Out of the Shelter

The restrictions of a wartime childhood in London and post-war shortages have done little to enrich Timothy's early youth. But everything changes when his glamorous older sister Kath invites him to spend the summer at Heidelberg.

'Mr Lodge has briliantly dramatized a kind of Anglo-American encounter ... to have made so well-ordered and humanely engaging a work of fiction in the process is a striking achievement'
Times Literary Supplement

You needed your P.X. card, of course, to get into the pool. In a few days, Timothy had developed a superstitious attachment to this small square of cardboard. It seemed like a talisman of magical powers that admitted him to a world of privilege and pleasure. His constant fear was that he would lose it and find himself excluded from the friendly, protective enclaves of the Americans. The swimming pool, the Stadtgarten, the P.X., Kate's room - these were his bases, safe barricaded positions between which he carefully plotted his daily movements so that he almost always found himself near one or the other when he needed rest or refreshment. For, though he responded to the beauty and charm of Heidleberg and its setting, a measure of unease, an indefinable sense of risk, never left him as he strolled the public German streets. It was not that people looked hostile, or resentful. They didn't even look particularly defeated. On the whole they seemed quite ordinary, decently clothed and well fed, bustling about the town on their business, not given to smiling overmuch, perhaps, but placid and self-possessed. Only once did Timothy glimse the Germany of his imagination. But that occasion affected him deeply.

He was walking up one of the cobbled streets behind the University that led to the castle. About halfway up there was a recess in the wall on the right-hand side where water trickled from a spout above a little stone bowl. The man walking in front of Timothy stopped to drink, stooping and twisting his head to catch the water in his mouth. It was a hot day and the climb was tiring. Timothy slowed his pace, intending to cool his face and hands in the water, if not to take the risk of drinking it. Then, as he approached, the man straightened up, and turned to face Timothy, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It was a face of such coarse brutality that, in spite of the warm day, Timothy turned cold with fear. A bumpy, shaven iron grey skull, small bloodshot eyes, flared nostrils, thick lips elongated into a sneer by a scar that curved down to the jawline - he took in this much as he swerved aside and stumbled on up the hill.

He glanced fearfully over his shoulder as, panting for breath, he reached the brow of the hill, but the man had disappeared, presumably up one of the steep lanes that branched from the road. Timothy passed into the cool shade of the castle grounds, but did not stop until he had reached the sunny parapet of the western wall. There he sat, feeling the warmth of the stone through his trousers. The roofs and steeples of the town shimmered beneath him; long, low barges plied up and down the river, threading the arches of the Old Bridge; somewhere a clock or church bell chimed. But it was a long time before the peaceful scene calmed him. Meeting the ugly man had been like kicking a stone in a summer garden and uncovering a loathsome nest of insects - it made you distrust the smiling surface of things. The face had been the very image of the concentration-camp commander - the Beast of Belsen and the other bogeymen who had scowled and strutted through the newspapers and nightmares of his childhood.