Somewhere Over England by Margaret Graham Page A

because a father’s love was too important to let slip through your fingers, too important to waste. And besides, Heine had said he needed her.
    Chris would not stay behind. He did not like his grandmother, he told Helen as she read to him that night. She was always too close, always wanting to take everyone away from him so that it was just the two of them. Helen listened but she already knew. That night in bed she told Heine that the three of them would go and that it would be all right. She dreamed of a sun-filled stream and she woke in the morning crying.
    Four days before Christmas Helen sat next to Heine as he drove slowly up to the border posts, his eyes on the slush-covered road, his hand wiping the inside of the windscreenwhere his breath had condensed and begun to freeze. Helen took out the leather from the glove pocket, leaned across and helped and then did her own. This time there were no birds singing, only snow which dragged down the branches of the trees. Neither of them spoke of the camera, of the search that must come when they stopped.
    There was no ‘
Grüss Gott
’ from the young blond border guard dressed in his green jacket and black trousers with his high black boots. This time he stood erect and snapped ‘
Heil Hitler
’ while Helen smiled, her shoulders tense, willing Heine to reply in kind which he did, but only when he had climbed from the car, because she knew he did not want her to hear him say those words.
    Chris eased himself up against the back of her seat, leaning his elbow along the top. There was a box of Christmas presents on the seat beside him and another box with the remains of their picnic beside that. They both watched Heine walk to the customs post and then climbed out at his gesture. Another guard came and searched the car, picking up and shaking the presents and opening some. Would he find the camera? But even if they did, they wouldn’t hurt a child, would they? Helen felt her headache throb more deeply. It had clenched down one side of her neck and head since they had left Britain.
    She took Chris’s arm and pointed down the road. ‘That’s Germany, where Grandfather and Grandmother Weber live.’ She must look natural, at ease. She must not appear afraid.
    She looked at the Nazi flag which hung limp at the top of the pole, at the trees which had been cut back so that it would be clearly visible from a great distance. She looked at the scarlet background, the white circle and the hooked cross marked out in the deadness of black and her hatred of it gave her courage.
    She smiled at her son and he took her hand. She could see his breath in the crisp cold air. Behind him the guard was looking at the picnic box, his face full of distaste at the apple cores, the banana peel, and he turned from it and nodded to the officer who waited with Heine. She smiled again at Chris and told him to stamp his feet to keep warm and knew that for now they were safe.
    They drove without stopping through verges no longer full of poppies or brown-eyed Susans but heaped with snow stained by slush and dirt. They saw no blonde-haired maidens, justiced ponds. No window-boxes, just inches of snow on ledges and long daggers of ice hanging from pointed eaves. They stayed on the first night at a country inn and the second in a town, but in both they said little because the people might have been Nazis.
    On the third day they drove through the flat beet fields and Helen told Chris of the boys his age who picked beet through the snow and ice. There were no commercial advertisements as they approached the outskirts of Hanover because the Nazis did not approve. They skirted around the city and as darkness fell they drove into Heine’s village.
    ‘Why wouldn’t Grandmother come? She will have Christmas on her own now.’ Chris’s voice was sleep-filled, his lids heavy.
    Helen shrugged. ‘Older people get set in their ways,’ she answered and was glad that her mother was not here because the older