‘Surely not a Lutheran church?’
‘No, a Presbyterian one. I would have preferred Church of England myself, but it seemed unmannerly to suggest that, so I accompanied them to their chosen place of worship.’
‘And how did you spend the rest of the week-end?’
‘On Saturday afternoons, if it was fine, we walked. Like many Germans, the Schumanns were great walkers. We would take the train to Brockenhurst and spend the day in the New Forest, or go to Lymington and cross over to the Isle of Wight, and then walk our legs off, while Heinrich and I talked theology.’
‘And Mrs Schumann?’
‘Oh, I imagine she listened. At any rate, I do not remember that she ever joined in the discussions. At five o’clock or thereabouts, when we found a suitable spot, we would have a picnic tea. Both of them carried rucksacks and at first I felt it incumbent upon me to attempt to relieve Karla of hers, but she always refused and Heinrich supported her, saying that I was their guest and must carry nothing. I will not pretend that I was sorry. I have a weak back and a tendency to sciatica, neither of which was helpful in carrying a heavy pack. In fact, the walks themselves were almost more than I could manage.’
‘Were the Schumanns naturalised at this time?’ asked Maisry.
‘Not for a couple of years, but the news from Germany was such that they were convinced war was inevitable and, knowing this, I suggested that, as they had fled the country and had no intention of ever going back, naturalisation might save them a good deal of trouble later on. They took my advice, and Heinrich was drafted into the Pioneer Corps when war broke out.’
‘With his intellectual background he could not have been pleased about that,’ commented Dame Beatrice.
‘Well, he received quite good treatment, I believe,’ said James, ‘and, when the air-raids began in earnest, I think anybody with a German name and speaking with a German accent, might have had a difficult time if he’d still been living in a place near Southampton, which suffered terrible damage and loss of life during the war. Karla, of course, retreated to the country and was not molested or annoyed in any way.’
‘But, until the war interrupted your friendship with them, you saw the Schumanns frequently and stayed many weekends at their flat?’
‘Yes, I knew them intimately from 1935 until 1939, but then came a change in our relationship.’
‘Oh, before the war began?’
‘Yes, indeed. Two things happened. Just before the war, as you may or may not know, the staffs of schools were instructed to issue gas-masks to the children, but to take care to stress the fact that this was a precautionary measure only, and that it was in the highest degree unlikely that they would ever need to be used, as, indeed, they never were. Well, Heinrich, probably with the best of intentions, was rash and irresponsible enough to tell his form – he was form-master of a group of twelve-year-olds, boys and girls – that the masks would be quite useless if the new and deadly poison gases which the Germans had secretly invented and perfected since the 1914 war should ever be used by an invading German army.’
‘With the result that some of the youngsters went home and spread alarm and despondency, I suppose,’ said Maisry.
‘Exactly. Parents, especially the parents of some of the little girls, bombarded the headmaster with tales of broken nights, of children screaming in nightmare or refusing to go to bed, etc. etc. until Schumann was severely censured by the headmaster, and the long and short of it was that he lost his job, and really one can scarcely be surprised. Of course, he was, in many ways, a singularly obtuse man, like so many Germans.’
‘I wonder what possessed him?’ said Maisry. ‘It seems such an idiotic thing to have said to a pack of youngsters.’
‘An attack of conscience. He had to tell the truth, as he saw it,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I am quite sure he did not realise the harm he was doing. So that is why he gave up teaching! His son told us that he had done so, but did not give us the reason.’
‘I doubt whether Otto knew it. His father would not have told him, and his mother was so incensed when Heinrich lost his job that she would never have made the slightest excuse for him, I’m sure. To her, he had simply been given the sack for incompetence.’
‘You mentioned a second reason for a break in your friendship with the Schumanns,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘Yes, well, that had nothing to do with the war.’ He paused. ‘It’s not a subject I care to discuss,’ he said. To give him time, Dame Beatrice asked,
‘And how did you get on during the war?’
‘I saw how things would go, so I changed my job. Our boys and girls were sent home as soon as school reassembled in the September of 1939. Most of them, in fact, had been sent to reputedly safer areas by their parents and did not return to the school at all. The headmaster had been going to retire at Christmas, in any case, and had sold the school buildings and our small playing field on advantageous terms to an hotel company, so we on the staff had been looking about us during the summer holiday and it seemed to me that my wisest plan would be to try for a post in a state school. Not only would this offer me better security in the form of a retirement pension, but I reasoned that teaching under the state scheme would have to become a reserved occupation, at least for a time, and would defer my being drafted into one of the armed services.’
‘And did it?’ asked Maisry, in order to keep James talking, since he had not, so far, received any useful information from him.
‘For a time, yes.
