A Time of Gifts (6 page)

These vague broodings brought me—somewhere between Tiel and Nijmegen, it must have been—to the foot of one of those vertiginous belfries which are so transparent in the distance and so solid close to. I was inside it and up half-a-dozen ladders in a minute and gazing down through the cobwebbed louvres. The whole kingdom was revealed. The two great rivers loitered across it with their scatterings of ships and their barge-processions and their tributaries. There were the polders and the dykes and the long willow-bordered canals, the heath and arable and pasture dotted with stationary and expectant cattle, windmills and farms and
answering belfries, bare rookeries with their wheeling specks just within earshot and a castle or two, half-concealed among a ruffle of woods. The snow had melted here, or fallen more lightly: blue and green and pewter and russet and silver composed the enormous vista of turf and flood and sky. There was a low line of hills to the east, and everywhere the shine of intruding water and even a faint glimmer, faraway to the north, of the Zuyder Zee. Filled with strange light, the peaceful and harmonious land slid away to infinity under a rush of clouds.

In the bottom chamber, as I left, an octet of clogged bell-ringers was assembling and spitting on their palms before grasping the sallies, and the clangour of their scales and changes, muted to a soft melancholy by the distance, followed me for the next few miles of nightfall and sharpening chill.

* * *

It was dark long before I reached the quays of Nijmegen. Then, for the first time for days, I found myself walking up a slant and down again. Lanes of steps climbed from the crowding ships along the waterfront; between the lamplight and the dark, tall towers and zigzag façades impended. The quayside lamps strung themselves into the distance beside the dark flow of the Waal and upstream a great iron bridge sailed northwards and away for miles beyond the river. I had supper and after filling in my journal I searched the waterfront for a sailors' doss-house and ended up in a room over a blacksmith's.

I knew it was my last night in Holland and I was astonished how quickly I had crossed it. My heels might have been winged. I was astonished, too, at the impressive, clear beauty of the country and its variety, the amazing light and the sway of its healing and collusive charm. No wonder it had produced so many painters! And the Dutch themselves? Although we were reciprocally tongue-tied, the contact was not quite as slight as these pages must suggest. On foot, unlike other forms of travel, it is impossible to be
out of touch; and our exchanges were enough, during this brief journey, to leave a deposit of liking and admiration which has lasted ever since.

Sleep fell so fast and empty of dreams that when I woke at six next morning the night seemed to have rushed by in a few minutes. It was the blacksmith's hammer just under the floor boards which had roused me. I lay as though in a trance, listening to the stop-gap bounces as they alternated with resonant horseshoe notes on the beak of the anvil and when the rhythmic banging stopped, I could hear panting bellows and the hiss of steam and the fidgeting of enormous hoofs, and soon the smell of singeing horn that rose through the cracks in the floor was followed by fresh clangs and finally by the grate of a rasp. My host was shoeing a great blond carthorse with a mane and tail of tousled flax. He waved when I went into his smithy and mumbled good morning through a mouthful of horsenails.

* * *

It was snowing. A signpost pointed over the bridge to Arnhem, but I stuck to the south bank and followed the road for the German border. In a little while it veered away from the river and after a few miles I espied two figures in the distance: short of the frontier, they were the last people I saw in Holland. They turned out to be two nuns of St. Vincent de Paul waiting for a country bus. They were shod in clogs, they had black woollen shawls over their shoulders and their blue stuff habits, caught in the middle, billowed in many pleats. Their boxwood rosaries hung in loops and crucifixes were tucked in their belts like daggers. But their two umbrellas were of no avail—the slanting snow invaded their coifs and piled up in the wide triangular wings.

The officials at the Dutch frontier handed back my passport, duly stamped, and soon I was crossing the last furlongs of No Man's Land, with the German frontier post growing nearer through the turning snow. Black, white and red were painted in
spirals round the road barrier and soon I could make out the scarlet flag charged with its white disc and its black swastika. Similar emblems had been flying over the whole of Germany for the last ten months. Beyond it were the snow-laden trees and the first white acres of Westphalia.

N
OTHING REMAINS
from that first day in Germany but a confused memory of woods and snow and sparse villages in the dim Westphalian landscape and pale sunbeams dulled by clouds. The first landmark is the town of Goch, which I reached by nightfall; and here, in a little tobacconist's shop, the mist begins to clear. Buying cigarettes went without a hitch, but when the shopkeeper said: “Wollen Sie einen Stocknagel?,” I was at sea. From a neat row of them in a drawer, he picked a little curved aluminium plaque about an inch long with a view of the town and its name stamped in relief. It cost a pfennig, he said. Taking my stick, he inserted a tack in the hole at each end of the little medallion and nailed it on. Every town in Germany has its own and when I lost the stick a month later, already barnacled with twenty-seven of these plaques, it flashed like a silver wand.

The town was hung with National Socialist flags and the window of an outfitter's shop next door held a display of Party equipment: swastika arm-bands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown-up S.A. men; swastika button-holes were arranged in a pattern which read
Heil Hitler
and an androgynous wax-dummy with a pearly smile was dressed up in the full uniform of a
Sturmabteilungsmann
. I could identify the faces in some of the photographs on show; the talk of fellow-gazers revealed the names of the others. “Look, there's Roehm,” someone said, pointing to the leader of the S.A. clasping the hand which was to purge him next June, “shaking hands with the Führer!” Baldur von Schirach was taking the salute from a parade of
Hitlerjugend
; Goebbels sat at his desk; and Goering appeared in S.A. costume;
in a white uniform; in voluminous leather shorts; nursing a lion cub; in tails and a white tie; and in a fur collar and plumed hunting hat, aiming a sporting gun. But those of Hitler as a bare-headed Brownshirt, or in a belted mackintosh or a double-breasted uniform and peaked cap or patting the head of a flaxen-plaited and gap-toothed little girl offering him a bunch of daisies, outnumbered the others. “Ein sehr schöner Mann!,” a woman said. Her companion agreed with a sigh and added that he had wonderful eyes.

The crunch of measured footfalls and the rhythm of a marching song sounded in a side street. Led by a standard bearer, a column of the S.A. marched into the square. The song that kept time to their tread, “Volk, ans Gewehr!”
[1]
—often within earshot during the following weeks was succeeded by the truculent beat of the
Horst Wessel Lied
: once heard, never forgotten; and when it finished, the singers were halted in a three-sided square, and stood at ease. It was dark now and thick snow flakes began falling across the lamplight. The S.A. men wore breeches and boots and stiff brown ski-caps with the chin-straps lowered like those of motor-bicyclists, and belts with a holster and a cross-brace. Their shirts, with a red arm-band on the left sleeve, looked like brown paper; but as they listened to an address by their commander they had a menacing and purposeful look. He stood in the middle of the empty fourth side of the square, and the rasp of his utterance, even robbed of its meaning, struck a chill. Ironic crescendoes were spaced out with due pauses for laughter and each clap of laughter preceded a serious and admonitory drop in key. When his peroration had died away the speaker clapped his left hand to his belt buckle, his right arm shot out, and a forest of arms answered him in concert with a three-fold “Heil!” to his clipped introductory “Sieg!” They fell out and streamed across the square, beating the snow off their caps and readjusting their chin-straps, while the standard-bearer rolled up his scarlet emblem and loped away with the flagpole over his shoulder.

* * *

I think the inn where I found refuge was called
Zum Schwarzen Adler
. It was the prototype of so many I fetched up in after the day's march that I must try to reconstruct it.

The opaque spiralling of the leaded panes hid the snowfall and the cars that churned through the slush outside, and a leather curtain on a semi-circular rod over the doorway kept the room snug from cold blasts. The heavy oak tables were set about with benches, hearts and lozenges pierced the chair-backs, a massive china stove soared to the beams overhead, logs were stacked high and sawdust was scattered on the russet tiles. Pewter-lidded beer-mugs paraded along the shelves in ascending height. A framed colour-print on the wall showed Frederick the Great, with cocked hat askew, on a restless charger. Bismarck, white-clad in a breastplate under an eagle-topped helmet, beetled baggy-eyed next door; Hindenburg, with hands crossed on sword-hilt, had the torpid solidity of a hippopotamus; and from a fourth frame, Hitler himself fixed us with a scowl of great malignity. Posters with scarlet hearts advertised
Kaffee Hag
. Clamped in stiff rods, a dozen newspapers hung in a row; and right across the walls were painted jaunty rhymes in bold Gothic black-letter script:

Beer, carraway seed, beeswax, coffee, pine-logs and melting snow combined with the smoke of thick, short cigars in a benign aroma across which every so often the ghost of sauerkraut would float.

I made room between the bretzel-stand, the Maggi sauce-bottle
and my lidded mug on its round eagle-stamped mat and set to work. I was finishing the day's impressions with a dramatic description of the parade when a dozen S.A. men trooped in and settled at a long table. They looked less fierce without their horrible caps. One or two, wearing spectacles, might have been clerks or students. After a while they were singing:

The words, describing a pretty forester's daughter in the greenwood, bounced along cheerfully and ended in a crashing and sharply syncopated chorus.
Lore, Lore, Lore
, as the song was called, was the rage of Germany that year. It was followed hotfoot by another that was to become equally familiar and obsessive. Like many German songs it described love under the linden trees:

The line that rhymed with it was ‘Sitzt ein kleiner Fink, Fink, Fink.' (It took me weeks to learn that
Fink
was a finch; it was perched on one of those linden boughs.) Thumps accentuated the rhythm; the sound would have resembled a rugger club after a match if the singing had been less good. Later on, the volume dwindled and the thumping died away as the singing became softer and harmonies and descants began to weave more complex patterns. Germany has a rich anthology of regional songs, and these, I think, were dreamy celebrations of the forests and plains of Westphalia, long sighs of homesickness musically transposed. It was charming. And the charm made it impossible, at that moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.

* * *

The green and intermittently wooded plains of Westphalia unfolded next day with hints of frozen marsh and a hovering threat of more snow. A troop of workmen in Robin Hood caps marched singing down a side lane with their spades martially at the slope: a similar troop, deployed in a row, was digging a turnip field at high speed and almost by numbers. They belonged to the
Arbeitsdienst
, or Labour Corps, a peasant told me. He was shod in those clogs I have always connected with the Dutch; but they were the universal footgear in the German country-side until much further south. (I still remembered a few German phrases I had picked up on winter holidays in Switzerland, so I was never as completely tongue-tied in Germany as I had been in Holland. As I spoke nothing but German during the coming months, these remnants blossomed, quite fast, into an ungrammatical fluency, and it is almost impossible to strike, at any given moment in these pages, the exact degree of my dwindling inarticulacy.)

I halted that evening in the little town of Kevelaer. It is lodged in my memory as a Gothic side-chapel overgrown with ex-votos. A seventeenth-century image of Our Lady of Kevelaer twinkled in her shrine, splendidly dressed for Advent in purple velvet, stiff with gold lace, heavily crowned and with a many-spiked halo behind a face like a little painted Infanta's. Westphalian pilgrims flocked to her chapel at other seasons and minor miracles abounded. Her likeness stamped my second
Stocknagel
next morning.

One signpost pointed to Kleve, where Anne of Cleves came from, and another to Aachen: if I had realized this was Aix-la-Chapelle, and merely the name of Charlemagne's capital in German, I would have headed there at full speed. As it was, I followed the Cologne road across the plain. Unmemorable and featureless, it flowed away until the fringes of the Ruhr hoisted a distant palisade of industrial chimneys along the horizon and barred the sky with a single massed streamer of smoke.

* * *

Germany!...I could hardly believe I was there.

For someone born in the second year of World War I, those three syllables were heavily charged. Even as I trudged across it, early subconscious notions, when one first confused Germans with germs and knew that both were bad, still sent up fumes; fumes, moreover, which the ensuing years had expanded into clouds as dark and baleful as the Ruhr smoke along the horizon and still potent enough to un-loose over the landscape a mood of—what? Something too evasive to be captured and broken down in a hurry.