by Paul Sussman
Where Colonel Dishby spoke in a sort of prosaic bluster, Major Burrows was laconic to the point of muteness. He rarely spoke, and when he did employed the fewest words possible to convey his meaning, so that talking to him was uncannily similar to conversing with a telegram.
‘Tunnel, Barrack D,’ he would whisper. ‘Start washroom, under sink. Four hundred yards to woods. Dig round clock. Complete four weeks. Begin tonight.’
Major Burrows loved tunnels. There was, for him, something peculiarly escape-like about them, as though the entire experience of breaking free was somehow enhanced by doing it down a long, muddy, underground shaft. I have no idea how many tunnels he initiated in the course of his sojourn at 18B, but it must have been a lot because by the final stages of our captivity, local roads were regularly subsiding into the excavations beneath them, and the overall volume of tunnels in the vicinity heavily outweighed that of soil.
Burrows’ tunnels generally started in one of the barrack huts and headed eastwards towards the forest 400 yards beyond the camp perimeter, the soil in that direction being rather looser and less stony than it was at every other point of the compass. There were, of course, exceptions, such as the tunnel that started in the wash block and headed westwards, or the one that began in the mini-greenhouse on the camp vegetable plot and headed nobody knew quite where. In the main, however, we usually aimed for the forest. We would all pitch in, working in shifts, and using whatever delving implements we could find or make. Tunnels would be shored up with wood stripped from the walls, floors, rafters and beds of our barracks, whilst soil would be disposed of in our mattresses, beneath our huts, on our garden, or, as the years passed and more and more tunnels were built, in old shafts that were no longer of any use.
Major Burrows planned his tunnels to the minutest detail. He would draw graphs and maps and plans and charts. He would measure and calculate and ponder and determine. Nothing was left to chance; every possibility was considered. Which made it all the more surprising that they were, without exception, to prove such unmitigated failures. Some surfaced short of the mark and were spotted by vigilant guards; others made it to the woods but then, once there, couldn’t find anywhere to exit because the trees were too thick. In 1943 we thought we’d cracked it with a tunnel from Barrack B, only to find, after four months of digging, that we’d somehow gone round in a circle and ended up beneath Barrack D.
‘Sure it’s not roots?’ Major Burrows inquired of the captain who’d made this unfortunate discovery.
‘No, sir,’ he replied. ‘It’s my bed.’
If his subterranean endeavours bore little fruit, the major enjoyed more – although only slightly more – success with his schemes above ground. These were invariably colourful, hare-brained affairs, the entertainment value of which easily made up for the fact that they rarely came off. On one occasion, for instance, he tried to escape by clinging to the underside of the commandant’s car – foiled because the car broke down before it reached the front gates – whilst on another he and four others almost got away disguised as members of a visiting Red Cross inspection team, the ruse only failing because one of the real team, who we had tied up and concealed beneath the floorboards of Barrack D, struggled free and raised the alarm. He had people pole-vaulting over the electrified perimeter fence, squirming under it and, in one memorable instance, endeavouring to fly above it in a home-made hot-air balloon, the latter scheme, like the balloon itself, singularly failing to get off the ground. Most spectacular of all, he once donned a wig made of mattress stuffing and, hips swaying provocatively, insinuated himself into a group of prostitutes as they left the compound after a night entertaining the camp guards. He would have made it, too, had one of the guards not taken a fancy to him and tried to kiss him on his way out, whereupon his true identity was discovered and he was consigned to the punishment block for two weeks on quarter-rations.
‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ he had sighed laconically, ‘try, try, try again.’
Like every other prisoner at Offlag 18B, I played my part in these escape attempts. I dug tunnels, I tied up unsuspecting Red Cross workers, I helped stitch the canopy of our hot-air balloon. In but one respect did I differ from the others: I had no desire whatsoever to escape.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t happy at 18B. Neither, however, was I especially unhappy. On balance I would rather have been there than, say, getting blown up in North Africa or shot at on the beaches of Normandy. It might not have been much, but the camp offered a degree of security when everywhere else in the world appeared singularly insecure. For my fellow prisoners escape was a duty. For me the only duty was staying alive.
The problem was, of course, that everyone assumed you did want to escape, and I was therefore required to tread a thin line between, on the one hand, enthusiasm and, on the other, inertia. Like a negative image of Major Burrows, I became an expert at not getting out of the camp whilst all the while giving the impression that I actually wanted nothing more. I thus tunnelled and stitched and rioted with the best of them, yet when it came to my turn to enjoy the fruits of that tunnelling/stitching/ rioting, I became curiously indisposed. When it was my turn to pole-vault over the fence, for instance, I developed an inexplicable paralysis of the right leg, whilst the night before I was due to escape concealed inside a large packing crate I engineered a slight altercation with one of the guards, as a result of which I ended up consigned to the punishment block for a week.
‘Damn hard cheese, old boy,’ consoled Colonel Dishby. ‘Must learn to control the old temper poo-poos.’
Most reprehensible of all, I alerted the Germans to the presence of certain tunnels when it began to look like those tunnels might actually reach their destinations. I enacted my treachery via small notes posted beneath the door of the camp office, suggesting, in pigeon German, that were the authorities to look beneath such and such a bunk in such and such a barrack they might well find something to their interest. There is no real excuse for such shabby behaviour, and I felt wretched doing it, but the desire to stay well and truly put was overwhelming. I could simply not take the risk, minuscule as it was, of one of Major Burrows’ tunnels actually emerging where it was supposed to, for had it done so there would have been no excuse for not using it. Half a century after the event, I apologize unreservedly to those whose hopes I so cruelly dashed. For what it’s worth, I feel far worse about my snitching than I do about murdering all those people.
And so the five years of captivity passed. I played cricket, I did drill, I worked on the camp vegetable garden, and I didn’t escape. The Pill remained secreted in the inner pocket of the calfskin wallet in which I had kept it since the early Thirties, whilst The Photo I pinned to the wall beside my bunk. Aside from that, nothing else happened. Nothing whatsoever.
Except for one thing. I learnt how to play the piano. There was an old, out-of-tune upright in the corner of our barracks, and a captain in the Canadian Marines taught me how to use it, introducing me to keys and scales and chords, and taking me through a variety of simple tunes. I wasn’t very good to start with, and it took me almost six months to learn ‘Jingle Bells’. I gradually improved, however, and by the time we were liberated I’d become remarkably proficient, enlivening our camp concerts with extended, jazzy renditions of such popular favourites as ‘I’ll Remember You, My Darling’, ‘There’ll Always be an England’, ‘Underneath the Arches’ and ‘I Leave My Heart in an English Garden’. At the time it was just a bit of fun, and I never suspected that, a quarter of a century later, I’d be doing it professionally, let alone as part of one of the seminal rock bands of the early Seventies. Which just goes to show how unexpected life can be.
The albino twins arrived at Offlag 18B in July 1944, and things immediately started to become more interesting.
I was playing cricket when they arrived, fielding at gully as the camp gates swung open and a covered truck drove through. It pulled up in front of the camp office and from the back two of the most extraordinary-lo
oking creatures I have ever seen stepped down. Or rather one of the most extraordinary creatures, accompanied by his mirror image.
Clive and Matthew Brain, for such were their names, were identical twins. And identical they were in every sense of the word. They were absolutely indistinguishable; as like one another as it was possible to be without actually being one another. More than once over the ensuing months, indeed, I wondered if perhaps they were actually the same person and their apparent duality was simply a result of my having gone cross-eyed during my years of captivity.
They were precisely the same height and girth, walked in precisely the same manner and spoke in precisely the same voice. They were dressed in precisely the same uniform, that of RAF flight lieutenants, and, as I later discovered in the communal showers, were blessed with interchangeable, and extremely large, private parts. And as if all that wasn’t enough, they were both albinos, with brilliant white hair, white parchment skin and piercing magenta eyes.
‘Like a pair of mythical what-you-ma-call-its,’ opined Colonel Dishby, who was so fascinated by the new arrivals that, for the first time in four years, he gave an incorrect umpiring decision (LBW when the ball was at least two feet outside the off stump).
Fate being what it is – i.e. inescapable – the Brain twins were assigned to my barrack. Not only that, but to the bunk immediately beside mine.
‘I’m putting the what-you-ma-do-das in beside you, Phoenix,’ announced the colonel. ‘They’re a bally odd couple, so keep an eye on ’em, there’s a good man. Think they might be a bit, you know, how’s your father.’
‘Yes, sir.’
And keep an eye on ’em I did. Two eyes indeed. Had I had ten eyes I would have kept all of them on the twins, all of the time, for they were the sort of people you couldn’t help but look at.
It wasn’t just that they were of such strikingly similar appearance, but that they seemed to do and say and think the same things, as though possessed of a single will. They would, for instance, sleep in precisely the same position, turning over at the same time and, to general amusement, each cuddling an identical teddy bear in the crook of his left arm. They would finish each other’s sentences, or both say the same thing at the same time. When the Lancaster Bomber in which they’d been flying – Clive as a navigator, Matthew as a bombadier – had been shot down, they had both, according to one of their colleagues, screamed at precisely the same pitch, and with precisely the same degree of terror. Even the normally unflappable Major Burrows was transfixed by them.
‘Incredible,’ he muttered, staring at the twins. ‘Wonder what like digging tunnels.’
As was to be expected of a couple with so many shared characteristics, the Brain twins – or, as I came to know them, the albino twins – enjoyed a quite unrivalled depth of sibling attachment. They always hugged affectionately before clambering into their respective bunks for the night, laughed uproariously at each other’s not especially amusing jokes, and were often to be seen holding hands, as if they were not merely identical but in fact Siamese twins, inseparably joined at the fingertips. On the football field more than one scoring opportunity was missed because, at the moment when he was about to kick the ball into an open goal, a player might happen to glance up, spot the albino twins arm in arm on the touchline, lose concentration as a result and hammer the ball twenty yards wide of the mark.
‘Damned bad miss,’ Colonel Dishby would cry before spotting the twins himself and running straight into a goalpost.
Most extraordinary of all, and most fascinating, the Brain brothers appeared to possess rudimentary powers of telepathy.
One evening, for example, they were working in one of Major Burrows’s tunnels. Matthew emerged with a large sack of earth and was halfway across the barrack on his way to depositing it on the camp vegetable plot when he stopped dead and uttered a piercing cry.
‘Clive!’ he screamed. ‘He’s in trouble.’
He dropped his sack and rushed back to the tunnel where, it transpired, his brother and two other men had been buried by a roof collapse. There had been no noise, and there was no way he could possibly have known what had occurred a hundred yards away and ten feet underground. And yet know he did. It was uncanny.
‘Gives me the chumbly-rumblies,’ admitted the colonel. ‘Like a pair of bally radars.’
It was shortly after the aforementioned incident that I found myself lying on my bunk talking to the twins, who were sitting side by side on Clive’s bunk a few feet away.
‘Can I ask you a rather personal question?’ I asked.
‘If you like,’ they replied, glancing at one another and smiling.
‘Well, I don’t want to pry or anything, but have you ever had a disagreement?’
‘A disagreement?’
‘Yes. You seem so close in every respect, I was wondering if you’d ever argued, or held opposing views on a given subject? Has there ever been a time when you haven’t liked each other?’
They gasped in surprise and linked hands as though to emphasize the indissolubility of their relationship.
‘Never!’ they cried with one voice. ‘Never.’
Which is when I got the idea.
I didn’t actually set out to kill the albino twins. At no point did it occur to me my actions might result in their deaths. Rather, I just wanted to experiment. See how far I could push them. To ascertain whether, in the light of their seeming inseparability, it might be possible to drive a wedge between the pair.
‘It’s just a bit of fun,’ I assured myself. ‘I’ll get them to argue and then stop. I won’t cause any lasting damage. Just one little argument, that’s all. It’ll help pass the time. Keep my spirits up.’
And indeed it did. From the moment I began plotting against the twins my spirits rocketed. I felt better than I had done in years.
I began my campaign by observing. For two whole months, from the middle of August 1944 to the middle of October, I did nothing but watch the Brains, surreptitiously gathering a wealth of data upon which to base my forthcoming activities.
I learnt, for instance, that each hid his toothbrush beneath his pillow and kept a photo of his family concealed beneath the mattress of his bed. Both, I found out, were highly partial to mint humbugs, hated insects (Clive having a particular aversion to spiders, Matthew to woodlice), collected stamps and received a fortnightly letter from their sister, Kitty. From camp medical records, copies of which I saw courtesy of a bribed guard, I discovered Clive had a chronic allergy to cheese, that broad beans brought Matthew out in a rash and that both suffered from a mild form of eczema, for which they were prescribed a soothing potassium cream. For two months I did nothing but probe and delve and nose and note, prying relentlessly into every aspect of the twins’ lives until I knew them almost as well as they knew each other. Until I knew them almost as well as I knew myself.
And then it was time to begin.
From the outset I knew that patience was the order of the day. The Brains were devoted to each other, and that was not something that could be changed overnight. I needed to plant seeds, sow doubts, nurture antipathy. A poke here, a nudge there; nothing too obvious or dramatic.
To this end I planned my campaign in three stages. Firstly, I would target just one of the twins. To have hit them both at the same time might have been to engender a sense of shared victim-hood which would only serve to throw them closer together. By tormenting one alone I would, hopefully, pry them apart a little, laying the foundations of doubt and uncertainty upon which I could build in Stage Two, when I intended to widen my operations to encompass both together. If things went according to plan, they would, by the end of this second stage, be like parched brushwood, ready to burst into flame at the least spark. That spark would come in Stage Three, which is when the teddy bears would come into play.
With this framework in mind, and with my intelligence gathered, I lay on my bunk one evening and flipped a coin. Heads for Matthew, tails for Clive. It came up tails. Clive it was. I embark
ed on Stage One.
I started with his family photo. One night, whilst everyone was asleep, I slid my hand carefully beneath the mattress of Clive’s bottom bunk and removed the photo from its hiding place. In the intermittent illumination of the camp searchlights I was confronted by the assembled Brain family arranged around a table in a country garden. Had they not pointed themselves out to me on an earlier occasion I would never have guessed which twin was which. As it was, however, I knew that Clive was the one standing behind his mother and, glancing across to make sure the albinos were still safely asleep, duly took a pencil and scored a thick cross through his face before returning the photo to its hiding place beneath the mattress. I then curled up on my own bed and went to sleep.
The next morning all hell broke loose.
‘Matthew!’ cried the distraught owner of the defaced picture. ‘Someone’s ruined my photo!’
I peered surreptitiously from beneath my blanket to see Clive perched on the edge of his bunk, clutching his photo, a look of pained bewilderment on his face. Matthew sat beside him, arm around the shoulder of his trembling sibling.
‘Who would so such a thing?’ whimpered Clive. ‘Who would be so cruel?’
‘There, there,’ consoled Matthew. ‘There, there.’ And then, raising his voice so the whole barrack could hear. ‘It’s probably just someone who’s jealous. Someone who can’t bear the thought of other people being happy. Swine!’
‘But why just my face?’ inquired Clive. ‘Why have they just crossed out my face? Look, they haven’t drawn on yours.’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Matthew, shaking his head. ‘Unless . . .’ And with that he leapt to his feet and pulled his own version of the photo from beneath the mattress of his top bunk.
