What Katie did next

THE knock that they had been expecting – dreading, rather – came when Katie Willkomm was just three years and four months old.

The blood Red Army marched off her mother at gun point, slave labour for the Russian coal mines.

Her maternal grandfather and an aunt were taken away, too, herded into cattle trucks – cattle trucks figure frequently in Katie’s story – for a fearful journey into the innards of the earth. Her father was already a prisoner of war.

“I still remember them on the doorstep,” she says. “I wanted desperately to keep my mother, clung to her, but there was absolutely nothing I could do. They just took her away.

“A lot of people in our village, very many in our country, suffered the same. Very many children were in the same boat.”

It was Romania, 1944, and she wouldn’t see her mother for another 12 years. In many ways, however, the nightmare was just beginning, the terrors of her own slavery – childhood slavery – yet to be endured.

Another time, another place, the book that finally she has written might have been called What Katie Did Next. Instead it’s called Wrong Time, Wrong Place and it’s utterly, heartrendingly compelling. “Someone up there doesn’t like me very much,” she suggests.

“Do you like him?”

“I try talking to him,” says Katie.

“I just think he’s been excused.”

SHE’S now 69, lives with her 44- year-old son in a small, stonesober farmhouse in the unforgettably named hamlet of Booze, in Arkengarthdale, North Yorkshire, a place so rough-hewn and remote that the Royal Mail famously refused to send its vans up there.

Emerge from her dim-dark living room on a fine October afternoon, the sun almost unimaginably aloft, and the view across the autumnal dale is almost as breathtaking as the ascent.

“It’s all very well, but the view doesn’t pay the rent and rent day is next month,” says Katie.

Nor is it much help when daylight is enfolded by 16 hours of darkness, or when it rains 24 hours a day just as their Russian captors had warned them that, in England, it always did.

The road up to Booze is both precipitous and pot-holed, as the Royal Mail discovered, to Fountain Farm harder yet. “Two flakes of snow and we’re cut off,” says Katie. “We can see the Reeth road and the snowploughs down below but here we can be stuck for two weeks.” It is not a comfortable existence.

There’s social isolation, too. “The majority of people have been very nice. Others have been hostile, hostile because I wasn’t English.

“Fifty years I’ve been here and I still don’t feel that I belong. Unfortunately, the feeling is hard to put down.”

A few cards still hang from the mantelpiece, a reminder of her birthday a month earlier. “They cheer me up when I get down at night,” she says.

In her appearance, her poverty and in the stark simplicity of her existence there is an unmistakable something of Hannah Hauxwell about her.

What if she, too, were to become that strangely English amalgam of curiosity and celebrity that so endeared Hannah to the nation? “I am a very shy person, I feel there is no celebrity attached to it,” she says.

“I have told a story that I lived through as it happened, and how I feel about it. Celebrity wouldn’t change anything for me.

“If it ever brought me anything, I would like it to be for my son. He’s had a hard run, too.”

HER family weren’t taken by the soldiers, or by the Russians.

They were taken, she says, by Stalin.

They’d been successful egg producers, enjoyed an affluent lifestyle despite Katie’s father being wounded and captured. Romania had changed sides in 1944, from the Germans to the Russians. The devil they thought they knew.

In 1946, ill and emaciated, her granddad Franz had been returned from Russia to Germany – more cattle wagons – but took another seven months to make his way back to Romania.

In Germany, unknown to either of them, he was in a hospital just ten kilometres from his daughter, Katie’s aunt Gertrude. They never saw one another again.

Franz was Katie’s favourite. “I can’t tell you how excited I was to have him home,” she says. “For a while things seemed almost to be normal, or as normal as they could be behind the Iron Curtain.

“The war finished in 1945, but not behind the Iron Curtain. There were things that, even now, people hardly dare realise.”

Still she had her grandparents and other family members, still the school where she started at seven – though the nuns would beat them terribly – still the Catholic church where she’d enjoy a role in the little pageants.

Then the Communists moved in, took over, declared state ownership, restricted both movement and religious freedom, vilified, abused, tortured and killed.

Word arrived that, in 1948, her mother – it’s instructive that her parents’ names are never mentioned – had been reunited with Katie’s father in Yorkshire, with no apparent attempt to return to her daughter in Romania. Katie remains rueful – resentful even.

“Personally, I feel that I was robbed of my mother in the years that form a bond and that gap can never be closed,” she writes.

“People in our village did not look on someone who went to the West as trying to better themselves and have a good life, but as a let-down to their families. How could they do such a thing to parents and other family?

“If there were troubles, you faced them head on and together.”

Perhaps it was fortunate that for little Katie Willkomm, the troubles that lay ahead couldn’t even be imagined.

ANOTHER knock, no more unexpected, came in 1951. More soldiers, more guns, more cattle trucks.

Katie, her grandparents and an aunt were taken to a labour camp in, as it transpired, a distant part of Romania.

It might have been worse, she wryly observes, it might have been Siberia.

She was nine. In truth it couldn’t have been much worse had they been sent on the first train to Hades.

The labour camp, the brutally hard labour camp, was just barren fields.

No shelter whatever. Since it was summer they lived in holes by the roadside – “like moles” says Katie – told to build huts with mud bricks before the onslaught of the eastern European winter.

They’d write to distant family but never hear back. It was agonising, she recalls.

“I remember the day we moved into the tiny hut. It was October 11, a cousin’s birthday, but really it was no more than a hovel.”

Then the howling blizzards came, three days at a time, great mountains of snow. “We had nothing to burn, very little to eat, just a little paraffin in a stove, no shoes. That was it.

“I suppose you got accustomed to it, but you didn’t talk to anyone about it. Stalin suppressed everything. If one of the family tried to run away, the others would be shot.”

All the time, though, the children reminded themselves of heroic names like Churchill, Adenauer and Eisenhower, told themselves that one day the West would come, wondered why still they did nothing.

“I always thought we would get free one day, but I think a lot of the grown-ups had given up hope. They’d seen more than we had. We had to accept what was happening. Just as long as we stayed alive.”

In 1952 she first heard that, through the Red Cross and the British Embassy, her parents, by then tenants of a small farm near York, were trying to take her to England.

She was taken off, at gunpoint, for meetings with the militia and with the secret police.

What were her parents doing there? Would she sign a statement agreeing not to go? Katie refused.

Then, in a dark cell with a bucket in the corner, came the greatest horror of all.

“It was so terrible that I cannot write about it in detail. I cannot bring myself to describe how I was treated by this man,” she writes. “It still hurts to this day to think of it. I was just a child, 11 years old. I had endured so much, and now this.”

STALIN died in 1953, after which things improved. It seemed more like a proper village, she says. It wasn’t until 1956, however, that finally they were allowed to return home. Several months later – apprehensive, even reluctant – she flew to London to be reunited with her father.

“It was a strange encounter,” she recalls. “I didn’t know my parents, under Stalin it was a big crime to have someone in the West at all. I respected my parents but I think it was difficult for all three of us.

“I wasn’t a normal teenager. They were getting someone they hardly knew.” She seemed, she says, like an interloper.

Taken past Buckingham Palace, told it was where the Royal family lived, she wondered why they weren’t in prison. In the hotel she saw her first television, on Kings Cross station encountered her first black man.

“I wanted to work with children, but they wanted me to work with animals.

You didn’t have to speak English to work with animals.”

Mostly, she learned English from television – “I copied Sylvia Peters, the announcer, and Lady Isobel Barnett on What’s My Line” – eagerly read newspaper reports of Princess Margaret’s world tour, ordered after her enforced estrangement from Peter Townsend.

Her English, though impeccable, retains an accent that’s a cross between BBC and Bucharest. “To me the Royal family was like a fairy tale,”

she says.

Still she worked unpaid with the animals until, in 1960, her parents took the tenancy of the semi-derelict hilltop farm at Booze, empty for three years, spartan even for those oftforbidding parts.

“The birds flew in an out of the ceiling and in and out of the roof,”

Katie remembers. “We built it up. It’s nothing grand today, but it’s a home of sorts.

“I’ve worked here all my life and what have I got to show for it? I still never got to work with children.”

She’s clerk to Arkengarthdale parish council, does ironing at the acclaimed CB Hotel on the main road way below, now leaves the animal work on the 57-acre farm to her son.

She never married.

So why the book? Why now? “I am near my three-score years and ten. It has taken me two years to write, but it has been with me for a long time.

“I wanted to do it before it is too late, before no one can write about those days at all and because people are still inclined to be hostile to me.

I don’t know how much longer we will be here, but however much time I have left, I hope I can spend it usefully.

“I try very hard to understand what happened to me, and why it did, and why evil men can cause so much mass destruction, such tragedies. At the end of the day, what good has it ever done?”

The book came out in July but has hardly been publicised. The story was picked up perchance on an unconnected visit to Reeth.

Costs covered, it may help pay the rent at that remote farm, but it warrants something altogether better than that. Right place, it should be read, and remembered, worldwide.

■ Wrong Time Wrong Place, published by Caroline Brannigan, Richmond, available from the CB Hotel, Reeth Post Office, Zeta’s Cafe, Barnard Castle and from Katie (plus £2.95 p&p) at Fountain Farm, Booze, Richmond, North Yorkshire, DL11 6EY.

caroline.brannigan.com