Ruth stepped off the bus and a few other people followed her. None of them exchanged glances, staring at their feet like naughty children. None of them wanted to be seen near the camp. A sense of shame hung over them, as if it was some kind of prison. Ruth knew it wasn’t supposed to feel like that, but she could think of no way of collecting a group of people together that didn’t. These poor people were being held against their will. She had heard of the internment camps in Nazi Germany. Wasn’t that the very thing they were fighting against? Hitler’s fascism wasn’t something they wanted here.
But she had to see him, especially after what had happened. She crossed the road as the bus pulled away, chugging its fumes behind it. Her walk took her away from the new council homes that had been built on one side of the road. Huyton was not a place she had known well before they had decided to place the internment camp here. It was only a short bus ride, too far for her to cycle, but it was like being out in the countryside. The houses were newer than hers, and there was more space between them. A village green separated them, almost out of sight of the main road and more trees. This was somewhere where children could grow up.
That was until the internment camp had arrived. She couldn’t shift the weight of oppression it gave to the place. Huyton was like two sides of a coin: the sleepy idyll of suburban residency on one side of the road, and the prison camp the other.
She had expected the camp to be ordered wooden huts, made especially for its purpose, but it was nothing like that. From the buildings no one would be able to tell that it was any form of camp at all. The rot festered underneath that. They had taken houses that had just been finished and placed in them every German, Italian or Austrian citizen they could find. Many of them had never even so much as set foot in their countries of birth since leaving as children, but still the British government were wary. Churchill had told his government to lock them all up, lest one of them pose a danger to the country. It was incredible, and Ruth couldn’t forgive the Prime Minister for what he had done.
An eight-foot fence had been erected around the houses. Rings of barbed wire prevented anyone from attempting to climb over, and a further ring of barbed wire inside made sure that they wouldn’t get out. Her grandfather was a man of eighty who on a bad day struggled to get out of his chair, let alone climb an eight-foot fence. She couldn’t even see George scaling something that high. He had wanted to come with her. ‘Please, Mummy, I want to see Great-Grandpa,’ he had said at the kitchen table, almost begging, but she wanted to keep him from anything like this. Her grandfather was the only one in the family who treated George like family. He doted on George as he had done when Ruth was a child and George loved him, but he was too young for this.
A pair of guards manned a gate, their rifles slung on their shoulders. They tensed as she approached and one of them stepped to block her path. Ruth reached inside her coat and the guard almost went for his rifle. What did they think she was going to do? Pull out a weapon and gun them all down while freeing the internees? No, her weapon was her words, her articles. Through the newspaper she would encourage the public to put pressure on the government. She had already written a piece about a family’s experience of losing their home to the bombing. It was the first of a series she planned, but so far Rupert had only allowed her this one. It was with the censors now, so there was no guarantee it would even see the light of day. The guard was just trying to exert his authority, the authority of a soldier over a civilian. A man over a woman. He scowled at her, the dark brown of his eyebrows almost meeting, but she did not stop.
‘My visiting order.’ She pushed a piece of paper in his direction. At first they had not been able to visit the camp, such was the government’s distrust of the inmates, but they had eventually relaxed their controls. She had used her position as a journalist in the beginning, not that they would let her write anything.
The soldier nodded to his companion, a shorter man who was clearly the sidekick. He jumped to and unbolted the gate, before letting one of its doors drift open. Ruth would have to push her way through. It was almost as if they expected the inmates to rush the gate, but as usual none of them so much as lingered by the way out. Nor did anyone turn to look as she entered. It wasn’t just the visitors who kept their heads down.
Despite the number of empty houses that had been turned over to the camp, there was severe overcrowding. Ruth passed canvas tents on her way to where her grandfather was housed. Some had holes in them and many were tied up with fraying rope. There was a general sense of dampness about the whole camp. It smelt like the sea despite being miles from the coast, and Ruth wondered whether there wasn’t also a large amount of illness. Even if some of these people were sympathetic to the Nazis, it was no way to treat them. They were still human beings.
When she had first come she had been escorted, but now they just let her walk about the camp. The guards no longer cared who she was. Her shoes sank into the earth by the front step. A pipe leaked nearby and there was no one to fix it. Staring at the front door, which looked so normal in this world of strangeness, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Even though she had been before, she never knew what to expect inside. The door opened with a click. It wasn’t designed to keep anyone out. There was a faint whiff of boiled cabbage in the hallway, but it was soon taken over by the smell of sweat. Mould had already grown up the stairway wall, and there were no pictures on the walls, no trinkets or heirlooms. This was no home.
There were bits of discarded clothing, wooden food containers and other associated rubbish. When she had last visited there had been twelve men living in the house. One of the younger men had told her that he was moving into one of the tents so her grandfather could have more space. It was no way of living, no matter how well the men knew each other, and she knew that even the army wouldn’t expect their soldiers to live in such cramped confines. But these men didn’t matter, because they were foreigners.
Her shoe crunched on a box, but she didn’t dare look down. She could already guess at the kind of mess that had been left around, especially if the smell was anything to go by. The stairs creaked as she climbed them and the banister wobbled in her grip. The houses might have been new, but they were cheap and made in a hurry. The men had given her grandfather the room at the front of the house, which faced south, so that he could have the best possible view. It buoyed her that even in these circumstances people could be kind. She would have to find some way to thank them for that soon, but she wasn’t sure what the guards would allow her to bring into the camp. She took another deep breath before entering, then regretting it because of the smell.
Her grandfather sat hunched over an upturned wooden box stacked to make a makeshift desk. His white hair was curled around his ears, and the collar of his sky-blue shirt was turned up at one side. He was wearing only one slipper.
He didn’t look up as she entered the room, but carried on scribbling. The pages were yellow and filled with his scrawling script. Ruth knew better than to disturb him. The box room he was occupying did nothing to dispel the illusion of a prison cell, and the door’s lock appeared to be broken. The bed was nothing of the sort, a simple pile of straw with some tattered sheets on top. Her grandfather was far from the kind of man who would live the life of a soldier. The bedsheets didn’t look slept in, they were neatly folded back on the makeshift bed, and Ruth wondered whether he had spent all his time writing. She couldn’t blame him. Who would be able to sleep in here? She wondered whether she could appeal to the camp officer to bring him in an actual mattress, but she knew the answer already. They would not wish to show any favouritism, and they would expect it to be stolen.
She shuffled her feet, being patient while her grandfather finished whatever he was writing. She had expected him to stop at the sound of her movement, but it was as if she wasn’t there. He often became engrossed in his projects, but she had never known him to be this oblivious to the outside world.
She risked a quiet ‘Grandpappa’, but still the pen flicked across the crumpled sheets. She should have brought him some writing paper, he would have appreciated the gesture. It looked as if he was writing over words that he had already written, all fighting for space on the same sheet. She wanted to take his hand and slow him down, help him find some kind of peace, but knew it would only agitate him further. She kept her voice calm as she called out to him again, louder this time.
‘Grandpappa? It’s Ruth. Can you stop for a moment?’
The wagging pen slowed and switched directions for a second, but it did not stop. He had heard her, despite his actions. What on earth was occupying his attention so? It could wait.
‘Grandpa!’
The pen fell from his grasp, rolling with the stalled motion, and clattered down the wooden box to land on the floor. Ruth knelt to pick it up for him – she knew it was precious to him – and came down to his eye level.
‘Ruthie?’ His voice was like a scratch in his throat, weak and struggling. She assumed that he hadn’t spoken to anyone for days. There was no sign of the accent she remembered from when she was little. ‘Is that you? What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come to visit you, Grandpappa.’ She laid a hand on his arm, but he had already returned to his writing. ‘To see how you were doing.’
His eyes glazed over as if he were viewing another time and place, and Ruth tried to pull him back. ‘What were you writing, Grandpappa?’ She took his hands in hers, feeling their coldness and willing them to take some of the heat from her body.
‘Hmmm?’ He glanced down at her hands enveloping his and smiled. ‘Oh, that? Memoirs. Of a sort at least. Trying to remember my home, my country. Austria. You know I was born in Austria? A beautiful country. Beautiful. The green hills over the Attersee, so much greener than England. The air was different, purer. We can’t let the Nazis destroy it, sully it with their ambition. I will never forgive them that. I stopped visiting then, although I wish I could see it as it was. I fear it’s already gone…’
He drifted off, but the brightness had returned to his eyes, fuelled by passion. Of course, Ruth had travelled to Austria when she was younger. Her parents had emigrated from Austria to England when Ruth was only a couple of years old and her sister only a baby. Before the war they had returned to their homeland.
‘Can I read it?’ It was her grandfather who had fostered her love for reading from an early age, reading to her in both English and German his favourite books from romances to history and philosophy. He was the only one who had truly understood when she had said that she wanted to write, and had given her a pen just like the one he used. It was precious to her too. She wanted to tell him about Peter, but when he was like this there would be no point.
‘Oh, not yet, I think. I’m not sure I can even read it.’ He flashed her a smile that reminded her of when she was little, him sitting on her bed reading to her. ‘You know my handwriting, it’s like some kind of code that only I can decipher, if I’m in the right mood.’
He shuffled the papers together, making the place tidy, and rested the pen on top. ‘It will take me a while to sort through this mess, I think. I just can’t seem to force it into any kind of shape, like my mind is unfocused and fluffy. It’s all wrong and I just keep writing.’
She knew exactly what he meant. He had always been protective of his writing, as if it was only for him, a way of getting the thoughts out of a busy head to leave room for others. She could empathise with that, but as far as she was concerned words deserved to be read. Words only found their life through the reader. Before he had left Austria he had published a number of poetry collections and even a novel, but had not published anything since. He had been well known in his small community, but now she expected the Nazis had burned his books, along with many others.
‘How have they been treating you?’ she asked, dreading the answer. She got up from her knees and crossed to the bed, sitting with her back against the wall.
‘The others bring me meals, so that’s something.’ He flashed a smile again, turning to face her and looking something like the man she had once known. ‘And their cooking is far better than your grandmother’s ever was, I can tell you that. I loved her dearly, but she could have burned charcoal.’
They laughed. It felt good to let the tension go, if only for a moment. Ruth hadn’t realised how much she had been holding in. Her laughter was almost hysterical as if a dam had broken inside her. She missed her grandfather incredibly, and she wished she could take him home, but no matter how much she appealed, the authorities would not let him go. The country had to know what was going on, and while their newspaper didn’t have much coverage, she was sure that if it was powerful enough word would spread.
Suddenly his eyes dropped to the floor.
‘Have you seen my other slipper?’ he asked and Ruth answered, but once again she had lost his attention to the sheet of paper.
Ruth wondered whether he had always been like this, or it was simply age. When she was younger he had seemed so confident and impressive, but had that just been the perspective of a doting granddaughter? If only she could ask her grandma what he had been like when they had met, when he had first come to England.
She knew she couldn’t stay much longer. She had to meet Harriet and George and she had work to do. But she would spend the next few minutes watching her grandfather, to remember the man he used to be before this terrible war had come and imprisoned him. She would fight to get him out of here, appeal to whoever she could, make as much noise about it as possible.
Harriet was waiting for her near the Albert Dock, George’s hand in hers. They looked far more like mother and child than Ruth and he ever did. Ruth almost stopped. Perhaps they were better together, it was not like Ruth was his flesh and blood. George’s small face broke into a wide smile when he saw her, then he pulled out of Harriet’s grip and rushed over. That grin was always a relief and it reminded her of Peter, even if their faces were not the same. Couldn’t be the same. He must have picked it up from watching his father, like the pattern of his speech.
He almost knocked the wind out of her as he collided into her and hugged her. Should she have let him come and see his great-grandfather? Those wide eyes looked up at her, but Harriet was the first to speak as she came close.
‘We’ve been walking up and down the docks. Been looking at all the boats. Haven’t we, Georgie?’
George nodded enthusiastically, without breaking eye contact with Ruth.
‘Did you like the ships?’ she asked, knowing full well that he and Peter had often gone to the docks to look at the boats before the war. George even had a wooden toy that Peter had carved for him, in the shape of the ship he had been serving on at the time.
‘There was a big grey one,’ he replied. ‘With lots of guns and men all on it.’
‘That sounds exciting,’ she said. Had she always been terrible at talking to children, or had she just grown out of practice while he had been away?
‘Like the one Daddy was on,’ he continued, breaking his gaze and looking downcast.
‘I know, my love. We all miss Daddy, but he’s safe now in heaven, far away from this horrible war.’ She had never agreed with dumbing things down to George, much to her family’s disappointment. He was a smart boy and lying to him would only create more problems in the future. She had told him the truth he deserved, but he also deserved reassurance. ‘He would be very proud of you. I’m sure he’s thinking about you right now.’
She hugged him tighter, smelling his hair and remembering how it had smelt when he was a baby.
‘I wish I could see Daddy.’ His voice came muffled from her chest.
‘So do I. So do I.’ Her voice almost broke, but she had to be strong for him. She was worried that he was more scared of the bombing than he was letting on. He might have asked more questions of Peter had he been there, but she would have to let him ask when he was ready.
Wires cracked, coming loose, and then barrage balloons rose into the sky like silver bullets. They were a sign of what they were living through and cast an oppressive shadow over the docks. It wasn’t long before an air raid siren burst into life. She felt George flinch against her chest, and he pulled away. It was early for a raid, but you could never predict when the Germans would come.
‘How do they know when the planes are coming?’
‘You know, I have no idea.’ She knelt down so that she could look him in the eye and hold him. That was something she would have to find out about. ‘Your father would have known. We should find out together.’
He nodded and she saw a tear trickle down his cheek. She brushed it away with her thumb.
‘Georgie, can you go with Aunt Harriet for me?’ She was needed elsewhere. The Matron had relented and given her an opportunity to drive the van, and she didn’t want to waste it. But it broke her every time she had to say goodbye.
‘I want to stay with you.’
The words choked in her throat. ‘I know, but I have to go and help keep us all safe. I will see you after the raid and we can talk about all the boats you saw today. All right?’
Harriet took a hold of his hand again. Ruth watched them both, unable to peel her eyes away, and hoped it was not the last time she saw him.