The Pigeon Tunnel Read Online Free PDF Page B

that way: the weeks and months of anguish and wrong turnings; the preciousfinished typescript; the ritual enthusiasm of agent and publisher; the proof editing; the great expectations; the angst as the Big Day approaches; the reviews, and suddenly it’s over. You wrote the book a year ago, so what are you sitting around for, instead of writing something new?
    Well, in fact, I was writing something new.
    I had begun a novel set in a public school. For background I was using Sherborne, where I had been a pupil, and Eton, where I had been a schoolmaster. There is a suggestion that I started preparing the novel while I was still teaching at Eton, but I have no memory of doing so. Rising at an unearthly hour before setting off for the Embassy, I completed the novel in short order, and sent it in. So once again, job done – except that next time round I was determined to do something grittier. I would write about the world on my doorstep.

    By the time I had been en poste for a year, my remit covered all of West Germany and gave me unlimited freedom of movement and access. As one of the Embassy’s travelling evangelists for Britain’s entry into the Common Market, I could invite myself to town halls, political societies and mayoral parlours anywhere in West Germany. In the young West Germany’s determination to appear an open, democratic society, all doors were open to the inquisitive young diplomat. I could sit all day in the Bundestag’s diplomatic gallery, lunch with parliamentary journalists and advisers. I could knock on ministerial doors, attend protest rallies and lofty weekend seminars on culture and the German soul, all the while trying to fathom, fifteen years after the collapse of the Third Reich, where the old Germany ended and the new one began. In 1961 this wasn’t at all easy. Or it wasn’t to me.
    A dictum attributed to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, nicknamed ‘The Old Man’, who held the post from West Germany’s foundationin 1949 until 1963, neatly summed up the problem: ‘You don’t throw away dirty water for as long as you haven’t got any clean.’ It is widely assumed that this was a veiled reference to Dr Hans Josef Maria Globke, his grey eminence on matters of national security and much else. Globke’s record was impressive even by Nazi standards. Even before Hitler’s rise to power, he had distinguished himself by drafting anti-Semitic laws for the Prussian government.
    Two years later under his new Führer he drafted the Nuremberg Law, revoking German citizenship for all Jews and, for purposes of identification, requiring them to insert the word Sara or Israel into their names. Non-Jews who were married to Jews were ordered to get rid of their spouses. Serving under Adolf Eichmann in the Nazi Office of Jewish Affairs, he drafted a new law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which sounded the signal for the Holocaust.
    Simultaneously, I presume by virtue of his ardent Catholicism, Globke contrived to reinsure himself with right-wing anti-Nazi resistance groups: so much so that he was earmarked for high office should the plotters succeed in getting rid of Hitler. And perhaps this was how, when the war ended, he eluded half-hearted Allied attempts to prosecute him. Adenauer was determined to have his Globke at his side. The British did not stand in Globke’s way.
    Thus it happened that in 1951, a mere six years after the end of the war, and two years after the creation of West Germany as a state, Dr Hans Globke achieved a stroke of legislation on behalf of his former and present Nazi colleagues that today remains barely conceivable. Under Globke’s New Law, as I shall call it, civil servants of the Hitler regime whose careers had been curtailed by circumstances beyond their control would henceforth receive full restitution of such pay, back-pay and pension rights as they would have enjoyed if the Second World War