9
17 FEBRUARY 1941
GUNWALLOE
He’d heard the fearful scream just as he was about to set off along the small
track back towards some sort of village that he could see in the distance. It
was either make his way there, or head towards the sea. And Rudi Fischer
knew instinctively that the sea there could not help him. There was no
harbour, no boats.
His friend, Hans, had been right. Rudi was no sailor, didn’t know the
first thing about navigation, and these shores looked treacherous. A man
would need to be a seaman in a place like this. So, even though heading
towards a village would carry its own danger, it was the only possibility of
escape. And he would be careful. Try to steer clear of people.
But then he’d heard the scream. It reverberated around his skull as if it
came from his own lips. And there was terror in it. And that’s when Rudi
did something totally illogical, something that might easily change the
course of his life. His legs seemed to work independently of his body,
taking him not to relative safety, but towards the far-off sand dunes and the
source of the scream.
Maddie was out of breath, her legs shaking with the effort she’d asked of
them, but her reaction had been automatic. Someone was in trouble and
that’s what you did – went to help. Her body did what she expected, but
even so, the speed surprised her for she wasn’t a natural athlete.
As she got nearer to the dunes and the barbed wire that surrounded
them, she could make out the figure crouched there. A small, scruffy lad.
Shaking. Crying.
She reached the wire; saw a hole in it, where the boy had squeezed
through. There was no warning sign. Maybe there had been once. Maybe
people knew it was a minefield and kept away. But not this little lad. This
small, intrepid boy. An explorer, like herself.
The lad’s sobs had turned to sniffles now. Tears ran down his dirty face
and joined the stream of liquid making its way out of his snotty nose. He
wiped it on the sleeve of his jumper, and turned his head towards her,
waved an angry hand in the direction of the rutted earth and the sand
thrown up by the explosion.
He’d been lucky. The fallout from the explosion of the landmine had
missed him by a few feet only.
‘’E’s dead, miss,’ he shouted. The boy dropped his head onto his chest
and his body heaved once more in a massive wail. ‘’E’s ’ad it! ’E never did
nuthin’ to nobody. Why’d ’e ’ave to die?’ More snot joined the thin, snail
like trail on the boy’s face. He shook his head in disbelief. Carrot-red hair
fell over his eyes.
‘Don’t move!’ yelled Maddie. ‘Who was with you?’ she asked, looking
at the heap of earth in desperation.
‘Weren’t nobody else ’ere, miss. I were on me own.’
‘Well, then who—?’
‘I were chasing a rabbit. Poor little sod got hisself blowed to bits.’ The
young lad choked out the words. ‘It ain’t fair.’
Maddie could feel her whole body shaking with the trauma. Fought to
bring it under control. A rabbit! So far, the only casualty had been a rabbit.
She wanted to cry, to laugh. It was a reaction, she knew. That, and relief.
For she’d imagined gruesome bits of body, another child’s body, lying out
here, peppering the sand dunes. But it wasn’t over, she still had to try and
get the boy to safety.
‘I…’ The small lad started to shiver and sank down onto his bottom.
‘Wot if I gets blowed up too?’
‘What’s your name?’ asked Maddie. She tried to keep her voice level, to
be strong, confident, reassuring. She didn’t have any experience with
children. But people were people. And this small person had begun to shake
uncontrollably, was definitely frightened. Who wouldn’t be? He’d just seen
bits of rabbit evaporate before his eyes.
‘Me name’s Harry. Harry Foster,’ he said, shakily.
‘And what age are you, Harry?’ It was hard to judge with small boys,
especially when they were sitting down. But he seemed very young.
‘I’ll be seven next birthday,’ he said proudly, and puffed his chest out a
little.
‘Seven,’ said Maddie. ‘Quite grown up, then. And does your mother
live nearby, Harry?’
‘Me ma ain’t nowhere near here,’ Harry said, sadly. ‘I miss ’er,
sometimes. I been ’vacuated. I lives with Mrs Edson in the village, she ain’t
too bad.’
‘So, you’re an evacuee, Harry?’ she said. ‘Must be nice, living by the
sea.’ Empty words, but maybe they would help distract him, calm him down.
Harry drew his bony knees up to his chest and wrapped his skinny arms
around them. Thin legs protruded from beneath the worn, short trousers.
She felt suddenly maternal and protective towards this small, red
headed waif. Whoever Mrs Edson in the village was, thought Maddie, she
certainly wasn’t over-feeding the lad.
‘We go swimming, sometimes. Me mates and me, like. Jimmy’s me best
mate.’
‘Well, we need to get you back to Jimmy, then. Can you stand up? Just
get to your feet, but don’t walk. I’ll come and get you.’ She had no idea
how she would do that, but one step at a time.
The young lad didn’t answer. Just stared at her wide-eyed, like he was
in shock.
‘C’mon, Harry. Try to stand up. You’re a brave lad, you can do it.’
Maddie tried to inject confidence into her voice, a confidence she didn’t
feel. But there was no point in them both being terrified – that wouldn’t get
the lad back to safety. ‘C’mon, Harry,’ she coaxed. ‘You can do it.’
‘I can’t, miss,’ Harry wailed. ‘I can’t move me legs.’
‘Look, I know you’re scared. Anybody would be,’ said Maddie.
‘I ain’t scared,’ he shouted, defiantly. But the shaking in his body
revealed the lie, the bravado.
‘Okay, that’s good,’ she said.
‘I’ll just sit here for a bit,’ said Harry. ‘Till me legs feel better.’
‘Right, that’s okay. You’ll be okay, young man,’ said Maddie, suddenly
making up her mind. ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll get you back home in time for
tea. You just stay there, quietly. I’m coming in right now to help you.’
Maddie bent down to the hole in the wire, and wrenched both sides apart to
make it bigger. She was about to try and squeeze through when she felt a
hand on her shoulder. A large hand. A man’s hand.
‘No! Not you. I go.’
She turned her head towards the voice. Seeing his face, the breath
jammed in the hollow of her throat and her head felt light as she tried to
work her way through the confusion. ‘You!’ whispered Maddie. ‘But
how…?’
He pulled her to her feet and put a finger to her lips to silence any more
questions.
‘I go,’ repeated the man. ‘You stay.’ He pointed to a spot far away from
the wire. ‘Stay!’ he ordered again, when she didn’t seem to be moving to
safety.
Stay? What, like a dog? What WAS it with men? How come they were
the ones who gave the orders? And what the hell was HE doing here, and
how in the name of Hades did he get here?
Maddie wanted to argue with him; after all, she was the one with the
uniform on; it was her land he was standing on. He was the usurper here,
this German.
All the same, when the German prisoner reached out his hand for hers, a
pleading look in those blue eyes of his, she nodded her head and took a step
back from the wire. She watched his face crease into a smile, his eyes spark
with a twinkle for a second and then turn serious again as his hands shooed
her away, even farther back, away from danger. That’s when she saw the
sign, abandoned, rusted, lying on its side in the dunes. The fierce-looking
skull and crossbones and the words beneath, faint now, almost illegible,
faded by the sun and scoured by sand and harsh winds: DANGER.
MINEFIELD. BEWARE.
Rudi stepped through the hole in the wire and tried not to think about the
odds. They would survive or they wouldn’t, him and this small, fearful lad.
But at least the woman was out of the danger zone.
He knew that there was no clever, strategic way to do this; nor was he
able to put into practice the way they taught you in training: he could not lie
on his belly and creep towards the boy, inch by painful inch, probing the
ground in front of him. He had no bayonet to do that, no way of
painstakingly testing for the tell-tale round metal shape hidden beneath the
surface. The size of a dinner plate, but far more malevolent than an innocent
piece of crockery, loaded with TNT. Simple but effective killers were
landmines. Not too much in there to go wrong: the lethal body packed with
explosive, the fuse and the pressure plate.
He tried to remember his basic training. The pressure plate – what kind
of weight would set the thing off? The weight of an average man, surely – if
they were anti-personnel mines? Even more weight would be needed if they
were anti-tank landmines. And he wasn’t the weight of an average man, was
he? He was a shadow of his former self, his skin loose where the bulk of his
body had retreated. He had no idea what he weighed, but it wouldn’t be
much.
He might be okay. They might both survive. Neither he nor this little
chap weighed much. But then he wondered what had made this mine
explode. A small animal, maybe. He remembered hearing of shrapnel
mines. They only needed a few pounds to set them off. Either way, he’d
have to take the chance. There was no other way if the lad was to be saved.
The boy had gone silent now. No more tears. No more shaking. The
small body was totally still: shock, he supposed. Scratch that up for both of
them; he was a little shocked himself. If his friend Hans had asked what
exactly Rudi would choose to do on his first day of freedom, both of them
would have been surprised that this had been his first choice.
But there had been no choice. Humanity saw no boundaries of race or
creed or even country. It wasn’t an idea he’d ever put into words before, and
not one a German patriot could have voiced in safety. The master race.
He’d never believed in it. The superiority. The flag waving. Hadn’t even
been keen on joining in a war in the first place. But still – he was a patriot.
You could not deny your own land that easily.
The first raindrop hit him hard on the back of the neck, returning his
thoughts to the present. The others followed with a ferocity he hadn’t
expected, and the sky that had once been merely grey now turned black, a
crack of thunder reverberating noisily off the granite headlands to either
side of the cove below.
The sudden fury of the storm surprised him and within seconds, he was
soaked through. So was the small child cowering and shivering a short
distance away. The lad’s hair was plastered to his head, like a bright orange
cap had been thrown at him, landing randomly, covering one eye.
The comical sight made Rudi laugh. And maybe such strange,
boisterous laughter was out of place, but he had no control over it. It might
even have been mild hysteria, simply a release valve for his own fear,
because the tension that had been building inside him like a curled-up fist
finally dissolved. And he moved as fast as he could, not away from the
danger, but towards it
