Pernkopf's Atlas

By Carl Peter Hough

Twice-divorced middle-aged teacher Andy Roberts' life is on what feels like permanent hold. His job teaching History in Ballymoney Grammar is stifling him, his cold and emotionally distant father's ill-health requires his constant attention. He's going nowhere. The universe is conspiring though. His father's death reveals a mystery with its roots in Germany Andy feels compelled to unravel. Even this is sidelined when another bombshell is dropped into his lap: his dying ex-wife presents him with a troubled 16-year-old son he knew nothing about. Andy's life is turned on its head. Is Andy doomed to repeat his own father's mistakes, or will solving the riddle of what happened in Occupied Germany bring redemption to father, father and son?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781470953133

Book preview

CARL PETER HOUGH

Copyright © 2023 Carl Peter Hough

All rights reserved.

AvaCarlo Publishing

ISBN: 979-8-2150-88593

What people are saying about

Pernkopf’s Atlas

‘Masterfully told. A grittily moving depiction of the darkness of war, and the light of humanity in its aftermath’ – Fiona Valpy, author of The Dressmaker’s Gift.

‘I loved it, it has everything – romance, father/son relationships, war, history … and it made me laugh out loud in places.’

‘An amazing story of love, tragedy and relationships brilliantly woven into a vivid historical framework. I was completely sucked into the characters’ lives from the outset, longing for them to find happiness and closure. I shed tears of sorrow and joy as I was drawn into the rollercoaster of emotions that stretched across time and generations.’ 

DEDICATION

This one is for my wife, for whom the adjective

‘long-suffering’ is particularly apt.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The two people who had the greatest bearing on the writing of this story will never see this. They are my father, Herbert John Hough, the RAF corporal who had the temerity to court Ingelore Charlotte Hartmann, my mother, when he wasn’t allowed to, and to marry her in Bückeburg, Lower Saxony in 1948. Thank you to them for seeing it through.

Thanks also to Tim Berners-Lee, whose madcap idea about a global connected resource made it relatively easy for me to give the impression that I know anything about anything. Also, books.

Lou, whose attention to grammatical detail is some kind of superpower.

Sarah, my wife. She never even raised her eyebrows when I had the need to sit and tap away while life swirled around us.

Finally, I have to acknowledge Adolf Hitler, whose vile philosophy created the conditions for most of the above and all of the below to happen – every silver lining has a cloud.

Author’s foreword

My father was a Royal Air Force corporal, and my mother was a German civilian. They met and fell in love in the immediate aftermath of WW2 and married in Germany within a month of the restriction on such unions being lifted. This is not their story, and most of the characters in what follows are entirely fictitious. Some historical details and situations in the following narrative inevitably derive in part from my parents’ experiences. Their story, in some ways more cinematic than what follows here, is one of millions of threads that make up the tapestry of those times. We tend to think of that war, now fading from living memory, as a series of huge, connected events and while we know how they connect up, it is only when we’re confronted by a name on a memorial, or a faded family photograph, that we remember that each participant, even the monstrous ones, were human beings.

If there’s a didactic aspect to this story, it is to underline the overlooked notion that the last country to be liberated from the Nazis was Germany. While being a citizen of the Third Reich under Hitler did not make you a Nazi, the regime certainly opened the door for opportunists for whom acceptance of an abhorrent political system was a price worth paying for their own advancement. This theme, of ordinary and seemingly harmless people seduced by ambition into following paths they knew to be wrong, has its place in this story too. Professor Eduard Pernkopf’s Topographische Anatomie des Menschen, known in medical circles as Pernkopf’s Atlas, is a real medical textbook, the history of which has been written about extensively. The relief by air of West Berlin during the Russian blockade, better known as the Berlin Airlift, is a matter of record.

Carl Peter Hough, Portstewart 2023

CHAPTER ONE

BOB AND ANDY

Bob was 85 when he was finally admitted to the Cedarwood care home in Ballycastle in April 2008. At first, it was easy for him and his 46-year-old son Andy, his only blood relation in Northern Ireland, to maintain the shared and mostly reassuring illusion that he was ‘just resting’ in the nursing home. He was ‘building up his strength’ until he came home again, Andy told him. But Andy knew that the old boy wouldn’t be going home to his own damp and dismal bungalow in rural Cullybackey. Not this time. The old man knew it too, even if it was hard to really know if he had much of a connection with real life left at that stage or paid attention to anything his son was telling him. Andy had mixed feelings about his father being in a care home. On the plus side, it was a huge weight off his shoulders. He was handing over the burden of his ailing father’s care to someone else. Anyone else. And dear God, not before time, he told himself. Andy was exhausted. He had been worn down by making his father’s pitiful version of independent living a reality, and by him having to deliberately, repeatedly, turn a blind eye to conditions in his father’s home that made everyday living increasingly dangerous. Andy was at a perpetual low ebb, stressed and anxious about his father falling and hurting himself again and again. There had been too many 3am calls from the calm operators at Age Alert, calls triggered by Bob pressing his emergency alarm button. Too many middle-of-the-night ambulance trips to A&E after finding his father lying on the floor in the dark. The old man just wouldn’t ask for, or graciously accept, help. Not directly. That had never been his style, it wasn’t his generation’s style. But he expected to be helped, nonetheless. He knew, if he knew anything at all about his circumstances, that Andy would always come, day or night. So they soldiered on, the two of them. Bob and Andy, an unlikely pair living out a horrible and grinding reality neither of them had anticipated or wanted. There was little love in it, and no reward.

Bob didn’t want a fuss. That was the problem. Every time he fell – and it had happened a lot – it was nearly always Andy who got there first. It had to be. Bob had no-one else to turn to. Andy knew that putting his father into a care home meant that neither of them could pretend that things were going to be the same or even OK anymore.

Cedarwood was not a bad place to be. Some of its residents remembered it from their younger days as Ballycastle’s Shevlin Lodge Hotel, which it had been until October 1977 and the night it suddenly and inexplicably went up in flames. At the time, the fire looked like just another sectarian attack on a thriving Protestant-owned business. It wasn’t long, however, before the whispering started. The Lodge wasn’t thriving the way the owner would have you think it was, they said. ‘He had it burned down himself,’ they said. Cynics duly noted and emphasised with a knowing smirk that the owner was conveniently and verifiably away in Lanzarote getting some late autumn sun the night the fire took hold. They hinted that some of his business associates were connected to, or interchangeable with, Loyalist paramilitaries known to be available for some remedial arson, if called upon. It was a standard Ulster answer to the problem of a failing business. The run-up to Christmas and New Year in the Province was never complete without the opportunity of a few ‘smoke-damaged’ bargains. Whatever the truth of it was, The Shev had eventually risen again from the proverbial and literal ashes in the late 1980s as a rambling two-storey ranch-style building set amongst the mature cedar trees of the former hotel’s grounds, away from the town centre but only a stone’s throw from the seafront. Now owned and run by the Presbyterian Church, Cedarwood, as it was renamed, quickly became a model care home and a highly desirable berth for the elderly and the infirm of Northern Ireland. And Bob was both. That he managed to win this lottery of care home placement was a testament to Andy’s tenacity in badgering Social Services, and he was grateful for the care the staff gave his father at Cedarwood even if it wasn’t exactly on his own doorstep. At least Andy could sleep a full night in his Ballymoney flat knowing he wasn’t going to be woken in the depths of night by Age Alert ringing to tell him, in their carefully measured tones, that the alert button had been pressed and that his father was in distress again.

Bob’s eventual admission to residential care had been the culmination of an accelerating cascade of stressful and worrying events. These always ended the same way, with Andy finding his father on the floor of his bungalow, usually hurt, always confused. Andy knew though that that was what you were supposed to do. You care for your own and when the call comes, you go. Rain or shine, night or day. That was his lot. Bob had never been the paternal kind, and this relationship didn’t feel like his son’s care was the natural and loving payback for years of fatherly love and attention. The roles just reversed. Family life’s great joke. The parent became the child. In any case, there wasn’t anyone else to share the burden.

Bob had been a blow-in from England, back in the 1950s, so there was no family locally on his side to share the load. When Bob’s wife died in 1992, her family broke their ties with him. They simply didn’t like him, and they never had. They had a low opinion of Andy too. His two failed marriages and a host of squandered career opportunities were all the McQuillans saw when they looked at him. He was the useless son who had gone away, failed, and then crept home again with his tail between his legs. That’s what they thought, and it was easy for them with their cheerless Presbyterian ethos to abandon Andy and Bob to their own devices. So much for Christian charity. It was an irony that Bob ended up in a home owned and managed by their own church organisation.

Some of what the McQuillans thought about Andy, however, was true. His first marriage had been a car crash from the outset. Deirdre had been Andy’s first real relationship. Both students at Queens University in Belfast, both 19 and there was, suddenly, a baby on the way. Getting married seemed the only proper way out. But there was no baby and never had been, just a needy girl with borderline mental health issues. Hardly Andy’s fault. OK, everyone had told him to be careful, but he had been blinkered by love’s young dream and a sudden access to unlimited sexual adventure. He didn’t listen. Even if he had, once Deirdre had the wedding plans rolling, that juggernaut could not be stopped. Her family, Fermanagh border farmers with shady Republican undertones, were not people to be messed about. It was Deirdre’s father that eventually decided, despite his family’s good Roman Catholic distaste for the evils of divorce, that the marriage was over six months later. Andy was, frankly, relieved. His second marriage, to Stephanie, was more like the real thing. Stephanie was borderline posh, private school, family property on the edge of the Cotswolds. They met at an Open University Summer School in Belfast. They were on the same Postgraduate Diploma in History course. While Andy was academically talented, he hadn’t learned much from his previous failed relationship. His impulses won the day again and he and Stephanie were married, pretty much in secret, within eight weeks of meeting. All might have been well if they hadn’t ended up living in a damp bedsit over a Turkish restaurant in Streatham on next-to-no money. Their version of the metropolitan dream was something of a let-down. While Andy took on supply teaching in some of Greater London’s more challenging schools, Stephanie did bar work. That’s how she met the dashing Michael, whose stirring tales of brave and secretive military deeds on Her Majesty’s service in exotic locations that he shouldn’t really talk about diverted her attention from the reality of living in a pressure cooker with her new and suddenly quite boring husband. Living in fear of cockroaches, eating cheap noodles, and drying teabags on the radiator took the shine off Andy and Stephanie’s tempestuous relationship. Her head was turned. Andy was dull and he could not compete with the relentless glamour of the brilliant and daring Mike. When his mother’s final illness brought Andy back to Northern Ireland, he came alone, eventually found a job in Ballymoney Grammar and stayed.

Andy and Bob lived in their own vacuum from then on. The years passed. Andy had his friends and colleagues from his teaching job. Bob had Andy, and that was it. Bob lived in his dismal bungalow in Cullybackey, Andy lived in his own place on Ballymoney High Street, a relatively short drive away in his decrepit car. When the falls started, Social Services arranged 15-minute visits from morning and evening carers for washing, dressing and undressing. It was a pitiful and undignified routine. Andy was grateful for this care package he had wrung out of the social care team. Bob was determined to stay in his own house, and even with two carer visits a day, it was cheaper and more convenient for everyone except Andy for him to remain there for as long as possible. An uneasy equilibrium existed, punctuated by Bob’s tumbles. That was the problem, however. He was a danger to himself on his own in the house. Andy hoped his father was self-aware enough to know that he was. But he would not leave. ‘I didn’t fight in the war or pay my tax all those years just so that those twisty cunts in government could take my house away,’ he had said in one of his sporadic moments of clarity. The vehemence of the profanity was a shock to Andy the first time he heard it. For all his faults, his father had always been a gentleman, always quietly mannerly. Cursing was just a sign of the mental changes he was going through, Andy supposed. A marker on that slippery downhill road. They didn’t discuss the alternatives. There was no point. Bob had made it abundantly and frequently clear many times that he didn’t want Andy to live in the bungalow with him. So they just got on with caring and being cared for. Two overlapping lives governed by one grim routine.

Eventually and inevitably, Bob tumbled onto his face for what turned out to be not quite the last time. On that occasion he lay on his living room floor, naked and distressed in his own mess, for nearly eight hours until Janice, his morning carer, found him. His panic button pendant, installed by Andy as part of a system to prevent precisely this outcome and at considerable cost, was lying on his bedside table at the other end of the bungalow. Andy had told his father over and over never to take it off unless he was in bed and it was within arm’s reach. Never. Ever. But Bob didn’t listen, or didn’t care, or forgot, and this was the result. Janice called Andy when she found him and Andy left work. In the middle of a class. Again. He arrived at the same time as the paramedics to find Bob on the floor. Janice had covered him with a duvet. His face under his eye was already darkening from hitting the corner of the coffee table on the way down. Janice had done her best to clean and comfort him. The paramedics did their tests, as they always did, and finally got Bob fastened into a chair with a blanket around him. This grim performance had played out so often that Andy was able to reel off his father’s conditions and medications from memory for the paramedics. Knowing, comradely, but hunted looks were exchanged. They saw it all the time. There was always one person in the family, through choice or circumstance, who carried that burden of the infirm relative, the ones that knew the meds, the conditions, the medical history. The ones who discreetly pointed to their ear and mouthed ‘he’s a bit deaf’. As Bob was being trundled to the ambulance, and in a rare lightning flash of self-awareness, the old boy announced matter-of-factly, and without any sense of regret or recrimination and without trying to look back, ‘I’ll never be in that house again, son’. Janice and Andy had shared a furtive, guilty look. There was nothing plausible they could offer to refute it and Bob knew it.

Bob, however, had been wrong about not coming home. After six weeks on a medical ward and endless assessments with teams of social workers and clinicians, and to Andy’s utter dismay, the hospital sent Bob back home to his miserable bungalow. That wasn’t what Andy wanted at all. Hospital wasn’t ideal, but at least his father was safe there. Andy had pleaded with the doctors, the social workers and the therapists. He knew his father would fall again. But the system won. They had put Bob on a treadmill, they had watched him shuffle up and down a corridor. They asked him who the Prime Minister was. They threw him a ball. He caught it. He sneaked through a battery of cognitive and mobility tests and eventually, against Andy’s heartfelt and strongly expressed wishes, they discharged Bob into his son’s care and sent him away. They had no clinical reason to keep him, they said. Five hours later, and half an hour after Andy had settled him and gone home to his own place, Bob got out of bed, went wandering in the dark and fell again. This time at least, he had his alarm pendant on. It was a furious Andy that told the now very sheepish team at the hospital that this time, they could stick their ‘clinical reasons up their collective holes’. And they had to accept his point. They kept Bob for two weeks this time, conducted another battery of tests, including a CT scan. After a number of further assessments by doctors and the Social Care team, Bob was eventually shipped off to Cedarwood. The hospital staff were relieved, Andy was relieved: Bob’s daily care was somebody else’s problem.

Before Bob started to fall, he and Andy had not exactly been what you could call close. Andy’s life, he freely admitted, looked very like the sorry catalogue of squandered opportunities from secondary school onwards that his maternal family told everyone it was. Two disastrous and fleeting marriages, no kids. Mediocre teaching job that he did not really find very fulfilling. These were all things about Andy that had also disappointed his father. It wasn’t just his own son Bob was disappointed in though. He had little time for any of Andy’s generation. They had not seen what he had seen, they had not served as he had served. As a boy, Andy found the constant stories of life during wartime and beyond lame and tiresome. He knew, from countless reminders, how lucky he was and that he had to finish his dinner because, in his father’s time, nobody had anything. Andy never really shook off what naturally developed into a protracted teenage rebellion. Bob was so conservative, so rooted in the values of his own youth that he couldn’t adapt to modern ways.

As Bob’s health failed and his ability to live independently diminished, he didn’t open up but retreated further into himself and shunned the outside world. He had no friends and no hobbies. Andy felt that his father was choosing to live in the past because he didn’t want to face the present and the unpalatable evidence of his own mortality and decline. But the confusion became less sporadic. In that grey zone between being a bit forgetful and the almost total withdrawal from reality, Bob started having the falls. The first couple of times were a shock. To him and to Andy. When Bob started dozing in his armchair and toppling forward, Andy bought him a reclining chair so he could sleep sitting up without any danger. When the night-time wandering and falling started, Andy had the panic alarm installed. He applied for Carer’s Allowance, which paid for private help, someone to come in to do his shopping and a few jobs around the house. Bob hated the indignity of it. The falls became more frequent. He broke his wrist. Andy found him naked in the bathroom that time. He had been washing his soiled pyjama bottoms in the sink in the middle of the night, trying to conceal the practical outcomes of his then occasional incontinence. While he was in hospital after that fall, Andy spoke to Social Services properly for the first time about getting some help to the house. Even then, with proper carers visiting every day, Bob still found time and opportunity to fall over. Nothing major at first. He toppled out of his bed, they gave him a bed rail. He fell in the bathroom. They installed hand grips in the bath and on the outside of the house at the doors for good measure. They gave him a rollator, commode chairs, every adaptive technology possible. He still fell. Every time he did, he pushed the alarm button. It was never in the daytime. That would have been too easy. It was always at night. The middle of the night. And Andy always had to go. Usually, Bob would need an ambulance. Usually, they would spend the night in A&E, he’d be admitted to a ward for a few days and then sent home. Until the last time. Enough was enough for everyone. Those nights spent in the hospital after a fall brought Bob and Andy as close as they were ever going to be. The pattern was more or less always the same. Bob would be assessed, put in a bay. Observations would be made and recorded and Andy would go through the ritual of rhyming off Bob’s conditions and medications again. Bob hated Andy speaking for him but they both knew it was the most efficient way. Doctors would come and go, blood would be taken, blood pressure would be measured. Each clinician would ask Bob if he was allergic to anything, to which he’d roll his eyes. Allergies weren’t invented when he was a lad, he would have said. But that was his default mode. Everyone was too soft today, in his opinion. He had even treated Andy’s boyhood high summer hay fever with suspicion and as a sign of weakness. A&E always had its own flow and metre. Most of the time there was nothing to do except wait. It was OK for Bob. He could doze in the bed. Andy didn’t like to leave him until he knew what was going on. Usually, Bob would be admitted to a medical ward for observation. This was always a relief for Andy as he knew that for once the phone wouldn’t ring in the middle of the night. Not for a night or two anyway and that meant he could sleep properly.

That last time Bob was admitted, Andy felt, and was thankful for, the feeling that something had changed. They kept Bob for two weeks and discovered what he had been doing his best to hide. Aside from his physical infirmities, Bob’s mind was going. He had accelerated to Stage 5 on the Alzheimer’s scale, they said. Things were not going to get any better for him. Andy’s initial reaction was a kind of guilty relief. What he had unkindly characterised as a wilful confusion, as part of the old man’s rage at simply getting old, was now understandable in clinical terms. That relief, that there was now a reason, was tempered by his guilt. Andy had been ignoring the possibility that there was actually something measurably amiss with Bob’s mind. And why hadn’t the hospital’s battery of tests picked up the signs? Andy knew that had he dared suggest to his father that the old mind might be going, his father would have been even more angry and upset. The classic carer’s tightrope. Care but don’t control. Wait to be asked. Never assume.

Bob took his place amongst the other crumbling, greying wrecks of humanity at Cedarwood. Alive, but not really living. Not outwardly anyway. At least he was safe. Andy had visited every day in hospital and then every day at Cedarwood. The dutiful son. Then it became every other day. Then twice a week. The guilt of not going was crippling at first but little by little, he got used to it. Bob wasn’t even very communicative when they did spend time together. He was defeated and sullen. Andy wasn’t even sure if he registered that his son was there or not sometimes. Or even cared. The 35-mile round trip was taking a new and different toll on Andy’s life and he found it easy to persuade himself that it didn’t really matter if he was actually there or not. The weeks rolled by. Andy established his sad but dutiful routine, settling on visiting one evening after school, usually a Friday, and then again on a Saturday afternoon. Physically, his father was in as good a shape as could be expected. But the slippage in the old boy’s mind was starting to accelerate. Andy loved his cold and emotionally empty father in his dutiful way, he supposed, but the shell of a man he visited was increasingly not the man he remembered.

And then the strangest thing happened. It was a Saturday afternoon, Andy’s established visiting slot. Bob was in his room watching The Battle Of Britain. It was his favourite, and he had a small TV/DVD player combo to watch the films he enjoyed. He was happy enough to sit and watch on his own and when he left his chair, the pressure pad he was sitting on would sound an alarm at the Nurses’ Station if he stood up, so they were happy to leave him to his own devices. They knew he was safe and that they would find him where they had left him. As Andy walked in on this particular day, Bob had looked over. He stiffened slightly in his seat and turned to look at his son.

Hello, old boy. Any news of Binky? he asked as he sometimes did. This had started not long after he had been admitted to Cedarwood, as if the change of scene had unlocked something deeper in his memory. Bob’s face was turned up glumly, as if he were expecting bad news. This wasn’t a new development. Andy had no idea who Binky was, or had been, but assumed he had been an old RAF colleague. When an answer wasn’t immediately forthcoming, Bob turned back to the television. Good show, this is, he had added, nodding at the screen enthusiastically as if it were the first time he had seen the film.

Hello Bob, Andy replied. Trying to correct his father or to unlock the reality of his actual life was usually pointless. He didn’t bother calling him ‘Da’ anymore. It just confused him more. No, no news, he replied. Andy always tried to keep his answers as vague yet as plausible as possible.

Busy over at the Sergeants’ mess, is it? Bob was fully focused on the television, seemingly uninterested in the answer. Roaring warplanes on the screen and the drab institutional decor had, for the time being, melded into one anachronistic RAF-based alternative reality for him. Andy knew he didn’t need to answer. He was just another character in this sorry facsimile of life. Andy sat and they watched the film in silence. Father and son. That’s pretty much what they always did. In profile, Andy could see Bob’s mouth forming the onscreen dialogue. Even that of the German characters. There was nothing wrong with that aspect of his memory. The shortness of his father’s breath worried him. Eventually, the credits rolled, Bob looked at his watch, then stopped the DVD with the remote. The TV flicked back to Cash In The Attic, which he watched glassily for a few moments before turning to his son.

That reminds me, Andrew … Bob hadn’t called his son by his actual name for months. It was always ‘old boy’ or nothing at all. The shock registered on Andy’s face. Bob noticed. What’s the matter, boy? You see a ghost?

What!? His father’s moment of lucidity had caught Andy out. One moment Bob was in some kind of timeless wartime reverie, the next he was fully present. Nothing Da. You just … Never mind. What is it?

Listen. Before they sell my house so they can keep me in this place, Bob said sotto voce, casting his eyes furtively around the institutionally magnolia walls, cheap furniture and chocolate box wall art as if he were only just noticing it or feared he was being recorded, Make sure you get the trunk out of the attic. There is stuff in there that I never sent back. And with that, Bob’s lip trembled slightly, as if he had been caught unawares by a sudden rush of emotion.

What are you talking about, Da? What trunk? Whose stuff and back where? Andy asked, intrigued but unsettled by the unexpected return to reality.

I wrote it all down too so I wouldn’t forget, Bob said conspiratorially. "Too late