Novellas
There is a theory that the way the ‘time’ works, is that the past, literally, never goes away.
Might what we call ‘ghosts’ simply be the faint echoes of moments from the past. We are here now, possibly, our ancestors are still where they were, in their own time, as real as you or I, except separated from us by…time itself.
Have you ever felt the whisper of ancestral voices, a tingling of the spine, or just an ‘odd’ feeling standing, or walking through a ruined castle, or across a ritual landscape so ancient as to be alien? When we claim a spiritual, or an ethnological, cultural or emotional link to a past we can only dimly, if at all understand let alone reconcile to our contemporary lived experience, is it just wishful thinking, or something…real?
Walk in the footsteps of the barrow-builders of the Kennet Valley, visit a country graveyard, stand upon the time-rounded ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort, or hold a flint flaked by a Neolithic hunter five thousand years ago; soak up the ambience, allow one’s mind to quieted; is it even possible to feel…nothing?
Travel, look upon vistas as old as human kind, the traces of great, lost civilisations, or mountains, valleys through which rivers that have meandered and flooded over eons, and across plains where bears and mammoths once roamed millennia before Rome’s conquering legions marched; and tell me the past does not reach out and…now and then, touch you.
Silbury Hill is about those ghosts, those whispering spirits in the landscape. Perhaps, just perhaps, it might be that we are not quite so different, disconnected from our past or as deaf or blind to the natural world and its moods as we ‘moderns’ sometimes like to think we are…
“Just for the record; this is insane!”
By then I ought to have known better than to speak truth to a member of the SS but actually, given that I was sitting at the controls of a prototype aircraft which had crashed on its maiden flight – I should know, I was flying it at the time – and had presumably, been in the hangar under repair ever since, I had every right to be pessimistic about my odds of surviving the forthcoming take-off so basically, there was not a lot the man in the right hand seat could do to frighten me.
Or rather, if one was being pedantic; frighten me any more than I already was.
And besides, I was tired, hungry and I hurt like Hell…everywhere…it was only seven weeks since I’d been blown out of the cockpit of my Me 262 over Munich and I had only started walking, very stiffly, again without a stick last week!
I was wasting my breath anyway…
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And for veteran test pilot Hendrik Pietersen things are not going to get better any time soon as one by one the engines of the last surviving prototype of the Amerika Bomber fire up.
In the dying days of the war the desperate masters of the Third Reich have one last, insane card to play and like it or not, Hendrik is, with or without a gun at his head, in the game until the final card falls.
And his disillusion, his demons are as nothing to those clinging onto the wings of the Amerika Bomber.
The piano was a 1912 Bechstein Model A Grand presented in a walnut, patterned case that was originally situated in the drawing room of the Schloss Marienhalle for some years, before it was transported to the what was at the time, the dining room of the Lake House. There it had resided in all its tonal splendour for some ten years before I set eyes upon it, little knowing that it would play such a pivotal part in my life.
I look at it today and the memories flood back.
It becomes harder to put them in their proper order, chronologies become muddled with the passing of the years, confused by conflicting passions and the distractions of emotions that have no right to be so…discombobulating…after all this time. Even as I set eyes again on the Bechstein, Etta’s piano, I am rooted to the spot.
In my mind’s eye I see her again at the keyboard in her finery, not a hair out of place, serene, majestic…
________
The German tragedy of the first half of the twentieth century was not one but a myriad of tragedies that coalesced into the industrial-scale atrocity of the Holocaust and the disintegration of the society in whose name it had been perpetrated.
But of course, we know the logical conclusion of Nazism.
Those living through it did not, and could not even if they lived in a nation that condoned and facilitated its evil; tyranny corrupts…everything.
From the pen of the creator of the Timeline 10/27/62, New England and Europa Reich series comes a story not so much about the headline horrors of Hitler’s War but about the day to day catastrophe experienced through the cracked prism of personal histories.
While there is life there is redemption, and sometimes…atonement.