Frank suggested that I should go away on my own for a week. I jumped at the idea, but couldn’t think where to go. I had always disliked holidays, and couldn’t face the thought of one on my own, especially in the depressed state I was in. Perhaps I could go and make myself useful somewhere, offer my services to a charitable organisation, sink my own troubles in the contemplation of someone else’s. But I had never been a very useful sort of person; apart from a flair for cooking, my domestic talents were almost non-existent. Still, I could cook, so I had something to offer. But to whom?
I don’t really know why or how, but somehow that same evening I found myself alone in a church. Maybe I’d gone there to give the Almighty a last chance. Or maybe I’d just gone there for a good howl in private. Anyway, there was no one else in the church, and it was a fine echo-ey building. As even when I’m quite alone I tend to be self-conscious, I didn’t howl, but muttered a defiant if muddled: ‘Damn you, you don’t exist, but I hate you.’ Then I burst into tears, and threw decorum to the winds. ‘All right,’ I heard myself shouting, ‘if you do exist, show me a way out. For a start, what the hell am I to do next?’ After this unbridled exhibition, I was startled by the noise I was making, and ran out of the church at top speed.
Frank was in an armchair reading when I got back to the house, still tear-stained. My mother and Betty had the children in another room, where they were watching television. We had, as we always did, brought with us enough books to withstand a siege, some of them selected from the local library by Frank. Idly I picked up one of these and looked at the title: The Face of Victory by Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, V.C. I could see that it was autobiographical, and I put it down again with a grimace. Cheshire, the bomber pilot V.C., had had a lot of publicity during and after the Second World War, and I was always suspicious of popular heroes. Not content with what others had written about him, I thought scornfully, he was now writing about himself. What an egoist the man must be. Frank saw the look on my face and more or less read my thoughts. ‘Don’t just put it down,’ he urged. ‘I think it would interest you. At least, give it a try.’
I had picked the book up again, and was rifling through the pages as he was speaking. As we went on talking, I stood with my thumb on one page somewhere near the end. When I put the book down it came open at that page. I stared at it, and saw that it was full of addresses, of Cheshire Homes For The Sick, where voluntary help was required. Right at the bottom, one address stuck out; a Home run not by Leonard Cheshire but by his wife, Sue Ryder. Home For Concentration Camp Survivors, Cavendish, Suffolk, I read. As I stood looking down at it, I realised that one part of my prayer in the church had been answered. I had demanded to know what I was to do next, and now I knew. I was going to Suffolk.
CHAPTER 4
SUE RYDER
It was not just an off-the-cuff decision to step into the unknown. As soon as I saw that address, I knew I had to go there; the way had already been prepared – when I was in Louvain.
The address took me back with a jolt to the Clinique St Raphäel, where I had spent so many interminable evenings after Paul had been put to bed. I couldn’t go out and leave him, so I had taken to pacing the corridor outside our room, up and down aimlessly for hours on end, Past the various wards and single rooms.
One night I saw a woman wheeled on a trolley into one of the emergency rooms, and was forcibly struck by her gaunt appearance and her sunken staring eyes. They were the eyes of a woman haunted by some appalling and unforgettable suffering. The next night I heard a woman scream, and knew who it must be. It was an unearthly screeching sound, unlike anything I had ever heard, a sort of banshee wail; and it filled me with an unbelievable dread.
The screaming continued for an eternity of ten minutes or so, then stopped as suddenly and as eerily as it had started, leaving behind a silence that was full of nameless horrors. A man who was pacing in the other direction must have seen the fear in my eyes, and he came to join me. ‘She was in Ravensbrück,’ he said quietly, with the air of one who has explained everything. ‘Ravensbrück?’ I asked blankly, as much in the dark as ever. The man looked taken aback by my obvious ignorance, and proceeded to tell me more. Ravensbrück, he explained, was the Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin, where women and children were sent. Many of these had been subjected to medical experimentation, and many thousands had died there. (The official figure was in fact 92,000.) This woman had been one of the guinea-pigs on whom experiments had been carried out. She was a sorry part of the human wreckage which had survived such camps, as much dead as alive. The hospital was as much her home as any other place, since she spent more time there than anywhere else.
His words sent ice-cold shivers coursing along my spine. I would have walked away if I could, but I didn’t dare. Mentally I resisted him. Why did the man have to tell me such things? Couldn’t he sense that I didn’t want to hear them? The war had been over for fifteen years, its effects had been neatly tidied away. When it had come to an end, I was still a child, and the stories coming out of Belsen and other places of that kind had scarcely troubled me, so great was my relief that the war was over at last. I didn’t want to listen to atrocity stories now. Hadn’t I enough troubles of my own?
But my companion, a man of about forty-five from Arlon, had no intention of letting me off. For four years he too had suffered in a concentration camp, Neuengamme, where only the strongest had survived. In spite of myself, I had to listen horror-struck to his nightmare memories: of the barely alive prisoners piling the dead each morning into trucks and throwing the corpses into a specially prepared ditch; of the six ounces of bread and two frost-bitten potatoes on which the prisoners were forced to perform slave labour. Sometimes, my friend recalled, the S.S. cook would fling a crust into their midst, for the sadistic pleasure of seeing starving men scratch and claw at each other in the scramble to stay alive. Rather than starve, they had eaten filth, keeping themselves alive on their own excrement. My friend had come through, but at a price. In the fifteen years which had elapsed since the Liberation, he had continued to suffer from severe intestinal disorders which forced him to spend one month out of every four in this hospital.
When he eventually let me go, I went back to my room and wrote in my diary, ‘I shall not go out there again tomorrow. If these things happened I prefer not to know about them.’ I was as good as my own cowardly word; I did not see the man from Arlon again; but I found that he was not so easy to forget. What he had told me could not be untold, and against my will it had had its effect. Every word he had spoken came unbidden to mind as I stood gazing at that address in Suffolk. With an uncanny feeling that the course of my life was being directed by powerful forces, I sat down and wrote to whoever was in charge at the Home for Concentration Camp survivors in Suffolk, offering my services for a week as bed-maker, and mentioning that I could cook. In the circumstances, it was no surprise at all when the reply came by return: Come as soon as you can, we need you urgently.
Wearing my best suit and carrying a large suitcase bulging with clothes, I passed the village duck-pond, turned into the drive of the Sue Ryder Home, and caught my first glimpse of the idyllic, pink-washed sixteenth-century house which sheltered physically handicapped patients, others who had been mentally ill, and a handful of survivors of Nazi tyranny. It was to become my own spiritual home over the next four years. The September sun was shining, and I was filled with a vague euphoria not entirely free of self-congratulation. I had come to indulge in a bout of do-gooding, and was all dressed-up to play the role of lady bountiful.
Without