The Sinking of the Laconia fanfic

[birdienl]

Title: Survivors
Fandom: The Sinking of the Laconia (BBC, 2011)
Rating: G
Characters: Hilda Schmidt/Thomas Mortimer
Words: 2.746
Summary: What happened to Hilda Schmidt and Thomas Mortimer after the end of The Sinking of the Laconia

Note: So, three things: I've never written fanfiction before, I've never written any fiction before in English (only scientific reports...) and I'm no expert on WWII history (not on any part of history by the way), but I just had to know how the story of Hilda and Mortimer ended. Do you still want to read on? I hope you do, and I hope you'll enjoy it and comment!
The characters Hilda Schmidt and Thomas Mortimer are based partly on the real life Laconia survivors Doris Hawkins and Thomas Buckingham. Doris Hawkins wrote a pamphlet titled Atlantic Torpedo about the sinking, the days on the U-boat, her time in the lifeboat and what happened after. I based Hilda's story in chapter 1 largely on this, until she arrives in England.

 

1.

 August 1943

Hilda Schmidt watched out over the fields, lazy beneath the sinking sun. Sometimes she did not believe peaceful evenings like this could exist in these days, with all of the world at war. And it was not just around her the war was raging. Though her body had healed, the wounds inside her had all but closed. Was it really less than a year ago she had picked strawberries in her mother’s garden, had waited for the birth of her first niece almost as anxiously as her brother and his wife had? They had all been worried about the war, talking about it during dinners and long summer evenings, but it had not greatly inconvenienced their lives. This summer evening the war again seemed far away, there were strawberries to pick and children to make you laugh, but her family would never enjoy these pleasures again. She had lost all of them to the war and very nearly her own live too.

 There had been days, sitting in the lifeboat, seeing fellow passengers die, she also wanted to close her eyes and never open them again. But for some reason those moments always passed and she would play silly word games to keep their spirits up. And one day Harry had woken her and pointed to the horizon. No longer it was just water surrounding them, they were sailing towards green hills. After 27 days adrift, they had reached the coast of Liberia. Fed and helped by the kindly natives, but still weak from exhaustion, they made their way to the nearest town. One morning Hilda woke up and found herself in a clean, soft bed and cried silently. Together with the handful of other survivors, she made the long journey to England. Talking to each other kept them sane through the sleepless nights filled with memories. Everybody had family to long for, friendly faces who would await them in Liverpool harbour. Harry would talk about his girl back home and how the first thing he would do when he saw her would be to ask her to marry him. Hilda only had an obligation to look forward to, to find Laura’s family and tell them her story.

 They reached England in the week before Christmas, and articles declaring them ‘Christmas miracles’ appeared in all the newspapers. Harry helped Hilda reach the Ferguson estate in Scotland and in the first week of 1943, she stood face to face with a widower and three motherless boys. All she could offer them was a wedding ring and Laura’s dying words. She was welcomed into the castle and the boys soon took to her. But Lord Ferguson, though civil when he needed to be, was grief-stricken and suspicious of Hilda’s intentions. She soon realized she had overstayed her welcome. There was only one place she could go now; Beckley in Oxfordshire, where her mother’s sister aunt Edith and her cousins Sarah and June lived. Nobody expected her, she had not been able to correspond with her family in years. Again she had to be the bearer of bad news, telling aunt Edith her sister had died. Sarah was only two months older than Hilda and they had been best friends during their childhood summers. The last time Hilda had seen her, she had been engaged, now she was a mother of two, trying to cope on her own, as her husband Philip was fighting. When Hilda told her what had happened to her in the last year, tears ran down Sarah’s cheeks, but she brushed them away and asked Hilda to come and stay at her house. Sarah wished to do her part for the war effort. With Hilda taking care of the children, she immediately volunteered at the local hospital.

 Not everywhere Hilda met with such kindness. People in Beckley had not forgotten her father was a German and they would cross the street when they saw her approaching. Some shopkeepers refused to serve her and she even received an anonymous letter filled with threats. Luckily, she had no need to go to the village often and in Sarah’s house she felt safe. Almost safe, for even these surroundings could not keep away the memories and worries that crept up on her at night. Her evening prayers had become longer than ever, asking God to take care of all the people she had met during her journey. Many of whom she did not know where alive or not, trusting Him to know the whereabouts of all. She would pray for Harry, Lord Ferguson and his sons, Lady Fullwood and her daughter, Captain Hartenstein and his crew, somewhere in the Atlantic. And always her prayers would end with a heartfelt plea for the safety of Thomas Mortimer.

 Her brother had teased her so often, saying he thought she would never find a man worthy of her attention, after she had supposedly broken the heart of another one of his friends by not responding to their flirtations. Wasn’t it a cruel coincidence that she had met this man she believed she could respect and even love on a boat that was destined to sink? A man who had just lost his entire family as well. At first she had tried to steer her mind away from thinking about Thomas in this way, but she could not help her daydreams returning to him again and again. He had every reason to hate her for what her countrymen had done to his family, yet he had forgiven her for being German the minute she told him how her family had died. He had found her a few times after that, on the busy deck of the submarine, and they had silently stared at the sea together, connected in their loss. Hilda had hated to leave him on the U-boat, but he waved her worries away with a smile, even while he was in pain. Sarah had written to friends in London about news of other survivors of the Laconia incident. Thomas’ name was on none of the lists. The image of him spending the war in a PoW camp in Germany filled her with dread, but if she could know he was there, she at least knew he was alive. She had been caught by her aunt staring out of the window with a dishcloth crumpled in her hands one day. ‘There’s a man on your mind, my love, isn’t there?’, aunt Edith had said. ‘I hope for all our sakes he’s not German.’ Hilda had said nothing.

 Now the sun had disappeared and it was getting chilly. Hilda stood up, brushed the grass from her skirt and started walking back to the house.

 2.

 June 1945

The end of the war had been like waking from a nightmare. The first few day Thomas Mortimer had not been able to fully believe it to be true. He and his fellow PoWs had talked about it so often, but now the moment had finally arrived, he could not grasp it and celebrate. For one he was too weak to celebrate much. Over two-and-a-half years in a PoW camp would debilitate even the strongest of men. The food shortages in the last year had made everything worse and Thomas had seen men fighting over small scraps of bread. Almost as bad as never having enough to eat where the endless and empty days, weeks and months. It was as if the Germans were trying to kill them with boredom. There were only so many hours you could fill with playing card games and reading the Bible. As long as the weather permitted, Thomas would sit in the courtyard, always choosing the one spot where he could see fields in the distance and people working on them, sowing and harvesting. It reminded him of his childhood years, growing up on a farm and helping his father work the land. He had never felt the love for the land like his father and older brother had, but when looking at the German farmers he would give everything just to work alongside them.

 After sitting on the hard stone ground for hours, pain in his leg would force him to get up. Although the wound had healed well, the bomb shell must have hit a nerve, for his leg would often hurt and he knew he should never walk without a limp again. Still, Thomas knew he was lucky compared to some of the other prisoners who had to go on living without a limb or severely burned. And many more had died from their war injuries. Wasn’t it ironic that his war injury had not been caused by killing, but rather by saving the life of an enemy. The weeks after the bombing he had spent on board the U-156 had been steeped in irony. He was a prisoner, but was treated almost like a guest. Sharing meals with the crew and evening conversations on deck with Captain Hartenstein. And almost before he knew, Thomas and Werner had become friends. Or, in better times it would have been called friendship, now it was merely an awkward alliance between enemies.

 He had been taken to a camp somewhere in the south of Germany. He was only interrogated once, upon arrival, by a high-ranked marine officer. He tried to find out if any of the other passengers had survived, but failed. Most of the guards were reluctant to talk about the Laconia incident. One of the guards was a friendly young man, perhaps not more than 19 years old, who tried to help him. But even he could not provide Thomas with the wanted information. He did however tell him one day the news that U-146 was no more. Thomas had to swallow away a wave of nausea when he heard that Werner Hartenstein and his men had met an early death somewhere on the Atlantic. Sometimes the best word to describe this war was unfair.

 That night he cried silently for the death of U-146’s crew, feeling guilty because he had been unable to shed tears over his family’s death. He had lain awake many nights, staring at the bed above him, reliving every moment of the life he had led with his girls; his wife Valerie and their daughters Eve and Ruth. After a while he would fall asleep from sheer exhaustion, but still they would find him in his dreams. Images of Christmases, birthdays and ordinary weekends spent shopping or in the park filled his nights. He had confided in Simon, a fellow prisoner who had been a psychologist before the war. ‘You have been through to much Thomas, your mind is protecting you from falling apart.’ Thomas was not convinced, until one evening a prisoner played a lullaby on his mouth organ and suddenly grief struck him like a blow.

 Thomas often thought how different everything was from what he had expected. He had hated the Germans when he was still an officer sailing the Laconia around the world. Then he had nothing to hate them for but the thought of how they had plunged all of Europe into war which killed so many. Now he had reason to hate every German he saw for taking away the ones he loved most, but he found he could not. Because of what had happened in the Atlantic, every German was now firstly a person caught in a war, just like his British countrymen. He would see prisoners around him being consumed by hate, and he knew he had Werner to thank for not feeling the same. Werner and Hilda Schmidt.

 At first Thomas had just been intrigued by a young woman travelling alone with an infant in such dangerous times. She and Ella reminded him of the family he had left behind. When he found out she was German, he had felt betrayed as if a friend or family member had turned on him. But when she told him her story, he could only feel they were both victims of the same evil. He marvelled at her strength in the days after the sinking. While the loss of Ella was visible in every line of her face, she would look after the Bates children and comfort Lady Fullwood as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Her presence had also comforted him, even though they had hardly spoken. A few times their eyes had met across the throngs of people on the deck of the U-boat and he knew they felt the same grief. When the bomb shells had hit him, she found him while he was being stitched together by Remmert. The words the German officer spoke had not registered in his mind at the moment, when he was in a haze of pain and adrenalin. But later he remembered them: ‘You should have kissed her.’ Had Remmert seen something in his behaviour that would never have occurred to himself? Thomas also remembered his last words to Hilda had been ‘See you’ and he realized how true they were. He did wish he could see her again, talk about everything they had been through, listen to her sensible voice and maybe even kiss her.

 He would not be able to go home for a while, with all of Europe being in such turmoil. But when he would set foot on English soil again, Oxfordshire was where he would go.

 3.

 September 1945

A long, emotional summer had ended. Hilda, bound by the war years to her cousin Sarah more than to any friend she had ever had, had hovered between celebrating the war’s end and uncertainty about Philip’s fate. Just a week ago, a letter had arrived, heavily delayed, but filled with good news. Philip wrote he would come home as soon as transport could be arranged. Hilda had left Sarah staring out across the lane, to post a letter of application for a job in London. She knew she had to start a life of her own soon. Her own good news had arrived a few days ago. Harry had written to her about his son, and enclosed a newspaper article entitled ‘Last Laconia survivor home’. Hilda shared her joy at finding out Thomas had survived with Sarah, but what feelings the news awoke in her, she could only cherish in her heart. If she could get the job in London, she would look for him and maybe, maybe he would be happy to see her again.

 ‘Hilda? Hilda Schmidt?’

 A voice from across the street disturbed her thoughts. At first she thought her mind was playing tricks on her, but it was no mistake. The man walking towards her was much thinner than she remembered and showed a small limp in his step, yet is was undoubtedly Thomas Mortimer. He had crossed the street before she could think and was looking down at her with serious eyes.

 ‘It is you.’

 ‘Mortimer, how come you are here?’

 ‘I was looking for someone, someone who once told me she knew the country lanes of Oxfordshire well.’ A smile crept over his face, a smile she remembered from the carefree days when he had nursed Ella on the Laconia.

 Hilda averted his gaze. ‘I… I didn’t know you had survived until….’ she pulled the crumpled newspaper article from her pocket, still trying to connect that piece of paper with the man standing in front of her.

 Their fingers touched as he took the article from her and she was aware how close they stood together. ‘I didn’t know you survived either until I came back home. But I’m so glad you did.’  His voice was soft and Hilda found she could no longer avoid looking straight into his face. She read in his eyes the pain and fears of the last years, but also saw hope glimmering. She wished he could read the same in hers. Suddenly she felt his hands gripping hers, their fingers intertwined. Thomas lifted their connected hands and stared at them for a long time. Then he looked at her again, hope now apparent in all his features. ‘Can we go somewhere for a cup of tea around here?’

 ‘Yes of course, I know just the place.’ Hilda’s heart was soaring as she realised Thomas did not let go of her hand when they walked towards the café. Tonight, her prayer would be filled with thanksgiving.

 

Comments

[litlover12.livejournal.com]

Birdienl, that was really good! Especially for being your first fanfic. I haven't seen the show, but you really brought the characters for life for me anyway.

I hope you'll do more writing!

[birdienl.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for your comment! It's great you've read and commented on my fic while you haven't even seen the show.

I do like to write, but usually when I'm curious or unsatisfied after a show/movie has ended, I'm just lazy and find already existing fanfic. There was nothing for this show, so I had no choice but to write it myself!

[litlover12.livejournal.com]

Necessity is the mother of invention! ;-)