Kathleen fills so many roles in "Cold Peace" that it is hard to categorize her. On the one hand she represents the legion of war widows left with children to bring up on her own. On the other hand she's a career woman, determined to succeed. Because she works as an air traffic controller, her plot-line also illuminates the challenges of air traffic control in the difficult environment of occupied Berlin. At the same time, through her innocent friendship with the wrong man, Kathleen's story also gives the reader a peek at the dubious and unsavory underworld festering below the surface of post-war Berlin.
Excerpt 1:
“How can you possibly take an innocent six-year-old child to Berlin of all places?” Mrs Harriman asked her daughter indignantly.
“Mother!” Kathleen pleaded, “Gatow is just another RAF station!”
“In the middle of Germany! You’ll be surrounded by Nazis!”
“The war has been over almost three years, Mother. Besides, I have housing on the station and Hope will go to school and have daycare there. We won’t need to go into Berlin for anything.”
“Then why go there in the first place? Why don’t you just quit the WAAF and take a nice, sensible job? You trained and worked as a sales clerk before you married, and I see signs in windows saying, ‘help wanted’ all over the place. There’s even a vacancy at Marks and Spencers on High Street! That would be perfect for you, and you would meet lots of nice, respectable people. You and Hope could move back in with us.”
The last thing Kathleen wanted was to live with her parents. It was nine years since she’d married and almost five since her husband Ken had been killed. She treasured her independence.
As if reading her thoughts, her mother hastened to add, “Think of how much better it would be for little Hope if you didn’t have shift work, Kathleen. As a shopgirl, you’d have regular working hours and could live a normal life again. It was one thing during the war when it was a national emergency and Hope was so little. I understand that working at an airfield helped you get over your grief, but it’s time to move on. You’re still an attractive young woman. No one would think you were 28 just by looking at you. Your hair is still so dark and thick. It is time to find a new daddy for poor little Hope.... What on earth do you hope to gain by going to Berlin?”
Kathleen drew a deep breath. There was so much she hoped to gain but her mother would understand none of it — not the chance to do radar controlling, or to be the senior WAAF on the station, or to be near Ken, who was buried in the Commonwealth War Cemetery there. Kathleen secretly hoped that going there and seeing the grave would at last free her to love again, but the last person she would ever confess that to was her mother. So, all she said was, “Mother, it’s my life.”
Kathleen is the product of Britain's raising middle-class. Her father worked in an office not a factory and earned enough money so her mother could stay at home and keep the house. She was raised in a nice, semi-detached house in the suburbs and she trained as a sales clerk after leaving school at 16. She soon had a good, respectable job with Mark & Spencers, and was the very epitome of a "nice" girl in the late 1930s . She is not wild, rebellious, or fast.
None of that changed when Ken Hart walked into her life. Yes, he was a sailor, but an officer, and he dutifully got her father's permission before taking her out on an evening date. Yes, they married after only knowing one another six months and, yes, Kathleen's parents never approved of Ken, but she was a virgin bride and a faithful wife.
Kathleen's life didn't really change until Ken's ship was sunk under him by a German U-boat in late 1940. He was in a lifeboat for nearly a week before being picked up by a Westbound ship. By the time Kathleen learned that Ken was still alive, it had been three weeks and some of his shipmate's wives had already held memorial services. Kathleen, four months pregnant at the time, had gone through hell and begged Ken to give up the sea.
Ken agreed. Yet as a man eligible for conscription, Ken didn't have the option of just staying ashore and finding a pleasant job. He was bound to be impressed into the Navy unless he volunteered for another service. So he traded the merchant navy uniform for an RAF one. With his navigational skills, it was only natural for him to volunteer and train as a navigator, eventually joining a Lancaster crew. The dangers were greater than ever, but at least Kathleen could live near his station and not only could they see each other almost daily, he could spend time with his little girl.
In May 1941, Kathleen had given birth to a baby girl, whom Ken insisted on calling "Hope." There was so much darkness and danger around her, he said, that hope was the most precious of all qualities. Furthermore, he told Kathleen, his daughter was the greatest reason for wanting to carry on with the fight for a better future. In March 1943, before Hope's second birthday, Ken was shot down over Berlin. There were no survivors from his Lancaster.
Unable to cope with the vacuum left by Ken's death, Kathleen became obsessed with carrying on the fight for Ken. She left Hope with her parents and joined the WAAF. Soon she found herself working in the control tower of a bombing station, guiding the bombers home after their nightly forays into hell. It was stressful but vitally important work, and when the war ends, she can't face just going back to the suburbs and being a salesclerk again. She stays in the WAAF and she takes a keen interest in her profession, including extra qualifying courses on radar controlling. When she sees a notice requesting a radar-qualified, air traffic control for an urgent assignment in Berlin, Kathleen doesn't hesitate for an instant. She hasn't really a clue what she's got herself into.
Excerpt 2:
Within minutes, the bleak rural landscape began to give way to a grey-black vista of broken masonry, piles of scrap metal, and burnt-out vehicles. The deeper the train rolled into the urban area, the closer and more ominous the destruction became. The buildings reached higher, but they lacked roofs and windows, and their sides were blackened by smoke. As the train slowed to a crawl, Kathleen realized that messages had been scrawled in white chalk on some of the charred walls. People had done that after being bombed out in Southampton, too, she remembered with a shudder.
The train brakes screeched shrilly, and Kathleen’s view was suddenly cut off by twisted rolling stock with shattered windows lined up behind a locomotive lying on its side with its guts spilling out. Kathleen shivered and closed her eyes, but the image could not be erased. The brakes were applied again and at last, they came to a stop beside a concrete platform. She opened her eyes to find out where she was, but she couldn’t read the sign at an oblique angle through the dirty glass. She stood and shoved the window down, letting in a blast of cold air smelling of coal smoke. An eruption of angry complaints from her fellow passengers convinced her to close the window rapidly, but not before she had deciphered the name of the stop. They had arrived in a place called Krefeld. It sounded vaguely familiar although she couldn’t imagine why. And then it hit her: more than once it had been “the target for tonight.”
A handful of passengers boarded the train, the doors clanged shut, and the train lurched forward again. As they continued out of the city, she saw nothing except heaps of grey debris covered with dirty snow. She asked herself, Did we really do all this?
The question repeated itself as the journey continued. The images were unremittingly chilling and with each mile deeper into Germany, Kathleen felt more uncomfortable. What the hell had she gotten herself into? There was so little left standing that it seemed pointless to try to rebuild anything, and there was little sign of life anyway. The few people she glimpsed lurking in the semi-deserted streets hunched against the wind and blowing dust, their heads down, their eyes averted. They undoubtedly looked defeated, but were they resentful too? Angry, maybe? Or bitter? Were they awaiting the chance to strike back? Kathleen turned away from the window. Everything beyond her overheated train compartment full of British travellers had become vaguely threatening.
And each stop was yet another “target for tonight” — Essen, Bochum, Dortmund, Hamm, Gutersloh, Minden. With dismay at her naiveté, she realized she was crossing the Ruhr, the hated “Happy Valley” of the bomber boys.
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