On The Black Hill (Vintage Classics) (25 page)

Another memorable occasion was the day when troops from the Dominions staged a mock-assault on Bickerton’s Knob.

The twins came back from drenching some calves at Lower
Brechfa
to find the farmyard swarming with ‘darkies’, some in lopsided hats, some with their heads ‘wrapped in towels’ – they were Gurkhas and Sikhs – all ‘chittering away like monkeys and scaring off the fowls’.

But the big event of the war was the crashed plane.

The pilot of an Avro Anson, flying home from a reconnaissance, misjudged the height of the Black Hill and pancaked into the bluff above Craig-y-Fedw. A survivor limped down the escarpment and roused Jim the Rock, who went up with the search-party and found the pilot dead.

‘I see’d ’im,’ Jim said afterwards. ‘Froze to death, like, an’ ’is face split open an’ all ’angin’ down.’

The Home Guard sealed off the area, and removed seven cartloads of wreckage from the site.

Lewis was very disappointed that Jim had seen the crash and he had not. All he found, strewn over the heather, were some shreds of canvas and a strip of aluminium with a bolt through it. He stuffed these into his pockets, and kept them as souvenirs.

Meanwhile, Benjamin had taken advantage of a depressed market to add a farm of sixty acres to the list of their possessions.

The Pant lay half a mile down the valley, and had two big arable fields on either side of the brook. Ploughed and planted, these yielded an excellent crop of potatoes; and to help with the harvest, the man from the Ministry assigned the twins a German prisoner-of-war.

His name was Manfred Kluge. He was a beefy, pink-cheeked fellow from a country district of Baden-Württemburg, whose father, the village woodman, had flogged him sadistically, and whose mother was dead. Drafted into the Army, he had served in the Afrika Korps: his capture at El Alamein was one of the few strokes of fortune he had known.

The twins never tired of listening to his stories:

‘I have seen the Führer with my eyes,
Ja!
I am in Siegmaringen.
Ja!
… And many peoples! Verrymanypeoples!
Ja!
“
Heil Hitler!
” … “
Heil Hitler!
” Ja? … Ja? And I say “Fool!” LOUD!! And this man next me in crowd … Verrybigman.
RED
-FACE-BIG-MAN …
Ja?
He say me, “You say, Fool!” And I say him, “
Ja
, very fool!” And he hit!
Ja?
And other peoples all hit!
Ja?
And I run away …! Ha! Ha! Ha!’

Manfred was a hard worker. At the end of the day, there were sweat-rings under the armpits of his uniform; and with the indulgence of doting parents, the twins gave him other clothes to wear about the house. A third cap in the porch, a third pair of boots, a third place at table – all helped remind them that life had not entirely passed them by.

He wolfed his food and was always ready with a show of affection as long as there was a square meal in sight. He was neat in his personal habits, and slept in; the attic in Old Sam’s room. Every Thursday, he had to report to barracks. The twins dreaded Thursdays in case he was transferred elsewhere.

Because he had a special talent for poultry, they allowed Manfred to breed his own flock of geese and keep the proceeds as pocket money. He loved his geese, and they could be heard burbling to each other in the orchard: ‘
Komm, mein Lieseli! Komm … schon! Komm zu Vati!
’

Then, one lovely spring morning, the war came to an end with a bold headline in the
Radnorshire Gazette:

For readers who wished to keep abreast of international events, there was a shorter column on the far side of the page:

‘Allies enter Berlin – Hitler dead in Bunker – Mussolini killed by Partisans.’

As for Manfred, he was equally indifferent to the Fall of Germany, though he brightened up, a few months later, on seeing in the
News of the World
a photo of the mushroom cloud above Nagasaki:

‘Is good,
Ja?
’

‘No.’ Benjamin shook his head. ‘It’s terrible.’

‘
Nein, nein!
Is good! Japan finish! War finish!’

That night, the twins had an identical nightmare: that their bed-curtains had caught fire, their hair was on fire, and their heads burned down to smouldering stumps.

Manfred showed no signs of wanting to go home when the first batches of prisoners were repatriated. He spoke of settling in the district, with a wife and a poultry-farm; and the twins encouraged him to stay.

Unfortunately, he had a very weak head for liquor. Once the wartime restrictions were lifted, he struck up a drinking friendship with Jim the Rock. He would stagger home at all hours, and the twins would find him, next morning, dead drunk in the straw. Benjamin suspected him of messing with one of the Watkins girls, and wondered whether they ought to get rid of him.

One summer afternoon, they heard the gander honking and hissing and Manfred gabbling away in German.

Coming out through the porch, they saw in the farmyard a middle-aged woman in brown corduroy trousers and a blue aertex shirt. She held a map in her hand. Her face lit up as she turned to face them:

‘So!’ she exclaimed. ‘Tvinss!’

A TALL STATUESQUE
woman, with slanting grey eyes and golden braids like hawsers, Lotte Zons had left Vienna not a month too soon. Her father, a surgeon, had been too ill to travel, her sister blind to the danger. She had arrived at Victoria Station with a domestic science diploma in her handbag; in the spring of 1939, to come as a servant was the only sure way of getting into England.

Her love of England, deriving as it did from English literature, had mixed in her memory with hikes in the Vorarlberg, gentians, the scent of pines, and the pages of Jane Austen blinding her in the alpine sunlight.

She moved with the ample grace of ladies in the age before Sarajevo. Her life in wartime London had been grimmer than anything she had known.

First, she was interned. Then, because of her training as a psychotherapist, she got a job treating air-raid victims at a clinic in Swiss Cottage. Her salary scarcely paid the rent of a cheerless room. Her strength ebbed away on a diet of corned beef and packet potato. A solitary gas-ring was her only means of cooking.

Sometimes, she met other Jewish refugees in a Hampstead café; but the nusstorte was uneatable, the backbiting made her even more miserable, and she would grope her way home through the foggy, blacked-out streets.

As long as the war went on, she allowed herself the luxury of hope. Now, with victory, hope had gone. No word came from Vienna. After seeing the pictures of Belsen, she broke down completely.

The head of the clinic suggested she take a holiday.

‘I could do,’ she said, doubtfully, ‘but where will I find some mountains?’

She took a train to Hereford, and the bus to Rhulen. For days she lost herself along leafy lanes unchanged since the time of Queen Elizabeth. A pint of draught cider went to her head. She read Shakespeare in ivy-covered churchyards.

On her last day, feeling so much stronger, she climbed the summit of the Black Hill.

‘Aah!’ she sighed in English. ‘Here at last von can breeze …!’

She happened to walk back through The Vision yard and overheard Manfred talking, in German, to his geese.

Lewis shook hands with the visitor and said, ‘Please to come on in.’ After tea, she jotted down Benjamin’s recipe for Welsh cakes, and he offered to show her the house.

He opened the door of the bedroom without a trace of embarrassment. Her eyebrow arched at the sight of their lace-trimmed pillow-cases: ‘So you loved your mother very much?’

Benjamin lowered his head.

Before leaving, she asked if they would welcome her again.

‘If you would come,’ he said; for something in her manner had reminded him of Mary.

In the following year, she came at the end of September at the wheel of a small grey coupé. She asked for ‘my young friend Manfred’ and Benjamin frowned: ‘We had to put him over the door, like.’

Manfred had got Lizzie the Rock into trouble. He had, however, done the ‘gentlemanly thing’ and married her, thus securing his right to remain in Britain. The couple had gone to Kington to work on a poultry farm.

Lotte took the twins on motoring expeditions round the countryside.

They visited megalithic tombs, crumbling abbeys, and a church with a Holy Thorn. They walked along a stretch of Offa’s Dike and climbed Caer Cradoc, where Caractacus made his stand against the Romans.

Their interest in antiquities revived. Against the chill autumn winds, she wore a plum cord jacket with big patch
pockets
and padded shoulders. She recorded their comments in a buckram-bound notebook.

She seemed to have absorbed the entire contents of the lending library. There was something terrifying about her grasp of local history; and at times she could be quite tigerish.

On a trip to Painscastle, they met an elderly man in plus-fours, an amateur antiquary who was measuring the moat. He mentioned in passing that Owen Glendower had defended the castle in 1400.

‘Qvite hrongg!’ she contradicted. The battle was at Pilleth, not Painscastle – in 1401, not 1400. The man looked flustered, excused himself, and fled.

Lewis laughed: ‘Oooh! She do have her head screwed on!’ – and Benjamin agreed.

She had taken a room in a bed-and-breakfast place in Rhulen, and showed no sign of wanting to return to London. Little by little, she broke through their shyness. She earned her place as the third person in their lives and ended up extracting their most intimate secrets.

Not that she made a secret of her interest in them! She told them that, before the war in Vienna, she had made a study of twins who had never separated. Now, she would like to continue it.

Twins, she said, play a role in most mythologies. The Greek pair, Castor and Pollux, were the sons of Zeus and a swan, and had both popped out of the same egg:

‘Like you two!’

‘Fancy!’ They sat up.

She went on to explain the difference between one-egg and two-egg twins; why some are identical and others not. It was a very windy night and gusts of smoke blew back down the chimney. They clutched their heads as they tried to make sense of her dizzying display of polysyllables, but her words seemed to drift towards the borderland of nonsense: ‘… psychoanalysis … questionnaires … problems of heredity and environment …’ What did it all mean? At one point, Benjamin got up and asked her to write the word ‘monozygotic’ on a scrap of paper. This he folded and slipped in his waistcoat pocket.

She wound up by saying that many identical twins were inseparable – even in death.

‘Ah!’ sighed Benjamin in a dreamy voice. ‘That’s as I always felt.’

She clasped her hands, leaned forward in the lamplight, and asked if they would answer a full range of questions.

‘I’d not be the one to stop you,’ he said.

Lewis sat upright on the settle and stared into the fire. He did not want to answer questions. He seemed to hear his mother saying, ‘Beware of this foreign woman!’ But in the end, to please Benjamin, he relented.

Lotte followed the twins on their daily round. Neither was accustomed to making confessions; but her warm understanding and harsh guttural accent struck a proper balance of proximity and distance. She had soon compiled a sizeable dossier.

At first, Benjamin gave her the impression of being a biblical fundamentalist.

She asked, ‘Then how do you imagine Hell-fire?’

‘Something like London, I expect.’ He screwed up his nose and sniggered. Only when she probed a little further did she discover that his concept of the life-to-come – whether in Heaven or in Hell – was a blank and hopeless void. How could you believe in an immortal soul, when your own soul, if you had one, was the image of your brother across the breakfast table?

‘Then why do you go to Chapel?’

‘Because of Mother!’

Both twins said they hated being mistaken for one another. Both recalled mistaking their own reflection for their other half: ‘And once,’ Lewis added, ‘I mistook my own echo.’ But when she steered her enquiry in the direction of the bedroom, she drew an identical, innocent blank.

She noticed it was Benjamin who poured the tea, while Lewis cut the loaf; Lewis who fed the dogs, and Benjamin the fowls. She asked how they divided their labour, and each replied, ‘I reckon we done it atween we.’

Lewis remembered how, at school, he had given all his money to Benjamin and ever since, the idea of owning
sixpence
– let alone a chequebook – was unthinkable.

One afternoon, Lotte found him in the cowshed, in a long brown work-coat, pitching the straw on to a cart. He was red in the face, and bothered. Skilfully timing her question, she asked if he was angry with Benjamin.

‘Bloomin’ mad!’ he said: Benjamin had gone into Rhulen and was buying another field.

There wasn’t any sense in it, he said. Not without a man to work it! And Benjamin was far too tight to pay a man a wage! They should buy a tractor! That’s what they should do!

‘Catch him buying a tractor!’ he muttered angrily. ‘Sometimes I think I’d be better off on my own.’

Her melancholic gaze met his. He rested his pitchfork, and the anger died in him:

How he’d loved Benjamin! Loved him more than anything in the world. No one could deny that! But he’d always felt left out … ‘Pushed out, you might say …’

He paused: ‘I was the strong one and him was a poor mimmockin’ thing. But him was always the smarter. Had more grounding, see? And Mother loved him for it!’

‘Go on!’ she said. He was close to tears.

‘Aye, and that’s the worry! Sometimes, I lie awake and wonder what’d happen if him weren’t there. If him’d gone off … was dead even. Then I’d have had my own life, like? Had kids?’

‘I know, I know,’ she said, quietly. ‘But our lives are not so simple.’

On her last Sunday Lotte drove the twins to Bacton to see the memorial to Dame Blanche Parry, a maid of Queen Elizabeth’s bed-chamber.