CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Gerd Böll was an expert in the strange new craft of bombed buildings. He knew that they could be divided into three main types. There were the ones that disintegrated into rubble and formed a pyramid of impenetrable debris. Then there were buildings that collapsed only at one side, so that all the floors on that side fell to the ground. The hospital had done that. Then there was this sort of ruin: the most difficult and treacherous of all. The floors had collapsed in the centre of the building so that they now formed several V shapes, jammed one upon the other and waiting for an excuse to settle lower upon a careless rescuer.

Gerd knew some of the ways of debris. He knew that a flimsy chair could support several tons of brickwork or lock with another piece of furniture to produce a miraculous cavern in the very centre of the wreckage. He knew that gas could collect in airless pockets and be dense enough to ignite a spark or overpower a man who put his head there. He knew the dangers of dripping water and he knew that a panicky person needed twice the diameter of a careful, calm one and because of that some rescue crews had been unable to return along their own tunnels. He knew the added strength of curving or crooked tunneling. In short, he was an expert.

‘No smoking,’ he told a soldier.

There was no one way to tunnel into the heap of debris which covered Voss’ cellar. Gerd Böll surveyed the whole heap of it. He peered at the piles of bricks and bits of wood. He lifted doors and mattresses to study the shape of the pile and to decide where the lines of thrust were. The top of the pile was twenty feet above street level and flattened abruptly into a plateau that had a slight bowl of subsidence. Normally he would have begun to dig as close to the ground as possible, but here at the top an old sofa and kitchen table seemed to form the entrance to a natural cavern through the rubbish. He tested it with his feet and when only a toy dog and some shattered plaster moved he decided that it was firm enough to burrow into.

He was able to get his whole body inside the wreckage by moving only a few bits of batten and breaking a chair-leg and passing it back to the men behind him.

‘Herr Böll is on his way’ he heard a soldier say. He imagined that Anna-Luisa would be taking it very calmly. She was a remarkably placid girl, Gerd thought, a schemer or a saint. No, saint certainly wasn’t the word. ‘Often debris provides a natural course for the tunneller and if possible he is well advised to use it.’ Even though he was now crawling at a more shallow angle he continued to move along the line of least resistance. He was deep inside the pile of debris when he stopped for a moment to listen to it. There were a few creaks and cracks and the shuffle of powdered plaster, but no danger signals. When he was a child he had had slight claustrophobia. The doctor had told his parents to leave his bedroom door open. ‘He’ll grow out of it.’ Gerd had overcome his fears and was proud of having done so.

‘Saw,’ he whispered. Cocking his hand back over his shoulder, he took the handle of it and working with his elbows against his chest and with the blade moving only three or four inches he was able to saw through the bookcase in ten minutes. Beyond it there were books and these he could only deal with one by one. Heine, Schiller, The Treasure of Silver Lake by Karl May, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Home Medicine, One Man’s Journey Through German West Africa, Memoirs of an Infantry General, Hay-box Cooking were all passed back to the TENO who was at his heels, and each permitted Gerd to crawl forward another inch. A pile of gramophone records cracked loudly under his elbow and a piece of fireplace cut his leg.

‘Silence,’ said Gerd, and the word was repeated back to the men at the entrance to the tunnel and then a whistle was sounded to tell passers-by to listen for the cries of the buried. But Gerd had been mistaken.

Anna-Luisa was not crying; she was sitting in an armchair with little Hansl held close to her, rocking him gently and smoothing his hair. He was asleep now, for something of the girl’s calm had reassured him. Since she had spoken with August she had played the musical box a dozen times, examined the Meissen and the silver and walked round the storehouse until she had seen it all. Now, with the oil-lamp flame turned very low—for she knew it would not get light here in the morning—she waited patiently to be rescued.

Gerd Böll made excellent progress, taking under an hour to reach ground level. Progress slowed as he went on, for Gerd preferred to jam a piece of wood or brick tightly against the tunnel’s roof to hold the wrecked house intact. When he came back he would remove his pit-props one by one. However, this made passing debris back difficult and whenever he could he packed it flat instead. There was still enough room for him to progress through the wreckage by removing only a minimum of obstructions. It was the easiest tunnel he had ever made, almost as if someone else had made it for him.

Like an archaeologist Gerd recognized the compressed layers that had once been storeys: through bathroom tiles into stair carpet and on through pieces of kitchen sink. The kitchen floor was stone and Gerd anticipated a long hard dig there, but it was simple enough. The flagstones had shattered and there was a wide pit in the soft earth. Gerd moved through the hole carefully but still he scraped his shins on the broken stone. He was at an angle of forty-five degrees now with his head downwards and it was an effort to prevent his legs sliding upon him while his hands were occupied with the blockages in front of him. Twice he did slide forward and had to use all his strength to stretch his legs out behind him to get purchase on the bricks and timber.

He was almost into the cellar when he reached the end of his easy tunnelling. In front of him there was a green metal barrier. It was two and a half feet across and circular in shape. It fitted close against the house debris, as the circular door of a safe fits into a wall. Gerd stroked the metal door and wondered what sort of household equipment it could possibly be. A water tank perhaps, but had ever a water tank been as sturdily made as this? Thick steel fixed together with massive bolts that could…A bomb, my God!

Gerd decided that it was the end of a medium-capacity bomb. A six-foot steel canister that had been dropped set for long delay with a celluloid heart full of acid eating its way through to detonate the Amatol.

It had dropped upon the wreckage and torn a passage through the rubble, which was why Gerd had found the natural path so easy to move along. He’d followed the bomb. Long delay, but how long: one minute, two minutes, twenty-four hours? Gerd went hot and cold and could hear his heart beating like a drum. A 1,000-lb cookie would obliterate half the street, and he was cuddling it. He felt the bomb and fancied that it was hot, although he knew it was probably the temperature of his nervous hands that deceived him. He thought he could detect the sharp odour of British paint and varnish that he’d smelled on other RAF bombs.

From now on he was tunnelling in earnest. He worked along the side of the metal, using the strength of the canister to support one side of his tunnel and building bits of broken stone and wood from it where necessary. It seemed as though his trip past the cookie would never end. He moved past the smooth steel shape and was six feet lower at the far end of it. Suddenly a piece of bedstead gave way under his elbow, the cellar wall buckled and collapsed, and he found himself sliding forward into space. He fell because, with remarkable self-discipline, he refrained from grasping at the bomb to steady himself. He landed heavily.

‘Herr Böll,’ said Anna-Luisa, opening her eyes to find the agile little man crouching on the wet floor, having appeared with the suddenness of a Demon King in a pantomime. He was covered in brick-dust and rubbing a sore elbow.

‘That’s a bomb,’ he said, awkwardly pointing at the dark smooth shape that was only just visible through the gap in the cellar ceiling.

‘It looks like a water tank,’ said Anna-Luisa. She came closer to stare at the metal shape.

‘No, I think it’s a bomb,’ said Gerd Böll, but now he had an uneasy suspicion that she was right. He smiled awkwardly at her and then asked, ‘Did you get the ring?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s in my handbag. Do you want to see it?’

‘I think we’d better try and get you out,’ he said.

‘I love Herr Bach.’ She took the oil lamp and turned the wick on full and Gerd shone his torch too.

‘It’s thicker than any water tank I’ve ever seen.’

‘Herr Bach’s hot-water tank in the apartment in Krefeld was just like that.’

‘Have you got everything?’

‘There are some wonderful treasures here, Herr Böll. Did you know that Herr Voss had such wonderful things?’

Gerd switched off his torch. There were lots of things he hadn’t known before, he thought; like young Anna-Luisa having false teeth. Perhaps she’d forgotten that she hadn’t put them in. He tried to think of some way of reminding her without causing embarrassment. ‘Voss is a wealthy man,’ he said.

‘I like him,’ said Anna-Luisa. ‘We might be dead now if he hadn’t made us take shelter.’

‘I’ll help you climb up to the tunnel,’ said Gerd, shifting an armchair upon which she could climb. ‘Leave the child. It will be easier for me to bring him, I’ve done it before.’

‘I’m glad it was you who came, Herr Böll.’

‘Why?’

‘I always had the feeling that you disliked me.’

‘I don’t dislike you,’ said Gerd blushing. ‘About the marriage I’m not so sure, but I don’t dislike you.’

‘But I would make Herr Bach a good wife, Herr Böll. I promise you, I promise you.’ The intensity of the girl’s words and the simplicity of her emotions showed Gerd a side of her he never knew existed. He patted her arm awkwardly and feared she would weep. He wanted to tell her about the letter he’d written. So that she would not see his face he picked up the child.

‘I promise,’ said Anna-Luisa again, and suddenly Gerd was happy for the two of them. He knew that his letter would have no effect upon two people really in love. It was August who’d been right. What did it matter what the girl had done or had been? The chances of happiness were too rare and too fleeting to be put under a microscope. He himself had been a rake in his young days and yet that had not prevented him becoming a loyal and loving husband. Why should it not be true of this girl?

AC McDonald, RAF armourer, whose father now sat in a Dundee kitchen with three cups of untouched cold tea at his elbow and the telegram still in his hand, had done his last day’s work well. He had fitted the type 47 pistol that morning and the celluloid was of one of the thinnest types used. As the bomb had left Lambert’s bomb-bay a linen cord, still attached to the plane, had dragged the safety device from the pistol and rotated a pulley which screwed down a bolt upon a tiny bottle of acid. Now the acid had eaten through the celluloid until the spring-loaded striking pin had nothing left to restrain it. The pin struck the detonator and six hundred pounds of explosive destroyed the cellar and was heard across the whole town of Altgarten.

Two houses were totally destoyed and four severely damaged. Five people were injured, since by the time it exploded they had heard the ‘all clear’ and come back to their houses. Other delay bombs had been roped off but no one knew of this one. Seven TENO men, three policemen and Storp the old Blockwart from number 29, who was still digging down towards his wife, were blown to pieces, and a wristwatch belonging to one of the TENOs was found four streets away. No recognizable part or possession or garment of Gerd Böll, Anna-Luisa or Hansl was ever found, although even today splinters of Meissen and shapeless blobs of silver turn up in the gardens there.

One of the difficulties that the rescue workers faced was in the removal of dead and injured. Many bodies were glued to the road surface by the heat and were impossible to move without special equipment. The body of the Burgomaster’s wife, for instance, held up traffic on Nehringstrasse for two hours.

Near the cinema a rescue team of TENO men were burrowing deep into a pile of debris. A whistle blew. ‘Quiet, everyone.’ There was still a lot of noise but every head cocked towards the rubble, listening for a call or groan.

‘Stretcher party,’ shouted an NCO.

‘Wonderful,’ said a policeman. ‘There are thirty-eight people buried under that lot.’

‘Morphia,’ shouted the NCO, ‘quickly.’ The first light of dawn revealed deep craters in the streets and pavements littered with furniture salvaged from nearby houses.

On a piece of brickwork among the remains of Nehringstrasse 39 there was a chalked message: ‘Kurt I am with Frau Weber love Kate’. Soon there were hundreds of such messages as the people of the town tried to reform themselves into groups: ‘News of Herr Stroop please’, ‘Otto is dead’, ‘Peter is on leave’, ‘Mother stay here’ were written alongside the bolder notes for rescuemen: ‘Nine dead in rear part of cellar’, ‘Two dead first floor back room’, ‘Danger gas sump’, ‘Quicklime Danger’.