That evening Stern said he was a navigator on one of the Luftwaffe's medium-sized bombers, a Heinkel He 111, which had been dropping mines along the east coast of England in April 1940, when the plane had been hit by ack-ack. With his clothes on fire he'd parachuted from the blazing bomber, and the rush of air had extinguished the flames, although not before his back and neck had been severely burned. The He 111 had crashed at Clacton, a few miles away, killing (he'd learned later) two civilians and injuring a hundred and fifty others, and he and the rest of the crew were captured and shipped off to Island Farm POW Camp down in Wales. That, he told us with an almost apologetic smile, was the extent of his personal war on Britain, although in March '45, a week or so before the fatal V2s were launched, he and sixty-five other German POWs had escaped from the camp (I vaguely remembered reading something about the breakout in the British newspapers at the time). It was while Stern, who had become separated from his Kameraden, was trying to make it to the Welsh coastline, where he hoped to steal a boat that would take him across to neutral Ireland, that the world about him changed.
The dead were everywhere and he couldn't comprehend why. Deciding to keep away from the towns -
now for two reasons: as far as he knew his country was still at war with Britain and America, and he was still a prisoner on the run; and he thought the plague that had killed everyone, including most animals he'd come upon, must be contagious - he scavenged from farmhouses and empty cottages. He survived almost a year that way until the harsh winter of '46 forced him to venture into a town.
He told us he must have gone into shock because of what he found there, since he'd lost all memory of those first weeks. When reason eventually returned he left the town, heading east, travelling in cars and abandoning each one when it ran out of gas, finding another to continue the journey in, determined to make it to the opposite coast, there to find a boat and cross the English Channel to mainland Europe.
From there he would return to his homeland, perhaps to die, for at that time he did not know how widespread the plague was, whether the Continent itself had been devastated. On his journey he had come upon an army base and had steeled himself to enter it. With nothing more than a scarf covering his mouth and nose, Stern had located a battery-operated radio transmitter and, using fresh batteries, had tried to contact his own base in Germany. There had been no response. All night he sent messages, praying for some reply, from anyone, from anywhere, but still there was no contact.
Giving up all hope, he'd sunk into deep despair, unable to understand what had caused the disease and why he had survived it. The whole of the next day he had contemplated ending his own life - not only did there seem nothing to live for, but his personal guilt at having lived while everyone else appeared to have perished was crushing. That thought evaporated with the next dawn when he realized it was his duty to live on, he owed it to his people and to his Fuhrer. He made no mention of the Master Race, but it was in my mind. I figured Stern thought the fittest had survived, so affirming Hitler's attitudes on breeding and the natural order. Stern was living proof of his leader's theories and to die now, especially by his own hand, would refute all that.
So, he wandered on, looting grocery stores for food and sleeping in empty houses. And then he had chanced upon other survivors, a kind of community living in a tiny village. They'd treated him with suspicion and, on hearing his accent and learning he was German, they'd driven him off, almost killing him in the process. It seemed they blamed him in full and personally for what they called the Blood Death, and he was lucky to get away with his life. For a long time after that he had lived on a remote farm near the New Forest, first clearing it of its corpses, then cultivating a few crops as best he could. The winter of
'47, even worse than the previous year's, had put an end to that.
His food had to come from village stores and shops, and so he lived on the fringes of these places, alone and, he admitted to us, 'somewhat insane in the head'. With the summer of '48 the desire to return to the
'Fatherland' returned and his journey began again.
The vehicle he was travelling in soon broke down - lack of maintenance rather than shortage of gasoline
- and it was while he was trudging down a country lane looking for another means of transport that the two girls came upon him in their Ford.
Their greeting was different from the kind he'd received two years before, and he was grateful for that.
As far as Cissie and Muriel were concerned, well, they were just overjoyed to find another live and healthy human being. His nationality meant nothing to them, not after all this time, and he certainly felt no enmity towards British civilians. He agreed to accompany them to the capital, although he told them that from there he would continue eastwards, possibly using the River Thames to reach the estuary and the English Channel. Stopping only once to refill the Ford's tank from a garage handpump along the way, they soon reached London. And hit trouble. Namely, me.
I put the question to the two girls, not the German. 'Like Cissie said before, for all you knew, I could've been the bad guy, and the Blackshirts the only law and order left. So why help me?'
'It was Cissie's decision,' Muriel replied, indicating her friend. I stared at the dark-haired girl.
She shrugged. 'I didn't like their uniform. I had bad memories of Mosley's Blackshirts before the war and that lot this morning didn't look any different.' Another sip of gin and peach juice. 'I told you my mother was Jewish. Besides, you looked desperate and I like desperate types.' She grinned at me.
It wasn't enough, but I didn't push it. Before Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and Jew-hater, had been interned at the beginning of the war and his vicious party of bigots broken up, he'd led marches into the very heart of Jewish ghettos in London's East End just to provoke the people into riots. He was one bad man and later, as the Allies were taking back Europe, grim stories of the Nazis' attempted extermination of the Jewish race reached the rest of the world and the British public finally understood the full horror of the ideals Mosley - along with his more discreet ally, Sir Max Hubble
- had aligned himself with. Those ragbag black outfits had meant only one thing to Cissie and, as she'd been driving the car at the time, her companions could only go along with her. She was a gutsy lady.
A little juiced by now, they had begun to ask questions about me, but I ducked them. We still hadn't heard the warden's story.
Albert Potter, his nose a deeper shade of red by this time, was only too pleased to gab, three years of loneliness and a good few measures of Grouse loosening his tongue some. Too old to join the British army, he'd volunteered as an ARP on the very day Neville Chamberlain had mournfully declared war on Germany, and he had dutifully served through both Blitzes on London, twice being buried beneath rubble himself. His home was in an LCC block of flats in the Covent Garden area and when this, itself, was eventually demolished by the Luftwaffe, he and his family had moved into the basement of a school that was being used as a Civil Defence HQ. (It was here that he first learned of the secret bunker beneath Kingsway, where he later became 'door watcher'.)
He had won three commendations for heroic action during the war years, we were proudly told, once for single-handedly clearing an entire building of office workers when a DA (delayed action bomb) was discovered on the rooftop, the second time for reviving an unconscious woman who had choked on a stale (she later claimed) piece of Battenburg cake in the Lyon's Comer House on the Strand, and thirdly for preventing a bus carrying several passengers from toppling into a bomb crater during the Blackout by dashing in front of it waving his flashlight at great risk to life and limb. He'd served King and Country as well as any man could, despite the taunts and jibes from the public, who tended to regard all ARPs as jumped-up little Hitlers, mad with the tiny powers given them. Well, that had never bothered him. Like Stern, Potter knew his duty, knew it then, knew it now. And when his wife died of the blood disease,