A Song for Summer

They were both silent, remembering Ellen driving off with Marek; the joy on her face--the absolute happiness that transformed everything about her--and her return after the fire.

"Do you think he's dead?"'

Sophie shrugged. "I almost wish he was; she wouldn't be so hurt that way. Anyway, whether he's dead or not doesn't make any difference."

"No."

Ellen had explained to them carefully what had happened at Pettelsdorf and why she would not be seeing Marek again. She had stayed on for the autumn term, the last term at Hallendorf, and packed up the children's trunks and helped to clear the building. She had taken the tortoise to Lieselotte's house and then everyone left. Two months later, Hitler had marched into Vienna and been greeted by jubilant and cheering crowds. Finis Austria ...

"No storks have come yet," Liseselotte had written that spring and the following spring--and then she became "the enemy" and could write no more.

"I suppose I'd better go and congratulate her," said Leon now. "I'll come round on Sunday."

But on Sunday the inhabitants of Gowan Terrace, having baked an egg-free cake in his honour, waited in vain, and when they phoned him, the telephone rang in an empty house.

The wedding was planned for December, but long before then the poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia.

Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning--and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those "enemy aliens" who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the F@uhrer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time.

Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling.

Leon happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age, packed his current film scenario--and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.

The views of the landladies evicted from their villas--from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven--are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates.

Facing the sea but unable

to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused "enemy aliens" arrived--Nobel

Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.

Although it was obvious to even the thickest British tommy that Hitler, if he had been relying on these men for spies, would have little hope of winning the war, the net which produced such a strange catch did just occasionally dredge up a genuine Nazi. When this happened, the results were unfortunate.

Immolated in boarding houses with at least a dozen Jews whose suffering at the hands of the Nazis had been unspeakable, a man polishing his boots and saying that Hitler would soon overrun Britain did not have a happy life. He was refused his rations, ostracised, the blankets stolen from his bed. Most of them capitulated and learnt to hold their tongues, but one of them, a handsome blond young man called Erich Unterhausen, continued each morning to polish his boots, give the Nazi salute and say "Heil Hitler!"

At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia.

He was not hurt, only bruised, which was a pity, but the news, spreading quickly through the camp, was regarded by the inmates as the first glimmer of light since the Fall of France.