... And the Policeman Smiled (9 page)

With the gap between expenditure and income growing by the day, Elaine was an early advocate of a campaign to prise money out of the government. But whenever the subject was raised, in or out of Parliament, it was made clear to the RCM and to the other refugee bodies that they were on their own. However persuasive their arguments for a relaxation of the purse strings, they always came up against the irrefutable – the guarantee offered five years earlier by Otto Schiff that no Jewish refugee would become a charge on public funds. It was a handy get-out for Foreign Office ministers who argued that if Britain acted unilaterally in subsidising refugees, Germany would compel more Jews to emigrate. This proved to be a nonsense. The Germans needed no encouragement to tighten the screw, as even the Foreign Office
had soon to admit. But by then, the Central British Fund, the chief provider for the
Kindertransporte
, was close to insolvency.

The strategy for dealing with the financial crisis was to call for volunteers who would be willing to act as foster parents at their own expense or with the help of a small allowance, and for guarantors who, linking up with relatives or friends in Germany, could nominate particular children for short-term adoption. The campaign was to get underway on 25 November, when Lord Samuel delivered an emotional radio appeal to the British public to open their homes to refugee children. The response was encouraging. Of the offers that came in, at least 500 were worth following up. But it took time to inspect accommodation and to assess evidence of a good character. By early December the work had hardly begun.

In any case, there were few offers of help which extended to the older children. Most potential foster parents were fixed on the idea of starting at the nursery level, but the early transports contained a high proportion of teenagers up to the age of sixteen who had been threatened with imprisonment, or who had actually been detained and released only on condition that they left the country.

Desperately searching for temporary homes for their young guests, the RCM hit on the idea of taking over two holiday camps: one at Dovercourt, a small seaside resort just along the coast from Harwich, the other further away at Pakefield, near Lowestoft. It must have seemed an ideal solution. Out of season the camps were unoccupied and cheap to rent.

The chalets, made to look like miniature bungalows, were purpose-built to keep a respectable distance between teenage boys and girls; all the essentials of mass catering were on hand; and the owners had allowed plenty of space for recreation. There was just one problem. The camps were designed for summer living. The RCM proposed reopening them in December, at the beginning of what was proving to be one of the coldest winters on record.

Preparations were still a long way from completion when the first
Kindertransport
was filing on board the
De Praag
, docked at the Hook of Holland. For those brought up in central Germany it was likely to be their first encounter with the sea. The experience was not encouraging. The crossing from the Hook to Harwich can be rough at any time of year, but in the winter of 1938 it was like riding a roller coaster.

Nina Liebermann was lucky enough to be a good sailor. Not so her younger sister, Ella:

She became violently seasick and for the next couple of hours I had to hold her head over the railing, all the while bathing her face with eau de cologne. (To this day, the very smell of it makes my sister feel ill.) When, at last, her bouts of seasickness subsided, I sank down exhausted onto our luggage in the cabin hold of the boat. The next thing I knew was someone pinching my cheeks and saying: ‘Don't worry. She can't be dead with rosy cheeks like that.' When I opened my eyes, my sister was staring at me, her lips quivering. I don't think I have ever slept so soundly. But it was my first rest in more than twenty-four hours.

Coming from Hamburg, thirteen-year-old Gerd Nathan was not entirely unfamiliar with the North Sea. But his advantage was slight:

On the boat we were two to a cabin and I occupied the top bunk. It must have been one of the roughest nights, it was terrible, and it was the one-and-only time I have been seasick. The chap below me was sick and that of course triggered me off. But I do recall after being sick I was very hungry, and I had my favourite sandwiches in my coat pocket (sardine sandwiches – sandwiches in oil!) and I wanted them. But I was so weak I couldn't get off the bunk to get them and the boy below was too weak as well.

The first thing I did on arriving in England was to have my sardine sandwiches – I was very hungry.

There was more to concern Ruth Michaelis than the rolling waves, even though she was one of the lucky few whose mothers travelled with them:

I can remember the boat very clearly – how enormous it seemed. Everyone was putting their cases into a big pile as they went on the boat. We were hustled down into the bunks and put to sleep and I can remember being terribly worried because I couldn't imagine how this huge boat could possibly float on the water; I imagined that once it was unhooked from the side it would just sink like a stone. Nobody was concerned and I remember asking and being told to shut up. Then I was very, very seasick. I remember being in the upper bunk, calling for my mother and leaning over and being sick all over her as she looked up from the lower bunk. The
cabin was tiny. My brother was very calm and quiet. I didn't see the open sea and all my worries about the boat sinking were forgotten about.

For those who could face up to a meal there was a first hint that English people and English ways might be, well, somehow different. Milk in tea was thought to be a curious habit and there was some consternation at the sight of square, thin slices of white bread. Alfred Cooper assumed he was being offered cake but thought how crazy it was to eat it with butter. Up to then he had been used to thick slices of rye bread.

Those who understood some English were puzzled by the crew's frequent use of certain adjectives which did not appear in any dictionaries. Practising these new words in front of supervisors they soon found out why.

The
De Praag
berthed at Parkeston Quay at 5.30 a.m. on Friday 2 December 1938. By 6 o'clock the children were ready for their first encounter with their British benefactors. A reporter from the
Eastern Daily Press
observed the scene:

As each child filed through the ship's lounge, which had been turned into a temporary office by Major Langdon, who was in charge of the landing arrangements, and his little band of helpers, an official ‘labelled' him or her. ‘Hans Jacobus', somebody called out. A youth stepped forward, took off his cap, and a woman tied around his neck an ordinary luggage label, on which was scratched his number and name. ‘Manfred Landau … Hella Richter …' and so the disembarkation went on.

It was not until more than four hours after the
De Praag
had drawn alongside Parkeston Quay that the refugees had left the ship.

Never has a sadder boatload of passengers filed through the customs barriers at Harwich. As the officers patted their pockets, trying to put the children at their ease with smiles and words of broken German, some of them timorously emptied their pockets and there was laid out on the long table an odd assortment of fountain pens, propelling pencils, cheap flash lamps and schoolboy odds and ends – their only possessions apart from the clothes they wore and the few garments stuffed in the rucksacks.

Another reporter, this one from
The Evening Standard
, detected a more cheerful mood.

Full of excitement at visiting a strange land the children showed little effect of their long journey and rough crossing, or indeed of the modern tragedy in which they have been involved.

It was more likely that the bland smiles were a thin disguise for total bewilderment. Few had any English; they could only guess as what was being said to them. Helga Samuel was not alone in fearing the worst.

Perhaps because I looked more lost and sad than the other children, I was picked out by a photographer who came over to me and said something which of course I did not understand. I began to cry so he put his arm round my shoulder and gave me a coin (I later found out it was half-a-crown). Then he called over one of the helpers, and with her looking at the label round my neck he took our picture.

The friendly policeman who appears in other photographs was a comforting influence. There was much interest in the shape of his helmet and even more interest in the fact that he did not carry a gun.

Other first impressions crowded in: small houses in different colours, front gardens, buses but no trams, pennies and half-crowns, lattice windows, open fires and smoking chimneys. A double-decker bus took the children to Dovercourt Camp in groups of sixty. Driving through Harwich, a girl on the lower deck found herself looking out at a bookshop window. She recognised just one title amongst the books on display –
Mein Kampf
. My God, she thought, what have I come to?

‘
If you go down Harwich way
Any evening, any day,
You'll find them all
Lachend den Harwich Skandal.'

Dovercourt in the thirties was an Essex coastal village favoured as a retirement home for those who enjoyed stiff breezes and bracing walks. From the seafront up to a mile inland was an uninterrupted expanse of tall grass and fern, the delight of ramblers. In the wet months it could turn into a quagmire.

Billy Butlin was not much interested in winter conditions. What he wanted was wide open spaces that could be converted to one of his new-style holiday camps, offering bargain, trouble-free holidays for the whole family.

At Butlin's everything was laid on. Mum and Dad could relax knowing that the children were being looked after, that someone else was cooking the meals and that every evening would bring some form of entertainment. And all for a price that at an ordinary hotel would barely cover the cost of bed and breakfast.

Butlin knew that the leisure industry was about to be revolutionised by a law forcing employers to give their workers holiday with pay. The millions who would soon be looking for somewhere to spend their hard-earned break were his natural customers. He set about looking for new sites.

Dovercourt was ideal. The land was cheap and there was plenty of it, room for an amusement centre and communal dining hall, children's play areas between the fir trees and lines of tiny chalets
fronted by pebble-dash walls and mock Tudor porches, copies of the latest fashion in middle-class suburbia, The hint of quality did not allow for heating and surface drainage, but neither were strictly essential in the summer months.

Dovercourt had just one season as a holiday camp before it was taken over by the RCM as short-term accommodation for refugee children. With Harwich and the docks at Parkeston Quay not more than two miles away, and a direct rail line to London, it would have been hard to think of anywhere more convenient for the RCM to set up a distribution centre.

When the first
Kindertransport
arrived at Dovercourt, it was cold but dry. The children's immediate reaction was a sense of relief at having arrived somewhere. Then there was the excitement of finding out about this strange miniature town with its open view of the North Sea over the mud flats.

Celia Lee's first impression of Dovercourt was roses. ‘I couldn't believe it: roses in wintertime! It made a strong impact on me. What a beautiful country.' Others remember the green of the countryside. ‘The first question they asked,' reported a voluntary worker, ‘was, “May we go on the grass?” They were astonished when we said “Yes”.' Everyone remembers the holiday chalets – ‘our little houses' as they were soon to be called.

In the way children have of promoting the incidental to matters of vital importance, settling in was a flurry of inconsequential activity. When Johnny Blunt was given his pocket money, he immediately went off and bought a tin of pineapple.

That was my first purchase in England. But how to open it? One of the other boys had a penknife and it took us about half an hour to get at the pineapple. But it was worth it.

There was curiosity and wonderment at those features of life that went unremarked by the natives but to foreigners were so eccentric, and so quintessentially British, like porridge and kippers for breakfast, ‘a peculiar liquid which looked like coffee, tasted like poison and was said to be tea', and bottles of HP Sauce and vinegar on the dining table. Outside, men in Wellingtons excited comment, though it was not long before everyone appreciated the value of waterproof boots. Those from middle-class homes, the great majority, were puzzled by the lack of double glazing and by
the custom of shooting loads of coal into iron stoves which sent most of the heat up the chimney.

In the chalets, stone hot-water bottles were a puzzle; so too were blankets (‘I had always associated them with picnics, holidays and Wild West stories'), and English toilet paper, ‘hard and shiny'.

The new experience everyone enjoyed was eating bananas and it was a great disappointment when the supply stopped short at the beginning of the war. The greatest deprivation was German sausage, made more intense for one boy who had brought a whole salami all the way from Vienna only to have it thrown away by a Dovercourt helper ‘because it didn't smell right'.

A reporter from the
Jewish Chronicle
visiting Dovercourt a week after the arrival of the first
Kindertransport
had nothing but praise for the RCM.

Everybody I saw was dressed in the warmest clothes … and all the children are given plenty of blankets to keep them warm at night … Some were playing table tennis, some darts (it was amusing to watch their efforts at this game, which was entirely new to them) … In a side room there were several surrounding a piano which was being played by a youngster of about ten.'

But it did not take a sharp journalistic instinct to realise that for refugees – particularly young refugees – life could never be that simple.