Winter of the World

The house was better inside than out. Ada showed him up to the drawing room, where there were flowers in a glass tumbler on the piano. A brightly patterned blanket had been thrown over the sofa, no doubt to hide holes in the upholstery. The newspapers in the windows let in a surprising amount of light.

A two-year-old boy walked into the room and inspected him with frank curiosity. He was dressed in clothes that were evidently homemade, and he had an Oriental look. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘My name is Lloyd. Who are you?’

‘Walli,’ he said. He ran out again, and Lloyd heard him say to someone outside: ‘That man talks funny!’

So much for my German accent, Lloyd thought.

Then he heard the voice of a middle-aged woman. ‘Don’t make such remarks! It’s impolite.’

‘Sorry, Grandma.’

Next moment Maud walked in.

Her appearance shocked Lloyd. She was in her mid-fifties, but looked seventy. Her hair was grey, her face was gaunt, and her blue silk dress was threadbare. She kissed his cheek with shrunken lips. ‘Lloyd Williams, what a joy to see you!’

She’s my aunt, Lloyd thought with a rather queer feeling. But she did not know that: Ethel had kept the secret.

Maud was followed by Carla, who was unrecognizable, and her husband. Lloyd had met Carla as a precocious eleven-year-old: now, he calculated, she was twenty-six. Although she looked half-starved – most Germans did – she was pretty, and had a confident air that surprised Lloyd. Something about the way she stood made him think she might be pregnant. He knew from Maud’s letters that Carla had married Werner, who had been a handsome charmer back in 1933 and was still the same.

They spent an hour catching up. The family had been through unimaginable horror, and said so frankly, yet Lloyd still had a sense that they were editing out the worst details. He told them about Daisy, Evie and Dave. During the conversation a teenage girl came in and asked Carla if she could go to her friend’s house.

‘This is our daughter, Rebecca,’ Carla said to Lloyd.

She was about sixteen, so Lloyd supposed she must be adopted.

‘Have you done your homework?’ Carla asked the girl.

‘I’ll do it tomorrow morning.’

‘Do it now, please,’ Carla said firmly.

‘Oh, Mother!’

‘No argument,’ said Carla. She turned back to Lloyd, and Rebecca stomped out.

They talked about the crisis. Carla was deeply involved, as a city councillor. She was pessimistic about the future of Berlin. She thought the Russians would simply starve the population until the West gave in and handed the city over to total Soviet control.

‘Let me show you something that may make you feel differently,’ Lloyd said. ‘Will you come with me in the car?’

Maud stayed behind with Walli, but Carla and Werner went with Lloyd. He told the driver to take them to Tempelhof, the airport in the American zone. When they arrived he led them to a high window from which they could look down on the runway.

There on the tarmac were a dozen C-47 Skytrain aircraft lined up nose to tail, some with the American star, some with the RAF roundel. Their cargo doors were open, and a truck stood at each one. German porters and American airmen were unloading the aircraft. There were sacks of flour, big drums of kerosene, cartons of medical supplies, and wooden crates containing thousands of bottles of milk.

While they watched, empty aircraft were taking off and more were coming in to land.

‘This is amazing,’ said Carla, her eyes glistening. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘There has never been anything like it,’ Lloyd replied.

She said: ‘But can the British and Americans keep it up?’

‘I think we have to.’

‘But for how long?’

‘As long as it takes,’ said Lloyd firmly.

And they did.

25

1949

Almost halfway through the twentieth century, on 29 August 1949, Volodya Peshkov was on the Ustyurt Plateau, east of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan. It was a stony desert in the deep south of the USSR, where nomads herded goats in much the same way as they had in Bible times. Volodya was in a military truck that bounced uncomfortably along a rough track. Dawn was breaking over a landscape of rock, sand, and low thorny bushes. A bony camel, alone beside the road, stared malevolently at the truck as it passed.

In the dim distance, Volodya saw the bomb tower, lit by a battery of spotlights.

Zoya and the other scientists had built their first nuclear bomb according to the design Volodya had got from Willi Frunze in Santa Fe. It was a plutonium device with an implosion trigger. There were other designs, but this one had worked twice before, once in New Mexico and once at Nagasaki.

So it should work today.

The test was codenamed RDS-1, but they called it First Lightning.