Peter Robinson - Before the poison

Sunday, 23rd July, 1944 After Caen fell two weeks ago, we started to get many more German casualties. Most of the ordinary soldiers are glad that the war seems almost over, and happy to be still alive as POWs. We have enough problems, though, that we have had to increase the number of armed guards and sentries around the hospital. The SS officers are especially difficult. They are still devoted to Hitler and cannot accept the possibility of a German defeat. Then there is the Hitler Youth. Because the German army is running short of able-bodied men, so Major Tanner explained to me, it has drafted in a lot of old men and boys to make up the numbers. The old men are quite passive and glad to be cared for, but the boys can be a nuisance. We try to treat them the same as everyone else, and most of the time we succeed, but sometimes our patience wears exceedingly thin. There was one boy called Dieter who arrived about two days ago. He had been shot in the upper thigh, had lost a lot of blood from the femoral, and was also suffering from some form of infection. He cannot have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Right from the start he made it clear he was going to be a nuisance. In his livelier moments, he would urinate and defecate on the floor near his bed, knock the kidney bowl out of my hands when I approached him, pull out his intravenous lines, and take great delight in telling me what the victorious German soldiers would do to English pig women like me when they had won the war. I grew to hate Dieter, and I dreaded having to approach him, but he was on my ward, and there was no way around it. Dorothy helped me as best she could, but he made her even more nervous. She shook so much around him that she could not administer an injection. Last night, while I was on duty, I heard Dieter cry out, and I went over to his bed to see what was the matter. He was burning up with fever, his breath an ominous rattle in his throat. We had known that he had an infection, but we had not known how serious it was, how long he had lain unattended before the stretcher-bearers took him to the field dressing station. His brow was hot and dry, his eyes unfocused. I made a move to go and get a cool cloth but he grabbed my wrist with a remarkably strong hand and begged me not to leave him. His English was quite good. I explained what I was going to do, and he relaxed his grasp but begged me to come back. I brought the cloth and sat on a canvas chair beside his bed. It was dark, and the only light came from the few hurricane lamps placed around the marquee tent. The wind was flapping the canvas and making shadows like hand-puppet shows all over the place. Dieter seemed to be hallucinating, lost in a world of memory, or imagination, as I mopped his feverish brow and whispered endearments. I heard the word ‘mutter’ several times and knew he was calling for his mother. So many do when they are dying. All the time he was gripping my wrist like a drowning man hanging on to a raft. Occasionally, his body would go into spasms, and he would cry out, waking some of the other patients and bringing forth a few groans and requests to be quiet. This seemed to go on for hours. Dorothy took care of the rest of my duties for the night, and I stayed where I was, mopping Dieter’s brow, telling him all would be well in the morning and he would soon be reunited with his mother. Soon, I could see faint daylight breaking through the canvas, the air outside turning slowly from black to grey. Dieter clung on. I had done all I could for him in the way of medicines and care, though perhaps if we had given him penicillin from the start, instead of the sulphonamides the Germans carry with them, it would have helped. The problem is that penicillin is so expensive, and we have so little of it that we must save it for our own wounded. At least, that is the rule at this hospital. Dieter’s pulse fluttered under my searching finger, then it slowed down and became so weak that I could no longer feel it. He had one more spasm, then I heard the death rattle in his chest, an unmistakable sound, and he was gone. I managed to uncurl his fingers from my wrist and gently close his staring blue eyes. I cried and cursed the war then, in that tent in the half-dark with the dead German boy lying before me, made fists and banged them against the mattress impotently. I had hated Dieter, feared him, even, but I hated and feared what had killed him even more. Now I sit outside my tent exhausted and drink hot coffee and smoke a cigarette in the dismal morning light, the day’s activity starting up all around me. I hear the lonely whistle of the first train leaving Caen for Bayeux. If I do not sleep soon, there will be no sleep for me today. But how am I supposed to sleep after all this?

January 2011

It was my turn to look gobsmacked, and no doubt I did. I certainly felt as if the earth had shifted underneath my feet, and I couldn’t find purchase any more. I was wrong. The knowledge left me dizzy and empty, treading space the way you tread water in the deep end. All these weeks I had believed that Grace Fox couldn’t have murdered her husband, then I had reluctantly accepted that she may have done, but that if she had, she had a very good reason, a reason that, for me, at any rate, partly exonerated her. Now all this had been swept away by a couple of sentences out of Billy Strang’s mouth. I had been so sure.

I could see Billy’s lips moving, but I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. It was like looking down on the waves and not hearing them. I had the sensation that my ears were blocked, the way I used to feel every time in a plane at takeoff or landing. Finally, I heard his words as if from a great distance. ‘Are you all right? You’ve turned very pale. Would you like a drop of brandy or something?’

I shook my head. I was still vaguely aware that I had to get back to my hotel somehow, and the last thing I wanted was to get lost in Khayelitsha or fall foul of the South African police over a drink-driving charge. ‘No,’ I managed. ‘I’m all right. Just a bit of jet lag, I suppose. I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea or something.’

‘I gave up tea years ago, but I can do you a decent cup of coffee.’

‘Thanks. Just black. No sugar.’

While he went to make it, I stood by the window staring down at the silent waves, the rocks, the beach, cars speeding by on the main coast road. It all suddenly seemed so alien, and the searing ache of missing Laura cramped my heart so hard I thought I was going to collapse. Was this what my life had become? The pursuit of an illusion? Ghosts and whispers and shadows. It was as close to fainting as I had ever come. I was wrong. Wrong about Grace. Wrong about everything. What would I say to Louise? To Heather? To Wilf? To Sam? I began to feel as if Grace herself had somehow let me down, taken me in with her heroic, enigmatic beauty and silence.

Billy came back with the coffee. ‘You certainly seem to have had a bit of a shock,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you sit down again? Do you want to know the real story? I guarantee you’ll find it even more interesting than the one you made up.’

I found that hard to believe, but I took the coffee and sat. ‘Yes. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t usually behave so foolishly. You must think I’m crazy.’

‘Not at all. I don’t know if it will help, but let me tell you the truth. Let me tell you why I really went to talk to Grace Fox that day.’

‘Have you ever heard of an establishment called Porton Down?’

Indeed I had, many times over the years, and I had also seen it mentioned quite recently, in Grace’s war journal. ‘Yes,’ I said, frowning.

‘Well, then,’ said Billy, ‘you’ll know it’s not exactly on a par with Watership Down. It’s a collection of ugly buildings near Salisbury, owned by the military, by the Ministry of Defence, actually. Been around since about 1916, probably at first as a response to the Germans using chemical warfare in the First World War, mustard gas and the like. A top-secret scientific research establishment. It kept pace with the times. It was the secret everybody knew, though nobody outside really knew what went on in there, not even the government, if we’re to believe what they say. But it’s also the sort of place most people have heard of, these days, and most know it’s a pretty sinister establishment connected with chemical warfare, nerve gas, anthrax and the like, and not without a few skeletons in its cupboards. The sort of secret we’d rather have swept under the carpet. The sort of things other countries do, and we react with moral outrage.’