Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

       Until Grete married my old friend Mike the evacuation was the only time she had ever left home. Mike met her when he was doing his National Service in Germany back in the days of our green youth.

       It was telling Mike about the evacuation that had seemed to draw them together.

      ‘The booming in the distance had gone on for days. I thought what a funny word it seemed, Evakuiering. Of course, I didn’t really understand. People kept coming in little groups, mostly mothers with children’.

       They had filled the forecourt and the platform of the little border-town’s station. Police and soldiers everywhere, lumpy with guns and kit. It was all very orderly.

       Mike explained to her that he had been evacuated too and that in English the word was almost the same.

       She told him about arriving in a clunking little train with slatted wooden seats, in first morning light. No woods here, like at home, just occasional stranded trees on undulating farmland which went on the same for miles and miles. A big old house where a rather severe woman showed them the room they were to sleep in. A school, part-time only, too many evacuated children and not enough teachers. Beginning to be able to read newspapers.  The invading enemy armies, the papers said, would soon be ‘hurled back’ and perhaps would never reach them, this long way from the border.  Then Grete’s little sister Annie died.

       ‘She slept in an old-fashioned cot Frau Stollenberg had. She woke up one morning stiff and hot all over. She couldn’t move. The doctor said she needed a kind of medicine which couldn’t be got because of the invasion.  Supplies of everything were breaking down’.

       He had been elderly, this doctor, with a white moustache and hands which shook.  He came several days running, but it was no good. Annie’s hurried burial was not at all like Grandmother’s had been back at home. Nobody there except her mother and herself, a priest and a bent old man with a spade.

       ‘It wasn’t long after that, I don’t know how long, that Mutti went off on the little train to try to see my father.  A telegram came. He was badly wounded, in some hospital somewhere. She left me with Frau Stollenberg’.

       Air-raids grew ferocious and a teacher at the school warned Grete that her mother might not be able to return immediately. Then the wireless grew unreliable, with broadcasts fading out, and contradictory information. but somehow news came that the German generals had signed a surrender.

       Soon afterwards a convoy of jeeps and trucks jolted into the town and soldiers in foreign uniforms occupied the town hall. Three of their officers came to live in Frau Stollenberg’s best rooms and Grete had to sleep in the attic.

       ‘It must have been getting to be autumn and there was nothing to heat the attic and no fuel for the stove in the back room. That was where Frau Stollenberg lived. And there wasn’t much to eat’.

       Frau Stollenberg looked thin and more severe than ever.
       ‘What am I going to do with you, child?’ she said over and over again.  ‘What am I going to do with you, child?’  Every few days she went to the town hall to try to find out what to do with Grete. Nobody could tell her.

       The same old man who was at Annie’s funeral ran messages on a rusty bike. One midday Grete came back from the school and Frau Stollenberg was standing in front of the house with him. He was giving her an envelope.

       ‘That was when I found out that Uncle Johann was living here in our old house. He had Stephan with him. He was asking for me to be sent back to join them’.

       She had never met this uncle, who had married her mother’s sister before Grete was born and taken her to live a long way off in the East. Aunt Stella had become an invalid and died before the war started.  She had had no children.

       Grete never saw her mother or father again.

       For a long time, Grete had hardly given a thought to ‘home’, living with Mike in England.

       Then she suddenly got the jitters and cleared off back hardly saying a word to anybody.

       At the end of her journey, she climbed down from a new-fangled sort of railbus, humming at the platform. Her uncle held out his arms to her.

       ‘There you are at last, child’.

       He looked older. What else had she expected?

       ‘Put your umbrella up’, he said.  Outside, the street-lamps hung in washy haloes and Grete felt a sense of deja vu.   After all. she was repeating an earlier homecoming. Here were the goods yards in the sodden darkness, overgrown and disused. Everything seemed still and ordinary, not like that day she had left from this same little station with her mother and Annie, or the night she had returned to find a huge man with a beard holding out his arms to her. He had told her not to be frightened of him. It was hard not to be, he looked so much like a giant in her story books. Every building they passed had bits of roof and wall missing and sometimes a hole right through as if something had gone in the front wall and out at the back. And her own little house with no proper doors or windows, and the walls not white any more.

       Grete had lived in the white house on a dirty track leading into the woods ever since she was born. In the woods, red squirrels scuttered away from you and trembling deer peered from occasional clearings. In the town. the important thing was to keep up appearances and not be different. But her uncle, in this Catholic town. went to the tiny Lutheran church down a narrow alleyway.

       Grete remembered her grandmother’s funeral, people in black, heaped-up flowers, a carriage and horses, and some black motorcars, at the church of St. Joseph and the Holy Child. Then the house belonged to her father. Every Sunday after Mass they went to the cemetery in the woods and put new flowers on Oma’s grave.  Until the evacuation. that is.

       Years later, she took Mike, this young man from the nearby RAF station. to show him one evening where her grandmother was buried. They suddenly found themselves making love in the woods.  She had acquiesced easily, naturally, without thought. It seemed, perhaps. some way of making up for what had happened between their countries in their childhoods.  To Grete, it seemed that everybody from both sides had had terrible experiences in the war.

       Only afterwards did her Catholic conscience turn and strike at her, and after a few days she felt obliged to go to the priest at the church of St Joseph and the Holy Child.

       It would be all right, he said, if they were going to get married.

       It came as no surprise in the town when the news broke. A foreigner!  What could you expect, in the care of a man like that, a Protestant, who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak the local dialect?

       She was in her old room again, catching her travel-weary reflection in the heavy-framed mirror which stood in the corner. At that first homecoming, she had pestered her uncle to try to find the mirror.  He had dug it out from behind a pile of rubble in the unsafe upstairs rooms. She had stared blankly at herself in the shattered glass.

       Now, as she tidied herself perfunctorily in it, ‘Are you there, Grete?’  A push on the unlatched door and her cousin Stephan appeared in the mirror behind her.

       And again, with Stephan here beside her, leaning to give her a peck on the forehead, her mind went back to that earlier homecoming. A boy about her own age, standing minutely beside the giant and staring at her.  But he hadn’t been shy. He began talking straight away, about things like the used bullets he collected, and the soldier’s helmet he had found.  It was getting dark and Uncle Johann carried a torch.  Every time Stephan saw the torchlight gleam on anything, any kind of metallic object, he ran over and scuffed his foot around in the dirt, looking for treasures.

       Halfway across Germany on foot the two of them had come, in the last weeks of the war. no transport except for troops, hardly anything to eat or drink. Uncle Johann had foreseen what would happen. He couldn’t have lived under that regime, he said. He had found this lone little boy weeping silently in the street one day, and nothing could be traced about him in the chaotic state of things, so he had brought Stephan with him. But Stephan always insisted that he himself would return one day.

       ‘But you’ll never be able to go back to the East!’ Grete would say.  ‘Reunification will never happen!’

       It was what everybody said: there would never be Wiedervereinigung. Most people in the town assumed Stephan and she really were cousins, and her uncle thought it not worth trying to explain.

       There had nearly been a quarrel, that first time she had taken Mike home.  He had been daft enough to say that their country hadn’t really lost the war.  ‘Look at your economic recovery’, he said. Grete herself was surprised when Stephan burst out. in that deep man’s voice he now had,  ‘What do you mean’ - thumping his fist on his chest - ‘we didn’t really lose the war?  You can go back any time, can’t you, to where your parents still are?’

       ‘So, child, you know the house belongs to you now’, her uncle said, this second homecoming. as he ushered her in. ‘Of course, it always did, but it’s all in black and white now’.

       ‘He’s still calling me child!’ she said now to Stephan.

       It was a pretty special day when Uncle Johann had come home with a piece of glass tied on the handcart he’d made using old bicycle wheels.  He even had some putty, in a rag in his pocket. He fixed it in the kitchen and at last they had one room with a proper window. You had to scavenge for everything. If you kept any chickens or rabbits in your back yard or tried to grow anything, you had to be constantly on guard. Even tiny children, no bigger than Annie had been, took their turns at hoeing or guarding. It was a couple of years before he got enough strong timbers to repair the upstairs floors. But long before that he mixed up some kind of improvised whitewash and Grete helped slap it  on the house walls to make them look like they used to.

       ‘What a mess I got in, and him just laughing at me!’ she had told Mike.

       Her uncle had stood and laughed at her, holding his big round waist with both hands, his great beard frothing up.

       Well, yes, she had always thought of it as Uncle Johann’s house, but of course it was really hers. After all, it had been her father’s and her grandfather’s. To think the house was hers!  And for four years she and Mike had struggled in England to save the deposit on a mere shoebox!

       That English phrase Mike had used struck her as comical at first. but she got used to it.

       Mike and Grete are a comfortable sort of couple now with grownup kids. Yes, Grete got over those jitters, of course. And last time I dropped in to see them they told me Stephan, now the wall is down, has gone back to the East after all, to set up a new office there for his firm.

       ‘By the way’, he had said that evening, as he turned to go, ‘there was something in the post for you. Only just come, so I didn’t send it on’.

       The envelope, with that stamp with President Lubke on it which she only saw now when her uncle wrote, was propped beside her bed. Who could possibly be writing to her here?  But inside - well, only one kind of card has black edges like that. ‘With deep sadness you are informed of the decease of Frau Magdalene Stollenberg’.  Born, died, the funeral will take place, etc.

       It was the first time she had ever heard of Frau Stollenberg since the day she went off from that place in the little train. Of course, Frau Stollenberg had already been a war widow. When she died, had somebody simply gone through her things turning up old addresses to send funeral notices to?

       It struck Grete, Frau Stollenberg was being buried in that same graveyard where Annie was. Should she go, and try to find Annie’s grave?

       She opened a window and listened to the dark watery voices of the woods. Of course, it was a long way, and Annie’s grave might not even be marked.

       She turned back into the room and tried squatting down in front of the mirror to be nearer where Annie and she, side by side, had long ago reached up to, pulling faces at themselves, giggling. Then she stared again at the black-edged card. The harder she looked at it, the more she felt that it was not there she had to go, not back into that past.

       She ran downstairs to the kitchen. Her uncle was frying potatoes on the stove and Stephan was poring over a newspaper, at the table by that first window Uncle Johann had repaired, the blind pulled over it now. They looked at her in surprise as she dashed into the room and burst out:

       ‘Well, I must be off back again in just a few days so that Mike and I can buy our shoebox’.

       She says it sounded even sillier in German.