Night Journey

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

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  Contents

  Winston Graham

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Winston Graham

  Night Journey

  Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE was an English novelist, best known for the series of historical novels about the Poldarks. Graham was born in Manchester in 1908, but moved to Perranporth, Cornwall when he was seventeen. His first novel, The House with the Stained Glass Windows was published in 1933. His first ‘Poldark’ novel, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945, and was followed by eleven further titles, the last of which, Bella Poldark, came out in 2002. The novels were set in Cornwall, especially in and around Perranporth, where Graham spent much of his life, and were made into a BBC television series in the 1970s. It was so successful that vicars moved or cancelled church services rather than try to hold them when Poldark was showing.

  Aside from the Poldark series, Graham’s most successful work was Marnie, a thriller which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1964. Hitchcock had originally hoped that Grace Kelly would return to films to play the lead and she had agreed in principle, but the plan failed when the principality of Monaco realised that the heroine was a thief and sexually repressed. The leads were eventually taken by Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. Five of Graham’s other books were filmed, including The Walking Stick, Night Without Stars and Take My Life. Graham wrote a history of the Spanish Armadas and an historical novel, The Grove of Eagles, based in that period. He was also an accomplished writer of suspense novels. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Private Man, was published by Macmillan in 2003. He had completed work on it just weeks before he died. Graham was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1983 was honoured with the OBE.

  Chapter One

  It was a shock when my sister came to tell me that the police had called. She was upset by it too; but then for the last few years the police of any country had had that effect on Nina. It wasn’t pleasant to see that anxious furtive look on her face again. I resented the fact that she should have to feel anxious even here.

  I took off my gloves, threw them on the slab, followed her into the living-room.

  Sergeant Evans, whom I know of old. I thought he looked in some way more official than when he had last called about two weeks ago. Not good, that.

  “Well, Sergeant,” I said rather pettishly. “Quite a familiar visitor, eh? What this time? More regulations? Sit down. You can drink a cup of coffee?”

  “Thank you, no, sir.” He stood by the window, feet firmly apart, taking authority from his native ground. The suns failing obliquely, threw across the room a shadow of him that was not a precise silhouette. “I’m sorry to say that they want you at the police station again.”

  I looked at my watch. “Well, it’s inconvenient. I’m working, you know. Could I call round this evening?”

  “Well, I’m afraid not, sir. I was told that they wasted to see you right away, sir. And to bring a small suitcase with a few personal belongings.”

  Outside, the starlings were twittering.

  “Robert,” Nina said, “ they’re going to——

  “Does this mean——”

  “I honestly don’t know, sir.” Sergeant Evans looked out at the dahlias to disclaim responsibility. “Maybe it’ll only be for to-night. Anyway, there it is, I’m afraid.”

  It was impossible to understand what this new development could mean. Surely they could not intend to reverse their previous decision—and so soon.

  “Whose instructions?” I said angrily.

  “I don’t know, Dr Mencken. Someone up above somewhere. That’s all I can tell you.”

  I shrugged, and then tried not to shrug, feeling that the over-expressive gesture was not English.

  “There’s nothing more to be said, then, is there? Give me five minutes to put a few things together. Make coffee for the sergeant, Nina.”

  But instead she followed me into the barn that I had laboriously converted into a laboratory.

  “Robert, let me come with you this time. It may help in some way. And besides, I want to be there!”

  “It wouldn’t be any use at all, mein lieber. Anyway, they would not let you come. Don’t worry. I shall be home tomorrow. Think it out for yourself! What point would there be in releasing me only a month ago and now interning me afresh?”

  “I’m not so sure,” Nina said. “You can never be sure what people will do in war-time—even people who have never been invaded for 900 years.”

  I turned out the gas-jet and took the tubes from the retort. “Precautions have to be taken. After what happened in Norway and other countries in May, can you wonder that everyone is on edge? This is another routine inquiry. I’ll be home to lunch to-morrow.”

  But in fact I was not so confident as I sounded; not at all sure of myself as I sat beside Sergeant Evans in his two-seater coupé and drove with him that bright early September afternoon of 1940 to the police station two miles away in Reading. All that Nina said was true: you could not depend on even reasonable people in war-time. Officialdom and red-tape are always needlessly unfeeling because they interpret a set of rules according to the book and not in terms of the individual. There were many instances of this in my previous internment.

  I am glad no one saw me enter the police station for I am still sensitive about these things. It is perhaps a middle-European attitude of mind. Ten minutes in a bare little room with war regulations posted on the wall, and then Sergeant Evans said that Inspector Donnington would see me.

  A bald, rosy-cheeked man was behind the desk in the inner office. I had not met him before.

  “Sit down, Dr Mencken, I’ll not keep you waiting a minute.” He went on writing until a constable came in with a file holding together some official buff-coloured forms, four photographs and two handwritten reports. When we were alone again he studied these. I felt very uneasy. Once you have been tried and found guilty, even if it is only the guilt of being the wrong nationality, the sensation sticks.

  Inspector Donnington was now studying one of the photographs and comparing it with the original sitting opposite him. I tried to look as if this was no business of mine.

  “I’ll just run over the main facts of your case, Dr Mencken, to see if we have them accurately. I’m sorry to have had to bring you in again.”

  “Gar nicht,” I said under my breath.

  “Your name is Robert Gustav Mencken?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are an Austrian subject, born at St Pöiten, near Vienna, of an Austrian father and an English mother. You are thirty-one years old and a doctor of chemistry. Th
is is an Austrian degree?”

  “That one is, yes. The University of Vienna.”

  “You also, I understand, have British degrees?”

  “I was made a doctor of science at London University last year. And I am a Fellow of the Institute of Chemists.”

  “You first came to England in June, two years ago?”

  “I came here to settle then. I had been over on holidays before. Three vacations.”

  “You are unmarried and have no relatives except your sister with whom you live. Is that correct?”

  “I have no very near relatives, true. My mother died last year. But her brother—my uncle—lives in Leeds. My father died in 1938 and a few of his relatives are in Vienna still.”

  “Your father was in Austria when he died?”

  “Yes, in a concentration camp.”

  Inspector Donnington looked up and coughed. He turned the paper over. “Was he of Jewish blood?”

  “No. It was his misfortune to have served as Minister of the Interior in one of the early Social Democrat Governments.”

  “I see … You have no more reason to love Hitler than we have, then. I understand that.”

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly.

  “To return to your own case, Dr. Mencken, I see from these reports that you were able to leave Austria in June 1938, with the help of the Society of Friends. You lived in London for a year and then rented the house where you now live. On the outbreak of war you—er—came before a tribunal under the chairmanship of Mr O’Casey and were granted a ‘ C’ certificate exempting you from the restrictions applying to enemy aliens. In May of this year … I don’t quite follow clearly what happened in May of this year.”

  “After Holland and places, after what happened there, the Government set up Regional Advisory Committees to re-examine all the cases. But you will know that, naturally. I beg your pardon. Well, I was summoned before them and re-examined and again given a ‘C’ certificate. But only a week after that, when the fifth columnist scare was at its height, I was arrested without notice and sent to Prisoners of War Internment Camp No. 3. I was there two weeks before being drafted up to Liverpool to be sent overseas. But by then the. Council of Austrians in Great Britain had appealed on my behalf and I was returned to Wercester.”

  “Yes, I understand that. And then in early August it was finally decided to release you again becuase you were doing work of national importance, eh?”

  I listened to the drone of Hurricanes overhead.

  “Since then,” I said, “I have thought all my troubles were over, but this seems to have been an optimistic view.”

  Donnington hunched his shoulders until his neck disappeared. “Well, it’s like this, doctor. The Home Office, as you may know, has taken over the camps and the question of aliens in general; but when it comes to the pinch the War Office still has the last say. And I don’t mind telling you that at the moment it must have. News has come through that we are to expect an invasion any day—almost certainly within the next ten. So the military have issued orders for the temporary re-internment of any aliens who have been set at large. I’m sorry to have to do this, but those are my orders.”

  I felt frozen, unable to think it out.

  “May I be allowed to write to my sister this time?”

  “Oh, yes, you’ll find a big improvement in conditions generally in the camps. Last time it was emergency measures for everyone. And I don’t—and if nothing too bad happens, I don’t suppose they’ll keep you much after the end of September. It’s got to come—the invasion, if it comes at all this year—has got to come within the next three weeks.” Inspector Donnington rose.

  “And my work?” I said, in exasperation. “It has already been delayed by months, and I assure you it’s not useless.”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid it’ll have to wait for your release, sir. We can’t very well provide you with a laboratory in the camp, can we? But if it’s papers you want—if it’s anything we can do in the camp—I’ll be very happy to pass on instructions to your sister. We’ll see that anything she sends will reach yon.”

  “I’m obliged.” I stared at the bright shafts of sunlight on the papers on his desk. They even lit up my photograph, the one taken by the Viennese security police, in April 1938. “I question if they will really risk the invasion while you—while we—still have some control of the air.”

  “That we don’t know. You will have seen that the best predictions date it for the day after to-morrow.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I should be more use with a rife—if you have one to spare—than locked away in an internment camp.”

  He looked at me narrowly

  “I daresay you would. But I’m afraid this is a case where ninety-nine innocent people have to suffer because of the odd black sheep who may be among them.”

  Chapter Two

  So much has happened since then that it is quite hard to remember just what those early days were like. The danger of invasion was acute; later it became chronic and therefore in a sense a commonplace. So memories are overlaid and one tends to forget the apprehension and qui vive of a whole nation.

  Yet for me as a part-alien, even as a part-pacifist, there had been a curious exhilaration in the thought. One might die. But one might live gloriously. Whatever happened there would be no more shame. So I took my first internment with great bitterness. It seemed like a sudden stab in the back—the uttermost insult.

  Of course I should say at once that physical conditions had not been too bad even in May. They were Utopian compared with the treatment we should have received in the countries of our various origins. It was the psychological shock that hurt, the incredible moral insult of being herded with men of pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist sympathies. In the matter of a few hours there were arguments, quarrels, open fights amongst us: factions and cliques, bitter enmities grew overnight. An old Italian journalist who occupied the bunk next to mine said one day:

  “Patience, my boy, that is what is needed for us all now. We of our type who have suffered and striven for what I suppose we can, without a sneer, still call democracy … who have become penniless and lonely and outcast … who have come to live in one of the very few lands—the last in Europe, almost—which still stand for the things we hold.… We feel betrayed because the people here seem, in the final crisis, to have turned against us.… But patience, it was bound to happen after all the other betrayals. A little time and we shall be free again.”

  I grew very much to admire old Gentile Farino. Unfortunately his freedom came earlier than it should have done, for he was transported to Canada on the Arandora Star, and when she was torpedoed he went down with her.

  But this time … this time I had no cause at all to complain of being herded with Nazi sympathisers. I had no cause to complain of being herded with anyone, because I was kept only one night in Worcester and then was transferred to a quiet place near Hereford where the buildings were hardly finished and the number housed was so few we could have had a hut each to ourselves. All the same I fretted and fumed at the waste of time, the boredom, the inability of officialdom to see into my brain and discover that it held no ambition more passionately than the defeat of the dictators. I prayed for rain with the ardour of a farmer in a drought, because it was obvious that the danger of invasion had to be considered imminent while the weather held. But each day was as bright as the last. My sister wrote that she had again appealed to the Council of Austrians and was determined to make a public fuss even if they did not. I wrote back to tell her to do nothing of the sort, since the probable reaction of a government already overburdened with work would be to intern her as well.

  Six days went, and then I was called out one morning and conducted by a sentry to a fine old Queen Anne house I had glimpsed before, set among beeches and not yet quite surrounded by Nissen huts. The house was empty, but in an ante-room off the panelled hall another interviewer was waiting.

  Star and crown of a lieutenant-colonel; a slender, b
lue-eyed soldier with a limp and hair thinning and greying. Air of authority so tactfully concealed that you imagined he hardly ever had to exercise it. I knew his type, the introspective man of action that the British Army—and the Austrian Army—sometimes throws up. The direct opposite of the Blimp, and rarer, but just as much a product of the same society.

  “Good morning. Do sit down, Dr Mencken. Whisky and soda?”

  “Thank you.” Somewhat surprised at this. “ But weak please. I seldom drink.”

  “That’s all to the good, Isn’t it,” he said, obscurely. “ Lovely house this; maybe you’ve seen over it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you notice that overmantel in the hall? Grinling Gibbons or his school. Must have been brought here, as the honse isn’t old enough.”

  “I will look as I go out.”

  “Good to be able to live in a place like this. Doubt if anyone will be able to afford to after the war.”

  “So long as there is an ‘after’.”

  “Yes. Yes.” He handed me a glass and now limped over to an armchair opposite me. “I expect you’re feeling sore about your re-internment, aren’t yon?”

  I smiled bleakly. “ Not happy, shall we say.”

  “That’s diplomatic anyway.… You know, the military have had to stand up to quite a few brick-bats over this internment question, Dr Mencken. Questions in Parliament concerning the limitations of the military mind and what happens when the War Office is in full cry. Oh, there’s some truth in it, I won’t deny. But I’d like you to know that the wholesale internment which took place in May was only finally decided on in the interests of the aliens themselves.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s an old story, that the refugee alien is not always a free agent. From 1935 to 1938 hundrerds of men and women were granted permission to leave Germany and enter France and then told privately before they left that their permits were not in order. They were then kept in touch with the Fatherland under constant threat of being exposed and forced to return.” The colonel sipped his whisky. “And any number of refugees of unimpeachable character and long records of oppression in their own country have betrayed the country that accepted them because of fear for their relatives. If you do not obey the commands of the Führer your mother or your brother or your sister or your wife will disappear into Auschwitz. Many cases have come to our notice in the last few months alone.”