It was fantastic returning to camp at 7 o’clock in the evening or maybe 8 in summer, everybody gradually coming in from their various work detachments, tired, dirty and hungry, to be greeted by the cry, ‘Mail up!’ We were so excited. It meant so much to us to get post from home and we would rush to collect what there was for us. Letters used to arrive all together so you could have a bunch of half a dozen to put in date order so you could read them in sequence and make sense of the news. You didn’t want to read about of the arrival of a new nephew before you had even heard that your sister was expecting. And you read them over and over again and looked after them, folding them carefully each time and putting them back in your shoebox. Each one was a life saver.
I was very upset when I threw all my letters away soon after setting out on The March in January 1945. I kept two envelopes, one from my mother and one from Lily, that was all. We could only carry essentials such as food and clothing. Lily’s letters were special to me and I wish I still had them now she’s no longer with me.
I always felt sorry for the lads who didn’t have anybody to write to when I collected my bundle and took it back to my room to read in a quiet corner. It was a comfort to see familiar handwriting and to read family news, how everybody was and what new additions there were to the family:
18 July 1943
Dear Winnie and Bert, Pleased to hear the good news and I hope you are both satisfied. (I would be) I expect to hear from you soon. You said you did not want another fireman in the family so if you should find even one too many, I’ll change. Keep smiling and remember everything comes to those who wait. Cheerio. Loving Brother Charlie
20 November 1944
All the kiddies will be getting grown up now and I look forward to seeing them all. Cheerio for now. All the best. Keep smiling Bert. Charlie xxx
It was good hearing about what people had been doing; whether or not half of it was true didn’t matter. I felt better thinking that everything was carrying on as normal back home:
5 April 1942
It’s nice to know you all go to dances and I wish I were able to. (But I cannot dance). Cheerio for now. Your loving Brother Charlie xxxx
21 September 1942
Have you a tandem also or do you ride a scooter. Thank Marjorie for her letter. I hope you all receive letters from me. Loving Brother Charlie xxx
But what was I meant to write? What news could I tell them? ‘Today I shared a bath with Sid and got an extra slice of bread.’ Or ‘Hurt my hand yesterday, breaking up rocks in the quarry.’ I certainly couldn’t have told them ‘Watched a man being beaten to death today’. I didn’t tell them about such things then, nor after the war.
As far as other communications went, we had postcards we could send – not quite ‘Wish you were here’ ones from the seaside. They were camp photographs which had been made into postcards. This was standard practice in POW camps, part of the ongoing German propaganda campaign and went on throughout the war. They were a way of showing everybody at home how well the Germans were treating their prisoners – all those rows of young men, smiling at the camera, trying to say ‘Cheese’.
I don’t think my family received any of the cards but some survived my journey home. The back of one photograph came in handy, as did the inside pages of my New Testament, to make notes about the things I saw and did on The March. I thought that if I didn’t survive maybe somebody would find the card and know what we had gone through. Postcard from Hell, that’s what it was, I’m afraid, when I read it now:
[March 30]
Two more of our men have passed away. We’re badly in need of food, a bath & clothing. Sid collapsed at work and also others. The guards are inhuman.
[31 March]
Yanks billet bombed.
I am glad this one didn’t get home to my mother.
When I look at the photograph now, I think it was remarkable how clean and tidy we all look, considering what we were going through. We must have made quite a bit of effort to get ourselves looking half-way decent. Rows of us standing at ease or sitting cross legged like children posing for a school photograph. Everybody is looking straight at the camera, putting on a good show for the folks back home. The photographs were taken at the back of the house we were living in, some time in 1941, I think. It looks as though we are sitting in somebody’s back garden, not like a prison camp. They couldn’t get us all in one photo so we were split up but my four pals are together with me on this one picture.
There’s me in the back row with what people call my cheeky grin, probably because I am next to Jimmy who has made a joke about something and made me laugh. I am wearing my non-regulation cap that was made for me by my tailor friend. There is Sid, in the middle row, and Laurie, in the front row, with Heb who doesn’t look at all well. We didn’t know that Hebby had a heart condition and he collapsed on The Long March home. He survived and I saw him once after the war but he died in 1960. And there is a chap named Sargent; you could always see the marks on his tunic where his three stripes had been. So he was actually Sergeant Sargent. You can’t forget that, can you?
I remember it was a few days before we were liberated by the Americans, after our four months on the road, one of the guards was walking down the column of men and struck Sergeant Sargent across the face with the butt of his rifle. There was blood everywhere and Sargent’s nose was broken. Later an American soldier saw the injury and asked Sargent what had happened. When he told him, the American asked if he could identify the guard and Sargent said he could. He was taken to a huge compound where the German soldiers were being held and he was able to identify the man who was then taken away and shot, so I believe. We all felt that justice had been done. The guard got what he deserved.
It was a Polish lad, about sixteen, who came and took our pictures. He was from the Home nearby and was ordered to do the job by the Unteroffizier. I think it must have been on a Sunday, our day off. When he had finished taking the photos, he left us and we never saw him again. The last we heard, three or four days’ later, was that he had been arrested and sent to a concentration camp.
The Home he was staying at was a sort of hostel for young Polish workers which had been built in a field not far from us. We watched the foundations being laid as we passed on our way to work each day, and then the brick walls rising over the next few months. What the Germans did every now and then was to go down a street in the early hours of the morning, knocking on all the doors, and if there were families with children, they would take away all the youngsters, mostly aged 14 to 16 or 17 years (old enough to work). They sent them to these homes all over the region where they stayed and were sent out to work, like us, on neighbouring farms. Extra labour was needed all the time to keep up with the demand for food across the country.
The German authorities, who had built the Home near us, were not bothered about comfort so the building had only the most basic accommodation and facilities. There was no running water or electricity laid on so they used oil lamps. The boys had to collect fuel for the stoves and water from the bowsers or water tankers in the village about 5km away. The girls had domestic duties round the house. There were about 40 children looked after by an elderly Pole, at first, who wore a yellow arm band, and then a couple took over and the woman mainly supervised the girls. It was upsetting to think of those children being in a similar position to us. They were forced to work in the house as well as slaving away on the land and separated from their loved ones. We used to see the boys and girls out on the fields, bent over picking crops or carrying huge baskets of beet or potatoes but never near enough to talk to.
One day a group of us was working near the Home. We were weeding and clearing stones and debris on some land; back breaking work, getting it ready for ploughing. The guards were not around and we were able to stop and have a stretch and a ciggie every so often. I was standing looking at the view, acres and acres of emptiness, when I heard the sound of an engine in the distance. That high-pitched whining noise of an approaching moto
rbike. I saw a German policeman, in his funny helmet, come up the road and stop outside the building. He parked the motorbike and then walked up to the front door and knocked. He had to wait a minute or two before the woman in charge answered. He had a longish conversation with her on the step, showing her some papers or something, and then she went back inside.
A few minutes’ later, she returned with a young girl, probably about 15 or 16 years old, holding her by the arm. The policeman grabbed the girl with both hands and marched her along the path, out to where his motorbike was standing. She was only a slight girl, wearing a flimsy floral dress and no coat, even though it was a chilly day. He slung her over the petrol tank at the front like a sack of potatoes, got on his bike and, holding her down with one hand, roared off down the road towards a little wooded area.
About ten minutes or so later, I heard the sound of the engine again and looked up. It was the same bike and policeman returning up the road. It stopped and the policeman got off, picked up the girl from the front and dumped her on the road outside the house. Poor thing, you wouldn’t have recognised her from the state she was in. I swear he was laughing as he roared off again back the way he came.
And what had she done to deserve this brutal punishment? We heard later, that all she had tried to do was alter a Brot-Karte – bread card – she had got from one of the lads. She had scratched out a tick on it which showed that the allowance had already been taken. Hunger can drive you to do terrible things, I know, but that was nothing really, hardly what you call a crime. That policeman was wicked behaving like that – a law unto himself, just for his own sadistic pleasure.
Some Germans, the worst kind, laughed and joked while they carried out these attacks. I think they enjoyed it because it was a way of keeping everybody under their control, reminding them who was in charge. They showed you that they could do anything they liked. There was nothing to do but stand by and watch and hate them all the more. The longer the war went on, I felt that it might never end, that these awful things would go on forever and I might never see home again. There was no escape.
It wasn’t any good dwelling on things like this too much. You would go mad if you did and some men did go crazy, not in our camp, thank heavens. We had to keep our spirits up and everybody tried to support each other if they could. No point in giving in or giving up. There was always somebody worse off than yourself.
When we weren’t working, we enjoyed a smoke together, told jokes, and tried to entertain ourselves, all things which broke up the time and relieved the monotony. There was little opportunity to do anything else. Except, every month or so, there was an extra activity which the Unteroffizier offered us in exchange for cigarettes. However, I wasn’t tempted to take on this particular one. I never did latrine duty.
This was important work, of course, and I am eternally grateful to those chaps who volunteered to do the job – clearing the pit out and transferring the contents to carts which were then taken off and dumped somewhere. Funnily enough, I never thought about where all our waste material went. Maybe it was part of the manure collected locally which we regularly spread on the fields. Maybe the potatoes we stole and brought back to cook and consume were ones grown in our own shit.
Our latrines were at the back of the house and consisted of a three-sided outhouse, about 20ft long, open at the front with a trench running the length. There was a pile of lime and a shovel at the side which you used to cover your evacuations. It didn’t smell too bad as the lime seemed to do the trick of keeping it under control. We only used it during daylight hours as there was no lighting. Civilians came periodically in horse-drawn carts with loads of lime which they left for us. Every four to six weeks, a guard would come and ask for volunteers to clear out the latrines and replace the lime.
My only contribution to the hygiene of my fellow inmates was cutting up old newspapers into squares (when we managed to find any) which we strung together and then hung from the central pole which kept the roof on. Pity we never got an English newspaper, we could have read it first before wiping our backsides with it. Something to read would have been good, anything to stimulate our brains and give us another view of the outside world. Imagine yourself being cut off from the rest of the world with no telephones, newspapers, TV or radio and no transport to take you out somewhere different, to shop or visit a cinema. All we had was ourselves, our own thoughts and the company of other prisoners.
We liked the occasional sing song and tried our best to pick out songs which we all knew, like Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Bless ’em All. Sadly, we were rather out of touch with the current music trends. We didn’t know the latest songs by Vera Lynn or Anne Shelton that everybody was singing back home.
Jack, the musical one, once suggested that we put on a little concert. It was all a bit awkward as we didn’t really know what to do and, like other people who were shy, I wouldn’t have been able to stand up in front of everybody and perform even if I had any talent. We got started on it then dropped it because some bright spark said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to do a play?’ That didn’t work either. I don’t think we had anybody among us who was good enough to write a script or learn the lines.
What I really enjoyed was listening to people talking about themselves and what they did in civvy street. We had some spare rooms and one had a long table and some wooden forms in it, a bit like a schoolroom. We took some chairs from somewhere else so we could seat about twenty of us and we would sit and talk, each person giving a little talk for twenty minutes before moving on to the next one. It was interesting hearing about people’s jobs and families and that’s when I learned that a couple of fellows lived not far from me in Barking. We could spend whole evenings like this and sometimes it was the simplest, everyday things which fellows talked about that really held my attention. It made me yearn for the old days when life was simpler.
Another highlight of camp life was when there was delivery of new uniforms from the Red Cross. This didn’t happen very often and I think the main camp had first pick from the look of what we landed up with. There were never enough clothes to go round so we had to wait our turn. I wore my original uniform for three years, that’s the one I was wearing in the propaganda photographs. I took care of it all that time so that it lasted. I kept it clean, darned holes and reinforced seams. Some men didn’t bother but it gave me something to do and gave me a sense of pride in keeping it going. After all, we were still British soldiers.
I was thrilled, of course, when I got something new. I remember a consignment of clothes arriving and it was my turn with Laurie to sit down to unpack them, sort them all out and check the sizes. They never had a full range of sizes, so it was pot luck getting a uniform which fitted. You weren’t fussy. You thought yourself lucky to get something and most men were walking about in a mismatch of clothes. What did it matter? It wasn’t a fashion parade.
I was a size 7 and ended up with size 16 trousers, much too big and long for me. So I cut the bottoms off, turned them inside out, gathered up the material and sewed them up to make a seam. Our tailor chap was a wizard with offcuts, so he snapped them up for future use, showing us how to make mittens (like little pockets for your hands) also using strips cut off our blankets. They came in handy when we working in very cold, wet weather and they were also easy to dry, unlike your clothes. Pop your mittens under your straw mattress or pillow and the warmth would dry them out.
It’s funny thinking about it now, how excited we got over the simplest everyday thing. A pair of new socks, an extra slice of sausage, a game of football, a letter from home, a dry coat, a boiled sweet, a sunny day, a guard who looked the other way. But, you know, I think life was the same for a lot of people at that time. Nothing was normal. You could take nothing for granted any longer. At home there was rationing and shortages, the fear of bombing and of receiving a letter from The War Office through your letter box.
Fear ruled everybody’s life. The local people were afraid of the authorities and no
t complying with orders, fearing reprisals if they didn’t do as they were told. They saw their farms and land taken over and their children sent away. They didn’t like to be seen speaking to us or showing us any favours. We would love to have got to know some of the people we worked alongside or indeed help them.
Several times we were called to unload the coal wagons at the railway station. This was winter fuel for the villagers and we spent a couple of days shovelling it from the wagons into carts, which then went off to storage places nearby. We got really filthy dirty doing this. Imagine standing by the open side of the wagon as the coal all comes hurtling down as soon as you dig into the pile. Never mind, we knew the locals appreciated what we did, even if they couldn’t say anything to us. A smile was enough.
Now there were always little bits of coal at the bottom of the wagon and some of the elderly people, usually women, from the village would bring baskets and crawl under the trucks to pick up any bits which had fallen through the gaps onto the line. So what we did when we were down to the last bit of the load was to find a decent hole in the floor of the wagon and push nuggets of coal through for the women underneath to pick up. We were not doing any harm to the Germans or costing them anything; we were just helping these old people get a bit of extra fuel for their stoves. And winters there were long and hard, bitterly cold with the snow and ice lasting six months or more.
Many of these elderly folk were struggling to keep going in their own homes. Families had been broken up, sons and grandsons had left, conscripted or taken away forcibly. If a man in our country did not want to go to war he could be a conscientious objector and do other work, such as going down the mines or serving in the medical corps. But in Germany they couldn’t refuse to fight or they and all their family could be sent to a concentration camp.
Survivor of the Long March Page 11
