Sometimes Florence had to pinch herself to make sure that that her new life here at Island House was real, that it wasn’t a dream. No two ways about it, she had landed on her feet good and proper the day she met Miss Romily, and in return she’d go to the ends of the earth to help the woman.
But daydreaming like this wouldn’t do, she scolded herself; there was work to be done. She had promised Mrs Partridge that she would help out in the kitchen in anticipation of the family arriving. Mrs Bunch had come in especially to lend a hand with the extra work, though all she’d done so far was sit around drinking tea and sharing the latest gossip from the village.
As big a gossip as the old woman was, though, she was wise enough to steer clear of what people were probably really talking about, and that was Mr Devereux and his beautiful mistress. Little did they know, thought Florence with a smile.
Chapter Five
Hope’s visit to Cologne had been a mistake. She should never have invited herself, but she had thought that spending time with Dieter’s parents, seeing where he had spent his childhood, might help her to come to terms with his death. It hadn’t. It had made things worse.
Her parents-in-law, Gerda and Heinrich Meyer, had worn her down with their grief. They were full of angry bitterness and appeared to hold her personally responsible for their son’s death from TB. In their eyes she had lured him away from the safety of home in Germany and forced him to live in germ-ridden England. No matter that Dieter had been living in London for nearly a year before Hope met him, that he had been there quite voluntarily.
Gerda and Heinrich’s disapproval of their son’s choice of wife was matched only by that of Hope’s father. ‘A German!’ Jack had roared. ‘You’re marrying a German, after all they did to us? And what they’re now doing to their own people?’
There had been no reasoning with her father, no explaining to him that not all Germans were merciless killers. Dieter wasn’t evil; he was kind and sensitive, and his coming to England to work as a teacher had been to escape all that he detested in Nazi Germany. He had been alarmed by the growing belief within his country of birth that with the shame of poverty behind them, they were now a country to be respected, a power to be reckoned with, and feared. Poor Dieter, he had been appalled to discover that there were those in power in Britain who thought Hitler a fine leader from whom much could be learned.
Hope’s brother, Arthur, had voiced a similar sentiment and praised Hitler for having taken a country from its knees and motivated the workforce and the young. ‘Can you blame them for wanting to win back everything they lost?’ he had said when challenged by their father’s disgust, angering him further. ‘Wouldn’t we do the same in the circumstances?’
Now, two and a half years after her marriage to Dieter – and a year since his death – Hope was seeing for herself the evil force sweeping through the country. Life in Nazi Germany had shocked her. She was shocked too that having been so consumed by grief, she had been in ignorance of just how bad the situation had become. It made her realise that it was time to lift herself out of the trough of despair in which she had willingly placed herself, believing it to be a comfort, a means to feel closer to the man she had loved.
Without Dieter, her life these last twelve months had felt so very empty and worthless. She had tried to console herself with her work as an illustrator, but it hadn’t been enough to fill the huge void. At her lowest point, having cut herself off from friends and family – especially family – she had briefly considered suicide so she could be with her beloved Dieter. But then she had thought how appalled he would have been that she could throw away her life instead of doing something meaningful with it.
Now, in the light of the suffering she had witnessed here in Germany, her grief had felt like a narcissistic act of self-pity that she had clung to for much too long. The persecution and collective hatred for Jewish people was everywhere, in the everyday casual violence they endured, but more particularly in the increasing number of laws created to make it impossible for them to live a decent life.
Even Hope had been targeted by a group of schoolboys dressed in their Hitler Jugend uniforms when she was returning from seeing Dieter’s sister and husband. Her presence in a Jewish neighbourhood and the fact that her hair wasn’t blonde but a mousy shade of brown was sufficient cause for the boys to jeer and taunt her. One of them had deliberately tripped her up and then laughed coarsely as she scrabbled on the ground to retrieve her bag. Another boy had spat at her.
Yet this paled into insignificance compared to what her sister-in-law, Sabine, and her husband, Otto, were subjected to. Hope was on her way to see them now, taking the tram across the city, glad to be escaping the suffocating company of Gerda and Heinrich for a few hours.
It was her last day before returning to London tomorrow and she couldn’t wait to board the train that would take her to the Hook of Holland, where she would catch the boat to Harwich. Yet for all her eagerness to leave, she would be desperately sorry to say goodbye to Sabine and Otto, and their dear little baby daughter, Annelise. Hope and Dieter had planned to have a family of their own one day, but now she had to make do with being an aunt to Annelise.
Otto Lowenstein was a doctor, but because he was Jewish, he was banned from working in his old hospital. Now all he could do was secretly treat Jewish patients in their own homes. Twice in the last year, since Kristallnacht last November, when synagogues were torched, Jewish homes, schools and businesses vandalised and hundreds of Jews beaten up and killed, Otto had been arrested for no real reason, and later released. It happened all the time apparently. He and Sabine had married before 1935, when a new law forbade mixed marriages. Gerda and Heinrich, both devout Roman Catholics, had been against the marriage, just as they had disapproved of Dieter marrying an English Protestant girl.
Sabine and Otto lived in a run-down area that bore all the signs of the discrimination and hatred they and their neighbours were subjected to. A number of shopfronts were boarded up and painted with the yellow Star of David, and the words ‘Filthy Jew’ or ‘Death of the Jews’ scrawled in large letters. There was nobody about, the streets as good as deserted. Remembering the route she had taken two days ago, Hope clutched the basket she was carrying and walked fast, trying not to give in to the uneasiness she felt. It was here that the group of boys had taunted her.
She turned left at the newspaper kiosk on the corner of Neuhofstrasse and became aware of an odd smell. Then fifty yards later, as she turned into Annastrasse, she stopped in her tracks at the sight that met her. The building on her left had been a bakery when she’d last seen it; now it was a burnt-out shell, a blackened carcass with smoke rising from the rubble, the warm air thick with dust and the acrid smell of charred wood. A flag with a swastika had been pushed into the blackened ruins. Shocked, Hope pressed on, stepping around the broken glass that was glinting in the sunshine. The area was nothing like the smart leafy street where Gerda and Heinrich lived; here the turn-of-the-century buildings were in a poor state of repair, with blackened walls and peeling paintwork.
With Annelise in her arms, Sabine answered the door almost immediately, as though she had been standing just the other side of it waiting for Hope’s knock.
‘Thank God you made it,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I was worried you might have changed your mind.’ She spoke excellent English, just as her brother had. She hastily kissed Hope’s cheeks and ushered her over the threshold of the ground-floor apartment, which had the benefit of a small garden. It also had the disadvantage of being an easy target for objects thrown through the window that fronted the street.
Hope followed her down the dingy narrow hallway with its pervading smell of damp and into the shabby high-ceilinged drawing room where the paucity of furniture – the better stuff long since sold to make ends meet – testified to the daily struggle of their lives.
‘Please,’ said Sabine, pointing to an old couch with horsehair poking out through patches of threadbare fabric, ‘sit down while I make us some tea. Or would you prefer a cold drink?’ The baby began to fidget in her arms, then let out a squawk of protest.
Thinking how fraught Sabine looked – her skin had a high colour to it as if she had a fever, and her eyes were red-rimmed – Hope put down her basket of farewell gifts. ‘Why don’t you let me make the tea?’ she said.
‘No, no, I can manage,’ Sabine replied. Annelise wriggled some more and began to cry in earnest, her face turning very pink, her fists punching the air.
Determined to help in some way, Hope said, ‘How about I take Annelise from you?’ She reached out for the crying infant, but to her horror, Sabine backed away from her and burst into violent sobs, sinking slowly to the floor, her arms wrapped tightly around her child as if protecting her from an imagined force. She knelt there on the rug, rocking backwards and forwards, her cries growing louder and louder. Not knowing what else to do, Hope knelt on the floor next to her. Clearly Sabine wasn’t well. She was having some kind of crisis. A breakdown. And who could blame her, living in this godforsaken country where hatred ruled?
Sabine’s wailing continued, coming from somewhere deep inside her, a primordial sound that reminded Hope of when she herself had been told that Dieter had died. She was trying desperately to soothe her sister-in-law, and to get her to relinquish her crying baby, when the door opened and Otto came in, his black medical bag in his hand. Taking in the situation, he dumped the bag on the nearest chair and joined them on the floor. He spoke in German, firmly, but kindly. Still holding a howling Annelise, Sabine pressed herself against him and sobbed all the louder.
Otto continued to speak in German, and Hope understood enough to know that he was asking his wife to give him the baby, that her crying was frightening Annelise. Sabine raised her reddened tear-stained face to him and shook her head. ‘Ich kann es nicht tun,’ she sobbed. I can’t do it.
‘Bitte, mein Schatz,’ he said with a catch in his voice. For an awful moment Hope thought Otto was going to cry as well. But he didn’t. Instead he somehow managed to calm Sabine, and at the same time persuade her to give him Annelise.
‘I’ll make us some tea,’ Hope said quietly.
The kitchen was poky and dark, with a small window positioned so high it was impossible to see out of it. At the sink, a tap was dripping, and when Hope turned it to fill the kettle, it gave a metallic screech of resistance that then set off a clanking pipe. She had just found a match to light the gas on the stove when Otto joined her. He was cradling his daughter in such a loving and protective way, Hope feared he had something terrible to tell her, that perhaps Sabine was seriously ill. On top of everything else they had to cope with, please not that.
