A Life Eternal Page 8

  I was different. That thought always came to me when a girl caught my eye or offered to buy me a drink. I was as different to every single person around me as a horse was to a fish, and it was in Berlin in 1928 when I first began to look upon other people with distaste.

  I started to think of them as polluted, unclean. An inkling began within me that they were somehow less than me. They were not as I was, and I began to dislike them. Nothing like the hatred I would hold them in later in my life, but it was in Berlin when those feelings started.

  Still, I must have enjoyed their distant company, because I ended up staying in Berlin for nearly six years. I learned the language and I learned the customs. I became used to the German lifestyle and it started to feel like home. A vague, lonely home: but a home nonetheless.

  Of course, over those years, between 1928 and 1934, a lot of the bars and clubs I visited began to close down as the Wall Street Crash came along and Germany once again slipped into desperation.

  Only to be saved by a new monster on the scene.

  1929’s ‘Black Thursday’ was only the start of Germany’s economic problems. America, that great and sleeping giant, suddenly woke up and realised that everything it thought it had been was nothing but the Emperor’s New Clothes. It heaved a death rattle of colossal proportions and drowned the entire world.

  Along with most other countries, Germany sank rapidly into the Great Depression, and I wondered vaguely as I read about the shares collapsing like a house of cards, how Percy Drebham had got on. Did he survive the collapse of the stock market, or was he one of the many who fell by the wayside? Plenty of people killed themselves when the reality of what they had lost became so horribly obvious, and I remembered Percy and his secret smile and his diamonds and gold. Even though he’d worked for Dwyer he had always seemed a decent enough man. I hoped he’d made it through.

  For all his skills, Stresemann could have done nothing about his own country’s demise. Thankfully for him, however, he died before the Crash happened and so he never saw his country tumble into the volcano on whose edge he had once said they were dancing.

  The American banks recalled their loans and the German economy ground to a halt once more. The German people, veterans of a lost war and two lost economies, howled at their political masters for revenge.

  And their saviour came to them in the form of Adolf Hitler.

  I had only vaguely heard of him in 1928, but by 1930 he was becoming the most recognised man in Germany.

  I’d seen some of the running battles between his so-called ‘Brown Shirts’ and the communists, of course, but I never thought that wonderful country I had lived in for six years would turn into the monster it did.

  Those fights between the right and the left became more commonplace, spilling onto every street corner around the capital.

  I was out one dull, misty afternoon in early 1931, walking along the street minding my own business. I had been grocery shopping and I’d just transferred one of the bags to my teeth as I fiddled with the lock of my front door when there was an almighty crash behind me.

  I dropped the bag and span around, just in time to witness a man being thrown through a bar room window opposite me. He landed in a tangle of arms and legs, his body sliced all over by the broken glass.

  The door to the bar burst open and several young men, dressed in their Nazi regalia, fell upon the fellow in the street, belting into his already cut body with their truncheons.

  I made to go to his aid. I don’t know why, I wasn’t really that bothered about him, and the disdain I felt for my fellow man was only getting worse. Perhaps it was just instinct. But before I could move a hand caught my arm and I turned to find an old woman who lived next door shaking her head at me.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘They’ll take you, too.’

  I turned back to the fracas in the street, but it seemed to be all but over now.

  The Brown Shirts dragged the young man to his feet and threw him into the back of a truck that had squealed to a stop beside them. They climbed in, slammed the doors, and disappeared in a cloud of diesel smoke.

  Other figures slowly emerged from the bar, some of them bleeding and one of them holding an arm that was obviously broken. They all wore the red armbands of the Communist Party. They stood around, muttering desultorily for a while before they dispersed. The whole episode had taken only seconds.

  I turned back to the old woman and I saw the fear in her eyes.

  ‘This is not right,’ she whispered, shaking her head at me. ‘This is not right. It is only going to get worse.’

  She turned away from me and shuffled off into her house.

  There were other occasions. Sometimes the Brown Shirts came out on top, sometimes the Communists did, but to be honest, it didn’t seem to make much difference to anyone else’s life.

  When Germany had been doing well, most people just carried on voting for the centrist politicians, but after the Wall Street Crash more and more people began to take Hitler and his young thugs more seriously and their membership grew.

  The Nazi Party’s popularity dipped and swelled over the next couple of years, until, in January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor. Things really began to change after that.

  The vulgar, bellowing, strutting young men of the Nazi Brownshirts—the SA—seemed everywhere now, and swastikas began to fly from windows and balconies.

  I watched distantly as they attempted to stop people buying from Jewish shops—seemingly with little effect at the beginning—and I watched as they opened what they called a ‘concentration’ camp near Dachau, to house the Communists and anyone else who did not agree with the way they were running Germany. It was, of course, the first of many. Not that a lot of Germans seemed to care.

  For myself, I viewed it all with a dark, growing disinterest. The machinations of funny little men with strange moustaches did not excite any concern in me. I was beginning to now believe the workings of human beings as pointless. I think I thought at the time that, once Germany got herself back on her feet, other politicians would come along, and the world would progress as it had done before. It’s strange to think now, how wrong I was.

  My money was fairly safe, still in the French bank, but I did move some to a British bank to be even safer. It was worth a lot less than it had been, but I at least had some sort of income and a roof over my head: which is a lot more than most people had at that time.

  I continued to search, half-heartedly now, for the Medic. One time, I thought I had caught up with him in Munich but found nothing there except more shouting Nazis, emboldened in their heartland. In late 1933 I travelled to Denmark after seeing a photograph that may or may not have been him. Again, my trip was wasted.

  I spent more and more time alone in my small house, listening on the radio to Goebbels and his insane propaganda, wondering how the German public could have been so stupid as to vote in these people who seemed little more than jokes to me. I still don’t really understand it now.

  Then in June 1934, I belatedly came to the conclusion that I should perhaps leave Germany. What came to be known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ changed everything. Hitler and his new favourites, the SS, took out the brown-shirted SA who had helped him gain the power he now possessed and who had been so happy to beat up the communists in the streets for him. It seemed they were no longer needed.

  When Hindenburg—the old, reliable President—died in August of that year, I knew it was time to go. Hitler combined the role of President and Chancellor and became the sole leader, or Führer, of Germany. And the public seemed to lap it up.

  I at last realised what this man was capable of doing, and I remember my first little frisson of fear for the future as I climbed aboard the train to leave Berlin for what I thought would be the last time. I went back to Paris, cancelled my tenancy on the apartment in Montmartre and, for the first time in years, I tried to forget about the Medic and went back to England.

  I went home.

  XI
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br />   I didn’t return to Northumberland as there was nothing there for me anymore. Instead I found a little house in Aylesford, Kent: near enough to London to be useful, but far enough away to be rural. It had a small garden in which I grew vegetables, and I would sit by the fire at night, thinking about Molly and Mickey and my little cottage at Longwood with Hector by my side. Hec would have been dead by then, I suppose, his life expectancy only a little shorter than the humans I shared the planet with, the humans I kept out of the way of.

  I continued to live alone, because the realisation that I was more different to them than I had first thought was now something I could not escape. It was on my fortieth birthday that I belatedly acknowledged the truth I had been ignoring for years now. That morning, I stared into the shaving mirror at the face of what, to me, seemed like a boy’s. It appeared the Medic’s touch had done more than just make me indestructible.

  I wasn’t ageing. My hair was still thick and full, and held no grey in it. My body was as lean and as powerful as it had been when I was twenty, even though the only exercise I really did was digging in the garden and taking long, lonely walks around the vicinity. I looked exactly the same as I had on the morning of the first of July, 1916. Twenty years ago, now.

  I wondered how this was possible. How could the touch of a man do this to me? How could someone change my physicality, make me so different to what I had been?

  Or maybe I had always been that way? Had I been born only to stop ageing at some pre-ordained time? Had that always been in me?

  I didn’t know and, to be honest, I was beginning not to care. I was just different; cursed. My previous insatiable quest for the Medic seemed like such a waste of time now. Especially with everything else that was going on in the world.

  By 1936, the news coming from Germany was becoming more and more frantic. The Olympics held in Berlin that year only confirmed the power Hitler held over his people.

  He had taken step after step to take control, and the world had just watched him do it, including the rearmament of Germany and the reoccupation of the Rhineland. It seemed no other country was bothered too much by the concentration camps, and the growing aggression towards the Jews and the disabled and anyone else who did not fit in with the Nazi ideas of perfection.

  Those other countries were still too wrapped up in their own economic plights to become involved in what was happening in Germany. They could not afford to do anything about it. And more, of course, was to come. Much more. Hitler’s malignance and hatred would soon sweep across the world and cause a conflict that in terms of casualties and destruction, would dwarf even the Great War I had fought in.

  I thought about my time in the trenches a lot during 1936. Although I tried to forget about him, my inability to discover the whereabouts of the Medic hung heavy on me for most of that year and the next. I remembered when I returned to my battalion after being wounded.

  *

  It was Captain Greene I first recognised when I returned, and I was very pleased he had survived. Most of the other soldiers in our company were new faces, so heavy had our casualties been in the Somme Offensive. The battle had descended into a farce that would have been amusing if the toll had not been so high.

  Day after day, for months, the men of our battalion and others had tried to take and re-take the same stretch of useless, mud-strewn, blasted land. Rotting corpses were clearly identifiable, either lying where they had fallen, or dispersed all over by the weeks of artillery fire, never to be returned to their families or even to a Christian grave. The smell was abominable. It was sickening.

  The few men who had survived from my time were not as pleased to see me as Greene seemed to be. They appeared to find my presence unsettling. They wondered how I had survived no doubt, and how I had recovered so quickly. They began to see me as a sign of bad luck. They began to see me as a Jonah.

  The hospital in Amiens had quickly assessed my condition and passed me fit for service. The nurses and doctors were suspicious when they saw the scars on my chest and read the report that came with me from Doctor Artigue at St Theresa’s. There was no way the wounds they saw had occurred only a few days ago; whatever had caused the scars must have happened a long time before.

  They x-rayed me and discovered marks on my ribs: the signs of old breaks, healed completely along with my flesh and muscle. They probably thought I was pretending to be ill. They probably thought me a coward.

  It was Captain Greene I had to thank for not being arrested for cowardice. Because of the pristine condition of my body, they wrote to him, and he confirmed that Corporal Deakin had indeed been wounded on the first day of the Somme Offensive. He stated in very strong terms his high opinion of me, calling me an exemplary soldier and that, whatever the reason for my quick recovery, it was nothing to do with a lack of bravery and fortitude. The doctor read the letter out to me and I swallowed hard when I heard what Greene thought of me and how he was standing by me.

  As there was nothing really wrong with me, I was released from hospital after just a week, and given two weeks’ leave to ‘recover’ even though I felt as fit as a fiddle. I think the hospital just wanted me gone.

  I went back home and spent the two weeks with Mu and her family: the last time I would see them alive. Mu’s husband, Arthur, had lost most of the fingers on his right hand in a farming accident years before, so had been classed as unfit for service. He tilled the land for the nation instead, helped by his wife and his young son.

  The girls from the village were by that time working in the fields too and, when I went back down to London for debarkation to France, I saw more of them walking to their shifts at the factories, some of them with hair and skin the yellowish colour of sulphur from the chemicals of the munitions. ‘Canaries’, they were nick-named. Times were indeed changing.

  I got back to the Front and the rolling thunder of the guns grew louder, the countryside becoming more and more stricken and bare. The bodies of men and horses started to decorate the vicinity in horrible tableaus.

  Greene, as I said, greeted me warmly, and I thanked him for his letter. He waved the thanks away with his customary nonchalance and handed me the sergeant’s stripes I have already described. I immediately sewed them onto my jacket, pleased more about the few extra pence a week than the new responsibility.

  The veterans said hello, but none of them shook my hand. They glanced at me warily if they ever looked at me at all, as if I was a mistrustful dog who would bite them as soon as they turned their backs on me. I heard them talking about me too, for whispers carry a long way in the trenches during lulls in the fighting: especially on the frosty, starlit nights.

  There were occasions when I would come around a corner and conversation would suddenly stop, all of them guiltily pretending to be busy doing something else until I had stepped around them. I would hear the conversation strike up again as I passed them by.

  It’s strange; I thought I had only been truly alone in those bars and clubs of Berlin but, in reality, my singular existence actually started much earlier, only a few weeks after the Medic got involved in my life.

  The rest of the war came and went: more battles were enacted across the same few miles of blasted ground, more men’s lives were wasted, until the day came when I found myself standing with Captain Greene in that ruined Belgian village on the eleventh of November, 1918. And in all that time I never got close to another soldier as the others all seemed to do. I was an outsider, I was different.

  I was indeed cursed.

  *

  It was in April 1937 when I realised I was cursed in other ways, too. I was cursed by ill luck. That year, I met a girl called Grace and she set me on a new path of destruction.

  I never wanted a relationship with her, or with anyone for that matter, and I wish to God I had never come across her. But I did. The lines of my life converged and I chose the wrong one. Again.

  To be honest though, I doubt any man would have been able to resist her, and of course I had the body
of a twenty-year-old. Although my mind was older, my physical wants and needs remained that of a young man and, when I saw Grace Yeo, I was spell-bound: totally and immediately.

  She was twenty-five and the daughter of the new parson who had recently taken over the parish. I first laid eyes on her as I was sauntering past the church on my usual walk. It was a clear, bright, early spring morning. The trees were just starting to recover from the long winter and daffodils were nodding cheerily at me as I passed. Rabbits jumped and ran in the distant fields and the sun was a golden disc in a bright blue sky.

  As I passed the church I saw people coming out, dressed in their finest. I slowly realised that it was Easter and the congregation were emerging from the special service by the new vicar, Thomas Yeo.

  It was the colour of the clothes against the backdrop of the grey-stoned church that made me halt at first. They made a fine sight, the epitome of a sunny English day.

  I certainly didn’t pause in my walk because of any sort of religious conformity. I had stopped going to church long ago, even before my wounding. The war had killed any sort of spiritual belief in me as I could not understand why a being as forgiving and as charitable as the Christian God was supposed to be, could ever have allowed a thing like that to happen. An abomination, Greene had called it when I talked to him in the library at Longwood. I couldn’t help thinking he was right.

  However, my belief in a God perhaps ratcheted up a notch or two when I caught sight of Grace Yeo, for only a God could have made something so perfect.

  She wore a blue, knee-length dress and an open coat. Her hat was wide-brimmed and matched the dress. Her gloves were white and she carried a small purse. Even from a distance I could see that she was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Her hair was chestnut brown, freshly curled and falling to a level just below her jaw. Her face was delicate, with large, brown eyes, and her figure was slim and athletic. She was standing with her father, greeting the people who were coming out, but she seemed to feel someone scrutinising her and turned to look at me. From my position at the church gate I nodded and touched my hat, and she smiled at me before turning away to take the hand of an old woman from the congregation.