Flight from Berlin (7 page)

In the final throes of the party, with the few loyal revellers-in-arms still standing, she had a memory of inventing an uproarious new dance called ‘the Avery,’ which involved making jerky, chickenlike steps, arms flapping and rear ends stuck out, in a burlesque parody of the Charleston.

Sometime in the early hours, Paul Gallico had carried her down to D deck and had found Mrs Hacker blocking the corridor to Eleanor’s cabin. The chaperone, in her bathrobe and hairnet, cocked her head as she saw them approach, relishing the moment of Eleanor’s vanquishing.

‘The cabins on this corridor are for females only,’ she said.

‘You can carry her yourself if you like,’ Gallico said. At this, Eleanor tried standing but listed towards the corridor wall.

‘Are you slithering around after me again?’ she slurred to Hacker, with a dangerous look in her eye.

‘I knew you would disobey Mr Brundage’s orders to—’

‘Why are you still up? Let me ask you that, why are you still up . . . you sneaking, snitching old witch?’ Eleanor staggered backwards, and Gallico caught her.

‘Well, I’ve never in my life been spoken to like—’

‘You creeping, crawling old spider!’ Eleanor shouted. Doors along the corridor opened, and a number of girls popped their heads out to listen.

‘You dried-up fossil cat’s turd . . .’

‘I’m going to fetch Mr Brundage this instant,’ the chaperone shrieked, but she seemed rooted to the spot, shrinking before the onslaught of Eleanor’s rage.

‘You do that, old girl, you do that,’ Eleanor said, pointing an unsteady finger.

Then she stumbled into her cabin and passed out on her bed.

Sometime before breakfast, she heard afterwards, the ship’s medic was called and failed to revive her. He thereupon diagnosed, no doubt at the prompting of Brundage, a condition of ‘acute alcoholism.’ Later that morning she found herself once more summoned to appear in the coffee room before the committee. As she was climbing the stairs to C deck, Gallico stopped her.

‘Eleanor, John Walsh and the press boys want a quick word before you see Brundage.’

T
en minutes later she walked into the coffee room. Brundage was tight-lipped, eyeing her as though she were some repellent specimen pickled in alcohol. The bald-headed committee member with the bow tie who’d told her to go to bed last night was the nominated spokesman, but she already knew what he was going to say. She had no time for bow ties, which she associated vaguely with frivolity and penile inadequacy. Brundage nodded to him.

‘Mr Penworth, if you please.’

The man cleared his throat and began reading from a statement.

‘After due deliberation with my colleagues concerning your violation of the AOC training rules in the early hours of this morning and Tuesday last, and after consideration of the various complaints from the team chaperone thereunto pertaining, and of the medical diagnosis of your condition, we regret to inform you that your entry into the Olympic Games is cancelled.’

He looked up, a sheepish blink behind his eyeglasses.

‘Look, gentlemen,’ Eleanor said in a bleary voice, ‘please don’t do this. I know I had a few glasses of champagne, and I’m very sorry about the whole thing, it was wrong of me to—’

‘We gave you every chance, Mrs Emerson,’ said Brundage, ‘but you forced our hand. You have not demonstrated the Olympic spirit, nor indeed any team spirit.’ Eleanor had expected him to be angry, but he seemed relaxed, as though vindicated and relieved to be rid of her.

‘Please,’ she said, the composure starting to drain from her voice. ‘I’ve spent four years training for these Games. You know I can win the gold. I want to apologise for my—’

‘I’m afraid the committee’s mind is definitely made up.’ Brundage snapped his rulebook shut and got up to leave. ‘You will disembark at Hamburg later today and return immediately to New York on board the
Bremen.
Mr Penworth here will make the arrangements. Goodbye, Mrs Emerson.’

As the other committee members began to rise, Eleanor felt her face flushing and adrenaline pumping—the instinct that kicked in when she was in danger of being beaten in the pool.

‘Now just hold on one minute,’ she said, leaping towards the entrance and barring the men’s way. She was damned if she was going to let them close the door in her face. Avery Brundage, accustomed to having the last word, looked surprised. The committee members stood still.

‘Sir, last night my friends in the press corps realised, probably before I did, what my fate would be this morning.’ She stared Brundage full in the face. ‘So they offered me a job.’

‘A job?’

‘Yes, a job. As a reporter, at the Games. They’re not hiring me for my writing—they’ll do that for me—but for my name. It seems, thanks to you, that I’ve already acquired a certain infamy in the dailies back home.’

Brundage removed his spectacles, his eyes narrowing with irritation.

‘Didn’t I make myself clear? I said you will disembark at Hamburg and return immediately—’

‘I heard what you said. If you’ve fired me from the team, that’s my hard luck, but you have no further rights over me.’ Her eyes glistened, but her voice held. ‘I’m from a free country, and if I want to be in Berlin to support my friends, there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop me—unless you want to make an ass of yourself in the thirty daily newspapers of William Randolph Hearst.’

Brundage opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. For a moment he seemed ready to yell something that far exceeded the strict parameters of his own code of conduct.

Eleanor walked to the door with her back straight and her head held as high as it would go, keeping her hands in her jacket pockets so they would not see her shaking.

‘See you at the opening ceremony,’ she said.

Chapter Six

Z
eppelins had been a part of Denham’s life for as long as he could remember. The serene giants first floated into his imagination in pictures on cigarette cards. Every day after school he’d walk home to Pound Lane, a quiet row of terraced houses along the river in Canterbury, daydreaming of airships—imagining fleets of them in the sky over the cathedral, humming like giant bumblebees. He’d draw them and make models from household litter. He wanted to know everything about them. Luckily his father, Arthur, a mechanical engineer, had caught the Zeppelin bug, too.

Even in those pioneer days there was no doubt in Arthur Denham’s mind that lighter-than-air ships were the future of long-distance travel. Aeroplanes, he said, were flying hedge-cutters. They’d never be good for anything but deafening, hair-raising hops. ‘Not for sailing through the clouds,’ he’d say with a twinkle in his eye, ‘across continents and oceans.’

The Great War was into its second year when Denham finally saw a Zeppelin. He was eighteen. He and his younger brother, Sidney, were on a day trip to London with their mother’s sister Joan, a nervous, childless woman who doted on them. Her surprise treat for them at the end of the day was a musical revue at the Strand Theatre.

Over the years the events of that night would assume a luminous clarity in Denham’s memory. It was a chill evening in October and an air raid blackout was in force. Only the yellow lights of trams and taxis lit the faces of the crowds along the pavements—the theatregoers, the office workers heading home, the soldiers on leave from the Front. Hollow-eyed lads lost in a gloomy limbo. Above the grand buildings of the Aldwych the constellations stood out as keen as diamonds.

The show was
Sunshine Girl
, and the audience was encouraged to join in the songs.

When the final curtain call ended, the audience rose and began making their way along the rows towards the exit. They hadn’t quite reached the auditorium doors when the floor shook and an ominous rumble sounded from outside.

‘And here’s us come without a brolly,’ Aunt Joan said.

The next rumble silenced the crowd and stopped them cold. Fragments of plaster dropped from the ceiling, and the stage curtains swayed. Sidney looked up at him wide-eyed, wanting reassurance.

When it came, the explosion was almost a direct hit.

A blast ripped through the foyer, sending rolls of plaster dust into the auditorium. The crowd fell to the floor, clutching their hats to their heads. In the commotion outside a man yelled,
‘
It’s a Zepp! It’s a bloody Zepp!’ A woman screamed, and unrestrained panic broke out as the crowd surged towards the exits. Sid began bawling and hid in the folds of his brother’s overcoat.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies—and—gentlemen—
please
,’ a voice boomed from the stage. Mr George Grossmith, the show’s star, was addressing them. ‘Remain inside until the danger has passed over, I beg of you.’ His peremptory tone seemed to take control of the crowd, making the panic subside somewhat. People hesitated, and one by one, they began to sit. ‘Now, all of you, sing along with me to calm yourselves down.’

The orchestra played ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,’ and slowly people joined in the singing. Aunt Joan’s voice came in short, rattled breaths, but she persevered, as if fearful of bringing on her asthma if she succumbed to hysteria.

As the explosions and rumbles outside grew fainter, voices that had sung out of terror sang out of defiance, and by the time the orchestra played ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ the audience was a chorus of patriotic fervour. Soon, a Boy Scout appeared in the emergency exit to call the all-clear, and they ended with ‘God Save the King.’

When Denham, Sidney, and Aunt Joan followed the crowd in single file through the wreckage of the foyer someone was again screaming. Outside, they stared in disbelief. People bloodied by flying glass were being tended on the steps until ambulances arrived. The grand crescent of the Aldwych, lit by the blazing roof of a building, was strewn with masonry and cobblestones. An acrid stench of cordite hung in the air. In his shock Denham was not certain what he was seeing among the flames and shadows. An omnibus overturned, its axle shattered. A dying horse’s snorting and whinnying. A number of clothed forms, limbs at unfamiliar angles, sprawled over a mosaic of smashed glass.

‘Oh, gosh,
look
,’ said Sidney.

In the distance to the east were the cigar shapes of four Zeppelins, golden in the lights of the fires, the drone of their propeller engines clear on the night air. Arc lights swept the sky, holding one gleaming ship, then another, in the fingers of their beams. Artillery fire boomed, making chrysanthemum blooms of flame in the sky beneath them, but nothing touched them.

‘It’s a battlefield,’ said Aunt Joan, holding a handkerchief to her mouth. ‘London’s a battlefield.’

Denham continued to stare, after his aunt and Sidney had turned to leave. He could not take his eyes off the four magnificent messengers of death.

H
e awoke clammy with sweat. Sheets writhed around his body, leaving striations and gullies across his neck and chest, like an artist’s impression of the canals on Mars. His dream of the Zeppelins had merged—as his dreams often did—into one of the trenches. After a few weeks’ training in the London Rifle Brigade he’d been shipped to France. Only a few days after that he’d seen his first man killed. And then more men killed than he could ever count.

A breeze from the lake moved the curtains, and light bouncing off water played on the ceiling of the elegant room.

He looked at his watch, and leapt out of bed.

‘Damn.’

He had a Zeppelin to catch.

A
t eleven o’clock Denham found the hangar in a frenzy. Beneath the vast tethered bulk of the
Hindenburg
, hundreds of ground crew were moving through the shadows, preparing the ship for the voyage to Berlin. Surfaces buzzed with the roar of the propeller engine cars, which were running a thunderous preflight test. The ship almost filled the hangar’s cathedral space. From the rows of tall windows along the right-hand wall, shafts of light were given mass and texture by the dust in the air. Where the ceiling could be glimpsed above the leviathan, a galaxy of electric lights twinkled.

Dr Eckener was directing proceedings from the top of a truck loaded with hydrogen canisters, booming through a megaphone his demands for pressure readings, weather reports, and general haste. How soon all this purposeful mayhem would become chaos, Denham thought, without the concentrating effect of the old man’s magnetism—the force that kept the whole enterprise going.

Behind him a whistle sounded, and with an echoing clang the building’s great doors began to roll apart. Denham saw rays of sunshine blaze across the ship’s nose and along the streamlined ridges of its hull, and felt his suitcase become light in his hands.

Eckener spotted him, and climbed down from his perch.

‘Good morning, good morning,’ he bellowed, without the megaphone. He was wearing his commander’s cap, an old leather flying jacket over his tweed suit, and a waistcoat smudged with cigar ash.

‘My dear Richard,’ he said, shaking Denham’s hand warmly. ‘I hope everything on board will be to your comfort and satisfaction.’

‘I don’t doubt it. How are the skies looking?’

‘A low drizzle over the Reich capital this morning. Also a stiff northeasterly. So we’d better depart before the weather plays any dirty tricks—and hope the clouds clear for our moviemakers. They’re on board, together with a pair of our local Party big shots, along for the champagne and the free ride.’

Eckener held up his pocket watch for all to see and shouted, ‘Ten minutes.’

‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ Denham said.

‘Richard, my boy, just come back and see your old friend soon. I hope you get the story you want. You’re in Captain Lehmann’s hands now.’

‘You’re not commanding the ship?’

‘Unfortunately, no . . .’ The old man hesitated. ‘It seems I’m being moved aside for incurring the wrath of the Propaganda Ministry once too often.’ Eckener chuckled, but there was worry in his eyes. ‘I have apparently “alienated myself from the Reich,” and you reporters are no longer to mention me in the newspapers.’