Aunt Lisl comes to stay

He was the sole occupant, his left hand grasping the remains of a pint that was resting on a small copper-topped table, its polished surface weakly reflecting the evening sun through a puddle of what looked like blood, but was probably only Campari. The key was placed carefully away from these dregs, lying half concealed by his leather driving gloves. Nobody wears them any more, but in the early sixties they were still an accessory to be admired, an indication of a certain wealth, or at least of breeding, in the owner.

I had followed his instructions to the letter, turning left off the A3 at the Malden roundabout, and heading south towards Worcester Park. His directions had been accurate, The Plough coming into view on the right almost immediately after I had passed under the railway bridge. I had pulled across the traffic into the car park and rushed into the bar. Mine host had looked up expectantly, but I had already seen what had to be the Snug; a small room half-hidden behind the fireplace. Progress has since replaced it by a modern extension of the restaurant, but in those days it was a lovingly preserved adjunct to the old building, roughly built from local stone, with two tiny windows and ancient wooden bench seats, now comfortably covered with deep red cushions.

He motioned me to the chair facing him, one of a pair of chintz covered armchairs set back-to-back in the middle of the tiny room, between them occupying most of the restricted floor-space. I shook my head and reached for the key, dropping the envelope into his lap as I did so. He grasped my wrist and nodded more incisively towards the chair. I surrendered and sat anxiously on the edge of the seat as he riffled through the banknotes that represented nearly all of my family’s joint savings until, appearing satisfied, he slid the envelope and its contents into his inside jacket pocket.

“Fair enough,” he announced, “are you sure you know what to do?”

I assured him that the instructions were etched into my brain, but he ran through them again, pausing frequently to check my understanding of each stage. He ended with a swift “Good luck – I’m sorry about the money, but these things are expensive.”  My lips curled involuntarily at the insincere platitude, but I said nothing as I grabbed the key and left the Snug.   I recomposed my features as best I could into something approaching insouciance, giving the barman a cheerful wave of acknowledgement as I hurried back to the car park.

Croydon would have been closer, but it had finally closed two years earlier, so it had to be Heathrow. Even through the evening traffic it only took about 30 minutes. It’s amazing in retrospect how little traffic there was in those days. The flight was uneventful, but boring. No multi-media entertainment package, just a few high-fashion magazines in a rack and, somewhat worryingly, a three-year-old copy of a newspaper carrying a headline about the Munich air disaster, which had ended the lives of so many of the Manchester United football team. The authorities were still blaming Captain Thain at that time, you may recall; he was not exonerated until much later.

The descent into Tempelhof brought a lump to my throat. I had been little more than a toddler when we left, but I had clear memories of playing in the ruins and of my parents working day and night to re-establish something better than a shadow of their life before National Socialism. Thank heavens for an extended family and the generous, if unexpected, offer of a job and accommodation in England. I checked into a small hotel two streets behind the Kurfürstendamm and went straight to my room. Whether I was simply exhausted by the travel or, more likely, apprehensive of the events of the morrow, the effect was the same: I collapsed into bed and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

At seven the next morning I was already showered, dressed and breakfasted. Unable to wait any longer, I jumped into the first taxi to appear, asking for the Kapernaum-Kirche in the French sector. The driver was highly amused by my immature German, but he was good enough to offer me advice on how to modify my speech to sound more like an adult, at the same time complimenting me on my Berlin accent – I had no idea then that German could be spoken any other way.   We had hardly spoken German since we left; it was not exactly popular in post-war England.

Although it was still early, there were military vehicles everywhere, it seemed, from all of the occupying nations, rushing about importantly. My new ‘uncle’ the taxi driver pointed out two Soviet Officers in a GAZ-69, immaculately attired in their pressed uniforms and tall caps, sitting stiff-backed behind their driver in his scruffy, ill-fitting fatigues. “Never, ever upset them, whichever sector you’re in. If they say jump, ask how high. They are all absolute s—–n.”   My grasp on grown-up German was increasing by leaps and bounds.

He dropped me outside the Church, giving me a final avuncular exhortation as I paid the fare, “Don’t wander into the East by mistake – there are places near here where the wall isn’t completely finished yet. You may get in, but you’ll never get back out again.” I grinned nervously to myself as he drove away; if only he knew.

The recently rebuilt church was empty. It was the work of a moment to locate the package taped inside Eva Limberg’s impressive new lectern and to re-emerge onto the street. I checked that all the identity papers and the air tickets were present, read the covering note, discarded it down the nearest drain and began the longish walk to the Bernauer Straße.   So far, so good.  I had plenty of time. With twenty minutes to spare I found the number I was looking for on the north side of the street and slipped inside.

There was no lighting in the derelict office building other than that emitted by my small torch, so it took care and a good few minutes to find the caretaker’s broom cupboard in the sub-basement. I eased the key from its hiding place in my belt and slid it into the lock. It turned rather stiffly, but I heard the mechanism click and pulled the door towards me. As I’d been warned, the roughly hewn steps to the Schönholzer tunnel dropped precipitously into the gloom. There was a strong musty smell and the sound of dripping water.   The secret path from the East did not survive for long after my visit, but at that time it had not yet flooded completely.

It can only have been ten minutes before I heard the sound of footsteps, although in my anxious state it seemed like an hour, or even longer. I saw a dark shape appear in the depths and then my dimly but fondly remembered Aunt Lisl was running at full speed up the last steps to throw herself into my arms, talking nineteen to the dozen in a confusing mixture of German, Polish, English and French. She was fluent in all four, when she bothered to stick to a single tongue for longer than a few seconds, but incomprehensible in any of them when she was excited.

“Little Helmut, wunderbar!   Jak się masz?   But tu n’es pas petit any more … and probably you are no longer called Helmut, nicht wahr?”

In my juvenile memories she had been a tall and imposing woman, but it must have been her personality rather than her stature that had registered with me as a child, for in reality she was barely over five feet tall – and she was sopping wet to boot.   I disengaged gently from her soggy embrace and handed her the bundle of documents. “Please remember to speak nothing but English until we’re airborne. You’re Elizabeth Hardcastle from Thornton Heath – but you’re still my favouite Aunt.”

While she struggled out of her wet clothes and gumboots, donning an overcoat from her holdall, and a dry pair of shoes extracted from its pockets, I closed and locked the door to the fake cupboard, carefully replacing the industrial sized broom and shovel that had been propped against it.

We climbed to the ground floor and peered cautiously out; miraculously there was nothing suspicious or worrying in the sparsely populated street, depressingly overlooked by the bricked up windows of the abandoned buildings on the south side, so we descended the steps and walked as calmly as we could down Bernauer Straße until we found a taxi.  The instant we shut the door of the cab our excitement could no longer be contained. We burst out laughing, terrifying the driver who must have thought that he had collected a couple of escaped crazies. But my Aunt explained that we were British, which seemed to be all that was needed to reassure him.

Our journey to the boarding lounge at Tempelhof was a happy anticlimax; no police, no military, no men in dark suits asking awkward questions.   We were waved through emigration with only a cursory examination of our passports.   We took off two hours later, and as we banked steeply over the city during our full power climb out, my Aunt looked down and gestured at the now distant suburb.

Taking great care to constrain herself to English she exclaimed, “It is very strange to see one’s home disappearing into the distance, knowing one may never return. Bye-bye Wedding, I wonder how you’ll survive without me?   Can we get a drink, do you think?”

Author: Bearsy

A Queensland Bear with attitude View all posts by Bearsy