Arnhem

It was a brave and optimistic assertion on her part, because there were too many indications of the opposite. Her husband, who had come out of hiding when the British landed and shared her bed for one night of freedom, had reluctantly had to make himself scarce again because of the very real threat that the Germans would soon be back in control. Outside in the village, soldiers were manning a barricade they had strung across the street made of cars, household furniture and even a piano. Now, loud explosions were shaking the walls of Kate’s home, and a neighbour’s house was on fire. The wounded must have been alarmed, lying there helpless against whatever was happening around them, but there was not a word of complaint. She wanted to stay with them, but other loyalties called. ‘I must go down into the cellar, for five little ones are longing for me and trusting I’ll remain uninjured in order to protect them.’ She went to her children. Later, when the shelling subsided, she came back up. The effect of the German onslaught and the paras’ fight-back against it was clear to see, because now it was not just the ground floor that was overrun with wounded but the rest of the house as well. ‘The whole top floor is full and so are the stairs and the landing. An orderly tells me they are even lying in the attic.’ The only consolation was the gallons of English tea boiling away in the copper kettle on the kitchen stove, some of which was dispatched to the grateful family in the cellar.

That evening, she managed to get to the back door, step outside and breathe in much-needed fresh air. She was revitalized, but not for long. As she cast her eyes around, ‘I see them for the first time – the dead. Six or seven of them, perhaps more, with tousled hair over their muddy faces. They lie like forgotten bags which have fallen on the path to the kitchen.’ But still she clung on to crumbs of comfort. Monty’s boys were ‘really quite near’, she’d been told. Best of all, ‘there are still no Germans in our house!’ She read the children a bedtime story, one they knew well and which would take their minds back to better times. As always, they laughed. ‘You are very brave,’ she told them. ‘It won’t last much longer and then we shall be free.’ For a treat, each got to take a cherry from the bottle of preserved fruit, and then she put out the candle. What tomorrow would bring, she did not dare to contemplate.

On that loose and leaky defensive perimeter now establishing itself around Oosterbeek – enclosing a thumb-shaped space roughly a mile long and three quarters of a mile wide with the Lower Rhine at its base – a strong sense of mutual dependence set in. Esprit de corps was always a major part of para culture and, significantly, it survived intact when severely tested in the field. Arthur Ayers recalled how a message came to his section, holed up in the northern edge of the enclave, that food was running short at another one not far away. ‘The major immediately gave orders that half of our meagre rations should be sent to them.’ Casualties were arriving all the time, to be treated at an aid post in the cellar, as were remnants of parties who had tried to make it into Arnhem and been repulsed. But set against this was the heartening sight of more German prisoners. No wonder it was so hard to gauge how the fighting was really going and what the outcome would be. Victory still seemed perfectly feasible – indeed, likely – if you saw, as Ayers did, a large group of captured enemy soldiers being herded to the tennis courts at the Hartenstein Hotel, which were in use as a p-o-w cage. ‘The grey of their faces matched the grey of their uniforms,’ he noted, and was moved to pity. ‘Eyes were sunk deep in tired, battle-weary, dirty and war-grimed faces. They shuffled along, some reeling like drunken men. Their expressions showed the hopelessness of war when the mask is off.’