Winter of the World

A moment later the door opened again and two people looked out. They might have been caricatures of a British officer and his wife: he in his mess kit with a black bow tie, she in a long dress and pearls.

‘Good evening,’ Maud said. ‘I’m frightfully sorry to disturb your party.’

They stared at her, astonished to be spoken to that way by a woman in rags.

Maud went on: ‘I just thought you should see what you’re doing to these wretched people outside.’

The couple looked at the crowd.

Maud said: ‘You might draw the curtains, for pity’s sake.’

After a moment the woman said: ‘Oh, dear, George, have we been terribly unkind?’

‘Unintentionally, perhaps,’ the man said gruffly.

‘Could we possibly make amends by sending some food out to them?’

‘Yes,’ Maud said quickly. ‘That would be a kindness as well as an apology.’

The officer looked dubious. It was probably against some kind of regulation to give canapés to starving Germans.

The woman pleaded: ‘George, darling, may we?’

‘Oh, very well,’ said her husband.

The woman turned back to Maud. ‘Thank you for alerting us. We really didn’t mean to do this.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Maud said, and she retreated down the path.

A few minutes later, guests began to emerge from the house with plates of sandwiches and cakes, which they offered to the starving crowd. Carla grinned. Her mother’s impudence had paid off. She took a large piece of fruit cake, which she wolfed in a few starved bites. It contained more sugar than she had eaten in the past six months.

The curtains were drawn, the guests returned to the house, and the crowd dispersed. Maud and Ada grasped the handles of the cart and recommenced pushing it home. ‘Well done, Mother,’ said Carla. ‘A carton of Gitanes and a free meal, all in one afternoon!’

Apart from the Soviets, few of the occupying soldiers were cruel to Germans, Carla reflected. She found it surprising. American GIs gave out chocolate bars. Even the French, whose own children had gone hungry under German occupation, often showed kindness. After all the misery we Germans have inflicted on our neighbours, Carla thought, it’s astonishing they don’t hate us more. On the other hand, what with the Nazis, the Red Army and the air raids, perhaps they think we’ve been punished enough.

It was late when they got home. They left the cart with the neighbours who had loaned it, giving them half a pack of Gitanes as payment. They entered their house, which was luckily still intact. There was no glass in most of the windows, and the stonework was pocked with craters, but the place had not suffered structural damage, and it still kept the weather out.

All the same, the four women now lived in the kitchen, sleeping there on mattresses they dragged in from the hall at night. It was hard enough to warm that one room, and they certainly did not have fuel to heat the rest of the house. The kitchen stove had burned coal in the old days, but that was now virtually unobtainable. However, they had found the stove would burn many other things: books, newspapers, broken furniture, even net curtains.

They slept in pairs, Carla with Rebecca and Maud with Ada. Rebecca often cried herself to sleep in Carla’s arms, as she had the night after her parents were killed.

The long walk had exhausted Carla, and she immediately lay down. Ada built up the fire in the stove with old news magazines Rebecca had brought down from the attic. Maud added water to the remains of the lunchtime bean soup and reheated it for their supper.

Sitting up to drink her soup, Carla suffered a sharp abdominal pain. This was not a result of pushing the handcart, she realized. It was something else. She checked the date and counted back to the date of the liberation of the Jewish Hospital.

‘Mother,’ she said fearfully, ‘I think the baby’s coming.’

‘It’s too soon!’ Maud said.

‘I’m thirty-six weeks pregnant, and I’m getting cramps.’

‘Then we’d better get ready.’

Maud went upstairs to fetch towels.

Ada brought a wooden chair from the dining room. She had a useful length of twisted steel from a bomb site that served her as a sledgehammer. She smashed the chair into manageable pieces, then built up the fire in the stove.

Carla put her hands on her distended belly. ‘You might have waited for warmer weather, Baby,’ she said.

Soon she was in too much pain to notice the cold. She had not known anything could hurt this much.

Nor that it could go on so long. She was in labour all night. Maud and Ada took turns holding her hand while she moaned and cried. Rebecca looked on, white-faced and scared.

The grey light of morning was filtering through the newspaper taped over the glassless kitchen window when at last the baby’s head emerged. Carla was overwhelmed by a feeling of relief like nothing she had ever experienced, even though the pain did not immediately cease.

After one more agonizing push, Maud took the baby from between her legs.

‘A boy,’ she said.

She blew on his face, and he opened his mouth and cried.