Christopher Priest - The Separation

Even so, our passionate affair continued. I went to see her when I could and after the first few times I no longer worried if Joe might be at home when I arrived, or that he might arrive when I was there. All pretence that I was visiting Birgit for her company or to tackle repairs around the house was abandoned. We were lost in our fervent, passionate need for each other.

Then, suddenly, it changed. One day, at the beginning of November 1940, I received a message from the adjutant’s office that there had been a long-distance telephone call for me, from Mrs Sawyer. She had left a number for me where I could contact her. Full of alarm, I raised the operator and booked the call, person-to-person. Within half an hour Birgit and I were speaking and she told me the news straight away: Joe was dead. He had been killed in London when a German bomb hit the Red Cross ambulance he was driving.

Joe’s body was cremated after a secular ceremony in Gloucester. The service of remembrance consisted of a reading of a poem by Wilfred Owen and an extract from Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Joe’s short life was described in moving terms by a man from the Quaker Society of Friends. Joe was not a Quaker, but apparently his work had brought him into contact with Meetings in Manchester and London. The speaker described Joe as friend to the Friends. Mrs Alicia Woodhurst, who was Joe’s boss at the British Red Cross Society in Manchester, gave an emotional account of the quietly heroic rescue work he had been carrying out in the Blitz in London.

Birgit, standing next to my father, leaning on his arm, sobbed all the way through. I, standing next to my mother, my arm around her shoulders, was stiff with grief and the sudden realization of loss, inexplicable and final. Afterwards, when we returned to my parents’ house, Birgit would not look at me or speak to me. I was thankful she would not. Waves of guilt consumed me. I was devastated, shocked, deeply depressed by Joe’s death, but as well I felt sick at heart when I thought about my affair with Birgit, behind his back, in his bed, dressing up as him to delude his neighbours, taking his place in his own house. Of course, of course!, Birgit and I could not have known or guessed what was going to happen - perhaps we would not have been deterred by the foreknowledge if we had - but even so. We did what we did, but now that we had done it we were left to agonize in a mire of guilty feelings.

The squadron had given me eight days’ compassionate leave and my parents pleaded with me to stay with them for the whole of that time. I was there at their house on the night after the funeral, but the next day I could stand it no more. I hopped on Robbie Finch’s motorbike - which had become mine ever since a raid on Cuxhaven, two weeks before, during which Robbie and his crew bailed out over Germany and were now prisoners of war - and headed back to Tealby Moor as quickly as I could.

What happened next made sense only in the callous context of wartime. Joe’s death was the worst and most emotional experience of my life and for a time I thought I might never recover from the complex feelings of guilt, lost love and misery. But wars are filled with deaths, both remote and close at hand. Every night that the Luftwaffe bombers came to a British city, thousands of people were injured or killed. Ships were being sunk at sea with frightful loss of life, sickening news that came in daily. And every time the aircraft of our squadron, or of any of the front-line squadrons, took off for Germany, inevitably there was a loss to contend with in the morning. Some mornings there were several losses. Four of our Wellingtons were destroyed in a single night in a raid on Bremerhaven in December of that year, a disaster within the squadron, demoralizing and depressing us all, but the young men who died were simply more to be added to the war’s tally. We never became blasé about death or immune to its shock, but as the war went on we grew to accept that deaths were the price we were paying. This was the context; this was the world in which Joe had died.

For me, the war was the only distraction I had from my private troubles. Now that the heady affair with Birgit had been taken from me, I gave myself up entirely to fighting the war. In doing so I realized the danger in which I had inadvertently been placing my crew. Those men were my closest friends and allies, yet for half the time I had been flying with them my mind had been on Birgit. I changed. I dedicated myself to war.

We went through the winter of 1940/41, one raid following another: Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Sterkrade, Düsseldorf. We learned what there was to learn about night bombing, but in that period of the war our techniques were crude and our successes uncertain. The only certainties were that we went out to Germany and that some of us never came back.

On May 10, 1941, after bombing the port and city of Hamburg, my aircraft A-Able became the latest plane from our squadron not to make it home and my crew the most recent to be posted missing or wounded.

Following the question-and-answer format suggested by Miss MacTyre, I wrote a shorter version of what I had learned about Rudolf Hess during my visit to Mytchett Place. The typewritten copy prepared in her office then went straight to the P.M., with copies of that and the full version sent to the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Admiralty and the War Ministry. All those copies, short or long, vanished into the government labyrinth.

Of all the actions in which I was involved during the war, preparing my report on Hess seemed the most important, certainly at the time and still, in some ways, even now. There for a few days, by what seemed like happenchance, I was acting as a kind of intermediary between two of the most powerful men in Europe, investigating one of them for the other, with whatever conclusions I drew being likely to affect the way the war would be conducted. That is how it felt at the time.

Yet in the end my work made no difference, or none that I could discern. The war continued and what I had discovered about Hess appeared to have no impact on it. Perhaps that was what Churchill wanted. With post-war hindsight I realize that the presence of Hess in Britain must have been a serious embarrassment to the British government: as soon as Stalin found out that Hess had landed in Scotland, he leapt to the conclusion that Britain and Germany were conducting secret negotiations. In papers released by Churchill soon after the end of the war it was revealed that at this time Britain was putting a great deal of effort into reassuring Stalin that the Anglo-Russian alliance was intact. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was in full flow at the same time as I was at Mytchett Place, with the Red Army retreating on every front.

Those published papers never included anything that even remotely resembled my findings. I have always been curious about why this might be, since what I discovered about Hess should have thrown everyone’s assumptions about him into turmoil. At first I assumed it was simply the way governments worked, but once I made serious efforts to find out what happened after I met Hess I realized that there must have been a decision to cover up the details.

Because I am telling my own story, not an official one, I don’t feel bound by the political imperatives of half a century ago. Although I can’t locate the original report I wrote, I do vividly remember the meetings, and because I have kept my own handwritten notes from which the report proper was typed I can reproduce a fair copy of it here. My days with Hess were long and often tedious, with many interruptions, distractions and obscurities. He often confused me and frequently annoyed me, but for a lot of the time he simply bored me. My report boiled everything down to the salient facts, thanks to Miss MacTyre’s advice. Some details might have become blurred by the passage of time, but the main conclusion is identical to the one I reported to Churchill in 1941. This report is still an accurate summary of what I discovered.