During the week John hardly saw his father, for he owned a small engineering works in Battersea which turned out the metal struts for shelving systems. The middle thirties was a bad time for small factory owners: markets were getting harder to penetrate, cheap goods were flooding in from Japan. This, Spencer was later to think, had been an added factor to cause his father to join the British Union of Fascists and adopt the black shirt as his uniform. In their sitting-room had hung portraits of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and opposite them, hanging above the mantelpiece, was a pokerwork slogan: ‘If you love your country you are a National. If you love her people you are a Socialist. Be a National Socialist.’ Underneath that was the name William Joyce. His father had known Joyce, who was later to leave Britain for Germany and become the propaganda broadcaster Lord Haw-Haw, and later still to be hanged by the British after the war for treason. He had come down to the house on one of his fund raising drives, for Spencer’s father was the local treasurer. Spencer remembered vaguely a short square figure dressed in a muffler and trench coat and carrying a heavy blackthorn stick. One side of his mouth was twisted by a scar. But he had been friendly and had shaken Spencer’s hand and talked to him about football.
The second time he had seen Joyce was at a meeting to which his father had taken him. It was on a Saturday afternoon and he could not have been more than seven or eight but he remembered the events of that day clearly. They had gone up to London in a charabanc hired by the South-East London Branch of the British Union of Fascists. The meeting was being held in the Albert Hall and the streets around it were already seething with demonstrators when they arrived. He remembered the rows of police in their dark blue uniforms, some holding truncheons, some dogs on leashes, some on horseback. In Kensington Gore and around the Albert Memorial groups were waving banners and surging up and down the pavements shouting ‘Red Front! Red Front! Red Front! United Front! Down with the Fascists!’ and then singing the Internationale.
The charabanc had stopped at the back of the hall and some of the opposition groups had pelted it with tomatoes and eggs and had tried to smash the windows with the poles of their banners.
‘Hold my hand,’ Wilfred Spencer had said to his son, ‘and don’t let go of it, understand?’
John was frightened by the noise and the shouting and the antagonism and they had to sit in the charabanc for fifteen or twenty minutes until the police encircled it and made two lines to the rear door of the hall through which they could walk in safety.
Stewards checked their tickets and as they went into the hall he saw a group of young women being hustled out of the far door. ‘Zionists,’ his father had said. He recalled the heat in the hall and the crush. His father was later to tell him that the principal speakers had been Mosley and Joyce but he could not remember them or what they had said.
After it was all over a policeman took him back to the charabanc while his father paraded with the other Blackshirts up and down Kensington Gore defying the opposition groups. Scuffles broke out, stones were thrown and when his father came back to the charabanc Spencer noticed that he had a cut on his right cheek which was bleeding. He looked stimulated, his eyes shone, and he seemed very pleased.
‘One day we’ll rule the country,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll make them pay.’
But when war broke out in 1939 hundreds of Blackshirts, many of whom had joined the organization just to wear the uniform or to brawl in the street or march or be gripped by the mass hysteria of the meetings, joined the army instead and put on other uniforms and went on other marches and fought a different opposition. Not Wilfred Spencer. He had really believed in Mosley and National Socialism and had seen Hitler and Mussolini as the great white hopes.
Soon after war was declared he brought himself a dachshund on the grounds that he wished to advertise where his sympathies lay. During World War I dachshunds had been stoned in British streets. But no one in Bromley paid much attention to the short fierce-looking man and the strangely-shaped dog as they went for their daily constitutionals. He sold his Morris car and bought a second-hand DKW, the German people’s car. He kept the portraits of Hitler and Mussolini on the walls of the sitting-room, and in the evenings, Spencer recalled, his father would always tune-in, as thousands of others did, to Lord Haw-Haw’s propaganda broadcasts from Berlin. Whereas most listeners did so to laugh and jeer, Wilfred Spencer sat crouched by the radio, drinking in every word. One of John’s most vivid memories of the early part of the war was his mother tip-toeing about the sitting-room while his father twiddled with the knobs of the old HMV radio until he picked up the voice saying, ‘Chairmany calling. Chairmany calling.’
Wilfred Spencer was twice investigated by the Special Branch. Once they came to the house at seven o’clock in the morning and went through his papers and the books on the bookshelves but the most damning evidence they could discover was a translation of Mein Kampf and there were thousands of those in the country.
Spencer’s father paraded his feelings so remorselessly that people eventually took notice. Little things began to happen. Their milkman, who had lost an eye at Dunkirk, finally refused to deliver their milk and when Mrs Spencer telephoned the dairy she was told briefly to find some other supplier. Then the local policeman on the beat, a man who had fought in World War I, took to standing outside their house for five and ten minutes at a time. Often he would stare in at the bow-windows. This attracted attention and once or twice after the pubs closed in the evenings a group of soldiers home on leave had pitched stones through the glass. Wilfred Spencer had gone down to the police station on both occasions but nothing had been done.
Spencer himself was at the local grammar school and it was here that he felt most severely the results of his father’s attitude. They gave him the nickname Adolf and bullied him continuously. There were two places he feared most. One was the lavatory block where a group of boys older than he had held his head in the lavatory pan while one had pulled the chain. The other was an area of waste ground where a bomb had fallen in 1941 and which was now, two years later, still a mass of rubble and weeds. It was on his way home from school and twice he had been pulled behind one of the broken walls of what had been a large house, and beaten up. After that he went an extra half mile to avoid the place.
In 1944 when he was sixteen, Spencer had turned into a good-looking youth, almost girlish in complexion. And a new hazard arose. He found himself frequently being solicited by soldiers and sailors.
The fights at school were continuing and Spencer was consistently losing them. He had had rheumatic fever when he was fifteen and had still not recovered his strength. Things came to a head early in 1944. One evening his father was listening to the radio in the sitting-room, his mother was in the kitchen, and Spencer was upstairs in his bedroom reading Sabatini instead of doing his homework, when he heard shouting in the road outside. They lived in a detached house built in the late twenties; part of a street of houses of exactly the same design. His room was at the front and he looked from the window and saw three or four shadowy figures. There were no lights on because of the black-out and he could not make out who they were. Then there was a crash from downstairs. He heard his father swear. He ran downstairs and saw that a brick had been thrown through the sitting-room window. It had smashed the glass and brought down part of the black-out blind.
Just at that moment, through the hole formed by the brick, someone threw a brown paper parcel filled with human faeces. It hit the wall of the room and spattered over the sofa. Then the voice of the local air-raid warden shouted, ‘Put out that bloody light!’ and there was a noise of running feet as the gang fled up the street. The following day Spencer tried to join the army.
He did not go to the local recruiting station in case he was recognized but instead he left school at lunchtime, changed his blazer for a tweed jacket and caught a bus to Lewisham. The recruiting sergeant was sitting behind a desk covered in forms. When Spencer told him he wanted to join the infantry the sergeant looked up a
nd said, ‘How old are you son?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘And you want to fight the Germans, do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does your Mum know you’ve come?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your Dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you on the telephone at home?’
‘Y — No.’
The sergeant was a grey-haired, fatherly-looking man who had been playing noughts and crosses with himself on one of the forms while he questioned Spencer. Now he put down the pencil and said, ‘Listen, son, I’ve seen hundreds come in here, some of them fifty years old and some of them your age. If you’d come in just after Dunkirk we might have taken you but we don’t need you just now. We can wait until you’ve grown up a bit. So you hop it back home and no one’ll know the difference.’ But he did not go home. He used what little money he had to go on into London as far as the East India docks where he was taken on as mess boy in a freighter that sailed two days later for Liverpool. No one gave a damn about his age or whether his Mum had given him permission.
Spencer had never formulated any idea of what war was really like. He had read several novels about World War I and had seen the soldiers and sailors in the streets of South-East London with their girlfriends clinging to their arms. Like many of his generation he had identified with the uniform and what it brought, go on into London as far as the East India docks where he was Reality was different. In the first place he was not fighting the Germans, in the second he had no uniform and in the third no formal or even discernible place in the scheme of things. He was the lowest form of life aboard and every unpleasant job from cleaning the lavatories to washing the saucepans in lukewarm greasy water, fell to him. On top of that he was seasick.
They joined a convoy assembling in Liverpool and sailed a week later for Russia. During that time the only thing he could recall doing was writing a letter to his mother telling her that he was at sea and that she was not to worry.
The SS Coral Strand had been built in the twenties for the jute trade and now, packed with spare parts for aircraft and tanks, she was like a derelict warehouse that had been pushed into the water. Rust streaked her deck housing and her engines were so worn and tired that she could barely manage eight knots. She was the slowest vessel in the convoy. Two hundred miles north-west of the Faroes she broke down completely. Spencer never knew what the trouble was, something to do with a bearing he was told, but for almost a day the ship was hove-to as her engineers tried to repair the damage. A destroyer was detached from the convoy escort to look after them. After nearly twenty-four hours they were still floundering in the heavy seas and the destroyer was needed on her station. They watched her go with despair. Six hours later they were torpedoed.
Up to that moment Spencer had been on the periphery of the war. He had got over his seasickness, but it had been replaced by constant exhaustion and any spare time he had he had crawled into his damp bunk and slept like the dead. Now he moved into the centre of the war where ships were blown out of the water and men were killed and lungs filled up with oil. Half an hour after the SS Coral Strand went down by the stem, he was picked up by a U-boat. He had swallowed a mixture of sea water and oil and for the next forty-eight hours he was in a semi-coma brought on by continuous vomiting. The medical orderly told the captain that he would never survive. But he did survive: the spasms grew fewer, the periods of quiescence longer and on the third day he began to get better. It was then he was told by the orderly, in a mixture of broken English and German, that he was his ship’s only survivor.
A few days later he was transferred to the German oiler Heide where he was kept under hatches for nearly two months. He was the only prisoner aboard and the captain treated him with exaggerated caution in what amounted to solitary confinement. He took his meals alone, spent most of the day alone and was given half an hour’s exercise on deck each afternoon.
The only contact he had with other human beings was the mess-hand who brought him his food. He was a young North German boy not much older than Spencer himself. At the beginning he was reserved and carried out his duties punctiliously, but after a week or so some of his reserve broke down. He brought Spencer a jig-saw puzzle and later Buchan’s Four Adventures of Richard Hannay, an omnibus volume that had been left aboard by someone in the days of peace. The German could speak no English and Spencer no German but by pointing to dishes and cutlery and food, he quickly learned the German words applicable to meal times and the mess-boy learned what they were called in English. They began to teach each other their languages, and by the time the Heide berthed in Bremer-haven in the late spring of 1944 Spencer had a reasonable grounding in German.
The camp to which he was sent was situated a few miles outside Bremerhaven on flat, sandy soil surrounded by dark pine woods. It was a stark, functional-looking place. The compound was about two hundred and fifty yards square inside a double fence ten feet high. The space between the fences had been filled with coils of rusty barbed wire. About thirty feet inside the main fence ran the warning wire and inside this were the living quarters. They comprised twelve bare wooden huts in three rows. Beyond them was an area of hard-packed soil used for games and the twice-daily head count that was known to British and German alike as appell. Just outside the warning-wire was the vorlager containing the sick quarters, the punishment cells known to everyone as the ‘cooler’ and the feomman-dantur, the administrative offices. Every hundred yards along the double fence was a sentry box and more sentries patrolled the fence on foot. As an additional precaution there were several hundfuehrers who patrolled with specially trained, savage-looking Alsatian dogs. The huts were divided into rooms about twenty feet square, each to be bedroom, dining-room and living-room for eight people. Furniture was sparse; double-decker bunks, a table, stools, lockers and a wood stove on a tiled base which stood in the comer. Each hut had a washroom, lavatory and a kitchen with a coal stove which had two burners and a small oven. Most of the cooking was done on the small stove though there was a cookhouse where they could get boiling water and sometimes cabbage soup. Spencer was sent to Hut Seven.
It took him some time to get his bearings in the camp. He never knew exactly how many men there were, somewhere between five and eight hundred probably. There were a dozen different nationalities: English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Indian, Goanese, Australian, Canadian; there were Lascars and even a Krooman from West Africa; they came from every part of the world where British Empire merchantmen recruited their crews.
At first he was pleased to be out of the solitary cell he had inhabited in the Heide, for in the camp, by comparison, discipline was lax, and provided he was on appell morning and afternoon and did not hang about the fences, he could spend his time very much as he liked. But it had its dangers, especially for a boy like Spencer. Most of the prisoners were stokers, deckhands and ordinary seamen; it was not an ideal place for a sixteen-year-old. Nor was he lucky with his fellow prisoners.
He was put in with some of the survivors of a Scottish freighter torpedoed nearly six months earlier. Her home port had been Leith and most of the men came from Edinburgh. They were a tough, clannish bunch who spoke a language of their own, hardly comprehensible to Spencer. They lived in a world of memory bounded by the pubs and whores of Rose Street on a Saturday night and the football fortunes of Hibs and Hearts. It was the wrong place for an Englishman to be and they didn’t hide their prejudices. Most of the time they treated him with indifference. He was fitted into the roster of cooking and washing-up but apart from that he was ignored. He was not included in their discussions or their endless games of cards, nor did he share their Red Cross food parcels. He was pleased to be excluded, he found them physically dirty and was repelled by their eating habits. He could ignore them too, all except Campbell.
Campbell was a stoker about thirty years old, a big, bony man with broad calloused hands and a face covered by the healed scars of acne. From the beginning Spencer had been aware of Cam
pbell. He was older than the other Scots and often did not join them at cards or reminiscing but would lie on his bunk reading ‘Superman’ and ‘Green Lantern’ comics, his lips forming the words as his eyes moved slowly across the page. And sometimes Spencer would look up from his own book and see Campbell’s eyes on him.
One afternoon the others had gone out to play football against another hut and Spencer had fallen asleep in his upper bunk. He woke to feel a hand on his leg. His eyes opened and he looked directly into Campbell’s face on a level with his own.
What do you want?’ he said jerking his leg away.
‘I want tae ask a wee favour.’
‘What is it?’ Spencer got down from the bunk and kept the table between them.
‘I want you tae do something for me.’
What?’
‘I’d no’ ask if it wasnae important. But you’re tae promise tae say nothing.’
‘That depends.’
‘Promise!’
At that moment Campbell looked imbalanced and Spencer began to move towards the door.
‘Promise!’
‘All right, I promise. What is it?’
‘I want you tae write a letter for me.’
It turned out that Campbell was illiterate and had been too shy to ask any of his fellow-Scots. Greatly relieved, Spencer wrote a letter on his behalf to his mother in Peebles. It was the first of several and it earned him Campbell’s gratitude. He was not sure whether this was better than his indifference, for now when he found Campbell’s eyes upon him, the big man would smile and he would be forced to return it.
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