But I grew uncomfortable, playing a part in Hogarth's picture of Calais Gate, his fat friar fingering the immense raw joint of English beef while the ragged and skinny populace enviously sup their bowls of thin soup. I was forbidden to exchange a friendly word even with my German bat-woman, who cleaned my room, polished my shoes, laundered my clothes and neatly mended them.
She was a handsome blonde who reminded me of Gerda, and I discovered that she was a Luftwaffe general's daughter, glad enough to earn the wages of the conquerors. It must have been the first employment of her life-two and a quarter million British misses and madams put their hair in snoods and went to work making tanks and aircraft, but Hitler refused Albert Speer at his Ministry of War Production to let Nazi womanhood dirty her hands with machine oil. The Fьhrer's notion that woman's place is in the home helped lose Germany the war.
'I hear there is some fratting with the Germans,' Greenparish said to me in the mess. 'Among the other ranks.'
'They use the word to mean another very similar.'
He wrinkled his nose. 'At least the powers that be have taken my point sufficiently to relax the rules for my little conversazione. One's problem of re-educating the Nazis is of opening sufficient windows. Hitler was to them simply the idealized embodiment of their group-identification. Surely you agree? One must let them know that other standards prevailed outside Germany. Not, of course, that there seems a single Nazi left in Germany today,' he added resignedly. 'They would all seem to have vanished from the face of the earth, like the swastika flags and SS uniforms and those ghastly muscular neo-Classical statues of pagan dimwits.'
The party was for the Saturday evening of December 2. Greenparish had transported a don from his own Cambridge college to lecture on English Literature, to be followed by Greenparish explaining the relationship of man to society. The don was a short, jumpy, birdlike man with large round glasses, always shaking hands and smiling and apologizing for his presence. Our colonel recognized it all as the familiar politicians' lunacy, but allowed use of a room with crystal chandeliers and cream and gold moulded walls, now badly knocked about. Greenparish had invited about thirty guests from the re-emergent Elberfeld Literary Circle. They were mostly middle-aged and elderly, and uncertain whether to be submissive, arrogant or frightened. All arrived dressed in their best, though everyone's best right across Europe was growing threadbare after six years.
On a long table against the wall were set bully beef sandwiches, sausage rolls, bottles of hock and cigarettes in glasses. Greenparish meant refreshments to be taken during the discussion of points raised by the speakers, in the manner of those spirited, sly, chattering little parties of Grange Road, Boars Hill and Hampstead. But the guests fell on the food at once, slipping sandwiches into handbags and pockets for their families, helping themselves to the wine, baring the table in two or three minutes.
'This isn't what I intended at all,' muttered Greenparish crossly. 'I honestly felt that tonight would see an achievement of mind over stomach. Look how those cigarettes simply vanished!'_
I stood in the corner, neither eating nor drinking. In those disordered times in Germany, you developed a suspicious eye for anyone who looked out of place. I had observed aloof from the others a man with the double distinction of being young and having an air about him. He was fair, pallid, sharp faced, with pale blue eyes, in a green high-buttoned sportsman's jacket, check trousers and stylish brown and white shoes. He caught my eye. After a minute or two, he approached and said in English, 'Mr Elgar, I believe?'
'How did you know my name?'
'A lot of people in Wupertal know you, Mr Elgar.' He spoke with the singsong precision of a man who has learned a language in a lecture room. 'You were a visitor in an earlier age.'
I noticed the thin hand which held his cigarette had fair hairs on the back, and I thought his nails were manicured. As the surviving young were all prisoners of war I asked curtly, 'Why aren't you in the Army?'
'A question which obviously needed asking. I worked for the Ministry of Propaganda, which first afforded exemption from military conscription. Later, I was too valuable for cannon-fodder.'
I saw that he must have been at least thirty, though he had a boyish look which I suspected he cultivated. But I did not believe him. There were plenty of SS men in Germany who had thrown their uniforms into the nearest ditch. 'May I introduce myself,' he continued. 'Herr von Recklinghausen. It should be "Count", but I dropped it in boyhood, the Hitler Reich not being…well, shall we say, you never knew exactly where you stood with titles. It was most amusing, to see senior members of the Nazi Party exhausting themselves in a struggle between their natural envy and their natural respect for our aristocracy. You noticed perhaps that I did not click my heels when introducing myself? So Teutonic a gesture would, I'm sure, be frowned upon in the state of affairs we now live in. _Autres temps, autres moeurs._ I try to adapt. I'm generally called Rudi.'
I felt greatly offended by this self-assertive harangue. 'If you worked for the Reichspropagandaministerium, you must be a member of the Nazi Party,' I said accusingly.
'How could I deny it? My file and party number will be among the others discovered on some country roadside by the Americans. But I have convinced Dr Greenparish that I am harmless. What a charming fellow he is! Most cultured. When I learned I was to be interrogated, I expected to be confronted with a beef-faced man smoking a stinking pipe, with his riding-crop and revolver on the table, the sort who would shoot a dozen Indian natives before breakfast. These national stereotypes! Well, they're the fault of us propagandists, I admit. But propaganda as a weapon of war has at least the virtue that it has killed nobody yet.'
He offered me his own packet of Lucky Strike, a gesture in the circumstances of nonchalant ostentation. I have never been able to hate anybody for long, even Lamartine and Archie. I began to be amused by Rudi. He was probably a deserter, perhaps a crook, disguising himself in an elaborate but transparent garment of respectability. 'What are you doing in Wuppertal?' I asked in a less unfriendly tone.
'I escaped from under the very moustaches of Josef Stalin. My home is in Schцnebeck on the river Elbe, which unfortunately is in the Russian Zone. My family is extremely well known there.'
I noticed Greenparish talking animatedly in German to an elderly couple with a well-scrubbed looking, pink checked, plump daughter of thirty or so, blonde hair in long girlish plaits down her back. He was providing Wuppertal with its first evening party of completely unafraid conversation since the advent of Hitler. But the others were not chattering about the intellectual treat in store, rather about food, cold, queues, transport and poverty, like everyone else.
'Would you perform for me an act of mercy?' Rudi asked unexpectedly. I noticed he smelt of perfume. I supposed Germany was flooded with it after the fall of France. 'It is to save the life of a sick child.'
'Can't you get hold of a doctor? Things haven't broken down to that extent in Germany.'
The greatest doctor in the world could do nothing. She is the little daughter of an old friend of my family's, who lives out in Beyenberg.' That was the eastern district of Wuppertal, where Jeff had taken Gerda and myself in the Cord for cakes and cognac that bright Sunday afternoon.