Winter of the World (Century Trilogy 2)

22

1946

The children of Berlin had a new game called Komm, Frau – Come, Woman. It was one of a dozen games in which boys chase girls, but it had a new twist, Carla noticed. The boys would team up and target one of the girls. When they caught her, they would shout: ‘Komm, Frau!’ and throw her to the ground. Then they would hold her down while one of their number lay on top of her and simulated sexual intercourse. Children of seven and eight, who ought not to know what rape was, played this game because they had seen what Red Army soldiers did to German women. Every Russian knew that one phrase of the German language: ‘Komm, Frau.’

What was it about the Russians? Carla had never met anyone who had been raped by a French, British, American or Canadian soldier, though she supposed it must happen. By contrast, every woman she knew between fifteen and fifty-five had been raped by at least one Soviet soldier: her mother, Maud; her friend Frieda; Frieda’s mother, Monika; Ada, the maid; all of them.

Yet they were lucky, for they were still alive. Some women, abused by dozens of men, hour after hour, had died. Carla had heard of a girl who had been bitten to death.

Only Rebecca Rosen had escaped. After Carla had protected her, the day the Jewish Hospital was liberated, Rebecca moved into the von Ulrich town house. It was in the Soviet zone, but she had nowhere else to go. She hid for months like a criminal in the attic, coming down only late at night when the bestial Russians had fallen into drunken sleep. Carla spent a couple of hours up there with her when she could, and they played card games and told each other their life stories. Carla wanted to be like an older sister, but Rebecca treated her like a mother.

Then Carla found she was going to be a mother for real.

Maud and Monika were in their fifties, and too old to have babies, mercifully; and Ada was lucky; but both Carla and Frieda were pregnant by their rapists.

Frieda had an abortion.

It was illegal, and a Nazi law that threatened the death penalty was still in force. So Frieda went to an elderly ‘midwife’ who did it for five cigarettes. Frieda contracted a severe infection, and would have died but that Carla was able to steal scarce penicillin from the hospital.

Carla decided to have her baby.

Her feelings about it swung violently from one extreme to another. When suffering morning sickness she raged against the beasts who had violated her body and left her with this burden. At other times she found herself sitting with her hands on her belly staring into space and thinking dreamily about baby clothes. Then she would wonder if the baby’s face would remind her of one of the men, and cause her to hate her own child. But surely it would have some von Ulrich features too? She felt anxious and frightened.

She was eight months pregnant in January 1946. Like most Germans she was also cold, hungry and destitute. When her pregnancy became obvious she had to give up nursing and join the millions of unemployed. Food rations were issued every ten days. The daily amount, for those without special privileges, was 1,500 calories. It still had to be paid for, of course. And even for customers with cash and ration cards, sometimes there was simply no food to buy.

Carla had considered asking the Soviets for special treatment because of her wartime work as a spy. But Heinrich had tried that and suffered a frightening experience. Red Army Intelligence had expected him to continue to spy for them, and asked him to infiltrate the US military. When he said he would rather not, they became nasty and threatened to send him to a labour camp. He got out of it by saying he spoke no English, therefore was no use to them. But Carla was well warned, and decided it was safest to keep quiet.

Today Carla and Maud were happy because they had sold a chest of drawers. It was a Jugendstil piece in burled light oak that Walter’s parents had bought when they got married in 1889. Carla, Maud and Ada had loaded it on to a borrowed handcart.

There were still no men in their house. Erik and Werner were among millions of German soldiers who had disappeared. Perhaps they were dead. Colonel Beck had told Carla that almost three million Germans had died in battle on the Eastern Front, and more had died as prisoners of the Soviets – killed by hunger, cold and disease. But another two million were still alive and working in labour camps in the Soviet Union. Some had come back: they had either escaped from their guards or had been released because they were too ill to work, and they had joined the thousands of displaced persons on the tramp all over Europe, trying to find their way home. Carla and Maud had written letters and sent them care of the Red Army, but no replies had ever come.

Carla felt torn about the prospect of Werner’s return. She still loved him, and hoped desperately that he was alive and well, but she dreaded meeting him when she was pregnant with a rapist’s baby. Although it was not her fault, she felt irrationally ashamed.

So the three women pushed the handcart through the streets. They left Rebecca behind. The Red Army orgy of rape and looting had passed its nightmare peak, and Rebecca no longer lived in the attic, but it was still not safe for a pretty girl to walk the streets.

Huge photographs of Lenin and Stalin now hung over Unter den Linden, once the promenade of Germany’s fashionable elite. Most Berlin roads had been cleared, and the rubble of destroyed buildings stood in stacks every few hundred yards, ready to be re-used, perhaps, if ever Germans were able to rebuild their country. Acres of houses had been flattened, often entire city blocks. It would take years to deal with the wreckage. There were thousands of bodies rotting in the ruins, and the sickly sweet smell of decaying human flesh had been in the air all summer. Now it smelled only after rain.

Meanwhile, the city had been divided into four zones: Russian, American, British and French. Many of the buildings still standing had been commandeered by the occupying troops. Berliners lived where they could, often seeking inadequate shelter in the surviving rooms of half-demolished houses. The city had running water again, and electric power came on fitfully, but it was hard to find fuel for heating and cooking. The chest of drawers might be almost as valuable chopped up for firewood.

They took it to Wedding, in the French zone, where they sold it to a charming Parisian colonel for a carton of Gitanes. The occupation currency had become worthless, because the Soviets printed too much of it, so everything was bought and sold for cigarettes.

Now they were returning triumphant, Maud and Ada steering the empty cart while Carla walked alongside. She ached all over from pushing the cart, but they were rich: a whole carton of cigarettes would go a long way.

Night fell and the temperature dropped to freezing. Their route home took them briefly into the British sector. Carla sometimes wondered whether the British might help her mother if they knew the hardship she was suffering. On the other hand, Maud had been a German citizen for twenty-six years. Her brother, Earl Fitzherbert, was wealthy and influential, but he had refused to support her after her marriage to Walter von Ulrich, and he was a stubborn man: it was not likely he would change his attitude.

They came across a small crowd, thirty or forty ragged people, outside a house that had been taken over by the occupying power. Stopping to find out what they were staring at, the three women saw a party going on inside. Through the windows they could observe brightly lit rooms, laughing men and women holding drinks, and waitresses moving through the throng with trays of food. Carla looked around her. The crowd was mostly women and children – there were not many men left in Berlin, or indeed in Germany – and they were all staring longingly at the windows, like rejected sinners outside the gates of paradise. It was a pathetic sight.

‘This is obscene,’ said Maud, and she marched up the path to the door of the house.

A British sentry stood in her way and said: ‘Nein, nein,’ probably the only German he knew.

Maud addressed him in the crisp upper-class English she had spoken as a girl. ‘I must see your commanding officer immediately.’

Carla admired her mother’s nerve and poise, as always.

The sentry looked doubtfully at Maud’s threadbare coat, but after a moment he tapped on the door. It opened, and a face looked out. ‘English lady wants the CO,’ said the sentry.

A moment later the door opened again and two people looked out. They might have been caricatures of a British officer and his wife: he in his mess kit with a black bow tie, she in a long dress and pearls.

‘Good evening,’ Maud said. ‘I’m frightfully sorry to disturb your party.’

They stared at her, astonished to be spoken to that way by a woman in rags.

Maud went on: ‘I just thought you should see what you’re doing to these wretched people outside.’

The couple looked at the crowd.

Maud said: ‘You might draw the curtains, for pity’s sake.’

After a moment the woman said: ‘Oh, dear, George, have we been terribly unkind?’

‘Unintentionally, perhaps,’ the man said gruffly.

‘Could we possibly make amends by sending some food out to them?’

‘Yes,’ Maud said quickly. ‘That would be a kindness as well as an apology.’

The officer looked dubious. It was probably against some kind of regulation to give canapés to starving Germans.

The woman pleaded: ‘George, darling, may we?’

‘Oh, very well,’ said her husband.

The woman turned back to Maud. ‘Thank you for alerting us. We really didn’t mean to do this.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Maud said, and she retreated down the path.

A few minutes later, guests began to emerge from the house with plates of sandwiches and cakes, which they offered to the starving crowd. Carla grinned. Her mother’s impudence had paid off. She took a large piece of fruit cake, which she wolfed in a few starved bites. It contained more sugar than she had eaten in the past six months.

The curtains were drawn, the guests returned to the house, and the crowd dispersed. Maud and Ada grasped the handles of the cart and recommenced pushing it home. ‘Well done, Mother,’ said Carla. ‘A carton of Gitanes and a free meal, all in one afternoon!’

Apart from the Soviets, few of the occupying soldiers were cruel to Germans, Carla reflected. She found it surprising. American GIs gave out chocolate bars. Even the French, whose own children had gone hungry under German occupation, often showed kindness. After all the misery we Germans have inflicted on our neighbours, Carla thought, it’s astonishing they don’t hate us more. On the other hand, what with the Nazis, the Red Army and the air raids, perhaps they think we’ve been punished enough.

It was late when they got home. They left the cart with the neighbours who had loaned it, giving them half a pack of Gitanes as payment. They entered their house, which was luckily still intact. There was no glass in most of the windows, and the stonework was pocked with craters, but the place had not suffered structural damage, and it still kept the weather out.

All the same, the four women now lived in the kitchen, sleeping there on mattresses they dragged in from the hall at night. It was hard enough to warm that one room, and they certainly did not have fuel to heat the rest of the house. The kitchen stove had burned coal in the old days, but that was now virtually unobtainable. However, they had found the stove would burn many other things: books, newspapers, broken furniture, even net curtains.

They slept in pairs, Carla with Rebecca and Maud with Ada. Rebecca often cried herself to sleep in Carla’s arms, as she had the night after her parents were killed.

The long walk had exhausted Carla, and she immediately lay down. Ada built up the fire in the stove with old news magazines Rebecca had brought down from the attic. Maud added water to the remains of the lunchtime bean soup and reheated it for their supper.

Sitting up to drink her soup, Carla suffered a sharp abdominal pain. This was not a result of pushing the handcart, she realized. It was something else. She checked the date and counted back to the date of the liberation of the Jewish Hospital.

‘Mother,’ she said fearfully, ‘I think the baby’s coming.’

‘It’s too soon!’ Maud said.

‘I’m thirty-six weeks pregnant, and I’m getting cramps.’

‘Then we’d better get ready.’

Maud went upstairs to fetch towels.

Ada brought a wooden chair from the dining room. She had a useful length of twisted steel from a bomb site that served her as a sledgehammer. She smashed the chair into manageable pieces, then built up the fire in the stove.

Carla put her hands on her distended belly. ‘You might have waited for warmer weather, Baby,’ she said.

Soon she was in too much pain to notice the cold. She had not known anything could hurt this much.

Nor that it could go on so long. She was in labour all night. Maud and Ada took turns holding her hand while she moaned and cried. Rebecca looked on, white-faced and scared.

The grey light of morning was filtering through the newspaper taped over the glassless kitchen window when at last the baby’s head emerged. Carla was overwhelmed by a feeling of relief like nothing she had ever experienced, even though the pain did not immediately cease.

After one more agonizing push, Maud took the baby from between her legs.

‘A boy,’ she said.

She blew on his face, and he opened his mouth and cried.

She gave the baby to Carla, and propped her upright on the mattress with some cushions from the drawing room.

He had lots of dark hair all over his head.

Maud tied off the cord with a piece of cotton, then cut it. Carla unbuttoned her blouse and put the baby to her breast.

She was worried she might have no milk. Her breasts should have swollen and leaked towards the end of her pregnancy, but they had not, perhaps because the baby was early, perhaps because the mother was undernourished. But, after a few moments of sucking, she felt a strange pain, and the milk began to flow.

Soon he fell asleep.

Ada brought a bowl of warm water and a rag, and gently washed the baby’s face and head, then the rest of him.

Rebecca whispered: ‘He’s so beautiful.’

Carla said: ‘Mother, shall we call him Walter?’

She had not intended to be dramatic, but Maud fell apart. Her face crumpled and she bent double, wracked by terrible sobs. She recovered herself sufficiently to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ then she was convulsed by grief again. ‘Oh, Walter, my Walter,’ she wept.

Eventually her crying subsided. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I didn’t mean to make a fuss.’ She wiped her face with her sleeve. ‘I just wish your father could see the baby, that’s all. It’s so unfair.’

Ada surprised them both by quoting the Book of Job: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ she said. ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

Carla did not believe in God – no holy being worthy of the name could have allowed the Nazi death camps to happen – but all the same she found comfort in the quotation. It was about accepting everything in human life, including the pain of birth and the sorrow of death. Maud seemed to appreciate it too, and she became calmer.

Carla looked adoringly at baby Walter. She would care for him and feed him and keep him warm, she vowed, no matter what difficulties stood in the way. He was the most wonderful child that had ever been born, and she would love and cherish him for ever.

He woke up, and Carla gave him her nipple again. He sucked contentedly, making small smacking noises with his mouth, while four women watched him. For a little while, in the warm, dim-lit kitchen, there was no other sound.

(ii)

The first speech made by a new Member of Parliament is called a maiden speech, and is usually dull. Certain things have to be said, stock phrases are used, and the convention is that the subject must not be controversial. Colleagues and opponents alike congratulate the newcomer, the traditions are observed and the ice is broken.

Lloyd Williams made his first real speech a few months later, during the debate on the National Insurance Bill. That was more scary.

In preparing it he had two orators in mind. His grandfather, Dai Williams, used the language and rhythms of the Bible, not just in chapel but also – perhaps especially – when speaking of the hardship and injustice of the life of a coal miner. He relished short words rich in meaning: toil, sin, greed. He spoke of the hearth and the pit and the grave.

Churchill did the same, but had humour that Dai Williams lacked. His long, majestic sentences often ended with an unexpected image or a reversal of meaning. Having been editor of the government newspaper the British Gazette during the General Strike of 1926, he had warned trade unionists: ‘Make your minds perfectly clear: if ever you let loose upon us again a general strike, we will loose upon you another British Gazette.’ A speech needed such surprises, Lloyd believed; they were like the raisins in a bun.

But when he stood up to speak, he found that his carefully wrought sentences suddenly seemed unreal. His audience clearly felt the same, and he could sense that the fifty or sixty MPs in the chamber were only half listening. He suffered a moment of panic: how could he be boring about a subject that mattered so profoundly to the people he represented?

On the government front bench he could see his mother, now Minister for Schools, and his Uncle Billy, Minister for Coal. Billy Williams had started work down the pit at the age of thirteen, Lloyd knew. Ethel had been the same age when she began scrubbing the floors of Tŷ Gwyn. This debate was not about fine phrases, it was about their lives.

After a minute he abandoned his script and spoke extempore. He recalled instead the misery of working-class families made penniless by unemployment or disability, scenes he had witnessed first hand in the East End of London and the South Wales coalfield. His voice betrayed the emotion he felt, somewhat to his embarrassment, but he ploughed on. He sensed his audience beginning to pay attention. He spoke of his grandfather and others who had started the Labour movement with the dream of comprehensive employment insurance to banish forever the fear of destitution. When he sat down there was a roar of approval.

In the visitors’ gallery his wife Daisy smiled proudly and gave him a thumbs-up sign.

He listened to the rest of the debate in a glow of satisfaction. He felt he had passed his first real test as an MP.

Afterwards, in the lobby, he was approached by a Labour Whip, one of the people responsible for making sure MPs voted the right way. After congratulating Lloyd on his speech, the Whip said: ‘How would you like to be a parliamentary private secretary?’

Lloyd was thrilled. Each minister and secretary of state had at least one PPS. In truth a PPS was often little more than a bag-carrier, but the job was the usual first step on the way to a ministerial appointment. ‘I’d be honoured,’ Lloyd said. ‘Who would I be working for?’

‘Ernie Bevin.’

Lloyd could hardly believe his luck. Bevin was Foreign Secretary and the closest colleague of Prime Minister Attlee. The intimate relationship between the two men was a case of the attraction of opposites. Attlee was middle class: the son of a lawyer, an Oxford graduate, an officer in the First World War. Bevin was the illegitimate child of a housemaid, never knew his father, started work at the age of eleven, and founded the mammoth Transport and General Workers Union. They were physical opposites, too: Attlee slim and dapper, quiet, solemn; Bevin a huge man, tall and strong and overweight, with a loud laugh. The Foreign Secretary referred to the Prime Minister as ‘little Clem’. All the same they were staunch allies.

Bevin was a hero to Lloyd and to millions of ordinary British people. ‘There’s nothing I’d like more,’ Lloyd said. ‘But hasn’t Bevin already got a PPS?’

‘He needs two,’ the Whip said. ‘Go to the Foreign Office tomorrow morning at nine and you can get started.’

‘Thank you!’

Lloyd hurried along the oak-panelled corridor, heading for his mother’s office. He had arranged to meet Daisy there after the debate. ‘Mam!’ he said as he entered. ‘I’ve been made PPS to Ernie Bevin!’

Then he saw that Ethel was not alone. Earl Fitzherbert was with her.

Fitz stared at Lloyd with a mixture of surprise and distaste.

Even in his shock Lloyd noticed that his father was wearing a perfectly cut light-grey suit with a double-breasted waistcoat.

He looked back at his mother. She was quite calm. This encounter was not a surprise to her. She must have contrived it.

The earl came to the same conclusion. ‘What the devil is this, Ethel?’

Lloyd stared at the man whose blood ran in his veins. Even in this embarrassing situation, Fitz was poised and dignified. He was handsome, despite the drooping eyelid that resulted from the Battle of the Somme. He leaned on a walking stick, another consequence of the Somme. A few months short of sixty years old, he was immaculately groomed, his grey hair neatly trimmed, his silver tie tightly knotted, his black shoes shining. Lloyd, too, always liked to look well turned out. That’s where I get it from, he thought.

Ethel went and stood close to the earl. Lloyd knew his mother well enough to understand this move. She frequently used her charm when she wanted to persuade a man. All the same, Lloyd did not like to see her being so warm to one who had exploited her then let her down.

‘I was so sorry when I heard about the death of Boy,’ she said to Fitz. ‘Nothing is as precious to us as our children, is it?’

‘I must go,’ Fitz said.

Until this moment, Lloyd had met Fitz only in passing. He had never before spent this much time with him or heard him speak this number of words. Despite feeling uncomfortable, Lloyd was fascinated. Grumpy though he was right now, Fitz had a kind of allure.

‘Please, Fitz,’ said Ethel. ‘You have a son whom you have never acknowledged – a son you should be proud of.’

‘You shouldn’t do this, Ethel,’ said Fitz. ‘A man is entitled to forget the mistakes of his youth.’

Lloyd cringed with embarrassment, but his mother pressed on. ‘Why should you want to forget? I know he was a mistake, but look at him now – a Member of Parliament who has just made a thrilling speech and been appointed PPS to the Foreign Secretary.’

Fitz pointedly did not look at Lloyd.

Ethel said: ‘You want to pretend that our affair was a meaningless dalliance, but you know the truth. Yes, we were young and foolish, and randy too – me as much as you – but we loved each other. We really loved each other, Fitz. You should admit it. Don’t you know that if you deny the truth about yourself you lose your soul?’

Fitz’s face was no longer merely impassive, Lloyd saw. He was struggling to maintain control. Lloyd understood that his mother had put her finger on the real problem. It was not so much that Fitz was ashamed of having an illegitimate son; he was too proud to accept that he had loved a housemaid. He probably loved Ethel more than his wife, Lloyd guessed. And that upset all his most fundamental beliefs about the social hierarchy.

Lloyd spoke for the first time. ‘I was with Boy at the end, sir. He died bravely.’

For the first time, Fitz looked at him. ‘My son doesn’t require your approval,’ he said.

Lloyd felt as if he had been slapped.

Even Ethel was shocked. ‘Fitz!’ she said. ‘How can you be so mean?’

At that point Daisy came in.

‘Hello, Fitz!’ she said gaily. ‘You probably thought you’d got rid of me, but now you’re my father-in-law again. Isn’t that amusing?’

Ethel said: ‘I’m just trying to persuade Fitz to shake Lloyd’s hand.’

Fitz said: ‘I try to avoid shaking hands with socialists.’

Ethel was fighting a losing battle, but she would not give up. ‘See how much of yourself there is in him! He resembles you, dresses like you, shares your interest in politics – he’ll probably end up Foreign Secretary, which you always wanted to be!’

Fitz’s expression darkened further. ‘It is now most unlikely that I shall ever be Foreign Secretary.’ He went to the door. ‘And it would not please me in the least if that great office of state were to be held by my Bolshevik bastard!’ With that he walked out.

Ethel burst into tears.

Daisy put her arm around Lloyd. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry,’ Lloyd said. ‘I’m not shocked or disappointed.’ This was not true, but he did not want to appear pathetic. ‘I was rejected by him a long time ago.’ He looked at Daisy with adoration. ‘I’m lucky to have plenty of other people who love me.’

Ethel said tearfully: ‘It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have asked him to come here. I might have known it would turn out badly.’

‘Never mind,’ said Daisy. ‘I have some good news.’

Lloyd smiled at her. ‘What’s that?’

She looked at Ethel. ‘Are you ready for this?’

‘I think so.’

‘Come on,’ said Lloyd. ‘What is it?’

Daisy said: ‘We’re going to have a baby.’

(iii)

Carla’s brother, Erik, came home that summer, near to death. He had contracted tuberculosis in a Soviet labour camp, and they had released him when he became too ill to work. He had been sleeping rough for weeks, travelling on freight trains and begging lifts on lorries. He arrived at the von Ulrich house barefoot and wearing filthy clothes. His face was like a skull.

However, he did not die. It might have been being with people who loved him; or the warmer weather as winter turned into spring; or perhaps just rest; but he coughed less and regained enough energy to do some work around the house, boarding up smashed windows, repairing roof tiles, unblocking pipes.

Fortunately, at the beginning of the year Frieda Franck had struck gold.

Ludwig Franck had been killed in the air raid that destroyed his factory, and for a while Frieda and her mother had been as destitute as everyone else. But she got a job as a nurse in the American zone, and soon afterwards, she explained to Carla, a little group of American doctors had asked her to sell their surplus food and cigarettes on the black market in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. Thereafter she turned up at Carla’s house once a week with a little basket of supplies: warm clothing, candles, flashlight batteries, matches, soap, and food – bacon, chocolate, apples, rice, canned peaches. Maud divided the food into portions and gave Carla double. Carla accepted without hesitation, not for her own sake, but to help her feed baby Walli.

Without Frieda’s illicit groceries, Walli might not have made it.

He was changing fast. The dark hair with which he had been born had now gone, and instead he had fine, fair hair. At six months he had Maud’s wonderful green eyes. As his face took shape, Carla noticed a fold of flesh in the outer corners of his eyes that gave him a slant-eyed look, and she wondered if his father had been a Siberian. She could not remember all the men who had raped her. Most of the time she had closed her eyes.

She no longer hated them. It was strange, but she was so happy to have Walli that she could hardly bring herself to regret what had happened.

Rebecca was fascinated by Walli. Now just fifteen, she was old enough to have the beginnings of maternal feelings, and she eagerly helped Carla bathe and dress the baby. She played with him constantly, and he gurgled with delight when he saw her.

As soon as Erik felt well enough, he joined the Communist Party.

Carla was baffled. After what he had suffered at the hands of the Soviets, how could he? But she found that he talked about Communism in the same way he had talked about Nazism a decade earlier. She just hoped that this time his disillusionment would not be so long coming.

The Allies were keen for democracy to return to Germany, and city elections were scheduled for Berlin later in 1946.

Carla felt sure the city would not return to normal until its own people took control, so she decided to stand for the Social Democratic Party. But Berliners quickly discovered that the Soviet occupiers had a curious notion of what democracy meant.

The Soviets had been shocked by the results of elections in Austria the previous November. The Austrian Communists had expected to run neck-and-neck with the Socialists, but had won only four seats out of 165. It seemed that voters blamed Communism for the brutality of the Red Army. The Kremlin, unused to genuine elections, had not anticipated that.

To avoid a similar result in Germany, the Soviets proposed a merger between the Communists and the Social Democrats in what they called a united front. The Social Democrats refused, despite heavy pressure. In East Germany the Russians started arresting Social Democrats, just as the Nazis had in 1933. There the merger was forced through. But the Berlin elections were supervised by the four Allies, and the Social Democrats survived.

Once the weather warmed up, Carla was able to take her turn queuing for food. She carried Walli with her wrapped in a pillowcase – she had no baby clothes. Standing in line for potatoes one morning, a few blocks from home, she was surprised to see an American jeep pull up with Frieda in the passenger seat. The balding, middle-aged driver kissed her on the lips, and she jumped out. She was wearing a sleeveless blue dress and new shoes. She walked quickly away, heading for the von Ulrich house, carrying her little basket.

Carla saw everything in a flash. Frieda was not trading on the black market, and there was no syndicate of doctors. She was the paid mistress of an American officer.

It was not unusual. Thousands of pretty German girls had been faced with the choice: see your family starve, or sleep with a generous officer. French women had done the same under German occupation: officers’ wives back here in Germany had spoken bitterly about it.

All the same, Carla was horrified. She believed that Frieda loved Heinrich. They were planning to get married as soon as life returned to some semblance of normality. Carla felt sick at heart.

She reached the head of the line and bought her ration of potatoes, then hurried home.

She found Frieda upstairs in the drawing room. Erik had cleaned up the room and put newspaper in the windows, the next best thing to glass. The curtains had long ago been recycled as bed linen, but most of the chairs had survived so far, their upholstery faded and worn. The grand piano was still there, miraculously. A Russian officer had discovered it and announced that he would return next day with a crane to lift it out through the window, but he had never come back.

Frieda immediately took Walli from Carla and began to sing to him. ‘A, B, C, die Katze lief im Schnee.’ The women who had not yet had children, Rebecca and Frieda, could hardly get enough of Walli, Carla observed. Those who had had children of their own, Maud and Ada, adored him but dealt with him in a briskly practical way.

Frieda opened the lid of the piano and encouraged Walli to bang on the keys as she sang. The instrument had not been played for years: Maud had not touched it since the death of her last pupil, Joachim Koch.

After a few minutes Frieda said to Carla: ‘You’re a bit solemn. What is it?’

‘I know how you get the food you bring us,’ Carla said. ‘You’re not a black marketeer, are you?’

‘Of course I am,’ Frieda said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I saw you this morning, getting out of a jeep.’

‘Colonel Hicks gave me a lift.’

‘He kissed you on the lips.’

Frieda looked away. ‘I knew I should have got out earlier. I could have walked from the American zone.’

‘Frieda, what about Heinrich?’

‘He’ll never know! I’ll be more careful, I swear.’

‘Do you still love him?’

‘Of course! We’re going to get married.’

‘Then why . . . ?’

‘I’ve had enough of hard times! I want to put on pretty clothes and go to nightclubs and dance.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Carla said confidently. ‘You can’t lie to me, Frieda – we’ve been friends too long. Tell me the truth.’

‘The truth?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I did it for Walli.’

Carla gasped with shock. That had never occurred to her, but it made sense. She could believe Frieda would make such a sacrifice for her and her baby.

But she felt dreadful. This made her responsible for Frieda’s prostituting herself. ‘This is terrible!’ Carla said. ‘You shouldn’t have done it – we would have managed somehow.’

Frieda sprang up from the piano stool with the baby still in her arms. ‘No, you wouldn’t!’ she blazed.

Walli was frightened, and cried. Carla took him and rocked him, patting his back.

‘You wouldn’t have managed,’ Frieda said more quietly.

‘How do you know?’

‘All last winter, babies were brought into the hospital naked, wrapped in newspapers, dead of hunger and cold. I could hardly bear to look at them.’

‘Oh, God.’ Carla held Walli tight.

‘They turn a peculiar bluish colour when they freeze to death.’

‘Stop it.’

‘I have to tell you, otherwise you won’t understand what I did. Walli would have been one of those blue frozen babies.’

‘I know,’ Carla whispered. ‘I know.’

‘Percy Hicks is a kind man. He has a frumpy wife back in Boston and I’m the sexiest thing he’s ever seen. He’s nice and quick about intercourse and always uses a condom.’

‘You should stop,’ Carla said.

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Carla confessed. ‘And that’s the worst part. I feel so guilty. I am guilty.’

‘You’re not. It’s my choice. German women have to make hard choices. We’re paying for the easy choices German men made fifteen years ago. Men such as my father, who thought Hitler would be good for business; and Heinrich’s father, who voted for the Enabling Act. The sins of the fathers are visited on the daughters.’

There was a loud knock at the front door. A moment later they heard scampering steps as Rebecca hurried upstairs to hide, just in case it was the Red Army.

Then Ada’s voice said: ‘Oh! Sir! Good morning!’ She sounded surprised and a bit worried, though not scared. Carla wondered who would induce that particular mixture of reactions in the maid.

There was a heavy masculine tread on the stairs, then Werner walked in.

He was dirty and ragged and thin as a rail, but there was a broad smile on his handsome face. ‘It’s me!’ he said ebulliently. ‘I’m back!’

Then he saw the baby. His jaw dropped and the happy smile disappeared. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What . . . who . . . whose baby is that?’

‘Mine, my darling,’ said Carla. ‘Let me explain.’

‘Explain?’ he said angrily. ‘What explanation is necessary? You’ve had someone else’s baby!’ He turned to go.

Frieda said: ‘Werner! In this room are two women who love you. Don’t walk out without listening to us. You don’t understand.’

‘I think I understand everything.’

‘Carla was raped.’

He went pale. ‘Raped? Who by?’

Carla said: ‘I never knew their names.’

‘Names?’ Werner swallowed. ‘There . . . there was more than one?’

‘Five Red Army soldiers.’

His voice fell to a whisper. ‘Five?’

Carla nodded.

‘But . . . couldn’t you . . . I mean . . .’

Frieda said: ‘I was raped, too, Werner. And so was Mother.’

‘Dear God, what has been going on here?’

‘Hell,’ said Frieda.

Werner sat down heavily in a worn leather chair. ‘I thought hell was where I’ve been,’ he said. He buried his face in his hands.

Carla crossed the room, still holding Walli, and stood in front of Werner’s chair. ‘Look at me, Werner,’ she said. ‘Please.’

He looked up, his face twisted with emotion.

‘Hell is over,’ she said.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘Life is hard, but the Nazis have gone, the war is finished, Hitler is dead, and the Red Army rapists have been brought under control, more or less. The nightmare has ended. And we’re both alive, and together.’

He reached out and took her hand. ‘You’re right.’

‘We’ve got Walli, and in a minute you’ll meet a fifteen-year-old girl called Rebecca who has somehow become my child. We have to make a new family out of what the war has left us, just as we have to build new houses with the rubble in the streets.’

He nodded acceptance.

‘I need your love,’ she said. ‘So do Rebecca and Walli.’

He stood up slowly. She looked at him expectantly. He said nothing but, after a long moment, he put his arms around her and the baby, gently embracing them both.

(iv)

Under wartime regulations still in force, the British government had a right to open a coal mine anywhere, regardless of the wishes of the owner of the land. Compensation was paid only for loss of earnings on farmland or commercial property.

Billy Williams, as Minister for Coal, authorized an open-cast mine in the grounds of Tŷ Gwyn, the palatial residence of Earl Fitzherbert on the outskirts of Aberowen.

No compensation was payable as the land was not commercial.

There was uproar on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons. ‘Your slag heap will be right under the bedroom windows of the countess!’ said one indignant Tory.

Billy Williams smiled. ‘The earl’s slag heap has been under my mother’s window for fifty years,’ he said.

Lloyd Williams and Ethel both travelled to Aberowen with Billy the day before the engineers began to dig the hole. Lloyd was reluctant to leave Daisy, who was due to give birth in two weeks, but it was a historic moment, and he wanted to be there.

Both his grandparents were now in their late seventies. Granda was almost blind despite his pebble-lensed glasses, and Grandmam was bent-backed. ‘This is nice,’ Grandmam said when they all sat around the old kitchen table. ‘Both my children here.’ She served stewed beef with mashed turnips and thick slices of home-made bread spread with the butcher’s fat called dripping. She poured large mugs of sweetened milky tea to go with it.

Lloyd had eaten like this frequently as a child, but now he found it coarse. He knew that even in hard times French and Spanish women managed to serve up tasty dishes delicately flavoured with garlic and garnished with herbs. He was ashamed of his fastidiousness, and pretended to eat and drink with relish.

‘Pity about the gardens at Tŷ Gwyn,’ Grandmam said tactlessly.

Billy was stung. ‘What do you mean? Britain needs the coal.’

‘But people love those gardens. Beautiful, they are. I’ve been there at least once every year since I was a girl. Shame it is to see them go.’

‘There’s a perfectly good recreation ground right in the middle of Aberowen!’

‘It’s not the same,’ said Grandmam imperturbably.

Granda said: ‘Women will never understand politics.’

‘No,’ said Grandmam. ‘I don’t suppose we will.’

Lloyd caught his mother’s eye. She smiled and said nothing.

Billy and Lloyd shared the second bedroom, and Ethel made up a bed on the kitchen floor. ‘I slept in this room every night of my life until I went in the army,’ Billy said as they lay down. ‘And I looked out the window every morning at that fucking slag heap.’

‘Keep your voice down, Uncle Billy,’ Lloyd said. ‘You don’t want your mother to hear you swear.’

‘Aye, you’re right,’ said Billy.

Next morning after breakfast they all walked up the hill to the big house. It was a mild morning, and for a change there was no rain. The ridge of mountains at the skyline was softened with summer grass. As Tŷ Gwyn came into view, Lloyd could not help seeing it more as a beautiful building than as a symbol of oppression. It was both, of course: nothing was simple in politics.

The great iron gates stood open. The Williams family passed into the grounds. A crowd had gathered already: the contractor’s men with their machinery, a hundred or so miners and their families, Earl Fitzherbert with his son Andrew, a handful of reporters with notebooks, and a film crew.

The gardens were breathtaking. The avenue of ancient chestnut trees was in full leaf, there were swans on the lake, and the flower beds blazed with colour. Lloyd guessed the earl had made sure the place looked its best. He wanted to brand the Labour government as wreckers in the eyes of the world.

Lloyd found himself sympathizing with Fitz.

The Mayor of Aberowen was giving an interview. ‘The people of this town are against the open-cast mine,’ he said. Lloyd was surprised: the town council was Labour, and it must have gone against the grain for them to oppose the government. ‘For more than a hundred years, the beauty of these gardens has refreshed the souls of people who live in a grim industrial landscape,’ the Mayor went on. Switching from prepared speech to personal reminiscence, he added: ‘I proposed to my wife under that cedar tree.’

He was interrupted by a loud clanking sound like the footsteps of an iron giant. Turning to look back along the drive, Lloyd saw a huge machine approaching. It looked like the biggest crane in the world. It had an enormous boom ninety feet long and a bucket into which a lorry could easily fit. Most astonishing of all, it moved along on rotating steel shoes that made the earth shake every time they hit the ground.

Billy said proudly to Lloyd: ‘That’s a walking monighan dragline excavator. Picks up six tons of earth at a time.’

The film camera rolled as the monstrous machine stomped up the drive.

Lloyd had only one misgiving about the Labour Party. There was a streak of puritan authoritarianism in many socialists. His grandfather had it, and so did Billy. They were not comfortable with sensual pleasures. Sacrifice and self-denial suited them better. They dismissed the ravishing beauty of these gardens as irrelevant. They were wrong.

Ethel was not that way, nor was Lloyd. Perhaps the killjoy strain had been bred out of their line. He hoped so.

Fitz gave an interview on the pink gravel path while the digger driver manoeuvred his machine into position. ‘The Minister for Coal has told you that when the mine is exhausted the garden will be subject to what he calls an effective restoration programme,’ he said. ‘I say to you that that promise is worthless. It has taken more than a century for my grandfather and my father and I to bring the garden to its present pitch of beauty and harmony. It would take another hundred years to restore it.’

The boom of the excavator was lowered until it stood at a forty-five-degree angle over the shrubbery and flower beds of the west garden. The bucket was positioned over the croquet lawn. There was a long moment of waiting. The crowd fell silent. Billy said loudly: ‘Get on with it, for God’s sake.’

An engineer in a bowler hat blew a whistle.

The bucket was dropped to the earth with a massive thud. Its steel teeth dug into the flat green lawn. The drag rope tautened, there was a loud creak of straining machinery, then the bucket began to move back. As it was dragged across the ground it dug up a bed of huge yellow sunflowers, the rose garden, a shrubbery of summersweet and bottlebrush buckeye, and a small magnolia tree. At the end of its travel the bucket was full of earth, flowers and plants.

The bucket was then lifted to a height of twenty feet, dribbling loose earth and blossoms.

The boom swung sideways. It was taller than the house, Lloyd saw. He almost thought the bucket would smash the upstairs windows, but the operator was skilled, and stopped it just in time. The drag rope slackened, the bucket tilted, and six tons of garden fell to the ground a few feet from the entrance.

The bucket was returned to its original position, and the process was repeated.

Lloyd looked at Fitz and saw that he was crying.