Winter of the World (117 page)

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?