The Night Train to Berlin

The Night Train to Berlin

MELANIE HUDSON

One More Chapter

a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Copyright © Melanie Hudson 2021

Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Cover photographs © Bonfanti Diego / Getty Images (main image), Lee Avison / Arcangel Images (woman) and Shutterstock.com (planes and sky)

Melanie Hudson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008420932

Ebook Edition © April 2021 ISBN: 9780008420925

Version: 2021-04-15

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Alex – Christmas Day, 1944

Chapter 1: Ellie – Present Day

Chapter 2: Ellie – Departing Paddington

Chapter 3: Eliza – Early April 1944

Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Ellie – Paddington to Reading

Chapter 6: Eliza

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10: Ellie – Reading to Castle Cary

Chapter 11: Penberth, April 1944

Chapter 12: Eliza – London, 1 May 1944

Chapter 13: Ellie – Castle Cary to Crewkerne

Chapter 14: Eliza

Chapter 15: Ellie – Crewkerne to Taunton

Chapter 16: Eliza – Field Hospital, Rennes, late July 1944

Chapter 17

Chapter 18: Ellie – Taunton to Exeter

Chapter 19: Eliza

Chapter 20: Ellie – Exeter to Plymouth

Chapter 21: Eliza

Chapter 22: Eliza – Paris, 28 August 1944

Chapter 23: Ellie – Plymouth to Bodmin

Chapter 24: Eliza – Paris, August 1944

Chapter 25: Ellie – Bodmin to Par

Chapter 26: Eliza – December 1944

Chapter 27

Chapter 28: Ellie – Par to Penzance

Chapter 29: Eliza – 20 December 1944

Chapter 30

Chapter 31: Eliza

Chapter 32: Eliza – Buchenwald Camp, 11 April 1945

Chapter 33: Ellie – Penberth, Present Day

Chapter 34

Epilogue: Alex – Christmas Day, 1944

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Melanie Hudson

About the Publisher

For Ysabel who sent hand sanitizer and Ian who found ten-thousand words.

Prologue

Alex

Christmas Day, 1944

This was the second memorable train on which Alex had travelled within the past year. Both had journeyed overnight, but where the first had offered a degree of spacious opulence and old-world charm, the second – the Sonderzüg – offered nothing at all. At least, nothing more than one hundred and fifty fellow passengers forcibly crammed into the same boxcar, with no food, no water, no latrine, no light and increasingly, it seemed, no hope.

Alex couldn’t even begin to guess at the time. His watch was broken and the clock he carried in his coat pocket had, of course, long since stopped. It might as well be three-fifteen, he thought, it was as good a time as any. He guessed that they had pulled into a siding. Other trains had rattled past for hours now, but they were different kinds of train carrying different kinds of people. They were trains where gentrified passengers – passengers who looked the right way, spoke and thought and behaved the right way, the accepted way – enjoyed comfort and a little warmth. They would perhaps not notice the line of cattle cars waiting in the siding, cast aside to allow their train to speedily pass, nor were they likely to notice the thousands of men, women and children forced into such cattle cars – some barely alive, some dead already, the rest utterly bewildered, hungry and afraid.

The old man to his left hadn’t moved for hours but his face was pushed onto the back of Alex’s head, his arm twisted awkwardly, painfully, into Alex’s side. They were animals off to slaughter, except that animals would surely suffer less. Of that, Alex was certain.

He allowed his thoughts to drift to another night train, to a time when he had been the very epitome of a gentrified passenger, when life – if only he had known it at the time – had been something really and truly wonderful. The green dress, the pinched waist, that look she threw his way, as if daring him to catch it, her beautiful, wonderful smile. Where was she now? Was she safe, was she well, was she alive, even? If only he had known to grab that blessed time on the night train and to cherish it – cherish her – to tell her, the moment she sat down opposite him, that he was spellbound, that he adored the very ground she walked on, that he – yes, even at that first moment – loved her. If only, oh, if only he could go back to that moment and cherish it, revel in it, to get it right.

Chapter 1

Ellie

Present Day

It was a particularly busy evening rush hour on the Central Line when Ellie Nightingale – a violin case in one hand and a wheeled suitcase in the other – managed to catapult herself out of the Tube at Paddington Station. She tried to walk invisibly down the platform, pausing now and again to catch her breath while wending her way upstream. Getting anywhere quickly was never Ellie’s forte, and as one woman – fast-footed, suited, lovely sneakers – dashed past, Ellie realised that she was the laborious tortoise to the superwoman’s hare, which was one of the many reasons why she generally avoided the Tube. She didn’t like that feeling of being stepped over, of being trampled on, of being undone.

And also, nobody ever seemed to smile.

But it was a beautiful spring day out there – up there – a time when smiling at strangers was obligatory, and so Ellie smiled anyway. She smiled at the busker who was playing ‘It’s a Wonderful World’ on his guitar in one of the underground tunnels and she smiled as she travelled all the way up the escalator at the people travelling all the way down on the other side, her fiddle case lifted, as though she was Poseidon rising out of the stormy sea.

As she stepped off the escalator, Ellie was pleased to see that Paddington railway station was not mobbed. The Salvation Army Band were just arriving at the final bars of ‘The Lord Bless You and Keep You’ and as she stood in the middle of the atrium and turned full circle to take it all in, Ellie realised that the spirit of spring had not only filtered into her own little soul this evening, but had also descended upon the whole station. It was as though she had stepped through the wardrobe into Narnia and felt that the very air around her, usually so electrified and frenetic in London, was softer somehow, giving the same sense of muffled peacefulness that a soft warm breeze flowing through the leafy London streets brings.

‘And all is calm,’ she said to herself, confusing spring with Christmas somewhat but it didn’t matter, ‘and all is bright.’

Ellie was particularly excited tonight as she was travelling to Cornwall, but the real excitement came because she wasn’t catching any old train. Tonight she was catching the sleeper train, also known as the Cornish Riviera, which travelled all the way from London to Penzance, where the pirates came from. Tonight’s trip was marketed as a ‘themed evening of travel into the nostalgic and bygone age of the 1940s’. (In other words, a Vera Lynn-themed fancy-dress party and booze-up.) Ellie adored 1940s style and music, but she worried that she might perhaps feel even lonelier and more self-conscious tonight, likely being the only single person at a busy event.

No matter. Travelling by sleeper train to Cornwall was something that had been at the top of Ellie’s bucket list for ages. Some years before, a friend of her Great Granny Nancy’s had bequeathed a cottage in Cornwall to Nancy in her will. This little cottage, in a pretty fishing cove in the farthest reaches of the county, was surrounded by wild countryside and stood with its toes resting on a cobbled slipway that ran gently down to the sea. It was the place where Ellie had spent much-loved family summer holidays, for which they had all been so very thankful.

And there was a lot for Ellie to be thankful for this year, which was why, much to her family’s disappointment, and for reasons only comprehensible to herself, she’d decided that it was time to return to the cottage for a holiday – to finally have the particular adventure that Great Granny Nancy had wanted her to have – and she would go on this holiday completely and utterly alone.

But the train didn’t leave for a whole hour yet – not until 7.02 p.m. – which left Ellie free, now that the Salvation Army band had packed up for the evening, to take out her fiddle, position herself upwind of Paddington Bear, who sat steadfast as ever on his bench near platform one, and throw her hat – a vintage red beret kept especially for such an occasion – onto the floor. She would fill the halls with the unmatched and absolute joy of fiddle music this evening. She would become ‘Ellie Nightingale, for one night only’ – something else she had always wanted to do.

She took up fiddle and bow and realised that this – right now, at the beginning of the adventure – was one of those moments that marks a fabulous stepping-off point. She took a moment to savour this realisation before beginning her set with the reprise to her favourite movie of all time, Beauty and the Beast. Ellie had imagined playing her violin to a packed audience all of her life (albeit within the setting of a theatre, but you couldn’t have everything) and wanted nothing more than to swaddle these busy passengers in good feeling. She put bow to string, paused a moment to settle, closed her eyes and began to play, and by the time she was ten bars in, the whole of Paddington Station and every last Victorian iron rafter rang out with the good cheer that only a Disney theme tune can bring. (‘Ellie Nightingale is a talented musician prone to daydreams, exaggeration and sudden lapses in concentration’ … this from her music teacher, year nine.) But truly, at the sound of the music – because, for Ellie, there was nothing, NOTHING, more romantic and more fuelled with empathy and emotion than the sound of a fiddle in full swing – the commuters were not simply commuters anymore, they were new-found friends who were smiling at each other, and without any effort on their part, found themselves tapping their feet, jigging a little to the music, relaxed and happy and free.

She took a moment to open her eyes and noticed a stocky-looking chap sitting on the plinth with his arm wrapped around the Paddington Bear statue. He had particularly lovely wavy blond hair and was wearing – incredibly, as it was quite a warm evening – a blue duffle coat. He held out an arm to take a selfie of himself with Paddington before turning in the direction of the music. Ellie smiled at him over the top of the bow. He smiled back, and for the whole of her set the man in the duffle coat sat with Paddington and listened to the music, smiling to himself; at least, he was smiling whenever she glanced up to look at him, which was often.

With her eyes closed as she neared the end of her set, Ellie sensed that someone was standing in front of her. She opened her eyes. It was the man in the duffle coat. He put a hand in his pocket and bent to place something in her hat. Ellie nodded her thanks as she played on and watched him disappear into the crowd. She lost sight of him somewhere near the ticket office, frowned to herself, and finished the song. Looking down at the beret, she found not only a whopping twenty-pound note inside, but also a button in the shape of a toggle. Ellie very quickly gave the money to a rough sleeper who was trying to settle down for the night in a sleeping bag outside the station, but the toggle … the toggle she saved for herself.

Chapter 2

Ellie

Departing Paddington

A car attendant called Rihanna (late twenties, blonde hair secured in a bun, kind smile) was holding a clipboard and standing on the platform next to carriage D as Ellie put down her cases and scrolled through the emails on her phone.

‘Sorry about this,’ she said, looking up. ‘The confirmation email is on here somewhere. I won’t be a minute.’

Rihanna put a hand on Ellie’s arm. ‘Don’t worry about the reference. We don’t tend to get stowaways on this train. I just need your name.’

Ellie slipped her phone into a back pocket of her jeans. ‘Ellie Nightingale,’ she said.

Rihanna noticed the fiddle case. ‘Oh, was it you playing “Beauty and the Beast” on the platform?’ she asked, looking up from the clipboard. ‘I’ve been dancing up and down the dining carriage laying the tables for the last half an hour singing “Be Our Guest”!’

Ellie laughed.

‘I love those songs,’ added Rihanna, wistfully. ‘Oh to be Belle, eh?’

Both women took a moment to think about what it would be like to actually be Disney’s Belle until Rihanna scrunched her nose and burst the bubble by saying, ‘A bit unrealistic though, falling in love with someone that ugly. Not that I’m shallow or anything, but there’s ugly, and then there’s an actual beast! I could get past the horns and a tail … but the paws?’ She shook her head. ‘Crazy, really. A whole generation of women inspired by a “tale as old as time” about a supposedly clever woman who decides to abandon her career, her home, her friends, everything, and all because she’s decided that there might just be a nice side to a grotesque sociopath who beat up her father and locked her up in a dungeon. And these are our role models. Is it any wonder I’m on my second husband?’

Ellie didn’t respond. She had never thought of it that way. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

‘Still, to be Belle though, right?’ said Ellie.

Rihanna gestured her absolute agreement. ‘Oh, to be sure! For the clothes if nothing else … and the castle. Anyhow, thanks for joining us this evening!’ She glanced down again. ‘Let’s have a little look on the list.’

Ellie peered over Rihanna’s shoulder and spotted her name straightaway. She pointed to it. ‘There. There I am,’ she said.

‘Fab.’ Rihanna drew a line through Ellie’s name with a biro. ‘You’re in coach F, cabin number seven.’ She nodded down the platform. ‘That’s two carriages further along. Now, you will be joining us for our musical extravaganza this evening, won’t you? It all starts with dinner at eight.’

‘I want to,’ said Ellie, doubtfully. ‘And I’ve brought a lovely dress – it’s vintage, too – but I’m on my own and …’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that!’ Rihanna dismissed Ellie’s uncertainty with a bat of the hand. ‘Tonight’s bunch seem to be very friendly, and you’re not the only person travelling alone, so you should come! There’s going to be a lovely quartet singing for you all, the D-Day Dames, who are – oh, my God – they’re so amazing. Why don’t you come to dinner and see how you feel after that? You’ll need to eat something, at any rate.’ Rihanna’s eyes widened. ‘I know, take a book with you! Do you have one? I never go anywhere without a book when I’m on my own.’

Did Ellie have a book?

Ellie was the master at carrying a book. Always the same one.

‘Yes, I have a book,’ she said.

‘That’s sorted then. I warn you, though, someone is bound to talk to you at some point. There’s just something about travelling on the sleeper train. It makes even the most anti-social people want to be … well, sociable! I love it!’ Rihanna’s excitement, Ellie had to concede, was contagious.

‘OK, I’ll be there!’ Ellie was getting in the mood now. ‘And where did you say my cabin is … coach F?’

‘That’s the one. Cabin seven. Let me know if you need anything. The meal starts at eight so if you could be in the dining car by five-to, that would be fab. Jake – he’s the barman – will sort you out for drinks and everything. It’s all complimentary.’

Complimentary? Even better.

Imagining something from an Agatha Christie novel, Ellie grabbed her things, manoeuvred her way onto the train and began to work her way along the carriages. She read the door numbers out loud as she went along, counting down to …

Coach F, cabin number seven.

She opened the door and stepped into heaven. No, it wasn’t a suite at The Ritz, but it was her own little space of luxury and she imagined herself later, safe and snug in this plush little place while the train rumbled on, rocking her to sleep, the vibration of wheels on rails acting as her own personal lullaby. The lighting was subtle, the wardrobe was hidden, a sink doubled as a bedside table, the fold-down bed had a thick duvet pulled back to reveal a bag of chocolates sitting on the pillow, and although the newly refurbished train wasn’t exactly as she had imagined (namely, the Orient Express with a beady-eyed Poirot sitting in a corner twiddling his moustache) it was, nevertheless, really quite plush and everyone she had bustled past in the aisle had an air of holiday spirit about them. She let out a contented sigh. Here she was, finally, having her very own adventure, and it felt really, really good.

She took a moment to lie down on the bed – doctor’s orders – and closed her eyes but then promptly opened them again.

No, she couldn’t rest. The lounge and dining cars were just a few carriages away and were probably filling up with excitable people by now. Maybe they would all be dressed in their 1940s clothes, too? Ellie smiled. A little rest could wait. She opened her suitcase and removed two things: an emerald green silk dress and a leather-bound journal. The dress she hung from the wardrobe door, smoothing it down, the journal she opened, taking out a letter from Great Granny Nancy. She kissed the paper and began to read Nancy’s words for possibly the hundredth time since Nancy’s death a few years ago:

Excerpt from The Last Will and Testament of Nancy Dubois.

… And finally, to my great-granddaughter, Eliza (Ellie) Nightingale, I bequeath ‘Meadowsweet’, my property in Penberth Cove, Cornwall, along with all the contents therein and riparian rights associated with the property. I also bequeath a vintage Christian Dior silk evening gown in emerald green. Given that both the house and the dress once belonged to my dear friend, war artist Eliza Grey, I also bequeath Eliza’s war journal and associated sketches to Ellie, in the knowledge that she will be inspired not only by the paintings, but by the courage and self-sacrifice of such an incredible woman.

I bequeath all these things on condition that, when Ellie is strong enough – fit enough, adventurous enough – as I know with certainty that she will be one day, she has the courage to travel alone to Penberth on an adventure of her own and to live there a little while, without the fuss of family and the medical profession around her. For sentimental reasons, I should also like her to travel on the night train from Paddington Station and have set aside a small amount of capital in order to pay for the ticket and to finance her stay.

I do all these things with love, partly because I know that my great-granddaughter will thrive in Cornwall, but mainly because every woman, at one point in her life, should have an exciting adventure all of her own.

Ellie sighed, popped the notepaper back into the journal and looked at the dress. It was certainly beautiful, if a little daring. It had a high halter neck, which was fortunate, as it covered her chest – which Ellie preferred, given the scar – but it was bare at the back and would skim the body in a way that left nothing to anyone’s imagination, and was significantly more stylish and, dare she say, seductive than anything she would ever usually wear.

Ellie ran the fabric of the dress through her fingers and remembered that there were no second chances in life. That little humiliations meant nothing, not really. She reminded herself that tonight she was, after all, Ellie Nightingale, for one night only, and it simply didn’t matter if all the other passengers hadn’t bothered to glam up. If she was the only person dressed up at the party (her ultimate dread), who on earth would notice or care?

Ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door. It was Rihanna and she was delivering Ellie’s pre-dinner aperitif on a silver tray – champagne!

‘Wow!’ Rihanna entered the cabin and began to speak in only exclamation marks. ‘What a fabulous dress! You look absolutely stunning!’ and so on …

Ellie was thrilled and did a little spin.

‘I would literally kill to wear it! That dress combined with that fabulous pixie haircut? Incredible!’

Ellie put a hand to her hair. She had been disappointed not to have long enough hair to put into victory rolls tonight. She turned to the mirror again. ‘It belonged to a friend of my great-grandmother’s. They were nurses together in the war. Is it too much, tho—’

Rihanna interrupted by handing her the glass of champagne. ‘Stop that, right now! Knock back your drink, and I’ll pop back and get you when everyone is seated. You can walk behind me into the dining car. No one will even notice you arrive …’

Unable to resist a force of nature such as Rihanna and spurred on by the fizz, when the knock came at the door a little later, Eliza grabbed her gloves, her book and her clutch and followed her new friend into the dining car. As for Rihanna’s conviction that Ellie could slip silently into her seat without anyone noticing her entrance … she couldn’t have been more wrong.

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