William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

Afine rain had started falling as the lorry shuddered to a halt outside the camp. Lysander and the new detachment of guards jumped down from the rear.

“Fuck me,” Lance Corporal Merrilees said. “Fucking rain.”

“Meant to clear up this afternoon,” Lysander said, taking his cap off and looking up at the mass of grey clouds above his head. Cold drops hit his upturned face.

“All right for you, Actor, ain’t it? All fucking warm and cosy.”

Merrilees led his section off around the perimeter wire and Lysander kicked the mud of his boots before going up the steps into the clubhouse.

The Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp had been the Bishop’s Bay Golf Club before the war started and before it was requisitioned by the Home Office as a holding facility for ‘illegal and enemy aliens’. A few miles west down the coast from Swansea, round the headland from the Mumbles, it had been transformed into a fenced prison camp of some forty wooden huts, each sleeping twenty people on bunk beds, constructed along the length of the eighteenth fairway. The clubhouse became the administrative centre and the members’ lounge was reconfigured into the camp’s canteen, capable of serving three sittings of two hundred prisoners a time, if required. The camp’s population fluctuated between four hundred and six hundred internees, men, women and children. Other areas of the golf course had been wired off as football and hockey pitches but there was not much demand for these, Lysander had noticed. The prevailing mood amongst the internees was one of glum injustice; grumbling and petulant lethargy their principal pastimes.

Lysander knocked on the camp-commandant’s door. “Capt. J. St.J. Teesdale’ it said on a temporary sign outside. Lysander stepped inside on Teesdale’s cry of ‘Enter!” and forced himself to smile and say, “Good morning, sir.” Teesdale had arrived only two weeks before and was finding his new authority something of a trial and a burden. He was nineteen years old and having some trouble growing his first moustache.

“Morning, Rief,” he said. “Nasty-looking one for the middle of May.”

“Ne’er cast a clout ‘til May be out,” Lysander said.

“Say again?”

“An ancient adage, sir. Summer doesn’t start until May is over.”

“Right.” He looked at some papers on his desk. “I’m afraid it’s Frau Schumacher, first up. Insisting on seeing a doctor again.”

Lysander collected his ledger and a bundle of files and empty forms and followed Teesdale from the Club Secretary’s office to the ‘19 thHole’ bar. Here a couple of middle-aged typists from Swansea coped with the camp’s administration, with the help of a solitary telephone, seated at desks at one end of the long room, while at the other, in front of a wide bay window, was a long trestle table where the day’s meetings and interviews took place. Through the window was a panorama of a choppy Bristol Channel with its massed continents of clouds — mouse-grey and menacing — beyond the links and the first tee. The walls were covered with framed photographs of golfers past — foursomes and monthly medal winners and amateur champions of the South Wales golfing fraternity holding silver trophies aloft. The bar had been cleared of its bottles and glasses, its shelves filled with rows of cardboard box files, one for each internee. Lysander found it one of the most depressing rooms he’d ever occupied.

Frau Schumacher sat at the trestle table, her back to the window, her arms folded across her chest belligerently, her chubby features set in a dark, implacable frown. She started to cough as she saw Lysander and Teesdale come in. Lysander took his seat opposite; Teesdale drew his chair out of range of Frau Schumacher’s staccato volley of dry coughs. Lysander opened Frau Schumacher’s file.

“ Guten Morgen, Frau Schumacher, wie geht es Ihnen heute? ”

It took an hour to persuade Frau Schumacher to go back to her hut with the promise, in writing, that she would see a doctor within twenty-four hours, or sooner, if one could be found in Swansea. Lysander didn’t dislike her, even though he saw her almost every two days, as almost everyone who was held in Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp had a long line of genuine grievances, not least their incarceration. There were merchant seamen — including half a dozen morose Turks — whose German colliers had been impounded in Swansea docks at the declaration of war; some twenty schoolchildren from Munich (awaiting repatriation) who had been visiting Wales on a late-summer cycling holiday; many proprietors of local businesses — butchers, tea-shop owners, an undertaker, music teachers — who had German names or ancestry. Frau Schumacher herself had been visiting her cousin in Llanelli, who was married to a Welshman named Jones. The household had been woken on the morning of August 5 and Frau Schumacher arrested — she had been due to return to Bremen on the sixth.

Bad luck, Lysander thought, rotten luck, stepping outside for some fresh air, already feeling tired after an hour’s translating of the Schumacher gripes and grudges. He turned up the collar of his tunic and jammed his cap on his head, searching his pockets for his cigarettes. He found them, lit one and wandered down a fairway towards the line of low dunes and the narrow beach beyond. Somebody shouted, “Hey, Actor!” from one of the watchtowers and he replied with a cheery thumbs-up.

It was still drizzling but he didn’t really care, content to stand alone on the beach and watch the wind whip the foam from the waves of the restless, steely sea. Ilfracombe was just about opposite, he calculated, many miles away out of sight on the other side of the wide channel. He’d been on holiday there once, in 1895, when he was nine. He remembered trying to persuade his father to come shrimping with him and failing. “No, darling boy, shrimping’s not for me.” He finished his cigarette and threw it towards the waves and strolled back towards the clubhouse. A small queue of internees had formed and they looked at Lysander expressionlessly as he walked past.

“Busy day,” Teesdale said, as they watched the first man shuffle in. “How come you speak German so well, Rief?”

“I lived in Vienna before the war,” Lysander said, thinking — what a simple expression, seven words, and what multitudes did they contain. He should have them carved on his tombstone.

“Better get started,” he said, sensing that Teesdale wanted to chat.

“What school did you go to, by the way?”

“I went to many schools, sir. Peripatetic childhood.”

♦

Of all the stupid decisions he had made in his life, Lysander thought, perhaps the stupidest had occurred that morning he had left Hamo’s cottage in Winchelsea and went to Rye to catch the train back to London. He had half an hour to wait and so had wandered aimlessly into town, his head full of bitter thoughts of Hettie and his unseen baby boy, Lothar, soon to be Udo Hoff’s son, in name, at any rate. In the window of an empty greengrocer’s shop he saw a large printed banner. “E.S.L.I. ‘THE MARTLETTS’. DO YOUR BIT FOR ENGLAND, LADS!” A plump sergeant lounged in the doorway and caught Lysander’s eye.

“You’re a fine-looking fellow. Strong and lively, I’ll warrant. Just the sort we need.”

And so Lysander had heeded this unlikely siren, had entered the shop and enlisted. He became Private 10099 in the 2 / 5 th(service) battalion of the East Sussex Light Infantry regiment. Two days later he reported to the E.S.L.I. depot in Eastbourne for six weeks of basic training. It was an act of penance more than one of duty, he told himself. At least he was doing something and all he craved was mindless routine and mindless discipline. He would go to France to fight the common foe and somewhere in the romantic back of his mind he had a vision of himself marching triumphantly into Vienna to claim a first joyful meeting with his little boy.