An Act of Peace

by Ann Widdecombe

Genres: General Fiction; Sagas; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

'A gripping read' Sunday Express From bestselling author Ann Widdecombe, a moving tale of families broken apart by war, and one boy's quest to come to terms with his history. Klaus-Pierre is the love-child of a young Frenchwoman and a senior, married German officer. Klaus-Pierre never knew his father, who was killed before he was born, and his mother was rejected by her family of patriots and resistance workers. Cared for by his German family, Klaus-Pierre is loved and happy - but as he grows up in a Europe where old enemies are learning to cooperate, he tries to make his own 'Act of Peace' with his French relatives. The result is a horrifying confrontation between the two families when they meet accidentally in Provence. Meanwhile, Klaus-Pierre is struggling with another quest to come to terms with his roots, as he tries to find out just what kind of man his father really was... The sequel to AN ACT OF TREACHERY 'Impressive . . . Widdecombe skilfully and often movingly uses the boy's struggle with his own painful history to throw light on the troubled years between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989' SUNDAY TIMES

Release date: December 1, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 308

Sample

As I watch the young demonstrating in the streets I think of Paris in 1968, but then we were angry while the sounds which reach us now are those of rejoicing. Yesterday the last restrictions were lifted and people are pouring through the wall, families separated for more than a quarter of a century are embracing and not a single shot is fired.

Ernst has a piece of the wall; a small knob of concrete – unremarkable, symbolic, a remnant of a shattered, cruel regime. We stare at it with all the reverence men once showed the moon rock.

‘Not another planet,’ Kurt observes when I voice the thought, ‘but another era. We watched that wall being built, your mother and I, and we grew so used to it that few thought it would fall in our lifetime.’

‘We are witnessing the end of communism,’ muses Ernst. ‘The end of the cold war. Surely there can be no need for an arms race now? It’s peace.’

‘Peace,’ repeats my mother, Catherine. Her tone is flat, sad even, and Ernst looks at her in surprise. His gaze travels to me and then to Kurt, and his puzzlement grows.

‘None of you looks very pleased. I said it’s peace. Is peace no longer a good thing?’

Kurt smiles. ‘Peace is always good, Ernst, but it brings its own problems. A new enemy always rises upon the demise of the old.’

Ernst keeps his expression respectful enough but impatience tinges his tone when he says he supposes so and if nobody has any objection he will rejoin Willi-Klaus and their friends in the street and by the way would anyone like another bit of the wall?

Kurt laughs as Ernst leaves us. ‘We spoiled it for him. They are so excited out there.’

We are all excited in here too. It was just the sudden use of the word peace which sent all our thoughts in the same direction, causing that momentary gloom so baffling to Ernst.

Peace. I look at the crippled Kurt, my stepfather, for whom peace meant repatriation as a disabled prisoner of war straight into the oppression of Soviet occupation, a last-minute escape from East Berlin in the final wave of refugees before the wall went up, coming to terms with life as one of the war limbless in a country that had been all but destroyed and for whose inhabitants few could bring themselves to care.

He guesses my thoughts and glances at my mother whom peace had cast into a hell of hatred and isolation. I too look at her. She is still beautiful, an older, statelier version of the Catherine Dessin who should have been the toast of Paris, if my stepfather is to be believed. Instead, scorned as a Nazi’s whore, disowned by those on whose love she relied, she had fled to the homeland of the enemy. ‘I was happy during the war,’ she had once told me with conscienceless, shocking truth.

As for me, I had been three months old when the Second World War ended and I spent the first three decades of my life coming to terms with the peace. I look out at the dancing, celebrating, chanting crowds and see a woman weeping with emotion, two young girls hugging each other in ecstasy.

My mother comes to stand beside me. ‘Thank God it’s over,’ she whispers.

I expect she said that when the war ended before she found out her ordeal was just beginning, before latent hatred turned into overt persecution, before I was old enough to want friends and playmates.

Our eyes meet and I know that she too is remembering. We look out together at the scene of euphoria below us and see only a house and garden in a small village near Aix-en-Provence.

My start in life was unpromising. I was the illegitimate result of a wartime liaison between a senior and married German officer serving with the forces occupying Paris and a young, naïve French girl, whom he seduced when she was scarcely out of her convent school. My father was killed in an Allied strafing attack during the retreat from Paris and I was five before his family learned of my existence.

My maternal grandparents – patriots and resistance workers – disowned their daughter so completely that, estranged from both them and her siblings, she remained in Provence with the maiden aunt who had agreed to hide her as the Germans fled France and the tide of vengeance, at last undammed, swept across the country, destroying traitors, collaborators and those who had the bad taste to love the invader.

My grandfather, Pierre Dessin, an erstwhile professor of the Sorbonne, would have been quite willing to watch his erring, nineteen-year-old daughter suffer for her generous-hearted folly and, had he prevailed, Catherine Dessin would have been dragged through a jeering, spitting crowd with her head shaved, but his bitterness was thwarted by my father who, in the dying weeks of the Occupation, made sure my mother was many miles away, safe and hidden in the small Provençal village, where the woman I called Aunt Marie, a second cousin of my grandfather, taught infants and played the organ in church.

My earliest memories are of Aunt Marie’s garden, of wide green lawns, rockeries and shrubberies, and a lily pond beside which I never seemed to stand alone but always with my hand firmly clasped in my mother’s. Later I crouched beside its gently rippling water and sailed a boat, formed from the base of a matchbox, in the centre of which was glued an upright match from which fluttered a small piece of brightly coloured cloth. Later still I floated a yellow and red wooden battleship, its mast secured to my hand by string, lest it should float to the centre of the pond and tempt me to lean too far over to retrieve it.

In the middle of the large lawn was a sundial on which our cat, Macfidget, would often climb to doze. On summer evenings I would wave goodnight to him before my mother drew the curtains of my bedroom window and we prayed to my guardian angel to keep me safe during the night. This puzzled me because it was not the nights I feared but the days, especially the days when we left the haven of the garden and went Outside the Gate.

Outside the Gate was a foreign country full of hostile natives whom I feared so terribly that I would hide behind my mother if one approached, especially if it was a child native, for the children were spiteful and threatening while the grown-ups were merely cold and unfriendly. There were two, a brother and sister, who would always put out their tongues at me before crying, ‘German brat! German brat!’ and a third, a boy twice my size, who never failed to yell ‘Nazi!’ whenever he saw me.

Once, when I saw tears in my mother’s eyes and was looking at her in ill-defined consternation, Aunt Marie crossed the road to remonstrate with his parents but their only reaction was a shrug. I could have told her that protest was useless, that Outside the Gate rudeness and bullying and tormenting were legitimate as long as I was the victim, that here the adults regarded me not as a small being to protect but as one who had no real right to be in their midst. I could have told her all that and more if I had known how to turn instinct into thought and thought into words.

I hated going Outside the Gate and most of our excursions beyond the garden were preceded by noisy scenes of weeping and pleading, my only means of communicating my dread. I sensed that Aunt Marie might have let me stay in my sanctuary but my mother was insistent. ‘We cannot hide him away for ever,’ was her oft-repeated refrain.

‘Well, change his name,’ Aunt Marie would retort.

My name is Klaus-Pierre but Aunt Marie as often as not called me Little Aeneas and my mother called me Klausi, especially when we spoke in our secret language which Aunt Marie could not understand. Outside the Gate they spoke like Aunt Marie and I had never met anyone who spoke our special, secret tongue, in which somehow Klaus seemed so much easier to say than Pierre.

Sometimes my mother held me to her, murmuring, ‘Mein liebchen, liebchen Klausi.’ Even before I had any real notion of grammar I knew this phrase to be a nonsense, a piece of silliness unique to our small household, in much the same way that I knew lambs were not called woollies and Macfidget did not understand what I said to him when I ran my fingers through his smoky fur as he lay, purring, on the sundial.

I was called Klaus-Pierre after my father, General Klaus von Ströbel, and my grandfather, Pierre Dessin. It was to be many years before I understood the unintended cruelty of that decision. I did, however, learn very early that announcing my name was guaranteed to provoke hatred and derision, or at the very least a cold withdrawal.

‘Why does Aunt Marie call me Aeneas?’ I asked my mother, wondering if it might be more acceptable Outside the Gate.

‘Because once there was a beautiful queen called Dido and a very brave man called Aeneas fell in love with her, but eventually he had to go away, far away across the sea and, when he had gone, Dido cried and cried and wished he had left her a baby Aeneas. You see, your daddy was also a brave man from far away, but when he went back he left me a baby: you. So I am luckier than Dido. I have my little Aeneas.’

‘Were you a beautiful queen?’

My mother smiled, not with her usual amused indulgence but with wistfulness, her eyes briefly focused on a scene played long ago. ‘Not a queen, no, but I was beautiful. That is why your daddy fell in love with me.’

‘Will he come back to see us?’

‘No. He is in heaven.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Jesus wanted him.’

I thought it decidedly selfish of Jesus to take my father away and I added a prayer to my usual quota, petitioning each night for my father’s return, until my mother overheard me one evening and urged me never to do so again because my father was happy in heaven and we would all be together one day. I would, she promised me, understand when I was older.

It seemed there were many things which I could do when I was older. I would go to school and know a great deal about everything. I could stay up late and eat what I liked. I could own a dog and take it for walks and no words would be too hard to read, no sums too difficult to add up. I could also go Outside the Gate alone.

I had no ambition to go Outside the Gate at all, but I had seen grown-ups coming and going through it and, almost always, they were alone. Perhaps then, when I was a man and peered on the child natives from a great height, it would be safe to venture through. Occasionally children came through the Gate with some visiting grown-up, and I came to realise that when this happened they did not hurl abuse at me or sneer, but nor did they play, and when I rushed up to them my mother or Aunt Marie always called me away. I would edge backwards, watched curiously by the child and with relief by the adult.

This even happened on the occasion when Mathilde brought her children, Hélène and René. Mathilde came once a week to do the washing and, although I was used to watching my mother work in the house or garden, I somehow sensed that the work Mathilde did was different, that hers was a lowlier status, that when my mother scraped vegetables and cooked and washed up she did it for herself and Aunt Marie, that such things were a normal part of being a grown-up, that everybody did them in their own homes, but that Mathilde must do them for others and at the whim and behest of others. I do not think I ever saw Mathilde receive her pay but, even so, I knew she was an employee and that I was ranked with the employer, though I knew neither word.

By the same subconscious process of reasoning I thought Hélène and René were my inferiors, that they would no more dare to insult me than would Mathilde my mother or Aunt Marie. They must have been two or three years older, and when my mother shooed us all out into the garden and told us to play outside because she wanted to wash the kitchen floor, I was half frenzied with excitement and, my fears forgotten, I ran about wildly before wandering up to them to see what we would play.

‘We can’t play with you,’ sniffed Hélène in disgust. ‘You’re much too little.’

I knew she wanted to say I was the German brat but did not dare.

‘Mummy said you have to play with me.’

René was more subtle. ‘We can play fighting the Germans. You can be the Boche and I’ll be the Maquis. Hélène can be the nurse.’

I may have lacked the skills to analyse what was being proposed but my instinct told me that this was not play, that it was personal, that it was a means of legitimising Inside the Gate what went on Outside. I shook my head.

‘Baby,’ sneered Hélène, but her contempt turned to alarm when tears squeezed from my eyes. She glanced towards the house.

René rescued her. ‘Let’s play catch. We’ll run and you can try and catch us.’

They sprinted away across the lawn and dived into the shrubberies. At first I raced after them enthusiastically but then they disappeared and, when I had hunted in vain, I knew I would not find them until it was time for them to go. I did not mind being outwitted but I could not bear being so hated and I collapsed on the ground, wailing loudly, until my mother came out and scooped me up, muttering words of comfort. I kicked and struggled until she put me down, holding my face between her hands, trying to force me to look at her.

I pulled my head back, away from her, and sent a scream into the air which seemed to travel to the very heavens. Far above me a rook flew and I yearned for its freedom, for its easy ability to escape the bonds of earth by wheeling and flapping through the skies. So intensely did I envy it that I could almost have put the thought into my three-year-old vocabulary.

Hélène and René never came again and, after a while, nor did Mathilde.

However safe I was Inside the Gate, I could still hear the children and, though I feared them and would always flee if one walked by, I was lonely and unhappy. My mother and Aunt Marie were kind but they could not fulfil the role of playmates. Sometimes I tried, cautious and afraid, to see what was happening Outside the Gate, peering through the bushes which divided our garden from the road. At first I was easily spotted and the cry of ‘German brat!’ soon brought my mother from the house, but in time I learned to hide more effectively and spent hours staring at small girls with skipping ropes and boys kicking footballs. I learned the principle of tag without ever having played it, I knew who owned which tricycle and I followed the adventures of the Germans and the French as children acted out scenes from the war and made up their own stories. In these games everyone wanted to be French and the Germans always lost.

Once an arrow flew over the gate and landed on the gravel path. I left my hiding place to retrieve it, looking at its bright red point, its pale green tail. A child came up to the gate and called out to me that it was his and I must return it to him. I shook my head and held the arrow behind my back.

‘Oh, come on. I’ll tell your mother if you don’t.’

Again I shook my head, aware that for once I had power over those strange beings Outside the Gate, that I had something they wanted. Other children had begun to gather and all were clamouring for me to hand over the toy. One had paint on his face and feathers in a band around his head.

‘It’s the German brat,’ said one of the older girls in disgust. ‘What a little thief.’

I began to back away, suddenly frightened, uncertain if those Outside the Gate could invade my own territory, wanting to call out for my mother, knowing I faced a chorus of scorn if I did so. For a few seconds I hesitated, then I threw the arrow on the ground and ran towards the house, pursued by cries of ‘Nazi’ and ‘Coward’.

Aunt Marie appeared in the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’ Her voice was sharp with displeasure and, for a moment, I wondered what wrong I had done, but her gaze was on something behind me and, turning, I saw that the child with the Indian feathers had come onto our path and was at that moment bending to retrieve the arrow. I kept behind Aunt Marie as she advanced on the trespasser with angry purpose.

‘What is your name?’

‘Louis,’ he mumbled, and I was aware that there was silence in the strange country which was Outside the Gate.

‘Louis what?’

‘Louis Lenoir.’

‘Well, Louis Lenoir, next time you need to retrieve something from this garden I suggest you ring the bell and ask if you may do so. Hasn’t your mother told you that it’s bad manners to wander about in other people’s gardens without their permission?’

He crept away and joined the now silent group Outside the Gate, leaving me triumphant, gloating, secure. My enemies had no power in my own territory. I could walk up to the very gate with impunity, could defy them, snatch their toys even, and as long as I stayed in our garden they would be unable to exact any revenge. The thought gave me only fleeting comfort: I wanted friends, not defeated foes.

Then, miraculously, friends arrived. I was in the garden, building mud castles from the wet earth, when my mother called out that she was going indoors to speak to Aunt Marie. All day I had listened to the sounds of children playing next door, their noise seeming very near. Instinctively I knew these children were not from the village. I recognised none of their voices; there had never in the past been any child in the neighbouring garden and, above all, they too had a secret language, different from that which I spoke with my mother. I heard them talking and knew the way they spoke would be as incomprehensible to the village children as it was to me. They seemed to switch between this funny language and French quite happily, often in the same conversation. I knew one of the children must be very young because, although I heard the others speak to her with exaggerated simplicity, I did not hear anything but babble in reply.

It was impossible to penetrate the thick hedge which separated the two gardens so I ran to the gate and peered up and down the road, but there was no sign of the hostile natives. I tried unsuccessfully to reach the catch and pull the gate open, before starting to climb over. When I stood on the third bar I became aware that I was very far from the ground but I climbed on, terrified when I found myself at the top, but still drawn by the sound of voices. On the other side I ran, knowing I was now in enemy territory and that it would be a hard, slow business to return to safety.

The children next door saw me as I was climbing their gate and the boy ran down the path to meet me. I hesitated but he was grinning, so I completed my descent into his garden.

‘Diable!’ he said in tones of admiration and at once I was reassured because I knew it was a bad word which only grownups were allowed to say.

‘That was a hard climb for a baby.’

I protested that I was not a baby and he laughed. ‘I’m Nick. What’s your name?’

‘Klaus-Pierre.’

‘I’m glad you’re a boy. I’m fed up playing with girls.’

‘So am I,’ I said loftily, conscious that I was lying but wanting very much to be part of his world.

‘Let’s play pilots and bomb the girls.’ He flung his arms out wide and began to run about, imitating the noise of an aeroplane, occasionally running up to his sisters crying, ‘Whoosh, bang, got you!’ causing them to squeal with delight.

‘My dad flies planes. He bombed the Germans. What does your father do?’

I was on the verge of trumping the boast, of announcing that my father had been a general, which I knew to be very important, when concepts began to join up in my head so suddenly that there was an almost audible click. The German brat. The Germans always lost in the childish games I watched being played Outside the Gates. My dad bombed the Germans. We must not speak German to Aunt Marie because she does not understand. Your father was a general in the German army. Why do you have to say Klaus in so emphatic a German accent – you must surely see it makes it worse for him here? German brat! German brat! German brat!

The voices of Nick, my mother, Aunt Marie and the children Outside the Gate ran through my head and, amidst their din, I arrived at some kind of childish understanding before becoming aware that Nick was looking at me curiously.

‘My father’s dead. He was killed in the war.’

‘Oh, sorry. But we won.’

Did we? Was I part of ‘we’? In that moment I understood what my mother had always told me but which, until that instant of revelation, had been of no more importance than what I ate for lunch. I was both German and French. What she had not said was that I was therefore neither one nor the other, that I had no identity, that I belonged nowhere.

I could not then have articulated any of this but I knew it all nonetheless, so much so that even now I can see the innocent expression on Nick’s face when he asked me what my father did. Nevertheless, the period immediately following this incident was a happy one. I heard my mother and Aunt Marie calling me but I was much too engrossed with my new companions to answer and, by the time they had worked out where I was, I was firm friends with Nick, Alice and one-year-old Julienne who amused me with her determination to be part of a much older group. Wherever we ran she crawled after us at high speed. When we were still she hauled herself up by grasping the nearest convenient object and stood there, watching us, clutching on to the support with all her puny might. I had never before had anyone younger or weaker than myself to look after and I adored her.

Nick, whom I found with surprise to be only a few months older than me despite being taller and sturdier, had a shiny new tricycle and his father, speaking to me in funny French, was teaching me to ride it when my mother and Aunt Marie arrived, anxious and wondering.

There followed two months of play and laughter, punctuated by only the occasional quarrel, quickly made up. My new neighbours came to tea and I was sick, less from the unusual amount of cake than from sheer excitement. Eventually the others were joined by more friends. I remember Marcel, who had bright ginger hair, and the very Louis Lenoir whom Aunt Marie had rebuked so sternly. I was teased much less but I still knew the chill of disapproval.

Nick’s grandmother disapproved, and when I played next door I hated going inside. Nick’s father had taken me under his wing and talked to me as if we were man to man while his mother spoiled me, but her own mother had never acknowledged me in all the time I had lived in the house next to hers and she was not inclined to do so now. I suppose they must have argued about it and Nick’s parents had won. Louis Lenoir’s elder sister, who always came to collect him when it was time for us to disperse, would invariably make a point of talking warmly to all the other children before turning to me with brief, dutiful, reluctant formality. I was afraid of her, and if my elders had not insisted that I say goodbye to each child and wave him off I should have hidden as soon as I saw her approaching the house.

I learned too that my acceptability was confined to my own house and to Nick’s, that I still could not join the other children in their gardens or in the small village play area with its swings and slide without incurring abuse or teasing so hostile that it amounted to bullying. Nick stoutly defended me on these occasions and once Alice fought an older girl, pulling her hair and slapping her in furious indignation. Invariably we would go back home and tell Nick’s parents who would comfort me while his grandmother sat tight-lipped, her expression saying more clearly than words: ‘I told you so.’

Nick’s father, Mr Dyer, was an English airman who had married Marie-Louise Lecompte before the war and taken her to live in Britain. As a result, she had not seen her mother for nine years and the family was now making an extended visit of two months following Mr Dyer’s demobilisation. Other members of the family came to see them and occasionally Nick and Alice stayed with us to make room for visiting relations.

Through these gatherings I came to understand that most children lived with a mother and a father, not with a mother and an aunt. I had always known this from the stories my mother or Aunt Marie read to me but the idea had meant little to me until now. Once, when the children next door had been taken to Paris for a week to see relatives and I was again lonely, I climbed onto a chair and stared at the photograph of my father which stood on the chest of drawers in my mother’s bedroom. Somewhere in the back of my infant mind was a sense of unfairness, a vague resentment that my father had died, the beginning of a belief that it was his fault he had done so, a small seed of blame.

I told my mother I wanted to have two sisters and that one must be like Alice and one like Julienne and, when that demand had been gently batted away, I asked why I could not have a granny, although I was by no means sure I wanted one if she was like Nick’s. I had, however, seen pictures of grannies in my story books and knew that, in general, they had buns of grey hair and looked kindly over the tops of spectacles as they sat by fires, knitting, with cats on their laps. I had an idea that this was the norm and Nick’s elegant, cold grandmother was the exception, especially as even she spoiled her grandchildren and cooed over Julienne.

Aunt Marie threw a worried glance at my mother. ‘So now it begins,’ she muttered.

My mother told me I did have a granny but that she lived far, far away in Paris and when I protested that Nick, Alice and Julienne had gone there she told me we were too poor to do so. I accepted the explanation with a grumble but without disbelief.

Before the Dyers went back to England, Alice had a fifth birthday and Madame Lecompte gave her a party to which a dozen or so children were invited. Post-war austerity and scarcity meant that on these occasions everyone helped with the food, and the smell of Aunt Marie’s baking drifted up the stairs to my room the night before the event. I lay in bed, happily expectant, too excited to sleep, untroubled by a future in which my friends were about to disappear, oblivious to the consequences, knowing they were leaving the following week and yet convinced my world would continue as it then was.

During the party I found myself arguing with Louis Lenoir that my boat was bigger than his boat and so fierce did the battle become that I decided to go home and get my precious red and yellow battleship, which by then had become faded and chipped but was still magnificent to my adoring eyes. I found it by the pond but, as I was about to return next door, I remembered something I wanted to ask my mother and, the large glass door at the back of the house being open, I ran inside, impatient to put my question.

From the kitchen I could hear Aunt Marie’s voice. At first I noticed nothing unusual, but, as I crossed the living room into the hall, something in her tone caused me first to hesitate and then to stop altogether. I had never before heard her arguing with my mother and indeed I vaguely thought that grown-ups did not argue.

‘. . . hell for him when those children leave. It will all start again. You must get him away from here. Make peace with your father, call the poor little thing Pierre instead of that silly name you gave him and speak to him in French instead of German.’

‘No. He is Klaus’s son. I will not teach him to disown his father.’

‘He will do that of his own accord once he is old enough to understand and realises what his father did to you. Bloody Klaus von Ströbel!’

My mother was crying as I crept away. I could make little, if any, sense of what I had heard but I was conscious of unease and an ill-defined fear. Grown-ups should not quarrel and cry – that surely was the lot of children – and nor should they dislike each other if they belonged to the same family, yet the one strong impression I had received from that incomprehensible exchange was that Aunt Marie did not like my father. A few minutes later I had all but forgotten the incident, as Louis and I placed our boats side by side and I gave a yell of triumph.

I remembered again when the party was over and I was playing with Alice while the adults cleared up the debris. Mrs Dyer was upstairs putting Julienne to bed and Nick was helping his father to stack the outside toys in the shed. The only grownup in the room was Madame Lecompte to whom I rarely dared to speak unless addressed first, but now my question seemed suddenly too urgent to wait.

‘What does bloodyklausvastrudel mean?’

I backed away as her voice rose in outrage asking me how I dared to swear in her house, in front of Alice and after they had all been so kind to me. I did not even know what swearing meant but I was sent home in disgrace nonetheless, howling with bewilderment, my feelings hurt and my heart bursting with indignation and misery.

At home they could not calm me for an hour but when my mother finally made sense of the situation, Aunt Marie went next door to apologise, to explain that I had heard the word from her, that I did not know what it meant. She came back looking uncharacteristically angry.

‘The Dyers said it would have been funny if Klaus-Pierre had not been so upset. I think they are horribly embarrassed by the whole thing but Madame is immoveable and it is her house.’

I later found that her words meant I could not go next door again and, for the few remaining days of their visit, Nick and Alice came to our house when we wanted to be together. When the day of their departure arrived I stood at o