It was strange, how things turned out, especially when you seemed to have
no control over them. When you made no contribution to their outcome.
Luck, he supposed. And Rudi didn’t argue with it.
He’d been in the compound for almost a week now, watching the new
airfield take shape. He’d got to know the layout and it seemed that if he
stayed in the tented part of the construction site where work took place in a
noisy chaos, he would be fine. Far away in the distance, where the runways
and control tower were being built was a different proposition. Wire
fencing. Barricades. Guards checking passes, men with rifles and hard,
granite faces. Security was tight over there.
Other than passing the time of day and offering him a cigarette, none of
the workers had questioned his reason for being there. A Polish fighter
squadron would be based here, or so the rumour went. And wasn’t he a
Polish flier? It was a kind of miracle, but he knew people tend to see what
they expect to see, and soon his presence became normal, commonplace.
Eventually he found himself moving freely throughout the massive site
with a confidence born of familiarity, and even managed to bag a bunk for
himself in one of the tented billets.
The mess tent served him three meals a day. And soon the cooks and
servers got to know his face and smiled when he waited patiently in line.
The girl in the army uniform who’d given him breakfast that first day
seemed to have taken a shine to him. She put extra-large helpings on his
plate, and had dropped some heavy hints about her availability, if he was
interested.
He’d tried to remain friendly without giving her the wrong idea. But he
had no interest in her, or any woman – not after Maddie. No one could fill
that gap. It was hard to look at the girl now, and last night she’d given him a
strange, cold stare and pushed the plate angrily towards him like he’d done
something wrong. Sometimes, women were hard to understand.
I was right, he thought, smugly. You could melt into a crowd, provided
you had the nerve and confidence. It helped that the building site was large.
One thousand acres when it’s finished, one of the ground workers had told
him. The football field back at the prison camp had been an acre. Rudi tried
to imagine a thousand of them stretched out over the fields here.
Boredom had finally driven him out for a walk. That, and looking for
inspiration: what to do next. He’d set off early in the morning and walked
into the town of Helston. It had taken three hours, but he’d been in no hurry.
He remembered Maddie telling him about the hotel where the strange
tasting beer had come from. Walking up the hill, knowing he was following
in her footsteps, made him feel happy and carefree. And he found that he
could think about her now without the crippling pain of loss.
He was feeling fitter, eating regularly. He smiled to himself. Yes, he had
every right to feel pleased, proud even. He’d done what he’d set out to do.
Here he was, walking through the streets like a free man. What would his
friend Hans say? And if a patrol should challenge him? He had no papers if
he was stopped but he would stick with the story. He was an ally. A Polish
flier, billeted at the airfield, had forgotten to bring his ID. Two chances.
Either it would work, or it wouldn’t. And he could always run. His leg was
stronger now.
That’s when he heard a car door slam, heard footsteps behind him. They
quickened, turned into something more sinister that should have rung a
warning bell. But there was no bell. No warning of any kind. Just rough
hands on his shoulders, pulling him backwards, wrestling him to the
pavement and pain in his head as it met concrete.
Rudi had been manhandled: roughed up a bit, but nothing fatal – a split lip,
one eye swollen shut, a multi-coloured bruise across the side of his face and
a headache that took itself seriously. But no bones broken.
He learnt that two British bobbies had been responsible for nabbing
him: they’d picked him up and dumped him unceremoniously into the back
of their police car.
He was an enemy after all. Maybe even a spy. He couldn’t expect
sympathy.
But when the intelligence officer had seen the results of the policemen’s
handiwork, he’d been angry. Had apologised to Rudi. ‘We’re civilised
human beings,’ the army officer told him, ‘not animals. Those chaps went
above their orders.’
‘They had orders?’ asked Rudi.
‘Police were warned to keep a lookout. Knew you were down this way
somewhere, old chap. Somebody gave you up, I’m afraid. Gave us
information that helped in your capture. Or should I say recapture.’ The
man smiled. ‘You’ve done quite well, so far. Impressive.’
‘Somebody gave me up?’ parroted Rudi, confused. ‘But who—?
Nobody knew I was here.’
‘Hardly matters now who it was, does it?’
‘It matters to me,’ lisped Rudi. His split lip was painful and when he
checked his teeth with his tongue, he found that one was missing. Those
policemen may have been old guys, but they’d done a right job on his face.
He remembered them taking turns, like it was a game.
‘I shouldn’t be talking out of school,’ said the man. ‘Don’t suppose it’ll
make a difference now, though. Not exactly a state secret. A private in the
ATS.’
‘What?!’
‘Lady soldier. Can’t give you a name, wouldn’t be cricket. But a private
in the Auxiliary Territorial Service gave us information that led to your
capture. Tick some woman off, did you?’ he asked. ‘Hell hath no fury like a
woman scorned, you know.’ The young officer grinned.
She’d given him up? How could that be? It seemed impossible. She
loved him. She’d said so. But perhaps when Maddie had got back to the
camp at White Cross, she’d had second thoughts about helping her
country’s enemy. Had she been angry he’d left without saying goodbye?
But he’d done that to save her pain. Himself, as well. Still, maybe she’d felt
abandoned. Hell hath no fury, the officer had said.
The pain in his face was nothing compared to the agony in his mind. In
his heart. He felt raw with it. And the more Rudi dwelt on the thought of
Maddie’s betrayal, the more convinced he became that it was true.
Days went by. Rudi was driven in lorries, travelled on trains with a surly
armed guard, was interrogated by several intelligence officers. He answered
none of their questions about how he had escaped, or why. It no longer
mattered. Nothing mattered to him but the cocoon of misery he had
surrounded himself with. He had reached an empty, bleak place in his mind
where there was no past, no future, and no point in even trying to survive.
As for love? Rudi Fischer discovered how easily love could turn sour.
He took a scouring pad to his memory of Maddie, painfully scouring every
trace of her from his life.
A month after he’d been recaptured, they finally transported him on a
long, gruelling journey from London to Scotland, to one of the harshest
prisoner-of-war camps in Britain. It was one reserved for the most high-risk
German prisoners, the ones who were fanatical, hardened Nazis, including
the SS and the Afrika Korps. And POWs like him who’d made escape
attempts. ‘Throwing all you rotten eggs in one basket,’ one of the Polish
guards had taken delight in telling him when he arrived in his new home.
You have to hand it to the British, thought Rudi. Clever, using Polish
troops to guard the camp. After what Hitler had done to their country, the
Poles in Camp 21 took every chance they could to make life miserable for
their German prisoners.
Camp 21, called ‘Cultybraggan’, was a few miles from Comrie village
in Perthshire. The countryside and its scenery reminded Rudi of his own
village at home. In another time, under happier circumstances, it might even
have been a pleasant place to visit. But nothing about Cultybraggan was
pleasant. It was designed for one thing only: as a maximum-security POW
camp. It made his last ‘home’ in White Cross look like a holiday camp.
Instead of the white patch of a low-risk prisoner on his jacket, he now
wore a black patch like the other prisoners around him. Unlike Rudi, most
of them wore their allegiance to Hitler and the Nazi Party as a badge of
honour. Men had died there. Killed by their own countrymen. Guards had
been unable to stop it, or maybe they hadn’t cared, had turned a blind eye.
A prisoner had been hanged in the showers, and all because he failed to
show the required enthusiasm for Nazi beliefs.
The irony wasn’t lost on Rudi Fischer: the fact that he had broken out of
one camp in order to escape a death threat from a fanatic and had ended up
somewhere much worse. A place where death threats were commonplace.
