The family home was large, old, and decrepit, with falling plaster, a leaky roof, and many rooms, one of which became mine, and where mice ran freely over me as I slept. The lady who lived there was the old family nanny, pensioned off but given a home for the rest of her days. Amazingly, she was English, but had been in France since her girlhood.
A lifelong spinster, Mimi Tunc had served the Colin family for many years, and throughout the entire war had passed for French under the noses of the German authorities, thus escaping internment.
Lamazière Basse was, as said, very old and almost medieval. A few homes, but not many, had electricity. For most, oil lamps sufficed. There were one or two archaic tractors, but no combine harvesters. The crops were scythed by hand and brought home in carts hauled by yoked oxen. In the fields, the peasants at midday would stand to murmur the Angelus, like figures from a Millet painting. Both men and women wore wooden clogs, or sabots.
There was a church, packed with attendance by the women and children, while the men discussed the important things of life in the bar-café across the square. The village priest, always called Monsieur l’Abbé, was friendly to me but slightly distant, convinced that as a Protestant I was tragically destined for hell. Up at the château on the hill dwelled Madame de Lamazière, the very old matriarch of the surrounding land. She did not come to church; it came to her in the form of poor Monsieur l’Abbé, sweating up the hill in the summer sun to bring her Mass in her private chapel. The pecking order was very rigid, and even God had to recognize the distinctions.
As my French improved, I made friends with a number of village boys to whom I was an object of extreme curiosity. The summer of 1948 was blazingly hot and our daily magnet was the lake a mile outside the village. There, with rods made from reeds, we could fish for large green frogs, whose back legs, dusted with flour and fried in butter, made an excellent supper.
Lunches were always large and taken outside: hams cured black in the chimney smoke, pâté, crusty bread, butter from the churn, and fruit from the trees. I was taught to sample watered red wine like the other boys, but not the girls. It was at the lake one sweltering day that first summer that I saw Benoît die.
There were about six boys skylarking in the clearing by the water’s edge one midday when he appeared, clearly very intoxicated. The village youths murmured to me that he was Benoît, the village drunk. To our fascinated bewilderment, he stripped naked and waded into the lake. He was singing out of tune. We thought he was just going to cool off, waist deep. But he went on walking into the water until he was up to his neck. Then he started to swim, but within a few clumsy strokes his head disappeared.
Among the boys I was the strongest swimmer, so after half a minute it was suggested I should swim out and look for him. So I did. Having reached the point where his head had disappeared, I peered downward. Without a snorkeling mask (unheard of back then), I could see very little. The water was an amber color, and there were tangles of weeds and some lilies. Still unable to see much, I took a deep breath and dived.
About ten feet down, on the bottom, was a pale blob lying on its back. Closer up I could see a trickle of bubbles emerging from his mouth. He clearly was not frolicking, but drowning. As I turned to resurface a hand gripped my left ankle and held it. Above my head, I could see the sun shining through the dim water, but the surface was two feet away and the grip did not slacken. Feeling the onset of panic, I turned and went back down.
Finger by finger, I peeled the dying hand off my ankle. Benoît’s eyes were open and he stared at me as my lungs began to hurt. Finally the hand was off my leg and I kicked for the surface. I felt the fingers seeking a second grip, but I kicked again, felt an impact with a face and then shot upward toward the sun.
There was that wonderful inrush of fresh air that all free divers will recognize when they return to the surface, and I began to splash toward the gravel patch under the trees where the village boys waited, openmouthed. I explained what I had seen and one of them ran for the village. But it was half an hour before men appeared with ropes. One stripped to his long johns and went in. Others waded in waist deep, but no farther. The man in the long johns was the only one who could swim. Eventually a connection was made with the object under the water and the body was hauled out by one wrist on the end of a rope.
There was no question of resuscitation even if anyone had known the technique. The boys gathered around before being shooed away. The corpse was bloated and discolored, a trickle of red, either blood or red wine, dribbling from the corner of the mouth. Eventually an oxcart appeared, and what was left of old, drunk Benoît was taken back to the village.
There were no formalities such as an autopsy or inquiry. I suppose the mayor wrote out a death certificate and Monsieur l’Abbé presided over a burial somewhere in the churchyard. I spent four happy summer holidays at Lamazière Basse, and when I returned from the fourth, aged twelve, I could pass for French among the French. It was an asset that would later prove extremely useful many times.
That summer of 1948 was the first time I had seen a human corpse. It would not be the last. Not by about fifty thousand.
LEARNING GERMAN
My father was a remarkable man. His formal education was from the Chatham Dockyard School, math-oriented, and in what he knew he was largely self-taught. He was not rich or famous or titled. Just a shopkeeper from Ashford. But he had a kindness and a humanity that were noted by everyone who knew him.
At the very end of the war, being a major serving directly under the War Office, he was summoned to London without explanation. In fact it was for a film show, but this one did not star Betty Grable.
With a hundred others, he sat in a darkened hall inside the ministry to see the first films, taken by the army photographic unit, of British soldiers liberating the concentration camp known as Bergen-Belsen. It marked him forever. He told me much later that after five years of war he had not really understood what he and millions of others had been struggling to defeat and destroy until he saw the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. He did not know there could be such cruelty on earth.
My mother told me that he came home, still in uniform, but instead of changing, he stood for two hours in front of the window, staring out, his back to the room, impervious to her pleading to tell her what was wrong. He just stared in silence. Finally he tore himself away from his thoughts, went upstairs to change, instructing her as he passed: “I never want to meet one again. I never want one in my house.” He meant Germans.
It did not last. Later, he mellowed, went to Germany, and met and spoke civilly to many Germans. It is a mark of the man that in 1952, when I was thirteen, he decided to send me to live during the school holidays with a German family. He wanted his only son to learn German, to know the country and the people. When my bewildered mother asked him why, he simply said: “Because it must never happen again.”
But he would not, by the summer of 1952, have an exchange visit with a German boy, though there were plenty of such offers available. I would go as a paying guest. There was a struggling British–German Friendship Society and I think it was arranged through them. The family chosen farmed outside Göttingen. This time I flew.
Dad had a friend from his army days who had stayed on and was based with the British Army of the Rhine at the British camp at Osnabrück. He saw me off at Northolt aerodrome outside London; the airplane was an elderly Dakota DC, which droned its way across France and Germany to land at the British base there. Father Gilligan, a jovial Irish padre who had been billeted with us in Ashford, was there to meet me. He drove me to Göttingen and handed me over.
It was very strange to be an English boy in Germany back then. I was an oddity. I had had three years of German at prep school, so at least I had a poor smattering of the language, as opposed to my first visit to France four years earlier, when I knew hardly a word of French. The family was very kind and did everything in their power to make me feel at home. It was an uneventful four weeks, of which I recall only one rather strange encounter.
There was a world gliding championship that year, and it was held at a place called Oerlinghausen. We all went off there for a family day out. My host’s interest in flying stemmed from the fact that he had been in the Luftwaffe during the war, as an officer but not a flyer.
The huge expanse of grassland was crowded with gliders in a variety of club markings, waiting their turn to be towed into the air. And there were notable pilots, around whom admiring crowds were grouped. One in particular was clearly very famous and the center of attention. And she was a woman, though I had not a clue who she was.
In fact she was Hanna Reitsch, Luftwaffe test pilot and Hitler’s personal aviator. If he doted on her, his admiration was as nothing to the adoration she bore for him.
In April 1945, as the Red Army closed in on the surrounded heart of Berlin, and Hitler, drawn and trembling, moped about his bunker under the Reich Chancellery, Hanna Reitsch, at the controls of a Fieseler Storch, a high-wing monoplane with an extremely short landing and takeoff run, flew into the doomed enclave. With amazing skill, she put it down on an avenue in the Charlottenburg Zoo, switched off, and walked through the shell fire to the bunker.
Because of who she was, she was allowed into the final redoubt where, a few days later, Hitler would blow his brains out, and was ushered into the presence. There she begged the man she admired so much to let her fly him out of the Berlin death trap and down to the Berghof, his fortified home at Berchtesgaden in s
outhern Bavaria. There, she urged him, surrounded by SS last-ditch fanatics, the resistance could continue.
Hitler thanked her, but refused. He was determined to die and bring all Germany down to ruin with him. They were not worthy of him, he explained, one notable exception being Hanna Reitsch.