The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

Chapter Forty-Three

Autumn 1947

When I think of the autumn of that famine year, I think of one thing only: potatoes. The apple harvest was poor, in part because so many people were roaming the country roads looking for free fruit, and there was no way to preserve the mushrooms or berries of summer, not that we had any surplus anyway. Some mushrooms like Russula ochroleuca and Meripilus giganteus (which is a very interesting-looking giant bracket fungus) have their season in the fall, but these were popular, not that common and not easily confused with poisonous mushrooms, so competition was intense for them. No, in the autumn of 1947 our attention turned to what was under the soil. Theodor and I walked out into the country every day and watched carefully as the potato harvest proceeded.

After a farmer finished with a potato field, we would race onto it and drop to our hands and knees to quickly sift through the muddy soil with our hands, looking for small potatoes the farmer had left behind or even little chunks of potato cut by the harvesting spade. The farmer did not care. He had taken everything that was worth his effort, so having starving townspeople come onto his fields after only helped him clean his field up nicely for the next season. We were not alone. In fact we were far from alone. One evening I counted one hundred people in the field, all of them crawling along, looking intently, working to beat the failing light. Some became adept at blindly finger-searching the fields in the dark and continued their hunt well into the night, but Mama wanted us home by sunset. Usually Theodor and I managed to get enough of what we called stubble nuts (these remnants were just the size of nuts) to allow Mama to make a reasonably nourishing soup. But there was never enough to save for the coming winter.

You would think that this monotonous diet of potatoes would put me off them, that I would only eat them for survival, not for pleasure, but I continued to love them. When I dreamed of my far-off future life as a forest ranger, the dream included a large clearing near my treehouse, or perhaps a field just past the forest edge, where I could plant potatoes. Maybe even an entire hectare of them. This is the only thing that Adolf Hitler and I agreed on. He had also been a big fan of the potato, although even in this he was an idiot. I smiled when I thought of his pronouncement in the latter days of the war that the encirclement of Germany and impossibility of food imports did not matter because we would happily live off the potato. “Like the ancient Germanic tribes did!” he declared. That potatoes were a New World crop that did not arrive in Germany until the seventeenth century was not a fact that had penetrated his delirium. In fact they were initially considered “the devil’s apple” and widely assumed to be poisonous until only about 200 years ago.

The turnip harvest followed the potato harvest. It was later because turnips can tolerate some frost and, for those who still cared about such things, it was said that the taste improved after a nip of cold. It was a much smaller harvest though, so we did not make too many meals of turnips. Mama saved some of these as the fear of the coming season deepened. Theodor and I also did another round of the potato fields, reasoning that between rows and in odd corners something might have been missed in the frantic after-harvest harvest. We were right. There were not many and these stubble nuts were frozen, but they were starch and calories. We would have collected and eaten the actual soil if it had calories.

Papa’s knack for oddly timed letters with surreal content continued with what I remember as the “Shakespeare letter.” It was waiting for us one afternoon after we returned with a small sack full of tiny frozen potatoes.

Dear Luise,

I have wonderful news. Major McWhirter and I are going to put on a Shakespeare production for the camp. He has made a present to me of a beautiful 1922 Methuen’s edition of The Tempest. This is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays and as it happens it is one of his favourites as well. We have recruited a few other British officers and men, as well as several of the prisoners who have a passable command of the King’s English.

Life in camp can be very dull and many of us long for some sort of cultural diversion, so this will suit very nicely. I will be quite busy as we prepare for this. We hope to stage it in the week or two prior to Christmas. As you might expect, I will take the role of Prospero, although it will take some time to learn the lines and I am also involved in the general preparation and stage management. Prospero has the best lines. “Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that’s gone.”

I hope your autumn has been better so far than your summer and certainly your spring. I’m sorry to hear that not all of my packages are making it to you. Did you receive the most recent, with the tinned beef?

Your Wilhelm

We had not received a package from him for several months. It seemed that the Russians were seizing them. It was also possible that hungry postal workers were making off with them. Fortunately this changed in late autumn when packages from the West began to arrive again. “Fortunately” is a significant understatement as we were once again teetering on the knife’s edge of actual starvation. The packages had been opened and inspected, but pilfering appeared to have subsided — not disappeared entirely but subsided. In retrospect this was the first indication that the chaos