Summer Read online

(The last time Hannah and their mother came to London, Christmas 1933, they all went to the circus. Grand Hall, Olympia. There was a sea lion that whispered into a woman’s ear. Bombayo the Hindu, a miniature man, stood on a pony as it galloped fast round the ring followed by four girls in tutus balanced one on top of the other on the back of a massive carthorse. Beauties and the Beast. A woman appeared as if by magic out of a cloud of white doves. A troupe of acrobats was painted gold all over. Mademoiselle Violette D’Argens and her Lions: First Appearance in London, she wore a skimpy satin top that barely hid her chest, commanded a beast with fierce claws and a body all muscle to sit neatly on a little stool and behave. Daniel, nearly twenty, was enchanted. Hannah, was she thirteen? fourteen? scoffed at him all the way home in the cab.)

  There were a couple of long tables, not many chairs. On either side of the long room there were structures with wooden boards on them, three, then three, then three. Bunks. The three by threes stretched further down the room than Daniel could make out in the dark.

  Plenty straw outside! Each alien is advised to fill his mattress bag and make it as thick or as thin as he likes, an NCO shouted.

  Daniel filled one.

  He filled another.

  He’s got two, a man younger than Daniel shouted. I want two.

  Old and young everywhere, all the ages under the sun. Men were running to bag the bunks closest to the door and furthest from the toilet now. Daniel ran with both straw bags. He got them a middle and a lower together halfway down the building. He waved to his father, told him not to let anybody else have them. Then he went and got the blankets. They’d only give him two. They thought he was being cheeky wanting four.

  The blankets were old, rough wool, didn’t smell great. His father sat meekly on the lower wooden board fingering a piece of straw.

  Up at the end of the room was a queue of men. That was the toilet behind a low brick divide next to the beds. Then the room was full of smoke and coughing; someone was trying to light a stove. It was 3am, the light outside coming up. Someone got the thing lit, boiled water, made tea.

  There weren’t enough cups for the number of people.

  People shared what cups there were.

  Things slowed. Something akin to silence happened. Snoring, sleep-moaning, the occasional panicked shout.

  I am seventy eight years old, Daniel heard the man in the lower bunk next to his father say. I cannot be expected to live like this.

  It’ll be better, brighter, tomorrow when we’re able to see where we are, Daniel’s father, below Daniel, said.

  Don’t you know? We are at Ascot, the man said.

  He said the word Ascot as if he were saying something made of glass and didn’t want his mouth cut.

  Racecourse, his father said.

  I have been here many times, the man said. Many times in the Royal Enclosure. Many friends here, many memories. What is your business, sir?

  Beer, Daniel’s father said. Imports, and sausage, pickles. General foodstuffs, general goods. These days, soap.

  He knocked the base of the bunk above with his fist.

  Up there is my son, he said. He looks after my accounts and works as a salesman for me.

  Pause.

  I mean he did. Was, his father said.

  All past, the man said.

  Then he said,

  my dear wife. She has died.

  I’m sorry to hear it, his father said.

  Ten years ago, the old man said.

  Mine three years ago, his father said. Time is nothing.

  You are a German, the man said.

  I grew up in England from infancy, never got the papers, his father said. A serious mistake, I should have known after the last war. But that war ended and I thought I didn’t need them. Then when I went to get them this time round it was too late, the war was up and running, they wouldn’t give them to me.

  I surmise from your reply that you are not a supporter of the Reich, the man said.

  You surmise correctly, Daniel’s father said.

  I am expected these days to sleep next to a Jew, the man said.

  Hard not to, in here. And I can’t speak for the fellow on the other side of you, or the one above. But it’s with regret I inform you. I do not have the honour of being a member of that race, his father said.

  But I do, Daniel said.

  Me too, the man on the other side of the gent said.

  And me, someone else said.

  And me, and him, and him, someone else said.

  A guard at the door called to them to be quiet, told them men were trying to sleep.

  A well-off blackshirt. All the blackshirts and sympathizers were supposed to be picked up by now. Category A went last autumn. B went in the spring. Daniel turned on to his front, saw in the half light the metal ring fixed in the wall.

  We’re all at the circus now, he thought. We’re all at the races.

  He closed his eyes.

  He opened them.

  Terrible noise.

  His father below him felt him shift, he spoke, told him what the noise was.

  Reveille.

  First thing Daniel saw in the bright summer light was how filthy everything, blanket he’d slept under, board he’d slept on, bag with the straw in it he’d slept on, floor, wall, ceiling, even the base of his own suitcase when he picked it up, was.

  His father sat on the edge of his own filthy straw bag and watched Daniel see how things were.

  Morning, Daniel said.

  He gave his father a rueful smile.

  Son, do you think Bill Bell locked the door? his father said.

  I do, Daniel said. Bill’s a good fellow.

  And what about the cat? And the roses? Who’ll do the tomatoes? The tomatoes’ll need doing today. They’ll need doing every day, if they’re not to rot. What about the soap? What if someone pilfers the stock?

  His father was a salesman for Sunlight soap and soapflakes now, do they lather? rather! He said these worried things, and variations on these things, all through the wait for the porridge, all through the eating of it, all through the standing in the sun that first morning, the milling around, the nothing else to do.

  So they went that first afternoon and got the requisite writing paper and wrote the requisite twenty four lines only, to William Bell c/o Steyning Police Station.

  But Daniel saw, though his father didn’t, what the corporal behind the post desk did with the letter his father wrote, thrown over his shoulder on to a pile of other letters in the metal bin overflowing with letters, letters, letters all over the floor.

  Now?

  Daniel stands in the ruined field and puts the paper hat on his head.

  Instantaneous relief!

  Thank you, old target practice.

  He goes towards the tree.

  But he can’t see his father among the seething people under there.

  He’ll go and see if he can find him at the gate, where the crowd waits every day after the milkman in the hope mail will arrive.

  Warmth on his hands, on his arm. Warm going cool.

  He opens his eyes.

  He looks at his hands.

  Someone is rubbing at him, old skin loose on the inner arm, light but firm with a warm damp flannel.

  Oh, hello, he says.

  Morning Mr Gluck, the nurse, what’s her name, Paulina, says. How you today?

  I’m very well, Paulina, he says. How are you?

  Fine, Mr Gluck. Are you ready to get up? Bit of breakfast?

  Thank you, Paulina.

  He is in his neighbour’s house, which has lately become his home. It is a very nice house. It is a lovely room. The room used to belong to his neighbour’s daughter.

  Paulina pulls the covers back and helps him swing his legs over the side of the bed.

/>   Toilet. Then back to bed. Breakfast.

  He’s been talking about camping today, he hears Paulina tell his neighbour’s daughter.

  His neighbour’s daughter, what’s her name, Elisabeth, is home again. That makes today Friday.

  And Paulina will be leaving the country soon.

  End of an era, he said to Paulina when they talked about it.

  Eras end, Paulina said. I’m Romanian. I know. They have to. So that new eras can begin.

  He closes his eyes.

  Today he has been chatting in his sleep, he hears Paulina say. About his friend Douglas who went camping. And then about going to the races, and how he camped there.

  Douglas, his neighbour’s daughter says. It’s not a person. It’s a place on the Isle of Man, they interned him and his father in the Second World War. At least we think so. It’s difficult to know.

  Yes, Paulina says. But that makes some sense of what he is saying.

  I think he’s thinking about it, his neighbour’s daughter says, because my mother or Zoe will have reminded him, there’s a man who tracked him down on the internet, he’s driving over to visit him today. I have a theory that he hears the word internet and thinks the word internment.

  He has a very curly mind for a gentleman who has lived so many years, Paulina says. A hundred and four years. He is the oldest person I have met in my time living in this country, and I’ve been here for fourteen years working with many people of many years. He told me today a story about apples. That one day at the gate of a prison someone brought crates of apples for the men in the prison and that it took only a few seconds for all those free apples to get taken and the crates lying empty on the ground. But nobody saw the apples, nobody ate the apples, nobody saw anybody else eat the apples – and then for weeks afterwards someone would say, like they were offering you a forbidden drug, would you like to buy this apple? And soon one apple cost fifteen times more than the first price. The world’s way.

  Certainly is, his neighbour’s daughter says.

  Your mother and her friend left this morning, she told me to remind you there are lentils in the fridge already in a sauce and they’ll see you on Sunday before you go back to London. I’ll see you tonight to tuck Mr Gluck in. I hope your day is a good one. And his day too.

  Cheery goodbyes.

  The front door closes.

  Memory comes to Daniel now by unforming itself the way a flake of snow will melt on something warm, your face, your hand, like it does on your collar when you come in from the cold. Sometimes he hears the hooves of the horses on the roads of the cities he grew up in on the road outside this window.

  That’s not horses, they tell him here in his neighbour’s house. That’s people from the AirBnB studio along the road. It’s the wheels of their suitcases going over the cracks in the pavement.

  —

  How long d’you think we’ll be here? an Irish-sounding man wrapped in a blanket (no other clothes with him, says he was brought in off a building site) asked Daniel’s father a fortnight into their time at Ascot.

  (Word had got round that Daniel’s father knew about internment.)

  No idea, friend, Daniel’s father said.

  (They moved them nearly three weeks later.)

  How long d’you think they’ll keep us here, Mr Gluck? the retired professor of medieval French asked Daniel’s father when they unloaded them into Kempton Park and told them to make beds for themselves in the Tote building under the betting pigeonholes.

  Your guess is as good as mine, sir, Daniel’s father said.

  (One night only. They took them in trucks to Liverpool next day and loaded them on a ship, gave each fifty-man group a lump of cheese the size of a forearm, told them to divide it among themselves for the journey. One of the soldiers cut it into pieces with a bayonet. Daniel got a piece an inch and a half square, size of half a finger.

  Don’t eat it all at once, his father said. Keep some for later.)

  How long d’you think we’ll be here? Daniel asked his father when they saw the barbed wire palisade and double fence at the Hutchinson gate.

  His father took his glasses off, wiped off the rain, put them back on. He looked at the rows of houses behind the wire. He looked at the fenceposts newly sunk into the pavements. He looked at the small crowd of men inside the camp standing soaked at the fences waiting to see if anyone arriving was someone they knew.

  Looks permanent to me, he said.

  On the march up the road from the port in the rain a man in his forties told Daniel how the CID had picked him up from Hampstead Public Library by arriving in the morning and shouting in the Reading Room all enemy aliens to the front desk now. Then they went round looking in everybody else’s faces deciding who looked Jewish but hadn’t reported to the front desk. Even on the way to the police station they kept halting the group and making them wait while they stopped people in the street they thought looked likely and asked for their papers.

  The local island people lining the road as they marched up the hill were watching them with their mouths hanging open.

  I think they think we’re Nazis, Daniel said. They think we’re Nazi prisoners of war.

  See, I never would’ve imagined, the NCO marching alongside them said then, that there’d be so many of you Jews who was Nazis. I can’t comprehend it. Why would you like the Nazis so much when the Nazis don’t like you so much?

  We’re not Nazis, Daniel said. You couldn’t get more opposite from Nazis. Didn’t they brief you?

  Briefed us nothing, the soldier said.

  We’re the ones who thought we’d got away from the Nazis, the man next to Daniel said. We’re doctors, teachers, chemists, shopkeepers, labourers, factory workers, you name it. What we’re not is Nazis.

  Told us nothing, the soldier said. Enemy aliens is what they said. Are you not the Germans, then?

  The Germans are not all Nazis, the man said.

  The parade slowed, quickened, slowed. This was because the enemy aliens up ahead were stopping, taking their hats off, as they passed something. As soon as the people who got to it saw it was a war memorial to the dead of the island in the first war, they stopped too and took off their hats, if they had hats.

  That sure enough don’t seem very Nazi, the NCO said.

  A sergeant shouted from the back at the rows of men up front to get a move on. A smartly dressed man ahead of Daniel turned and told the sergeant to stop shouting, they couldn’t go any faster, that the man in front of him was more than seven decades old and was going as fast as he could.

  That sergeant laid off the shouting right away.

  Now there’s a turn up for the books, Daniel’s father said. There’s a different fishkettle. Might be all right here, you know.

  They got sorted into groups of thirty, told to take a house on the square, told which houses were free. The houses were holiday houses, guest houses, the landladies long gone taking the carpets and most of the furnishings with them. The windows were painted blue, blackout. The houses were lit with red bulbs. They were bare, a few chairs, makeshift tables. But the bedrooms had beds. There was water, cold. The kitchens had gas for cooking. There wasn’t much to eat anything with in the way of plates, spoons. People made do with bits of wood and as soon as they got a chance carved themselves something in the way of a spoon. Each place chose a cook from among its house members, someone sorted a rota, duties, cleaning, so on.

  Poor man’s riviera! That’s what they call this place when there’s not a war on.

  But there’s a green grass square in front of the houses and it’s got flowers, annuals, in the borders fresh-cut into it, and beyond it through the wire down the hill a view of the sea.

  The Daily Mail says you’re getting a sea air holiday here, a boy of ten says to Daniel a week later through the wire, where Daniel, bare-chested, is hanging his just-washed shirt on t
he fence to dry. The Daily Mail says you’ve luxury sunbathing beds and miniature golf and more money than we’ve got and hot water and coal. You get sugar and milk and eggs for your breakfast. Fried by landladies.

  Miniature golf. Eggs.

  Daniel looks over his shoulder at the slow-moving men wandering the street, aimless, hunched, as if the mild summer air isn’t air but anaesthetic. Any minute, the invasion. Everybody expects it now. France and Belgium and Holland gone. Any minute, and an island of men, mostly Jews and people the fascists want dead, ready parcelled up to be handed over, lock and stock.

  What’s your name? Daniel asks the boy.

  Speak some Nazi, the boy says. Go on.

  I’m not a Nazi, Daniel says. Want to swap places?

  The boy goggles his eyes at Daniel.

  Tell you what. I’ll come out, Daniel says. You come in here instead and have the holiday.

  We can’t holiday here, the boy says. We’re already home.

  Lucky you, Daniel says.

  You’re luckier, the boy says. You got miniature golf.

  There’s no golf here, Daniel says.

  Daily Mail says there is, the boy says.

  They put the Nazis down at Peveril mostly, a different boy kicking about in some fence rubble behind the first boy says. Them’re the enemy aliens.

  Speak some enemy alien, the boy says.

  I’m Daniel, Daniel says. Tell me your name.

  That’s not alien words, the boy says. That’s just English.

  I am English, Daniel says.

  What you doing in there then? the boy says. Come on out.

  I belong in here, Daniel says. My family’s here.

  Your family’s enemy aliens? the boy says.

  In a manner of speaking, Daniel says. But also not at all.

  That don’t make no sense, the boy says.

  His name’s Keith, the other boy says.

  Brothers? Daniel says.

  What’s it to you? the other boy says.

  Move it! Away from the wire!

  A guard is shouting at the boys, waving his rifle.

  Tell the Daily Mail from me, Keith, Daniel calls after them, from me as a representative of us all here, that we’re internees in a prison camp, we’re not enemies, and that a prison is always a prison, even in August when the sky is blue.