Perfectly Ordinary People(100)

But then she straightened, shook her hair from her eyes, and looked straight at me.

She didn’t say a single word, she just gasped. I suspect our mouths fell open, and for a few long seconds we just stood there at opposite ends of the hallway, staring at each other.

Finally she managed to say my name, but when I tried to reply, when I tried to say the word ‘Ethel’, nothing came out.

She bit her bottom lip for a moment and then said, ‘My God! It’s you!’

We met in the middle of the hallway and hugged rigidly, and then she held me at arm’s length so she could look at me better. She started to say how she couldn’t believe that I’d found her, but something behind me distracted her and I turned to see Christophe standing in the doorway, his hands on Guillaume’s shoulders. ‘God,’ she gasped. ‘Pierre!’

‘It’s Christophe now,’ he said, winking at her. ‘I changed my name.’

Ethel shot me a puzzled glance and then kissed Christophe on the cheek before crouching down so that she was at Guillaume’s level. ‘Hello, little man,’ she said, then, glancing between Christophe and me, ‘Is he yours?’

Christophe started to answer, but I beat him to it. ‘Yes,’ I said, forcefully, because Guillaume, after all, was listening. ‘Yes, this is our wonderful baby boy, Guillaume.’

Ethel straightened then and said, rather coldly, I thought, that we clearly had some catching up to do. She leaned into the lounge to ask Irene if it was OK, and then we followed her to the top floor, where her tiny attic-room was located.

‘I can’t believe this,’ she said repeatedly. ‘I just can’t believe that you’re here.’

She sat Christophe, Guillaume and me on the bed and then positioned herself cross-legged opposite us as we started to attempt to catch up on the five missing years. There was so much to tell that we jumped back and forth as we tried to reorganise all the events into some kind of cohesive story. We told her about escaping from Alsace, and the winters in Le Mas, and Christophe’s family rejecting him when we got back; the only subject we avoided really was Guillaume, because, of course, he was present.

But Ethel seemed to be elsewhere for much of the conversation and I was never sure if she was listening. It was bizarre. You know when someone ums and ahs in the wrong places? Well, she was doing that.

I tried to explain about my parents, but failed. It was still hard for me to say the words without breaking down. But as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Ethel had been home already. She’d visited Christophe’s parents just a week after we’d returned to Le Mas and she said they’d told her everything.

I asked her about her family, and she told us that her father was missing, presumed dead. He’d been shipped to Schirmeck and then Dachau, whereupon he’d vanished from view. By then, we all knew what that meant. Her sister and her sister’s fiancé were missing, too, as were most of her aunts and uncles and cousins. In the end it turned out they’d all died in the camps, every single one of them.

God, she must have been heartbroken.

She was devastated. It’s the kind of trauma you never recover from. She’s had a visceral hatred of Germans her whole life. I remember, once or twice, people have tried to reason with her about that. They’ll say that the Germans of today aren’t the Nazis of yesterday, but for much of our lives, of course, they were. Many of those responsible are alive and kicking right now in 1986. So it’s hard and it never really gets easier. But at least her mother slipped through the net. She was alive and living in Mont-de-Marsan with a surviving aunt. ‘She won’t even discuss the fact that the others might be dead,’ Ethel told us, shaking her head. ‘Especially Dad. She just can’t accept the possibility . . . But one day there’ll be a piece of paper, I suppose, and then she’ll have no choice. At that point we’ll have to deal with it.’

‘She’s in denial,’ Christophe said.

‘Exactly,’ Ethel agreed. ‘But who can blame her? I’d quite like to be in denial about it myself, but I can’t. I can sense it . . . that he’s gone.’

After an hour or so, Irene knocked on the door and handed Ethel a plate of sandwiches and a jug of lemonade for us all, so once she’d gone, Ethel told us about her, too, and about all the other Quakers who had helped her.

I know Quakerism is a religion, but if I’m honest, I don’t know much more than that.

Sure. Well, it’s a branch of Christianity, really – Protestant. But I like to think of them as sort of real Christians in a way, if you know what I mean?

Real?

The way Christianity maybe ought to be, if you went right back to the source. There’s none of the pomp or circumstance of Catholicism, for instance, about the Quakers. They don’t have fancy churches or gilded altars. They believe in non-violence and helping others . . . And during the war, they did everything they could to help the Jews. But I’d never heard of them either until that day.

Is there a specific reason the Quakers helped the Jews? Is there some sort of link between the two religions?

No, not really. It was just their Christian desire to help others, I think. And perhaps for some it was a way to make up for the fact that, being non-violent, they couldn’t fight. But they certainly did help thousands during the war. It all started with the Kindertransport in ’38, when they began evacuating all those Jewish children from Germany. The Quakers convinced Britain to let them in, and organised transporting them and placing them once they arrived. There were over ten thousand of them, I think.