Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

From rough pasture edged with marsh and thin woodlands, we reached a ramshackle farmstead, yellowy, peeling, rain-stained, drab without the consolations of melancholy.

Painfully stiff, I alighted. The Herr General followed, still moving with the smoothness unexpected from his stature, tall and metallic against the low, misty sky.

‘You must remain here. For how long it’s not yet possible to say. It may not be the Heimat you’ve envisaged. The people are good… at least…’ pausing, he suddenly recovered that familiar, boyish complicity, ‘they are… good enough.’

For the first time ever, he bent and kissed my forehead, before a man and woman joined us, leathery, stolid, and as if sexless, deferential but not obsequious, almost immediately escorting me inside, not to a turret but to a raftered attic smelling of age and sacking, with an immense bed quilted with heavy coats. Little else. I heard the car departing at speed.

The world turned over, into flame, steel, high explosive. Operation Barbarossa, shattering the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Nach dem Osten woll’n wir reiten . Daily the sky was thunderous, black with planes, the air shaken by unseen torments, though this dull, even region of pine, rye, scrub remained motionless.

Greg and Trudi did not qualify for the Ten Per Cent. Childless, their youth unimaginable, they were slow, barely literate, narrow in speech, treating me as a strong, though unskilled farmhand. Neighbours were few, peasants with chests like rugs, stomachs like barrels, saying little. Mother, with her furs, rings, rippling laughter, would have dazed, then perhaps aggrieved them.

I questioned little in relief at escaping the Reds, though wondering why, with German triumph, I had been deposited here like a parcel instead of with Mother amongst Berlin’s interesting coteries. Only on Sundays, workless, monotonous, empty, I relapsed into sullen self-pity, raging for my dues, for lavish meals, respect, words. The only book here was a Lutheran Bible, rendered insipid by sectarian editing. No letters came. Mother must be very ill or had forgotten me. Awaiting the Wolf’s entry into the Bear’s den, I learnt to cut pine, tend cattle, plough, muck fields. I was often hungry for, though sour, almost-rancid beer was plentiful, food, despite titanic victories in Russia, was depleted by the requisition of eggs, butter, game, poultry, beef, under SS supervision. Almost weeping, I remembered thick roasted slabs with glistening dabs of Meerretich, the honeycombs, cream, the sumptuous plum and apricot puddings.

Survival here was tugged from north winds and small harvests from poor, rather sandy earth. We mostly subsisted on cabbage and potato, shreds of pork, horseradish leaves, bruised apples, occasional pumpkins. I learnt to treasure a hunk of coarse rye bread, porridge boiled with wild mushroom, thickly salted herring, woody carp, tough cheese whose identity would have puzzled Herr Max and outraged even Father. He had told me of Balzac, mighty storyteller, poor and almost starving, writing down his favourite dishes, then rising, convinced that he had dined well. Experimenting, I failed.

Winter sky, unshaken by the wind, resembled grey, damp wool; birds were shrill and famished, pecking at frozen soil. I feared degenerating and was sustained by fragments of news from Greg’s battered wireless. Britain, despite destruction of London and most cities, still survived. Mr Chatterbox still chattered, the Palace was not yet scuppered, the King had failed to reach Canada or had been drowned.

Greg grumbled that Churchill-pig would pay his Jews to trap America into betraying us. Then our Great Asiatic Ally struck, and the Cripple in the White House wheeled himself down the warpath. There were hints of Italian treachery.

My stories were merely unpleasant visions: saurian eggs straining from a filthy nest, swollen butterflies stinking on the edge of a poisoned year: childhood sickening like a diseased plant. Months were becoming years, though seasons were starkly distinct, winter gripped the bone, green awoke the spring, summer meant prolonged work, autumn mostly Rising Tide.

From exhaustion I slept well, and in dreams the past returned unsullied. The lost domain of racquets and straw hats, games on summer islands, Forest in calm June, gracious lawns, the Turret kingdom of lamplight. Legends, wondrous secrets. Imagination could now seek release only in this dreary scrap of landscape, though, I had to admit, it yet gave clues, not to the marvellous but at least to forgotten peoples and archaic rituals. Place names grazed old memories: Castle-Land, Moon Hound Tye, Frey’s Camp. The terrain, if not godless, was barely Christian. Christmas passed like a felon, a wreath of entwined ivy and holly laid at a crossroads, was tribute, but to what? I recalled flowers to the Lady, to Forest Uncle.When, after days in rainy fields, I began a feverish cough, Trudi bound my throat with mangy fur, assuring me that this, and some incomprehensible rhyme, would cure me.

Slowly, the land began revealing its own stories. Two women, two years, two centuries ago, barred the door on a corpse, against the widow; lately, a rich lady, a Gräfin , had chosen to starve rather than accept the indignity of a ration card. In Soviet-dominated Estonia every peasant now owned one-third of a horse.

Despite privations, I could enjoy not only suggestive place-names and tales but snatches of beauty: a flooded stream coiling with pewter-coloured patterns; fields, dark brown, strictly ploughed, sprinkled with pearls dropped from a Buckingham’s cloak; huge suns, cold and yellow, hovering behind spindrift branches, outflying on the bitter sky. Necessity sharpened memory. Deposed Emperor Earth, while sawing and digging, I strengthened it like a muscle by memorizing passages from lost books, powerful as swords. Then I found a damp, warped notebook and began a story: ‘For many months, whispers abounded throughout the province that, after so many years, a train might come.’

From unexpected angles more memories reappeared: a girl’s face at an ‘Ogygia’ picnic, now older, harsher, scornful at a boy’s hesitation before diving; a smile between Mother and an officer enlarged into what I could not precisely name. All these were strangely important, while a Grand Hunt, a New Year Ball, shrivelled to insignificance. Legendary heroes – Kalev, Kostchei the Deathless, Baldur – remained, though weakened; even Pahlen was less vivid than a black scarf always worn by a cousin, perhaps concealing a monstrous blemish or criminal scar. I ruminated over stories by Pär Lagerkvist, one beginning with the dead talking together in low tones, another describing a lift that went down to Hell. Father’s chosen poems – Heine, Goethe, Trakl, Stefan George – returned.Wrinkles of time.

This transcended stony fields and tedium. For me, exiled, brimming with desire for nakedness, a blank page, however discoloured, was restoration of the fitting and needful, all else gaunt as a scarecrow.

Local girls had long been conscripted for military brothels and, I was to learn, SS stud farms. Those I had once avoided revenged themselves in dreams, taunting, undressing, but beyond reach, so that I awoke wet and frustrated.

Spade in hand, I would stare up at the sky. Clouds were now lean and dark, now white, billowing sails, bergs, continents or fleeting red sores. More remembered words descended:

Meaningless? Certainly not. Essence of privacy, exclamation of soul, resounding like a rattle, making life limitless, creating alternative language for eye and ear, like Forest stored with apparitions, real or shadowy, or ships, faint question-marks, far out on unknown missions.