The atmosphere was so tense, he said, that you could have chopped it with a battle-axe. But when he repeated his sentence in even blunter English their anger at his accusation gave way to embarrassment, and then to humour when they realized he had seen through their trick. They bought his patterns, and paid him well, and he went to Chemnitz many times until the Great War put a stop to it.
He left for England only hours before war was declared. On the way from Berlin he witnessed the manoeuvres of the Imperial German Army near Magdeburg, and made a dramatic farewell to the country because the police tried to arrest him at Bremerhaven for what he had seen. The ship pulled out from the quay just as they came into view. If they had collared him he would have been interned for four years in Germany, and thus saved himself some bother in trying to avoid the war in his own country. The sea crossing was so appallingly rough that he was unable to leave his cabin.
When call-up came in 1916 he would have nothing to do with it, averring that a person who refused to get killed for his country is more patriotic than a mad keen bravo who rushes into death for it, that a man is of more value to everyone else if he stays alive. He was not alone in his reluctance to go, for in the first six months of conscription 100,000 men failed to appear for call-up, and another 750,000 hurried to claim exemption.
His wife belonged to the Christadelphian Sect and Frederick had converted to it. Assiduously studying the Bible and learning to read Hebrew, he hoped one day to become a preacher. His allegiance therefore led him to stand as a conscientious objector — an educated phrase that was unintelligible to most ordinary people, which would have been better understood as ‘a hater of war’.
Facing the tribunal of old, true-blue British dunderheads who looked upon him with a sort of patriarchal distaste and offended class unction because he was staunchly refusing the honour of being sent to fight for what they held dear, and would no doubt lavishly enjoy after many of those who had gone to do so were dead, he simply stated his religious principles and folded his arms against them with such mute and obstinate belligerence that it caused one mellower gentleman to regret that such unyielding brass could not be turned against the Germans.
Having long ago weighed up his own talent as a lace-designer and painter of pictures, Frederick quoted his profession before these men as that of artist, upon which the mellower gentleman brightly wondered why he had not joined the Artists’ Rifles when the war began, whose fine battalions did wonderfully dreadful work against the Hun.
Frederick broke his silence, though he had gritted his teeth for some minutes against doing so. ‘There wasn’t one artist in the Artists’ Rifles,’ he said sharply, and so angrily that he had to fight against his own blood to keep to the point of what he wanted to say. ‘They stopped being artists as soon as they put on a uniform. No true artist picks up a gun to kill his fellow-men. Whoever had the idea to form battalions of artists was a devil. He was anti-Christ. It was Satan’s trick, to get rid of those artists who might otherwise stay behind and make trouble — or keep a breath of sanity in this country. If any artists are still fighting they are poor deluded fools who don’t deserve their talent. In all likelihood they never had any.’
The two sides were without meeting point, and instead of being sent into the army Frederick spent two years shovelling shit — as he put it — on a farm in Lincolnshire.
‘Man chooses,’ he said, ‘though God disputes his right to it. Freedom of choice is given to everyone, and if I lived in the moderate comfort of a hayloft instead of cringing in a mud-trench in Flanders, then I betrayed no one, because everybody else could have done the same. They made the wrong choice, and it led to the biggest disaster in the history of the world, because the Second World War came out of the first, and the Jews were almost destroyed by Hitler and his lunatic pan-Germans, and by all those others who didn’t say a big No when they should have done. The only things you can say yes to in this world are love and work, and even then you’ve got to be intelligent and careful about it. God knows, I’m not made of such stuff that my life’s been all that successful, but I’ve never killed or injured anybody.’
During his agricultural life he and his companions were awakened from the hayloft opposite the house at five each morning to the tune of a bully-farmer cracking a whip below, and cursing so richly that it might have sounded picturesque if it hadn’t been aimed at them. To the farmer they were workhorses, and weak ones who did not have the necessary patriotic feeling to go and fight for their country so that he could stay behind and make a profit from it. They were scum, worse even than prisoners of war, who might at least have fair reason for being out of the fighting.
Nocturnally roaming around and into remote sheds of the farm Frederick and a friend discovered a small trunk hidden under a heap of sacks. On shaking it they rightly guessed that it contained several hundred gold sovereigns. As the Great War went on the government needed gold to pay its debts, so a law was passed that such coinage was to be handed in to the banks, who would then issue the equivalent in paper money. It was illegal to hoard such metal, though many did — so as to sell it after the war when its value would be much increased.
Next day the conscientious objectors carried the box to the farmer’s door. When he came at the jingle of it, Frederick said in his most pompous and grating tone that they expected his behaviour to improve from now on, as a reward for finding his long-lost gold. But if the farmer was not the real owner of it, then it should be taken to the police station in Louth. If he was, which seemed likely because they had found it on his property, then it should be put into a bank for safe keeping.
The farmer disliked them, but accepted his gold and treated them more reasonably afterwards. He never found out who had broken the lock of the shed where the box had been kept, though he had his suspicions. As Frederick said, delicate fingers can always be put to good use.
48
We lived in a room on Talbot Street whose four walls smelled of leaking gas, stale fat, and layers of mouldering wallpaper. My father’s thirty-year-old face was set like concrete, ready to hold back tears of humiliation that he must have been pleased to find were not there when the plain clothes police came to take him away.
From the side I saw two of him as he combed his black hair in the mirror. The face looking into the glass seemed about to smile, but that reflected from it showed the bafflement of his brown eyes, and lips that were thinner when he was unhappy. In both images his flesh was grey.
He had especially gloated over his brother Frederick’s haughty manner with creditors. Being dunned as a young man during one of his indigent phases after his release from the servitude of the Great War, Frederick stood at the door of his father’s shop on Trafalgar Street with, as my father remembered: ‘Hardly any bleddy shoes to his feet,’ shouting at a tradesman waiting hopefully on the pavement: ‘I only pay my bills quarterly! Do you understand? Quarterly!’
That night a pantechnicon was loaded to the gills by my father and the driver, Frederick looking on because his hands were too fine to lift such heavy goods and furniture on which little more than a deposit had been paid. The pantechnicon went to London where, as far as the creditors were concerned, Frederick was never heard of again, London being a long way from Nottingham in those days.