Arnhem

Marie-Anne’s Oosterbeek house, meanwhile, was already full of British soldiers and had been for days. When they weren’t manning the walls and windows, they were sitting on the stairs and sleeping on top of the potatoes in the cellar, alongside her and her family. They were low on supplies. ‘Some parachutes were dropped yesterday. Most fell beyond the English lines and the Germans got them. Some landed in the meadow but the boys dare not go and fetch them because the firing is too heavy.’ She had developed a real bond with the men and was worried when one of her favourites, Len the Cockney, was showing signs of exhaustion and battle fatigue. ‘The shooting over our heads is very bad and he comes down from upstairs and sits with his head in his hands. I try to distract him by showing him some photographs, and he gives me a snapshot of himself in uniform with his youngest son as a baby in his arms. Mummy makes a place for him and he lies down beside her, holding her hands very firmly. Some time later he is called back upstairs. Another soldier tells us that Len is overwrought and thinks too much about home. Len comes down again and sits beside me on the bed. He is almost asleep. I tell him to lie down and he does so, while I sit at his feet. Then another soldier comes and calls him upstairs again. He rises and goes. I never see him again.’ Later, when she asked Gerald, her other favourite, how Len was, he changed the subject.

But there was love as well as loss, affection as well as angst, in that Oosterbeek cellar, a form of bunker mentality brought on by proximity and the shared sense of danger. At twenty-one, Gerald was nearer Marie-Anne’s age, and he now sat beside her as she lay down to sleep, trying to soothe and reassure her that ‘everything will be all right.’ The whistling of shells and the din of battle continued to terrify her, and he stretched out next to her to comfort her, the young man far from home and frightened and the teenager suddenly thrust into the maelstrom of an adult world. ‘We lie talking for some time. He starts to nibble at me, so I ask him if he is hungry. He laughs and then falls asleep. At first he wakes up when the noise is very loud, then he sleeps on. He must be very tired. Suddenly he starts talking in his sleep. He starts crying and puts his arms around me. I stroke his head and he quietens down again. He wakes up and smiles at me when he sees me looking at him. We talk for a bit, but he falls asleep again. I must have slept, too, but not for long. The night seems endless.’

With their brother-and-sister intimacy, she and Gerald kept each other going, and if, in that intense atmosphere, there were some more romantic exchanges between them, then she never spoke of them. They laughed and romped around and tickled each other; when he wasn’t upstairs manning his post, they sat discussing classical music – ‘he knows everything about Mozart, Bach and Haydn.’ They shared the bed in the cellar again. ‘We both fall asleep. Then he turns round, puts his arms around me and calls, “Georgie, Georgie!” When he wakes up, he tells me that is his wife’s name. He falls back asleep with his head on my knees.’

If Marie-Anne was like a sister to the men camped out in her home, then Kate ter Horst – her house now turned into a fortress and a full-scale hospital for wounded airborne troops – was a sainted mother to the hundreds finding refuge there. She would walk the makeshift wards, the vision of an angel, minister to the sick, pray with the dying, give aid and comfort, for all of which she was one of the best-known and most admired heroes of the Arnhem story. But she also had to be a mother to her own five children, terrified by what was happening to them and their home. When the fighting around the house was at its worst, she would draw them around her to sing songs and to look through a picture book by the light of a candle. ‘We hear the shrapnel bursting and the splinters rattling against the house. Even down in the cellar, the noise is painful so I put cotton wool in baby’s ears.’ When a frightened little one announced that she wanted to go back to the nursery to sleep in her own bed, Kate had to calm her while concealing from the child the fact that her bedroom now housed a dozen bloodied and bandaged men.