‘Who’s she?’
‘An English nurse. She’s working with the French and the Italians. Does that make her a traitor, like Haw-Haw, do you think?’
‘I’m sure it doesn’t. Aren’t doctors and nurses exempt from that sort of thing? What sort of woman is she?’
‘The sort you fall for.’
He grinned. He didn’t seem to mind. I stood at the nearest window. The hospital stood at the very edge of a one-mile destruction zone. This part of Bremen looked like a gigantic, smashed-up building site. You start with one of the most elegant skylines in northern Europe and a couple of thousand bombs, and work your way backwards to heaps of scattered bricks and stone, a couple of thousand large holes in the ground, and cap it with the stink of unburied bodies. They’d call that reverse engineering these days, I suspect. I did something stupid. Still looking out of the window I spoke what was on my mind: never a good idea.
‘Mankind is very young,’ I said. ‘Scarcely out of the caves.’ It sounded like just the sort of platitude an unimaginative priest might have used: as profound as last week’s Yorkshire pudding. Maybe Ross thought so too. He asked me, ‘Will you take a service, Padre?’
Bollocks! Funnily enough it was an easier prospect than facing Grace. I asked him, ‘Do you think they’ll want it?’
‘Of course, Padre. Didn’t Anna tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
The nursing sister told me herself. ‘We moved all of the Christians in here,’ she said. ‘If anything bad had happened they would have all been together.’
Anything bad. For once I didn’t ask a silly question.
‘All the Christian denominations under the sun,’ the Sergeant said cheerfully.
‘So they won’t mind me, then?’ I asked him. ‘I’m an independent hedonist.’
He made a whistling sound, and said, ‘Don’t get me wrong, Padre, but in my mob we would have said that that sounds very painful.’
‘And I haven’t any of my things . . .’
‘We have a Book of Common Prayer, and a couple of hymnbooks. Theirs are in German, of course, but mine’s English. It always flew with me.’
I don’t know why I wanted to do it. I asked, ‘Would you be satisfied with a short informal service? I say a prayer, and you could sing a few of the good old ones?’
It’s the silly little things that sometimes get to people.
The nun asked, ‘Can I say that the war is over?’
‘For Bremen,’ I told her, ‘the war is over. Tell everyone you like.’ After that they all began to speak to each other. In low voices, murmuring. No one used loud voices any more.
It felt oddly natural turning to face them with Ross’s book in my hand. I should have felt ridiculous, but I didn’t. I gave them three prayers, including a long one for peace on Earth, and good will to all men. Looking back on that, it may have been a bit hypocritical, but it seemed appropriate to the times. They gave me three hymns back, singing lustily at first. Everything went well until the last one: I chose it from among my memories of a whitewashed, corrugated iron Sunday school alongside our parish church . . . and all of a sudden the Germans couldn’t sing because they were crying. Sister Anna’s voice, and mine, and Ross’s rang out in the little room, whilst all the rest of them mumbled. One of the soldiers came up and hugged me afterwards; tears were streaming down his face. I know that he wanted to speak, but something was stopping him. I didn’t know what the hell was going on until James asked me, ‘Did you plan that, Charlie, or did it just happen? Part of your magic?’
He had been standing at the doorway, and must have seen the end of my performance.
‘Hello, James. I am afraid I don’t know what’s happened. They suddenly got very emotional.’
‘It’s you, you silly bugger, and the last hymn. Don’t you realize that you’ve just had them sing the tune of an old German national anthem?’ Then he said, ‘Les wants you. You’d better come downstairs. You didn’t meet your Grace?’
‘No, but she’s here somewhere. That pilot talked about her . . .’
As we walked down the marble stairs he said, ‘You’re getting awfully good with the bell, book and candle, you know.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Maybe it should be your line in Civvy Street.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Better than being one of Cliff’s bloody spies for the rest of your life.’
‘Fat chance of that either, sir.’
‘Yes. Didn’t you tell us you were off to Australia to be a sports writer?’
‘That’s right, sir. That’s what I’d like. What’s the matter, don’t you believe me?’
All he did was give his strange whinnying laugh. Now what was so bloody funny?
There was a different atmosphere in the hospital: some cloud had lifted. Alongside the pain and the scrambling of medics and nurses from ward to ward there were some smiles too. I saw the back of Hendriks’s head. He was dashing down one of the corridors like a sprinter: he didn’t notice me. They must have had a radio in one of the wards, and it was that fellow Sinatra expiring over ‘When Your Lover Has Gone’ with Tommy Dorsey’s band. I’ve loved that performance ever since. God sends you all these little messages, and you never pick up on them; you’re always tuned to another station.
Les was sitting on a small marble bench in what had been the hotel lobby, oblivious to the noise and bustle. He had some people around him. One was a plump nurse with long wavy blonde hair like a film star. I knew immediately that this was the woman they had told me about. The German nurse on Grace’s team who the men had argued over. If I hadn’t just met Ingrid I could have seen why. Her uniform was white, clean and a little
