Read Online The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons - Free Book Online

was a lot of flak about, very likely they were shot before they reached the ground. I was in luck. I landed with a broken arm, decided I might as well give myself up, knocked on the door of the nearest house a few minutes’ walk away. The man was a mine foreman, a Socialist, fed up with the war. He and his wife took me in, kept me in a room until my arm was better, got me a fake German passport. Then Hans, that was the miner’s name, arranged to get me on a lorry going down south. I was crated up as some sort of machinery, and Hans put in food and drink to last me for a couple of days. The idea was I would get into occupied France and try to contact the resistance groups there, and Hans had given me some names. But that was the point at which my luck ran out. The lorry went south all right, but it went to Hungary, which as you may remember was on the skids at that time. The driver must have taken some sort of wrong route, because they ran slap into the Russians. The Russians decrated me, but they wouldn’t believe I was British, or what was I doing with a German work permit? I believe they came to the conclusion that I was some sort of German spy trying to get information. Anyway they sent me to this labour camp, Novoruba. I’m talking too much.”
    “Oh, no,” Stephen said. “We’re very interested.”
    I looked at Lady W to see if she had taken in the malice of Stephen’s tone, but she was sitting back in her chair with eyes half-shut. I could not even be sure that she was listening to David.
    “Novoruba – I don’t really want to talk much about that. I was there for years, I don’t know how many. Eight years, I suppose, something like that. We lived in huts, sixty to a hut, with one small stove to keep us warm in winter. Deaths were something like twenty per cent a year. One day after an old man had died, he was a Pole and he simply died of cold and semi-starvation, I asked for an interview with the camp commander. I got it, which was a pity. He asked what I wanted and when I told him I had a complaint he listened to it. I lost my temper a bit, and said the Russians were in every way worse than the Germans. That put him in a towering rage. He shot off a whole stream of Russian I couldn’t understand, and then I was hiked outside and frogmarched away in a direction away from our hut. I told them I wanted to go back, and when they took no notice I punched one of them in the guts and started to run. That was a mistake because I never had a hope. When they caught up with me, two or three of them whanged me on the head very thoroughly with the damned great wooden staves they carried. One of them also did a nice job of stamping on my hand and breaking some bones in it. Nobody bothered whether they mended properly, and they didn’t. That’s why my writing isn’t what it was.
    He held up his right hand. Two of the fingers were much shorter than the others, and the whole hand was bunched together and contorted like the hand of a sufferer from arthritis. His cheek twitched, his face was heavy with brooding.
    “I can remember every detail of life in the camp, but I can’t distinguish one day from another, one year from another even. I’ll tell you what I remember. Breakfast. Every day it was a sort of soup, either thin with bits of gristle or stiff with some kind of filthy coarse lentil. Then bread, disgusting uneatable bread that gave you dysentery. Sometimes a bit of sausage as a treat. Rock sausage we used to call it, because one day somebody broke a tooth on it. Then we worked all day, we were supposed to be constructing some kind of dam I think. I had to work even when my hand was healing. Afternoon meal, or dinner or whatever you call it, was the same as breakfast except that sometimes you got a few vegetables in the soup.” He shuddered, and the violence of it went all through his body.
    “I can’t – I can’t talk about it much, I’ve tried to forget it. They treated us like animals, and in the end