Lunch Menu
Potage Parmentier
Boiled Brisket of Beef
Mustard Sauce
Dressed Cabbage
Pomme Purée
Spotted Dick, Cream Sauce
Coffee
Roz’s observations: boring, bland, mostly out of a tin but plenty of it.
Edith found the Education Branch Office on Königstraße, housed in a tall, narrow building that was more or less intact. She was to report to her immediate boss, Brigadier Thompson. He had kept his military title, even though he now worked for the Control Commission and was sitting in his greatcoat, swathed in scarves, wearing half gloves on purplish digits. His nose was red and dripping. When he spoke, his voice was thick with cold.
‘Miss Graham?’ He rose to meet her, his fingers icy. ‘Thank God you’re here! Come and sit down.’ He sneezed. ‘Do excuse me.’ He sneezed again and blew his nose copiously. ‘No heating today, I’m afraid. You might want to keep that fur around your shoulders.’ He pressed a button on the console in front of him. ‘Can we have some tea? And some of those ginger biscuits.’
‘Lebkuchen?’ Edith inquired.
‘The very ones!’ He smiled. ‘German speaker? Then you are doubly welcome.’
‘I thought we all were.’
‘Preferable, of that there is no doubt but, alas, not always the case …’
‘I see.’
It was all she could think of to say. It made no sense, but very little did in this new world which surprised and dismayed by turns.
‘Ah, the inestimable Miss Esterhazy with the tea.’ The Brigadier’s smile of relief exposed prominent, yellowish teeth under his bristling military moustache.
The Inestimable Miss Esterhazy was young, in her early twenties. She regarded the brigadier over her horn-rimmed half glasses as she poured the tea. She had startling violet-blue eyes.
‘I prefer gingernuts myself.’ The Brigadier dunked his biscuit. ‘Find these too soft. Not that the poor devils out there would be complaining.’
Despite his stated preference, he made short work of the Lebkuchen.
‘Now, where to start?’ He brushed crumbs from the wide lapels of his coat. ‘We’ve got our work cut out, no doubt about it.’ He counted the problems off until he ran out of half-gloved fingers. ‘No buildings, no teachers, no books, no paper, no boards, no chalk, no desks, no chairs, no heating, no help.’ He spread his hands wide in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘And more of the little blighters flooding in every minute from points east. Turning into a positive torrent. The whole area is filling up like a tank.’ He leaned forward, hands folded now; his already furrowed brow wrinkled further. It wasn’t just his cold making him look tired and worn out. ‘As Control Commission, Education Division, we have to set up schools where there aren’t any and get the kinder in. Most of them haven’t been near a school for the last three years, so that’s a job in itself. We have to inspect any places that are up and running. Make sure that the staff is vetted. No raving Nazis, secret devotees of Herr Hitler preparing for the Second Coming. That sort of thing. You need to develop a bit of an eye for who’s playing with a straight bat and who’s not. As for supplies and equipment – do the best you can. Sounds a lot, I know …’
The Brigadier’s voice tailed off as if even he recognized the understatement.
‘And what will be my role exactly?’ Edith was almost afraid to ask. She’d heard all this before but there was a difference between hearing it in a briefing in Kensington and actually being here. She felt a certain heart sinking at the enormity of the job before her and there was an ominous hint of what might be to come in do the best you can …
‘Miss Esterhazy will fill you in. Now, do excuse me, I’m in need of a rum toddy. Medicinal purposes. They do a good one at the club.’ Edith followed him out of his office. ‘Not much anyone can tell you, really,’ he said as he pulled on a balaclava helmet. ‘Best to learn on the job.’
He put his cap on over the balaclava and was gone. From her desk, Miss Esterhazy rolled her eyes towards the closing door. She sat muffled in a bouclé coat that came up round her ears. She pulled the coat closer, tucking her chin into the shawl collar. Her liquorice-black hair swung forward from a centre parting so severe that it showed the white of her scalp.
‘That’s the last we’ll see of him today.’ She looked up at Edith. ‘He really does have a rotten cold but he’d do anything rather than go through this lot.’ She put her hand on the pile of papers stacked in front of her.
‘What are they?’ Edith peered over her shoulder.
‘Fragebogen. Forms the Jerries have to fill in.’ She picked up a couple of the papers. ‘130 questions covering everything from religious affiliation to the membership of forty-four proscribed Nazi organizations. If they jump through all the hoops, they get a denazification certificate. The Germans call it a Persilshein, washed clean. One of our biggest problems, among many big problems, is finding staff. These,’ she brandished the forms she held in each hand, ‘have to be filled in by anyone applying for anything. Then they have to be checked. Against what?’ She swung in her chair. ‘Most records have been destroyed, either by the Nazis or in the bombing. Even if such records exist, people have been displaced, their records might be hundreds of miles away in the Russian Zone.’ She swung back. ‘Before we get the forms, they have to go to Public Safety, who hang onto them forever, mostly because they don’t know any German. Then they are sent here, for the Brigadier to look through, which he might, or might not, get round to, then, and only then, we might, just might be able to employ somebody.’ She let the forms drift back onto her desk. ‘Welcome to the Control Commission, Miss Graham. Welcome to the British Zone of Occupation. Welcome to Germany.’ She put her hands inside her coat sleeves and shivered. ‘Added to which, it’s bloody freezing. Let’s get out of here.’
They stepped out from the offices onto Königstraße. Edith had visited Lübeck before the war. The old Hanseatic port had been one of the stopping-off points on that Baltic trip. The medieval town was on an island, surrounded by water, bridges reaching over the circling river Trave and canals. She remembered the churches with their pretty green steeples; the conical towers of the Holstentor Gate; the Salzspeicher, salt houses, with their steeply pitched, rust-coloured roofs; the medieval buildings with their distinctive crow-stepped gables. It was a different scene now. Much of the centre of the town was missing, obliterated in a great swathe from the Lübecker Dom to St Petrikirche and the Marienkirche. The towers of the churches loomed gaunt and tall over the razed ground, their sides blackened by fire, the green copper spires fallen, their bricks stacked in great frozen heaps ready for reconstruction, whenever that might be.
‘More than half of the buildings in the city were damaged or destroyed in a single raid on Palm Sunday, 1942. They say in the Mess that it could take fifty years to build the place back up again.’ Miss Esterhazy looked up at Edith. ‘You’re from Coventry, aren’t you?’
Edith nodded. The bare-ruin’d choirs of the churches, the rubble-strewn emptiness that had once been the tangle of ancient streets between them. She knew what kind of damage a concerted raid on a small city could do.
A bitter wind whined up from the River Trave and whipped down the streets, fluttering slips of paper plastered onto walls, shop windows and lampposts by worthless postage stamps bearing the head of Hitler. Notes put up by displaced persons: refugees, returnees trying to find lost relatives.
Edith stopped to read the little messages: Ich suche meine Frau, mein Mann, meine Tochter, mein Vater, meine Mutter, mein Kind … Last seen … Last known place …
Some had been there so long that the colour of the stamps had faded, the paper puckered by sun and rain, the message disappearing to invisibility. There was something forlorn and hopeless about them, the chances of reunion so vanishingly small. Did any of them mention Elisabeth von Stavenow? Were any from her? The chances seemed even smaller. Edith’s heart sank further at the impossibility of it all.
‘The authorities clear them away every now and then,’ Roz commented, ‘but they keep coming back again.’ Miss Esterhazy turned her astrakhan collar against the biting wind. ‘Come on, it’s best not to linger in this cold.’
Like any bombed city, the damage was patchy. Out of the centre, Lübeck was remarkably intact. The Mess was well away from the scenes of devastation. A large house, commandeered from an architect. Pale oak panelling and parquet flooring. It reminded Edith of a college of the more modern sort. There were rooms upstairs for visitors, Roz explained, and a library, and a dining room.
A German attendant took their coats. Under the bulky bouclé, Miss Esterhazy was tiny, trimly dressed in a smart navy skirt and twin set with a wisp of scarlet polka-dotted scarf round her neck to add some colour.
‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to have a large sherry.’
‘I’ll join you.’
They went into a spacious, pleasant sitting room. A waiter brought their drinks. Miss Esterhazy took off her spectacles to sign for them.
Without her glasses, she looked younger. She was really very pretty with a finely chiselled nose and a pointed chin. Her carmine lipstick gave emphasis to the sculpted shape of her mouth, the upper lip curving like a Scythian bow. There was something East European about the tilted eyes, the flat cheekbones, the canna-lily skin.
‘Esterhazy? Isn’t that Hungarian?’ Edith said to break the silence that had grown between them.
‘My father was Hungarian, my mother Austrian; that’s how I speak German. We moved to London when I was small. My real name is Rozália – my mother changed it to Rosalind to sound more English but everyone calls me Roz.’ She toyed with her glass. ‘I was working in an office back home. When I saw this, I jumped at it. I put down Austria; we still have family there. Instead, I end up here, about as far away as you can get!’ Her laugh had a bitter edge. ‘That’s me, Miss Graham.’
‘Call me Edith, please.’
‘The Brigadier won’t like it.’
‘Who’s to tell him? Call me Edith when we are out of the office,’ Edith said. ‘And I can’t keep calling you Miss Esterhazy.’
‘It is a bit of a mouthful.’
‘Edith and Roz it will be, then.’ Edith raised her glass in a mock toast. ‘Would you like another?’
‘I’d better not. I still have those blasted Fragebogen to get through. There are good people,’ she said as they went into the dining room. ‘Dismissed by the Nazis, Trade Unionists and so on. They’re mostly getting on a bit, but they’re still about. I think they could be used to recruit staff. They know the difference between those who were dedicated Nazis and those who weren’t. Better, at any rate, than a bunch of retired policemen who don’t speak German and are only here to add to their pensions. It drives Jeff mad!’
‘Who’s Jeff?’
‘He works in Public Safety. They vet the Germans.’
‘Is Jeff your boyfriend?’
‘Oh, no. We’re not going out or anything! We go to the pictures sometimes, that’s all.’
A sudden swipe of rose madder across Roz’s cheek said it might be something more.
Before she could say anything, a waiter came to show them into the dining room.
‘They feed us well, Miss Graham,’ Roz said as she picked up a menu card. ‘Mostly out of a tin, bland, boring but there’s plenty of it.’ She put on her glasses to see what was offered that day. ‘Cabbage, now. That won’t be out of a tin, nor the potatoes. Beef is another thing. Spotted Dick.’ She grimaced. ‘I might give that a miss. I’ve put on pounds since I came out here.’ Miss Esterhazy laughed, showing little pearly teeth. ‘Food is all anybody ever talks about. And drink, of course.’ She gazed out of the window. ‘Us in here stuffing ourselves and swilling; them out there more or less starving. The German ration is hardly enough to keep body and soul together. It seems wrong.’
She broke off and looked round at the other diners. She didn’t need to say what didn’t seem right to her, or to Edith, for that matter, but that was how things were. To the victor, the spoils.
‘Staffing is not the only problem,’ Roz said as their soup arrived. ‘All the textbooks are “contaminated” by Nazi ideology, even the Maths books are useless. Needless to say, there aren’t any replacements. Then there’s the buildings. Those still standing need repair or are in danger of being requisitioned for other uses. Even when we have got a building, there’s no fuel to heat it. There’s a shortage of everything. And the children. Lübeck’s already overcrowded, more coming adds to a significant refugee problem, children separated from parents and vice versa. And we’ve got to get them into the schools. Lack of shoes is a particular difficulty, given the winter we’re having. Add that to a lack of adequate clothing and nourishment – how can children learn with no food inside them? Most come after no breakfast at all. Sorry.’ She smiled her apology. ‘I’m running on a bit.’
‘Not at all,’ Edith said as she finished her rather gluey soup. ‘It’s best to know.’
Roz laughed as the next course arrived: brown stew, boiled cabbage and mash, carefully marshalled on the plate. ‘See? I was right!’
‘The Brigadier made it all sound more than a little, er, hopeless,’ Edith ventured as the waiter came to collect their plates.
‘He’s pretty overwhelmed, poor lamb. Just about given up, easier to sit on your hands. It doesn’t have to be like that.’ Roz moved the cruet with nervous fingers, making patterns on the tablecloth. ‘There are things we can do. I’ve got ideas. But he won’t listen. I’m just a secretary.’ She sighed and looked at her watch. ‘No time for coffee. I’d better be getting back.’
‘I’ll walk with you.’
They retraced their steps back to the office. It was colder, if anything. A dusting of snow falling.
‘Your friend, Jeff?’ Edith asked, as they passed the faded messages fluttering in the bitter wind. ‘Could he find somebody?’ She kept her voice casual. ‘A German, I mean.’
‘I could ask him.’ Roz stopped and looked at Edith. ‘Who is it?’
‘A woman I knew before the war,’ Edith brushed a gloved hand over the little notices. ‘From the east. Prussia up near the Polish border. She had relatives near Lübeck. I wondered if she was here, that’s all.’
‘It’s possible. There’s a lot here from the east. Give me her name and I’ll pass it on to him.’