This time Max bared his straight, white teeth and a sigh fought its way through. ‘I’ve spent the last week holed up with a German dictionary but I’m not much beyond saying hello and asking for a beer.’
‘Well, that might get you further than you think,’ she said. ‘Never mind, mine’s a little rusty too. But I think I can at least order us dinner, so stick with me and at least we won’t starve.’
For a second, Georgie imagined he might have softened a little – spotted the hint of a slight, appreciative nod in Max Spender.
‘Perhaps we should get a drink before take-off?’ he suggested.
‘Yes, definitely,’ she said, grasping the opportunity. She wasn’t much of a drinker, never had any real need of it, but the thought of her first ever flight in a heavy metal tube that lifted several thousand feet off the ground was more intimidating than their final destination. A drink might just settle the herd of elephants in her stomach.
Georgie downed her whisky in three gulps, the ice chill causing her to gasp and swallow hard.
‘Steady!’ said Max. ‘Are you nervous by any chance?’
There was no denying her anxiety – it was his turn to enjoy the upper hand when she admitted to being a virgin flyer against his veteran status. Still, he didn’t dwell on it, and this time he was magnanimous in his advice.
‘Just keep yourself distracted during take-off and landing,’ he said. ‘Have you got a book?’
She nodded.
‘Good. And if you have a wobbly moment, just remember the pilots. They’re not nervous, and they have to fly the bloody thing! That’s what my mother always told me.’ He smiled only briefly, eyes cutting away and staring into his glass wistfully.
‘Thanks. I’ll remember that,’ Georgie said.
But as they walked out onto the tarmac, her anxiety reared again. The aircraft was little more than a corrugated metal crate; beads of perspiration collected at the nape of her neck. She looked suspiciously at the three extremely small propellers charged with hoisting such a great mass into the sky, a weight that would soon include her. The other passengers boarding appeared relaxed enough, and she had to remind herself of Max’s advice, that thousands of people flew every day – and survived. As the engine sputtered into life and growled towards take-off, she opened her book and steadied her breathing, hoping she reflected a picture of calm. Inside was another matter.
Once in the air, the whisky nicely stroking at her angst, Georgie pushed her nose further into the pages. Her choice of The Trouble I’ve Seen by her hero Martha Gellhorn was not a deliberate irritant to Max Spender, but nicely fortuitous. She held it high in front of her face, partly as a distraction, but mostly as a way of nailing her colours firmly to the female mast.
Max, by contrast, was reading the morning’s Daily Express – she noted his eyebrows twitching at reports from the new Austria, still in its infancy, the Nazis having simply trooped into their neighbouring country in March and declared it to be henceforth part of Germany. Buoyed by this, native Germans living in the Czech Sudetenland were agitating for their own alliance with the Fatherland and looked to be gaining strength. Few in the world, it seemed, had issued much of a protest, least of all Britain’s politicians, with the British and American government officially refusing to accept any more Jewish refugees.
And so, even without the summer swelter, Berlin promised to be a cauldron. Yet, to the population in England, Chancellor Hitler was merely a strange little man with a moustache who liked to stalk around in shorts and bark into a microphone at huge gatherings of idol worshippers. It was the correspondents – writers and analysts tracking Hitler’s meteoric rise and his harsh, legal restraints directed at Jews especially – who recognised the real threat. To Georgie, Herr Hitler was both strange and dangerous, and somehow, she needed to get that across in her writing. Objectively and professionally.
Already, she felt that familiar mix of trepidation and excitement at being the one to report on Germany’s political tableaux. It wasn’t simply seeing her name next to the print – though that still gave her a lift – more that her words might actually inform someone’s thinking. To have that responsibility for representing the truth gave her a buzz like no other – that she was shaping the tiniest part of history. And no, she wasn’t naive to that old argument about journalistic bias, but she still believed passionately in a free press. It was why she had become a reporter, after all. And if there was ever a need for a free press, it was in a country under the dictatorship of a small man with big ideas.
Throughout the three-hour flight, broken only with a jerky descent and a brief refuelling in Paris, they continued to defy the laws of gravity in their glorified crate, bumping through the cloud film as Georgie peered at the carpet of sea and land barely visible beneath them.
Coming in to land, her nerves and excitement reared again in equal measure. The patchwork green of rural fields gave way to granite lines of runways as they circled above their final destination, the window beside her stippled with cloud dust. She pushed her nose against the pane, eager to pick out more, and it was then that – through the white mist – it came into view: a beacon of red pulsing through the opaque sky, a vast line that seemed to sway in a rhythm. As they taxied and puttered to a halt, everything drew into focus behind the warp of noonday heat – the line was moving, huge flags of crimson fluttering above the airport terminal, each with their own, iconic black and white centre. The sight was stark and impressive – no doubt designed for its impact, and perhaps as a welcome to newcomers, although that remained debatable, given what she already knew. The sun’s glare formed a dazzling backdrop, and yet – in Georgie’s own mind – the dominant red swathe against the building’s sandy façade created a brooding, leaden cloud: a tempest of swastikas. And she was just about to enter into the eye of that storm. By choice.
The tinny speaker aboard the plane crackled into life. ‘Thank you for flying Lufthansa today, ladies and gentlemen,’ the stewardess said in her native, crisp tone. ‘Welcome to Germany’s great capital – Berlin.’
Towards the back of the plane, a voice rang out in response, distinct and audible: ‘Heil Hitler!’
4
A Simmering City
Berlin, 2nd August 1938
Georgie stepped onto German soil for only the second time in her life and sensed a change in the air, dense with heat and politics. Glancing back at the plane, she noted the Lufthansa tailfin was painted entirely in a large swastika and felt a pinch in her gut that she had been unwittingly flying inside a large advert for a party she already viewed with a great deal of suspicion.
The small line of passengers made their way towards the terminal, which – though dressed in Nazi regalia – was undoubtedly impressive: commanding yet stylish, the sleek art-deco lines of its tall, slim windows cut into fawn limestone brick, glowing against the sun’s rays.
Civilian staff along the way smiled and said how welcome the passengers were, how much they hoped she and Max would enjoy their stay. And yet the atmosphere was thick with mistrust. A uniformed border guard thrust out his hand for Georgie’s passport, his eyes boring into the print for some secret missive between the lines. He caught her eye and held it defiantly, perhaps as a way of injecting a clear message: You may be welcome, foreigner. But you are watched. If she didn’t know otherwise, Georgie might have imagined Germany was already at war.