Summer 1978
At last, after weeks of worry, we got news that George was alive.
He had been taken prisoner on the Ypres Canal at the end of May 1940, and was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. Stalag VIIIB it was called, in a place called Lamsdorf. It’s now in Poland, and called something else.
It was part of a big camp complex around another place, one you’ve probably heard of. It’s called Auschwitz.
Terrible things happened there, to the Jewish people of occupied Europe and many others. The Nazis committed acts of unimaginable cruelty and evil against helpless civilians.
The prisoners in the Britenlager – the British camp – were treated well enough, though. At least, until the War was ending. I’ll tell you about that another time.
George was able to write to us, too.
We received a preprinted postcard saying he was alive, uninjured and being treated well. Of course, we didn’t know how much of this to believe, at first. As time went on, we got a clearer picture.
We could send parcels and letters through the Red Cross, you see, and George was able to write back regularly.
All of this made it necessary for Percy and Charlie to get back in touch with each other. After all, Charlie was the dear boy’s mother, and Percy his father. So they just had to swallow their pride, bury their differences, and get along as best they could.
Percy would go to see her and Daphne from time to time, and we tried to coordinate what the two households sent George, as far as we could.
She never came to our flat on Chancery Lane, and I never met her, though we spoke on the telephone when we had to. We were both very polite.
George particularly asked me for reading material.
I tried to send him at least one book a month, choosing ones I thought would be to his taste. Older novels and poetry were safest – nothing the Germans could object to as propaganda. Dickens and Wordsworth and so on. Magazines were likely to be confiscated, we thought.
We knew that the Red Cross was sending all the POWs regular parcels of basic necessities: milk, butter, jam, biscuits, bully beef and so on. Even chocolate. So we always tried to send luxury foods or things that would help to break up the monotony of camp life.
It wasn’t like peacetime, though. Many things were rationed in Britain now – or just weren’t available. Things you might not think of, like writing paper. So what we could send was limited by that.
He would make a point of thanking us for the things we did send, listing them so we’d know nothing had been stolen or lost. Otherwise his letters were cheerful, often funny, and included little pencil sketches of his pals and life around camp. He tried to give us a positive view of his incarceration, but I think that really it was quite bleak, and often terribly boring.
He was there for five years, Pauly. Five years!
So, all that was going on, and occupying our minds. But meanwhile, the War was having an impact on our lives at home, too.
At the beginning of July 1940, the Luftwaffe started mass air raids on our shipping and ports. Then they turned their attention to RAF Fighter Command. They hoped to destroy our Spitfires and Hurricanes on the ground, leaving the country helpless to defend itself against Göring’s bombers.
They’d overrun France and occupied the Channel ports by this time, you see, and were getting ready to invade Britain.
Well, that didn’t work, as you know.
At the end of the Battle of Britain, we had more Spitfires and Hurricanes than at the start, our friend Robert Lennox told us later. He was something high up in a government ministry now, and in the know.
When our pilots got shot down, they’d be checked over, patched up, and back in the air in a new fighter within days – sometimes even the same day. On the other hand, when German pilots got shot down, their War was over. So they couldn’t sustain the casualties, the loss of crews and aircraft. We could.
When Göring’s strategy to destroy the RAF had failed, it was clear what was going to happen next. London was going to feel the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s fury. And so the Blitz began.
It was a terrible mistake, though, on the Nazis’ part. A waste of men, machines and bombs.
You see, if Hitler and Göring imagined they could break Londoners’ morale by blowing up our homes, destroying our beloved city, they were very much mistaken. We weren’t broken at all by the bombing – we were bloody furious.
Excuse my language, Pauly.
Percy volunteered as an air raid warden. His job was to make sure that every flat and office in our block maintained the blackout. Even one brightly lit window during a bombing raid could shine out like a beacon in the dark streets, and let the German navigators know they were over London. That would unleash a stream of bombs.
Once they’d found the target they were looking for, the Germans would drop incendiary bombs first. Thousands of little firebombs, each the weight of a bag of sugar.
Once the target was burning nicely, for all to see, along would come the next wave of bombers with their high explosives.
Even if a building wasn’t blown to Kingdom Come by high explosives, the incendiaries would eventually burn through the roof and destroy the rooms below.
So they had to be put out. One way to do that was to shovel them into a bucket, then shovel sand on top of them. Another was to spray them with water from a stirrup pump. That made the fire burn more fiercely, but quickly burn itself out.
Both methods were horribly dangerous. All the while, the blessed thing was spitting out gobs of molten metal. If you got any on your skin, it would burn you to the bone. If you got it in your eye, you would be blinded. You had to do it exactly the right way.
I know, because I was trained how to do it.
Much good that it did us, in the end.
Coming up:
This Friday in Tales from the Wood: Pauly goes to Germany. (Paid subscriptions.)
Next Tuesday in Lizzy May: As the Blitz intensifies, Percy and Lizzy May contribute to the battle to protect their city.
I like George's taste in reading material (old novels). I didn't know about the little firebombs which set the stage for heavy raids.