PART TWO OF THREE

At this point in my narrative I should explain a few details about my mother.

The promontory known as Viking Point stands 500 feet high and is almost sheer cliff amongst rugged and broken coast with a boulder-strewn shore. Our house is built into a large niche in the cliff almost three-quarters of the way up. If you draw a line due east from the house across the North Sea, it touches land on the other side along the Danish-German frontier at Schleswig, and it was from Schleswig that the Danish Vikings came in the 9th century.

On my morning walks along the harbour front at the foot of Viking Point, I would sometimes pass a half hour in conversation with Mr Jennings the Harbourmaster, who also prided himself on being the local historian.

When I suggested to him one day that our house, had it existed in the 9th century, would have been the obvious spot for a lookout post, he replied that to his knowledge there had been a watchtower in that niche long before the Danes arrived. I pressed him for more information but all he would tell me was that my late father had the true history and kept it in some diaries.

In my mid-teens I searched high and low for these diaries until finally my mother relented and recalled some half dozen shabby calf-bound volumes in a box in the store room. "There you are," she had said, "and if you can find anything of interest in that welter of green peas and early strawberries then good luck to you."

As my mother Muriel observed, the diaries were mostly taken up with garden matters and parish gossip, and notes about the weather, all written in a delicate and painstaking style. Stuffed down the spine of one of them I found two closely-typed folios which provided all there was to know of my predecessors at Viking Point, and intriguingly the narrative also mentioned an underground tunnel which led from the property a vast distance. The entrance to this tunnel had never been found.

One evening when I was sitting with the harbourmaster on a rock looking over the mudflats towards Viking Point he threw in a comment about my mother, wondering where she came from. She had arrived suddenly as my father's bride in 1940, but the harbourmaster, who was well travelled as a mariner, judged from her rather elaborate English that she might be German or Dutch. Though she was kindly and very good looking, he had always wondered about her whether there might not be some dark secret lurking in her past.

The more I thought about this the more inquisitive I became, for although now in 1960 her English was faultless, she had no family and no past that I had been able to determine. When she found herself in dire straits in 1942 upon the death of her husband my father, she had had nobody call round to offer to help financially. The "family who had urged her to marry him for the property" did not exist, and the only official document relating to her presence in England before 1942 was her marriage certificate of 1940.

As a result of my puzzlement I made a thorough rummage of the old store room and found a letter, edges yellowing with age, dated 1937 and rubber-stamped with the German eagle and swastika. I had it translated, and that morning after we slept together I showed a facsimile of it to my mother.

She merely glanced at it and explained, "Oh yes, the SS came in 1937 and wanted permission to search for the tunnel. They were very keen, but father said no. As you see from the translation, they would have paid him handsomely."

I gave my mother a long stare. "And since when do you read German so well?"

She flushed and retorted, "Oh, I just picked up a few words here and there darling."

"Where did the SS think the tunnel led, mother?"

"It was just the archaeological branch, not the really bad ones," she said, as though in some way that diminished the significance of what I had stumbled upon. "I think they expected it to come out on Walcheren island in the Scheldt. There was a cult of the goddess Freya there and at Viking Point itself in prehistoric times, and the archaeologists thought the cult might have spread to Britain from Holland using the tunnel."

"And my father would not let them search."

"Well, he must have given in I suppose, because an SS team did come in 1937 and 1938, he told me."

I took my mother by the arm and steered her into the vegetable garden. If there was something awkward to be said, we always went there. "Now mother, are you telling me that none of these SS archaeologists realized that if this tunnel exists, and they found it, they could send their troops along the tunnel to invade England when the time came?"

My mother Muriel knew that there was no answer to this and looked into the distance.

"Now let me get this straight. For the first time in your life, tell me your past from your birth to your marriage in 1940."

She heaved a great sigh. "I was born in London in 1924. Our family name is Henker, and we came from Bavaria. My father was an officer of middling importance with the German diplomatic mission, a sort of aide to the military attaché. Germany was not supposed to have military attachés after the Great War so it was all kept very low key. After Hitler came to power we returned to Germany in 1936. At age thirteen I went into the Hitler-Mädchen organisation and was picked out for overseas work with the Abwehr - the military intelligence organisation - because I was fluent in English."

"And my father?"

"Your father was a member of the British Union of Fascists. He knew my father at the embassy, and no doubt collaborated with him over Viking Point and volunteered to help the SS search for the tunnel. Your father arranged our marriage, and he got me a false identity papers, the works. We used to laugh at how the British took every document and statement at face value. Compared to the way identity papers in Germany are managed it was childishly simple." 

"How did you come to England? By U-boat or did they perhaps parachute you in?"

My mother grinned at this. "No, it was by motor torpedo boat actually. 'E-boats' the English called them. I came ashore on the other side of the headland during a minelaying operation."

"You were a German spy or was it just for the tunnel?"

"Oh, I had no orders to transmit or flash messages out to sea or anything like that. If the SS archaeologists came I was to put them up at Viking Point, nothing else. And in the end they never came." 

"So why did you have me, mother?"

"War or no war, life goes on. Nobody ever suspected. I received news that my family had been killed in an air raid and so I thought I might even settle here after the war ended."

"Well, lucky for you there's an amnesty for Nazi spies nowadays, mother. You know they'd have hanged you if you'd been caught, don't you? Well, I have to hand it to you, you're a brave bastard, and nobody ever knew how brave you were."
 
She dropped her gaze and stared at her feet, her hands deep in her mackintosh pockets, her shoulders hunched against the cold. "How kind of you to say so," she said icily. The phone rang. It was the harbourmaster, Mr Jennings.

"Thought you might like to know, there's a German trawler coming in, the Götz von Berlichingen. They've got a bloody cheek. Can't be too many trawlers with a name like that. If memory serves me right, that's the same bloody boat that came in 1937 and 1938. If they ask for you shall I send them up?"

I told him to be sure to, and I let my mother know. She was as surprised as I was. "Are they coming to this house?" I asked her. She said she had no idea, honestly. I said Hmmm. After lunch Muriel and I walked down to the harbour. The sun was out for a change and the old brick of the cottages glowed rosily. Smoke curled up lazily from some of the chimneys. We sat on a bench near where the Götz von Berlichingen had just moored. A customs launch was alongside her. Half an hour later the harbourmaster came with a list of names. He had marked the two passengers with an asterisk. "Don't know either of them," my mother remarked laconically.

"What do you think these people are after?" I asked.

"I suspect that after twenty years they've suddenly rediscovered me and want to know if I've found that bloody tunnel entrance yet."

"Why are they sure there is one?"

"In 1936 the SS had an expedition to Iceland. There they learnt a lot of information about tunnels built thousands of years ago and supposed to lead into the Underworld. Most of them are in South America, but they know of several in Europe too. They think that long before the Christian era a tunnel connected Viking Point with Walcheren in Holland. All they know for certain is that the entrance is at a place called Blackfriars Steps, but nobody has a clue where that is. Before the war the SS came here and took up the flooring of the whole house and the outhouses too but went away very glum. In the end they didn't really believe in the tunnel. I think the Führer was very upset."

I laughed. "He should have asked me, mother. I know where Blackfriars Steps is!"

Suddenly she sat bolt upright beside me.

"Where, darling, where?"

"Well, come on slow coach, there's just time before it starts getting dark," I told her. Soon we were ascending Viking Point by the steep little path to the summit. Nobody ever came here, it was all our property. I shivered in the cold wind, but my mother was in an irritatingly cheerful mood.

On the moor at the summit a drenching shower of rain caught us, but we ignored it, for at last we stood before the low ruins of what had been a tiny chapel dedicated to St Mary Magdalene. The only outward sign of this chapel's existence were crumbling walls a foot or so in height. I pulled back some vegetation to reveal a heavy stone slab. "Now if I were an SS archaeologist, I would have started my excavations under this slab," I told my mother.

"But what is the connection between St Mary Magdalene and Blackfriars Steps?" she asked.

"Not Blackfriars, mother, Black Freya's. Freya, goddess of the Underworld, is black. When King Alfred drove out the Danes, the old pagan temple sites were renamed. So out went Black Freya the goddess, and in came St Mary Magdalene the Christian equivalent." Directly under that slab is the old crypt, and below that the crypt steps lead down to nobody knows where."

"So how do you know all this?"

"Mr Jennings, harbourmaster and local historian told me ages ago. He knew all the time where Black Freya's Steps were to be found, but the SS never asked him."

My mother sank on a chunk of rock, legs apart, elbows on her knees, head in hands. "Mein Gott, the tunnel exists. After all these years," she said mournfully.

"Should we tell the Götz von Berlichingen people?" I asked her.

She gave me a tired smile. "Certainly I must, if it's me they've come to see. I swore an oath I would reveal my knowledge to them whenever I found it."

"But surely after all these years....?"

"The oath never dies," she told me. She ruminated for a while, then suddenly her demeanour changed. "Yes, the oath never dies, and those bastards own me a million marks in back pay!" she cried. "No back pay, no tunnel!"

The people from Götz von Berlichingen listened to my mother's long complaint sympathetically. Though they were not prepared to pay a million marks, the settlement was very reasonable, and my mother accepted gratefully. They also gave her a medal. The certificate read: "In the name of the Führer and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht I award to Abwehr Assistant Muriel Henker the Iron Cross First Class. Signed (illegible), Berlin 1 August 1944."

"Congratulations, mother, there's not many English boys can say their mother has got one of those," I told her. A German archaeological team spent six months on the moor and left very satisfied. We never discovered where the tunnel led, and my mother, the harbourmaster Mr Jennings and I had to agree to the entrance being cemented over and then sign a non-disclosure agreement. Mr Jennings was very pleased with his sudden windfall. "So you're a Jerry," he told my mother, "I always suspected as much. You were too beautiful a woman to be shut away at Viking Point unless there was something behind it."

For those who are interested, tunnels of enormous length are proven below Ecuador and Peru, as reported by Erich von Däniken in his Gold of the Gods. It may be no coincidence that in 1971 the magazine Bild der Wissenschaft reported a German archaeological dig at Otuzco in Peru where from 62 metres below ground a tunnel led 105 kilometres down to the Pacific and continued offshore, at which point the expedition was called off.

That day as my mother and I relaxed on the sofa in the drawing room, she nursing her cheque and Iron Cross, I told her, "Muriel, I've never met a woman who could hold a candle to you. A man should love his wife more than his mother, but that's something I could never do."

She grinned. "Are you sure you're not one of those cowardly young men who shelter behind the love of a mother to avoid the bother of supporting a wife?" She laid her head against my shoulder and when I separated her legs she raised no objection to my stroking the insides of her thighs. When she said I could "go higher if I liked" I insinuated my hand inside her panties. Once my fingertips began to play around her clitoris she shivered with pleasure and murmured, "Darling, you could win a girl just doing that even if you had nothing else. You've got just the right touch, and not one man in hundreds ever bothers to learn it."

"You like this better than the real way?"

"Oh, I never enjoyed intercourse. Lots of women like it better by the fingers than the regular way," she added. In this she was merely confirming what is now well known - the vast majority of women require clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm because penetration does not work for them on its own. Now I understood why she was so excited that first time I had fingered her clitoris.

"Look, darling, what's most important for me is my sexual satisfaction. My clitoris is the key. I know it sounds very selfish, but all I want is just to lie still and enjoy myself while you do the work."

"Well, if that's the case...." I got up and began clearing the big library table of its ornaments and told her to bring a blanket and pillow from the bedroom.

"What for?" she asked in bewilderment.

"For you to lie on, mother, that table is awfully hard."

"Darling, I am not going to lie on that table."

"I am sorry, mother, but I must insist. This is a once-only clinical session so that I can see exactly what you want me to do. Now, would you mind?"

"Oh very well. But I'm going to have a shower first. You set the table up."

The idea of having my beautiful mother naked on a table with her thighs wide open afforded me the most delicious thrill imaginable. I spread out the blankets and pillow and awaited her appearance trembling with excitement.

A half hour later she came in naked. Her thick curly crown of raven hair bore an intricate chaplet woven with many kinds of flower, obviously from our garden, but what most caught my eye was the thick bush of pubic hair at the base of her abdomen. Her great dark eyes, her most wonderful feature, were almost startling against the ivory pallor of her face. So slender was she that apart from her breasts with their large nipples her figure was almost boyish.

She was still slightly scandalized by the proceedings and, as I expected, when she laid herself on the table she clenched her legs tightly together, forcing me to caress and kiss around the top of her thighs. Her limbs twitched and quivered as though each kiss were a little electric shock.

With my thumbs in her pubic hair I began to push the flesh upwards and outwards. This was obviously pleasurable for her for she raised her knees, enabling me to open her thighs wide like a book. Her pink labia were long and delicate with darker frilled edges, and after a few kisses they moistened and separated. The clitoris, a small bud-like object located at the top of her labia was no more than an eighth of an inch in size, and peeped out from the shelter of her clitoral hood.

This was the only visible structure for her pleasure over much of her pelvic region, and I knew I had to lubricate my fingers and the clitoral region with oil and then gently rub in slow circles. Barely had I begun than her hands gripped the edges of the table either side of her and she started to moan. I kept up the activity for several minutes, then varied it by sliding my fingers tenderly up and down either side side of the clitorial hood. Moving to her side I saw in the strained expression on her beautiful face and her rapid breathing just how fierce was the effect of...