Winter of the World

‘You’re a nurse, you understand these things better than I do.’

Carla was enjoying nursing, though she still felt frustrated that she had not been allowed to train as a doctor. Now, with so many young men in the army, the attitude to female medical students had changed, and more women were going to medical school. Carla could have applied again for a scholarship – except that her family was so desperately poor that they depended on her meagre wages. Her father had no work at all, her mother gave piano lessons, and Erik sent home as much as he could afford out of his army pay. The family had not paid Ada for years.

Ada was a naturally stoical person, and by the time they got home she was getting over her upset. She went into the kitchen, put on her apron, and began to prepare dinner for the family, and the comfortable routine seemed to console her.

Carla was not having dinner. She had plans for the evening. She felt she was abandoning Ada to her sadness, and she was a bit guilty; but not guilty enough to sacrifice her night out.

She put on a knee-length tennis dress she had made herself by shortening the frayed hem of an old frock of her mother’s. She was not going to play tennis, she was going to dance, and her aim was to look American. She put on lipstick and face powder, and combed out her hair in defiance of the government’s preference for braids.

The mirror showed her a modern girl with a pretty face and a defiant air. She knew that her confidence and self-possession put a lot of boys off her. Sometimes she wished she could be seductive as well as capable, a trick her mother had always been able to pull off; but it was not in her nature. She had long ago given up trying to be winsome: it just made her feel silly. Boys had to accept her as she was.

Some boys were scared of her, but others were attracted, and at parties she often ended up with a small cluster of admirers. She, in turn, liked boys, especially when they forgot about trying to impress people and started to talk normally. Her favourites were the ones who made her laugh. So far she had not had a serious boyfriend, though she had kissed quite a few.

To complete her outfit she put on a striped blazer she had bought from a second-hand clothing cart. She knew her parents would disapprove of her appearance, and try to make her change, saying it was dangerous to defy the Nazis’ prejudices. So she needed to get out of the house without seeing them. It should be easy enough. Mother was giving a piano lesson: Carla could hear the painfully hesitant playing of her pupil. Father would be reading the newspaper in the same room, for they could not afford to heat more than one room of the house. Erik was away with the army, though he was now stationed near Berlin and due home on leave shortly.

She covered up with a conventional raincoat and put her white shoes in her pocket.

She went down to the hall, opened the front door, shouted: ‘Goodbye, back soon!’ and hurried out.

She met Frieda at the Friedrich Strasse station. She was dressed similarly with a stripey dress under a plain tan coat, her hair hanging loose; the main difference being that Frieda’s clothes were new and expensive. On the platform, two boys in Hitler Youth outfits stared at them with a mixture of disapproval and desire.

They got off the train in the northern suburb of Wedding, a working-class district that had once been a left-wing stronghold. They headed for the Pharus Hall, where in the past Communists had held their conferences. Now there was no political activity at all, of course. Nevertheless, the building had become the centre of the movement called Swing Kids.

Kids of between fifteen and twenty-five were already gathering in the streets around the hall. Swing boys wore check jackets and carried umbrellas, to look English. They let their hair grow long to show their contempt for the military. Swing girls had heavy make-up and American sports clothes. They all thought the Hitler Youth were stupid and boring, with their folk music and community dances.

Carla thought it was ironic. When she was little she had been teased by the other kids and called a foreigner because her mother was English: now the same children, a little older, thought English was the fashionable thing to be.

Carla and Frieda went into the hall. There was a conventional, innocent youth club there, with girls in pleated skirts and boys in short trousers playing table tennis and drinking sticky orange cordial. But the action was in the side rooms.

Frieda quickly led Carla to a large storeroom with stacked chairs around the walls. There her brother, Werner, had plugged in a record player. Fifty or sixty boys and girls were dancing the jitterbug jive. Carla recognized the tune that was playing: ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me.’ She and Frieda started to dance.