GAME CHANGER
courtheir 7, the r said rinks. er we s and lders ecalls Kim, emotion wobbling his voice. “Both sets of parents had tears rolling down their cheeks.”
That spring, the family began taking Heike with them to the seaside, even though it was not officially allowed. “She had to hide in the well of the car in case we bumped into the military police,” says Kim.
Heike told him “to be driving with the Brooks to the seaside and be accepted as equal” was a treasured memory. To this day he has no idea what the Ladiges’ role in the war had been, although he does not believe they were members of the Nazi party.
“We didn’t have deep conversations, maybe the parents did,” he says. “My gut feeling is they’d have parked it. There was a family down the road who we had a much cooler relationship with, we knew they had been in the party.” Eventually, Kim began returning to Britain for boarding school and, aged 13, in 1951, the family left for good.
He and Heike wrote but 15 years passed before they saw each other again.
By then they both had married and each had four children of their own.
For his research, Rhidian returned to Hamburg with Kim and they all met up.
“I was often asked if they resented us,” says Kim. “When I asked, they were lovely and effusive about how kind my father had been. It was very clear they admired him, and were very fond of us.”
He can’t help but refer to the political climate of today. “It breaks my heart my father’s vision and steps to rebuild a lasting peace in Europe are being put in jeopardy,” he says.
■ The Aftermath is out on Friday.
My father felt that his job was rebuilding, not revenge ...eyebrows were raised