Little Manfred Read online

  “Manfred lived in my street, in my town, Regensburg. We went to the same school, played football in the same team. You could say we grew up like twin brothers who became best friends. When he got married to Jutta, I was his best man. And when little Inga was born, I was made her godfather. We joined the navy on the very same day. This was only a few months before the war began.

  “All the way through our training in the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, Manfred was at my side. And then we found ourselves serving on the same ship. The Bismarck. We could not have been more proud. We knew this was the finest battleship in the German navy, the fastest in the world, thirty knots, 50,000 tons. Every sailor in the Fatherland wanted to serve on her. It was a great honour and privilege to be chosen to sail in this ship.”

  To start with I worried that Alex would interrupt him to ask some stupid question or other, but then I realised that he was completely absorbed. Alex sat there cross-legged, unable to take his eyes off Walter’s face. I very soon found I was lost in his story myself.

  “There were over 2,000 men on board,” Walter went on, “and every one of us believed that nothing in the world could beat us. We were young and full of – the word is bravado, I think. Everyone was like this in those early days of the war. Our commander, Captain Lindemann, promised us victory. Of course, we believed him; we believed everything we were told. We were sure that if any ship of the Royal Navy dared to come within range of our guns we could blow it out of the water. So when we steamed out of Gotenhafen that day – this was in the spring of 1941 – we had no doubt in our hearts, only pride, a fierce and foolish pride. When we went into our first battle in the Denmark Strait, we were quite sure of victory.

  “The captain told us afterwards, Manfred and me and the others on the gun crew, that it was a shell from our gun that destroyed the Hood. The Hood was the pride of the Royal Navy, the biggest battleship they had. It was something we could not believe when we saw it. She just blew up and sank within a few minutes. There were some who cheered – many, I am ashamed to say. But Manfred and me, we both knew there was nothing to cheer about, that in those few short moments, as we looked on, hundreds and hundreds of sailors had died. They were seamen like us, fighting for their country like us. I think this was the first time I began to understand that this is what happens in war. You kill people. People kill you.”

  He found it difficult to go on, and had to take a deep breath before he did. It was as if he was telling the story of a nightmare he could not forget.

  “The other British ships made smoke and turned away. Our first battle was over and we had won a famous victory. It was just as we had been told: Bismarck was the most powerful battleship in the world. All over the ship we knew we had beaten the best the Royal Navy could send against us, so of course we were even more sure that nothing could stop us now. Everyone on the ship was happy, and I knew I should be happy with them. But I was not. At night when I closed my eyes, I could see the Hood blowing up, and I could not sleep. I heard the cries of drowning sailors. I thought I would never sleep again.

  “For a few days after this, it was as if the Bismarck ruled the seas. With Prinz Eugen, another of our most powerful ships, we steamed out into the Atlantic. The ocean was ours. The world was ours. We could sink any ship we found. Of course, we knew the British would come after us, that there would be more battles ahead. We did not ‘give a monkey’s’ as you say, I think – I like this expression. And by now we believed we were invincible.

  “Even when the torpedo from the bomber plane hit our rudder, and we knew we could no longer manoeuvre properly, even when the British fleet was closing in all around us, still we believed that we would fight them off and reach the safety of a French port, that we would be able to make our repairs and come out again to finish what we started. We believed this maybe because we wanted to believe it. Even when we were being bombarded from all sides and the ship was not able to move any more and all our guns were out of action, I never thought we would sink. I promise you: even when we heard the order to Abandon Ship, we could not imagine the Bismarck was going down. It just was not possible.

  “It was only in the cold of the water, with the sea on fire, with men screaming and dying all around me, that at last I had to accept the truth of what was happening. My leg was damaged, broken – I do not know how, but I found I could not use it. Manfred had hold of me and was swimming me away when we saw the Bismarck disappear beneath the waves. There was a terrible groaning as she went down and – a sound I shall never forget – a long sigh of steam and smoke as if the ship was breathing her last breath. All around us there were drowning sailors. It was like the sinking of the Hood all over again, only this time it was me that was going to die, Manfred too, all of us.

  “I am not a brave man – I know this now – but I was not frightened. I think perhaps I just knew that there was nothing more I could do. I remember thinking that dying must always be like this, that to make it easy you have only to give in to it. I know that without Manfred I would have given up and let myself drown. I was too weak, too cold to go on struggling. I had lost my will to survive. But Manfred held me up, kept talking to me, telling me that help was coming, that we would be all right.

  “I do not know how long we were in the water – Manfred said I was only half conscious most of the time. All I know is that when I looked up I saw the side of a great ship, close to us, so close I could almost reach out and touch it. With Manfred’s help, I grabbed the scramble net and held on. How Manfred got me up that net I do not know. He must have dragged me up. My leg of course was useless, so I could not have done it on my own. Then I was being pulled on to the deck. I was more dead than alive, I think. When I opened my eyes I saw the face of this man.” He was pointing at Marty, smiling through his tears. “This same man, who is sitting right beside you now. Marty.”

  Marty reached out and patted his arm. “Excuse me, Walter, it was Able Seaman, First Class, Martin Soper of HMS Dorsetshire, if you please.” Then Marty turned to us and took up the story himself.

  “I’m telling you, when I first saw Walter lying there on the deck of our ship, he was like a fish out of water, gasping for breath. He was coughing up seawater, half the Atlantic. And he was covered, head to toe, in black oil. His friend, Manfred, was too. There were hundreds and hundreds of them still in the sea, dozens of them struggling up the nets. Manfred spoke a little English; you spoke none, Walter, not then. Manfred told me you had a broken leg, probably, and I remember I called the doc over to have a look. He said to get you on a stretcher and take you below to the sickbay, to get you cleaned up and warm, that he’d be down to look after you as soon as he could, but that there were hundreds of urgent cases to see to first on deck, and so he might be some time.

  “Manfred and me, we were just getting Walter on to the stretcher when we felt the ship beginning to move under us. We knew well enough it wasn’t just the swell of the sea or the wind because we could hear the engines roaring. Everywhere – on deck, on the scramble nets, in the sea all around – people were shouting and screaming. Then we heard the Captain’s voice coming over the intercom, telling us there were reports of U-boats in the area, that we had to get under way at once, that we had no choice. Stay where we were, the Captain said, and we would be a sitting duck, an easy target for torpedoes.

  “The ship was already turning and steaming away. We had to stand there and watch. We left nearly 2,000 men to drown, not the enemy to us any more, who had sunk the Hood, but fellow sailors. For one sailor to leave another sailor to drown, no matter what uniform he wears, cries out against all he believes in, against all the traditions of the sea. To leave one would be bad enough. To leave 2,000… I still see those men in the water every day of my life.”

  “But you did pick up nearly a hundred of us, Marty,” said Walter. “I have told you often that you must never forget this. On the Hood, they never got a chance – only three of them survived.”

  For a while, neither one of them spoke, but looked
out to sea, each lost in his own thoughts. The silence was broken by a pair of gulls, screeching and swooping overhead.

  I said the first thing that came into my head. “My dad says that every gull you hear is the ghost of a dead sailor, letting you know he’s still alive.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Alex said, turning on me, “and you know I hate it when you talk about them.”

  “I also do not believe in ghosts,” Walter told him, “but I do like this idea of your father’s very much. If I must be a bird in my next life, I wish to be a gannet, not a gull. I want to be able to dive like a gannet, and I shall float high on the air as they do. Up there they are free. They love their freedom, I think. To be free, this is the most important thing of all, for birds, for people too.”

  He picked up a handful of pebbles and scattered them out on to the beach, like dice. It was as if he was speaking out his thoughts in much the same way.

  “We saw many gannets, I remember,” he said, “on the day I came to England on HMS Dorsetshire.

  I was now a prisoner of war, of course. When I looked up at the gulls crying in the sky back then, I thought, They are free up there; I am not. What are they crying for? I could not know it then, and nor did Manfred, of course, but we would be prisoners of war for six long years.”

  “Six years?” I said. “That’s like for ever.”

  “You are right,” he went on. “But I had Manfred with me. Without him… well, it would have been much harder for me. We were lined up on the quayside, all of us, all the survivors of the Bismarck, and Marty came over to us to say goodbye. You remember this, Marty? None of the other British sailors did this. Only you. You shook us by the hand, Manfred and me, and you gave us cigarettes too. I never forgot this kindness, nor did Manfred. They took us away up to the north of England to a prisoner-of-war camp and after that I did not see you again, Marty, did I? Not for a long, long time.

  “I will be honest with you. At first, Manfred and I, we could not forgive the British navy for what they did when they left our comrades to drown in the sea. For a long time we were angry. But the more we talked about it and thought about it during our years as prisoners of war, the more we came to understand that the British had good reason not to forgive us also. Those 2,000 men on the Hood who had died had families too. How could they ever forgive the gun crew who did what we had done? We thought much about this, Manfred and me, and we talked about it often, quietly, between ourselves. It is never out of my mind even now.

  “When I learned later on what had happened to so many of my friends, from the navy, from school, from my home town, I think after all I was lucky to be safe in my prison camp in England. It was cold in the winters and the food was never enough. But we had Red Cross parcels and letters from home. They made us work hard in the fields, picking up stones, spreading manure, making roads. But no one was shooting at us, no one was bombing us. The war seemed far away. So it was not so bad for us.

  “I think perhaps Manfred found it harder than I did being a prisoner. It took weeks, sometimes months for a letter to arrive from Jutta, and he longed to see Inga, his little daughter, again. He had only seen her for such a short time, just for one week when he was home on leave, before we sailed on the Bismarck. They came to wave us off, I remember. We both lived on our memories, I think, but as time went by I would often see Manfred standing there looking out through the wire and I knew what he was dreaming of. I could see the sadness in his eyes and I could tell he was finding it harder and harder to be without Jutta and Inga.

  “As for me, like Manfred, like the rest of the men in the camp, I longed only for the end of the war, to be a free man again. So when it came at last, in the summer of 1945, we were just happy it was all over and we would be going home.

  “But sadly this did not happen, not for a long time. They would not let us go home. Instead we were moved down to a prisoner-of-war camp near here in Suffolk, to work on the farms and sometimes to clear the beaches of wire and mines. And this was how, in the end, Manfred and I were let out of the camp and came to be housed with a family in Mayfield Farm, and so we found ourselves living there with a farmer and his wife, Mr and Mrs Williams.” He paused then, and smiled at us. “And their daughter, a little girl called Grace.”

  Part Three

  ALEX, I COULD tell, was still trying to work it out. “So was that our mum, Charley?” he whispered to me. But Alex could never whisper softly.

  Walter answered him for me. “I think so. I am very much hoping so. Maybe you understand now why I am so happy to have met you like this, and all by chance, by accident. It is as if it was meant to be.”

  But there was something that was still bothering me. “I still don’t understand why your friend, Manfred, has the same name as our dog,” I said.

  “Ah yes, Little Manfred,” Walter went on. “Do not worry, I have not forgotten Little Manfred. He is not a dog I could ever forget, I promise you. I will tell you about him soon enough. But let me tell you first about Mr and Mrs Williams – this is your grandmother and your grandfather, I think. As I told you, it was their farmhouse we were staying in, Manfred and I.

  “To start with, I must say, they were just polite, but not at all friendly. I do not think they wanted us there at all. They did not like having to lodge us in the house – we were Germans after all. The war was over, but we were still the enemy. And little Grace, she would not even be polite. She did not speak to us for weeks; sometimes she used to stick her tongue out at us, I remember. But Manfred, he managed in the end to make friends with her. He talked to her a lot about Inga, showed Grace her photograph. He built her a tree house in the garden, where she could sit and read. She loved to read books.”

  “She still does,” Alex said. “Mum’s always reading. We watch telly, she reads books. I don’t like books. They’ve got spellings in them.” I shushed Alex, and Walter went on.

  “But it wasn’t long before they were treating us as if we were a part of the family. They let us eat with them at their table; we even went to church with them on Sundays. We worked with them, looking after the horses, ploughing, harvesting, spreading muck on the fields, fetching water, digging ditches, picking stones off the fields, whatever it was that needed doing. I was always a little slower than the others, because I had to walk with a stick, after my injury. But I was a hard worker. And on the days we were not needed on the farm, we were sent to work with the other prisoners down on the beaches, clearing the wire and the mines. There were mines all round the coast, you see. They had been put there, years before, to stop an invasion from the sea. But of course in the end there never was an invasion. Then after the war was over, we prisoners of war, we had to help clear it all away, to make the beaches safe again.

  “In the evenings, Manfred would often sit and read a story to Grace – I remember this very well. I did it sometimes myself, if Manfred was still out feeding the animals after dark. But I knew always that Grace liked it better when Manfred was there. His English was much better than mine, although after two years living there, I could speak it quite well.

  “At Christmas, Manfred and I sang to them some German carols – that was Mrs Williams’s idea. Manfred taught Grace to sing ‘Stille Nacht’, ‘Silent Night’, in German. And, in the end, the villagers were kind – for most of the time, anyway. There were one or two who crossed the street to the other side, so they did not have to speak to us, but we had to expect that. In this war many had suffered greatly, had great griefs and sadnesses to bear; and where there is sadness, there is often anger. I think perhaps that the anger lasts longer even than the sadness. For Manfred, Grace became almost like a daughter, the daughter he was parted from. I never saw him happier than when he was with her.

  “Then at last came the good news that Manfred and I were soon to be going home. This was when Manfred decided he would make something special for Grace, a gift from us both to leave behind. Manfred loved to make things, out of wood usually. He had always been clever with his hands. Anyway, h
e found some bits of wood in the barn – this wood, I remember, came from apple crates in the barn – and out of this wood he carved a little dog, a dachshund like the one he and Jutta and little Inga had at home. He made wheels for it too. I painted it – a brown body, of course, with a little black nose, eyes, ears, and a green chassis too. And the wheels, I painted bright red.”

  “Little Manfred!” said Alex. “You painted Little Manfred?”

  “Manfred made him, and I painted him,” Walter told him proudly. “We made Little Manfred together. I tied on a piece of string too, so Grace could pull him along. This was all done in secret, in the bedroom we shared together, because we wanted it to be a surprise for her. Manfred said it would be like a ‘dog of peace’. I have always remembered those words. We were very pleased with him, and hid him away under my bed so that we could give him to Grace on the day we left.

  “We spent the last day down on the beach, clearing more of the barbed wire – there was always more. When we were having our lunch, Manfred and me and the others, we came up here to sit by this boat. We were looking out to sea just like I am doing now. Then Manfred showed me a flat stone he had found. He told me that he would bounce it all the way to Germany. It would get back home before we did, he said. So he got up and went down to the sea to throw his stone. The tide was far out that day, I remember, so he had a long walk.

  “There was suddenly a great flash and I was thrown up against the side of the boat by the force of the explosion. I hit my head, and I think I was unconscious for some time. How long I lay there, I do not know. When I woke up they told me what had happened. It was a mine that blew Manfred up, one that had not been discovered. They told me that they were very sorry. This is why I was alone that evening when I gave Grace the little dog Manfred had made. She was so upset she could not speak. But later, after Grace had gone up to bed, Mrs Williams told me that Grace had decided to call the dog ‘Little Manfred’, and that she would keep it for ever, that they would all think of Manfred every time they looked at this little dog, and remember how good he was, and kind.