They had always kept themselves to themselves, living quietly at home and going about their business; but now, following a public proclamation, they were forced to report for work duty like everyone else in order to earn bread — a very small piece of bread initially. Shortly after seven in the morning, the two of them had to make their way to the designated assembly area in the town. On the way they were often joined by neighbours, but usually they managed to shake them off and be on their own, as they had been accustomed throughout their married life.

They walked side by side in the fresh May morning, Doll normally deep in thought and only half listening to the chatter of his wife, who was quite content with the occasional interjection of ‘Yes, quite’ or ‘I see’. His wife’s ability to carry on talking endlessly had prompted Doll to dub her his ‘sea surf’. He said she reminded him of long walks he had taken earlier along the beach, accompanied by the constant rush and roar of the sea next to him.

When they reached the assembly area — the school yard — the togetherness they were used to, and the sea surf, came to an abrupt end: men and women were lined up separately, counted, registered, and assigned to all kinds of different work duties. If they were lucky, they could at least call out to each other as they were leaving and tell each other what kind of work they’d been given, so that each would know what the other was doing all the time they were apart. ‘I’m going cleaning!’ she might call to him. And he would reply: ‘Stacking sacks!’ Later on, both were given a fixed job: he was sent to mind the cows, while she was put to work carrying sacks.

They often didn’t see each other again until the late evening, both of them exhausted by the unaccustomed physical labour, but both doing their best not to let the other know. Then he would talk derisively of his labours as a cowherd, where a herd of over a thousand cows, which were not from the same farm and therefore had no sense of solidarity, had to be kept together and prevented from getting into the cornfields. There were eight cowherds on the job, but his colleagues were inclined to stand around in the same place and pass the time chatting. It was the usual men’s talk: how long would things go on like this, and the meagre ration of bread they got wasn’t enough to feed a single man, let alone an entire family, and peacetime had not turned out quite how they had imagined, and the Nazis were up to their old tricks again, making sure they landed all the cushy jobs — it was all just hot air from start to finish, and it bored Doll stiff.

Meanwhile the herd of cows was scattering far and wide, straying from the fields of vetch into the barley crop, while Doll charged about like a madman, trying to herd a thousand cows on his own, throwing stones at them, beating them with his stick, and finally sitting down on a stone, utterly exhausted and out of breath, nursing feelings of despair, anger, and dejection. At that very moment, a Russian horseman would often turn up to check on the work of the cowherds. The other cowherds, who had wisely positioned themselves while they chatted so that they could see the rider approaching from afar, were now busy about their work, while the exhausted Doll was given a dressing-down for being lazy. But he could never bring himself to behave like the others. This whole way of carrying on — only working when the people in charge were looking, and in actual fact doing nothing at all — he found abhorrent, and typical of the hated soldiering life, where of course ‘cushy numbers’ are highly prized.

The only good thing about this cow-minding job was that when the cows had been driven in for the evening, cowherds and gasbags alike could stand in line with a jug — big or small, it could be any size — and they would get it filled to the brim with milk by the Ukrainian milkers. Thanks to this, the Doll family in those days could enjoy a bowl of soup for supper, which did them all good, young and old alike.

When it came to this kind of thing — getting hold of supplies — Alma Doll’s efforts were a good deal more successful than her husband’s, and she was more ingenious, too. Along with thirty or forty other women and girls, she had been given the job of clearing the remaining supplies from a hut camp formerly occupied by the SS, and transferring them to a large shed by the railway line. It was quite a distance, and the sacks that the women had to carry were often filled with heavy goods, so that the weight was sometimes too much for them.

What really made them angry, though, was the fact that all these preserved meats, these tins of butter, cheese, milk, and sardines, these cans of ground coffee, these packs of premium pressed leaf tea, these cartons filled with powdered chocolate (not to mention the racks of bottles containing wine and cognac and countless packs of tobacco goods) — what really made the women’s blood boil as they lugged all this stuff about was the thought that all this abundance had been withheld for years from starving women and children, including many children who had never tasted chocolate in their lives, only to be crammed into the greedy mouths of swaggering SS bully boys, who were directly responsible for much of Germany’s misfortune.

Ever since the children, bottles of wine in hand, had got drunk outside the largest hotel in the town, most of the local population had taken a new line on property ownership: these were all goods to which they were actually entitled. The selfishness and greed of the merchants had kept these things from them — so it was only right that people should now take whatever they could get their hands on! It was a long way from the SS hut camp to the railway sheds, and the sacks were a heavy load to carry: every so often, a woman would disappear into the bushes that lined the path, and when she emerged again to join the tail end of the long, straggling column, having just now been at its head, her sack was only three-quarters full, and in the bushes was a nice little stash of supplies to be picked up that evening.

Alma Doll was no more scrupulous than the other women; like most of them, she had children at home who were not getting enough fats in their diet, and who would also like to find out what a cup of hot chocolate tasted like. Like the other women, she stockpiled supplies in the bushes, and when she discovered that these supplies were being plundered before the end of the working day, either by her fellow workers or by other people watching from a distance, she became even bolder. Hidden in the bushes, she waited until the tail end of the column had gone by. As soon as the last woman was out of sight, she hurried with her sack to a nearby house occupied by friends of hers, and left everything there, to be shared with them later. When it was time for the column to pass the spot again on its way back, she would get back into the bushes and then slip out, her empty sack over her arm, to rejoin the others.

Her absence had not gone unnoticed by the other women, of course, and they made free with their barbed remarks and innuendos; but as they were all doing more or less the same thing themselves, she had nothing worse to fear. As for the Russian sentries who marched at the head and tail end of the column, they either saw nothing of what was going on or chose not to see. More likely the latter: they doubtless all knew what real hunger felt like, and they behaved magnanimously, even towards a hated nation that had let the wives and children of those sentries starve to death without mercy.

In the evening, Alma would then sit with her husband, while their supper of milk soup heated up on the little makeshift stove, and the young wife would show him her latest acquisitions by candlelight — because the electricity had been cut off. They all ate tinned sardines on bread to start with, and then powdered chocolate was sprinkled into the milk soup. They didn’t just eat the food — they devoured it, gorging themselves until they were fit to burst, all of them, from the five-year-old Petta to the old and virtually immobilised grandmother. They didn’t care about overfilling their stomachs, or the effect this would have on their already disturbed night’s sleep, nor did they ever think about keeping something back for the next day. They’d said goodbye to all such thoughts during the years of sustained aerial bombing. They had become children again, who live only for today, without a thought for the morrow; but they had nothing of the innocence of children any more.