Slow Poison - Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

LUCIFER: Thou canst not all die - there is what must survive. Lord Byron

Babworth, December 22nd 1947

The wooden huts flanking the parade ground were barely visible above the banks of snow that had drifted against the twelve-foot high steel mesh perimeter fences. At five thirty in the morning no one slept, neither guard nor prisoner. The sub-zero temperatures allowed little sleep. The thin blankets were no match for the biting easterly winds that tore mercilessly at the rough plank walls. In each of the huts there hung an all pervading smell of paraffin, hinting at a source of warmth somewhere, but none of the prisoners had yet located that magical place.

There were fifteen of these huts, each with a contingent of twenty male prisoners. Each man lay awake, numbly dreading the day ahead. Each day filled with the dull pain of waiting. Escape was suicide. Escape was blackened skin, the bleak solitude of exposure. Escape from the thin grey blankets was punishment enough. But they were alive, stretched out like corpses in their iron cots, their skin touched with death’s bloom, chafed on cotton tick. There were windows between each second cot. Each window had been adorned with fanciful creations of ice crystals, exotic feathers and plumes masking the morning darkness with William Morris screens.

The camp had been built in 1917 as a makeshift training base, shaping the last great spearhead bound for The Front. That the huts would survive until 1947 had never been envisaged. The camp was set high in the hills, surrounded by far acres of windswept Defence land. The camp comprised of the fifteen huts - the prisoners’ sleeping quarters - a crude shower block, a canteen, an officers’ mess, and the officers’ quarters, then, and now, an altogether warmer place.

The majority of the guards despised their work. Up here among the drifts of snow, they were as much captive as their prisoners. There were forty guards - one to every seven or eight inmates. The only footprints visible led from the old officers’ barracks up to and in through the door of the canteen. The men of the first watch had breakfasted well on fatty bacon and eggs and hot sweet tea. They sat, eight of them, in a huddle around one table near the serving hatch. The sickly stench of porridge steamed from the kitchen into the canteen. In the kitchen the great urns bubbled away like grey geysers threatening to spout. A heavily set man swaddled in a thick red scarf stirred the glutinous mass. He turned his face away as if the sight of the boiling porridge sickened him. He slanted his head to catch snippets of conversation. Nothing of importance was said. More small talk about the weather. Brass monkeys. That kind of thing.

Breakfast finished, the eight rose reluctantly from their seats to brave the cold. The guards split up into pairs and tramped through the fresh snow toward their appointed huts. The time was a little after six when the guards began their token inspection. They slammed each door shut behind them, stamping along the floorboards to rid their boots of snow. All present and correct. Nothing was said. No words were spoken. These men, the guards and their prisoners, had few words in common. God - one of those words - had ceased to exist as anything more than a mumbled expletive. Nothing was said.

The prisoners followed the guards with their eyes. At a signal, twenty prisoners slipped slowly from the comfort of their cots into the painful air of the hut. They were all fully clothed, without exception. Once more they were in luck - there would be no shower this morning. Even the porridge was made with boiled snow.

The camp was controlled by an indifferent officer from the South; Group Captain Randolph Wathern. At six o’clock he lay awake in a stuffy bed, wrapped in the arms of a plump woman in her early thirties. The bed creaked as he extricated himself from her embrace. She turned over to sleep on. He looked at the green numerals on the small alarm clock. There would be no more sleep for him. His sleep patterns being governed by military habit, by The Six o’clock reveille. But there was nowhere to go, no parade to inspect, no duty roster to complete. He was snowed out, going nowhere, waiting for the thaw. Waiting in the cosy domesticity of one of the requisitioned lodges in the valley. He had not been able to reach the camp for more than ten days. No one had.

Communication had completely broken down. There was no telephone contact. The lines were severed, the steel strands encased in ice so cold, that the touch could lift flesh from a  bone. Radio contact was difficult under normal conditions - the steep valley walls suppressing the signal - but now there was nothing but white, white noise. The snow lay deep in all directions. Travel was impossible. The entire county lay under a seamless blanket of snow. The plump woman groaned pleasurably as he slid his arm around her waist. Wathern was not entirely unhappy with his predicament.

“Poor bastards!”  he mumbled.

“Hmm?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

The flamboyant scrolls of ice crystals were fast disappearing in the growing warmth of the canteen. The large hut was quite full of men, and yet a strange, unnatural silence hung about the place. The men busied themselves with their breakfast. The combined sounds of scraping and chewing of the three hundred men created an eerie tattoo, interspersed with the fruity jokes of the guards. The prisoners resembled Cistercian monks goaded by devils. At first glance there was much they shared; the shaven head, the unshaven, sunken jowls, the look of despair in their eyes. They shared too the dejected emaciation of men kept at the outer limits of survival.

Each man spooned out his porridge until the metal bowl gleamed. Some of the men began to unbutton their air force blue greatcoats as the accumulated heat of men and porridge increased pleasantly in the canteen, almost to the point of luxury. If the prisoners understood the schoolboy jokes of the guards, or if they even heard them, they gave no hint. Strange words broke through the foreign drone with the regularity of a mantra. ‘Puffy Wathern, Puffy Wathern…’ followed by hoots of laughter, slaps and punches. With the porridge finished, the prisoners began to take more notice of the boisterous behaviour of their guards. None of the prisoners spoke. It was forbidden in the canteen. Beyond the backdrop of coughing and belching, there was no sound from them at all. Nevertheless, the sullen mood had brightened appreciably. A thin man of around thirty-five sitting near the guards shifted nervously in his seat before standing hesitantly. He looked around briefly then approached the guards standing at the serving hatch.

“It’s fucking Oliver! He wants some more fucking porridge!” said one of the guards.

“Nah, it’s the fucking poet again. Wants to show us his fucking poetry again.” said another.

Isaacs stood before them, thin, white, a huge beak of a nose all out of proportion with his shaven head and broad shouldered greatcoat. He stood with his head bowed in deference to the red-faced guards.

“Nicht sprechen zie fucking Deutch, mate. Fuck off!” the first guard said.

Trim stood his ground, searching for the few words he remembered.

“I must speak with you, please.”

“Hey listen lads! The poet speaks our lingo! Well fucking sieg heil to you, chum!”

“No, please, you must let me speak, you must hear me. I am not German. There is a mistake. I am not a Duitser. I am Dutchman.”

“You fucking Jerries'll try any fucking thing. Get back to yer fucking mates, poet.”

The guards had pet names for many of the prisoners. They called Isaacs ‘the poet’ because of his habit of scribbling in a small leather-bound book at every opportunity. Several of the guards had complained to Captain Wathern, had implied mysterious reasons for the writings, but Captain Wathern was not about to deny these remnants anymore of their scant privileges. He was indifferent, but not insensitive or inhumane. He too had seen the inside of such camps. There would be no blatant cruelty here.

“For Christ’s sake, man, leave them at least some of their dignity.” 

The prisoner stood facing the guard for a few more seconds, trying to understand his words. The guard placed his hand on Isaac’s shoulder and pushed him in the direction of the crowded tables. He shuffled resignedly back to his place at the long trestle table. The other prisoners muttered approval as he squeezed past them. For what exactly he did not know. 

“Fuckin’ Jerry!”

“Bloody poet.”

“He’s no fucking poet.”

“What is he, then?”

“Fucking forger, isn’t he! Papers, passports, you know. There must be dozens of Jerries got in on one of his bits of work.”

The guard spat on the ground to underline his disgust.

“How long d'you reckon we’ll have to keep the buggers up here then?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“They sent the Commies back. Why not these fuckers?”

“You know what happened to them poor bastards, don’t you?”

“What then?”

“Shot the fucking lot of them as they came down the fucking gangplank.”

The door of the canteen opened, sending an icy blast around the warm room. All eyes turned to locate the source of the cold wave. Hunter, the acting commandant stood in the open doorway, stamping snow from his boots. One of the guards addressed him.

“Put the board in the fuckin’ hole, Sah!”

Hunter looked up, mentally noted his name.

“Sorry. It’s like a bloody hothouse in here!”

Hunter slammed the door behind him, but the chill had already shifted the mood in the room.

“Char for the officer, lad. Come on, look lively.”

“Yes Sah!” the orderly shouted back.

Hunter began to unbutton his greatcoat.

“No problems here?”

One of the guards answered him quickly.

“Meek as fucking lambs, sir. No problems here.”

The tea arrived, pushed through the hatch by the mess orderly. Hunter took a sip of tea and signalled to the others that they should join him at a table. They all sat and waited for the officer to speak.

“Captain Wathern has still been unable to reach us. The lines are most likely down. The radio is ruddy useless, too. I don’t know about you chaps, but I’ve never seen snow as ruddy deep as this before.”

“I come from the Pennines, sir. We get it bad.” one of them said.

“Well, we must assume that unless we take action of some sort, and soon. We are going to find ourselves in a tricky situation before long.”

The others nodded in agreement. They waited for Hunter to continue.

“Now, I’ve been going over the ordinance survey, and I think that our best bet is to head out towards Uzzleworth, try to get to Ciren. They’ll probably have supplies there. We’ve got the manpower in any case.

“I was thinking along those lines too, sir.” one of them replied.

“Good. We’ll start as soon as we can. I’ll want a full complement of guards on duty. I know it’s unlikely, but I don’t want any of them to think about escaping.”

“They’d have to be fucking bonkers, sir.”

“I still want all of you out there. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can I leave you to organise the proceedings, Davis?”

“Yes, sir!”

“The rest of you - keep the prisoners here until we have everyone assembled. Let the poor blighters know what we’re going to do today. Which of you speaks their lingo?”

No one spoke.

“What none of you? Davis? None of you?”

Hunter rose from his seat and walked over to face the rows of tables. He spoke in a clear voice.

“Achtung! Achtung!”

Hunter went on to explain the duties he had thought up for them. He stumbled on in ungrammatical German. The prisoners listened numbly. Davis left the warmth of the canteen to awaken the remaining guards. The others remained seated at their table, discussing Hunter’s plan.

“We’ll just have to get hold of every available shovel and get this shower out there digging.”

“You don’t reckon we got that many shovels on this place, do you?”

“I’ve never fucking counted.”

“We’ll have to take whatever there is.”

“Tell ’em to take their fucking porridge spoons with them.”

“Have you seen how deep the fucking stuff is?”

“Yeah, short arse! Better watch yer bollocks!”

“ It must been ten fucking foot outside the fence.”

“More on the roads, I reckon.”

“Yeah, that fucking wind’s whipping it up summat cruel.”

“I’ve never known it so fucking cold.”

“We’ve been stuck up in the Pennines for weeks some winters. Lost so many wee lambs. Tragic it were.”

“Oh, that’s lovely! That really cheers me up!”

“Who’s got a fag?”

“Here you are, scrounger.”

The men grabbed for cigarettes.

“Flipping heck, I’m not a blooming charity.”

Torture. The sweet smoke drew the attention of the assembled prisoners with its silent eloquent poetry. The stuttered words of the officer drifted into the hazy distance. The language of need took over. These were English cigarettes. The scent was instantly recognisable. Woodbine. Oh, dear god. Torture. Not here. Not in these humane camps, these snow-bound isolation blocks. Not here. This was Britain, 1947. The beast was dead. Torture. This smell, this cruel odour, this nicotine apocalypse, this slow death. 

A young man from the outskirts of Dresden vomited suddenly on to the floor. Others moved quickly away, avoiding the splashes. The young man’s continued retching broke the flow of Hunter’s instruction.

“Oh, bloody hell! One of them’s thrown up. There’s puking fucking porridge all over the show.”

Two of the guards moved to help the young man. He cowered as they approached him.

“Einschuldigen, einschuldigen.”

The orderly handed the bucket and the cloths to a prisoner standing close by, motioning that he should clean up the mess. One of the guards tossed his cigarette to the floor and ground it under his heel. All eyes turned toward him, to the floor, to the broken butt, still smouldering, lying near the boot. Unfair. Torture. No one moved. The smoke drifted up and hid the sour stench of vomit, masking out all other sensation. The young man leaned over the table, his stubbled head in his hands. He felt sick to his stomach. The fumes billowed around him and washed through him with the swiftness of a narcotic, filling his veins with home and sex and school friends and leverworst and flowers from the park and the dark interior of Frau Hermes’ Zigarrengeschaft. O mein gott.

There was some nervousness as each prisoner was handed a digging tool. To call the strange implements spades would never do them justice, but they served that purpose. Two high-sided camouflaged vehicles fired their motors, spluttering into life, headlights blazing, at the head of the shuffling, stamping army of prisoners. Few had been excluded. Some, the Dresden boy included, were left behind. Too sick to work.

At a little after seven, the strange parade began. The supply jeeps chugging in the lead, cutting a path through the first banks of snow that covered the gravel drive leading from the camp. The snow clouds were so dense, so full, that no more than a grey half-light shone through. 

“Come on, you shower!” Davis shouted at the prisoners. He was seated in the back of the second vehicle, smoking away, thoroughly enjoying himself. The vehicles edged forward, crawling into the powdery snow that filled the camp entrance. Beyond the boundaries of the camp came the first of the problems. The lead vehicle found itself stuck fast, unable to push forward.

“Right you lot! This is where we start digging! Ciren’s thataway!”

Davis beamed out from his vantage point. The task seemed impossible. To everyone. But there was no other way. Dig. They began. Dismantling pyramids. Unravelling genetic chains. Splitting atoms. Simple tasks. Things like that.

The guards took their teams and scattered like sparrows, boot holes soiling the snow. The snow before them had drifted to unseen heights. Fifteen feet, twenty feet. Someone had to begin. Compass points set, dry stone walls located. No snow fell. The sky threatened, but saturation point had been reached and the time had come to cut a pathway to freedom. For the first full hour there appeared to be little progress, but as each team pushed forward, it soon became apparent that a considerable amount of ground had been covered. The prisoners laboured slowly, methodically, shovelling away at the white wall before them, hollowing a channel two jeeps wide, up and down the country lane.

There was a point at which dusk appeared to fall, a point at which light faded and the headlights of the two jeeps brightened into brilliant orbs of yellow light. They had a day of cruel labour behind them, the prisoners, muscles aching and hands blistered and raw, bodies damp with sweat, exposed skin, and faces numb with cold. A great distance had been covered. If no fresh snow fell, if the wind remained passive, the work could continue, would reach farther. It was cold. The tunnel might freeze and harden. It was cold enough for that. There were oaks and apple trees. There were frozen crows and seagulls perched on branches. There would be two more days of digging before the tangle of the bicycle was uncovered. And beyond that, another hour before the body of the old farmer was recovered, preserved intact in the sarcophagus of snow. There was sun. Yes, brief moments later as the ancient man was laid out in the back of the second jeep, the grey snow transmuted into gold, bright bars of an alchemist’s vision stretching like fingers across the pale faces of the resting prisoners. For most of them the incident would pass without much thought, too many bodies they had seen, but ‘the poet’ would later note the look of despair upon the old farmer’s face, would note it in his diary, would not forget.

No one seemed to know just what the fate of these prisoners was to be. Some had been at Babworth for almost a year, while others had arrived a few weeks before. None were newsworthy characters, of the calibre of the Nürenburg hearings. They were, for the most part, administrators, clerks, soldiers, sailors and airmen from among the lower ranks of the German offensive. Men who had found themselves marooned around the coast of Great Britain past the celebration of Armistice Day. In the two interim years they had been rounded up and localised, awaiting a future of some kind. A few had slipped through the tight controls around the ports and harbours, equipped with false documents that defied close inspection. A foreign accent was a foreign accent.

Isaacs sat on the edge of his iron cot scribbling away in spidery letters, page after page. All around him the other men lay on their cots, fully dressed. Some were talking. Some played cards. The air in the hut was cold, the atmosphere little better. There were a few books piled up on a table, mostly English detective novels, read and passed on by the guards. They lay for the most part unread by the men in the hut.

“What are you writing? Why are you always writing?” 

The question was asked by a thin man of twenty-four with a livid scar stretching from his upper lip to his left nostril.

“Just a few things. Before I forget.”

“You’re not German.”

“No, I’m Dutch.”

“You don’t mix with the others.”

“I prefer to be alone.”

“Why have they got you here, then, if you’re Dutch?”

Trim did not reply immediately. The other man went on.

“Was you working with us, or what?”

“I don’t have to answer your questions!” he snapped.

The other man leaned back and smiled at the wooden ceiling.

“I could do with a smoke. You’d think they’d get us smokes, wouldn’t you.”

“I don’t care.”

“The guards shouldn’t be allowed to smoke near us. It’s not fair. It’s cruel.”

“Will you shut up?”

The man with the scar was new. Came when it started snowing. The boy from Dresden was still in sickbay. The man with the scar had been given his cot. He leaned over and extended a large bony hand.

“Lammert. From Garmischkirchen.”

He closed the diary and sighed, laid down his pencil and turned to the younger man.

“Isaacs. Amsterdam.”

“Oh.” said Lammert, removing his hand limply. He said nothing more. Isaacs had his peace and quiet, his space to think. He returned to his writings. 

We expected the quiet, the emptiness pervading the street, our day guiltily smuggled past acquaintances and neighbours, ending the day with plain fare in the flickering tallow glow, the blessing. Papa papa papa papa play the music...’eat’ I said. ‘I can eat and listen’ you said, ‘all right, I said, and once more the sweet music filled our lives and you couldn’t keep still, you never could. I watched you for long moments as midnight approached. How black your hair upon the pillow. Like an angel you lay, sleeping so deeply. We should have stayed, could have stayed, should have stayed.

Forty years divide the snowfalls. Forty years and the sodden Air-force mittens with their particular smell, and the steam as they dried out in the wooden barracks that he would never forget. Almost ten years of anguish, the endless waiting for life, or for the war to end. Had summer ever come again? All there seemed to be sometimes was the bitter grey snow. The Germans had kept him warm in the camp, warmer than most. While others lost their flesh to frostbite, blackened bits that flaked into the slush paths to the gashouses, his fingers had been soft and pink and clean and washed and warm. Those sensitive arthritic fingers of his.

This enemy had been so well organised, so meticulous, thorough to the point of obsession. The invading army of bureaucrats had headed straight for the heart, hacking through the thickets of red tape that withered before them. The fortress they sought to conquer first was the Department of Public Records. Each town, each city, had such a department. An archive where all records, past and present, were filed. A great storehouse of information where every name, every address, every occupation, every form of religious persuasion had been carefully noted and filed away for easy access in the great banks of grey metal filing cabinets. Nothing could have been simpler. Pick a name. Any name. Something beginning with I.

I

ISAACS, Ephraim Abraham,

geboren 10 oktober 1907

adres: Buiksloterweg 47b

beroep: tekenaar

gehuwd 1933, JACOBS, Esther

kinderen: dochter, Giselle

godsdienst: Joods

Nothing could have been simpler. Choose any manila card, knock on any door. So simple. Bide your time. We can always find you. We know the name of each soul in each home in each house in every town in this entire god-forsaken country.

Where were the torches? The torches to destroy? No one came to bring them. No ink was spilled across the names. There was no one barring the doors, no one to throw the keys into the oily waters of the canals, no one to say ‘no’.

No one.

Instead, the clerks and secretaries worked throughout the night, and, throughout the ensuing weeks sifted out the offending cards, stamping the special star on each of those earmarked files. So efficient. So civilised. The system working perfectly. Systematically worrying out the virus. Genocide on bureaucratic terms.

Fate.

Sealed with a star.

A star!

Jewboy wins a prize! Eternal life! Courtesy of your own, your very own - Third Reich!

Ta dah!

Twinkle, twinkle little star.

Now we know just what you are.

After all the choices had been made, after the death of his baby, then and only then, came the thoughts of vengeance. The all-consuming belief that, one day, when this eternal nightmare had finally dissipated, had shrivelled to nothing at the far reaches of memory, then would be the time to expose these behemoths, show the free world how much evil had been committed in the name of purity. He filtered scraps of evidence away. There were names he would never forget. He could sketch each Aryan face, recreate each Teutonic cell, and expose the beasts to the world. But when the war had ended, when the camps were opened, when the Americans discovered the all-talking, all-singing skeleton hoards, his nightmare continued. ‘Collaborateur!’  they called him. ‘Verrader!’ they said. They took him from that place and would not believe him. ‘Vervalser!’ they spat at him. ‘Godverdomdeklootzak!’ they threw at him. And when they were done with him, they threw him to the Allies. ‘Dutch? You’re not fucking Dutch. These papers? All forgeries. In the truck you fucking Nazi.’ And there were the trials and the courtrooms and the flashbulbs and the sentence. And his lesser crime found him England bound. A broken prisoner of peace.

Ephraim Abraham Isaacs closed his eyes against the white walls of the council estate. he pulled his blanket close around his shoulders and shivered in the cold. He opened his eyes at the familiar sound of children. He looked for the boy, but the boy was grown, was a man. There were other boys. They built their snowmen and Eskimo homes, shrill voices echoing across the tricorn green with its giant oak, dying from within with a cancerous fungal disease. The old man was not so fortunate. His health was good. He was cold, hungry and depressed to the point of giving up life, but he was healthy, with a heart that beat like a Grandfather Clock. And now he had the book. The frail book he had thought lost in the fires, lost for all eternity, and in those pages music swirled and pulsed, and his sweet Giselle danced once more.