Little Manfred

“How do you know that, Mister?” Alex asked him, rather bluntly. “We haven’t never even seen you before.”

“No, young man,” he replied with a smile. “I have not seen you before, but if I am not mistaken, I have been to your farm. I think I know every ditch on this farm, every hedge, every barn.” He turned to his friend. “This is wonderful, Marty, ausgezeichnet.” Then back to me again. “And I think maybe your mother, she is called Grace, ja? Am I right?”

I couldn’t believe it. The man seemed to know so much about us – our home, even our mum’s name – and I hadn’t told him anything. As he turned away from us I could see he was near to tears. He walked away on his own up to the top of the beach, where he sat down by the upturned rowing boat.

That was when his friend spoke up. “I think Walter needs a little time on his own,” he said – he spoke English a bit more like we did. “This was always going to be a difficult day for him. Coming back, it is never easy, you know.”

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, and I think it must have showed, because, without my even asking, he went on to explain.

“Well,” he said. “This is going to be difficult for you to believe, but it looks to me as if my friend Walter over there must have known your mother a long time ago when she was a girl. All he has told me, all I know for sure – and he hasn’t told me much – is that a long, long time ago, just after the war, Walter lived for a while on a farm round here, near Kessingland. And it’s looking to me now, and to him I think, very much as if it might have been on your farm. He lived there for nearly two years, I believe. And he did say something about a dog there called Little Manfred and a girl called Grace. So when he comes here to this beach – which he clearly remembers so well – and he meets a dog called Manfred, and then he discovers you very probably live in the actual farmhouse where he lived, and that your mother is called Grace – well, you can imagine, it must have come as quite a shock to him. A nice shock, but a shock all the same. We’ll go and see how he is, shall we?”

As we walked together up the beach, he introduced himself to us as Mr Soper. Then he added, “Marty. You can call me Marty, if you like. I don’t even know your names, do I?”

“She’s Charley,” said Alex, seemingly quite happy now to chat away, “which is a boy’s name, but she’s a girl. She’s my sister, and I’m Alex and I’m seven and a quarter. That man by the boat, who speaks funny, who is he?”

“Walter?” Marty replied. “Walter is a very old friend of mine from Germany. He came over to England to go to Wembley for the World Cup Final – he’s a big football fan, like me. But also he came to see me, and I thought it would be a grand idea to come here to see if he could find the place again, the farm where he stayed at the end of the war. It’s the first time he’s been back in England since he left, and that was nearly twenty years ago.”

“Wowee!” said Alex, beside himself, as I knew he would be, with excitement – about Wembley, about the football match. “You were really there? At the match? At Wembley? Wowee!”

Marty nodded. “I was,” he replied with a smile. “We both were, Walter and me. So I came away happy. But he was not so happy – which is quite understandable when you think about it.”

“You were at the match yesterday? You actually saw it?” Alex still couldn’t believe it. “That goal of ours,” he went on, “it did go over the line, didn’t it? The ref was right, wasn’t he?”