The Girl from Station X (35 page)

Barnes was
half-German and half Cherokee Indian
. My mother marvelled at his informal relationship with his superiors compared with British soldiers towards theirs,
later quoting Barnes hooting his horn at an officer and shouting: ‘Hey Lootenant, how about my dough?’

It was not until 1 July, her thirty-first birthday, when Anne set off again with Joe Darling and Barnes, in the US Army weapon carrier, this time to Hamelin, then to Hildesheim, that she began
to see signs of bomb damage:

when we reached the town, it was the most amazing sight I’ve ever seen as there was practically not a house left standing and this is literally true –
just a mass of twisted iron girders, half-burnt timber beams and rubble, far worse than anything I’ve seen in London . . . there was an odd scent in the air which Joe told me was due to the
bodies still in the ruins . . . the blitz happened the day before VE day and just before the Americans went in there. The inhabitants were given an ultimatum to surrender. The Burgomaster was a
strong Nazi and refused.

At Guslav, the next town they came to, Anne noted that, for the first time since she’d been in Germany, she saw the shops full of things and that the ex-soldier boys leaning out of the
hospital windows appeared to be
14 or 15 at most. I noticed the same thing amongst members of the Wehrmacht who one sees trudging along the roads carrying bundles on their
backs.

She and Joe lunched at the Steinberg Hotel, overlooking the Harz mountains, above a building which, they were told,
was one of Hitler’s baby farms, for babies born to girls by
members of the S.S. and where they are still cared for.

The Steinberg Hotel was a headquarters of ‘T’ Force:

They follow on right behind the combat troops and seize the important ‘targets’ before they are destroyed . . . Part of T Force’s and Joe’s
job at the moment is to get hold of the people who have information that may be of use to us and either take them to England or get them out and it is a rush just now to get them out before the
Russians move into that zone, as the Russians won’t allow us into their zone at all . . . Apparently some of the V (ie experimental) stuff that T Force have found has staggered them in its
potential destructive possibilities.

Anne was clearly interested in Joe’s work and this must have been an important factor in her getting on so well with him. He was serious and dedicated. (Similarly, my parents’
marriage went well when my father was naval attaché in Madrid; his job interested her. However, I believe that, for someone of my mother’s temperament, a husband’s job would
never be enough to engage her fully. She would always be dissatisfied unless using her own mind. She was not a ‘man’s woman’ and never could be.)

She basked, though, for some time in Joe Darling’s adoration. His letters – he calls her, among other things,
dear, sweet, a haven of understanding, a sympathetic
soul
– surely gave her an exalted view of herself. She would probably never feel so ‘womanly’ again.

Joe gets a terrific kick out of having me along I think, as they are all so surprised to see a woman so far forward and everyone in the messes is charming to me. I
have never quite realised before just how much men needed us and how much we can raise morale just by being there and talking to them!

As we went along the road we saw cars (many of them with Red Cross flags) coming along loaded up with refugees, returning Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, trudging along with their
equipment. Some limping, others sitting by the roadside for a rest. Some of them asked for lifts, but we just drove straight by. The Wehrmacht are sent by train to within 20 miles of their homes,
given a day’s rations and some money and then they walk the rest. All these people were walking in one direction, away from the Russian zone!

A few hours later, my mother was in the Soviet zone herself, without a permit.

In the villages were knots of people evidently discussing what to do and where to go or whether to stay. I must say I began to feel v. sorry for them. The other
side of the zone was guarded by some British soldiers, who told us that they had orders not to let a single civilian through as from 0300 hours this morning and there had been ‘tears and that
sort of thing’ all day.

At Blandenburg we called on one of the Polizei who took us round to find the man Joe had come down to see – a certain Herr Vogel, who worked for the Reichstelle and had
information which we needed. After a pleasant chat with him we started for home . . . We finally reached Northerin, which is controlled by the Poles – on the way we saw a slave labour camp
and factories where slave labour had been used and surrounded by wire fences. When liberated, they smashed the windows . . . and then had to go back and live in the buildings as there was no other
accommodation for them.

The intense suffering of so many displaced peoples was a strange backdrop for romance. I also had to remind myself that communication between Anne and Joe, let alone meeting physically, was
often very difficult, but perhaps this intensified their relationship. In a letter of 15 July 1945, Joe writes:

Anne my most sweet . . . To get me by phone you have to ask for Hanover exchange, and then Brunswick, and then Kassel, and then the Ministerial Collecting Center and then
my number which happens to be 251. Since we have a limited number of lines to Kassel, it may take an hour or two to get through . . . Golly, I feel much closer now than I have for weeks. Two and
three weeks for mail is simply atrocious.

The day of Joe’s letter, 15 July, TAF ceased to exist and became BAFOG – British Forces Occupation of Germany. On 26 July, Churchill lost for the Conservatives and there was a Labour
Party victory in England. My mother, shocked, wondered about other countries’ reaction; surely the British public would appear to them to be ungrateful?

We have chucked Churchill out almost without so much as a thank you and it must be v bitter to him and v mystifying to the rest of the world at this stage, before
the end of the Japanese war. Some have a theory that it is the women’s vote that has done it, because of the food situation, others think it is because of the muddle over housing. The service
vote was undoubtedly overwhelmingly Labour, because the troops considered themselves – with some justice I believe – to have been badly treated by the present government, with which I
entirely agree.

Perhaps she had not fully understood the desire for social change felt by so many of her countrymen.

I wonder how America will view this throwing out on his backside of the man who saved England and for whom they have so much admiration! The Belgians I spoke to
could not understand it and viewed it with grave suspicion. Hamilton
[her cousin, a Conservative MP who was later Parliamentary Private Secretary to Harold Macmillan and MP for
Cambridge]
has lost his seat which will break his heart I am afraid. If Labour speed up the demobilisation scheme, at least that will be something in their favour.

Despite all the obstacles to meeting, on 5 August, just before the first atomic bomb was dropped by the Americans on the Japanese at Hiroshima, my mother was again travelling in the weapon
carrier with Joe and Barnes driving, this time to Hamburg. One of Joe’s tasks, he explained to her, was to get the names of ‘clean Germans’ to put into the government when it was
reconstituted. Thus, in Hamburg, he took Anne into her first German house.

I felt awkward and didn’t like it much. A boy aged about 21, called Peter, and his sister. They are half-Austrian. I talked with the sister. Joe told them
that I had worked in the bombing raids and she said: ‘Well, you made a good job, I sat in the cellar and trembled,’ to which I replied: ‘Well, so did I in London.’ They all
ask whether London was much damaged, to which I replied most definitely, ‘No.’ She also told me about Russian atrocities and I felt like saying ‘What about Belsen and
Buchenwald?’ but did not though I think we should really. I finally said to her: ‘Well, if you had overrun the whole world, do you think it wd. have been a success?’ to which she
replied: ‘Personally, no, but there are others who do think so.’ It is fantastic talking to them, it is like talking to no other nationality, almost as though 1 half of their brain does
not exist. It never seems to occur to them that one might not want to speak to them, or that Germany is in any way guilty over the war.

By mid-August, America had dropped another atomic bomb, on Nagasaki, and Japan had surrendered. Joe managed to attend the VJ dance in my mother’s ‘mess’, at which, to her
delight, they were allowed to wear civilian clothes. She wore green crêpe de chine – presumably bought in Brussels – and
felt marvellous
. She danced the
waltz with a Norwegian wing commander – my mother had a penchant for blonds – and next day wrote, showing disloyalty to Joe:
I wish to God I had met this Norwegian
before.

Later that day, however, she went to Hamburg with Joe and a friend of his from the US Army.
Passed beside Belsen camp on the way but couldn’t see much except the barbed wire .
. . the remaining internees are now living in the S.S. barracks nearby and we saw 1 or 2 of them walking up the road. You are not allowed in without special permission, most of it has been burnt .
. . but the ovens where they burnt people are still there.

These macabre details jar with Anne’s burgeoning romance, but undoubtedly it was during that period, from mid-August until October 1945, that she was most in love with Joe Darling, if she
ever was truly in love with him. He certainly was with her. Apart from having a wife and three children back in America, none of whom he mentions in his love letters from Germany – though my
mother does, sporadically, in her diary – he appears in those letters as a high-minded man with a conscience. In one letter, explaining his duties regarding the subjugated Germans, he writes:
To so regulate fundamentally a person’s life, in such numbers, rather sobers one
. He must have been of Quaker origin, as he sometimes addresses Anne as ‘thee’ in the
letters. He certainly idolised her.

For someone with her temperament, who was so intensely curious, and hated dull routine, it also helped that he was able to open doors to her in post-war Germany. He held her interest. Finally
Joe pulled off the ‘coup’ of taking her to Berlin, which she longed to see.

Was getting more and more thrilled as we approached Russian territory . . . was slightly nervous that my ‘papers’ which were bogus as hell, wd. not get
me through, but there was no trouble at all and we sailed in and then saw the Russian frontier post with red flags flying over a photo of Stalin and of 2 Russian generals. The sentries saluted us
and we were in the Russian zone! . . . most of them seemed to have quite a sense of humour and were not in the least forbidding or fierce.

My mother would not of course have had this attitude to the Russians had she been German, Polish or Czech; thousands of women, young and old, had been raped by Russian soldiers as they advanced
on their victorious march west. But she was always fascinated by Russia and Russians.

In Berlin, Joe had to work, and the rest of that day Anne went out again with Barnes.

As we passed through Schoneberg I saw an elderly woman carrying a heavy basket leaning on the wall in such an attitude of abject despair that it struck me all of a
heap – it is these older people that affects me more than the others; they seem more sympathetic somehow . . . as we drove through the Russian zone I saw women sitting in the rubble and
grubbing amongst it for sticks and anything they could find. One German woman who spoke to me to try and buy some cigarettes told me that v. small children were dying of hunger and that the
Russians had bought up everything.

In Unter den Linden, Barnes got out of the truck to see how much he could get for two American watches. He ended up getting the equivalent of $300 dollars apiece in German marks:
The
Russians pulled out wads of 1,000 mark notes, which the Russian Government seems to have printed ad lib and so legalised the looting, the British and Americans have printed nothing above a 100 mark
note . . . A red flag was flying on top of what remained of the Reichstag although it appeared to be in what I believe was the British zone.

Two weeks later, my mother and Joe Darling were in a very different setting. On 1 September, having gone through endless complications to synchronise their
‘leaves’, they managed to go to Cannes, where they spent six days together.

4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, September.

As I write these days in retrospect, it all seems part of one glorious dream . . . we had everything we could possibly want, wine, figs, grapes, melons, in plenty .
. . there was a mimosa tree in the garden . . . we stole figs from a tree leaning over the wall of an empty villa where Joe lifted me up on his shoulders so that we could get the best ones. It was
fun doing the shopping too in the little shops . . . bread is still rationed . . . Joe and I would walk back feeling very domestic and carrying melons, long sticks of bread and bottles of wine. The
front at Cannes is v. little changed.

This was the only time I had glimpsed my mother in a purely domestic setting and enjoying it. Ordinarily she loathed anything to do with food or cooking, always managing to get others to take
care of it. Could she have been happy married to Joe Darling, or to someone like him?

On 26 September, for perhaps the only time in her life (except for, briefly, with Alan the pilot) she admits to being in love with a man:
Don’t know why I’m in love with
him.