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CHAPTER 4

SUE RYDER

It was not just an off-the-cuff decision to step into the unknown. As soon as I saw that address, I knew I had to go there; the way had already been prepared – when I was in Louvain.

The address took me back with a jolt to the Clinique St Raphäel, where I had spent so many interminable evenings after Paul had been put to bed. I couldn’t go out and leave him, so I had taken to pacing the corridor outside our room, up and down aimlessly for hours on end, Past the various wards and single rooms.

One night I saw a woman wheeled on a trolley into one of the emergency rooms, and was forcibly struck by her gaunt appearance and her sunken staring eyes. They were the eyes of a woman haunted by some appalling and unforgettable suffering. The next night I heard a woman scream, and knew who it must be. It was an unearthly screeching sound, unlike anything I had ever heard, a sort of banshee wail; and it filled me with an unbelievable dread.

The screaming continued for an eternity of ten minutes or so, then stopped as suddenly and as eerily as it had started, leaving behind a silence that was full of nameless horrors. A man who was pacing in the other direction must have seen the fear in my eyes, and he came to join me. ‘She was in Ravensbrück,’ he said quietly, with the air of one who has explained everything. ‘Ravensbrück?’ I asked blankly, as much in the dark as ever. The man looked taken aback by my obvious ignorance, and proceeded to tell me more. Ravensbrück, he explained, was the Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin, where women and children were sent. Many of these had been subjected to medical experimentation, and many thousands had died there. (The official figure was in fact 92,000.) This woman had been one of the guinea-pigs on whom experiments had been carried out. She was a sorry part of the human wreckage which had survived such camps, as much dead as alive. The hospital was as much her home as any other place, since she spent more time there than anywhere else.

His words sent ice-cold shivers coursing along my spine. I would have walked away if I could, but I didn’t dare. Mentally I resisted him. Why did the man have to tell me such things? Couldn’t he sense that I didn’t want to hear them? The war had been over for fifteen years, its effects had been neatly tidied away. When it had come to an end, I was still a child, and the stories coming out of Belsen and other places of that kind had scarcely troubled me, so great was my relief that the war was over at last. I didn’t want to listen to atrocity stories now. Hadn’t I enough troubles of my own?

But my companion, a man of about forty-five from Arlon, had no intention of letting me off. For four years he too had suffered in a concentration camp, Neuengamme, where only the strongest had survived. In spite of myself, I had to listen horror-struck to his nightmare memories: of the barely alive prisoners piling the dead each morning into trucks and throwing the corpses into a specially prepared ditch; of the six ounces of bread and two frost-bitten potatoes on which the prisoners were forced to perform slave labour. Sometimes, my friend recalled, the S.S. cook would fling a crust into their midst, for the sadistic pleasure of seeing starving men scratch and claw at each other in the scramble to stay alive. Rather than starve, they had eaten filth, keeping themselves alive on their own excrement. My friend had come through, but at a price. In the fifteen years which had elapsed since the Liberation, he had continued to suffer from severe intestinal disorders which forced him to spend one month out of every four in this hospital.

When he eventually let me go, I went back to my room and wrote in my diary, ‘I shall not go out there again tomorrow. If these things happened I prefer not to know about them.’ I was as good as my own cowardly word; I did not see the man from Arlon again; but I found that he was not so easy to forget. What he had told me could not be untold, and against my will it had had its effect. Every word he had spoken came unbidden to mind as I stood gazing at that address in Suffolk. With an uncanny feeling that the course of my life was being directed by powerful forces, I sat down and wrote to whoever was in charge at the Home for Concentration Camp survivors in Suffolk, offering my services for a week as bed-maker, and mentioning that I could cook. In the circumstances, it was no surprise at all when the reply came by return: Come as soon as you can, we need you urgently.

Wearing my best suit and carrying a large suitcase bulging with clothes, I passed the village duck-pond, turned into the drive of the Sue Ryder Home, and caught my first glimpse of the idyllic, pink-washed sixteenth-century house which sheltered physically handicapped patients, others who had been mentally ill, and a handful of survivors of Nazi tyranny. It was to become my own spiritual home over the next four years. The September sun was shining, and I was filled with a vague euphoria not entirely free of self-congratulation. I had come to indulge in a bout of do-gooding, and was all dressed-up to play the role of lady bountiful.

Without warning, a female figure erupted out of a mullioned window on the ground floor of the house, and hurled itself at me. ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ said the girl fervently, casting a baffled glance at my enormous suitcase, before rushing on at the same breathless speed: ‘You must be the new slave. Look, the bathroom in the extension is flooded, and the water’s seeped into Edward’s room, and the whole place is in a terrible mess. Would you mind frightfully going over there and seeing what you can do? Good. I’ll go and get a bucket and mop.’ And with that she was off, leaving me feeling as bewildered as Alice accosted by the White Rabbit. I looked down at my good suit, and suddenly saw how ridiculous I must look, standing there kitted out for the London Hilton rather than for flooding bathrooms in deepest Suffolk. The girl was now back with mop and bucket. Resignedly I dumped the suitcase on the gravel, and went off in the direction in which she had pointed, mop-handle tucked under Windsmoor jacket sleeve. ‘By the way,’ the girl shouted after me, ‘I believe you can cook. Well, when you’ve finished cleaning up over there, do you think you could manage supper for seventy? We’ve got a whole group of survivors over from Poland on the Foundation’s Holiday Scheme, as well as the Bods who are always here.’

That was my introduction to Sue Ryder’s Headquarters (not untypical, as I later discovered). I was sorely tempted to turn right round and head for home. Instead I meekly went off to tackle the flood.

Two days, several hundredweight of peeled potatoes and many gallons of soup later, I felt I had been there all my life.

The village is an unlikely backdrop to the lives of the people who have found refuge there. It is a peaceful, sleepy place which minds its own business and does not take all that kindly to foreigners. Sue Ryder’s mother had lived in the converted farmhouse for several years and was much loved in the village, but when Sue moved in with her patients, Mrs Ryder, amid general mourning, went to live in the near-by village of Clare.