Somewhere Over England Read Online Free Page B

into wagons drawn first by horses on the lower slopes then oxen as the fields became steeper. Helen wished that she could take photographs as Heine was doing and he promised that on their return he would show her. He pushed strawberries into her mouth and kissed her and she could taste the strawberries on his lips too.
    Soon they drove through sugar beet fields where women and children hoed between the rows and Heine said that they would be at his parents’ home soon and fell silent. But Helen would not let him sink again and made him tell her of the beet women. He told of how they had come after the war from the East; from Poland and Silesia to work on German farms during the beet harvest, for here they did not starve – not quite. He told of how they had married farmworkers and settled incondemned farmhouses where they were secure as long as they stayed bound to the farmer. He stopped the car and pointed to a plot of land on which a woman and two children worked.
    ‘I used to watch them before I went to Munich, wondering how they could bear it. In the spring they single out the small plants. In the summer they hoe the weeds as they are doing now and in the autumn they pull out the beet.’
    Helen peered forward, trying to see past him but there was no room so she opened the door and stood looking. She preferred the fresh air, it made her feel less nauseous but she would not tell him about that, not yet. The wind was brisker now, across the flatter lands. Heine turned off the engine and he too came and stood and looked.
    ‘I took many photographs, especially of the children. They start work at the age of six and here our winters come early and are not like English ones. I would see them tossing the beets into the carts in the snow and ice and hear their coughs. I exhibited the photographs in Munich but what can be done? It is, and was, work in a time of no work. It is food in a time of no food.’ He looked over to a clump of cottages in the distance. ‘I took photographs inside too, of the one large stew pot in the centre of the table, the spoons which were dug in all at once by thin armed, thin faced people.’
    He turned again to the beet fields. ‘I felt so fortunate that I was not a beet picker, that I had the time and energy to think; something which is denied to these people. But now I wonder.’
    Helen grasped his arm. ‘Come along, my love, the sun is out, this is our honeymoon. Or would you perhaps like us to move back here; pull beet, hoe, plant?’ She shook him and smiled, willing him to laugh and he did, and he kissed her and said against her mouth that no, no one in his family would ever have to hoe or pull beet and that while she was with him she kept the shadows from him.
    The village where his family lived was to the west of Hanover and his mother met them at the door, holding Heine to her, her blonde-white hair folded into a pleat, her face buried in his shoulder.
    ‘Mutti,’ he said. ‘Oh Mutti.’
    Helen knew then just how much Heine loved his mother because he cried.
    She turned and looked over the village, at the church, thebarns, the tall poplars, the houses, the window-boxes and wondered what a mother’s soft arms were like. She looked to either side of Heine’s tall house and saw the lime trees, those same trees that Heine had talked about throughout the winter and as spring approached.
    She looked up at the long eaves which he said dripped heavy thawed snow in the spring and knew that when they entered the house they would go into the sitting-room and sit on red brocade settees with carved wooden arms, and that there would be a portrait of his grandfather above the sideboard. She knew too that the room would be dark because of blinds drawn halfway down the window to protect the red carpet from the sun. And it was just as she imagined it would be when they followed his mother into the room from the hall except for the muslin curtains which she had forgotten would be hung in the