Nothing But Fear (6 page)

I
n 1910 Grandfather and Farmor moved from Orehoved Hotel to one of the smartest addresses in Nykøbing. The name ‘Bellevue' stood out in gold letters, and the house had three storeys with a look-out tower at the top built in green timber and clad in copper. Farmor could have fainted when Carl took out the keys and let himself in. The living rooms they walked through went on forever and their ceilings touched the sky. All Karen wanted was to get out as quickly as she could, but Grandfather told her not to worry. He was planning to open a haulage company and that would pay for the house and the children and more besides! It was just a question of speeding up developments, and then just wait and see! Before long the link between Copenhagen and Berlin would go straight as the crow flies, and Nykøbing bang in the right place, the new centre for business and tourism. And Karen never said a word but unpacked and hung the kitchen clock on the wall. A few years later he was bankrupt.

They were up to their ears in debt, and Grandfather at his lowest ebb sat on the bench down by the station watching the trains go past, staring at the world as he walked around, silent, refusing to talk to anyone. He kept himself to himself in the study at home, twiddling his thumbs in
the dark behind drawn curtains, while his beard, his hair, his nails grew longer and longer and he gave up washing and eating. This carried on until Grandfather hit rock bottom and was dead to the world. Then he picked himself up, dusted himself down and started out afresh. There were endless opportunities! Nothing was impossible!

After the buses it was a shoe shop in Frisegade. It went bust. Parisian fashions were not made for hoeing beet, and people stood outside and laughed at the models in the shop window. Customers were so few and far between that when the shop bell jangled he jumped and asked people what they were doing there. Then he read about the Copenhagen Telephone Company in the paper – more than 50,000 subscribers – and tried to sell telephones to people who didn't know anyone but those who lived next door, and was left with hundreds of sets and no one to call. He sat himself down on the bench and shut himself away in his own world, but it wasn't long before he flung open the door again and was trying it out with motorbikes – Nimbus motorbikes! – and the cameras flashed and Grandfather was there, his arms spread wide, smiling to the press, who were on the spot photographing him with flags and spirits flying high in front of the next doomed enterprise.

His downfall could be followed year by year in
The Lolland-Falster Times
, and, as time went on and any hope of making things work out in reality fell apart, Grandfather began to invent. He bought on tick and kept creditors at bay with stories, coming up with one excuse after the other, and the worse things got the better the stories. Returns on
shares in Canada! An equity advance from a distant uncle, guarantors whose signatures must have got lost in the post – he had just had a meeting with the barrister, who would contact them in person within the next few days! Grandfather was convincing, and he managed to swim abreast of the catastrophe as he gambled on a future that had to reach Nykøbing sooner or later, even though the town lay at the furthest corner of the earth – and he closed his eyes and begged the powers that be for it to be his turn before it was too late.

It was left to Karen to deal with everyday life and keep things ticking over. She had two children to look after, and then three, four – Leif and my father, Ib and their little sister Annelise – and she worked herself to the bone to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. She took on cleaning jobs on the side, did piecework in the strawberry fields in the summer, baked bread, grew vegetables and rechristened the soup every evening – onion soup, potato soup, consommé with egg – Grandfather asked if there was brandy in it, and there was – and she made it last so long that in the end it tasted of nothing but goodwill and pure love. She cut a heel out here, a toe out there and knitted and sewed and made the best out of nothing, while the things they did have were sold one by one, and when she came to the end of her day, she put the children to bed and bade them goodnight with a kiss and a small white lie.

They lived on air, and no one realised how bad things were – except Father. He grew taller and thinner, feeling the pinch as clothes and shoes didn't fit, and at Christmas knew
that the presents were empty words packed in wrapping paper. He did what he could to help out at home, got good marks at school and when he turned fifteen left school and got a job as a trainee at the bank. He looked after Leif, who had spinal TB and limped in and out of hospital, covered Annelise's dancing lessons and paid the school money for his little brother Ib, who was into skiving and stealing and smoking. If anyone teased Leif for being an invalid, Father told them off and threatened to go to the police, after which they got stick from Ib, who hit them too hard and too long, his behaviour turning more and more criminal. Annelise used make-up and began going out on the town, and Father would fetch her home at night from the inn, the
Friser
. He got up in the morning and helped Ib with his homework, even though he hung out with the wrong crowd down at the quarry and was drinking. And after work Father would tuck a file under his arm and go to evening classes to learn bookkeeping and stenography and German, and when he put up his hand he had the correct answers at his fingertips.

The day he got the job at Danish Building Assurance – that day in 1934 – was the happiest of my father's life, and he needed no excuse to tell the story over and over again, remembering the advertisement in the newspaper and Director Damgård who received the applicants in the company's premises in the Market Square. He was a large man and had started the business from nothing with three employees, Frøken Slot, Max Christensen, who kept the books, and his son-in-law, Henry Mayland. Clients were
reinsured and they saved two Danish crowns if they took out a ten-year policy – that kind of thing would be completely impossible nowadays! I heard Father tell the story at least a thousand times, and he always beamed when he came to the point when Director Damgård looked in at the office – it was late in the evening and he was working late – and asked him what he thought about bridge. Father had learned bridge from the old ladies in town – he was fond of visiting them, chatting to them – and he stepped into the breach as a fourth and played cards with the board and drank coffee and cognac and said no thanks to a cigar – and was promoted to chief clerk. Damgård had always thought highly of him, said Father, smiling at the thought, and then started the story all over again, retelling it like a gospel that spread light in a time of darkness.

There was a financial crisis, and there was no work to be had. Leif was sent to a sanatorium in Jutland, and the bills poured in. Ib was expelled from school and blew it every time he got a new apprenticeship. He swaggered around wearing a hat and flared trousers and somehow managed to be better off than Father. Even though it meant taking a chance – not something he was keen on – he got Ib employed as a trainee at Danish Building Assurance in order to keep an eye on him. It went well at first, and then it started going too well to be true. Ib charmed and fast-talked his way, making more promises than he could keep. They got more customers than ever, but it was one big fiddle. He had his hand in the till and was eating out and playing the fat cat, buying drinks all round. It was a scandal, and it was left
to Father to smooth things out, to apologise to the board and to Director Damgård – he would make sure everything was put right – and he settled the accounts and brought the clients back into the fold. Then he got hold of Ib. One thing was certain. Nothing and no one was going to rock the boat and take from him the little he had achieved!

Father spoke to the bank and to Victor Larsen, the solicitor, and bought a second-floor flat for himself on Nybrogade 9. There was a little balcony and a dining room, a living room, a bedroom and a kitchen, all just as it should be, and the only way he could afford it all was to go to auctions and wait for the lowest bid. He bought a dining table with four mahogany chairs, a genuine leather armchair, carpets and paintings that he hung in gilded frames – a country road with pollarded willows, a harbour with fishing boats, a forest scene – and his greatest coup was the grand piano. He couldn't play, but it was part of it all. Father even put sheet music on the stand for effect and the cleaner turned the pages once a week. Father relished his snug. He sat in the armchair reading German and English, dictionaries and grammar books mostly, and he applied to join the Brage male voice choir, went on outings to Pomlenakke and sang
How fresh and green the woodlands lie
. In the afternoons he could be seen crossing the Market Square carrying in his hands cakes from baker Jensen – two cream-filled angel cakes – making his calls and paying his respects to the ladies, even the married ones, and several cups of coffee later he was on his way back. They left him cold. He had his mother, and she cooked the food he liked and washed his clothes – that
was all the woman he needed, and Father preferred to be left in peace. The icing on the cake came when he was allowed to join the Freemasons. He bought a tall hat and a dinner jacket and strutted off to lodge meetings on Wednesday evenings, and slowly he rose through the ranks and greeted the town's élite and carved out his career inch by inch.

Father constructed his existence around what meant more to him than anything else – security – and in the home he made for himself everything was perfectly ordered, while the world around him fell apart. Ib ended up in court, Annelise ran off with a man – and Father sorted it all out. It was always left to him to pick up the pieces. He was a character witness for Ib, who got off lightly with a suspended sentence, he made sure that Annelise came back home, and he found an apprenticeship for Leif with Balling & Sons (Hides, Skins & Leathers). He looked after his mother, who had got arthritis – no treatment helped – and helped his father, who was increasingly at his wit's end, not daring to walk the streets for fear of running into unpaid bills. They were due to move from ‘Bellevue', now mortgaged to the hilt three or four times over – and Father sat up going over the paperwork into the small hours, while his father tore his hair and gabbled on about business and tourism and transport and routes as straight as the crow flies. There was no way out. They might just as well give up – they had reached the end of the line. Grandfather ran up and down the stairs looking to see where the future had got to. It had to be there soon! But it never came. It never came – and Karen took the kitchen clock off the wall, and the packing cases
stood ready to be fetched, but they were empty. All was lost. And then it did come after all and was the worst thing that had ever happened.

It was on the morning of 9th April. Father and his little brother Ib were walking along Vesterskovvej – Ib's suit always looked rumpled even though it had just been pressed – and everywhere there were people shouting ‘The Germans are coming! The Germans are coming!' As they stared up at the sky, the fighter squadrons flew north over the town. Ib threw a stone at them.

‘What do we do now?'

‘We go to work,' answered Father. ‘What else?'

When something was wrong, he acted as though nothing had happened – and as a rule it worked. Father was reckoning he could ignore the Second World War and make it disappear.

People had gathered in the square, even those from the office. They stood talking, and Director Damgård told them that troops had come ashore. The word was that they were on their way from Gedser at that very moment. They had taken the ferry from Warnemünde that night.

‘I hope they bought a bloody ticket an' all!' said Ib, laughing.

Father was beside himself that his brother should be shooting his mouth off and tried to get him to shut up, but Ib didn't give a damn. He said that the ferry should have been scuppered long since, and that the Germans wouldn't have had much bloody trouble navigating into the harbour when they had the lighthouse to guide them, and why
hadn't anyone thought of turning it off?

‘Ib!' shouted Father and was on the point of apologizing to Damgård and the others, but none of them said anything. There was nothing to be said. Ib was right, and they knew it.

Repairs on the road running north-south on Falster had been due for years. No one had done anything about it and the council's coffers were bare. But four days earlier the potholes had been filled in and the road was rolled and ready for use. The only bombardment that hit the invasion forces as they moved up through Gedesby, Bruserup and Marrebæk came from the signs saying ‘
Zimmer Frei
' and ‘
Potatoes for sale
'. The stallholders on the Market Square discussed whether they should draw down their shutters or display their goods with prices marked in Reichsmark. It was getting on for nine o'clock and it wouldn't be long before they reached Nykøbing. A German had been seen in Væggerløse and several more in Hasselø and Lindeskoven. They were on their way up Østergade and Nygade and Jernbanegade – and at that point reality overtook rumour. Soldiers arrived walking in columns, hugging the housefronts and covering both sides of the street with rifles at the ready. There was utter silence. Not a sound. And Father and Ib and the rest of them stood watching with gaping mouths, unable to believe their eyes, holding their breath, waiting for the influx that was approaching like rolling thunder, louder and louder, until it was just round the corner – and here was the German Army!

They marched right through the middle of the town –
infantrymen with knapsacks and helmets and rifles – tramping past, an endless sea of uniforms staring straight ahead. At the rear came the horse-drawn wagons carrying bread, but that was it – no tanks, no jeeps, not a single motorised vehicle. The blacksmith from the sugar factory could not resist and, as the last wagon clattered past, he tipped his cap and asked if the bread was for the horses. The soldier shook his head and said,
‘Nein, für uns,'
and continued down Langgade and turned right into Rosenvænget. After twenty minutes the troops were back, their feet beating the same tempo as they marched up Kongensgade – and so they went round in circles.