Dearest Jane... Read online

  By September 1944, Roger derived some satisfaction from his new found domestic skills.

  Well, I’m settling down for the fifth winter in gaol, not with any noticeable degree of pleasure, but with as good a grace as is permitted by my surly and melancholic nature. Many thanks to all kind persons who wrote and assured me ‘Home by Christmas’ (same for the third or even fourth year running). May they not have to do it many times more. I’ve taken on the job of chief of the woodpile again and am looking forward to smashing about 200 tons of gnarled old roots. My policy is to centralise as far as possible – in fact to do all the talking and very little of the work – a typical jack-in-the-office. In the evenings I half cook for the room. I’m beginning to get a sort of touch or flair after weeks of painful experimenting and I’m capable of dishing out really good stuff. There is very, very little that cannot be improvised from a basis of biscuit crumbs and a lump of margarine. At present my specialities are fishcakes, fried currant pudding and I’m coming on at ‘Shapes’ trifle, bubble and squeak and mock macaroni cheese. In the spare time left over I shall knit feverishly.

  Best love to you all,

  Roger

  But the inevitable arrival of winter could always be depended upon to lower the most robust spirits.

  10 November 1944

  A very dreary day with sleet and snow driving across from the west. It’s hard work on the woodpile these days as my clothes never seem to get dry and we can’t afford a fire in the evening yet. A lot of clothing parcels have come in recently, mostly sent off in June, July or August, but so far my luck is out. I’m getting very ragged in the trouser line but I’ve still got Tony Rolt’s Sandhurst knickers which are standing the strain well. Underclothes are truly hideous and I’m continually putting my feet through the wrong hole. However, by knitting, sewing and swopping I get along alright and it’s wonderful how the poor help each other. Cooking is rather dull on half a parcel a week and I try to save on that, as they’ve completely ceased to come through and we’re out on Dec 15th. Altogether this winter is rather bleak but we all remain cheerful and try to get over shortages by ingenuity.

  A main course might still be ‘meat’ at this stage – typically, half a tin of bully beef between six men, mashed up with some low-grade turnips and potatoes, which were prison camp issue by the Germans. This would be followed by bread pudding – old crusts soaked in water and gingered up with a smattering of dried fruit, and baked. A month later, in his Christmas greetings to family and many named friends, Roger is rightly proud of his plum pudding – I’m told it also contained chopped bootlaces for currants . . .

  10 December 1944

  After three months of saving, I hoarded enough to make a pretty big Christmas pudding – breadcrumbs, margarine, raisins, apricots, prunes, sugar, beer, marmalade, egg powder, a tinned apple pudding and biscuit crumbs. I wrapped it in greased lavatory paper, tied it up in Everard’s towel and steamed it madly for 7 hours. It is now hanging from a hook on the wall. The flat sounds nice, but I pity you moving. I know something about moves and they’re hell.

  Roger means the trauma of being moved from one prison to another.

  No sign of any clothes or food parcels, or I fear, those cigars you kindly sent. I had a record week on the woodpile last week and we cut up about 9 tons with three saws and 3 axes in spite of stinking weather. It doesn’t seem like five years since I saw you all, and as far as I’m concerned, absence only makes the heart grow fonder and I don’t mean that in the ironical sense.

  Roger

  The New Year did indeed have a move in store. His weary, resigned and cynical tone shows that my father knew little of the extent of the momentous changes which lay ahead, as the war ground horribly through its closing stages.

  1 January 1945

  Well, here we are at the beginning of another dreary year of prison life; it is increasingly hard to visualise liberty. Prison has ceased to be an episode and has become one’s normal life. One’s pre-war friends are vague memories and one’s friends are those of your fellow convicts that you can still tolerate after living at close quarters with them for four-and-a-half years. Naturally, we get duller and more useless year by year and I think our worst feature is that we are all very great bores indeed, self-centred, critical and altogether dim. One’s existence in the winter is entirely based on food and fuel and it certainly hasn’t been a gala winter for either. Books never arrive, or at any rate, very rarely, and one’s correspondents dwindle away year by year. If anyone writes to me this year and assures me I shall be home for Christmas, I shall regard it as a very bad omen indeed. I hope prison life will become more normal during the coming year and books, clothes and cigarettes will start filtering though again.

  In those final months of the war, the atmosphere at Eichstätt oscillated between hope and elation, fear and despair. As new prisoners were continuously being brought into the camp, they were full of news – often conflicting and confusing information – on military movements and manoeuvres on all sides. Germany was now a country in a state of collapse. There was intense speculation amongst the POWs as to when and by whom they might be liberated and what their fate was likely to be. Roger, in true acidic form, opined that ‘If you ask me, we’ll all be carved up like a bank holiday ham.’ However, his mordant wit was generally welcomed for its cheering effects, as Desmond Parkinson recorded in his diary.

  Wed 24 January 1945: Morty came in for a brew and was in colossal form. He talked most amusingly of his experiences at Sandhurst and as a Subaltern.

  Mon 29 January 1945: In the evening Morty came to visit us and was given stick by one and all.

  Desmond’s account in his diary culminates in a dramatic day in April 1945, a brutal experience which had a most terrifying effect on himself, my father and their close friends. The heading in Desmond’s diary on 14 April 1945 speaks volumes:

  BLACK SATURDAY. The most tragic, terrifying and emotional day of my life as a prisoner.

  My father was beside Desmond on that fateful day. This is a summary of that day’s events, based on Desmond’s diary: the Nazi authorities ordered that POWs must be evacuated from Eichstätt and moved to another camp, Moosberg, where conditions were said to be dire. There was no transport – prisoners were to march the full distance, each with their entire possessions on their back. Leaving early in the morning, our POWs had been tramping on their road for barely an hour when a solitary US plane appeared in the sky. Immediately a great cheer was raised by the men and morale soared. Twenty minutes later, a formation of eight US Thunderbolt bombers appeared overhead. These planes commenced a bombing attack – not on our POWs – but on a convey of German lorries on a parallel road nearby. Alarming though this scenario was, it seemed clear that the pilots were taking pains to avoid the onward column of prisoners. That did not turn out to be the case. As soon as the lorries had been destroyed, the planes swooped over again and, dipping very low, opened a sustained attack of gunfire on the POWs, their allies. No amount of signalling and waving of handkerchiefs succeeded in halting the attack.

  Again and again the planes swept down and strafed us from practically road level. Mercifully they must have used up their bombs on the lorries. By this time, Freddie, John, Morty and I were trying to make ourselves as small and inconspicuous as possible in a little hollow some ten yards off the road. We felt horribly exposed and very frightened. My instincts were of self-preservation, but this soon gave way to complete fatalism, punctuated by prayers and thoughts of my family.

  It was only when someone had the presence of mind amongst the mayhem to unfurl a Union Jack and lay it in the across the road that the bombers ceased their attack and withdrew. By which time, eight comrades had been killed and forty-two wounded.

  At last, we were told that we could make our way back to the camp. We set off carrying our absurdly heavy kit. I have never been so thankful to get back anywhere as I was to reach the comparative sanctuary of our camp at Eichstätt.

  I must admit that this w
hole adventure has shaken me badly, like most other people too. The fact is that after five years of this unreal life, one’s powers of resistance to any shock are practically nil and all the terror and tragedy of the morning has hit me deeply. Luckily we are to spend the night here and march off at dusk tomorrow evening, only moving at night. This will give us all a chance to regain our balance. I thank God that all my own friends are safe and sound . . . It is depressing to think that, before the day of our liberation, the line of battle will have to pass over us and that today’s horrors may only be a foretaste of things to come.

  There would be further darkness before the dawn. Their final camp, Moosberg, was a living hell to be endured before Roger and his surviving comrades would become free men. Their next destination was home – at last.

  Years later, my father would reflect back on his life. On 5 May, the anniversary of VE Day, he wrote to me describing his own situation on the day that Europe was liberated.

  The Gloomings

  5 May [1970s]

  Dearest Jane

  VE Day. I spent it in 1945 on an airfield in Bavaria waiting for a Dakota to take me part of the way home. Having been in robust health for the entire time in prison, I now contracted diarrhoea. The US Dakota pilots were as drunk as an Irish priest on St Patrick’s Day and flew the whole way at just above ground level. Every Frenchman with a gun fired at us. We had been released some days before by General Patton’s Army. Patton was a howling cad but a dashing soldier. He hated the English. We were in Moosburg which really was anus mundi. There were 50,000 half-starved Russians in the camp. When these individuals got at the booze and began rounding up German women between the ages of six and ninety-six, there were some very unpleasant scenes I have done my best to forget. We were all confined to the camp by the Yanks but I took no notice of that and went for a walk with Charlie Rome and Peter Black, my first stroll as a free man since May 1940. It was not very romantic as the Russkis and others crapped everywhere! A lot of the Yanks were unattractive and seemed to regard spitting as normal behaviour. I made friends at merry Moosburg with Peregrine Worsthorne’s brother, a jolly little fellow who taught medieval music at Worcester College, Oxford. We are quite chummy to this day though he is an RC. His stepfather Montagu Norman was a v. bad Governor of the Bank of England.

  Love to all,

  xx D

  Another letter is a reminder that my father was old enough to recall the impact of the First World War on his schooldays. As a younger boy, he had wondered at half the women in London appearing in black mourning dress, notably during the Battle of the Somme. After the waste and loss of life on such a scale, it was unimaginable that similar sacrifice could be demanded just twenty years later. His anger is palpable; his memories of German war criminals fascinating.

  Hypothermia House

  11 November [1980s]

  My Dearest Jane

  Armistice Day. When I was a boy, Armistice Day was taken very seriously. To make the faintest squeak of noise during the two minutes of silence rated a crime only slightly less deserving of dire punishment than murder. At Eton the whole school assembled in School Yard for the Two Minutes Silence and when the big clock finished striking eleven, silence was absolute. A fair number of my contemporaries had lost a father or a brother in the war. Some of the older masters were visibly moved, remembering the many boys of high promise they had taught and who had given their lives. Over 1,300 Etonians were killed in World War I (we then called it ‘The Great War’). My own house had won the football cup in 1914. The photograph in the dining room showed that six out of the eleven members of the team had been killed. The possibility of another European war would at that time (1922) have been considered too improbable for serious consideration. It was not, I think, until 1936 that I fully appreciated that we were doomed. When I think of some really splendid friends who were killed in the last war, I wonder if they would reckon they had been swindled if they could see England as it is today. Incompetent politicians, corrupt trade unions, punks, muggers – charming. The only good result of the last war was getting rid of that dangerous lunatic Hitler. For a short time I looked after some odious war criminals in a house in Kensington Palace Gardens. One, a general, was almost illiterate and simply had no idea of how to spell quite easy German words. He was just a crude thug. Far worse was a former Bavarian priest who gave me a feeling of acute nausea whenever I saw him. He was really cruel in an oily, odious way. Cruel war criminals were seldom Prussian; nearly always Bavarian or Austrian. The nicest man we had in London was Field Marshal von Runstedt, far more agreeable and amusing than many English senior officers, certainly more so than American top-ranking officers. I used to take him in a drink in the evening and we had a good gossip together. No one ever pinned any war crimes on him. A man turned up there, Hauptmann Ebse, who had punished one of his own sentries for failing to shoot me dead when he had the opportunity to do so in 1943. I soon had him scrubbing the cookhouse floor and peeling potatoes with a blunt knife.

  I also had to look after a lot of English officers awaiting trial by court martial for various offences. They were quite a jolly lot and I got up a successful little bridge tournament among them to help them pass the time.

  Best love,

  xx D

  As an avid reader of twentieth-century military history, he was perpetually re-examining the events of the two wars that reshaped our world.

  The Crumblings

  4 August [1970s]

  My Dearest Jane,

  The date, August 4th, always makes my blood run chilly. I can hardly bear to think of the appalling slaughter, all to no purpose. In the first few months of the war the French suffered more casualties than this country did in 4 years. They had been trained to attack come what may, and wearing blue coats and red trousers (the officers in white gloves) they advanced shoulder to shoulder with standards flying and trumpets blaring. The Germans sat tight and mowed them down with little loss to themselves. Gestures, like the dying French officer who called to his men ‘Debout les morts!’ were not much use. By Christmas the officer class had been destroyed. Even now I cannot read the staid official account of the Battle of the Somme without tears coming to my eyes. The British Army that attacked the Germans that day was an army of volunteers, the flower of the nation (the regular Army was wiped out at Ypres in 1914). At the Somme, the infantry, half trained, attacked Germans in deep shelters protected by uncut wire. They lost 55,000 killed on the first day, few of them ever setting eyes on a German. Some divisions were completely obliterated. Most battalions went into action with about 24 officers; few emerged with even half a dozen. That is why the left-wing actors in ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’ were so despicable, the whole attitude being that the officers shirked their duty and left everything to the other ranks. The average lifespan of the 2nd/Lt in the front line was about three weeks. Richard Attenborough’s malice in ‘A Bridge Too Far’ against certain senior officers (dead, conveniently for him) was contemptible. Less serious is that really there has not been much ‘douceur de vivre’ for the middle classes since 1914. World War II destroyed it all together.

  Love,

  xx D

  This chapter is dedicated to my father and his trusted friends and comrades, both those who died and those to whom he remained close for many more years.

  As ever, I give the last word to my father:

  The Olde Nuthouse

  20 March 1982 [on his pink pig paper]

  A good lunch party given by Desmond P. for ex POW chums. All healthy (bar me) and materially successful (except me). Two with dubiously earned knighthoods. One guest had a sexual slip up (male masseur) but has made a million in Thames Valley newsagents’ shops.

  xx D

  4

  First and Worst

  [1960s]

  My Dear Child,

  Thank you for your twittering letter. Parts of it were legible and almost coherent.

  Yours ever,

  D

  [1970s]

 
Dear Little Jane,

  I trust you are in your customary robust health, eating like a starving hippopotamus as usual, and managing to keep out of the more hideous forms of trouble.

  Love,

  xx D

  [1980s]

  Dearest Jane,

  Thank you so much for your letter; the pleasure of receiving it was enhanced by its scarcity value.

  Best love,

  xx D

  The doorbell rang and dressed up in my best, starched summer frock, I rushed to open it. My parents were having a party. As the arriving guest stepped over the threshold, my father loomed into view. ‘This is Jane,’ he said cheerily. ‘My first and worst.’ Tears smarted my eyes, and I turned tail and rushed away.

  The role of the eldest child is a double-sided coin. Enjoying exclusive attention for a while, they will also receive the full focus of their parents’ anxieties in their first effort in that universal experiment – bringing up a child.

  As the eldest, I received the largest quota of letters from my father, a bonus of his determination to launch me into the world to make my own way, as soon as I was able. Unlike Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, my father saw more options for his daughter’s future security than marriage; I don’t think he could foresee any man who might commit himself to my small range of charms. My voice was too loud, my interests too trivial, my nose too large and my dress-sense too curious: I was destined to work. In this aspiration on my behalf, my father was rewarded – intermittently, as consistency of purpose was not a conspicuous virtue in the Mortimer children.

  In my earlier years, between the ages of eleven to twenty-two, my father’s letters – usually funny, deeply understanding and affectionate – were often also sharp with criticism.