‘He was just doing his job.’
‘He enjoys his work too much,’ Joe said.
But soon after that we relapsed into silence, each of us absorbed by the unfamiliar scenery of northern Germany.
The sights we saw have since blended into a few memorable images. A lot of the landscape we passed through was forested, a conspicuous change from the vistas of flat farmland we had seen in Belgium and Holland. Although we went through several industrial towns - Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, all of them shrouded in a thin, bitter-smelling haze that made our eyes sting - there was not enough variety to provide detailed memories. I was keeping a journal as we went along but of that journey I recorded only a couple of short paragraphs. Most of what I remember was a general sense of being in Germany, the place that was always being talked about in those days, and with it the vague sense of dread that the name gave rise to. The feeling was reinforced by the hundreds and thousands of swastika flags that were flying from almost every building or wall, a glare of red and white and black. Many long banners were strung across the autobahns and from building to building across the streets of the towns and villages. They bore inspiring messages, perhaps spontaneously created, but because of the insistent tone more likely to be the product of the party. There were slogans about the Saar, about the Rhineland, about the Versailles Treaty, about Ausland Germans - one banner which we saw many times in different places declared: ‘[WE ARE PLEDGED TO BLIND OBEDIENCE!].’ There were few commercial advertisements on display anywhere and certainly there were no messages about the Olympic Games.
We drove and drove, trying to conserve our physical energy for the training and events which lay ahead, but inevitably, by the time we were approaching the environs of Berlin, we were done in. Joe wanted to find the British team headquarters straight away, to let them know we had arrived, but I was tired of driving, tired of being in the van. I simply wanted to find the house of the family friends with whom we had arranged to stay. We argued listlessly about it for a while. Joe pointed out that we had arrived in the city before noon, that there were many hours of daylight left. I agreed that we should resume training as soon as possible, get our muscles back into competitive trim, but I stubbornly insisted that what I wanted to do was rest. In the end, we came to a sort of compromise. We located the British team headquarters, then went from there to the stretch of water near the Olympic Village at Grunewald, where sculling and rowing teams were to train. We unloaded our two shells and our oars into the boathouse that had been allocated to us. Next we drove to our friends’ apartment, in Charlottenburg, a western suburb of Berlin. We did no training that first day we arrived.
5
Five years later, in the early summer of 1941, I was in hospital in rural Warwickshire. My plane, Wellington A-Able, had crashed into the North Sea about thirty miles from the English coast, somewhere off Bridlington. Only one other crew member was still on the aircraft with me when it went down: Sam Levy, the navigator, who had been hit in the head and leg by shrapnel. Sam and I managed somehow to scramble into an inflatable dinghy and we were picked up by a rescue boat many hours later.
I was in a fog of amnesia. I remembered almost nothing of even the bare outline I have described. Moments only of it remained, glimpsed in flashes, like fragments of a terrible dream.
I came slowly back to full consciousness, confused by what was going on in my mind, a conflict of violent images and what I could see around me in the physical world. I was in a bed, suffering intense pain, there were strangers coming and going, inexplicable actions were being performed on my body, bottles and trays were clattering, I experienced a sensation of helpless motion as I was wheeled somewhere on a trolley.
In my mind I saw or heard or remembered the deafening sound of the engines, brilliant flashes of light in the dark sky around us, a loud bang that was repeated whenever I moved my head, a shock of cold as the windscreen in front of my face was shattered by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel, voices on the intercom, the huge and terrifying surge of the sea, the cold, the terror.
I gradually emerged from the confusion, starting to make sense of what I saw around me.
I realized I was in a hospital, I remembered being on the plane, I knew other men had been with me. My legs hurt, my chest hurt, I was incapable of moving my left hand. I was taken from the bed, placed in a chair, returned to the bed. Medical staff came and went. I saw my mother’s face, but the next time I opened my eyes she had gone again. I knew I was critically ill.
I tried getting answers about my illness from the staff, but as I slowly improved I realized that they would not give answers unless I asked questions. Before I could do that, I should have to formulate the enquiry in my mind. Before even that, I should have to be clear in my own mind what it was I wanted to know.
I worked backwards to find the memories I needed, learning as I went.
6
While we were in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin we stayed in a large apartment in Goethestrasse. By good chance it was not far from either the Olympic Stadium or the training area at Grunewald. The apartment was owned by close friends of my mother’s family: Doktor Friedrich Sattmann, his wife Hanna and their daughter Birgit. They lived on the second floor of a huge, solidly constructed building which on one side looked down on the wide, tree-lined street where trams ran to and fro all day and much of the night, and on the other over an area of open parkland with many trees. Joe and I were given a room to ourselves at the back. We had a balcony where we could sit and enjoy coffee and cakes with the family. It was a home full of music: all three of the family played instruments. Frau Sattmann was an accomplished pianist, her husband played the bassoon. Seventeen-year-old Birgit was a violinist, studying under Herr Professor Alexander Weibl, at the Berliner Konservatorium. Everything, they told us, had been banned - they could not even go to friends’ houses to play in their small ensemble, so they played together at home.
Herr Doktor Sattmann and his wife treated us with great generosity throughout our stay, but we were left in no doubt that the doctor’s medical practice was no longer prospering. He said nothing about it to us, but every morning that we were staying in his apartment he announced formally that he was leaving to attend to his patients, then he would return only an hour or so later, reporting that only one or maybe two patients had required his services.
Frau Sattmann explained that it was no longer possible for her to continue to work at the publishing house where she had been a translator. Birgit, who was in only her first year of study at the Konservatorium, told us that she had become desperate to leave the country. I was dazzled by Birgit from the moment I set eyes on her: she was dark-haired and pretty and her face became illuminated when she smiled. She stayed shyly away from Joe and me.
Every evening Frau Sattmann would prepare a meal for Joe and myself, but the portions were small and the quality of the food was poor. Nothing was explained or described.
It was during our days in Berlin that I first began to feel the emerging differences between Joe and myself that were to have such a lasting impact on us both. When we were not training together I hardly ever saw him. While I maintained a fitness regime, he went on long solitary walks around Berlin, claiming it was for exercise, but often in the evenings I would hear him discussing what he had seen and the whole area of politics with Doktor Sattmann. I tried to join in, but in truth I was not all that interested, constantly thinking ahead to our race. I began to feel that Joe was not pulling his weight, that our existence as a team was in jeopardy.