5

My passport in the name of Ludwig Weber had gone to the bottom with my boots, which saved me the trouble of destroying it. I was accepted on board as unquestionably British and gave my name as William Smith, a former resident of Italy who was being shifted from one internment camp to another. To have introduced myself under my true name might have resulted in being made free of the wardroom and overwhelmed with questions to which answers were better avoided until I reached land and the proper authorities. I had not forgotten memories of Sweden, which had remained dormant while week after week all my thoughts had been concentrated on vengeance and escape. It began to occur to me very vividly that now I should again be mercilessly hunted down by the hounds of wartime security and that in the end my only cover would be the truth, though unbelievable.

We were making for the port of Haifa. Why I did not know, and did not wish to be inquisitive. It may have been because enemy aircraft would expect us to run for Alexandria or because Haifa was convenient for disembarking enemy seamen. As soon as the destroyer docked, we were separated out on the quay. The Italians were loaded into army transport and removed. My companions, the Albanian and the Greek, were taken to the port offices and I was put up at a seamen’s hostel, told that I should be wanted for questioning and that meanwhile I was at liberty to wander about the town.

As I had no money there was not much I could do. But I needed none. It was satisfaction enough to walk among British troops, to observe Jews and their laughing children as carefree as in the London I left in 1938, and to exchange friendly greetings with Arabs to see how much of my Swahili could be understood. Then I walked up the winding road to the top of Mount Carmel and rejoiced in the view of this peaceful and prosperous land and of highlands which might well flow with milk and honey instead of the saw-toothed crags of Greece. Though neither Jew nor Arab, I was home again.

Home again. Had I any right to be? What home had she who should have been at my side? For more than three long years I had tried to avenge her, tried to play the part for which I was most fitted in the destruction of this evil as if I saw our tortured Europe in the image of her torn body. No, I had no right to peace. It was not here above the crystalline Mediterranean that I would find her. ‘Not until I am ready,’ she had seemed to tell me when I lay exposed and helpless on the brink of the Aliakmon. Not until she was ready had I any business with peace. Our union must come from some sacrifice in which her blood and mine were mingled, never to be separated.

On and on the trance wavered like a blown mist of the mind, but all I understood of it was that the mixing of the blood must be spiritual. How gladly I would have died if it could have been physical. Then I was startled back to reality. Someone had addressed me by name.

‘Raymond. My dear chap! You look a bit down on your luck.’

There he was. A colonel. Probably handing out pay to the army, for all he knew about was money. A snob who always had made a point of being seen at the bar at our club on intimate terms with me.

‘Nobody has set eyes on you for years. I was sure you’d have had your squadron by now. Where on earth have you been?’

‘Shooting,’ I replied.

He turned away in patriotic disgust, or more likely he was afraid I’d touch him for a loan.

I returned to my hostel and found an army sergeant waiting for me.

‘Would you mind giving my commanding officer a little of your time?’ he said.

The first approach of the British Gestapo. It was so comic that I couldn’t help laughing and said I would be delighted.

I was driven down to a billet not far from the port where I was left waiting in a general office with cheerful NCOs coming and going and the occasional roar of a motorcycle beneath the window. Accommodation seemed rather more spartan than that of the Gestapo. I caught a glimpse of straw-filled palliasses on the floor of the next room, indicating that these special troops had no extra privileges, and of a neat little bar which suggested that the unit was civilized enough to be trusted with it.

I was led into the major’s office. He sat behind a trestle table covered with an army blanket with two basket chairs opposite. The atmosphere was in no way threatening. I felt almost as if I had called to ask for a job with some tanned and travelled foreign correspondent. He had that sort of face, genial but politely sceptical.

‘Don’t they fix up distressed seamen with a new outfit?’ was his first question.

‘Perhaps I don’t count as one, sir.’

‘Well, I don’t know their rules. There are so many kinds of distress in our world. I will see what I can do. Now, about your two companions – are they harmless?’

‘Perfectly, neither are pro-Italian enough to work for them.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that. But my obvious course is to hand them over to the Greek Brigade, and I want to be sure they won’t meet with an unfortunate accident. That Albanian fellow – what are his politics?’

‘Independence for Albania on Mondays and Tuesdays. Union with Greece for the rest of the week and when convenient.’

‘I see. Just as you are Bill Smith on Mondays and Tuesdays but Ludwig Weber when convenient, or so I am told by your two companions.’

‘A passport in that name was given to me by the German consulate in Istanbul.’

‘And what is your true name?’ he asked, accepting my reply without comment.

It was no good prevaricating if I wished to be accepted into one of the British services.

‘Raymond Ingelram.’

‘Borrowed perhaps?’

‘Christened in St George’s Chapel, October 1909.’

‘Related to the royal family?’

‘Not near enough to count. My mother was Austrian.’

‘Why do you tell me that?’

‘Because you will find it out anyway. I am also known to the enemy as Hauptmann Haase of the Sicherheitsdienst and Ernesto Menendez Peraza, citizen of Nicaragua.’

‘Are you employed by any of our private armies? You can safely tell me.’

‘Only by my own. I have fought the enemy for three years.’

He sat back, much more relaxed. He said that would be all for the present and suggested that I might like a check-up in hospital after my adventures. I replied that it was unnecessary. I had been short of food in Greece before I was deported to Italy, but I was still physically very fit.

‘Greece? You were left behind when the army got away?’

‘I reached Greece through Poland, Romania and Turkey.’

‘You said your mother was Austrian. I suppose it was natural that she had some sympathy for Hitler.’

‘My mother is dead. She was descended from Kings of Bohemia. Is it likely that she would have even spoken to that scum?’

My anger must have impressed him as sane and genuine, for he gave up the idea of getting rid of me on to a psychiatrist.

‘Who financed you in Germany?’

‘I used my own money – what was left of it.’

‘So you are well off?’

‘No. I gave everything away in trust for my tenants before I left England.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Because I intended to assassinate Hitler.’

I could see that his doubts of my sanity returned.

‘As an Englishman in Germany during the war?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Before the war. If I had succeeded and been caught, think of the repercussions!’

‘But you seem to have returned and stayed on?’

‘Yes, as a Nicaraguan. I was exposed but managed to escape.’

‘Can you supply any evidence at all of your movements?’

I told him of my attempt in April to get home by way of Denmark to Sweden and how they accepted that I was British but suspected me of being an enemy agent, in which they were justified.

‘I suppose the Foreign Office will have some record of that,’ he said, ‘but it will take months to get it out of them. Anything else?’

‘Have you any Poles here?’

‘A whole brigade in training.’

‘Ask their intelligence officer if he can get in touch with a guerilla leader known as the Voevod operating in the Carpathians. There is another in the villages east of Cracow known as Casimir. And there could be a Jew named Moshe Shapir who was a racehorse trainer in Germany and may have reached Palestine overland.’

‘I will make inquiries. If your Shapir exists he probably arrived illegally, but that’s a matter for civil police not for me. The Jewish Agency will tell me. Their intelligence service is remarkably efficient.’

‘And today I ran into a Colonel Tracy who knew me well in London. But I would like him kept out of it if it is possible.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I have kept my true name secret. I do not want it disgraced.’

‘It won’t be if you have told the truth.’

‘I must assume that nobody will believe I have told the truth.’

‘Very well. For the time being I will ask the colonel to identify you and no more.’

‘That is very kind.’

‘We like to avoid publicity, Mr Bill Smith, until we have made up our minds what to do with you.’

‘Deportation or the bug-house?’

‘And you’ll be bloody lucky if that’s all, as a traitor to your country.’

‘You know I am not.’

‘I know nothing of the sort. But you don’t seem the type to be a British fascist or a German agent. Now I shall arrange for you to stay on at the hostel and have a little pocket money. Keep your mouth shut, don’t draw attention to yourself in any way, and report to my sergeant-major daily!’

So that was British interrogation. There were several essential questions which he had never put to me. For example: what was I doing in Istanbul and why had I gone off to Greece when I could have reached the British army overland? When the cheerful racket in my hostel dormitory had begun to die down and it was possible to think, I came to the conclusion that he had deliberately avoided questions which could be answered by a simple lie. They would be asked at a second, more ruthless interview after he had a general picture of the man and his movements which could found a sound basis for attack.

I then remembered that I had a very useful witness to my entry into Greece if he could be contacted; so when next day I reported to the sergeant-major I left a note for his commanding officer asking if it was possible through some Turkish representative to get in touch with Major-General Kurtbek, once assistant military attaché in London, who could state how Ludwig Weber entered Greece.

I was left alone for a week or more, my only contact outside the hostel being the sergeant-major, who knew of course that Bill Smith was highly suspect but found him a refreshing change from the daily routine of Jews, Arabs and straightforward breaches of security. He was the son of a Gloucestershire cattle dealer and had carried into the army the family gift for summing up a stranger at a glance. When he decided that, whatever I was now, I had been an honest West Countryman at some time, we could indulge in mutual homesickness and I was invited to take a drink at the bar. Kindliness or to loosen my tongue? A bit of both, I think.

‘Men aren’t what they were. Too many of them. That’s the trouble.’ And he yarned away about the eccentric characters of his county loved by everyone who knew them.

This was a heaven-sent chance to find out what my world thought of me. I said I believed that at the other end of the county the Ingelrams owned a lot of land and were his sort of people.

‘Ralph Ingelram! Now he was a wonderful fellow. I often heard my father speak of him. Killed on the Somme, he was. The best always go first, it’s said. Married a foreign lady as if there weren’t any beauties in London good enough for him. I reckon their only son took after her. Supposed to be the finest shot in Europe and always abroad. Now I’ll tell you a funny thing about him. Just before the war he gave away all his possessions and disappeared. Some say he’s in gaol with a long sentence and they let him use a false name. And there’s a rumour that he’s in Africa, but I don’t believe it. He’d have beaten it back home to serve his country. Soldiers, most of them. One of them was at the taking of Jerusalem, and we know that’s true because there’s a tomb in the village church with his arms crossed like a crusader in his coat of mail and his sword at his side. Agincourt, too, they say. And the son fought for the Parliament while the father fought for King Charles.’

Pretty accurate. He left out my great-great-grandfather killed at Waterloo and the last of the line about to be disgraced as a traitor. Ah God! What sons my dark and lovely lioness might have given me!

On my next visit I was called in to see Major North – the skipper, as they called him. He was sterner than before and warned me that my only hope was to answer all questions frankly.

‘Headquarters say that they have no facilities for dealing with you,’ he said. ‘And that as I have gone so far I might as well complete the preliminary inquiry. In the end you will have to be taken down to Cairo for the final word. You may go there now if you wish.’

I replied that I was very glad that he was to be in charge.

‘Thank you. But we have a long way to go before you can be. Meanwhile here is some good news for you. General Kurtbek has given us a statement. He seems to be an admirer of yours. So is my sergeant-major. He’s lost when it comes to foreigners. No languages. But I have a great respect for his snap judgement on any Englishman. Now I am going to take a most unusual course with an enemy agent,’ he added smiling. ‘Will you dine with me this evening?’

‘As I am?’

‘I can lend you a very natty civilian coat. We are about the same size.’

Himself in civilian clothes, Major North picked me up at the hostel and drove out along the coast to a little seaside town where we sat under a spreading Judas tree at a dimly lit table obviously meant for a loving couple.

Finding that my knowledge of current affairs had gaps, he put me at ease explaining the campaign in the Western Desert. He was certain that the enemy had got as near to Alexandria as they were ever going to, and would have the hell of a difficult retreat just as we had. His summary was very clear and I asked if he was a regular soldier.

‘No, an amateur. I was a businessman in England. They picked me for a security officer because I spoke Arabic and German.’

He called for another bottle and I remarked that I had not been so well entertained since Berlin.

‘Don’t rush it! We’ll come to that later. My impression is that Hauptmann Haase would be a good start. Tell me the whole story. I shall take a few notes but I am not going to interrupt.’

I gave him the bare bones of my personal war from Sweden and Rostock down to my surrender to the Italians in Greece.

‘This burning hatred – it comes through. You never fired a shot without it. That makes the three years very hard to explain. Now let’s go back to Berlin.’

I replied that it was easy to explain, provided he accepted that I had one idea: to kill Hitler. I failed, was caught, bestially interrogated, but managed to crawl back to England. I told him how they sent an assassin after me and how when I had killed him I took his Nicaraguan passport, which enabled me to return to Germany and try again. I was trapped in Berlin by the outbreak of war which I could have sworn our government was too timorous to declare. Then I conceived the idea of being a known and trusted Nazi propagandist in order to get near my victim. But I became sick of my own parodies and tried to get home. The rest he knew.

‘No one will believe that you could have had such patience.’

‘Do you?’

‘Not on the evidence you have given me. Why did you label your dead?’

‘To protect the villagers.’

‘Did it? You never had time to find out. My sergeant-major has of course reported to me what you said to each other. The Ingelrams came up. Don’t worry! I won’t give your identity away till I have to. I accept your private crusade. But it does not sound like an Ingelram to label his dead. Why did you do it?’

‘Subconscious reasons perhaps.’

‘Subconscious, my backside! You’ve never fussed about your subconscious unless it was failing to warn you of trouble waiting behind the next bush. Why? You know the answer. Out with it!’

‘Have you ever been in love?’

‘Who hasn’t?’

‘I mean, so entirely that to both of you the two bodies and souls were one.’

‘Near enough. We are married now.’

‘And what would you do if the perfection that you loved had been tortured to death by these devils?’

‘Suicide or the bottle.’

‘No vengeance?’

‘Vengeance is mine saith the Lord. And it’s coming to him all right.’

‘Now do you understand?’

‘Understand, no. Believe, yes. At last it all makes sense. But I cannot make Cairo swallow a love story against the facts.’

‘Is there any fact more absolute than love?’

‘All the same I wish the Poles could have helped.’

‘The Voevod?’

‘His band has been wiped out. All they know is that it was infiltrated by the Sicherheitsdienst. I thought it best not to mention your stay with them.’

‘And Moshe Shapir? Any luck?’

‘I’m afraid he won’t impress as a witness. He’s doing ten years in Acre Gaol. He shot at an immigration official.’

I shouted that I couldn’t believe it, that Moshe was so gentle.

‘Then you see our trouble. With you as well. We are not equipped to deal with cases of monomania. Has it ever occurred to you that a fair translation of Herrenvolk is Chosen People?’

Moshe’s crime was serious. He was one of a party of four who had travelled down through Turkey and Syria passing as Greeks from Istanbul on their way to join the Greek forces in Palestine. They tried to ride across the desert frontier but missed the way, ended up at a police post and were detained for questioning. Moshe, sure to have bagged the best horse, jumped the wire and galloped away. He was shot at, turned round in the saddle, shot back with an old Colt .45 and winged an immigration officer. God, what a fluke! And what a fool! He should have galloped on. His people would have spirited him away in no time.

I asked if it would be possible to question him.

‘Yes. I have already got permission. It must be in my presence and that of a warder.’

I have written of several irreversible turning points in my outward and inward life. Memory is not clear enough to say whether I recognized them at the time. But of the effect of this meeting with Moshe I have no doubt. A cold and formidable place was that citadel of Acre. Well, Palestine then was threatened from north and south, but still the criminal was dealt with promptly, efficiently and by due process of law. Moshe was marched in to our presence by a warder who was alarmed when he broke away and threw himself into my arms.

‘Ernesto!’ he cried. ‘Thank God you got through.’

I could only say the same and how distressed I had been by the deplorable story of his arrival in the land for which he had so longed.

‘What does it matter? I am in Israel and I shall be free long before the ten years are up.’

‘Quite likely,’ the major murmured, ‘providing Himmler doesn’t get here first.’

‘But you, Moshe! You who were so repelled by violence!’

‘You taught me not to be.’

Volubly and with excited gestures which I had never before seen him use – stemming from childhood perhaps and long abandoned – he told our story, remembering little incidents which I had ignored or forgotten, his voice breaking with anger and indignation that a British agent could be thought a Nazi. But on all of it there was no conclusive proof. Of my life in Germany of course he knew nothing, nor could he confirm how I had come by the name of Ludwig Weber and why I had been specially flown to Salonica.

‘Swear that you will come to see me and ride with me when Israel is ours,’ he demanded.

I promised, though sure that within ten years he would never have the Israel of his dreams and that my own destiny was incalculable.

We returned to Haifa and he to his cell. All night Moshe’s words haunted my weary brain like a recurring tune that one cannot dismiss: ‘You taught me.’

Yes, by example over and over again. I had also justified unlimited violence. In that I was right when it came to war and the defence of our once sweet Europe. But private war? What sort of character would wade in blood and glory as I had done?

When I made next day my routine report, Major North told me that he had made a note of Moshe Shapir’s evidence and added it to my dossier. We were now ready for Cairo’s final judgement.

‘Before we go,’ he said, ‘and while I am still in charge of your case, isn’t there anything I can do for you?’

‘Yes. Would it be possible for me to see Jerusalem?’

‘A conducted tour or from far off like Richard Coeur de Lion?’

‘From far off. In streets I am distracted by reality.’

‘On collar and chain?’

He had put it well and I agreed. He said that he had to drive up to Jerusalem on a short visit to his colonel and that he would take me with him.

‘I will leave you to yourself – on parole as they used to call it when wars were fought between gentlemen. Give me your word of honour that you will not try to escape!’

I gave it. In any case both of us knew that if I took to the hills it would be a confession of guilt.

The road to Jerusalem reminded me a little of Greece – the same scrub, the same rocks but all on a smaller scale, good enough country for ambush but not for refuge; an Arab would choose the desert for that, a Jew some settlement where he could be hidden and his identity disguised. I was ashamed to find myself thinking of the opportunities for an outlaw. This land was stern and calm as the religions it had fostered. Under the blue bowl of the watching sky one God was enough.

He stopped on the top of Mount Scopus, saying that he would be back in a couple of hours and pick me up by the roadside.

The great, grey block of the city lay below me, the tiles of the Mosque of Omar flaming in the sun. I had the impression of a fortress built and walled to contain the divine. But the unknown purpose cannot be visited through a door. It is in the open air that man and his fellow creatures, though themselves wordless, rejoice in the gift of life and movement and give thanks for the sense of unity which we call beauty.

Was this the view which fierce King Richard saw as he thrust his head and shoulders over the ridge, perhaps with my ancestor by his side, and after crying out that he was unworthy to approach withdrew to cover? It was an excuse. He knew his force could never take Jerusalem. But in excuses there can still be truth. I too could say I was unworthy because my crusade had come to its end.

Moshe’s words were still an obsession: ‘You taught me.’

I stretched out my arms to that enigmatic sky which canopied Jerusalem from hill to hill and swore an oath to myself – for what is self but a receptacle of Purpose – that never again would I fire a shot at man or beast. Emotional and perhaps absurd, since I know as well as anyone that man is the cruellest of all creatures and the bullet can be merciful. But I defend emotion. Even a snail must know emotion – either at the sight of a lettuce leaf or at the ripeness of one half to mate with the other – for emotion is the link between itself and other life.

When North returned, I thanked him for having chosen such a spot for me and asked him how he knew.

‘I didn’t, I just felt you might need a memory. Lord knows you have courage enough for fifty, but you may need a different kind of courage now.’

‘Yes. I am going to be a different kind of outlaw.’

‘You are ready to be told you are a supporter of National Socialism and a liar?’

‘I have been through all that in Sweden.’

‘Let’s hope you won’t have to again. But I have a reputation for believing fairy tales and they like to forget that once in a while I have been right.’

Early next morning we started down the coast road to Cairo, arriving at sunset when my body was delivered to a fellow security officer. On leaving, Major North presented me with his white coat and a tie, saying that he could not loose an enemy agent into the arena dressed as the shipwrecked Bill Smith. He cut short goodbyes, knowing, I think, as well as I, that no words could add to our strange and warm relationship.

Treatment was more military than at the seamen’s hostel. It was also more comfortable. I was accommodated in a caravan fitted with all that a staff officer could need in the desert, yet there was a sentry outside. The combination revealed my anomalous position as a presumed traitor but also a thoroughbred out of the stud book about whose fate there might be awkward questions. If the authorities had known that no one was likely to ask they might not have been so cautious.

The house to which I was taken swarmed with officers and files. Passing between the ranks of the usual trestle tables and quick glances from the occupants, I was escorted into a private office. My interrogator was a brigadier and had a proper civilian desk; on it was a thick file marked RAYMOND INGELRAM followed by a string of aliases which I could not read. I disliked the brigadier at first sight. He had a dark moustache, more movie star than military, and a straight thin mouth beneath it, which seemed to carry a slight sneer as if I were an incompetent subordinate who thought too highly of himself. I judged him coldly efficient, the right man to deal with facts but, as North had said, not with a love story.

I remember little of that interview. It is not worth remembering. He started straightaway with the report from Sweden. I had claimed to be an escaped prisoner-of-war, but it was discovered that I had been in Germany as a civilian since the outbreak of war pretending to be Nicaraguan and that I had spent two years on propaganda directed at Latin America. I had claimed that my motive was to get near to Hitler in order to kill him. Did I wish to confirm that story? Yes, I did.

We then moved to my Austrian mother and the Austrian friends of my youth. To hell with such foolishness!

My escape. Well, there he had the evidence of the convict Shapir which was quite independent of my own. He was condescending enough to accept our stories.

‘People in England seem to know very little about you. I have been able to obtain some newspaper cuttings which indicate that at one time your travels and your habit of hunting with the nets and weapons of natives caught the attention of the popular press.’

‘They exaggerated.’

‘Are you known to any of the East African governors?’

I gave him names, saying that all they could tell him was that I had been an agreeable dinner guest and had no political opinions whatever. I hoped, however, that if he approached them he would tell them that I was being vetted for possible service in Africa, not as a supporter of Hitler.

‘You are suspected of worse than that, Mr Ingelram. You admit that you willingly allowed yourself to be employed in propaganda. I suggest that you tried to escape from the Reich before it was too late and to clear your name and your conscience by what you call a private war. Just how many of the enemy did you kill?’

I had to stop and think.

‘I make it seventeen,’ I said. ‘That is not counting the Voevod’s battle in the ravine and a truckful of troops drowned.’

It should have been eighteen. I had forgotten the stabbed doorman at Kozani, memory having censored him.

He was plainly shocked. I could see that he thought it close to murder. To him casualties were statistics. I doubt if he had ever been in action.

‘Have you never ordered that a man be quietly shot?’ I asked.

‘That is entirely different.’

‘Perhaps. But to kill a man face to face is not assassination. It only differs from bombing a town or wiping out fifty men with a machine-gun because you see his eyes.’

This was outside his experience and bad taste coming from a traitor. He quickly changed to politics and asked what mine were.

I replied that as a soldier – even in my private army – I was not supposed to have any.

‘What are they anyway? I take it you have no use for democracy?’

‘None whatever. It subjects us to government by a rabble of ambitious, self-important crooks. But even more, I detest dictatorship which adds fiendish cruelty to the same dishonesty.’

I had shocked him again, though he had probably said much the same about politicians in the mess. I meant to shock. Since I could see already that there was no hope of acquittal, nothing was to be lost if I disconcerted him by answering contempt with contempt.

He took refuge in a judicial air, saying that I would realize it was quite impossible to leave me at liberty. In Egypt, however, the only internment camps were for Italian civilians. So he would send me home to be confined or publicly disgraced with the rest of my aristocratic Nazi friends.

‘What is your financial position? Major North tells me that you distributed all your possessions before leaving for Germany.’

‘I did.’

‘In order to tuck your assets away in Switzerland or Latin America, I presume.’

‘No. But you may presume it.’

‘In that case I will make a recommendation that you be repatriated at a minimum cost to public funds by any ship returning round the Cape. Do you agree?’

‘I must, if your service insists on considering me a traitor.’

The following day he called me in again to tell me that I would be moved to Suez and very shortly embarked on a freighter leaving for England. No British passport would be issued but the master would carry in a sealed envelope the documentation enabling me to pass through immigration control into the hands of the police.

‘And as you have no money, I shall provide you with a small sum for your expenses on the voyage.’

I thanked him and refused it, saying that Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda had paid me very well and placed funds at my disposal in London upon which I could draw.

A childish revenge. I had no doubt that Security and Censorship would waste a lot of time and energy trying to trace through what neutral country money had been transferred to London, how I intended to get at it and why in the end the traitor had confessed. North could have told them why. If an outlaw wishes to preserve his pride, he can only depend on himself.

I did not offer to shake hands on leaving, nor very properly did the brigadier.

I was decently treated when I went on board at Suez. Evidently the master had been told that he should keep a careful eye on me but not that I had been an enemy agent. He spared me questions, believing – so far as I could guess – that I was a person of some distinction who had committed some unforgivable folly such as seducing the King of Egypt’s daughter or dancing a drunkard’s jig in the cathedral.

The ship was to call at Mombasa, a port which I knew well, and there I proposed to leave it. I had never any intention of going home. My future did not matter. I had renounced the future and lived only in a past which contained, co-existing with me, the spectral vision of my love.

Somehow I could exist. Poland and Greece had proved that I could endure privation. But there could be no living off the rifle. ‘You taught me,’ poor Moshe had said. That lesson and my oath under the conscience-searching skies of Palestine were reinforced when the brigadier asked me how many of the enemy I had killed. Seventeen, I answered, omitting the uncounted. By what right had I killed? Was my justification self-defence or was it sheer anger and a savage eagerness to return blood for blood? But blood would not resurrect my beloved nor fetch from the void the children we might have had.

The captain did not object to me going ashore at Mombasa. He had no reason to suspect that I might disappear since I was on my way home and had no money. I had at first conceived the preposterous idea of walking to Nairobi. By now I was so used to using my feet that I hardly considered road or rail transport. How a white beggar would be treated I could guess: by the blacks with kindness, by the whites with an insistence on peremptory action to explain my poverty, which, if I were still close to Mombasa, must result in official inquiries and my return to the ship.

It was only when I had walked out of town along the railway track that it seriously occurred to me to take a train without a ticket. In a friendly, free and easy colonial society it should not be necessary to resort to the desperate tricks of American bums on the move. A freight train was halted hissing impatiently alongside a banana grove. I climbed into a truck half full of gravel and for the next three hours no one disturbed me. I was then discovered and rebuked, but merely advised that I should not be seen when getting off in the Nairobi yards.

It was early morning when I slid to the ground and walked away from my truck with, I hoped, the confident air of Hauptmann Haase at Auschwitz, though now my uniform was only three stained garments. I had to avoid the centre of the town in case some old acquaintance recognized Raymond Ingelram. I wondered what he would do: assume that this disreputable figure could not be me, or decide that it was and should be passed without a greeting. It was unlikely that in the yards I should meet anyone but merchants, white, black and Indian, all busy loading lorries or cursing because expected goods had not arrived, so I sat down on a crate to watch them and speculate on their destinations. I did not care where I went, so long as it was not back to Mombasa and far enough into the interior for search for me to be abandoned.

The most hopeful prospect seemed to be an energetic little man with a face tanned darker than an Indian’s by the equatorial sun who was loading crates which evidently contained parts of a motor boat to be reassembled on arrival. Some of the crates were marked in French as well as English, which indicated that the lorry must be bound for the Belgian side of the lakes. I asked the contractor if there was any chance of a job and told him some story which I have forgotten – in Africa all stories are possible – and that I had spent every cent I had to reach Nairobi from Mozambique.

‘I speak French,’ I added hopefully.

‘And Swahili?’

To show that I was fluent I answered him in the language.

‘You don’t look as if you drank,’ he said, half to himself.

‘I have found better ways to waste money when I had some.’

‘You’ll have some if you can start this afternoon.’

Why do I record in detail this meeting with a stranger, having nothing in common with him but a taste for Africa? Because he set me on the way to peace. The mutations of a life do not necessarily spring from close associations but sometimes from a talk or a companionship which only lasts a matter of minutes. So it was here.

Why this record at all if it comes to that, considering Bill Smith is a non-person, an outlaw who renounced any steady stream of life as soon as it no longer contained love? Because I find myself unwilling to join those millions of other Bill Smiths who, as the Ecclesiast writes, are perished as though they had never been born. Then for whom do I write when I am the last of my line without sons or even an identity? For myself, I suppose. Here in the peace of the convent among these women who happily fulfil themselves in their duty to God and the neighbour, I spend the evenings re-living the action of the past – not wholly in repentance but, as it were, licking the blood from my whiskers with pride in the success of stalk and kill which relieves me of weighing right against wrong. I am content to be. I love, therefore I am. She had loved, therefore in some form she is.

My employer was an excellent mechanic and must have been a good picker of men, for his two Kikuyu boys, cook and driver’s mate, were cheerful and intelligent. His navigation and choice of camp sites were poor, for this was the longest journey he had ever undertaken. With relief he soon handed over that side of the business to me. With whom and where, he asked, had I so much experience. Long ago, I replied, with a certain Raymond Ingelram of whom he had vaguely heard. He was disappointed because I would not shoot, but otherwise inclined to slap me on the back for every comfort of the wilds that I knew how to provide.

After delivery of our boat to a ferry company starting up on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, we made ready for the return to Nairobi. He was astonished when I insisted, in spite of his promises of prosperity for both of us, in staying where I was. I had to. The ship would have long since reported the disappearance of Ingelram from Mombasa and the Nairobi authorities, with so many old acquaintances to bear witness, could have no doubt of the real identity of Bill Smith. So my employer paid me off most generously and I settled down in Albertville for a few days until a Belgian mining engineer, attracted by the praises of my employer and the ferry company, appealed to me to take charge of his small safari.

He had no luck. As we were travelling up the Ruzizi River, I went down with a tropical fever which must have been rather more virulent than malaria against which I was pretty thoroughly salted. If he, not I, had been ill, I could have nursed him well enough to give him a fair chance, but he was inexperienced, in a hurry and afraid of fevers in general. So he deposited me in the nearest village, leaving one of his boys to serve me, under the supervision of the local witch doctor, who knew more of fevers than most consultants, but disliked the fuss and bother and questions that would result from the death of a white man. He put me in a hammock and two runners dropped the shivering bundle, like an unwanted baby, upon the steps of the nunnery thirty miles away, where it seemed to me in my fever dreams that white seagulls in a cloud were swooping over me.

They turned out to be the white robes of a heroic little group of Belgian nuns who combined a hutted hospital with farming of fruit, herbs and vegetables and a small herd of fly-proof cows – perhaps to remind them of the long-lost meadows of their home – where the grasslands began to merge into the forest. They soon had a Bill Smith in working order and then asked him where he wanted to go. I answered that I wanted to stay with them and serve them, requiring only my food and an outlying, watertight hut of my own. There were many tasks that a man could undertake for them more easily. The headman was a pious fool, always in and out of the little chapel and paying more attention to the candles than to the garden or the cows.

The mother superior asked me to swear that I was not a fugitive from justice. Leaving out the Gestapo, who had no interest in justice, and the brigadier, a limited man who could not do justice without papers, I could honestly swear that I was a fugitive from no one but myself.

‘But why?’

‘Because my love was killed.’ I could not bring myself to tell her how, or of my vengeance.

‘Yet you are so full of love to us and to the animals. Cannot you love God too?’

‘I do. At dawn with birds and at evening with the beasts.’

She did not understand and was sad.

It is true that in the evening I join in the thanks offered up by the cries of the beasts around me. They have accepted me as of the same substance as these angels whom they do not fear. But there is one I wish had more fear. Killing is too easy for her. I have tried a dozen tricks to frighten her away, but she is impertinent like all cats. She knows me too well and I could swear she is jealous of the nuns. She has the white robes fluttering for the safety of the house, but with me in the last of the light she will exchange a quick, green glance as if there was some secret understanding between us.

Yesterday she jumped the enclosure and killed a cow. That cannot be permitted. Also I am a little afraid for the white robes; the margin between lack of respect and attack is so small. She has to die, my lioness of the twilight. I have forbidden myself to shoot, but there is still another way and in the Sudan I dared it successfully, hurled to the ground under my shield unhurt. One must provoke the direct charge, and I am not sure that charge she will. Another absolute essential is a strong shield of hippopotamus hide and a broad spear of steel forged by a skilled blacksmith. The headman has both in his hut, emblems of the past manhood of his tribe though he himself can’t even handle a pitchfork properly. I must inspect them closely and see if they are up to the job. And then, my dear, the rest is up to you. If you will not charge, it cannot be done. If you will and I can hold the spear steady as you leap, the pain will be no more than that of the bullet.