.
And tonight there was something new, unfamiliar German voices talking softly, the voices of the SS working through the night. He wondered how many other inmates listened to the same conversations, and how fearful they were.
It was no surprise when the call for an appell came in the middle of the night.