Earning a Living!
At Ipswich’s Northgate School in the 1930s, a particularly dreaded part of the General Schools Certificate Examination that we all took in the fifth form was ‘The French Oral’. An outside examiner would descend on the school to interview each one of us individually…in French!
It was the same examiner every year. He came from Bristol and was referred to by Dr Kerby, our French Master, as ‘the Bristol Doctor’, in much the same tones as those in which one might speak of ‘the Boston Strangler’.
We were carefully coached in the probable course of the interview. He would hand us a picture postcard that we would be asked to describe. I remember that the central feature of mine was a clock tower, and the French word for clock had vanished from my memory! He would ask us a number of questions, one of which was likely to be (I won’t attempt it in French): ‘What do you expect to do when you leave school? The recommended answer, in French of course, was, ‘I am not sure but I expect that I shall become a clerk’.
What a prospect! It wasn’t one that appealed to me, but in the late 1930s few school-leavers were able to ‘choose a career’. Most just looked for a job.
I wanted to be a writer. I had been awarded the top grade in ‘English, language and literature’ in the General Schools Certificate Examination and, praising my essays, my English master had forecast a career in journalism for me. However, shortly before the end of my last term a visiting ‘careers expert’ had warned against just such forecasts and just such ambitions. ‘You’d have very little chance’, he said. ‘You’d be competing with university graduates – and if you went up to London, you certainly wouldn’t earn enough as a trainee to live on’.
Discouraged, I didn’t even enquire if there were any vacancies for trainees with the East Anglian DailyTimes. Probably there weren’t though. Most of Ipswich’s major employers; Ipswich Borough Council, East Suffolk County Council, Churchmans, Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, Ransomes and Rapier, Cranfields Ltd., W.H. Paul Ltd. notified Northgate’s Headmaster when they had vacancies at the end of the school year.
It was in response to just such a notification that, towards the end of July 1937, I presented myself for interview for the post of Junior Clerk at the offices of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department, then in Elm Street, behind the Town Hall. It was a terrifying experience. First I was grilled by Mr Herbert Walton, the Chief Clerk, and then passed on to Dr. A.M. Pringle, Medical Officer of Heal
It was with mixed feelings that I learned that it wasn’t a clerical career that was being offered. If appointed I would be expected to attend Evening Classes in Building Construction and Drawing, Shorthand and Typing while working as a Junior Clerk in the general office, during my first two years in the Department. Then I would be transferred to the Sanitary Inspectors’ Office to receive practical training as a Sanitary Inspector while travelling up to London twice a week to attend an approved course of theoretical training.
Train fairs, course fees and books would cost me about £100 (a vast sum in those days) that the Council would be prepared to loan me, and I would be expected to take and pass the Sanitary Inspectors’ national qualifying examination at the end of the course. If I failed, I was warned, there wouldn’t be a job for me in the Public Health Department.
The starting salary would be seventeen shillings and sixpence (88p) a week but a qualified Sanitary Inspector could expect to earn as much as £350 or even £500 a year. That, in 1937, seemed wealth beyond the dreams of avarice!
I said that I was still keen on the job. It seemed to promise more interest than spending my life sitting in an office, totting up figures and shuffling papers. I might have been even keener had I known that the distinctly unappealing title of Sanitary Inspector would one day be changed to that of Public Health Inspector and ultimately (but after my retirement!) to Environmental Health Officer.
There were, so they said, other school-leavers to interview. A week later, when I had all but abandoned hope, I received a letter from the Medical Officer of Health offering me the post of Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector and asking me to report for work immediately.
Thus I entered the local government service at a time when it was at the very zenith of its power and prestige, as for the past three decades it has been at its nadir. Ipswich was a County Borough, in third millennium new-speak a ‘Unitary Authority’, responsible for all local government services, a vastly wider range of activities than any authority undertakes today.
The town had its own Police, Fire, Education and Highway services.; its own parks, recreation grounds and swimming pools; its own museums, public libraries and its own council housing estates. The council was also responsible for social security and for the Public Assistance Institution or Workhouse. The council supplied gas, electricity and water, provided and ran its own public transport service and was responsible for refuse collection and disposal, street cleansing, sewerage and sewage treatment.
In the field of Public Health, where my foot was on the very lowest rung of the ladder, the Council had comprehensive responsibilities. In the Public Health Department, in addition to Dr. Pringle at the head, there were three qualified medical officers running their own clinics and specialist services; a School Medical Officer (in those days all school children had regular medical inspections); a Maternity and Child Welfare Officer and a Tuberculosis Officer. Professional support staff included School Dental Officers, Sanitary Inspectors, Health Visitors, School Nurses, District Nurses and midwives together, of course, with clerical and manual employees.
The Health Department was responsible for the Borough Maternity Home in Wingfield Street, the Isolation Hospital and Tuberculosis Sanatorium, both in Foxhall Road and the Borough General Hospital (now greatly expanded as Ipswich Hospital), off Woodbridge Road.
My duties were, needless to say, extremely menial. As office junior I had to see that the inkwells (red and black) were clean and full of ink (this was long before ballpoint pens had been thought of!) and that those more important than me, which was just about everybody, had clean blotting paper. I had to answer the phone and, using an old-fashioned manual switchboard, put calls through to other offices in the building. I had to deal with personal callers at the general office counter. I had to stamp, record and post the office mail, and try to keep the post book balanced. And, of course, I had to do any other jobs that I was asked to do.
Office hours were 9.00 a.m. till 5.30 p.m. (or as much later as it took the Medical Officer of Health to sign the Department’s post and get it down to me) with an hour for lunch, from Monday to Friday, and from 9.00 a.m. till 12.00 noon on Saturday. I was granted a fortnight’s holiday a year.
During my second year in the Health department, I was just one rung up the ladder. I still had to undertake some pretty menial tasks but I was in charge of the Registers of Notifiable Infectious Diseases and Minor Infectious Diseases, and of admissions to the Isolation Hospital. Infectious diseases such as Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria, Puerperal Pyrexia or Childbed fever, Poliomyelitis and so on, were sadly common in those days. An Ipswich doctor, wanting a case or suspected case admitted to the Isolation Hospital, would phone the office. I would take the message, phone the hospital to arrange for an ambulance to pick up the patient, and enter the case in the register of admissions
Doctors from outside Ipswich had to contact the Medical Officer of Health of their local Urban or Rural District Council. This Medical Officer then had to phone the office and ask for the patient to be admitted to our hospital – and had to promise, and later confirm in writing, that his authority would accept responsibility for the cost of treatment and nursing care.
This arrangement almost landed me in the most serious trouble of my entire local government career. One lunchtime while I was in the office on my own, the MOH of a neighbouring rural authority phoned to ask if we would accept a case of Scarlet Fever from his district. I took the details, made sure that he accepted financial responsibility, and phoned the case on to the hospital
A couple of hours later a furious Hospital Medical Superintendent phoned Dr Pringle to say that ‘some idiot junior’ (that was me!) had made what could prove to be a lethal mistake. When the ambulance, with blankets and a nurse from the Scarlet Fever Ward, had arrived to pick up the patient, she was found to have, not Scarlet fever but Puerperal Pyrexia. If the unfortunate woman now developed Scarlet Fever on top of her existing infection there would be no doubt as to who would be to blame.
Dr Pringle phoned the Medical Officer of Health who had made the request to me. He claimed that he had of course, known that it was Puerperal Pyrexia and that that was the message he had passed on to me. Who would be likely to accept the word of a seventeen-year-old junior over that of a qualified and experienced doctor?
I spent a sleepless night. Could I have misheard? I was sure that I hadn’t, but no-one was likely to believe me. Supposing the patient did develop Scarlet Fever on top of her Puerperal Pyrexia – and died. I went into the office in the morning pale faced, bleary-eyed and shaking in my shoes as I wondered what fate awaited me.
There, to my unspeakable relief, I found salvation. In the post was a form from the Medical Officer who had phoned me, accepting responsibility for the patient’s maintenance – and describing her as suffering from Scarlet Fever!
Needless to say, I was up the stairs two at a time to Dr, Pringle’s office. He shooed me out of the room before he phoned the Medical Officer in question – but I learned afterwards from his secretary that the conversation was well worth hearing!
In my third year, with my salary pushed up to a splendid twenty-five shillings (£1.25) a week, I was due to go into the Sanitary Inspectors’ Office and to start my training in earnest. It didn’t happen. The year was 1939 and I was a volunteer in the Territorial Army. Called up with the embodiment of the TA the day before war was declared, I didn’t give another thought to public health or local government for the next seven years.
……………………………….
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Early years at the Northgate School
Early Years at Ipswich’s Northgate School
In July, 1931, at the end of the summer term, the old Ipswich Municipal Secondary School (known locally as ‘The Muny’!) on Tower ramparts, near the town centre, closed for ever. In September the school was reborn as the Northgate Municipal Secondary School (destined to be called simply ‘The Northgate’) in new buildings in Sidegate Lane, in what was then virtually open countryside. Unlike in the past, the boys’ and the girls’ schools were on the same site though with strictly separated playing fields. There was a shared ‘utility block’ between the two schools.
I was among the first new intake as the school reopened. Ten years old (I have never understood how it was that I started a year earlier than practically everybody else!) I cycled the three miles from my home in Bramford Lane, along Valley Road and Colchester Road to the new school, wearing the regulation school uniform of grey trousers and blazer, white shirt with school tie, navy blue mac and navy cap with the school badge, the Ipswich Municipal Crest.
It was a journey that I was to make twice a day, in both directions, during school term for the next six years. Our days at school were long by today’s standards 9.00 a.m. till 4.30 p.m. Mondays to Fridays plus, once we had progressed beyond the first two forms, 9.00 a.m. till 12 noon on Saturdays. We did have an almost-two-hours midday break though and many of us, having sampled the school dinners (only 6d or 2.5p) opted to cycle home for the midday meal.
Mr Alfred Morris was the headmaster throughout my time at the Northgate. He was an august figure whom we saw mainly at Assembly every morning. Once we reached the fifth form though he would take us for what was then called ‘Scripture’. He was fascinated (but failed to pass his fascination on to us!) by Middle Eastern archaeology and would carry on at length about Assyrian kings with unpronounceable names and about the excavations of a Sir Henry Layard in what was then called Mesopotamia but is now Iraq.
Of other masters I have much more colourful memories. In the junior forms Scripture was taught by Mr Lord (‘Ginger Lord’ to us boys for obvious reasons). He was fully persuaded that every word in the Bible was literally true. ‘Never mind what other teachers may tell you’, he’d say, in a strong ‘Coronation Street’ accent. ‘In the centre of the earth on one side is Paradise or Abraham’s Bosom where the souls of ‘the Just’ of the Old Testament are to be found. On the other side is Hell – and between the two there is a Great Gulf fixed’. He’d draw a circle on the blackboard and write ‘Paradise’ on one side and ‘Hell’ on the other with two lines in the middle labelled ‘Great Gulf’. I wonder how he got on with his colleagues in the staff room?
Then there was Mr Bishop, who taught us Geography, and taught it very well too. I recall though, his assuring us, this must have been in 1933 or ’34, that Ipswich could never have a professional football team. ‘We lack the industrial hinterland to make a team viable’, he insisted.
Mr Edwin Day and Mr ‘Johnny’ Cousins I recall with gratitude. They taught me to appreciate English Literature and to string words together acceptably myself. It is the only real skill that I have ever possessed. There was Mr Rees-Jones, whose lessons gave me a somewhat cynical view of British and world history that I have retained to this day; Mr Litchfield, who failed to turn me into a mathematician, and Dr Kerby who was even less successful at teaching me French.
Dr Kerby, as any of my contemporaries would confirm, was a real eccentric. He was a little man who had constant trouble with classroom discipline. On one Armistice Day (11th November) when we were particularly unruly, he shouted, ‘I will have order. I’ll fight you for it! I can fight’. He added, pulling aside his jacket to display two World War I campaign medals pinned to his waistcoat. He then spoilt the effect by explaining that he hadn’t been ‘a real soldier’, only an interpreter. His wife insisted upon his wearing his medals on Armistice day (all ex-servicemen did in those days) but he didn’t want to display them – so he compromised and wore them where they couldn’t be seen!
Our French pronunciation appalled him.‘You’re mutilating my favourite European language’, he would say to us with total contempt. ‘It’s le lendemain not ‘le laundryman’. He constantly complained that we weren’t taught English properly. ‘Yes, I know. You probably know more about Shakespeare than I do, but how can I teach you French grammar when you don’t know any English grammar?’ I wonder what he would think of English teaching today?
I believe that Dr Kerby was, in fact, a very distinguished scholar. During my time at the school the French President paid a state visit to the UK and Dr Kerby was among those invited to meet him. Thereafter he would sometimes punctuate his lessons, not altogether seriously, with, ‘As I said to Monsieur le Président…..’
Northgate School in those days liked to imitate the public schools. We were organised into ‘Houses’, and sport and games played an important role in school life. We played rugby during the autumn term, hockey during the spring term and tennis and cricket on alternate weeks during the summer term. I was uniformly useless at all of them. It wasn’t until decades later that I discovered that one of the reasons for this was that I had non-stereoscopic vision. Each of my eyes functioned satisfactorily, but not together. When one was working the other ‘switched off’. Consequently I saw nothing in 3D – and was hopeless at any game involving a fast-moving ball. I was a good shot with a rifle though, and not bad at lawn bowls and ten-pin bowling!
As well as being required to take part in team games every week, we were also expected to turn out on at least three Saturday afternoons during each term to ‘support the school team’.
Not that academic work was neglected. We were kept hard at it during each day, and with homework during the evening. In the first two forms we were expected to spend an hour each evening on homework, in the third form an hour and half and in the fourth and fifth forms two hours. There were written exams at the end of each term and regular tests throughout the term.
Each term saw the production of a school magazine. Very occasionally, when a teacher was running out of ideas, we’d have a lesson devoted to ‘writing a contribution to the magazine’. For some reason we all seemed to find verse easier than prose. I blush to think of some of my contributions that may be still in the school archives!
On one such occasion a classmate, totally bereft of inspiration, passed the time by idly copying from a poetry anthology Tennyson’s fairly well known verse fragment ‘The Eagle’. ‘He clasps the crag with his crooked hands…….etc’ The teacher, glancing over his shoulder, recognised this as being real poetry but, almost incredibly, failed to recognise its source. He snatched it up, enthused about it, and submitted it to the School Magazine editor in my classmate’s name. The editor didn’t recognise its source either (which doesn’t say much for my school’s teaching of English Literature) and published it in the Christmas 1934 issue of the magazine, still available in the school archive. A first former blew the gaff ‘Please sir – this poem by Tomlin in form 4b is in my poetry book!’. I would have been 13 at the time so Tomlin would probably have been 14. I don’t know what happened to him. Nothing much I suspect. He always said that he had never, for one moment, claimed that he had written the poem. The teacher just assumed that he had.
All our academic efforts were in preparation for the London University School Certificate Examination that we took in the fifth form at the age of sixteen. To be awarded the General Schools Certificate you had to get a mark of 40 percent or above in at least five subjects of which English (including both language and literature), Maths and French had to be three. If you failed in one of those five subjects you failed the whole exam. If you were awarded a credit mark of 50 percent in those five subjects you were exempted from the Matriculation (entrance) examination of London University. Because of this the school-leaving exam was often referred to simply as ‘the Matric’.
Headmaster Alfred Morris was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Consequently he had established a tradition that all School Certificate candidates spent the day before the exams started, boating on the Stour at Flatford Mill. We cycled from Ipswich to Flatford (we were all cyclists in those days) taking sandwiches with us for lunch. We spent the day on the river in skiffs hired by the school, rowed up the river to Dedham for tea (again provided by the school) and then rowed back to Flatford for the ride home. Many of us sat the exam the next day with blistered hands and an aching back!
Be that as it may, I left the Northgate in July 1937 with my School Certificate and Matriculation Exemption. I had taken the exam in English, Maths, French, History, Geography and General Physics. The last of these was guaranteed to be an examination on the principles of Physics only – with no mathematical problems to answer!
For a sixteen year old it was not, I think, too bad a preparation for life.
In July, 1931, at the end of the summer term, the old Ipswich Municipal Secondary School (known locally as ‘The Muny’!) on Tower ramparts, near the town centre, closed for ever. In September the school was reborn as the Northgate Municipal Secondary School (destined to be called simply ‘The Northgate’) in new buildings in Sidegate Lane, in what was then virtually open countryside. Unlike in the past, the boys’ and the girls’ schools were on the same site though with strictly separated playing fields. There was a shared ‘utility block’ between the two schools.
I was among the first new intake as the school reopened. Ten years old (I have never understood how it was that I started a year earlier than practically everybody else!) I cycled the three miles from my home in Bramford Lane, along Valley Road and Colchester Road to the new school, wearing the regulation school uniform of grey trousers and blazer, white shirt with school tie, navy blue mac and navy cap with the school badge, the Ipswich Municipal Crest.
It was a journey that I was to make twice a day, in both directions, during school term for the next six years. Our days at school were long by today’s standards 9.00 a.m. till 4.30 p.m. Mondays to Fridays plus, once we had progressed beyond the first two forms, 9.00 a.m. till 12 noon on Saturdays. We did have an almost-two-hours midday break though and many of us, having sampled the school dinners (only 6d or 2.5p) opted to cycle home for the midday meal.
Mr Alfred Morris was the headmaster throughout my time at the Northgate. He was an august figure whom we saw mainly at Assembly every morning. Once we reached the fifth form though he would take us for what was then called ‘Scripture’. He was fascinated (but failed to pass his fascination on to us!) by Middle Eastern archaeology and would carry on at length about Assyrian kings with unpronounceable names and about the excavations of a Sir Henry Layard in what was then called Mesopotamia but is now Iraq.
Of other masters I have much more colourful memories. In the junior forms Scripture was taught by Mr Lord (‘Ginger Lord’ to us boys for obvious reasons). He was fully persuaded that every word in the Bible was literally true. ‘Never mind what other teachers may tell you’, he’d say, in a strong ‘Coronation Street’ accent. ‘In the centre of the earth on one side is Paradise or Abraham’s Bosom where the souls of ‘the Just’ of the Old Testament are to be found. On the other side is Hell – and between the two there is a Great Gulf fixed’. He’d draw a circle on the blackboard and write ‘Paradise’ on one side and ‘Hell’ on the other with two lines in the middle labelled ‘Great Gulf’. I wonder how he got on with his colleagues in the staff room?
Then there was Mr Bishop, who taught us Geography, and taught it very well too. I recall though, his assuring us, this must have been in 1933 or ’34, that Ipswich could never have a professional football team. ‘We lack the industrial hinterland to make a team viable’, he insisted.
Mr Edwin Day and Mr ‘Johnny’ Cousins I recall with gratitude. They taught me to appreciate English Literature and to string words together acceptably myself. It is the only real skill that I have ever possessed. There was Mr Rees-Jones, whose lessons gave me a somewhat cynical view of British and world history that I have retained to this day; Mr Litchfield, who failed to turn me into a mathematician, and Dr Kerby who was even less successful at teaching me French.
Dr Kerby, as any of my contemporaries would confirm, was a real eccentric. He was a little man who had constant trouble with classroom discipline. On one Armistice Day (11th November) when we were particularly unruly, he shouted, ‘I will have order. I’ll fight you for it! I can fight’. He added, pulling aside his jacket to display two World War I campaign medals pinned to his waistcoat. He then spoilt the effect by explaining that he hadn’t been ‘a real soldier’, only an interpreter. His wife insisted upon his wearing his medals on Armistice day (all ex-servicemen did in those days) but he didn’t want to display them – so he compromised and wore them where they couldn’t be seen!
Our French pronunciation appalled him.‘You’re mutilating my favourite European language’, he would say to us with total contempt. ‘It’s le lendemain not ‘le laundryman’. He constantly complained that we weren’t taught English properly. ‘Yes, I know. You probably know more about Shakespeare than I do, but how can I teach you French grammar when you don’t know any English grammar?’ I wonder what he would think of English teaching today?
I believe that Dr Kerby was, in fact, a very distinguished scholar. During my time at the school the French President paid a state visit to the UK and Dr Kerby was among those invited to meet him. Thereafter he would sometimes punctuate his lessons, not altogether seriously, with, ‘As I said to Monsieur le Président…..’
Northgate School in those days liked to imitate the public schools. We were organised into ‘Houses’, and sport and games played an important role in school life. We played rugby during the autumn term, hockey during the spring term and tennis and cricket on alternate weeks during the summer term. I was uniformly useless at all of them. It wasn’t until decades later that I discovered that one of the reasons for this was that I had non-stereoscopic vision. Each of my eyes functioned satisfactorily, but not together. When one was working the other ‘switched off’. Consequently I saw nothing in 3D – and was hopeless at any game involving a fast-moving ball. I was a good shot with a rifle though, and not bad at lawn bowls and ten-pin bowling!
As well as being required to take part in team games every week, we were also expected to turn out on at least three Saturday afternoons during each term to ‘support the school team’.
Not that academic work was neglected. We were kept hard at it during each day, and with homework during the evening. In the first two forms we were expected to spend an hour each evening on homework, in the third form an hour and half and in the fourth and fifth forms two hours. There were written exams at the end of each term and regular tests throughout the term.
Each term saw the production of a school magazine. Very occasionally, when a teacher was running out of ideas, we’d have a lesson devoted to ‘writing a contribution to the magazine’. For some reason we all seemed to find verse easier than prose. I blush to think of some of my contributions that may be still in the school archives!
On one such occasion a classmate, totally bereft of inspiration, passed the time by idly copying from a poetry anthology Tennyson’s fairly well known verse fragment ‘The Eagle’. ‘He clasps the crag with his crooked hands…….etc’ The teacher, glancing over his shoulder, recognised this as being real poetry but, almost incredibly, failed to recognise its source. He snatched it up, enthused about it, and submitted it to the School Magazine editor in my classmate’s name. The editor didn’t recognise its source either (which doesn’t say much for my school’s teaching of English Literature) and published it in the Christmas 1934 issue of the magazine, still available in the school archive. A first former blew the gaff ‘Please sir – this poem by Tomlin in form 4b is in my poetry book!’. I would have been 13 at the time so Tomlin would probably have been 14. I don’t know what happened to him. Nothing much I suspect. He always said that he had never, for one moment, claimed that he had written the poem. The teacher just assumed that he had.
All our academic efforts were in preparation for the London University School Certificate Examination that we took in the fifth form at the age of sixteen. To be awarded the General Schools Certificate you had to get a mark of 40 percent or above in at least five subjects of which English (including both language and literature), Maths and French had to be three. If you failed in one of those five subjects you failed the whole exam. If you were awarded a credit mark of 50 percent in those five subjects you were exempted from the Matriculation (entrance) examination of London University. Because of this the school-leaving exam was often referred to simply as ‘the Matric’.
Headmaster Alfred Morris was strongly opposed to last minute swotting for exams. Consequently he had established a tradition that all School Certificate candidates spent the day before the exams started, boating on the Stour at Flatford Mill. We cycled from Ipswich to Flatford (we were all cyclists in those days) taking sandwiches with us for lunch. We spent the day on the river in skiffs hired by the school, rowed up the river to Dedham for tea (again provided by the school) and then rowed back to Flatford for the ride home. Many of us sat the exam the next day with blistered hands and an aching back!
Be that as it may, I left the Northgate in July 1937 with my School Certificate and Matriculation Exemption. I had taken the exam in English, Maths, French, History, Geography and General Physics. The last of these was guaranteed to be an examination on the principles of Physics only – with no mathematical problems to answer!
For a sixteen year old it was not, I think, too bad a preparation for life.
Return to Suffolk 1948 - 1955
Return to Suffolk – 1948 to 1955
Who, in his right mind, would choose to live in furnished rooms in Battersea and work in central London when there was a chance of a job, with unfurnished living accommodation, in a familiar and well-loved part of rural Suffolk? Certainly not me!
It was in the late autumn of 1947. I had been discharged from the army after nearly seven years’ service, on 23rd April 1946. Heather Gilbert my fiancée (whom I had met in Ipswich on the day that war was declared!) and I were married four days later on 27th April at Gants Hill Methodist Church, Barkingside, Ilford. Recalled a week early from our honeymoon in Devon so that I could attend a government course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors, Heather and I trudged the streets of south-west London with our suitcases until we eventually secured furnished rooms in Battersea’s Southolm Street, within a few hundred yards of the Polytechnic that I was to attend.
I attended lectures and demonstrations at Battersea ‘Poly’, at the Brixton School of building and at Smithfield Meat Market. I underwent practical training with Battersea Borough Council and with Sutton and Cheam, and Esher Urban District Councils. I bought myself a second-hand bicycle and cycled to Smithfield Market, and to Sutton and Esher every day that I trained there. In September 1947 I sat for the Sanitary Inspectors’ statutory qualifying examination and passed.
Armed with my newly acquired certificate I found employment with the Westminster City Council on what was then the princely salary of £450 a year, including ‘London weighting’. The Knightsbridge District, which I was to take over when I was thoroughly familiar with it, included Buckingham Palace, which gave me no trouble whatsoever, and the Royal Albert Hall. If today the drains of the latter famous edifice are less than perfect, it could be because supervising their reconstruction after damage sustained during the war, was one of my tasks.
Parts of ‘my’ district could only be described as very posh indeed! I recall that on one occasion we received a complaint about some building defect (was it a leaking roof? a blocked drain? I don’t remember) at the ‘White Eagle’ Polish Officers’ Club. I called to explain that as their premises were Crown Property the Council had no jurisdiction over it at all and they should get in touch with the Crown Agent who would, no doubt, quickly sort their problems out for them.
I was welcomed by a very regal Polish gentleman speaking perfect English, who simply refused to listen to a word I had to say until we had first lunched. ‘But …’, I tried. ‘Not a word!’ he said, showing me at my seat. ‘First we lunch. Then we talk business’
Well, we had a splendid lunch and it was only over the post-prandial coffee that I was able to explain and apologise. ‘Not a word, old man’, he replied. ‘Thank you for giving me the phone number of the chap I should have contacted – I hope that you enjoyed your lunch’. Well yes, I had - but all the time I had had the feeling that I was enjoying it under false pretences!
I was happy enough working ‘at the centre of things’ in Westminster, and might well have spent my whole local government career in London, had I not seen that job advertisement in the ‘Municipal Journal’. It was for an Additional Sanitary Inspector with the Gipping Rural District Council. The salary was only £390 a year (£60 difference in salaries seems trivial now. Believe me, it wasn’t then) the bottom rung of the Administrative, Professional and Technical grades. There was a car allowance though and the promise of unfurnished housing accommodation to rent.
The Gipping Rural District! I knew it well of course, and couldn’t have asked to work anywhere better. It was bisected by my beloved River Gipping. It encircled Stowmarket, its administrative centre was at Needham Market, and it included parishes like Bramford, Claydon, Great Blakenham, Coddenham and Somersham, through which my friends and I had cycled in my youth.
My scruples at applying so soon for another job were laughed at by my colleagues at Westminster. I applied and was granted an interview at the Council Offices, Needham Market on 20th November 1947. I remember the date well, since it was the wedding day of the Queen (then Princess Elizabeth) and Prince Philip!
There was only one other applicant at the interview. I was familiar with the district. I was prepared to buy a car and learn to drive – and I still had a Suffolk accent! I was appointed and started work on 1 January 1948. My father had died in 1939 and Heather and I lived with my mother in her home in Kensington Road, Ipswich, while the bungalow that had been allocated to us was being completed.
This was half the main block of a former isolation hospital in what had once been called Workhouse Lane but had been renamed ‘The Crescent, off the Norwich Road in Barham near the ‘Sorrel Horse’. The hospital was being converted into five bungalows for members of the Council’s staff. We moved into our new home, our first real home, in the spring.
Opposite us was Barham’s disused and disintegrating workhouse while behind our bungalow was an area of stony, rabbit-infested heathland known as ‘The Broom’. A walk across the Broom and over the railway line took us to the River Gipping and to Great Blakenham. Here we could catch a bus to Ipswich or Needham Market. We called our first home ‘Broomside’ and later, when we moved into another smaller but more convenient bungalow on the same site, we took our nameplate with us. It became new ‘Broomside’.
The Public Health Department was on the upper floor of the Council Offices, a large converted house in Needham Market’s High Street that had been called – and was still usually called - ‘Hurstlea’. Chief Sanitary Inspector was Ewart Morgan, a Welshmen from Port Talbot. There was another Additional Sanitary Inspector, older and more experienced than I was. He was Bernard Davies who came from the Birmingham area. Sam Seamans was the administrative officer, clerk and mainstay of the Department. Sam Seamans and I were the only ‘natives’. We were also the only ex-servicemen in the Department.
Bernard Davies and I were occupied with the rural housing survey. Every rural home in the district had to be inspected and classified either as fit in all respects, capable of being made fit at reasonable cost or unfit for human habitation. The survey taught me that slum dwellings were not an exclusively urban phenomenon and that delightful thatched ‘picture postcard’ cottages sometimes concealed unbelievable squalor behind a picturesque façade.
I inspected cottages where the ground floor was simply mother earth and where every interior wall was running with dampness. One remote group of cottages, I recall, had a fenced-off ‘drinking water pond’ as its sole source of water. Things are, I have little doubt, very different now – but I can’t claim to have played any material part in effecting that improvement.
We were responsible for refuse collection, cesspool emptying and, since few properties in the district were on a sewer, for organising the odoriferous ‘nightsoil collection’. This noxious task was carried out during the hours of darkness so we didn’t see a great deal of the nightsoil collectors.
There was an arrangement with Ipswich Corporation that the tanker used for cesspool emptying and nightsoil collection could be emptied down a designated sewer inspection chamber, into Ipswich’s sewerage system. The designated chamber was well over the other side of town from the Gipping District. On one occasion, when running a little late, the driver of the vehicle decided to raise a sewer manhole cover and dispose of his load in Ipswich’s Henniker Road, near the Gipping boundary.
The vehicle was a tanker with an 18in. diameter quick release facility for rapid emptying. What happened when the full tank was suddenly discharged into an inspection chamber carrying a 9in diameter sewer can be better imagined than described! That was when the driver learned the hard way, that there was a reason for that distant specially designated disposal point.
I have never relished taking other people’s orders – or indeed, giving orders to other people. All my working life I have yearned for independence. When the post of Housing Manager of Gipping’s roughly a thousand council houses became vacant I applied for it and was successful. Nominally in the Engineer and Surveyor’s Department I reported directly to the Council’s Housing Committee on tenancy and rent arrears matters. I had just one subordinate, Les Mayhew, who looked after the office and priced the housing repairs jobs that were carried out by the maintenance staff – a job that I could never have managed! Les became a trusted friend. He married Thelma Overton, a member of the office staff, and Heather and I exchanged news and Christmas greetings with them for many years.
Gipping RDC at that time had an extraordinary method of allocating council house tenancies. When a house became vacant, or houses under construction were completed, posters advertising them for letting were displayed in the parish in which the vacancy or vacancies existed and on the Council notice board in Needham Market. Application forms had to be completed, and I visited and reported on the circumstances of each applicant to the Housing Committee.
Some people filled in many application forms for different houses before they were successful. It isn’t a system that would be likely to appeal to any local authority today but I can only say that it seemed to work reasonably fairly, and it did tend to preserve village communities.
If a rent collector were on holiday or off sick, I would occasionally go out on rent collection. Even in those days it astonished me to find that some tenants, having to go out on rent day, were trusting enough to leave their back door unlocked and the rent with the rent book on the kitchen table!
Rents were low; phenomenally low by today’s standards. I can remember some of our council house rents going up to £1 a week (inclusive of rates). ‘Yew’ll never get folk round here to pay that sort of rent’, insisted one local ‘expert’. ‘They’re used t’ paying tew or three bob a week’.
The working atmosphere in the public services generally (at least in rural Suffolk) in the early 1950s was infinitely more relaxed than it is today. In one very remote parish of the Gipping rural district, there were just two council houses. Their address, somewhat unimaginatively, was 1 and 2 Council Houses, The Street.
They were in need of external painting. We invited tenders and accepted the lowest tender. From time to time on my rounds I would drive out to this particular parish and was quite surprised to see no evidence of work being done there. I phoned the builder who assured me that he had finished the job the previous week. ‘It certainly needed doing and I made a good job of it’, he insisted. ‘You’ll be getting the bill next week’.
I drove out there forthwith. It transpired that as well as there being two council houses in the Street, there were, two or three hundred yards away, two semi-detached Police houses. He had painted them – ‘and they certainly needed painting more than your council houses do’, he insisted. I phoned the Police Authority, told them what had happened and assured them that, by making that mistake, the builder had probably saved them hundreds of pounds. ‘Goodness knows what it might have cost you in repair bills if they had been neglected for another year’, I told them.
The Police Authority (probably guiltily aware that the maintenance of those out-of-the-way houses had been neglected) paid the builder! I just can’t imagine even a remote possibility of that happening today – or indeed at the time of my retirement from the local government service in 1980.
Things have changed – and things have changed throughout Gipping too. I went back there on a sunny Saturday a few years ago. Gipping Rural District has, of course, been absorbed into the new Mid-Suffolk District Council. Hurstlea looked much the same from the front – from Needham Market High Street – as it had before. At the rear though, the lush lawn on which we used to play a leisurely lunch-hour game of bowls, had disappeared. In its place were new office buildings looking like a set for a new Sci-fi soap opera set in a humanoid colony
I parked my car in the car park of ‘The Chequers’, Great Blakenham and walked over the Gipping and across the Broom to The Crescent. The Broom, as I knew it, had disappeared. There was now, presumably on the site of a worked-out gravel pit, a large tree-lined lake with preserved fishing, which appeared to have been there for years. An official picnic site was nearby.
The old workhouse was no longer there and, most startling of all, the Crescent had been cut in two by the new dual-carriageway A45. This separated the old isolation hospital site from the bungalows nearer Norwich Road. The five bungalows were still there though. I gazed again at our very first home, ‘old Broomside’ and nearby, ‘new Broomside’ where our elder son had been born over half a century ago.
.
Perhaps it was a mistake to go back. It might have been better to have continued to remember Needham Market the Crescent, Barham and the Broom, and indeed the old Gipping Rural District, as I once had known them.
Heather 1948 - 1955
I had lived and worked in the Gipping district for seven years, and they had been seven momentous years for me. Soon after we moved into the original ‘Broomside’ it became clear that Heather was far from well. She tired very quickly, was losing weight and sweated heavily at night. Her voice became hoarse and she developed a worrying ‘bronchitic’ cough. She had a nagging ache in the upper part of her back. I took her temperature. It was high every evening and subnormal every morning.
We visited our doctor. She produced sputum samples and had X-ray examinations. In the late summer she was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She had to take to her bed and my mother moved in to help look after her while we waited for her to be offered a bed in a sanatorium.
In November she was removed by ambulance to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium (though taken over by the newly-created NHS) at Nayland, near Colchester, where she was destined to remain for the next two years. The first few months were desperately worrying ones. Her condition seemed to be deteriorating. She was given a course of streptomycin (she was one of the first patients to be given this powerful antibiotic) and, to rest her larynx and give it a chance to heal, she was forbidden to speak for three months.
Under this regime her larynx healed and the progress of the disease in her left lung was halted. Her right lung had, fortunately, never been affected. Her left lung was partially collapsed by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space between her diaphragm and the left lung (a PP or Pneumo-Peritoneum). She was put on the list for radical surgical treatment. This was to be a thoracoplasty – a surgical procedure involving the removal of a number of ribs to collapse part of the lung permanently and give it a better chance to heal.
This was to be carried out at Papworth Hospital, now famous for heart surgery but then specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis. It was a very drastic procedure, carried out in three stages (two or three ribs at a time!) in which the patients invariably lost a stone in weight. Heather therefore had to put on a stone in weight before she could undergo it!
Heather was moved to Papworth in the summer of 1950 and spent six weeks there, returning to Nayland after having had three separate major operations and losing no less than eight of her ribs on the left side of her body. Inevitably, this was to affect her physically for the rest of her life.
It did ‘cure’ her TB though. Her condition improved rapidly after her return from Nayland and in the late autumn she was discharged home.
While she had been in Nayland and at Papworth I had visited her every week, sometimes twice a week, and had written every day. Once she was well enough to do so she wrote back to me equally regularly. Although it had been a terrible two years it was a time in which Heather made real and lasting friendships among the other young women patients at the sanatorium.. I remember particularly Lily ‘Chick’ Cottis, Pat Burrows and Pat Troy. Chick was an eighteen year old who had been diagnosed very shortly after enlisting in the Army. Pat Burrows was about Heather’s age and was married with one small son. We visited Pat Troy at her home in Woolwich after her discharge from Nayland. She and Heather corresponded regularly until her death, a few years before Heather’s. All three were ex-service. ‘Chick’ and Pat Burrows corresponded with Heather until her death in 2006. I still communicate regularly with Pat Burrows, now a widow and living in Australia.
Throughout her time away and during subsequent periods of ill-health, Heather was always patient, cheerful and concerned only about the inconvenience that she might be causing others. When seriously ill and asked by a doctor how she felt, her most typical response was, ‘I’m fine thank you doctor – and how are you?’
We stayed with my mother in Ipswich for a short while after Heather’s discharge from the Sanatorium but we were both eager to get back into our own home in Broomside. When the other, smaller bungalow in the Crescent became vacant we moved in – naming it New Broomside. We had both wanted to have a family and on 17th July 1953, less than a year after the doctor had pronounced Heather strong enough to become a mother, it was at home, in New Broomside that our first son, Peter was
It was at our home in Barham that Pete was weaned, took his first faltering steps, and learned to talk. He came to love our kitten José (given to us by the local vicar), the hens that we kept for eggs at that time, and playing in the sand pit that I made him in our large back garden, where Heather could keep an eye on him from the kitchen window.
And a bit more about myself
As well as becoming a father while we lived in Barham, I realized my own interest in housing administration, I, also studied for and passed my qualifying examination as an Inspector of Meat and Other Food, passed the driving test (at my fourth attempt!) became a competent amateur photographer and took my first faltering step towards satisfying my school-days’ yearning to become ‘a writer’. Heather and I also became Quakers (see ‘To Church on Sunday’ in this ‘My Life’ series).
I enjoyed being Housing Manager in a way that I had never enjoyed being a Sanitary Inspector. It is true that I returned to my former employment in 1955 but this was solely because it offered a higher salary now that I had acquired the Meat Inspector’s Certificate and I felt that I owed that to my growing family.
Many years later the opportunity arose to return to housing management and I seized it with both hands. I was very pleased indeed that at that time both my sons realized how fulfilling I found the job, and became trainee housing managers themselves in the London area. I hope that it wasn’t because, ‘Anything the old man can do must be dead easy!’
Having a baby inspired both Heather and myself to become amateur photographers. I bought (and I think it cost £12 – a considerable sum in those days!) a Paxina 2.25in x 2.25in camera with a 3.5f lens and variable shutter speeds. It was really very basic but was a great advance on the cheap box cameras to which we had both been accustomed. It produced publishable pictures and we spent more money on an enlarger and dark room equipment. Both Heather and I became capable amateur photographers and, to our great satisfaction, managed to sell a few pictures to the press.
It was while Heather was in the Sanatorium that I decided to try my hand at freelance writing but it was not until after her discharge (in 1953 in fact, the year that Peter was born) that I had any success. I sold ‘The Sanitary Man’, a light-hearted article of a thousand words about my former job, to ‘Men Only’ for the princely sum of five guineas (£5.25 but with the purchasing power then of over £100 today). I hasten to add that the ‘Men Only’ of 1953 was very different from the publication into which it has evolved and which may, I think, still be seen on the top shelves of newsagents’ displays!
With Heather’s support and encouragement – it was she who first realized how our photographic skills could be combined with my writing to make articles more saleable - I persevered with my spare-time writing, increasing my output and my income every year. An article of mine published in ‘Municipal Engineering earned me a regular feature on establishment matters in that popular local government publication. Another article on ‘How your hot water system works’ was accepted by ‘Practical Householder’ and led to a regular plumbing or drainage feature in ‘Do-it-yourself’ magazine and to my replying to readers’ queries on those subjects. Ultimately it led to my having published seven or eight commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage, including two hard-backs and two that ran to two editions.
Our time in Barham saw the beginning of a profitable hobby that, when I took early retirement from the local government service in 1980, became a second career. Even today, as I approach my nineties, I have not entirely abandoned it!
The years between Heather’s discharge from Nayland Sanatorium and our leaving Barham for north-east Essex, were happy ones for both of us. Like so many good things though, I don’t think that we realized quite how happy they had been until they were past.
……………………………………….
Who, in his right mind, would choose to live in furnished rooms in Battersea and work in central London when there was a chance of a job, with unfurnished living accommodation, in a familiar and well-loved part of rural Suffolk? Certainly not me!
It was in the late autumn of 1947. I had been discharged from the army after nearly seven years’ service, on 23rd April 1946. Heather Gilbert my fiancée (whom I had met in Ipswich on the day that war was declared!) and I were married four days later on 27th April at Gants Hill Methodist Church, Barkingside, Ilford. Recalled a week early from our honeymoon in Devon so that I could attend a government course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors, Heather and I trudged the streets of south-west London with our suitcases until we eventually secured furnished rooms in Battersea’s Southolm Street, within a few hundred yards of the Polytechnic that I was to attend.
I attended lectures and demonstrations at Battersea ‘Poly’, at the Brixton School of building and at Smithfield Meat Market. I underwent practical training with Battersea Borough Council and with Sutton and Cheam, and Esher Urban District Councils. I bought myself a second-hand bicycle and cycled to Smithfield Market, and to Sutton and Esher every day that I trained there. In September 1947 I sat for the Sanitary Inspectors’ statutory qualifying examination and passed.
Armed with my newly acquired certificate I found employment with the Westminster City Council on what was then the princely salary of £450 a year, including ‘London weighting’. The Knightsbridge District, which I was to take over when I was thoroughly familiar with it, included Buckingham Palace, which gave me no trouble whatsoever, and the Royal Albert Hall. If today the drains of the latter famous edifice are less than perfect, it could be because supervising their reconstruction after damage sustained during the war, was one of my tasks.
Parts of ‘my’ district could only be described as very posh indeed! I recall that on one occasion we received a complaint about some building defect (was it a leaking roof? a blocked drain? I don’t remember) at the ‘White Eagle’ Polish Officers’ Club. I called to explain that as their premises were Crown Property the Council had no jurisdiction over it at all and they should get in touch with the Crown Agent who would, no doubt, quickly sort their problems out for them.
I was welcomed by a very regal Polish gentleman speaking perfect English, who simply refused to listen to a word I had to say until we had first lunched. ‘But …’, I tried. ‘Not a word!’ he said, showing me at my seat. ‘First we lunch. Then we talk business’
Well, we had a splendid lunch and it was only over the post-prandial coffee that I was able to explain and apologise. ‘Not a word, old man’, he replied. ‘Thank you for giving me the phone number of the chap I should have contacted – I hope that you enjoyed your lunch’. Well yes, I had - but all the time I had had the feeling that I was enjoying it under false pretences!
I was happy enough working ‘at the centre of things’ in Westminster, and might well have spent my whole local government career in London, had I not seen that job advertisement in the ‘Municipal Journal’. It was for an Additional Sanitary Inspector with the Gipping Rural District Council. The salary was only £390 a year (£60 difference in salaries seems trivial now. Believe me, it wasn’t then) the bottom rung of the Administrative, Professional and Technical grades. There was a car allowance though and the promise of unfurnished housing accommodation to rent.
The Gipping Rural District! I knew it well of course, and couldn’t have asked to work anywhere better. It was bisected by my beloved River Gipping. It encircled Stowmarket, its administrative centre was at Needham Market, and it included parishes like Bramford, Claydon, Great Blakenham, Coddenham and Somersham, through which my friends and I had cycled in my youth.
My scruples at applying so soon for another job were laughed at by my colleagues at Westminster. I applied and was granted an interview at the Council Offices, Needham Market on 20th November 1947. I remember the date well, since it was the wedding day of the Queen (then Princess Elizabeth) and Prince Philip!
There was only one other applicant at the interview. I was familiar with the district. I was prepared to buy a car and learn to drive – and I still had a Suffolk accent! I was appointed and started work on 1 January 1948. My father had died in 1939 and Heather and I lived with my mother in her home in Kensington Road, Ipswich, while the bungalow that had been allocated to us was being completed.
This was half the main block of a former isolation hospital in what had once been called Workhouse Lane but had been renamed ‘The Crescent, off the Norwich Road in Barham near the ‘Sorrel Horse’. The hospital was being converted into five bungalows for members of the Council’s staff. We moved into our new home, our first real home, in the spring.
Opposite us was Barham’s disused and disintegrating workhouse while behind our bungalow was an area of stony, rabbit-infested heathland known as ‘The Broom’. A walk across the Broom and over the railway line took us to the River Gipping and to Great Blakenham. Here we could catch a bus to Ipswich or Needham Market. We called our first home ‘Broomside’ and later, when we moved into another smaller but more convenient bungalow on the same site, we took our nameplate with us. It became new ‘Broomside’.
The Public Health Department was on the upper floor of the Council Offices, a large converted house in Needham Market’s High Street that had been called – and was still usually called - ‘Hurstlea’. Chief Sanitary Inspector was Ewart Morgan, a Welshmen from Port Talbot. There was another Additional Sanitary Inspector, older and more experienced than I was. He was Bernard Davies who came from the Birmingham area. Sam Seamans was the administrative officer, clerk and mainstay of the Department. Sam Seamans and I were the only ‘natives’. We were also the only ex-servicemen in the Department.
Bernard Davies and I were occupied with the rural housing survey. Every rural home in the district had to be inspected and classified either as fit in all respects, capable of being made fit at reasonable cost or unfit for human habitation. The survey taught me that slum dwellings were not an exclusively urban phenomenon and that delightful thatched ‘picture postcard’ cottages sometimes concealed unbelievable squalor behind a picturesque façade.
I inspected cottages where the ground floor was simply mother earth and where every interior wall was running with dampness. One remote group of cottages, I recall, had a fenced-off ‘drinking water pond’ as its sole source of water. Things are, I have little doubt, very different now – but I can’t claim to have played any material part in effecting that improvement.
We were responsible for refuse collection, cesspool emptying and, since few properties in the district were on a sewer, for organising the odoriferous ‘nightsoil collection’. This noxious task was carried out during the hours of darkness so we didn’t see a great deal of the nightsoil collectors.
There was an arrangement with Ipswich Corporation that the tanker used for cesspool emptying and nightsoil collection could be emptied down a designated sewer inspection chamber, into Ipswich’s sewerage system. The designated chamber was well over the other side of town from the Gipping District. On one occasion, when running a little late, the driver of the vehicle decided to raise a sewer manhole cover and dispose of his load in Ipswich’s Henniker Road, near the Gipping boundary.
The vehicle was a tanker with an 18in. diameter quick release facility for rapid emptying. What happened when the full tank was suddenly discharged into an inspection chamber carrying a 9in diameter sewer can be better imagined than described! That was when the driver learned the hard way, that there was a reason for that distant specially designated disposal point.
I have never relished taking other people’s orders – or indeed, giving orders to other people. All my working life I have yearned for independence. When the post of Housing Manager of Gipping’s roughly a thousand council houses became vacant I applied for it and was successful. Nominally in the Engineer and Surveyor’s Department I reported directly to the Council’s Housing Committee on tenancy and rent arrears matters. I had just one subordinate, Les Mayhew, who looked after the office and priced the housing repairs jobs that were carried out by the maintenance staff – a job that I could never have managed! Les became a trusted friend. He married Thelma Overton, a member of the office staff, and Heather and I exchanged news and Christmas greetings with them for many years.
Gipping RDC at that time had an extraordinary method of allocating council house tenancies. When a house became vacant, or houses under construction were completed, posters advertising them for letting were displayed in the parish in which the vacancy or vacancies existed and on the Council notice board in Needham Market. Application forms had to be completed, and I visited and reported on the circumstances of each applicant to the Housing Committee.
Some people filled in many application forms for different houses before they were successful. It isn’t a system that would be likely to appeal to any local authority today but I can only say that it seemed to work reasonably fairly, and it did tend to preserve village communities.
If a rent collector were on holiday or off sick, I would occasionally go out on rent collection. Even in those days it astonished me to find that some tenants, having to go out on rent day, were trusting enough to leave their back door unlocked and the rent with the rent book on the kitchen table!
Rents were low; phenomenally low by today’s standards. I can remember some of our council house rents going up to £1 a week (inclusive of rates). ‘Yew’ll never get folk round here to pay that sort of rent’, insisted one local ‘expert’. ‘They’re used t’ paying tew or three bob a week’.
The working atmosphere in the public services generally (at least in rural Suffolk) in the early 1950s was infinitely more relaxed than it is today. In one very remote parish of the Gipping rural district, there were just two council houses. Their address, somewhat unimaginatively, was 1 and 2 Council Houses, The Street.
They were in need of external painting. We invited tenders and accepted the lowest tender. From time to time on my rounds I would drive out to this particular parish and was quite surprised to see no evidence of work being done there. I phoned the builder who assured me that he had finished the job the previous week. ‘It certainly needed doing and I made a good job of it’, he insisted. ‘You’ll be getting the bill next week’.
I drove out there forthwith. It transpired that as well as there being two council houses in the Street, there were, two or three hundred yards away, two semi-detached Police houses. He had painted them – ‘and they certainly needed painting more than your council houses do’, he insisted. I phoned the Police Authority, told them what had happened and assured them that, by making that mistake, the builder had probably saved them hundreds of pounds. ‘Goodness knows what it might have cost you in repair bills if they had been neglected for another year’, I told them.
The Police Authority (probably guiltily aware that the maintenance of those out-of-the-way houses had been neglected) paid the builder! I just can’t imagine even a remote possibility of that happening today – or indeed at the time of my retirement from the local government service in 1980.
Things have changed – and things have changed throughout Gipping too. I went back there on a sunny Saturday a few years ago. Gipping Rural District has, of course, been absorbed into the new Mid-Suffolk District Council. Hurstlea looked much the same from the front – from Needham Market High Street – as it had before. At the rear though, the lush lawn on which we used to play a leisurely lunch-hour game of bowls, had disappeared. In its place were new office buildings looking like a set for a new Sci-fi soap opera set in a humanoid colony
I parked my car in the car park of ‘The Chequers’, Great Blakenham and walked over the Gipping and across the Broom to The Crescent. The Broom, as I knew it, had disappeared. There was now, presumably on the site of a worked-out gravel pit, a large tree-lined lake with preserved fishing, which appeared to have been there for years. An official picnic site was nearby.
The old workhouse was no longer there and, most startling of all, the Crescent had been cut in two by the new dual-carriageway A45. This separated the old isolation hospital site from the bungalows nearer Norwich Road. The five bungalows were still there though. I gazed again at our very first home, ‘old Broomside’ and nearby, ‘new Broomside’ where our elder son had been born over half a century ago.
.
Perhaps it was a mistake to go back. It might have been better to have continued to remember Needham Market the Crescent, Barham and the Broom, and indeed the old Gipping Rural District, as I once had known them.
Heather 1948 - 1955
I had lived and worked in the Gipping district for seven years, and they had been seven momentous years for me. Soon after we moved into the original ‘Broomside’ it became clear that Heather was far from well. She tired very quickly, was losing weight and sweated heavily at night. Her voice became hoarse and she developed a worrying ‘bronchitic’ cough. She had a nagging ache in the upper part of her back. I took her temperature. It was high every evening and subnormal every morning.
We visited our doctor. She produced sputum samples and had X-ray examinations. In the late summer she was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She had to take to her bed and my mother moved in to help look after her while we waited for her to be offered a bed in a sanatorium.
In November she was removed by ambulance to what was then the British Legion Sanatorium (though taken over by the newly-created NHS) at Nayland, near Colchester, where she was destined to remain for the next two years. The first few months were desperately worrying ones. Her condition seemed to be deteriorating. She was given a course of streptomycin (she was one of the first patients to be given this powerful antibiotic) and, to rest her larynx and give it a chance to heal, she was forbidden to speak for three months.
Under this regime her larynx healed and the progress of the disease in her left lung was halted. Her right lung had, fortunately, never been affected. Her left lung was partially collapsed by crushing the phrenic nerve and pumping air into the space between her diaphragm and the left lung (a PP or Pneumo-Peritoneum). She was put on the list for radical surgical treatment. This was to be a thoracoplasty – a surgical procedure involving the removal of a number of ribs to collapse part of the lung permanently and give it a better chance to heal.
This was to be carried out at Papworth Hospital, now famous for heart surgery but then specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis. It was a very drastic procedure, carried out in three stages (two or three ribs at a time!) in which the patients invariably lost a stone in weight. Heather therefore had to put on a stone in weight before she could undergo it!
Heather was moved to Papworth in the summer of 1950 and spent six weeks there, returning to Nayland after having had three separate major operations and losing no less than eight of her ribs on the left side of her body. Inevitably, this was to affect her physically for the rest of her life.
It did ‘cure’ her TB though. Her condition improved rapidly after her return from Nayland and in the late autumn she was discharged home.
While she had been in Nayland and at Papworth I had visited her every week, sometimes twice a week, and had written every day. Once she was well enough to do so she wrote back to me equally regularly. Although it had been a terrible two years it was a time in which Heather made real and lasting friendships among the other young women patients at the sanatorium.. I remember particularly Lily ‘Chick’ Cottis, Pat Burrows and Pat Troy. Chick was an eighteen year old who had been diagnosed very shortly after enlisting in the Army. Pat Burrows was about Heather’s age and was married with one small son. We visited Pat Troy at her home in Woolwich after her discharge from Nayland. She and Heather corresponded regularly until her death, a few years before Heather’s. All three were ex-service. ‘Chick’ and Pat Burrows corresponded with Heather until her death in 2006. I still communicate regularly with Pat Burrows, now a widow and living in Australia.
Throughout her time away and during subsequent periods of ill-health, Heather was always patient, cheerful and concerned only about the inconvenience that she might be causing others. When seriously ill and asked by a doctor how she felt, her most typical response was, ‘I’m fine thank you doctor – and how are you?’
We stayed with my mother in Ipswich for a short while after Heather’s discharge from the Sanatorium but we were both eager to get back into our own home in Broomside. When the other, smaller bungalow in the Crescent became vacant we moved in – naming it New Broomside. We had both wanted to have a family and on 17th July 1953, less than a year after the doctor had pronounced Heather strong enough to become a mother, it was at home, in New Broomside that our first son, Peter was
It was at our home in Barham that Pete was weaned, took his first faltering steps, and learned to talk. He came to love our kitten José (given to us by the local vicar), the hens that we kept for eggs at that time, and playing in the sand pit that I made him in our large back garden, where Heather could keep an eye on him from the kitchen window.
And a bit more about myself
As well as becoming a father while we lived in Barham, I realized my own interest in housing administration, I, also studied for and passed my qualifying examination as an Inspector of Meat and Other Food, passed the driving test (at my fourth attempt!) became a competent amateur photographer and took my first faltering step towards satisfying my school-days’ yearning to become ‘a writer’. Heather and I also became Quakers (see ‘To Church on Sunday’ in this ‘My Life’ series).
I enjoyed being Housing Manager in a way that I had never enjoyed being a Sanitary Inspector. It is true that I returned to my former employment in 1955 but this was solely because it offered a higher salary now that I had acquired the Meat Inspector’s Certificate and I felt that I owed that to my growing family.
Many years later the opportunity arose to return to housing management and I seized it with both hands. I was very pleased indeed that at that time both my sons realized how fulfilling I found the job, and became trainee housing managers themselves in the London area. I hope that it wasn’t because, ‘Anything the old man can do must be dead easy!’
Having a baby inspired both Heather and myself to become amateur photographers. I bought (and I think it cost £12 – a considerable sum in those days!) a Paxina 2.25in x 2.25in camera with a 3.5f lens and variable shutter speeds. It was really very basic but was a great advance on the cheap box cameras to which we had both been accustomed. It produced publishable pictures and we spent more money on an enlarger and dark room equipment. Both Heather and I became capable amateur photographers and, to our great satisfaction, managed to sell a few pictures to the press.
It was while Heather was in the Sanatorium that I decided to try my hand at freelance writing but it was not until after her discharge (in 1953 in fact, the year that Peter was born) that I had any success. I sold ‘The Sanitary Man’, a light-hearted article of a thousand words about my former job, to ‘Men Only’ for the princely sum of five guineas (£5.25 but with the purchasing power then of over £100 today). I hasten to add that the ‘Men Only’ of 1953 was very different from the publication into which it has evolved and which may, I think, still be seen on the top shelves of newsagents’ displays!
With Heather’s support and encouragement – it was she who first realized how our photographic skills could be combined with my writing to make articles more saleable - I persevered with my spare-time writing, increasing my output and my income every year. An article of mine published in ‘Municipal Engineering earned me a regular feature on establishment matters in that popular local government publication. Another article on ‘How your hot water system works’ was accepted by ‘Practical Householder’ and led to a regular plumbing or drainage feature in ‘Do-it-yourself’ magazine and to my replying to readers’ queries on those subjects. Ultimately it led to my having published seven or eight commercially successful books on domestic hot and cold water supply and drainage, including two hard-backs and two that ran to two editions.
Our time in Barham saw the beginning of a profitable hobby that, when I took early retirement from the local government service in 1980, became a second career. Even today, as I approach my nineties, I have not entirely abandoned it!
The years between Heather’s discharge from Nayland Sanatorium and our leaving Barham for north-east Essex, were happy ones for both of us. Like so many good things though, I don’t think that we realized quite how happy they had been until they were past.
……………………………………….
Into 'Civvy Street'
Into ‘Civvy Street’
1946 – 1948
Looking back over the years, it astonishes me that during the final year that I spent in the army I never for one moment considered any possible future other than resuming the career that had been abruptly interrupted in 1939 – that of student sanitary inspector. Had six years in the army, including three as a POW, addled my brain, or had the imminence of marriage driven every other thought from my mind?
I was twenty-four years old. My six years military service (seven by the time I was discharged) plus my General School Leaving Certificate with Matriculation Exemption from London University, would have ensured me a university place. The Labour Government would have been happy to pay both my tuition fees and a living allowance for my wife and myself. I could have pursued my schooldays’ dream of becoming a writer.
I didn’t even think of it! The few working class boys I knew who had made it to University had all become either teachers or priests. Neither calling appealed to me. No, I was delighted to know that the government would pay for me to attend a special ‘Further Education and Training’ course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors and would pay my wife-to-be and myself an allowance that, we calculated, would be enough for us to live on. I attended a selection board for such a course and was accepted. I would be notified of the time and place of the first course that began after my discharge from the army.
I was discharged from the army on 23rd April 1946. Heather and I were married just four days later, on the 27th. We had planned a fortnight’s honeymoon at a guesthouse that had been recommended to us on the outskirts of Dawlish in Devon. I have forgotten its name but it was owned and run by a Quaker, the first Quaker I had ever actually met. All the guests were invited, if they wished, to attend a Quaker Meeting for Worship held at the guest house on Sunday mornings. Heather and I politely declined.
I don’t remember much about that honeymoon (does anybody?) except that it was cut unexpectedly short. A letter from my mother enclosed an official notification that a course for trainee Sanitary Inspectors would begin at Battersea Polytechnic on the following Monday. My attendance would be expected.
So, we had one week’s honeymoon instead of the fortnight that we had planned. The guesthouse proprietor, when told about our situation, generously declined any payment for the second week that we had booked.
We went back to the home of Heather’s parents. It was just about possible to get to Battersea Polytechnic from there daily and we knew that we would be welcome to stay until we had found somewhere to live in Battersea.
We certainly didn’t want to do that though. I signed in as instructed but the course didn’t actually begin for another few days. Heather and I trudged round the streets of Battersea and Clapham with a suitcase, calling in at estate agents, studying the cards in tobacconist’s shop windows and the advertisement columns of the local newspapers. It took only a few days for us to find at least a temporary home. A very kind lady in The Grove, Clapham Common took pity on us and let us have a furnished apartment on the top storey of her home, stressing that we could have it only ‘for a month or two’ while we found something more permanent.
It was Heather’s Uncle Charlie who found us a more permanent home. There was an advert in the ‘Methodist Recorder’ for furnished rooms in Battersea at No 14 Southolm Street, off Battersea Park Road and only a few hundred yards from Battersea Polytechnic in one direction and Battersea Park Station in the other. The accommodation consisted of a ground floor kitchen and toilet compartment and a roomy sitting room and bedroom on the first floor. The rent was a good deal lower than we were paying on Clapham Common.
There were snags about it though. It was in a somewhat slummy street and our accommodation had only very basic facilities – no bathroom and only a cold water tap over the kitchen sink. A large ‘tin’ bathtub was hung up against an outside wall in the tiny back yard.
There was another furnished apartment on the top floor. Occupants were a very friendly and helpful lady called Mrs Somerville who had a husband that we never saw and a son Alex, who was still away in the forces. Her accommodation was even more basic than ours. She had no proper kitchen sink – just a three cornered sink with a cold tap over it (they used to be called ‘dripstone sinks’ I believe) in a corner on the floor of the landing! Another snag was that it was only a few hundred yards from a railway embankment carrying the main line from Waterloo to Clapham Junction. Trains seemed to pass, shaking the building, every few minutes of the day and night. It was astonishing how quickly we became used to it.
We took the tenancy and, despite all the drawbacks, the months that we spent there were happy ones. I was quite enjoying my course at Battersea Polytechnic and Heather seemed happy as a housewife. She couldn’t do the washing and get it dry in the flat, so every week she would put it in a large suitcase and take a tram from the end of Southolm Street to the Municipal Washhouse, a journey of – I suppose – about half a mile. Here there were no washing machines (they were yet to make their appearance!) but there was hot and cold water, sinks, scrubbing surfaces, and detergents. There was also what I now realize was an enormous spin dryer called a hydro-extractor or ‘hydro for short, in which the women using the washhouse put their washed clothes to get them damp-dry.
All of this I learned second-hand from Heather. Men were strictly prohibited from entering the washhouse and I was allowed to wait outside to help Heather home with the washing only as a very special concession. ‘House-husbands’ and lone fathers had clearly not been heard of in those days.
We were both very inexperienced slum-dwellers. There were no power points and I wrecked a new electric iron (a wedding present) by plugging the lead from it into a light socket. Not that that would have done any harm had our electricity supply not been DC (direct current). The iron had been designed for AC (alternating current)! Heather took her housewifely duties very seriously. One day, coming home from the Poly, I was horrified to see her outside the first floor windows standing on a plaster cornice while she hung onto the window with one hand and cleaned the pane with the other!
In the evenings Heather would help me with my studies – testing me on my knowledge of public health law and so on. It was possible to obtain past exam papers from the Sanitary Inspectors’ Examination Board and I practised answering them regularly. By the time the exam came round I reckoned that I had answered every question that could possibly be set me. Mind you, as well as the written exam there would be an oral exam and a practical inspection – which could be of a dwelling house, a factory, a slaughterhouse, a shop, a canal boat, or practically anything in fact. Candidates had to make an inspection and produce a written report. Both the final report and the notebooks we had used during the inspection had to be submitted to the examiners.
Although there was a separate examination for Inspectors of Meat and Other Foods this subject – perhaps at a less detailed level – was part of the Sanitary Inspectors’ syllabus. For practical inspection of meat and fish we had to pay regular visits to Smithfield and, less frequently, to Billingsgate. To familiarise ourselves with the practice of our other duties we had to spend six or eight weeks with the Public Health Department of a London Borough, an Urban District and either a Rural District or, since there were few of these within easy reach of Battersea, an urban district with rural characteristics.
For all of these expeditions I purchased a second hand bicycle for 30 shillings (£1.50) I think and made my way by cycle. We were, of course, entitled to travelling expenses based on the second-class rail fare or bus fare. Thus, with official approval, I was able to supplement our just-adequate living allowance.
The three authorities at which I had my practical experience were Battersea Borough Council, Sutton and Cheam Urban District Council, and Esher Urban District Council. It was the last of these that had rural characteristics.
It was Battersea – possibly because it was on my doorstep and had some serious housing and environmental health problems – that I found most helpful. I made one or two good friends among the inspectors and public health staff and was told that when I passed my exam there would almost certainly be a job there for me if I wanted it. Sutton and Cheam, and Esher I remember less well. At the end of our time with them the Chief Sanitary Inspector had to submit a general report about us. The Chief at Esher showed me his report before he submitted it. I was rather surprised to find myself described as being ‘of the right type’ since he and the only Additional Sanitary Inspector were committed members of the Conservative Party and I had never made a secret of my – at that time – quite radical left-wing views!
There are only two of my fellow-students that I remember with any clarity. There was a black Jamaican, Denzil Smith, who had a problem getting his living allowance as, although he had served in the RAF, was not a British Citizen. I invited him to our home on one or two occasions. Then there was another E. Hall (he was actually E.W.E. Hall) who had been a glider pilot and had taken part in the D Day landings. He and I were, I think, usually regarded as the course’s most promising students.
I was able to do him a service after we had both qualified. I fairly quickly got a job with Westminster City Council – and immediately signed on for the course for the Meat and Other Foods Inspectors Certificate that we had been advised to acquire. He left his application too late. The course was full and he would have to wait another year. Before the course actually began I had applied for and obtained an appointment with the Gipping Rural District Council in Suffolk. I immediately wrote to him and suggested that he should write to the course organisers, signing himself simply E. Hall, and tell them that he had now moved from 14 Southolm Street, Battersea, SW11 to wherever he was living. This he did – and no-one was ever aware that he wasn’t the E. Hall who had originally signed on!
There were also two women students – former ATS members – with us at Battersea Polytechnic. I think that they both passed the exam. I do remember though that one bleak and drizzly November afternoon we visited a Horse Slaughterhouse in Plaistow (not one of London’s more cheerful areas!) and one of them fainted. Mind you, I had felt pretty queasy myself and I don’t think that I had been alone.
The exam was held in the autumn of 1947. I felt fairly confident that I had done well in the written papers, and I had been very lucky with the practical inspection. I had a simple ‘two rooms up and two down’ terraced house in a poor area (not unlike my own home at the time!) with minimal facilities. It was empty and I noticed that most, if not all, of the houses in the street were also empty. Could it be one of the Housing Act’s Clearance or Improvement Areas that we had learned all about? I thought it likely.
When I wrote my report I detailed all the house’s deficiencies and items of disrepair and added, ‘A cursory glance at other dwellings in the vicinity suggested that there should be further inspections made with a view to the declaration of a Clearance or Improvement Area’. That, I thought, was one up to me!
I was less happy with the oral examination. Always, I think, it is as you are walking away from that kind of ordeal that you think of the replies that you should have made to the examiner’s questions!
The exam results were sent to candidates by post, but a few days earlier they were pinned up in the entrance hall of the Royal Sanitary Institute’s (now the Royal Society of Health) headquarters in Westminster. On the fateful day Heather and I took the train from Battersea Park Station to Waterloo and walked the short distance to the RSI’s HQ. Hand in hand we nervously perused the posted notice. I had passed! I had been fairly confident of success – but you can never be sure until you see it in print.
I was now a qualified sanitary inspector and my next task was to get a job. Theoretically I was still employed by the Ipswich Corporation and was on unpaid leave of absence for military service. I could have gone back there, but Heather and I had made ourselves a home, however humble, in Battersea. I was determined not to relinquish it except to move into somewhere at least equally satisfactory.
Ipswich Council replied to say that they were unable to help with housing so I terminated my appointment with them and ‘signed on’ for unemployment pay though – as it turned out – I drew it for only a few weeks.
Heather and I scoured the local government press – ‘The Municipal Journal’, ‘Municipal Engineering’, ‘The Local Government Chronicle’ for sanitary inspectors’ jobs in the London area – or elsewhere if they were offering housing accommodation. I applied for an inspector’s job in St. Pancras and was granted an interview. I wasn’t successful. Someone with experience was appointed.
Then I applied for one with the City of Westminster. This time I really was successful. I was appointed as an ‘additional sanitary inspector’ with what was, I suppose, the wealthiest and most prestigious borough in London at what was, at the time, the princely salary of £450 a year including ‘London Weighting’. In 1939, when I had been last in the labour market, anyone with a salary of £250 or over was reckoned to be ‘comfortably off’. My dad had certainly never earned that amount. It was, of course, appreciably more than the government grant on which we had been living.
The office was in Charing Cross Road, not far from the Edith Cavell memorial. I became a commuter. Every morning I would catch the 8.30 a.m. from Battersea Park Station up to Waterloo, then the bus to Charing Cross Road. Westminster’s sanitary inspectors used to foregather every morning after they had done their ‘paper work’ at a nearby Lyons Corner House for coffee and a chat, before departing to their various districts to investigate complaints or make routine inspections of homes or businesses.
There was a very good staff canteen for Westminster City employees just down the road from our office where we would gather again for lunch. My sons and grandsons are, I think, quite astonished when I tell them that that brief period I spent with Westminster City Council was the only time after leaving the army that I wasn’t able to get home for lunch or, as I tend to call it in my working class fashion, dinner.
It was a circumstance that only lasted a couple of months. A few weeks after I had started work at Westminster an advert appeared in the Municipal Journal for an additional sanitary inspector with Gipping Rural District in Suffolk – an area, just outside Ipswich, that I knew well. Salary was only £390 but there was a car allowance and the offer of the tenancy of an unfurnished bungalow!
I consulted my Westminster colleagues. They advised me to ‘go for it’. I did, and was successful. At the end of December Heather and I departed from Battersea for ever and in the New Year of 1948 I took up my appointment with the Gipping Rural District Council (see Return to Suffolk 1948 to 1955).
By the end of 1947 I had been out of the army and married for just over eighteen months. Heather and I had spent most of that time in Battersea and, on the whole, it had been a very happy time.
We had paid regular visits, though not as regular as both our parents would have liked, to both Ipswich and Ilford. We also, one day, took a train to Newbury and visited my old great-aunts Aunt Tem and Aunt Annie (See Origins, My parents). Heather’s sister Margaret stayed with us for a weekend (we had a bed-settee in the sitting room) and so did one or two of Heather’s old school friends.
On summer evenings we often went into Battersea Park and I remember rowing Heather on the ornamental lake there.
We attended a local Methodist Church and Heather resumed Sunday School teaching, a task she thoroughly enjoyed. Although I had lost my Christian faith I went along with her and helped where I could. She was, I remember, a great success in the leading role in a Harvest Festival event staged by the Church, ‘The Lord of the Harvest’. On another occasion she was one of a number of Sunday School Teachers who took a group of their kids to Southend for the day by train. I waited for them at Clapham Common tube station on their return.
It wasn’t long after we moved to Suffolk that Heather was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She was away from me for two years and in that time she had eight ribs removed on the left side of her body to collapse her left lung permanently and give it a chance to heal.
After that she gave birth to and brought up two fine sons and managed to live a more-or-less normal life for many years – for which I am profoundly grateful. She was always short of energy though, always liable to contract chest and throat infections, always needing to take an after-lunch rest, never able to do heavy shopping on her own or go anywhere for very long without me being there to give her a hand from time to time.
Possibly it is because it was just during those first eighteen or so months of our marriage that she was completely fit and ‘normal’ that their memory is so precious to me.
There were warning signs to which we should have paid more attention. The winter of 1946/’47 was a particularly bitter one with snow and ice on even Battersea’s streets for weeks. It was followed by a wet spring. Twice at least during that time she was stricken with what we, and the doctor, thought was ‘flu. She had a sky-high temperature every evening and a subnormal one every morning. She was hoarse and had a bronchitic cough. She sweated profusely at night and was completely devoid of energy. There were no antibiotics in those days and the doctor’s advice was the standard, ‘Keep her warm and in bed, give her plenty of warm drinks and some aspirin to get her temperature down’. Each time she seemed to recover but, thinking back, I realize that each time she was a little weaker. She should have had an X-ray examination. What a difference earlier diagnosis might have made!
Had her disease been diagnosed just a year or two earlier that disabling and energy-sapping operation might not have been necessary. Nor would she have had to have it had she developed the disease a year or two later. The continuing development of antibiotics made thoracoplasty operations obsolete.
These thoughts come unbidden into my head. There really is no point though in speculating about what might have been, had circumstances been just a little different.
Heather lived till she was eighty-two, outliving all her ‘fitter’ cousins. We had 60 happy years of marriage, two fine sons, three grandchildren of whom she was immensely proud and – as a bonus – loving nieces and a nephew whom Heather lived to see have wonderful and loving children of their own. Although I did, over the years, recover my Christian faith I have often wished, and still wish, that my faith were as strong and unshakeable as hers was.
I have typed those last few paragraphs with difficulty. I have been on my own now for over two years – and I still miss her more than I can say.
……………………………………….
1946 – 1948
Looking back over the years, it astonishes me that during the final year that I spent in the army I never for one moment considered any possible future other than resuming the career that had been abruptly interrupted in 1939 – that of student sanitary inspector. Had six years in the army, including three as a POW, addled my brain, or had the imminence of marriage driven every other thought from my mind?
I was twenty-four years old. My six years military service (seven by the time I was discharged) plus my General School Leaving Certificate with Matriculation Exemption from London University, would have ensured me a university place. The Labour Government would have been happy to pay both my tuition fees and a living allowance for my wife and myself. I could have pursued my schooldays’ dream of becoming a writer.
I didn’t even think of it! The few working class boys I knew who had made it to University had all become either teachers or priests. Neither calling appealed to me. No, I was delighted to know that the government would pay for me to attend a special ‘Further Education and Training’ course for ex-service trainee sanitary inspectors and would pay my wife-to-be and myself an allowance that, we calculated, would be enough for us to live on. I attended a selection board for such a course and was accepted. I would be notified of the time and place of the first course that began after my discharge from the army.
I was discharged from the army on 23rd April 1946. Heather and I were married just four days later, on the 27th. We had planned a fortnight’s honeymoon at a guesthouse that had been recommended to us on the outskirts of Dawlish in Devon. I have forgotten its name but it was owned and run by a Quaker, the first Quaker I had ever actually met. All the guests were invited, if they wished, to attend a Quaker Meeting for Worship held at the guest house on Sunday mornings. Heather and I politely declined.
I don’t remember much about that honeymoon (does anybody?) except that it was cut unexpectedly short. A letter from my mother enclosed an official notification that a course for trainee Sanitary Inspectors would begin at Battersea Polytechnic on the following Monday. My attendance would be expected.
So, we had one week’s honeymoon instead of the fortnight that we had planned. The guesthouse proprietor, when told about our situation, generously declined any payment for the second week that we had booked.
We went back to the home of Heather’s parents. It was just about possible to get to Battersea Polytechnic from there daily and we knew that we would be welcome to stay until we had found somewhere to live in Battersea.
We certainly didn’t want to do that though. I signed in as instructed but the course didn’t actually begin for another few days. Heather and I trudged round the streets of Battersea and Clapham with a suitcase, calling in at estate agents, studying the cards in tobacconist’s shop windows and the advertisement columns of the local newspapers. It took only a few days for us to find at least a temporary home. A very kind lady in The Grove, Clapham Common took pity on us and let us have a furnished apartment on the top storey of her home, stressing that we could have it only ‘for a month or two’ while we found something more permanent.
It was Heather’s Uncle Charlie who found us a more permanent home. There was an advert in the ‘Methodist Recorder’ for furnished rooms in Battersea at No 14 Southolm Street, off Battersea Park Road and only a few hundred yards from Battersea Polytechnic in one direction and Battersea Park Station in the other. The accommodation consisted of a ground floor kitchen and toilet compartment and a roomy sitting room and bedroom on the first floor. The rent was a good deal lower than we were paying on Clapham Common.
There were snags about it though. It was in a somewhat slummy street and our accommodation had only very basic facilities – no bathroom and only a cold water tap over the kitchen sink. A large ‘tin’ bathtub was hung up against an outside wall in the tiny back yard.
There was another furnished apartment on the top floor. Occupants were a very friendly and helpful lady called Mrs Somerville who had a husband that we never saw and a son Alex, who was still away in the forces. Her accommodation was even more basic than ours. She had no proper kitchen sink – just a three cornered sink with a cold tap over it (they used to be called ‘dripstone sinks’ I believe) in a corner on the floor of the landing! Another snag was that it was only a few hundred yards from a railway embankment carrying the main line from Waterloo to Clapham Junction. Trains seemed to pass, shaking the building, every few minutes of the day and night. It was astonishing how quickly we became used to it.
We took the tenancy and, despite all the drawbacks, the months that we spent there were happy ones. I was quite enjoying my course at Battersea Polytechnic and Heather seemed happy as a housewife. She couldn’t do the washing and get it dry in the flat, so every week she would put it in a large suitcase and take a tram from the end of Southolm Street to the Municipal Washhouse, a journey of – I suppose – about half a mile. Here there were no washing machines (they were yet to make their appearance!) but there was hot and cold water, sinks, scrubbing surfaces, and detergents. There was also what I now realize was an enormous spin dryer called a hydro-extractor or ‘hydro for short, in which the women using the washhouse put their washed clothes to get them damp-dry.
All of this I learned second-hand from Heather. Men were strictly prohibited from entering the washhouse and I was allowed to wait outside to help Heather home with the washing only as a very special concession. ‘House-husbands’ and lone fathers had clearly not been heard of in those days.
We were both very inexperienced slum-dwellers. There were no power points and I wrecked a new electric iron (a wedding present) by plugging the lead from it into a light socket. Not that that would have done any harm had our electricity supply not been DC (direct current). The iron had been designed for AC (alternating current)! Heather took her housewifely duties very seriously. One day, coming home from the Poly, I was horrified to see her outside the first floor windows standing on a plaster cornice while she hung onto the window with one hand and cleaned the pane with the other!
In the evenings Heather would help me with my studies – testing me on my knowledge of public health law and so on. It was possible to obtain past exam papers from the Sanitary Inspectors’ Examination Board and I practised answering them regularly. By the time the exam came round I reckoned that I had answered every question that could possibly be set me. Mind you, as well as the written exam there would be an oral exam and a practical inspection – which could be of a dwelling house, a factory, a slaughterhouse, a shop, a canal boat, or practically anything in fact. Candidates had to make an inspection and produce a written report. Both the final report and the notebooks we had used during the inspection had to be submitted to the examiners.
Although there was a separate examination for Inspectors of Meat and Other Foods this subject – perhaps at a less detailed level – was part of the Sanitary Inspectors’ syllabus. For practical inspection of meat and fish we had to pay regular visits to Smithfield and, less frequently, to Billingsgate. To familiarise ourselves with the practice of our other duties we had to spend six or eight weeks with the Public Health Department of a London Borough, an Urban District and either a Rural District or, since there were few of these within easy reach of Battersea, an urban district with rural characteristics.
For all of these expeditions I purchased a second hand bicycle for 30 shillings (£1.50) I think and made my way by cycle. We were, of course, entitled to travelling expenses based on the second-class rail fare or bus fare. Thus, with official approval, I was able to supplement our just-adequate living allowance.
The three authorities at which I had my practical experience were Battersea Borough Council, Sutton and Cheam Urban District Council, and Esher Urban District Council. It was the last of these that had rural characteristics.
It was Battersea – possibly because it was on my doorstep and had some serious housing and environmental health problems – that I found most helpful. I made one or two good friends among the inspectors and public health staff and was told that when I passed my exam there would almost certainly be a job there for me if I wanted it. Sutton and Cheam, and Esher I remember less well. At the end of our time with them the Chief Sanitary Inspector had to submit a general report about us. The Chief at Esher showed me his report before he submitted it. I was rather surprised to find myself described as being ‘of the right type’ since he and the only Additional Sanitary Inspector were committed members of the Conservative Party and I had never made a secret of my – at that time – quite radical left-wing views!
There are only two of my fellow-students that I remember with any clarity. There was a black Jamaican, Denzil Smith, who had a problem getting his living allowance as, although he had served in the RAF, was not a British Citizen. I invited him to our home on one or two occasions. Then there was another E. Hall (he was actually E.W.E. Hall) who had been a glider pilot and had taken part in the D Day landings. He and I were, I think, usually regarded as the course’s most promising students.
I was able to do him a service after we had both qualified. I fairly quickly got a job with Westminster City Council – and immediately signed on for the course for the Meat and Other Foods Inspectors Certificate that we had been advised to acquire. He left his application too late. The course was full and he would have to wait another year. Before the course actually began I had applied for and obtained an appointment with the Gipping Rural District Council in Suffolk. I immediately wrote to him and suggested that he should write to the course organisers, signing himself simply E. Hall, and tell them that he had now moved from 14 Southolm Street, Battersea, SW11 to wherever he was living. This he did – and no-one was ever aware that he wasn’t the E. Hall who had originally signed on!
There were also two women students – former ATS members – with us at Battersea Polytechnic. I think that they both passed the exam. I do remember though that one bleak and drizzly November afternoon we visited a Horse Slaughterhouse in Plaistow (not one of London’s more cheerful areas!) and one of them fainted. Mind you, I had felt pretty queasy myself and I don’t think that I had been alone.
The exam was held in the autumn of 1947. I felt fairly confident that I had done well in the written papers, and I had been very lucky with the practical inspection. I had a simple ‘two rooms up and two down’ terraced house in a poor area (not unlike my own home at the time!) with minimal facilities. It was empty and I noticed that most, if not all, of the houses in the street were also empty. Could it be one of the Housing Act’s Clearance or Improvement Areas that we had learned all about? I thought it likely.
When I wrote my report I detailed all the house’s deficiencies and items of disrepair and added, ‘A cursory glance at other dwellings in the vicinity suggested that there should be further inspections made with a view to the declaration of a Clearance or Improvement Area’. That, I thought, was one up to me!
I was less happy with the oral examination. Always, I think, it is as you are walking away from that kind of ordeal that you think of the replies that you should have made to the examiner’s questions!
The exam results were sent to candidates by post, but a few days earlier they were pinned up in the entrance hall of the Royal Sanitary Institute’s (now the Royal Society of Health) headquarters in Westminster. On the fateful day Heather and I took the train from Battersea Park Station to Waterloo and walked the short distance to the RSI’s HQ. Hand in hand we nervously perused the posted notice. I had passed! I had been fairly confident of success – but you can never be sure until you see it in print.
I was now a qualified sanitary inspector and my next task was to get a job. Theoretically I was still employed by the Ipswich Corporation and was on unpaid leave of absence for military service. I could have gone back there, but Heather and I had made ourselves a home, however humble, in Battersea. I was determined not to relinquish it except to move into somewhere at least equally satisfactory.
Ipswich Council replied to say that they were unable to help with housing so I terminated my appointment with them and ‘signed on’ for unemployment pay though – as it turned out – I drew it for only a few weeks.
Heather and I scoured the local government press – ‘The Municipal Journal’, ‘Municipal Engineering’, ‘The Local Government Chronicle’ for sanitary inspectors’ jobs in the London area – or elsewhere if they were offering housing accommodation. I applied for an inspector’s job in St. Pancras and was granted an interview. I wasn’t successful. Someone with experience was appointed.
Then I applied for one with the City of Westminster. This time I really was successful. I was appointed as an ‘additional sanitary inspector’ with what was, I suppose, the wealthiest and most prestigious borough in London at what was, at the time, the princely salary of £450 a year including ‘London Weighting’. In 1939, when I had been last in the labour market, anyone with a salary of £250 or over was reckoned to be ‘comfortably off’. My dad had certainly never earned that amount. It was, of course, appreciably more than the government grant on which we had been living.
The office was in Charing Cross Road, not far from the Edith Cavell memorial. I became a commuter. Every morning I would catch the 8.30 a.m. from Battersea Park Station up to Waterloo, then the bus to Charing Cross Road. Westminster’s sanitary inspectors used to foregather every morning after they had done their ‘paper work’ at a nearby Lyons Corner House for coffee and a chat, before departing to their various districts to investigate complaints or make routine inspections of homes or businesses.
There was a very good staff canteen for Westminster City employees just down the road from our office where we would gather again for lunch. My sons and grandsons are, I think, quite astonished when I tell them that that brief period I spent with Westminster City Council was the only time after leaving the army that I wasn’t able to get home for lunch or, as I tend to call it in my working class fashion, dinner.
It was a circumstance that only lasted a couple of months. A few weeks after I had started work at Westminster an advert appeared in the Municipal Journal for an additional sanitary inspector with Gipping Rural District in Suffolk – an area, just outside Ipswich, that I knew well. Salary was only £390 but there was a car allowance and the offer of the tenancy of an unfurnished bungalow!
I consulted my Westminster colleagues. They advised me to ‘go for it’. I did, and was successful. At the end of December Heather and I departed from Battersea for ever and in the New Year of 1948 I took up my appointment with the Gipping Rural District Council (see Return to Suffolk 1948 to 1955).
By the end of 1947 I had been out of the army and married for just over eighteen months. Heather and I had spent most of that time in Battersea and, on the whole, it had been a very happy time.
We had paid regular visits, though not as regular as both our parents would have liked, to both Ipswich and Ilford. We also, one day, took a train to Newbury and visited my old great-aunts Aunt Tem and Aunt Annie (See Origins, My parents). Heather’s sister Margaret stayed with us for a weekend (we had a bed-settee in the sitting room) and so did one or two of Heather’s old school friends.
On summer evenings we often went into Battersea Park and I remember rowing Heather on the ornamental lake there.
We attended a local Methodist Church and Heather resumed Sunday School teaching, a task she thoroughly enjoyed. Although I had lost my Christian faith I went along with her and helped where I could. She was, I remember, a great success in the leading role in a Harvest Festival event staged by the Church, ‘The Lord of the Harvest’. On another occasion she was one of a number of Sunday School Teachers who took a group of their kids to Southend for the day by train. I waited for them at Clapham Common tube station on their return.
It wasn’t long after we moved to Suffolk that Heather was diagnosed as suffering from pulmonary and laryngeal tuberculosis. She was away from me for two years and in that time she had eight ribs removed on the left side of her body to collapse her left lung permanently and give it a chance to heal.
After that she gave birth to and brought up two fine sons and managed to live a more-or-less normal life for many years – for which I am profoundly grateful. She was always short of energy though, always liable to contract chest and throat infections, always needing to take an after-lunch rest, never able to do heavy shopping on her own or go anywhere for very long without me being there to give her a hand from time to time.
Possibly it is because it was just during those first eighteen or so months of our marriage that she was completely fit and ‘normal’ that their memory is so precious to me.
There were warning signs to which we should have paid more attention. The winter of 1946/’47 was a particularly bitter one with snow and ice on even Battersea’s streets for weeks. It was followed by a wet spring. Twice at least during that time she was stricken with what we, and the doctor, thought was ‘flu. She had a sky-high temperature every evening and a subnormal one every morning. She was hoarse and had a bronchitic cough. She sweated profusely at night and was completely devoid of energy. There were no antibiotics in those days and the doctor’s advice was the standard, ‘Keep her warm and in bed, give her plenty of warm drinks and some aspirin to get her temperature down’. Each time she seemed to recover but, thinking back, I realize that each time she was a little weaker. She should have had an X-ray examination. What a difference earlier diagnosis might have made!
Had her disease been diagnosed just a year or two earlier that disabling and energy-sapping operation might not have been necessary. Nor would she have had to have it had she developed the disease a year or two later. The continuing development of antibiotics made thoracoplasty operations obsolete.
These thoughts come unbidden into my head. There really is no point though in speculating about what might have been, had circumstances been just a little different.
Heather lived till she was eighty-two, outliving all her ‘fitter’ cousins. We had 60 happy years of marriage, two fine sons, three grandchildren of whom she was immensely proud and – as a bonus – loving nieces and a nephew whom Heather lived to see have wonderful and loving children of their own. Although I did, over the years, recover my Christian faith I have often wished, and still wish, that my faith were as strong and unshakeable as hers was.
I have typed those last few paragraphs with difficulty. I have been on my own now for over two years – and I still miss her more than I can say.
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Still in the Army 1945 - 1946
Most accounts of life in Britain in the years immediately following World War II describe them as years of deprivation, of continued rationing and shortages amid an atmosphere of discontent and gloom.
Well, Heather and I lived through them and that is certainly not how we saw them. To us they were years of happiness and hope for the future. The war, which had brought us together but had blighted six years of our lives, was over. We both considered ourselves to be democratic socialists and we both voted Labour in that first exciting post-war election. Although I was twenty-four, it was my very first opportunity to vote and I was proud to be one of the returning ex-servicemen who had cast out the old and brought in a new government. It was, we fondly imagined, a government that would be taking the first steps towards building ‘Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land’, working towards a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor at home, and towards a world in which, as Alfred Lord Tennyson had prophesied a century earlier:
‘The war-drum throbs no more and the battle flags are furled,
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’
How innocent, how naïve, how idealistic we were! Sixty-five years after that election Britain is engaged in two un-winnable wars, the gap between the rich and poor is wider than it has ever been, and the mere idea of a Federal Europe, never mind a Federal World, evokes shock and horror! And that is after over ten years of government by politicians who consider themselves to be the heirs of Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, Clem Attlee, and Nye Bevan!
But to begin at the beginning. I arrived at my home in Ipswich’s Kensington Road sometime after 10.00 p.m. on 18th May 1945 – my 24th birthday! I had walked all the way from Ipswich Station. This was long before the days of mobile or even of the large scale installation of terrestrial phones. However I had managed to phone a message to a friendly local shop keeper. He had passed on to my mother the news that I was safe and back in England.
She had no idea when I would be home but had stayed up beyond her usual bedtime ‘just in case’. She would have been 57 at the time and had been a widow since November 1939. She had good friends and neighbours but no relatives closer than London. It is only now, as a widower myself, that I appreciate how lonely she must have been throughout the war years. Worrying about my fate in the turmoil at the end of the war (there wouldn’t have been any letters from Germany for a couple of months) she had completely lost her voice – but had recovered it when she had heard that I was safe and on my way home.
It was a Friday evening. The following morning I caught the train to Ilford ‘to bring Heather back to Ipswich for a few days’. I can’t remember whether I had been able to let her know that I was safely back in England, but she certainly didn’t know that I was home and on my way to met her. I knew her address of course – 29 Woodville Gardens, Barkingside, Ilford. I had been there a few times too – but always I had met Heather at either Liverpool Street or Ilford Station and she had taken me there. The last time had been at least four years earlier and I couldn’t remember the bus, where we had caught it, or where we had got off.
I made my way from the train into the busy street. The area round Ilford Station was not, I imagine, quite so busy then as it is now – but there was much more of a bustle than I had experienced for several years! I spotted several bus stops and made my way towards them. I would have to ask someone which was the right bus. There though, waiting at one of the bus stops were Heather and her Mum. They had been on a shopping expedition and were on their way home! If I had read about such a coincidence in a novel I’d have dismissed it as unbelievable.
I can’t remember much detail about the next few days. I know that Heather and I – despite the way in which we had both ‘grown up’ during the past four years of separation – felt about each other as we had before. The magic was still there. I bought an engagement ring, a solitary diamond in a square setting and slipped it onto her finger. No – I don’t remember asking her to marry me. I think that we had both taken it for granted.
I took her back with me to Ipswich. She and my mother had corresponded during the war years and she had paid one or two visits to Ipswich. We all three went to 11.00 a.m. Choral Eucharist at St. Thomas’ Church on the Sunday. It was a new vicar whom I didn’t know. I had lost the faith of my childhood and youth though I was still prepared to ‘go through the motions’. I don’t think that I went to St Thomas more than another once or twice before my mother’s funeral in 1978.
I had a pass for six weeks leave with a ration book giving me double rations. Heather and I took a fortnight’s holiday in Gloucestershire, with the folk to whom Heather had been finally evacuated in 1940. No – we didn’t share a bedroom. We each had our own bedroom – and stayed in it! This was 1945, not 2008. ‘Nice girls’ didn’t do that sort of thing even when engaged, and ‘decent chaps’ didn’t expect them to!
I have never been the most observant of people (I should never have been a public health inspector!) but it was at about that time that I realized that there was a certain tension between my mother and Heather. They got on well enough together but each was beginning to resent the time that I spent with the other. It was a difficult situation for me and I hope that I coped with it as well as possible. Nowadays I think – I hope – that I’m pretty sensitive towards other people’s feelings but I have an idea that I may not have been then.
Atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As had been agreed between Churchill, Truman and Stalin, exactly three months after VE Day the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the Red Army advanced into Japanese occupied Manchuria. Japan surrendered and World War II came to an end. The return of POWs of the Japanese with their horrifying stories made me realize how fortunate I had been to have served in North Africa and been imprisoned by Europeans. Even my very worst experiences in that large prison camp in northern Italy were far better than those of prisoners of the Japanese.
I learned too, for the first time, of Nazi Germany’s death camps. Auschwitz was in Poland but not all that far from Zittau. How easy it would have been for that huge shower chamber at Stalag IVb (see ‘Arbeitskommando’) to have been converted into a gas chamber!
My six weeks leave was extended for a further six weeks. Surely they would discharge me now. They wouldn’t call me up again after all that time.
But they did. One morning there was an OHMS envelope on my mother’s front doormat. It contained a railway warrant and orders for me to report to Billingshurst in Sussex within 48 hours.
Here the army did its best to turn us returned prisoners into British soldiers again. POWs returned from the Far East were given an immediate discharge. They deserved and thoroughly needed it. We ex-European POWs were given a thorough medical examination. Those graded below A1 were given an immediate discharge. The rest of us had to ‘soldier on’. I was found to be physically fitter than I had ever been. I made a half-hearted attempt to ‘work my ticket’ (out of the Army) on my nerves which, I assured the Medical Officer, ‘were in a terrible state’. He looked me up and down, slapped me on the back and said ‘You’re a young man. You’ll soon grow out of that’.
We were shown propaganda war films to teach us ‘how we won the war’. In those days it was still acceptable to acknowledge the enormous contribution that the people of the Soviet Union had made to that victory. I’d bet that today there are thousands of Brits who don’t even realize that ‘the Russians’ were ‘on our side’. I remember being particularly impressed with a film, made at the time, of the siege and eventual relief of Leningrad. Now, of course, it has reverted to its Tsarist name of St. Petersburg.
We did drills and had fitness tests – running a mile, jumping, hauling oneself up on parallel bars and so on. These were all things that I had never been any good at. Despite having, as a POW only a couple of months earlier, been doing the very heaviest physical work, I had the greatest difficulty passing that ‘fitness’ test!
We also had a general knowledge, ‘intelligence’, and manual skills test. I found the general knowledge and the ‘intelligence’ tests very easy, but I failed dismally to reassemble a bicycle pump that had been taken to pieces and placed in front of me!
Eventually we were pronounced to be ‘soldiers again’ and were despatched to Woolwich RA Depot, that great ‘human warehouse’ for the Royal Artillery. During the next few weeks I discovered how relatively easy it was to get to Ilford from Woolwich and to see Heather when I had some time off; through the pedestrian tunnel under the Thames and then on a 101 bus into Ilford and another bus (I had learnt which one by that time) to take me to Barkingside.
We began to plan our wedding. It was to be immediately I was discharged from the Army. We had all been given a ‘Demob Group Number’ that depended upon the length of wartime service and the age of the serviceman. I had the maximum amount of service – from 2nd September 1939 – but was still only 24 years old. My Demob Group was therefore No. 28 and, at the speed that releases were taking place it looked as though my group would be dealt with about mid-March 1946.
We decided to play safe and fix the date for late April. Heather’s Mum’s birthday was on 27th April which in 1946 was the Saturday after Easter. So that was the date on which we decided. The wedding was to be at the local Methodist Church, where Heather had been a Sunday School teacher and active member, with a (strictly teetotal!) reception in the church hall afterwards. I was happy enough with whatever made Heather happy. Someone Heather’s mum knew was going to make her wedding dress.
Then came a bombshell! On parade one morning it was announced that we were all being posted to Catterick – a bleak RA Depot in Yorkshire about which we had heard nothing good. There was however one local posting, for just two men. Men whose homes were local were asked to step forward. Well, my fiancées home was almost local so I joined the twenty or so who came forward? Who had had office experience and could use a typewriter? My typing was strictly of the ‘hunt and peck’ school but that didn’t stop me from being one of the six remaining. Finally – who had had any first aid, medical or nursing experience? Well, as I explained, I had worked in a large public health department with school, TB and Child Welfare Clinics, and was training for a post in the field of public health. I didn’t stress that I had really just been the office boy!
That did the trick. One other chap and myself were appointed medical orderlies to ‘K’ Battery (a reserve battery) RA and to the Boys’ Battery. We had to get our kit and move into a medical centre, just up the road from the depot, forthwith.
It was a little bungalow building, near the headquarters of the Boys’ Battery RA – a unit composed of 14 to 18 year-olds destined for a military career who, at 14, had ‘signed on’ to serve seven years as regular soldiers after they had been ‘mustered’ into the adult army at 18. ‘K’ Battery RA was nearby.
Our purpose was really diagnostic, the dispensing of pills and carrying out treatments for minor ailments, and the issue of ‘sick notes’. Any hint of anything really serious and the patient was bustled away promptly to ‘The Royal Herbert’ Military Hospital.
It was the kids of the Boys’ Battery that I remember best. Some were from very posh ‘army families’ – the sons of Majors and Colonels who wanted them to experience life at the bottom of the pile, though later on they would no doubt give them a helping hand to get to the top. Others came from the very poorest of poor backgrounds. They all had to address us lowly medical orderlies as ‘sir’, a novel and somewhat disquieting experience for me.
Most of them were as tough as old boots and it was easy to forget that they were very young and that some of them were homesick, frightened and vulnerable. I remember very well one kid who had a blister on his heel that I had to put a plaster on. When he took his boot and sock off I said, possibly a little crossly, ‘You might have tried washing your feet before you came here!’ and he burst into tears. Another, from a well-to-do family, was afraid that he had caught something unpleasant after an experimental evening out with a less-than-virtuous local girl. ‘What will Mum and Dad say, and Barbara (the approved girl friend and captain of the hockey team in a good girls’ school) will never speak to me again’. We packed him off to the Royal Herbert for diagnosis and, as our Medical Officer had thought, he was suffering from nothing worse than a guilty conscience.
All the boys had to learn to blow the trumpet – and it must be said that they got to be very good at it. From time to time they developed cracked, swollen or damaged lips and one of the most common medical certificates issued was ‘excused sounding, seven days’.
The other orderly and I thought highly of our Medical Officer who, as a British Army officer, was very unusual indeed. His name was Captain Boomla and he was a Parsee. His sister, so he told us, was a member of the Indian National Congress and he himself was a fervent Indian Nationalist with very left-wing views. He also had a sense of humour
I remember once a gunner from ‘K’ Battery, clearly hoping for a day or two off duty, reported sick with a bad cold. ‘You know Smith’, said Captain Boomla, ‘If I had been your doctor in civvy street, you wouldn’t have come to see me with this, would you?’ ‘Too right I wouldn’t have sir,’ came the reply. ‘I’d have stayed in bed and sent for you!’
With any other medical officer such an ‘insolent’ reply would have evoked an explosion of wrath. Captain Boomla simply smiled and said ‘Yes, I believe you would’ adding to me ‘write out a chit for two days light duty and give him enough aspirin for a couple of days’. Light Duty, which could include such tedious chores as potato peeling was not what had been hoped for.
Captain Boomla usually read ‘The Daily Worker’, the Communist Party’s daily paper and would come into the medical centre with it ostentatiously tucked under his arm. One morning he turned up with ‘The Times’ instead. ‘You haven’t changed your political allegiance have you sir?’ we asked him rather anxiously. ‘No, no, nothing like that’, he replied, ‘It is just that I have an interview with the Colonel this morning – and one must always try to impress the natives!’
It was at about that time that I too was summoned to an interview with the Colonel. I did my best to make myself ‘look soldierly’. I tapped on the door of his office in some trepidation. What could possibly have brought me to his august attention? ‘How long have you been in the army?’ he asked. ‘Since the beginning sir; since 2nd September 1939’. ‘Well’, he went on, ‘there’s now a splendid opportunity for you. As a result of those tests you had back in Billingshurst it has been decided that you are potential officer material. Captain Boomla agrees and I can send you off to an officer training unit within a week. You would, of course, have to sign on for another three years army service first’.
Was it, I wondered, my success with the general knowledge and ‘intelligence’ tests that had marked me as ‘a potential officer’ – or my total inability to perform a simple practical task? Four or five years earlier it would have been an opportunity I would have seized with both hands. Now though, it was too late. ‘Thank you sir – but no thank you’, I replied. ‘I am due for release in another three or four months and I have a civilian career planned.’ It was, I am inclined to think, the reply that he had expected. He simply wished me well and dismissed me.
Did I make a wrong choice on that occasion? I have wondered that from time to time. I don’t think so. I have always hated either giving orders or taking them and I couldn’t imagine myself at ease in an officers’ mess – or Heather worrying about what was, and what was not, the right course of action for an ‘officer’s lady’. There was always the real risk (I had seen it happen to other young hopefuls) of being rejected by the final selection board and, as they used to put it; being ‘RTU’d from WOSB, LMF’ (Returned to Unit from War Office Selection Board, lack of moral fibre) – and, I would have already signed on for another three years!
Always the threat of a distant posting threatened us. I had dropped into a routine of regular visits to London or to Ilford to see Heather – and occasional ones to Ipswich. I didn’t want to see any changes in that comfortable routine. I should, I now realize, have made the effort to visit my mother more frequently but the young are thoughtless and selfish – and I was still young.
‘Operation Python’ reared its ugly head. This was an army scheme in which returned POWs in high numbered ‘demob groups’ were posted to Palestine to reinforce the troops who were already there, attempting to keep the peace between Arabs and Jews and to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants. My group was 28, just low enough to escape ‘Python’ but it wasn’t till after Christmas that I felt really safe from its threat.
Our medical centre closed down for several days over Christmas. I think that the ‘Royal Herbert’ Hospital provided emergency cover. The Woolwich Garrison was severely depleted. All the boys from the Boys Battery who had homes to go to (a few hadn’t) were granted leave. So were most of ‘K’ Battery and the other troops in the garrison.
I spent the holiday in Ilford and my mother came up from Ipswich and stayed with Heather’s parents over the holiday. My mother had my usual room and bed and I slept on the settee in the sitting room. It was the first Christmas that I had been able to spend ‘at home’ since 1939 and I had slept in many worse places during the intervening years!
I have very vague memories of a happy time. One afternoon – on Boxing Day perhaps – we all went to see Judy Garland in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. Everybody else thoroughly enjoyed it but it left me depressed. It seemed to me that its final message was that everything is an illusion. At that time I had lost my formerly strong religious faith and was inclined to agree.
In the New Year I and the other medical orderly were posted away from Woolwich – but not far away. ‘K’ Battery was sent to Sunningdale, near Aldershot and we went with them. We had quite comfortable accommodation in a Nissen Hut at one end of which was our medical treatment room and at the other our living and sleeping quarters.
Our days (but not, I hasten to add, our nights!) were sometimes enlivened by the presence of two young ATS (or had they become WRAC by that time?) ambulance drivers. They were stationed at Aldershot where Princess Elizabeth had joined the FANY (Field Ambulance Nursing Yeomanry) and was learning the ropes. All the young subalterns were, so they said, competing for the privilege of helping her learn to drive an ambulance. They also amused us with their accounts of women’s army dress and discipline. It appears that they were required at all times to wear two pairs of underpants – fairly brief white knickers underneath and voluminous khaki ‘passion killers’ over them. The latter were universally hated and from time to time the NCOs would order girls to raise their uniform skirts to check that they had them on! Anyone not wearing the khaki over-pants was charged with ‘being indecently dressed’!
Captain Boomla stayed with the Boys’ Battery in Woolwich. Our new medical officer was a Captain Charles de Gruchy whose home, I believe, was in Chelmsford. He wasn’t quite as exciting as Captain Boomla but was friendly and approachable. Most of our casualties were ‘flu and feverish colds (‘bed rest and aspirin’), scabies (‘apply gentian violet to affected areas’), cuts and grazes (acriflavine dressing) and wax in the ears. For this we used to drip hydrogen peroxide into the affected ear. There would be a furious fizzing – and hearing would be miraculously restored. Nurses today are horrified when I tell them of that treatment. I can only say that it worked and that there seemed to be no ill-effects – but perhaps we were lucky.
We also had a few cases of VD or suspected VD. I think that, in this euphemism obsessed age, they are called ‘social diseases’ but in those days we preferred to call a spade a spade. This was, of course, before the age of antibiotics. Such cases were whisked off to military hospital from which we received horrifying reports of the treatment they were given there.
I still managed to get to London and to Ilford regularly. Sometimes I would be able to meet Heather at her office near the British museum and go home with her. Our wedding plans were maturing. The wedding dress was ready for fitting. My fourteen year old cousin Sheila, and Heather’s twelve year old sister Margaret were to be bridesmaids. My nearest friend, whom I would have liked to be best man, was still serving in India. Alex Innes, a young sanitary inspector from Ipswich, who had been with me in that prison camp in Northern Italy, stood in for him. He was a member of the Salvation Army, one of my few acquaintances who could be depended upon to behave himself at a ‘dry’ wedding reception. We would spend the first night of our married life in London’s Cumberland Hotel and then have a fortnight’s honeymoon in Dawlish, Devon.
A last minute hitch! – the speed with which the Demob Groups were dealt with slowed down. Would I be out of the army before 27th April? My originally expected discharge date in mid-March came and went. I made an appointment to see the Army Welfare Officer. He wanted to know why we were in a hurry? ‘Is your fiancée expecting?’ he asked. I explained that we had been waiting to get married for seven years and yes, she was expecting – she was expecting to get married on 27th April! He promised to do what he could but didn’t leave me feeling very hopeful.
Perhaps though, he was more helpful than I had imagined. I was discharged on the very first day of Group 28 releases – 23rd April (St. George’s Day) 1946. A party of those of us to be discharged were driven down to the ‘Demob Centre’ in Guildford. Here I was issued with my ‘demob suit’ – a choice between a chalk-stripe suit or a sports jacket and grey flannel slacks. I chose the latter. We kept the army uniform we were wearing and were allowed to retain our army great-coats for £1. It was a bargain at that price and I wore mine in cold weather for many years!
I think that there must also have been another medical to check that we were fit at the time of discharge and a lot of form filling and name signing, but I don’t remember any of it. I was just eager to get out.
We were, I remember, given a railway warrant to any town that we chose. I was, of course, going home to Ipswich but I remembered that I was going on my honeymoon to Dawlish in less than a week. I had the Warrant made out to Dawlish and paid my own fare home from Liverpool Street to Ipswich!
It was just four days from my wedding day! The time passed in a daze. Once again I feel sure that I didn’t appreciate what a stressful and difficult time it must have been for my mother. She had got me back only to lose me again almost at once. I was to be married in uniform but I went, in civvies, to a posh outfitter in Ipswich and bought a khaki silk shirt and tie clearly labelled, ‘For sale only to Officers of HM Forces’. Our wedding might not be ‘toppers and tails’ but I did want to look my best for my bride.
Alex Innes, my best man, had a car and had promised to pick me up to catch an early train to Ilford. He and my mother would come up separately on a later train. He didn’t turn up exactly when he had promised and, as usual in such circumstances, I panicked! I started out to walk to the station and was three quarters of the way there before he overtook me, picked me up and got me to the station in plenty of time to catch the train!
Heather’s Uncle George and Aunt Daisy met me at Ilford Station and drove me to their home in Wanstead. I have an idea that later, on our way to the church, we looked in at 21 Woodville Gardens, Ilford, to make sure all was well there. I wasn’t of course allowed to see the bride.
At the church I had a brief and friendly word with the Minister. I noticed that he didn’t seem keen to get too close to me – and then I realized, Heather’s Uncle George had given me a large scotch ‘to steady my nerves’ and the Methodist Minister Rev. David Parton was a life-long teetotaller! My best man was already in place. I settled at his side after making sure that he had the ring safely in his possession.
At last, the murmur of conversation in the church ceased, the organist launched into the Wedding March and the bride, on her father’s arm and with her bridesmaids in train came down the aisle to us. Heather was all that I had dreamed of, and more. She had a most beautiful snowy-white wedding dress with head-dress and veil held in place by a diamante tiara. She carried an enormous bouquet of fragrant natural flowers.
I don’t remember much about the service, the photographs and the reception afterwards. I do remember Heather slipping away to the church vestry to change from her wedding dress into a no-less-becoming going-away outfit. I remember too the arrival of the taxi that was speed us away from an event for which we had patiently waited for seven years, towards the beginning of our life together in a marriage that was to endure for sixty years.
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Most accounts of life in Britain in the years immediately following World War II describe them as years of deprivation, of continued rationing and shortages amid an atmosphere of discontent and gloom.
Well, Heather and I lived through them and that is certainly not how we saw them. To us they were years of happiness and hope for the future. The war, which had brought us together but had blighted six years of our lives, was over. We both considered ourselves to be democratic socialists and we both voted Labour in that first exciting post-war election. Although I was twenty-four, it was my very first opportunity to vote and I was proud to be one of the returning ex-servicemen who had cast out the old and brought in a new government. It was, we fondly imagined, a government that would be taking the first steps towards building ‘Jerusalem, in England’s green and pleasant land’, working towards a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor at home, and towards a world in which, as Alfred Lord Tennyson had prophesied a century earlier:
‘The war-drum throbs no more and the battle flags are furled,
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’
How innocent, how naïve, how idealistic we were! Sixty-five years after that election Britain is engaged in two un-winnable wars, the gap between the rich and poor is wider than it has ever been, and the mere idea of a Federal Europe, never mind a Federal World, evokes shock and horror! And that is after over ten years of government by politicians who consider themselves to be the heirs of Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, Clem Attlee, and Nye Bevan!
But to begin at the beginning. I arrived at my home in Ipswich’s Kensington Road sometime after 10.00 p.m. on 18th May 1945 – my 24th birthday! I had walked all the way from Ipswich Station. This was long before the days of mobile or even of the large scale installation of terrestrial phones. However I had managed to phone a message to a friendly local shop keeper. He had passed on to my mother the news that I was safe and back in England.
She had no idea when I would be home but had stayed up beyond her usual bedtime ‘just in case’. She would have been 57 at the time and had been a widow since November 1939. She had good friends and neighbours but no relatives closer than London. It is only now, as a widower myself, that I appreciate how lonely she must have been throughout the war years. Worrying about my fate in the turmoil at the end of the war (there wouldn’t have been any letters from Germany for a couple of months) she had completely lost her voice – but had recovered it when she had heard that I was safe and on my way home.
It was a Friday evening. The following morning I caught the train to Ilford ‘to bring Heather back to Ipswich for a few days’. I can’t remember whether I had been able to let her know that I was safely back in England, but she certainly didn’t know that I was home and on my way to met her. I knew her address of course – 29 Woodville Gardens, Barkingside, Ilford. I had been there a few times too – but always I had met Heather at either Liverpool Street or Ilford Station and she had taken me there. The last time had been at least four years earlier and I couldn’t remember the bus, where we had caught it, or where we had got off.
I made my way from the train into the busy street. The area round Ilford Station was not, I imagine, quite so busy then as it is now – but there was much more of a bustle than I had experienced for several years! I spotted several bus stops and made my way towards them. I would have to ask someone which was the right bus. There though, waiting at one of the bus stops were Heather and her Mum. They had been on a shopping expedition and were on their way home! If I had read about such a coincidence in a novel I’d have dismissed it as unbelievable.
I can’t remember much detail about the next few days. I know that Heather and I – despite the way in which we had both ‘grown up’ during the past four years of separation – felt about each other as we had before. The magic was still there. I bought an engagement ring, a solitary diamond in a square setting and slipped it onto her finger. No – I don’t remember asking her to marry me. I think that we had both taken it for granted.
I took her back with me to Ipswich. She and my mother had corresponded during the war years and she had paid one or two visits to Ipswich. We all three went to 11.00 a.m. Choral Eucharist at St. Thomas’ Church on the Sunday. It was a new vicar whom I didn’t know. I had lost the faith of my childhood and youth though I was still prepared to ‘go through the motions’. I don’t think that I went to St Thomas more than another once or twice before my mother’s funeral in 1978.
I had a pass for six weeks leave with a ration book giving me double rations. Heather and I took a fortnight’s holiday in Gloucestershire, with the folk to whom Heather had been finally evacuated in 1940. No – we didn’t share a bedroom. We each had our own bedroom – and stayed in it! This was 1945, not 2008. ‘Nice girls’ didn’t do that sort of thing even when engaged, and ‘decent chaps’ didn’t expect them to!
I have never been the most observant of people (I should never have been a public health inspector!) but it was at about that time that I realized that there was a certain tension between my mother and Heather. They got on well enough together but each was beginning to resent the time that I spent with the other. It was a difficult situation for me and I hope that I coped with it as well as possible. Nowadays I think – I hope – that I’m pretty sensitive towards other people’s feelings but I have an idea that I may not have been then.
Atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As had been agreed between Churchill, Truman and Stalin, exactly three months after VE Day the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the Red Army advanced into Japanese occupied Manchuria. Japan surrendered and World War II came to an end. The return of POWs of the Japanese with their horrifying stories made me realize how fortunate I had been to have served in North Africa and been imprisoned by Europeans. Even my very worst experiences in that large prison camp in northern Italy were far better than those of prisoners of the Japanese.
I learned too, for the first time, of Nazi Germany’s death camps. Auschwitz was in Poland but not all that far from Zittau. How easy it would have been for that huge shower chamber at Stalag IVb (see ‘Arbeitskommando’) to have been converted into a gas chamber!
My six weeks leave was extended for a further six weeks. Surely they would discharge me now. They wouldn’t call me up again after all that time.
But they did. One morning there was an OHMS envelope on my mother’s front doormat. It contained a railway warrant and orders for me to report to Billingshurst in Sussex within 48 hours.
Here the army did its best to turn us returned prisoners into British soldiers again. POWs returned from the Far East were given an immediate discharge. They deserved and thoroughly needed it. We ex-European POWs were given a thorough medical examination. Those graded below A1 were given an immediate discharge. The rest of us had to ‘soldier on’. I was found to be physically fitter than I had ever been. I made a half-hearted attempt to ‘work my ticket’ (out of the Army) on my nerves which, I assured the Medical Officer, ‘were in a terrible state’. He looked me up and down, slapped me on the back and said ‘You’re a young man. You’ll soon grow out of that’.
We were shown propaganda war films to teach us ‘how we won the war’. In those days it was still acceptable to acknowledge the enormous contribution that the people of the Soviet Union had made to that victory. I’d bet that today there are thousands of Brits who don’t even realize that ‘the Russians’ were ‘on our side’. I remember being particularly impressed with a film, made at the time, of the siege and eventual relief of Leningrad. Now, of course, it has reverted to its Tsarist name of St. Petersburg.
We did drills and had fitness tests – running a mile, jumping, hauling oneself up on parallel bars and so on. These were all things that I had never been any good at. Despite having, as a POW only a couple of months earlier, been doing the very heaviest physical work, I had the greatest difficulty passing that ‘fitness’ test!
We also had a general knowledge, ‘intelligence’, and manual skills test. I found the general knowledge and the ‘intelligence’ tests very easy, but I failed dismally to reassemble a bicycle pump that had been taken to pieces and placed in front of me!
Eventually we were pronounced to be ‘soldiers again’ and were despatched to Woolwich RA Depot, that great ‘human warehouse’ for the Royal Artillery. During the next few weeks I discovered how relatively easy it was to get to Ilford from Woolwich and to see Heather when I had some time off; through the pedestrian tunnel under the Thames and then on a 101 bus into Ilford and another bus (I had learnt which one by that time) to take me to Barkingside.
We began to plan our wedding. It was to be immediately I was discharged from the Army. We had all been given a ‘Demob Group Number’ that depended upon the length of wartime service and the age of the serviceman. I had the maximum amount of service – from 2nd September 1939 – but was still only 24 years old. My Demob Group was therefore No. 28 and, at the speed that releases were taking place it looked as though my group would be dealt with about mid-March 1946.
We decided to play safe and fix the date for late April. Heather’s Mum’s birthday was on 27th April which in 1946 was the Saturday after Easter. So that was the date on which we decided. The wedding was to be at the local Methodist Church, where Heather had been a Sunday School teacher and active member, with a (strictly teetotal!) reception in the church hall afterwards. I was happy enough with whatever made Heather happy. Someone Heather’s mum knew was going to make her wedding dress.
Then came a bombshell! On parade one morning it was announced that we were all being posted to Catterick – a bleak RA Depot in Yorkshire about which we had heard nothing good. There was however one local posting, for just two men. Men whose homes were local were asked to step forward. Well, my fiancées home was almost local so I joined the twenty or so who came forward? Who had had office experience and could use a typewriter? My typing was strictly of the ‘hunt and peck’ school but that didn’t stop me from being one of the six remaining. Finally – who had had any first aid, medical or nursing experience? Well, as I explained, I had worked in a large public health department with school, TB and Child Welfare Clinics, and was training for a post in the field of public health. I didn’t stress that I had really just been the office boy!
That did the trick. One other chap and myself were appointed medical orderlies to ‘K’ Battery (a reserve battery) RA and to the Boys’ Battery. We had to get our kit and move into a medical centre, just up the road from the depot, forthwith.
It was a little bungalow building, near the headquarters of the Boys’ Battery RA – a unit composed of 14 to 18 year-olds destined for a military career who, at 14, had ‘signed on’ to serve seven years as regular soldiers after they had been ‘mustered’ into the adult army at 18. ‘K’ Battery RA was nearby.
Our purpose was really diagnostic, the dispensing of pills and carrying out treatments for minor ailments, and the issue of ‘sick notes’. Any hint of anything really serious and the patient was bustled away promptly to ‘The Royal Herbert’ Military Hospital.
It was the kids of the Boys’ Battery that I remember best. Some were from very posh ‘army families’ – the sons of Majors and Colonels who wanted them to experience life at the bottom of the pile, though later on they would no doubt give them a helping hand to get to the top. Others came from the very poorest of poor backgrounds. They all had to address us lowly medical orderlies as ‘sir’, a novel and somewhat disquieting experience for me.
Most of them were as tough as old boots and it was easy to forget that they were very young and that some of them were homesick, frightened and vulnerable. I remember very well one kid who had a blister on his heel that I had to put a plaster on. When he took his boot and sock off I said, possibly a little crossly, ‘You might have tried washing your feet before you came here!’ and he burst into tears. Another, from a well-to-do family, was afraid that he had caught something unpleasant after an experimental evening out with a less-than-virtuous local girl. ‘What will Mum and Dad say, and Barbara (the approved girl friend and captain of the hockey team in a good girls’ school) will never speak to me again’. We packed him off to the Royal Herbert for diagnosis and, as our Medical Officer had thought, he was suffering from nothing worse than a guilty conscience.
All the boys had to learn to blow the trumpet – and it must be said that they got to be very good at it. From time to time they developed cracked, swollen or damaged lips and one of the most common medical certificates issued was ‘excused sounding, seven days’.
The other orderly and I thought highly of our Medical Officer who, as a British Army officer, was very unusual indeed. His name was Captain Boomla and he was a Parsee. His sister, so he told us, was a member of the Indian National Congress and he himself was a fervent Indian Nationalist with very left-wing views. He also had a sense of humour
I remember once a gunner from ‘K’ Battery, clearly hoping for a day or two off duty, reported sick with a bad cold. ‘You know Smith’, said Captain Boomla, ‘If I had been your doctor in civvy street, you wouldn’t have come to see me with this, would you?’ ‘Too right I wouldn’t have sir,’ came the reply. ‘I’d have stayed in bed and sent for you!’
With any other medical officer such an ‘insolent’ reply would have evoked an explosion of wrath. Captain Boomla simply smiled and said ‘Yes, I believe you would’ adding to me ‘write out a chit for two days light duty and give him enough aspirin for a couple of days’. Light Duty, which could include such tedious chores as potato peeling was not what had been hoped for.
Captain Boomla usually read ‘The Daily Worker’, the Communist Party’s daily paper and would come into the medical centre with it ostentatiously tucked under his arm. One morning he turned up with ‘The Times’ instead. ‘You haven’t changed your political allegiance have you sir?’ we asked him rather anxiously. ‘No, no, nothing like that’, he replied, ‘It is just that I have an interview with the Colonel this morning – and one must always try to impress the natives!’
It was at about that time that I too was summoned to an interview with the Colonel. I did my best to make myself ‘look soldierly’. I tapped on the door of his office in some trepidation. What could possibly have brought me to his august attention? ‘How long have you been in the army?’ he asked. ‘Since the beginning sir; since 2nd September 1939’. ‘Well’, he went on, ‘there’s now a splendid opportunity for you. As a result of those tests you had back in Billingshurst it has been decided that you are potential officer material. Captain Boomla agrees and I can send you off to an officer training unit within a week. You would, of course, have to sign on for another three years army service first’.
Was it, I wondered, my success with the general knowledge and ‘intelligence’ tests that had marked me as ‘a potential officer’ – or my total inability to perform a simple practical task? Four or five years earlier it would have been an opportunity I would have seized with both hands. Now though, it was too late. ‘Thank you sir – but no thank you’, I replied. ‘I am due for release in another three or four months and I have a civilian career planned.’ It was, I am inclined to think, the reply that he had expected. He simply wished me well and dismissed me.
Did I make a wrong choice on that occasion? I have wondered that from time to time. I don’t think so. I have always hated either giving orders or taking them and I couldn’t imagine myself at ease in an officers’ mess – or Heather worrying about what was, and what was not, the right course of action for an ‘officer’s lady’. There was always the real risk (I had seen it happen to other young hopefuls) of being rejected by the final selection board and, as they used to put it; being ‘RTU’d from WOSB, LMF’ (Returned to Unit from War Office Selection Board, lack of moral fibre) – and, I would have already signed on for another three years!
Always the threat of a distant posting threatened us. I had dropped into a routine of regular visits to London or to Ilford to see Heather – and occasional ones to Ipswich. I didn’t want to see any changes in that comfortable routine. I should, I now realize, have made the effort to visit my mother more frequently but the young are thoughtless and selfish – and I was still young.
‘Operation Python’ reared its ugly head. This was an army scheme in which returned POWs in high numbered ‘demob groups’ were posted to Palestine to reinforce the troops who were already there, attempting to keep the peace between Arabs and Jews and to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants. My group was 28, just low enough to escape ‘Python’ but it wasn’t till after Christmas that I felt really safe from its threat.
Our medical centre closed down for several days over Christmas. I think that the ‘Royal Herbert’ Hospital provided emergency cover. The Woolwich Garrison was severely depleted. All the boys from the Boys Battery who had homes to go to (a few hadn’t) were granted leave. So were most of ‘K’ Battery and the other troops in the garrison.
I spent the holiday in Ilford and my mother came up from Ipswich and stayed with Heather’s parents over the holiday. My mother had my usual room and bed and I slept on the settee in the sitting room. It was the first Christmas that I had been able to spend ‘at home’ since 1939 and I had slept in many worse places during the intervening years!
I have very vague memories of a happy time. One afternoon – on Boxing Day perhaps – we all went to see Judy Garland in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. Everybody else thoroughly enjoyed it but it left me depressed. It seemed to me that its final message was that everything is an illusion. At that time I had lost my formerly strong religious faith and was inclined to agree.
In the New Year I and the other medical orderly were posted away from Woolwich – but not far away. ‘K’ Battery was sent to Sunningdale, near Aldershot and we went with them. We had quite comfortable accommodation in a Nissen Hut at one end of which was our medical treatment room and at the other our living and sleeping quarters.
Our days (but not, I hasten to add, our nights!) were sometimes enlivened by the presence of two young ATS (or had they become WRAC by that time?) ambulance drivers. They were stationed at Aldershot where Princess Elizabeth had joined the FANY (Field Ambulance Nursing Yeomanry) and was learning the ropes. All the young subalterns were, so they said, competing for the privilege of helping her learn to drive an ambulance. They also amused us with their accounts of women’s army dress and discipline. It appears that they were required at all times to wear two pairs of underpants – fairly brief white knickers underneath and voluminous khaki ‘passion killers’ over them. The latter were universally hated and from time to time the NCOs would order girls to raise their uniform skirts to check that they had them on! Anyone not wearing the khaki over-pants was charged with ‘being indecently dressed’!
Captain Boomla stayed with the Boys’ Battery in Woolwich. Our new medical officer was a Captain Charles de Gruchy whose home, I believe, was in Chelmsford. He wasn’t quite as exciting as Captain Boomla but was friendly and approachable. Most of our casualties were ‘flu and feverish colds (‘bed rest and aspirin’), scabies (‘apply gentian violet to affected areas’), cuts and grazes (acriflavine dressing) and wax in the ears. For this we used to drip hydrogen peroxide into the affected ear. There would be a furious fizzing – and hearing would be miraculously restored. Nurses today are horrified when I tell them of that treatment. I can only say that it worked and that there seemed to be no ill-effects – but perhaps we were lucky.
We also had a few cases of VD or suspected VD. I think that, in this euphemism obsessed age, they are called ‘social diseases’ but in those days we preferred to call a spade a spade. This was, of course, before the age of antibiotics. Such cases were whisked off to military hospital from which we received horrifying reports of the treatment they were given there.
I still managed to get to London and to Ilford regularly. Sometimes I would be able to meet Heather at her office near the British museum and go home with her. Our wedding plans were maturing. The wedding dress was ready for fitting. My fourteen year old cousin Sheila, and Heather’s twelve year old sister Margaret were to be bridesmaids. My nearest friend, whom I would have liked to be best man, was still serving in India. Alex Innes, a young sanitary inspector from Ipswich, who had been with me in that prison camp in Northern Italy, stood in for him. He was a member of the Salvation Army, one of my few acquaintances who could be depended upon to behave himself at a ‘dry’ wedding reception. We would spend the first night of our married life in London’s Cumberland Hotel and then have a fortnight’s honeymoon in Dawlish, Devon.
A last minute hitch! – the speed with which the Demob Groups were dealt with slowed down. Would I be out of the army before 27th April? My originally expected discharge date in mid-March came and went. I made an appointment to see the Army Welfare Officer. He wanted to know why we were in a hurry? ‘Is your fiancée expecting?’ he asked. I explained that we had been waiting to get married for seven years and yes, she was expecting – she was expecting to get married on 27th April! He promised to do what he could but didn’t leave me feeling very hopeful.
Perhaps though, he was more helpful than I had imagined. I was discharged on the very first day of Group 28 releases – 23rd April (St. George’s Day) 1946. A party of those of us to be discharged were driven down to the ‘Demob Centre’ in Guildford. Here I was issued with my ‘demob suit’ – a choice between a chalk-stripe suit or a sports jacket and grey flannel slacks. I chose the latter. We kept the army uniform we were wearing and were allowed to retain our army great-coats for £1. It was a bargain at that price and I wore mine in cold weather for many years!
I think that there must also have been another medical to check that we were fit at the time of discharge and a lot of form filling and name signing, but I don’t remember any of it. I was just eager to get out.
We were, I remember, given a railway warrant to any town that we chose. I was, of course, going home to Ipswich but I remembered that I was going on my honeymoon to Dawlish in less than a week. I had the Warrant made out to Dawlish and paid my own fare home from Liverpool Street to Ipswich!
It was just four days from my wedding day! The time passed in a daze. Once again I feel sure that I didn’t appreciate what a stressful and difficult time it must have been for my mother. She had got me back only to lose me again almost at once. I was to be married in uniform but I went, in civvies, to a posh outfitter in Ipswich and bought a khaki silk shirt and tie clearly labelled, ‘For sale only to Officers of HM Forces’. Our wedding might not be ‘toppers and tails’ but I did want to look my best for my bride.
Alex Innes, my best man, had a car and had promised to pick me up to catch an early train to Ilford. He and my mother would come up separately on a later train. He didn’t turn up exactly when he had promised and, as usual in such circumstances, I panicked! I started out to walk to the station and was three quarters of the way there before he overtook me, picked me up and got me to the station in plenty of time to catch the train!
Heather’s Uncle George and Aunt Daisy met me at Ilford Station and drove me to their home in Wanstead. I have an idea that later, on our way to the church, we looked in at 21 Woodville Gardens, Ilford, to make sure all was well there. I wasn’t of course allowed to see the bride.
At the church I had a brief and friendly word with the Minister. I noticed that he didn’t seem keen to get too close to me – and then I realized, Heather’s Uncle George had given me a large scotch ‘to steady my nerves’ and the Methodist Minister Rev. David Parton was a life-long teetotaller! My best man was already in place. I settled at his side after making sure that he had the ring safely in his possession.
At last, the murmur of conversation in the church ceased, the organist launched into the Wedding March and the bride, on her father’s arm and with her bridesmaids in train came down the aisle to us. Heather was all that I had dreamed of, and more. She had a most beautiful snowy-white wedding dress with head-dress and veil held in place by a diamante tiara. She carried an enormous bouquet of fragrant natural flowers.
I don’t remember much about the service, the photographs and the reception afterwards. I do remember Heather slipping away to the church vestry to change from her wedding dress into a no-less-becoming going-away outfit. I remember too the arrival of the taxi that was speed us away from an event for which we had patiently waited for seven years, towards the beginning of our life together in a marriage that was to endure for sixty years.
…………………………………….
Zittau’s ‘Lenten Veil’
It was once the practice in churches in parts of Austria and Germany to screen off the sanctuary during the season of Lent. The reason for this, so I have been told, was to impose a spiritual, as well as a physical, fast on the faithful during that period.
This screen called a Fastentuch (or Lenten Veil) was originally a plain piece of cloth but it later became the practice to decorate it in various ways. The great Lenten Veil of Zittau, the small East German town in which I spent the last eighteen months of World War II as part of a working party (Arbeitskommando) of thirty ‘other rank’ British prisoners of war, was unique in Germany. It was 8.2 metres high by 6.8 metres wide. It was seven centuries old and had painted on it 90 Biblical pictures, 45 from the Old Testament and 45 from the New. It was the town’s pride and joy.
At the end of World War II it was found to be missing from its home in the Zittau Town Museum and was eventually found on the slopes of Mount Oybin (a spectacular peak several miles from the town). It was in four pieces and was being used by some Russian soldiers to line the walls of a sauna! It was recovered and, after German reunification, was lovingly restored and put on permanent display in the redundant Church of the Holy Cross that has been adapted and provided with controlled lighting and a controlled atmosphere to ensure its preservation.
No-one knew quite how this enormous artifact had found its way from the museum to Mount Oybin. This mystery was solved quite accidentally during the course of correspondence between myself and an email pen-friend (Ingrid Zeibig) in Zittau when I mentioned, quite casually, one of the odder jobs that I had had while doing ‘hard labour’ in her town between September 1943 and May 1945. It had been towards the end of February 1945, after the terrible British and American fire-bomb raids of the 13th and 14th of that month on the city of Dresden (about 60 miles from Zittau). The thunder of artillery from the eastern front was becoming daily louder. The end of the war was clearly in sight. I had been one of a party of half a dozen or so POWs who helped transport for safety some very heavy cases of ‘treasures’ from the town museum to what I thought was a ruined ‘Dracula type’ castle (I discovered later that it was actually a ruined monastery) on the summit of Mount Oybin.
Ingrid immediately thought of the Fastentuch and took it up with the scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck, Direktor (we would call him the curator, I think) of the Zittau Museum, who agreed with her. Thus, I became unwittingly one of the ‘rescuers’ of one of the town’s most valued possessions.
This ensured for me a little local and very temporary celebrity when in March 2007, my son and grandson (I certainly couldn’t have done it on my own!) accompanied me on my revisit to Zittau as a free man after over 60 years. We were able to meet and be welcomed by my correspondent and her family – and by Dr, Dudeck, who speaks perfect English.
We were given a free VIP showing of the Fastentuch displayed in all its glory together with a commentary in English on each of its 90 pictures. I found myself astonished by its immense size and by the comprehensive nature of the pictures on it. I couldn’t think of a single familiar bible story that wasn’t illustrated! I hope that I may be forgiven a warm glow of pride at having played a tiny role in the history of an artefact that had been, for seven centuries, an important part of the spiritual life of a great many local people.
Afterwards we were interviewed by a friendly, and fortunately bilingual local newspaper reporter (my German is of the tv ‘ ‘Allo, Allo’’ variety) and a photo of my son, grandson and myself appeared, together with a very friendly article, on the front page of the following issue of Zittauer Zeitung (Zittau Times).
That was not the end of my involvement with Zittau and its Fastentuch. I continued my correspondence with Ingrid Zeibig. Dr Dudeck and I became close friends and we too corresponded by email. During my visit Ingrid, knowing that I was an author and journalist, asked me when I returned to England, if I would write an article about my impressions on returning to Zittau as a free man after over sixty years. She would translate it into German primarily for her own family but perhaps also for a wider readership.
I sat down at my lap-top intending to write about 1,000, perhaps 1,500 words. However, once I had written the first few sentences I became carried away. I explained why I had wanted to return to Zittau and how, when I was in my eighties, this had become possible. I finished with a considerable piece of autobiography of nearly 8,000 words. It was certainly much too long for any publication in this country. Nevertheless I duly dispatched copies by email to Volker Dudeck (we were on Quakerly first-name terms by this time) and to Ingrid.
Both were enthusiastic about it but Ingrid must surely have been daunted by the thought of translating it as well as holding down a full-time job and caring for a teenage daughter!
Fortunately, she didn’t have to. Volker, having read it, passed it on to Frau Schubert, a colleague whose knowledge of English was even better than his own, to translate. He sent me a copy of the result – ‘Rückkehr nach Zittau’ and also told me that it would be published in full in a future issue of the Zittauer Geschicktsblätter , a glossy regional cultural publication.
It was once the practice in churches in parts of Austria and Germany to screen off the sanctuary during the season of Lent. The reason for this, so I have been told, was to impose a spiritual, as well as a physical, fast on the faithful during that period.
This screen called a Fastentuch (or Lenten Veil) was originally a plain piece of cloth but it later became the practice to decorate it in various ways. The great Lenten Veil of Zittau, the small East German town in which I spent the last eighteen months of World War II as part of a working party (Arbeitskommando) of thirty ‘other rank’ British prisoners of war, was unique in Germany. It was 8.2 metres high by 6.8 metres wide. It was seven centuries old and had painted on it 90 Biblical pictures, 45 from the Old Testament and 45 from the New. It was the town’s pride and joy.
At the end of World War II it was found to be missing from its home in the Zittau Town Museum and was eventually found on the slopes of Mount Oybin (a spectacular peak several miles from the town). It was in four pieces and was being used by some Russian soldiers to line the walls of a sauna! It was recovered and, after German reunification, was lovingly restored and put on permanent display in the redundant Church of the Holy Cross that has been adapted and provided with controlled lighting and a controlled atmosphere to ensure its preservation.
No-one knew quite how this enormous artifact had found its way from the museum to Mount Oybin. This mystery was solved quite accidentally during the course of correspondence between myself and an email pen-friend (Ingrid Zeibig) in Zittau when I mentioned, quite casually, one of the odder jobs that I had had while doing ‘hard labour’ in her town between September 1943 and May 1945. It had been towards the end of February 1945, after the terrible British and American fire-bomb raids of the 13th and 14th of that month on the city of Dresden (about 60 miles from Zittau). The thunder of artillery from the eastern front was becoming daily louder. The end of the war was clearly in sight. I had been one of a party of half a dozen or so POWs who helped transport for safety some very heavy cases of ‘treasures’ from the town museum to what I thought was a ruined ‘Dracula type’ castle (I discovered later that it was actually a ruined monastery) on the summit of Mount Oybin.
Ingrid immediately thought of the Fastentuch and took it up with the scholarly Dr Volker Dudeck, Direktor (we would call him the curator, I think) of the Zittau Museum, who agreed with her. Thus, I became unwittingly one of the ‘rescuers’ of one of the town’s most valued possessions.
This ensured for me a little local and very temporary celebrity when in March 2007, my son and grandson (I certainly couldn’t have done it on my own!) accompanied me on my revisit to Zittau as a free man after over 60 years. We were able to meet and be welcomed by my correspondent and her family – and by Dr, Dudeck, who speaks perfect English.
We were given a free VIP showing of the Fastentuch displayed in all its glory together with a commentary in English on each of its 90 pictures. I found myself astonished by its immense size and by the comprehensive nature of the pictures on it. I couldn’t think of a single familiar bible story that wasn’t illustrated! I hope that I may be forgiven a warm glow of pride at having played a tiny role in the history of an artefact that had been, for seven centuries, an important part of the spiritual life of a great many local people.
Afterwards we were interviewed by a friendly, and fortunately bilingual local newspaper reporter (my German is of the tv ‘ ‘Allo, Allo’’ variety) and a photo of my son, grandson and myself appeared, together with a very friendly article, on the front page of the following issue of Zittauer Zeitung (Zittau Times).
That was not the end of my involvement with Zittau and its Fastentuch. I continued my correspondence with Ingrid Zeibig. Dr Dudeck and I became close friends and we too corresponded by email. During my visit Ingrid, knowing that I was an author and journalist, asked me when I returned to England, if I would write an article about my impressions on returning to Zittau as a free man after over sixty years. She would translate it into German primarily for her own family but perhaps also for a wider readership.
I sat down at my lap-top intending to write about 1,000, perhaps 1,500 words. However, once I had written the first few sentences I became carried away. I explained why I had wanted to return to Zittau and how, when I was in my eighties, this had become possible. I finished with a considerable piece of autobiography of nearly 8,000 words. It was certainly much too long for any publication in this country. Nevertheless I duly dispatched copies by email to Volker Dudeck (we were on Quakerly first-name terms by this time) and to Ingrid.
Both were enthusiastic about it but Ingrid must surely have been daunted by the thought of translating it as well as holding down a full-time job and caring for a teenage daughter!
Fortunately, she didn’t have to. Volker, having read it, passed it on to Frau Schubert, a colleague whose knowledge of English was even better than his own, to translate. He sent me a copy of the result – ‘Rückkehr nach Zittau’ and also told me that it would be published in full in a future issue of the Zittauer Geschicktsblätter , a glossy regional cultural publication.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Return to Zittau
Return to Zittau
I departed from Zittau on 7th May, 1945 amid the thunder of artillery fire through which could be heard the no-longer-distant chatter of machine guns and the occasional whine of an approaching shell. It was obvious that the town would be part of the battlefield within days, if not within hours.
I had been one of a working party (Arbeitskommando) of thirty ‘other rank’ British prisoners of war living and working in Zittau since October 1943. We had been captured in Tobruk, North Africa on 21st June 1942 and had been imprisoned in a large prisoner of war camp in Northern Italy. After the collapse of the Italian Fascist government and the surrender of its successor to the British and American allies, we had been transported to Germany, to Stalag IVb at Mühlberg, and thence to Zittau.
In Zittau we were lodged in Neustadt in the town centre, in what remained of the old Town Theatre, most of which had been destroyed by fire. We occupied a day room and a dormitory on the first floor. Our guards lived on the ground floor below us.
From this base we went out to work, in parties of two, three or four, every day. Our work mainly consisted of loading and unloading railway wagons at Zittau Railway Station and at other railway sidings in and around the town. When available though, we did any other heavy manual work that was needed. We helped deliver groceries and greengroceries from wholesalers to retail shops in the area. We loaded produce from local farms onto lorries and unloaded them at their destinations. We swept the streets, dug graves in Zittau cemetery, worked in a local bakery, in an iron foundry, in a jam factory and, in fact, anywhere else where our labour was required.
On one memorable day in, I think, February 1945 some fellow-prisoners and I loaded onto a lorry a number of large and heavy boxes from Zittau Stadtmuseum and took them to the summit of Mount Oybin where we left them for safety in the ruins of an ancient monastery. Thus, so it is believed, we played a tiny part in the history of the famous Zittauer Fastentuch.
It wasn’t long before we became almost as familiar with Zittau as with our home towns in Britain. We got to know its cobbled streets and squares, its narrow alley-ways, its centuries-old buildings and, of course, its railway sidings.
We soon learnt enough very ungrammatical German to be able to hold basic conversations with our guards and with the German civilians, and prisoners of war and civilian workers of other allied nations with whom we came into contact while working. We came to know some of them very well indeed. The Germans were, of course, our enemies - but it is difficult to maintain personal enmity with people whom you have come to know well and who you realize that, under other circumstances, could have become good friends.
Two of our guards I remember particularly. In charge of the Arbeitskommando was Unteroffizier Kurt Laudenbacher. It might have been expected that he, at least, I would have regarded with enmity. Goodness knows, there had been plenty of British noncommissioned officers whom I had thoroughly disliked! It’s true that he shouted a lot. We called him ‘Alleman’ because of the frequency with which he would shout ‘Alleman raus!’, ‘Alleman saubermachen!’ And so on.
He was fair though and would often take our side against the Stalag authorities or against our civilian employers. When we first arrived in Zittau we were paid in Lagergeld – paper money that could be spent only in a Stalag shop or canteen. We pointed out that for us, in a tiny Arbeitskommando far from the nearest Stalag, Lagergeld was totally useless. He agreed and took the matter up with the Stalag. From then on we were paid in real Reichmarks and Pfennigs.
Then too, he insisted that if we worked with scrap metal we had to be provided with leather aprons and gloves. If they weren’t provided he told us to ‘down tools’ and stop work.
Then there was Otto Rosenstück, an amiable guard who wore the ribbon that indicated that he had been on the eastern front throughout the winter of 1941/1942. He told us that at one point his unit had been within sight of the suburbs of Moscow.
He lost all his toes to frostbite during that bitter winter and had been assigned to the undemanding job of POW guard because he could no longer march properly.
He was married and had a son, a toddler called Franz Josef. He arranged for his wife and son to come to Zittau to escape the allied bombing in the Rhineland where they had lived. I have often wondered what happened to that little family when the war ended.
I worked for some time for Burger’s Fruchthof which employed four or five Germans, two Dutch civilian workers and - depending on the number of railway wagons of produce expected – between two and five British POWs. Frau Burger appeared to be in charge of the business. I recall that Frau and Herr Burger celebrated their silver wedding anniversary while I was working for them and they gave a celebratory party for all their employees, including us. Frau Burger had a sense of humour. She gave a little speech in which she said that she was a very lucky woman because she had been married for twenty-five years and her husband hadn’t a grey hair on his head. He was, in fact, completely bald!
The Burgers had, as far as I know, just one daughter Sonja who was sixteen or seventeen at the time and I suppose was still at school. She was a friendly girl and much appreciated the attention of us woman-starved POWs. I hope that she survived the chaos at the end of the war. She was six or seven years younger than me and could, of course, still be living today.
Also possibly still living could be Brigitte, daughter of Herr Rutsch (I may well have spelled his surname wrongly) a coal merchant. I remember Brigitte as a shy and endearing little girl of about ten with big blue eyes and long blonde plaits. I hope that she too survived the war’s aftermath.
Her father, the coal merchant, clearly suffered from chronic bronchitis or some similar bronchial affliction. He had a most appalling cough that was made worse by the cigarettes that he was unable to resist.
Then there was a very tough old lady (‘old’ by our youthful standards – she may have been fifty) who, single handed, ran a scrap metal business. She also kept one or two sheep for their milk (most of us had never before heard of sheep being kept for their milk). She had, in her youth, been to England and had visited Harwich – a town with which I, and several other prisoners, were very familiar.
Christian, whom I got to know well, was an elderly man employed by Kurt Kramer, wholesale grocers in Neustadt, not far from our Lager. For several weeks another prisoner and I, pulling a handcart, accompanied Christian through the streets of Zittau delivering groceries to the many retail shops in the town.
Then, of course, there were the ‘foreigners’, prisoners of war and volunteer or conscripted civilian workers from every German-occupied country in Europe. The greatest number were ‘Ostarbeiters’ from Russia or the Ukraine but there were others from Poland, Jugoslavia, The Baltic states, The Netherlands, Belgium, France and elsewhere. There was even one – Cherim, who worked for the old lady metal scrap merchant – from Albania!
A few I remember by name. There was Pieter from Groningen in the Netherlands. He had such a strong local accent that his fellow Dutchmen claimed that they understood him better when he spoke in German than in Dutch. He and Jacques, a Frenchman from Marseilles, both worked for Fruchthof.
Anna, a friendly young woman of about the same age as us prisoners, came from Orel in Russia. She worked for the Münchner Hof hotel in Neustadt, from which we collected our rations (black bread, margarine and swede soup) every day. Occasionally, two or three of us would be sent across the square to the Münchner Hof to peel potatoes. This gave us an opportunity to chat to Anna who taught me enough Russian to speed my journey home through Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia in May 1945.
Then there was Alex who worked for Gocht und Steffens, Marmelade, Konserven und Kunsthönig manufacturers. He came from Sebastopol in the Crimea and had been a cinema projectionist before the war. Alex had a ‘Lagerfrau’ (he admitted that he had another wife back in Sebastopol) with whom he lived at the Gasthof Drei Linden, a hostel for Ostarbeiters. The ‘Lagerfrau’ was Mareja, a likeable Ukrainian woman whose face bore the scars of smallpox. She too worked at the jam factory. She had a passion for English milk chocolate and I always tried to save her some from my Red Cross parcels.
There were many Serb prisoners of war with unpronounceable names. One, with an enormous moustache, was called simply Schnurrbart by us, by the German guards and sometimes by his fellow-Serbs. He always vowed that he would shave off his moustache on the day that he was sure the war was coming to an end. I saw him clean-shaven, and hardly recognisable, on 6th May 1945, just a day before we were marched out of Zittau.
An Estonian dentist attended to the dental needs of all foreign workers and prisoners of war in Zittau. I visited him, with a guard, two or three times. He spoke no German except ‘Bitte spucken!’ (please spit) but he did speak Russian, and his Russian receptionist and dental nurse, who spoke fluent German, interpreted for him. They made a very good team and I certainly received as good dental treatment from him as I ever had in the British Army. Sadly, they left Zittau at the beginning of 1945 ‘for safety’. They departed in the direction of Dresden and I very much fear may have been victims of the inexcusable (in my opinion) British and American terror-raids on that town on 13th and 14th February.
On that day in early May 1945 when we marched out of Zittau into what is now the Czech Republic I never dreamed that I would ever see Zittau again. I reached my home in Ipswich – about 100 kilometres north-east of London – eleven days later, on the 18th May, my twenty-fourth birthday
I never forgot the time that I spent in Zittau though – and my memories were far from being wholly unpleasant. . I have often thought that it was in the streets and on the railway sidings of that small town in Saxony that I ceased to be a boy and became a man. Zittau was often in my mind and I wished it well.
I married Heather, the girl I had met and fallen in love with on 3rd September 1939, the day that Britain and Germany went to war. We had two sons and with them we took annual camping holidays, at first in Britain and later in mainland Europe. We camped in France, Switzerland, the Italian Alps, Austria’s Vorarlberg and Tyrol. Our sons grew up and my wife Heather and I continued camping with a motor-caravan. We drove to what was then Jugoslavia , travelling down the Dalmation Coast to Dubrovnik and beyond and inland to Mostar, Sarajevo and Jajce. We spent one happy holiday in Germany’s Black Forest.
During that holiday, and during the earlier ones in Austria, I found that I had not entirely forgotten the German that I had learned as a POW in Zittau.
We didn’t visit Zittau. It was within the DDR. While I had no real fears for our personal safety, I could imagine that we might have had to endure long delays at the border, and possible searches of our camping equipment, while the DDR police satisfied themselves that we weren’t British spies intent on mischief. That was the kind of inconvenience that, in late middle age, we didn’t wish to experience on holiday.
The Berlin wall came down. Germany was reunited. Sadly, this came too late for Heather and myself. Our motor-caravan had succumbed to corrosion (it was a Toyota - perhaps we should have chosen a VW!), and we had grown too old for tented camping. Heather’s physical condition deteriorated and reached a point at which she was unable to think about taking holidays. I would certainly never have left her to go away, even for a day, on my own. I put aside any thought of overseas travel.
I didn’t lose interest in Zittau though. I wrote an article about my life as a POW for ‘The Friend’, a Quaker weekly journal. Zittau was mentioned though I thought it unlikely that any reader of ‘The Friend’ would have ever heard of the town. I was wrong. Jasper Kay, a Quaker from Cottenham, near Cambridge, wrote to tell me that his family had originated in Zittau and had settled in England a few decades earlier. Furthermore, he was a fluent German speaker and corresponded regularly with a Zittau family – to whom he had sent a copy of my article. He was to make his own first visit to the town in a month or two’s time. Was there anything I would like him to bring back from his visit?
I wrote back at some length giving him more details of where I had lived and where I had worked in Zittau and saying that I would love to have some postcards or photographs of the town.
That was how I first came to make the acquaintance of the remarkable Kulke family. Ingrid Zeibig (formerly Kulke) had been Jasper’s correspondent and became mine too. She could speak, read and write English as could her teenage daughter Maria Theresa. Her mother, Frau Ingrid Kulke lived in Zittau, as did her brother Andreas. They all proved to be good friends. Ingrid Zeibig translated my original article and my letter to Jasper Kay into German for the whole family. I have now corresponded with her by email for several years. Andreas and his mother visited every place that I had remembered and mentioned and took photographs of them for me. Frau Kulke managed to obtain for me a photocopy of a back number of the local Zittau newspaper – Der Zittauer Nachrichten for 18th May 1944 (my twenty-third birthday) that I spent as a prisoner in the town!
Heather and I felt that we had become members of the family. When Andreas married his wife Kornelia, we were told all about it and sent a wedding photograph. When they had their first baby in September 2006 I was sent a birth notification card. They had been blest with a lovely little girl whom they named Maja Ruth.
My association with Zittau was destined to increase.
Our younger grandson, Nick, became a student at Westminster University, studying photography. Seeking a project for the final year of his degree course, he decided to retrace my journeys as a prisoner of war between June 1942 and May 1945 and to make a photographic record of his travels. He was, at that time, 21 years old – the same age as I was when captured at Tobruk.
He was unable to obtain permission to visit and take photographs in Libya, so his journey began in Tarranto on the south of Italy where we had disembarked and begun our long journey from prison camp to prison camp. It ended in Prague, where at the Hotel Atlantic on 10th May 1945 I had enjoyed my first night’s sleep in a real bed for four years!
He unearthed some interesting information on the way.
All signs of the transit camp at Altamura near Bari in Southern Italy, where we stayed under canvas for a week or so, had disappeared. The area, still as bleak and desolate as I remembered it, was now a military training area, forbidden to prying photographers and news reporters (though Nick managed to gain access!) and was, so he heard, one of the least popular postings in the Italian Army.
Campo Concentramento PG 73 near Carpi on the plain of Lombardy, was very different. It had been a large camp of which I had only unpleasant memories. We had lived in poorly built, unheated huts, unbearably hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter (I had suffered from a frost-bitten toe during that winter in ‘sunny Italy’!). We were counted daily, a process that frequently took long over an hour. We were louse infested, desperately hungry and bored out of our minds. Few days passed without a fellow prisoner dying of starvation related disease..
On one occasion we had the opportunity of having our photographs taken and sent to our families in England. On receiving mine, my mother took one look at it and tore it up. She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow that I had become.
When he found the site, Nick was surprised to find huts, preserved and still standing and groups of young Italians visiting. It appears that after we had been transported to Germany, the camp had been taken over by the S.S. and used as a transit camp for Jews and political dissidents destined for Auschwitz.
It was now preserved by the Italian authorities and used as an educational facility to illustrate some of the harsh realities of World War II.
Transported to Germany after the collapse of Mussolini’s government, we had spent two days and nights in cattle trucks before arriving at Stalag IVb near Mühlberg. Here, as ‘other rank’ British prisoners of war, we were showered, deloused, photographed and finger-printed, inoculated, medically examined and – eventually – issued with new underclothes and British Army uniforms, presumably provided by the Red Cross.
At Stalag IVb, as at Campo PG73, my grandson found a surprise awaiting him. He discovered that, after the Allied prisoners had been liberated in May 1945, the camp had been taken over by the Soviet NKVD. Now there was a German memorial, and well-kept German graves there as well as an Allied memorial and allied graves in the grounds of a little chapel, half a mile or so away from the actual site.
The ages marked on the graves of the German dead (many in their 40s and 50s) suggested that senior army officers had been interned, and had met their end there. The graves were cared for reverently and lovingly by dedicated volunteers.
We had spent two – or was it three? – days at Stalag IVb. Then a group of 30 of us, all found medically fit for heavy work (Schwerarbeit) were sent with just one guard to Zittau to become Arbeitskommando 1153. Although we had been processed at Stalag IVb we discovered that we were now an outpost of Stalag IVa.
At Zittau, my grandson’s only surprise was the warmth of the welcome that he received. I had given him Frau Ingrid Kulke’s address and had suggested that he might call on her with a bouquet of flowers to express my thanks and appreciation of the kindness that she and her family had already showed me. At that time he spoke no German but I had schooled him to say: ‘Ich bin Nicholas Hall. Mein Grossvater ist Ernest Hall aus Clacton-on-Sea, England’
I had hoped that Frau Kulke would be pleased to see him but I had hardly expected her to be quite so kind and hospitable. By an extraordinary coincidence it was her birthday. She invited him to a party attended by the whole of her extended family from all over Germany. She let him stay in her flat for the two or three days that he spent in Zittau and she went with him, in his hired car, to show him where I had lived and all the places where I had worked during my stay in Zittau between 1943 and 1945. He was able to meet Ingrid Zeibig, my correspondent, and her daughter Maria Theresa, and Andreas and Kornelia Kulke. Little Maja had, of course, not yet been born.
From Zittau, my grandson went on to visit Leitmeritz (now Litomerice), in the Czech Republic, where, in 1945, I had first encountered the Soviet army – and had been thankful for the few Russian words and phrases that Anna had taught me back at the Münchner Hof in Zittau. From there he went, as I had, to Prague where he found the Hotel Atlantic in which, thanks to the Czech Red Cross, I had spent my first night in a comfortable bed for four years!
To put the finishing touches on the video record of his travels that he was preparing, Nick retraced his journey through mainland Europe the following year. Once again he experienced the unstinting kindness and hospitality of Frau Kulke and her family. Later that year the video was to help him gain a BA with honours at Westminster University.
Meanwhile I continued to care for Heather who was, by then almost totally disabled. It was a difficult, challenging and sometimes heart-breaking time but it was a happy one. We became closer together than we had ever been and she remembered to the very end the wonderful camping holidays that we had spent in Britain and in mainland Europe. Sadly, her life came to an end on 12th July 2006.
She died, as she would have wished, in her sleep, in her own bed and in her own home with me by her side.
Heather’s death left a gaping – and aching – hole in my life. For the last two years of her life she had been totally dependent upon me. I had never left her side except for essential shopping, and then, for no more than three quarters of an hour at a time and always only after I had found a tv programme or DVD that she could enjoy in my absence.
I engaged in a programme of feverish activity to try to fill that gaping hole.
I had a cataract dealt with that had impaired my sight so that I could no longer enjoy reading and had had to give up driving a car. We had continued to go regularly to our Quaker Meeting for Worship on Sunday mornings in a special taxi that would take Heather’s wheelchair. It was a great relief to have my vision back again. .
Throughout her adult life Heather had made a practice of writing down in a number of tiny notebooks any short piece of poetry or prose that she found helpful. I collected these notebooks together and typed out their contents to create an anthology of quotations that I had printed as ‘Heather’s Treasure’ in a 54 page booklet. Our elder grandson Christopher, an art graduate, created a line drawing of his grandmother for the title page. These I distributed as a memorial to Heather.to all the members of our extended family, to all our friends, to every member of Clacton Quaker Meeting and to anyone else who was interested.
I had several rooms of our bungalow refurbished to make it more suitable for a widower living alone – and to make it easier for my sons to sell when I am called to rejoin Heather.
Despite all this activity my life still seemed empty and devoid of purpose.
My interest in Zittau was revived when I received an email of condolence from Ingrid and a little later, when my spirits were at their lowest ebb, a message of faith and hope from Frau Kulke, Ingrid’s mother. She had written it in German and her daughter had translated into English for her.
Later, for the very first time, Zittau featured briefly in our national news bulletins on tv. Poland and the Czech Republic had become members of the EU and the national leaders of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic met to celebrate in the obvious place – Germany’s ‘three-country-corner town’!
I began to wonder if it might just be possible for me to make the journey to Zittau to thank Frau Kulke and her family personally for their kindness to myself and grandson Nick, and to revive some of my memories of the last eighteen months of World War II.. I was now free to travel, but I knew that at 85, I was incapable of making the journey on my own. I doubted if I was even capable of travelling so far with a companion.
My mind was made up for me by my elder son Pete and grandson Nick, both of whom knew how very much I would have liked to have visited to town again as a free man. They overrode my anxieties and booked, on line, for us to fly from Stansted Airport to Berlin at the end of March 2007 for a six day visit to Zittau. They arranged for a hire car to be waiting for us at the Berlin Airport. With the help of Ingrid, they rented for us a furnished apartment in Neustadt which would be ready for us when we arrived.
Our plane landed at an airport in the outskirts of Berlin soon after 9.00 a.m. on Wednesday 28th March 2007. My flight home in 1945 had been in two stages; Regensburg to Rheims and Rheims to an RAF Station to the west of London in Buckinghamshire. The aircraft for each flight had been a now old-fashioned propeller plane. Our flight from Stansted to Berlin had therefore been my first in a modern jet air liner and had been, in itself, an adventure!
The promised car was waiting for us and within an hour we were speeding along the Autobahn over the flat central German plain. Our first destination was Mühlberg. It was fortunate that grandson Nick had been there before because the actual site of Stalag IVb was by no means easy to find. But find it we did. The site was now heavily wooded and all the huts and administrative buildings had been demolished.
The main highway through the camp was still easily recognisable though. In 1943 the Soviet POW compound had been one side of that highway and the British and American on the other side. The foundations of the buildings were still visible and there were notices indicating their purpose as well as a plan of the Stalag when it had been operational. There were volunteers on the site lovingly tending the German graves and generally keeping the site neat and tidy.
My German was adequate to explain to them that I had been a prisoner there in 1943 and we were directed to the allied graves and war memorial in a well-kept enclosure half a mile or so away.
We had a late lunch in a restaurant in a nearby town and drove on to Zittau. After a while we left the Autobahn and proceeded along narrower minor roads. The countryside became less flat and we could see mountains in the distance. I knew that we were nearing our destination.
Zittau presented no major surprises. We passed through its outskirts into the town centre and finally parked in the Neustadt Square which, in 1943, had been called the Platz der SA. The whole area round the square had then been referred to as Neustadt. Above us towered the enormous, and surely unique, Salzhaus. It had been used for cheap housing accommodation towards the end of World War II and had, as I knew from my correspondence with Ingrid, been recently restored. Now there was a welcoming restaurant and bar ‘Zum Alten Sack’ near the main entrance.
The remnants of the old burnt-out theatre, which had been converted into accommodation for us prisoners had been demolished. In its place was the modern Dresdner Bank. On the other side of the square I recognised the Gasthof where the friendly Russian girl Anna had worked and from which, as prisoners we had collected our rations every day. It was now the Zittauer Hof and, so I was later told, had been completely refurbished and refitted as a comfortable modern hotel.
The square itself was unchanged. Its cobbled surface I remembered well but in 1943 there had been few, if any, vehicles parked there and there had certainly not been marked out parking spaces.
My son made a call on his mobile phone. Within minutes a car drew up beside us. It was Ingrid with the keys of the flat. It was an emotional moment for me. Ingrid and I had corresponded for several years but had never met. She was every bit as friendly, helpful and charming as I had expected. She handed over the keys to the flat – it was on the top floor of a building just across the alleyway beside the Dresdner Bank, within a few yards of my former lodging in the town! As Ingrid wished us good night she invited us to breakfast at her mother’s apartment the next morning – and to an evening meal with all the family later in the week.
The flat proved ideal for our purpose. It had a large living room with a kitchen annexe, containing a settee that could be converted into a bed as required, two roomy bedrooms and a spacious and well appointed bathroom. A feature of the living room was a balcony from which it was possible to survey the roof tops of Zittau and many of its public buildings. On view was the tower of the Rathaus, to the roof of which I had once had the task of carrying sandbags as a fire precaution! In the distance could be seen ‘the blue remembered hills’ of the Zittauer Gebirge.
We were to visit those hills on one of the most memorable days of our stay. Ingrid, my son Pete and I went to Zittau railway station where we caught the narrow gauge railway train to Berg Oybin, while Nick, my grandson, drove there by road to meet the train.
The journey itself evoked more memories than I had expected. Soon after the train moved off we passed a main line railway bridge beyond which had been the entrance to Burger’s Fruchthof. A little further on was the entrance to the Felt factory (Filzfabrik) where we had often worked. Near its entrance had been a pig slaughterhouse. Far away across level fields, could be seen a many arched railway viaduct that I well remembered having gazed at over sixty years earlier.
Further on still, on the other side of the track, there was a large building standing on its own. It was the old barracks (der Alt Kaserne) used for cheap housing accommodation in 1943 and ’44. Several times, when being taken in the back of a lorry to work in the outskirts of the town, we had stopped at the Alt Kaserne while the driver picked up Fritz - or Hans - or Heinz, who lived there and was working with us.
I couldn’t identify it but I am sure that we must too have passed the spot where there had been a siding and what we used to call the ‘Rinder Bahnhof’. Huge piles of tree bark were stacked by the railway track. I never did discover their purpose but from time to time we had to unload more bark from railway wagons or stack some onto lorries to be taken to an unknown destination.
On one occasion I cut my hand quite badly while working there. The cut was bleeding profusely. I was able to communicate in German by that time and I told the civilian who was in charge of us that I needed to go back to the Lager in Neustadt, to have it bandaged. ‘I can’t take you’, he said, ‘I must stay here and get this wagon unloaded’. ‘Das macht nichts’, I said, ‘I can find my way back on my own’. And so I did, striding unescorted through the streets of Zittau and hammering on the door of the lager to gain admission. The guard was a little surprised to see me unaccompanied but he duly washed and bandaged my wound.
We British prisoners in Zittau could easily have escaped from the town at any time – but speaking only basic German and wearing British uniforms with big red triangles painted on them I don’t think that we would have managed to get very far.
Nick, with the car, was waiting for us at Oybin station. We drove on up the mountain track as far as possible. Then we had to walk. I got as far as the souvenir and gift shop before age and arthritis finally defeated me! Nick had been to the summit on one of his previous visits so he stayed with me in the gift shop while Pete and Ingrid climbed to the very top, seeing the ruined monastery where, in 1945, I had helped take those heavy boxes from the Zittau Stadtmuseum, believed to contain the Fastentuch.
Later we drove on into the Zittau Gebirge, having lunch in a mountain restaurant and exploring the neighbourhood of Jonsdorf. In 1944/’45 Herr und Frau Burger of Fruchthof had owned a small chalet in a deep valley in the Jonsdorf area. They kept it well stocked with food and other provisions (I helped take some of them there!) and they had intended to go there for refuge when the Ostfront threatened to engulf Zittau. I wonder what happened to them.
On the Saturday of our stay in Zittau we walked the short distance from our apartment in Neustadt to the Church of the Holy Cross, where we had arranged to meet Dr Dudeck, whose special concern had been Zittau’s great Fastentuch, at 10.00 a.m.
The tiny part that I am believed to have played in the Fastentuch’s seven centuries’ history ensured us an especially warm welcome. We had a special private showing of the great Fastentuch displayed, in all its splendour, across the nave of the now redundant church, which has been converted into a museum for that purpose only.
The Fastentuch’s original purpose, its origins and its history were explained to us in English and each of its ninety illustrations identified. I found myself astounded at the enormous size of it, the comprehensive nature of its ninety pictures and the obvious loving care with which it has been restored and is now displayed. I couldn’t think of a single well-known bible story that isn’t pictured there.
Afterwards my son, grandson and I were photographed for the regional press and interviewed by a friendly, and fortunately bilingual, lady newspaper reporter. As a result a very positive account of our visit appeared a week later on the front page of the Zittauer Zeitung.
On the Saturday afternoon we were shown some of the other sights of Zittau by Andreas and Kornelia Kulke, accompanied by baby Maja. There was the Salzhaus which we had previously seen only from the outside, the floral clock and the smaller Fastentuch in the Stadtmuseum – which I remembered from my previous visit in 1945. While Andreas with my son and grandson engaged in strenuous activities like climbing to the top of a church tower, Kornelia and I, with little Maja, enjoyed a coffee and a chat in a nearby café.
It was a pleasure to make Kornelia’s closer acquaintance. I found her to be a charming, thoughtful and considerate young lady who understood and spoke English much better than I had realized. She told me that her daughter was to be baptised Maja Ruth on Easter Sunday at a magnificent nearby church.
Another highlight of our stay in Zittau included a trip across the frontier into what is now Poland to visit the open-cast lignite (brown coal) mine at Hirschfeld where I had briefly worked as a prisoner. It had obviously expanded tremendously since then and was now really a dreadful man-made scar on the landscape. I was shown a site, still in Germany and just outside Zittau, where a similar open-cast mine had been converted into an attractive lake with a well-appointed and welcoming hotel on its shore. Perhaps there is hope yet for Hirschfeld!
We crossed the frontier into the Czech Republic – and were impressed by its atmosphere of prosperity. I felt that I would like to see Leitmeritz (now Litomerice) again. In 1945 I spent my first night of freedom, with other former prisoners, sleeping on the floor of a barn a mile or two out of the town. The friendly Czech farmer drove us into town the next morning.
We had found it filled with Soviet troops, their tanks being garlanded by jubilant Czechs. The few Russian words and phrases that I had learned from Anna in the Münchner Hof proved invaluable. When checked I produced a broad smile, a smart British army style salute and the assurance, in stumbling Russian, that, ‘Ya Anglishki Tovarishch. Ya yeddoo dommoy na Anglia’ which I hoped meant ‘I am an English comrade. I am going home to England’. It invariably resulted in my being waved on with an answering smile.
German women and children were being rounded up and ruthlessly driven out of town by the Czechs. It occurred to me then for the first time – ‘How quickly the oppressed can become oppressors!’ It was a thought that I was to have on many subsequent occasions as the years passed.
Leitmeritz – or Litomerice as, in 2007, it now was – came as a great surprise. It took us a lot longer to drive there from Zittau than I had expected. I was amazed that, in May 1945, walking and hitching lifts on lorries fleeing southward, I had managed to get there from the Zittau Gebirge in a little over half a day. It was also a much larger town than I had remembered and I would certainly never have recognised it.
It was clean, well-maintained and prosperous, with attractive buildings and well-stocked shops. We lunched in a restaurant near the town centre. Directly we saw the menu we realized the great difference between not knowing very much of a language, as in Germany, and not knowing it at all, as in the Czech Republic!
Later, I did at least recognise the railway station from which, with scores of others, of all ages and all nationalities, I had caught the very first post-war train from Leitmeritz to Prague during the afternoon of 9th May 1945.
When, on another day, we drove to Prague I had no difficulty whatsoever in knowing where I was. Once you have seen the Prague skyline you never forget it. I recognised the Hotel Atlantic too where, thanks to the Czech Red Cross, I had spent my first night in a ‘real’ bed for four years! I would never have found it though without having my much-travelled grandson as a guide.
The ‘Atlantic’ is now a luxurious ‘four star’ hotel. We lunched in its restaurant and were able to look into a vacant bedroom on the first floor. Was it the one in which I had spent that first-comfortable night in May 1945? It could have been. It was just as I remembered it except, of course, that it had now been provided with a television set – and there were no bullet holes in the window!
Prague is nowadays a popular destination for British and – I suppose – American tourists. There were lots of us there, and I noticed that the menus in at least the larger restaurants are in English as well as Czech!
It was wonderful during those few days, to be able to visit so many places that I had seen under very different circumstances over sixty years earlier. The memories came flooding back.
However, what I had particularly wanted to do was to meet the members of the Kulke family who had been so friendly and helpful to me, and so hospitable to my grandson Nick. In the immediate family was Ingrid Zeibig, whom I had known by correspondence for years. Heather and I had never been blest with a daughter – just two sons of whom we were immensely proud. If we had had a daughter we would have been delighted if she had developed into just such a kind, thoughtful and considerate a lady as Ingrid.
I knew, of course, from grandson Nick about Ingrid’s mother’s kindness and generosity. I discovered her wisdom for myself. She spoke no English but during the course of an evening that we spent with her family she told her daughter Ingrid that she could see I was still very sad from Heather’s death. I had thought that I had successfully concealed this! She wrote on a piece of paper ‘Psalm 103 Vs. 2’ and asked her daughter to give it to me.
I didn’t have a chance to look this up until I returned home. Then I found that this verse was ‘Praise the Lord O my soul – and forget not all his benefits’. I have indeed a very great deal for which to be thankful, not least a loving family and good friends in Britain – and now in Germany.
It was wonderful to meet Ingrid’s brother Andreas and her sister-in-law Kornelia and, of course, the lovely little Maja.
There was one other member of the family to whom it was an honour and a privilege to be introduced. That was Ingrid and Andreas’s grandmother, Frau Kulke’s mother.
She was a most remarkable lady of 95, who put me to shame. Her husband, a Leutnant in the Wehrmacht had been killed on the Eastern Front and she had come to Zittau as a refugee from Silesia at the end of World War II. She was almost blind and physically very frail indeed. Yet her mind was razor sharp and her spirit indomitable.
We told her about our visit to Prague and she made it clear that she knew the city well – and the Hotel Atlantic! She spoke very little but we discovered that she had learnt and could still speak a great deal of English – and she spoke it with perfect pronunciation. I am sure that she is a source of pride to the whole family.
On one memorable evening we met the whole of the extended Kulke family – nearly twenty of them in all. Frau Kulke had booked a large room at an hotel at the foot of Berg Oybin for the very first ‘big screen’ showing of ’60 years’ the video record of Nick’s travels in my earlier footsteps that had helped to earn him his BA degree.
The commentary was, of course, in English which only a few of those present were able to follow and understand. Perhaps though, the pictures spoke louder than words. Anyway the video seemed to be much appreciated by all present and Ingrid translated into German my few words of thanks and appreciation at the end of the showing.
Afterwards we all enjoyed a festive evening meal together in the hotel’s restaurant.
On Tuesday, 3rd April we said farewell to Frau Kulke and her mother and began our homeward journey. We were to meet Pete’s partner Arlene at Dresden airport. She was flying there with a vital piece of equipment that Nick needed for a demonstration in connection with his podcasting enterprise that he was to give in Berlin on the following day.
Arlene’s plane arrived on time and all went according to plan. We were able to spend an hour or so in the city of Dresden before taking the motorway to the capital. In 1943 our train journey from Mühlberg to Zittau had taken us through Dresden. We had had to change trains at the station there but had seen nothing of the town.
Now I was amazed at the way in which this beautiful and historic city, devastated by British and American bombing on 13th and 14th February 1945, had been restored to its former magnificence. We enjoyed a late lunch in one of its many restaurants before embarking on the final lap of our journey in Germany.
I cannot say how very much I appreciated my visit – a visit that I had never dreamed I would be able to make – to the scenes that had been so familiar to me between 1943 and 1945. Much in and around Zittau had changed in the intervening 60 years, yet much remained the same. I had felt ‘at home’ there. In some ways it had reminded me of Britain in the 1950s.
There was no litter in the streets; no graffiti on the walls; no fast-food from ubiquitous Macdonald restaurants. There were no cars parked nose-to-tail in every side street and everyone, even the motorists, seemed to be remarkably law abiding.
I think though that the most valuable aspect of our visit was the friendship firmly established between the members of the Kulke family and those of my family.
My father was a regular soldier (beruf Soldat) and served in the British army through World War I. I was a Territorial volunteer (Kriegsfreiwillige) and served in the British army through World War II. I thank God that neither my sons nor any of my grandchildren have been required to serve in the armed forces, or have felt any desire to do so. Although today’s world is far from peaceful, Western Europe at least has been at peace with itself since 1945. Nor is it possible even to imagine it being otherwise.
I like to think that friendships such as that forged between my family and the Kulkes make a tiny contribution towards lasting Anglo-German friendship, and thus to the peace of the whole world.
I departed from Zittau on 7th May, 1945 amid the thunder of artillery fire through which could be heard the no-longer-distant chatter of machine guns and the occasional whine of an approaching shell. It was obvious that the town would be part of the battlefield within days, if not within hours.
I had been one of a working party (Arbeitskommando) of thirty ‘other rank’ British prisoners of war living and working in Zittau since October 1943. We had been captured in Tobruk, North Africa on 21st June 1942 and had been imprisoned in a large prisoner of war camp in Northern Italy. After the collapse of the Italian Fascist government and the surrender of its successor to the British and American allies, we had been transported to Germany, to Stalag IVb at Mühlberg, and thence to Zittau.
In Zittau we were lodged in Neustadt in the town centre, in what remained of the old Town Theatre, most of which had been destroyed by fire. We occupied a day room and a dormitory on the first floor. Our guards lived on the ground floor below us.
From this base we went out to work, in parties of two, three or four, every day. Our work mainly consisted of loading and unloading railway wagons at Zittau Railway Station and at other railway sidings in and around the town. When available though, we did any other heavy manual work that was needed. We helped deliver groceries and greengroceries from wholesalers to retail shops in the area. We loaded produce from local farms onto lorries and unloaded them at their destinations. We swept the streets, dug graves in Zittau cemetery, worked in a local bakery, in an iron foundry, in a jam factory and, in fact, anywhere else where our labour was required.
On one memorable day in, I think, February 1945 some fellow-prisoners and I loaded onto a lorry a number of large and heavy boxes from Zittau Stadtmuseum and took them to the summit of Mount Oybin where we left them for safety in the ruins of an ancient monastery. Thus, so it is believed, we played a tiny part in the history of the famous Zittauer Fastentuch.
It wasn’t long before we became almost as familiar with Zittau as with our home towns in Britain. We got to know its cobbled streets and squares, its narrow alley-ways, its centuries-old buildings and, of course, its railway sidings.
We soon learnt enough very ungrammatical German to be able to hold basic conversations with our guards and with the German civilians, and prisoners of war and civilian workers of other allied nations with whom we came into contact while working. We came to know some of them very well indeed. The Germans were, of course, our enemies - but it is difficult to maintain personal enmity with people whom you have come to know well and who you realize that, under other circumstances, could have become good friends.
Two of our guards I remember particularly. In charge of the Arbeitskommando was Unteroffizier Kurt Laudenbacher. It might have been expected that he, at least, I would have regarded with enmity. Goodness knows, there had been plenty of British noncommissioned officers whom I had thoroughly disliked! It’s true that he shouted a lot. We called him ‘Alleman’ because of the frequency with which he would shout ‘Alleman raus!’, ‘Alleman saubermachen!’ And so on.
He was fair though and would often take our side against the Stalag authorities or against our civilian employers. When we first arrived in Zittau we were paid in Lagergeld – paper money that could be spent only in a Stalag shop or canteen. We pointed out that for us, in a tiny Arbeitskommando far from the nearest Stalag, Lagergeld was totally useless. He agreed and took the matter up with the Stalag. From then on we were paid in real Reichmarks and Pfennigs.
Then too, he insisted that if we worked with scrap metal we had to be provided with leather aprons and gloves. If they weren’t provided he told us to ‘down tools’ and stop work.
Then there was Otto Rosenstück, an amiable guard who wore the ribbon that indicated that he had been on the eastern front throughout the winter of 1941/1942. He told us that at one point his unit had been within sight of the suburbs of Moscow.
He lost all his toes to frostbite during that bitter winter and had been assigned to the undemanding job of POW guard because he could no longer march properly.
He was married and had a son, a toddler called Franz Josef. He arranged for his wife and son to come to Zittau to escape the allied bombing in the Rhineland where they had lived. I have often wondered what happened to that little family when the war ended.
I worked for some time for Burger’s Fruchthof which employed four or five Germans, two Dutch civilian workers and - depending on the number of railway wagons of produce expected – between two and five British POWs. Frau Burger appeared to be in charge of the business. I recall that Frau and Herr Burger celebrated their silver wedding anniversary while I was working for them and they gave a celebratory party for all their employees, including us. Frau Burger had a sense of humour. She gave a little speech in which she said that she was a very lucky woman because she had been married for twenty-five years and her husband hadn’t a grey hair on his head. He was, in fact, completely bald!
The Burgers had, as far as I know, just one daughter Sonja who was sixteen or seventeen at the time and I suppose was still at school. She was a friendly girl and much appreciated the attention of us woman-starved POWs. I hope that she survived the chaos at the end of the war. She was six or seven years younger than me and could, of course, still be living today.
Also possibly still living could be Brigitte, daughter of Herr Rutsch (I may well have spelled his surname wrongly) a coal merchant. I remember Brigitte as a shy and endearing little girl of about ten with big blue eyes and long blonde plaits. I hope that she too survived the war’s aftermath.
Her father, the coal merchant, clearly suffered from chronic bronchitis or some similar bronchial affliction. He had a most appalling cough that was made worse by the cigarettes that he was unable to resist.
Then there was a very tough old lady (‘old’ by our youthful standards – she may have been fifty) who, single handed, ran a scrap metal business. She also kept one or two sheep for their milk (most of us had never before heard of sheep being kept for their milk). She had, in her youth, been to England and had visited Harwich – a town with which I, and several other prisoners, were very familiar.
Christian, whom I got to know well, was an elderly man employed by Kurt Kramer, wholesale grocers in Neustadt, not far from our Lager. For several weeks another prisoner and I, pulling a handcart, accompanied Christian through the streets of Zittau delivering groceries to the many retail shops in the town.
Then, of course, there were the ‘foreigners’, prisoners of war and volunteer or conscripted civilian workers from every German-occupied country in Europe. The greatest number were ‘Ostarbeiters’ from Russia or the Ukraine but there were others from Poland, Jugoslavia, The Baltic states, The Netherlands, Belgium, France and elsewhere. There was even one – Cherim, who worked for the old lady metal scrap merchant – from Albania!
A few I remember by name. There was Pieter from Groningen in the Netherlands. He had such a strong local accent that his fellow Dutchmen claimed that they understood him better when he spoke in German than in Dutch. He and Jacques, a Frenchman from Marseilles, both worked for Fruchthof.
Anna, a friendly young woman of about the same age as us prisoners, came from Orel in Russia. She worked for the Münchner Hof hotel in Neustadt, from which we collected our rations (black bread, margarine and swede soup) every day. Occasionally, two or three of us would be sent across the square to the Münchner Hof to peel potatoes. This gave us an opportunity to chat to Anna who taught me enough Russian to speed my journey home through Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia in May 1945.
Then there was Alex who worked for Gocht und Steffens, Marmelade, Konserven und Kunsthönig manufacturers. He came from Sebastopol in the Crimea and had been a cinema projectionist before the war. Alex had a ‘Lagerfrau’ (he admitted that he had another wife back in Sebastopol) with whom he lived at the Gasthof Drei Linden, a hostel for Ostarbeiters. The ‘Lagerfrau’ was Mareja, a likeable Ukrainian woman whose face bore the scars of smallpox. She too worked at the jam factory. She had a passion for English milk chocolate and I always tried to save her some from my Red Cross parcels.
There were many Serb prisoners of war with unpronounceable names. One, with an enormous moustache, was called simply Schnurrbart by us, by the German guards and sometimes by his fellow-Serbs. He always vowed that he would shave off his moustache on the day that he was sure the war was coming to an end. I saw him clean-shaven, and hardly recognisable, on 6th May 1945, just a day before we were marched out of Zittau.
An Estonian dentist attended to the dental needs of all foreign workers and prisoners of war in Zittau. I visited him, with a guard, two or three times. He spoke no German except ‘Bitte spucken!’ (please spit) but he did speak Russian, and his Russian receptionist and dental nurse, who spoke fluent German, interpreted for him. They made a very good team and I certainly received as good dental treatment from him as I ever had in the British Army. Sadly, they left Zittau at the beginning of 1945 ‘for safety’. They departed in the direction of Dresden and I very much fear may have been victims of the inexcusable (in my opinion) British and American terror-raids on that town on 13th and 14th February.
On that day in early May 1945 when we marched out of Zittau into what is now the Czech Republic I never dreamed that I would ever see Zittau again. I reached my home in Ipswich – about 100 kilometres north-east of London – eleven days later, on the 18th May, my twenty-fourth birthday
I never forgot the time that I spent in Zittau though – and my memories were far from being wholly unpleasant. . I have often thought that it was in the streets and on the railway sidings of that small town in Saxony that I ceased to be a boy and became a man. Zittau was often in my mind and I wished it well.
I married Heather, the girl I had met and fallen in love with on 3rd September 1939, the day that Britain and Germany went to war. We had two sons and with them we took annual camping holidays, at first in Britain and later in mainland Europe. We camped in France, Switzerland, the Italian Alps, Austria’s Vorarlberg and Tyrol. Our sons grew up and my wife Heather and I continued camping with a motor-caravan. We drove to what was then Jugoslavia , travelling down the Dalmation Coast to Dubrovnik and beyond and inland to Mostar, Sarajevo and Jajce. We spent one happy holiday in Germany’s Black Forest.
During that holiday, and during the earlier ones in Austria, I found that I had not entirely forgotten the German that I had learned as a POW in Zittau.
We didn’t visit Zittau. It was within the DDR. While I had no real fears for our personal safety, I could imagine that we might have had to endure long delays at the border, and possible searches of our camping equipment, while the DDR police satisfied themselves that we weren’t British spies intent on mischief. That was the kind of inconvenience that, in late middle age, we didn’t wish to experience on holiday.
The Berlin wall came down. Germany was reunited. Sadly, this came too late for Heather and myself. Our motor-caravan had succumbed to corrosion (it was a Toyota - perhaps we should have chosen a VW!), and we had grown too old for tented camping. Heather’s physical condition deteriorated and reached a point at which she was unable to think about taking holidays. I would certainly never have left her to go away, even for a day, on my own. I put aside any thought of overseas travel.
I didn’t lose interest in Zittau though. I wrote an article about my life as a POW for ‘The Friend’, a Quaker weekly journal. Zittau was mentioned though I thought it unlikely that any reader of ‘The Friend’ would have ever heard of the town. I was wrong. Jasper Kay, a Quaker from Cottenham, near Cambridge, wrote to tell me that his family had originated in Zittau and had settled in England a few decades earlier. Furthermore, he was a fluent German speaker and corresponded regularly with a Zittau family – to whom he had sent a copy of my article. He was to make his own first visit to the town in a month or two’s time. Was there anything I would like him to bring back from his visit?
I wrote back at some length giving him more details of where I had lived and where I had worked in Zittau and saying that I would love to have some postcards or photographs of the town.
That was how I first came to make the acquaintance of the remarkable Kulke family. Ingrid Zeibig (formerly Kulke) had been Jasper’s correspondent and became mine too. She could speak, read and write English as could her teenage daughter Maria Theresa. Her mother, Frau Ingrid Kulke lived in Zittau, as did her brother Andreas. They all proved to be good friends. Ingrid Zeibig translated my original article and my letter to Jasper Kay into German for the whole family. I have now corresponded with her by email for several years. Andreas and his mother visited every place that I had remembered and mentioned and took photographs of them for me. Frau Kulke managed to obtain for me a photocopy of a back number of the local Zittau newspaper – Der Zittauer Nachrichten for 18th May 1944 (my twenty-third birthday) that I spent as a prisoner in the town!
Heather and I felt that we had become members of the family. When Andreas married his wife Kornelia, we were told all about it and sent a wedding photograph. When they had their first baby in September 2006 I was sent a birth notification card. They had been blest with a lovely little girl whom they named Maja Ruth.
My association with Zittau was destined to increase.
Our younger grandson, Nick, became a student at Westminster University, studying photography. Seeking a project for the final year of his degree course, he decided to retrace my journeys as a prisoner of war between June 1942 and May 1945 and to make a photographic record of his travels. He was, at that time, 21 years old – the same age as I was when captured at Tobruk.
He was unable to obtain permission to visit and take photographs in Libya, so his journey began in Tarranto on the south of Italy where we had disembarked and begun our long journey from prison camp to prison camp. It ended in Prague, where at the Hotel Atlantic on 10th May 1945 I had enjoyed my first night’s sleep in a real bed for four years!
He unearthed some interesting information on the way.
All signs of the transit camp at Altamura near Bari in Southern Italy, where we stayed under canvas for a week or so, had disappeared. The area, still as bleak and desolate as I remembered it, was now a military training area, forbidden to prying photographers and news reporters (though Nick managed to gain access!) and was, so he heard, one of the least popular postings in the Italian Army.
Campo Concentramento PG 73 near Carpi on the plain of Lombardy, was very different. It had been a large camp of which I had only unpleasant memories. We had lived in poorly built, unheated huts, unbearably hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter (I had suffered from a frost-bitten toe during that winter in ‘sunny Italy’!). We were counted daily, a process that frequently took long over an hour. We were louse infested, desperately hungry and bored out of our minds. Few days passed without a fellow prisoner dying of starvation related disease..
On one occasion we had the opportunity of having our photographs taken and sent to our families in England. On receiving mine, my mother took one look at it and tore it up. She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow that I had become.
When he found the site, Nick was surprised to find huts, preserved and still standing and groups of young Italians visiting. It appears that after we had been transported to Germany, the camp had been taken over by the S.S. and used as a transit camp for Jews and political dissidents destined for Auschwitz.
It was now preserved by the Italian authorities and used as an educational facility to illustrate some of the harsh realities of World War II.
Transported to Germany after the collapse of Mussolini’s government, we had spent two days and nights in cattle trucks before arriving at Stalag IVb near Mühlberg. Here, as ‘other rank’ British prisoners of war, we were showered, deloused, photographed and finger-printed, inoculated, medically examined and – eventually – issued with new underclothes and British Army uniforms, presumably provided by the Red Cross.
At Stalag IVb, as at Campo PG73, my grandson found a surprise awaiting him. He discovered that, after the Allied prisoners had been liberated in May 1945, the camp had been taken over by the Soviet NKVD. Now there was a German memorial, and well-kept German graves there as well as an Allied memorial and allied graves in the grounds of a little chapel, half a mile or so away from the actual site.
The ages marked on the graves of the German dead (many in their 40s and 50s) suggested that senior army officers had been interned, and had met their end there. The graves were cared for reverently and lovingly by dedicated volunteers.
We had spent two – or was it three? – days at Stalag IVb. Then a group of 30 of us, all found medically fit for heavy work (Schwerarbeit) were sent with just one guard to Zittau to become Arbeitskommando 1153. Although we had been processed at Stalag IVb we discovered that we were now an outpost of Stalag IVa.
At Zittau, my grandson’s only surprise was the warmth of the welcome that he received. I had given him Frau Ingrid Kulke’s address and had suggested that he might call on her with a bouquet of flowers to express my thanks and appreciation of the kindness that she and her family had already showed me. At that time he spoke no German but I had schooled him to say: ‘Ich bin Nicholas Hall. Mein Grossvater ist Ernest Hall aus Clacton-on-Sea, England’
I had hoped that Frau Kulke would be pleased to see him but I had hardly expected her to be quite so kind and hospitable. By an extraordinary coincidence it was her birthday. She invited him to a party attended by the whole of her extended family from all over Germany. She let him stay in her flat for the two or three days that he spent in Zittau and she went with him, in his hired car, to show him where I had lived and all the places where I had worked during my stay in Zittau between 1943 and 1945. He was able to meet Ingrid Zeibig, my correspondent, and her daughter Maria Theresa, and Andreas and Kornelia Kulke. Little Maja had, of course, not yet been born.
From Zittau, my grandson went on to visit Leitmeritz (now Litomerice), in the Czech Republic, where, in 1945, I had first encountered the Soviet army – and had been thankful for the few Russian words and phrases that Anna had taught me back at the Münchner Hof in Zittau. From there he went, as I had, to Prague where he found the Hotel Atlantic in which, thanks to the Czech Red Cross, I had spent my first night in a comfortable bed for four years!
To put the finishing touches on the video record of his travels that he was preparing, Nick retraced his journey through mainland Europe the following year. Once again he experienced the unstinting kindness and hospitality of Frau Kulke and her family. Later that year the video was to help him gain a BA with honours at Westminster University.
Meanwhile I continued to care for Heather who was, by then almost totally disabled. It was a difficult, challenging and sometimes heart-breaking time but it was a happy one. We became closer together than we had ever been and she remembered to the very end the wonderful camping holidays that we had spent in Britain and in mainland Europe. Sadly, her life came to an end on 12th July 2006.
She died, as she would have wished, in her sleep, in her own bed and in her own home with me by her side.
Heather’s death left a gaping – and aching – hole in my life. For the last two years of her life she had been totally dependent upon me. I had never left her side except for essential shopping, and then, for no more than three quarters of an hour at a time and always only after I had found a tv programme or DVD that she could enjoy in my absence.
I engaged in a programme of feverish activity to try to fill that gaping hole.
I had a cataract dealt with that had impaired my sight so that I could no longer enjoy reading and had had to give up driving a car. We had continued to go regularly to our Quaker Meeting for Worship on Sunday mornings in a special taxi that would take Heather’s wheelchair. It was a great relief to have my vision back again. .
Throughout her adult life Heather had made a practice of writing down in a number of tiny notebooks any short piece of poetry or prose that she found helpful. I collected these notebooks together and typed out their contents to create an anthology of quotations that I had printed as ‘Heather’s Treasure’ in a 54 page booklet. Our elder grandson Christopher, an art graduate, created a line drawing of his grandmother for the title page. These I distributed as a memorial to Heather.to all the members of our extended family, to all our friends, to every member of Clacton Quaker Meeting and to anyone else who was interested.
I had several rooms of our bungalow refurbished to make it more suitable for a widower living alone – and to make it easier for my sons to sell when I am called to rejoin Heather.
Despite all this activity my life still seemed empty and devoid of purpose.
My interest in Zittau was revived when I received an email of condolence from Ingrid and a little later, when my spirits were at their lowest ebb, a message of faith and hope from Frau Kulke, Ingrid’s mother. She had written it in German and her daughter had translated into English for her.
Later, for the very first time, Zittau featured briefly in our national news bulletins on tv. Poland and the Czech Republic had become members of the EU and the national leaders of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic met to celebrate in the obvious place – Germany’s ‘three-country-corner town’!
I began to wonder if it might just be possible for me to make the journey to Zittau to thank Frau Kulke and her family personally for their kindness to myself and grandson Nick, and to revive some of my memories of the last eighteen months of World War II.. I was now free to travel, but I knew that at 85, I was incapable of making the journey on my own. I doubted if I was even capable of travelling so far with a companion.
My mind was made up for me by my elder son Pete and grandson Nick, both of whom knew how very much I would have liked to have visited to town again as a free man. They overrode my anxieties and booked, on line, for us to fly from Stansted Airport to Berlin at the end of March 2007 for a six day visit to Zittau. They arranged for a hire car to be waiting for us at the Berlin Airport. With the help of Ingrid, they rented for us a furnished apartment in Neustadt which would be ready for us when we arrived.
Our plane landed at an airport in the outskirts of Berlin soon after 9.00 a.m. on Wednesday 28th March 2007. My flight home in 1945 had been in two stages; Regensburg to Rheims and Rheims to an RAF Station to the west of London in Buckinghamshire. The aircraft for each flight had been a now old-fashioned propeller plane. Our flight from Stansted to Berlin had therefore been my first in a modern jet air liner and had been, in itself, an adventure!
The promised car was waiting for us and within an hour we were speeding along the Autobahn over the flat central German plain. Our first destination was Mühlberg. It was fortunate that grandson Nick had been there before because the actual site of Stalag IVb was by no means easy to find. But find it we did. The site was now heavily wooded and all the huts and administrative buildings had been demolished.
The main highway through the camp was still easily recognisable though. In 1943 the Soviet POW compound had been one side of that highway and the British and American on the other side. The foundations of the buildings were still visible and there were notices indicating their purpose as well as a plan of the Stalag when it had been operational. There were volunteers on the site lovingly tending the German graves and generally keeping the site neat and tidy.
My German was adequate to explain to them that I had been a prisoner there in 1943 and we were directed to the allied graves and war memorial in a well-kept enclosure half a mile or so away.
We had a late lunch in a restaurant in a nearby town and drove on to Zittau. After a while we left the Autobahn and proceeded along narrower minor roads. The countryside became less flat and we could see mountains in the distance. I knew that we were nearing our destination.
Zittau presented no major surprises. We passed through its outskirts into the town centre and finally parked in the Neustadt Square which, in 1943, had been called the Platz der SA. The whole area round the square had then been referred to as Neustadt. Above us towered the enormous, and surely unique, Salzhaus. It had been used for cheap housing accommodation towards the end of World War II and had, as I knew from my correspondence with Ingrid, been recently restored. Now there was a welcoming restaurant and bar ‘Zum Alten Sack’ near the main entrance.
The remnants of the old burnt-out theatre, which had been converted into accommodation for us prisoners had been demolished. In its place was the modern Dresdner Bank. On the other side of the square I recognised the Gasthof where the friendly Russian girl Anna had worked and from which, as prisoners we had collected our rations every day. It was now the Zittauer Hof and, so I was later told, had been completely refurbished and refitted as a comfortable modern hotel.
The square itself was unchanged. Its cobbled surface I remembered well but in 1943 there had been few, if any, vehicles parked there and there had certainly not been marked out parking spaces.
My son made a call on his mobile phone. Within minutes a car drew up beside us. It was Ingrid with the keys of the flat. It was an emotional moment for me. Ingrid and I had corresponded for several years but had never met. She was every bit as friendly, helpful and charming as I had expected. She handed over the keys to the flat – it was on the top floor of a building just across the alleyway beside the Dresdner Bank, within a few yards of my former lodging in the town! As Ingrid wished us good night she invited us to breakfast at her mother’s apartment the next morning – and to an evening meal with all the family later in the week.
The flat proved ideal for our purpose. It had a large living room with a kitchen annexe, containing a settee that could be converted into a bed as required, two roomy bedrooms and a spacious and well appointed bathroom. A feature of the living room was a balcony from which it was possible to survey the roof tops of Zittau and many of its public buildings. On view was the tower of the Rathaus, to the roof of which I had once had the task of carrying sandbags as a fire precaution! In the distance could be seen ‘the blue remembered hills’ of the Zittauer Gebirge.
We were to visit those hills on one of the most memorable days of our stay. Ingrid, my son Pete and I went to Zittau railway station where we caught the narrow gauge railway train to Berg Oybin, while Nick, my grandson, drove there by road to meet the train.
The journey itself evoked more memories than I had expected. Soon after the train moved off we passed a main line railway bridge beyond which had been the entrance to Burger’s Fruchthof. A little further on was the entrance to the Felt factory (Filzfabrik) where we had often worked. Near its entrance had been a pig slaughterhouse. Far away across level fields, could be seen a many arched railway viaduct that I well remembered having gazed at over sixty years earlier.
Further on still, on the other side of the track, there was a large building standing on its own. It was the old barracks (der Alt Kaserne) used for cheap housing accommodation in 1943 and ’44. Several times, when being taken in the back of a lorry to work in the outskirts of the town, we had stopped at the Alt Kaserne while the driver picked up Fritz - or Hans - or Heinz, who lived there and was working with us.
I couldn’t identify it but I am sure that we must too have passed the spot where there had been a siding and what we used to call the ‘Rinder Bahnhof’. Huge piles of tree bark were stacked by the railway track. I never did discover their purpose but from time to time we had to unload more bark from railway wagons or stack some onto lorries to be taken to an unknown destination.
On one occasion I cut my hand quite badly while working there. The cut was bleeding profusely. I was able to communicate in German by that time and I told the civilian who was in charge of us that I needed to go back to the Lager in Neustadt, to have it bandaged. ‘I can’t take you’, he said, ‘I must stay here and get this wagon unloaded’. ‘Das macht nichts’, I said, ‘I can find my way back on my own’. And so I did, striding unescorted through the streets of Zittau and hammering on the door of the lager to gain admission. The guard was a little surprised to see me unaccompanied but he duly washed and bandaged my wound.
We British prisoners in Zittau could easily have escaped from the town at any time – but speaking only basic German and wearing British uniforms with big red triangles painted on them I don’t think that we would have managed to get very far.
Nick, with the car, was waiting for us at Oybin station. We drove on up the mountain track as far as possible. Then we had to walk. I got as far as the souvenir and gift shop before age and arthritis finally defeated me! Nick had been to the summit on one of his previous visits so he stayed with me in the gift shop while Pete and Ingrid climbed to the very top, seeing the ruined monastery where, in 1945, I had helped take those heavy boxes from the Zittau Stadtmuseum, believed to contain the Fastentuch.
Later we drove on into the Zittau Gebirge, having lunch in a mountain restaurant and exploring the neighbourhood of Jonsdorf. In 1944/’45 Herr und Frau Burger of Fruchthof had owned a small chalet in a deep valley in the Jonsdorf area. They kept it well stocked with food and other provisions (I helped take some of them there!) and they had intended to go there for refuge when the Ostfront threatened to engulf Zittau. I wonder what happened to them.
On the Saturday of our stay in Zittau we walked the short distance from our apartment in Neustadt to the Church of the Holy Cross, where we had arranged to meet Dr Dudeck, whose special concern had been Zittau’s great Fastentuch, at 10.00 a.m.
The tiny part that I am believed to have played in the Fastentuch’s seven centuries’ history ensured us an especially warm welcome. We had a special private showing of the great Fastentuch displayed, in all its splendour, across the nave of the now redundant church, which has been converted into a museum for that purpose only.
The Fastentuch’s original purpose, its origins and its history were explained to us in English and each of its ninety illustrations identified. I found myself astounded at the enormous size of it, the comprehensive nature of its ninety pictures and the obvious loving care with which it has been restored and is now displayed. I couldn’t think of a single well-known bible story that isn’t pictured there.
Afterwards my son, grandson and I were photographed for the regional press and interviewed by a friendly, and fortunately bilingual, lady newspaper reporter. As a result a very positive account of our visit appeared a week later on the front page of the Zittauer Zeitung.
On the Saturday afternoon we were shown some of the other sights of Zittau by Andreas and Kornelia Kulke, accompanied by baby Maja. There was the Salzhaus which we had previously seen only from the outside, the floral clock and the smaller Fastentuch in the Stadtmuseum – which I remembered from my previous visit in 1945. While Andreas with my son and grandson engaged in strenuous activities like climbing to the top of a church tower, Kornelia and I, with little Maja, enjoyed a coffee and a chat in a nearby café.
It was a pleasure to make Kornelia’s closer acquaintance. I found her to be a charming, thoughtful and considerate young lady who understood and spoke English much better than I had realized. She told me that her daughter was to be baptised Maja Ruth on Easter Sunday at a magnificent nearby church.
Another highlight of our stay in Zittau included a trip across the frontier into what is now Poland to visit the open-cast lignite (brown coal) mine at Hirschfeld where I had briefly worked as a prisoner. It had obviously expanded tremendously since then and was now really a dreadful man-made scar on the landscape. I was shown a site, still in Germany and just outside Zittau, where a similar open-cast mine had been converted into an attractive lake with a well-appointed and welcoming hotel on its shore. Perhaps there is hope yet for Hirschfeld!
We crossed the frontier into the Czech Republic – and were impressed by its atmosphere of prosperity. I felt that I would like to see Leitmeritz (now Litomerice) again. In 1945 I spent my first night of freedom, with other former prisoners, sleeping on the floor of a barn a mile or two out of the town. The friendly Czech farmer drove us into town the next morning.
We had found it filled with Soviet troops, their tanks being garlanded by jubilant Czechs. The few Russian words and phrases that I had learned from Anna in the Münchner Hof proved invaluable. When checked I produced a broad smile, a smart British army style salute and the assurance, in stumbling Russian, that, ‘Ya Anglishki Tovarishch. Ya yeddoo dommoy na Anglia’ which I hoped meant ‘I am an English comrade. I am going home to England’. It invariably resulted in my being waved on with an answering smile.
German women and children were being rounded up and ruthlessly driven out of town by the Czechs. It occurred to me then for the first time – ‘How quickly the oppressed can become oppressors!’ It was a thought that I was to have on many subsequent occasions as the years passed.
Leitmeritz – or Litomerice as, in 2007, it now was – came as a great surprise. It took us a lot longer to drive there from Zittau than I had expected. I was amazed that, in May 1945, walking and hitching lifts on lorries fleeing southward, I had managed to get there from the Zittau Gebirge in a little over half a day. It was also a much larger town than I had remembered and I would certainly never have recognised it.
It was clean, well-maintained and prosperous, with attractive buildings and well-stocked shops. We lunched in a restaurant near the town centre. Directly we saw the menu we realized the great difference between not knowing very much of a language, as in Germany, and not knowing it at all, as in the Czech Republic!
Later, I did at least recognise the railway station from which, with scores of others, of all ages and all nationalities, I had caught the very first post-war train from Leitmeritz to Prague during the afternoon of 9th May 1945.
When, on another day, we drove to Prague I had no difficulty whatsoever in knowing where I was. Once you have seen the Prague skyline you never forget it. I recognised the Hotel Atlantic too where, thanks to the Czech Red Cross, I had spent my first night in a ‘real’ bed for four years! I would never have found it though without having my much-travelled grandson as a guide.
The ‘Atlantic’ is now a luxurious ‘four star’ hotel. We lunched in its restaurant and were able to look into a vacant bedroom on the first floor. Was it the one in which I had spent that first-comfortable night in May 1945? It could have been. It was just as I remembered it except, of course, that it had now been provided with a television set – and there were no bullet holes in the window!
Prague is nowadays a popular destination for British and – I suppose – American tourists. There were lots of us there, and I noticed that the menus in at least the larger restaurants are in English as well as Czech!
It was wonderful during those few days, to be able to visit so many places that I had seen under very different circumstances over sixty years earlier. The memories came flooding back.
However, what I had particularly wanted to do was to meet the members of the Kulke family who had been so friendly and helpful to me, and so hospitable to my grandson Nick. In the immediate family was Ingrid Zeibig, whom I had known by correspondence for years. Heather and I had never been blest with a daughter – just two sons of whom we were immensely proud. If we had had a daughter we would have been delighted if she had developed into just such a kind, thoughtful and considerate a lady as Ingrid.
I knew, of course, from grandson Nick about Ingrid’s mother’s kindness and generosity. I discovered her wisdom for myself. She spoke no English but during the course of an evening that we spent with her family she told her daughter Ingrid that she could see I was still very sad from Heather’s death. I had thought that I had successfully concealed this! She wrote on a piece of paper ‘Psalm 103 Vs. 2’ and asked her daughter to give it to me.
I didn’t have a chance to look this up until I returned home. Then I found that this verse was ‘Praise the Lord O my soul – and forget not all his benefits’. I have indeed a very great deal for which to be thankful, not least a loving family and good friends in Britain – and now in Germany.
It was wonderful to meet Ingrid’s brother Andreas and her sister-in-law Kornelia and, of course, the lovely little Maja.
There was one other member of the family to whom it was an honour and a privilege to be introduced. That was Ingrid and Andreas’s grandmother, Frau Kulke’s mother.
She was a most remarkable lady of 95, who put me to shame. Her husband, a Leutnant in the Wehrmacht had been killed on the Eastern Front and she had come to Zittau as a refugee from Silesia at the end of World War II. She was almost blind and physically very frail indeed. Yet her mind was razor sharp and her spirit indomitable.
We told her about our visit to Prague and she made it clear that she knew the city well – and the Hotel Atlantic! She spoke very little but we discovered that she had learnt and could still speak a great deal of English – and she spoke it with perfect pronunciation. I am sure that she is a source of pride to the whole family.
On one memorable evening we met the whole of the extended Kulke family – nearly twenty of them in all. Frau Kulke had booked a large room at an hotel at the foot of Berg Oybin for the very first ‘big screen’ showing of ’60 years’ the video record of Nick’s travels in my earlier footsteps that had helped to earn him his BA degree.
The commentary was, of course, in English which only a few of those present were able to follow and understand. Perhaps though, the pictures spoke louder than words. Anyway the video seemed to be much appreciated by all present and Ingrid translated into German my few words of thanks and appreciation at the end of the showing.
Afterwards we all enjoyed a festive evening meal together in the hotel’s restaurant.
On Tuesday, 3rd April we said farewell to Frau Kulke and her mother and began our homeward journey. We were to meet Pete’s partner Arlene at Dresden airport. She was flying there with a vital piece of equipment that Nick needed for a demonstration in connection with his podcasting enterprise that he was to give in Berlin on the following day.
Arlene’s plane arrived on time and all went according to plan. We were able to spend an hour or so in the city of Dresden before taking the motorway to the capital. In 1943 our train journey from Mühlberg to Zittau had taken us through Dresden. We had had to change trains at the station there but had seen nothing of the town.
Now I was amazed at the way in which this beautiful and historic city, devastated by British and American bombing on 13th and 14th February 1945, had been restored to its former magnificence. We enjoyed a late lunch in one of its many restaurants before embarking on the final lap of our journey in Germany.
I cannot say how very much I appreciated my visit – a visit that I had never dreamed I would be able to make – to the scenes that had been so familiar to me between 1943 and 1945. Much in and around Zittau had changed in the intervening 60 years, yet much remained the same. I had felt ‘at home’ there. In some ways it had reminded me of Britain in the 1950s.
There was no litter in the streets; no graffiti on the walls; no fast-food from ubiquitous Macdonald restaurants. There were no cars parked nose-to-tail in every side street and everyone, even the motorists, seemed to be remarkably law abiding.
I think though that the most valuable aspect of our visit was the friendship firmly established between the members of the Kulke family and those of my family.
My father was a regular soldier (beruf Soldat) and served in the British army through World War I. I was a Territorial volunteer (Kriegsfreiwillige) and served in the British army through World War II. I thank God that neither my sons nor any of my grandchildren have been required to serve in the armed forces, or have felt any desire to do so. Although today’s world is far from peaceful, Western Europe at least has been at peace with itself since 1945. Nor is it possible even to imagine it being otherwise.
I like to think that friendships such as that forged between my family and the Kulkes make a tiny contribution towards lasting Anglo-German friendship, and thus to the peace of the whole world.
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