Every twelve hours this metal cylinder had surfaced and its voice had told da Cunha that it was still ‘alive and well’. Fernie Tomas had tried to ‘home’ on the signal, but failed to spot it before it descended to the sea bed again. Harry Kondit knew that his boat travelled twelve miles on each of da Cunha’s trips. ‘Down the coast’ he had said, because Harry Kondit thought he was the only man who kept rendezvous at sea.
I reached inside to where the instruments had once been, and found a slim metal tin with the Nazi eagle and the bright-red sealing wax. Before I opened it I sent for a jug of coffee and sandwiches. It was going to be a long task.
57 Lost letter in the mail
Dear Baron,
What a wonderful surprise to have your letter, it had taken nearly nine weeks to reach us. You may well wonder what the ‘state of mind’ is here in England. You would never recognize Number 20 now and it is like no other Christmas I care to remember. They have used the gardens for some sort of dump and five of the houses are full of Polish officers who are for ever shouting and singing. Gerald is in the Cameroons negotiating with the French, and Billy is with the Fleet, goodness knows where. We have only cook and Janet now to look after us and are ‘camping’ in the study and the gold room that you liked so much. We don’t go into London at all, as there is little petrol available and the trains are blacked out and quite filthy, and now they are talking about restricting restaurant meals. That Karl is having a wonderful time in Paris we have little doubt, how we all envy him! You must send him my love when you next write.
How we agree with you about this dreadful war. The government here is completely dominated by these dreadful Labour Party people, and Sir B. is quite sure they are plotting with the Bolsheviks against the poor, gallant little Finns. At least, Daddy says, they are going to have the
Your true friend,
BESS
Dear Walter,
I shall ask you to burn this the moment that you have read it. Tell K.E.F. that he will
Would your Wehrmacht people be interested in buying the place? Should you be interested I will appoint you as the agent at the usual rate. Surely a factory in the Vichy Free Zone could be useful in the light of this ‘Trading with the Enemy Statutory List’?
I think these people here are beginning to realize which way the wind has blown and already a little of the bravado has disappeared. You can mark my words that should your fellows actually come into conflict with the Soviets we British will not be long in understanding what must be done.
Our plant in Latvia has gone down the drain now that they have been subverted by the Bolshies and I can only say how glad I am that the plans for the Bukovina place didn’t materialize.
I am forming a ‘Brains Trust’ (as they say these days) of people who see eye to eye with me on these points so that when the country finally comes to its senses we will be in a position to do something about it.
You are right about Roosevelt’s crowd; now that he’s safely in for the third time they will foment the spiteful retaliatory attitude of the socialist mob here. However, Roosevelt isn’t America you know, and as long as your people don’t do anything foolish (like dropping a bomb on New York) only a small number will be willing to pick up a gun if it means putting down a cash register.
Burn this now,
Yours,
HENRY
58 To put it together hastily
Perhaps they are not typical of the letters that I took from the cylinder. I spread them all out across the table. Some were written under engraved headings, some on paper torn from exercise books. What did they all have in common?
I shook the tiny tin of silica gel crystals that had helped keep the documents dry and I flipped through the yellow-paged, rough-printed book of names and addresses. I wondered if I would have reasoned that these things were among the great treasures of the modern world. I decided that I wouldn’t have, but then da Cunha was more than a little dotty. Da Cunha who could sit and lecture me about the sanctity of the middle classes.
When Nazi Germany was falling about its creator’s ears the bigwigs were busy making a grab for a souvenir of something they had known and loved — like money.
Some liked big pictures and they took old master paintings; some liked little pictures and they took stamp collections; some liked luxury, they took gold; some liked
When the Wehrmacht was straining its eyes to peer through the Channel mist, the order went out to form a British Puppet Government. German diplomatic circles were asked to contact likely sympathizers, using the individual approach as far as possible. So it was that earnest, charming, personal letters reached earnest, charming people who might be prepared to be a Member of Parliament in the Nazi-backed National Socialist Government that was to have its seat in the Channel Islands until London was made ready.
These letters were filed when winter set in. They were filed again at the end of the next summer, when letters about puppet governments were addressed to earnest, charming Bessarabians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. They had collected dust until, one day in 1945, a man realized that these letters from influential people might make life easier in an unfriendly world.
Fregattenkapitan Knobel, a scientific officer of the German Navy, took his packet of letters and his tin of heroin and went aboard the Type XXI U-boat at Cuxhaven. Da Cunha knew all about the meteorological buoys and he spent an hour sealing his package of blackmail ammunition into the canister and re-fixing the waterproof seal. Off Albufeira he ordered the commander of the U-boat to drop the canister, and then da Cunha went ashore in a rubber dinghy. The U-boat captain lost a dinghy and very soon after he lost his life, for the U-boat foundered with all hands.
What happened will probably never be known. Few Type XXIs ever came into contact with water. Most of them were packed tightly together, half-completed, on the slipways of Northern Germany, when the Allied armies
