Read The Separation for Free Online Page A

side. He said, with quiet bitterness, ‘Heil bloody Hitler.’
    ‘He was just doing his job.’
    ‘He enjoys his work too much,’ Joe said.
    But soon after that we relapsed into silence, each of us absorbed by the unfamiliar scenery of northern Germany.
    The sights we saw have since blended into a few memorable images. A lot of the landscape we passed through was forested, a conspicuous change from the vistas of flat farmland we had seen in Belgium and Holland. Although we went through several industrial towns - Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, all of them shrouded in a thin, bitter-smelling haze that made our eyes sting - there was not enough variety to provide detailed memories. I was keeping a journal as we went along but of that journey I recorded only a couple of short paragraphs. Most of what I remember was a general sense of being in Germany, the place that was always being talked about in those days, and with it the vague sense of dread that the name gave rise to. The feeling was reinforced by the hundreds and thousands of swastika flags that were flying from almost every building or wall, a glare of red and white and black. Many long banners were strung across the autobahns and from building to building across the streets of the towns and villages. They bore inspiring messages, perhaps spontaneously created, but because of the insistent tone more likely to be the product of the party. There were slogans about the Saar, about the Rhineland, about the Versailles Treaty, about Ausland Germans - one banner which we saw many times in different places declared:
    ‘[WE ARE PLEDGED TO BLIND OBEDIENCE!].’ There were few commercial advertisements on display anywhere and certainly there were no messages about the Olympic Games. We drove and drove, trying to conserve our physical energy for the training and events which lay ahead, but inevitably, by the time we were approaching the environs of Berlin, we were done in. Joe wanted to find the British team headquarters straight away, to let them know we had arrived, but I was tired of driving, tired of being in the van. I simply wanted to find the house of the family friends with whom we had arranged to stay. We argued listlessly about it for a while. Joe pointed out that we had arrived in the city before noon, that there were many hours of daylight left. I agreed that we should resume training as soon as possible, get our muscles back into competitive trim, but I stubbornly insisted that what I wanted to do was rest. In the end, we came to a sort of compromise. We located the British team headquarters, then went from there to the stretch of water near the Olympic Village at Grunewald, where sculling and rowing teams were to train. We unloaded our two shells and our oars into the boathouse that had been allocated to us. Next we drove to our friends’ apartment, in Charlottenburg, a western suburb of Berlin. We did no training that first day we arrived.
    5
    Five years later, in the early summer of 1941, I was in hospital in rural Warwickshire. My plane, Wellington A-Able, had crashed into the North Sea about thirty miles from the English coast, somewhere off Bridlington. Only one other crew member was still on the aircraft with me when it went down: Sam Levy, the navigator, who had been hit in the head and leg by shrapnel. Sam and I managed somehow to scramble into an inflatable dinghy and we were picked up by a rescue boat many hours later. I was in a fog of amnesia. I remembered almost nothing of even the bare outline I have described. Moments only of it remained, glimpsed in flashes, like fragments of a terrible dream. I came slowly back to full consciousness, confused by what was going on in my mind, a conflict of violent images and what I could see around me in the physical world. I was in a bed, suffering intense pain, there were strangers coming and going, inexplicable actions were being performed on my body, bottles and trays were clattering, I experienced a sensation of