... And the Policeman Smiled (10 page)

Closer observation revealed here a group of three little girls, one with a doll clutched to her, seated quite silently in a corner, and there a boy rubbing his eyes furtively.

In the weeks ahead the loneliness would intensify, but in the early days there was too much happening to keep homesickness at bay. A stream of visitors turned up at the camp. J. S. Homes, the National Liberal MP for Harwich, made an early visit, closely followed by the mayor who arranged for the town band to give a concert. The chief rabbi made two visits, the first to distribute his
Book of Jewish Thought
, the second to plant a commemorative tree.

For Celia Lee the excitement of meeting new people soon wore off. She recorded her impressions of Dovercourt in 1941 when she was still only fourteen.

All day long we had no peace. At first it was fun but afterwards we got tired of standing, jumping, dancing and sitting, of talking to and shaking hands with more or less important people from the district.

For the first time in its history, Dovercourt was news. Though some newspapers like the
Mail
and the
Express
harped on the theme of ‘charity begins at home', the general line was to stress the potential benefits of taking in such ‘lively, sturdily-built and intelligent' children.
Picture Post
thought the young refugees would be a credit to Britain:

They will be trained … to become farmers and farm-workers, artisans, plumbers, builders, electricians. Many of the girls will become nurses, maids or farm assistants.

What their parents would have made of this is another matter.

Of all the journalists who made the pilgrimage to Dovercourt, the team from the BBC caused the greatest excitement. Radio was still something special and the idea of putting out a half-hour programme on the young refugees – to be called
Children in Flight
– was a great public relations coup for the RCM. The word from Woburn House was that everybody should cooperate with all the enthusiasm they could muster.

For a week, producer Robert Kemp had free run of the camp, interviewing whoever he chose for as long as he chose. The result is the single most comprehensive account of the early days at Dovercourt.

This is not to say that it was wholly accurate. The style of BBC Radio was to report but not to offend. The editing of the draft script reveals an overwhelming urge to remove any hint of criticism of the administration and to avoid other possibly contentious errors, like education and employment.

Where the programme is most revealing is in its assumption that the proper way of handling young refugees was to treat them as if they were entrants to a minor public school. The doctor set the tone:

‘Kommen Sie hier, bitte!
Do you speak English? Well, just take your shirt off; I want to listen to your heart. Breathe please. Open your mouth wide. Let me see your eyes, please. Rightho, you're healthy.
Alles gut
.'

The contributions from the children suggest cheerful acquiescence in a slightly dotty game, though doubtless this mood was created largely by careful rehearsal. Their chief spokesman was Leslie Brent, who was chosen for his grasp of English. The words came over clearly but cautiously:

A bell rings at eight o'clock and we have to get up. Some boys get up earlier to make a run to the sea which is near the camp. At 8.30 we have a good English breakfast, which we enjoy. First we did not eat porridge but now we like it. When we finish the breakfast we get the letters or cards from our parents, and then we are all very happy. After that we clear and tidy our rooms, then we have two hours lessons in English. When the lessons are over we take our lunch and then we can make what we like. After tea we can go to the sea, which is wonderful, or we play English games of football. In the evening we learn a lot of English songs till we go to bed. I sleep with two other boys in a nice little house. Now it is very cold and we cannot stay in our house. We like to sit around the stove in a very large hall, and we read or write to our parents. The people are very kind to us. A gentleman invited me to go with him in a car; then we drove to his house and there we had tea. Oh, it was very nice. Sometimes we go to a picture house in Dovercourt. We have seen the good film
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. We were all delighted. Now I will go to school, then I can speak English good and then I would like to become a cook. We are all very happy to be in England.

Leslie Brent was denied his ambition to be a cook. Instead, he became a professor of immunology but says that he still enjoys cooking. One line of his broadcast – ‘Now it is very cold and we cannot stay in our house' – hints at a crisis that nearly closed Dovercourt and did result in the evacuation of Pakefield, the overspill camp near Lowestoft.

Around Christmas the cold became so intense that children slept in their sweaters or coats. ‘Four of us shared a double bed,' recalls Margot Barnes. ‘When one said “turn” we all turned.' There were nights when stone hot-water bottles left out on the floor froze solid. Top blankets were nearly always damp.

In the early morning, waking up to a fierce easterly wind and a leaden sea, the children gathered in the dining room to find snow fluttering through the rafters and piling up over the breakfast plates. It was too much for the older boys, who had the bright
idea of purloining some old electric heaters from the stores. But when they were switched on they blew the main fuses, which deprived them of lighting for the day and taught them why they had to rely on coal fires.

Erich Duchinsky, a
Youth Aliyah
worker at Pakefield and Dovercourt, encouraged his youngsters to keep on the move. ‘You could not stand still for a moment. Running about and trying to organise energetic games was my total preoccupation.' Those who were too tired to move and still felt cold took themselves off for a hot bath.

In the last weeks of December, Pakefield had to be evacuated. Two hundred and fifty children were moved to St Felix's Girls School in Southwold, where the staff gave up their holiday to help look after their guests. The luxury of single cubicles and warm beds lasted until the end of the first week in January when the regular boarders returned. Then it was back to Lowestoft and a new set of problems.

After the snow came the rain. One night the water in the gullies flooded over into the chalets. Children were carried shoulder-high to the road, where a bus took them to a seafront hotel. They spent the night sleeping on the ballroom floor. After that it was boys only at Pakefield. The girls went to Dovercourt. Not that conditions there were very much better. The chalets on the lower ground nearest the beach were liable to flood and more than once young children had to be lifted from their beds in the middle of the night. On these occasions a dormitory was improvised in the dining room.

Early in the New Year, Anna Essinger, the doughty headmistress of Bunce Court, was asked by Norman Bentwich to take charge of the welfare and education of all children at Dovercourt and Pakefield. Having emigrated from Germany with most of her school some five years earlier, she and her team of staff and older children knew a thing or two about the traumas of young people settling in a strange country.

It was impossible not to notice Anna Essinger. She was tall and imposing, but in a rather distant way; her formidable look was emphasised by dark glasses. But the personality belied the appearance. She got on with children and dedicated herself to their wellbeing. Anna Essinger did not like what she found at Dovercourt. She thought the domestic arrangements were too primitive
and the facilities for education, particularly language training, at best inadequate. One of her immediate problems was overcrowding. Dovercourt was designed for at most 500 residents but was providing for up to twice as many. Those children leaving the camp to go to foster parents (about one hundred in December) were vastly outnumbered by new arrivals.

The sheer volume of young people clamouring for attention frustrated Anna Essinger in her ambition, which was to recreate the spirit of Bunce Court by the sea. But she did try. From her own school she enlisted five teachers she could ill afford and ten senior boys and girls. Then the call went out for teaching assistants. Train fares and free board and lodging were offered, plus pocket money ‘where necessary', but this was never more than a pound a week. Undergraduates on Christmas vacation were the biggest group of helpers, but their colleagues were attracted from a wide catchment of background and experience.

Vera Tann's husband Fred was a railway shipping clerk at Parkeston Quay continental office. When he told her about the children at Dovercourt she and a friend went along to help in teaching English.

We put everyday articles on a table, sat round and taught them to ask ‘What is this?' – a spoon, fork, knife, sugar, milk and, later, because they watched the workmen, a saw, hammer, screws, nails. It was all a game but they learned very fast.

A volunteer who had lately returned from China where she had seen another aspect of the refugee problem spent her first evening at Dovercourt simply observing the children.

… hundreds of them, ranging in age from six years old to sixteen. Watching a small, fair-haired girl with a cross hanging from a silver chain round her neck, the visitor wonders whether the little non-Aryan Christians in these strange surroundings are not even more to be pitied than their Jewish playfellows, who already take persecution for granted as the burden of their race. Some of the older children are talking round one of the stoves, a few of the younger ones have toys to play with, and there are always groups round the ping pong tables. Very few are reading, partly because it is difficult for these children to concentrate after all the excitement of their journey and arrival in a strange country, and partly because
the books which have been presented to the camp are nearly all English. But there is one occupation which is unfailingly popular among them all, no matter what their age, and that is writing letters.

She forgot to mention the noise. Everybody else remembers the uproar in what was known grandly as the Palm Court, the former bar and dance hall where during the day several lessons were held simultaneously, including at least one assault on the piano. Classes gathered round the pipe stoves which gave out a strong smell of soot.

There was great fun learning English songs: ‘Tipperary'; ‘Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree'; ‘Daisy, Daisy' and the ‘Lambeth Walk' – simple, rousing tunes to which new and more appropriate lyrics would be added.

If you go down Harwich way

Any evening, any day
,

You find them all

Lachend den Harwich Skandal.

But singing songs and letter writing, though powerful antidotes to homesickness, did not amount to a decent education, as Anna Essinger was well aware. Writing in 1941, Walter Friedmann, who taught at Dovercourt, regretted

… that the staff for these transit camps had to be assembled at very short notice. Many had no proper qualifications or training to deal with young people and were not really good organisers either. As it was most important to move the children away from the camps as quickly as possible to enable others to come over from the continent, there was really no chance for a proper selection and many a gifted child … was sent to places where all the qualities they had were useless, whilst sheer luck led others to places which offered splendid opportunities for which they were not qualified to take advantage.

That luck played a big part in the distribution of favours at Dovercourt is confirmed by Anna Saville.

One day a violin teacher, who hadxome over to England with Anna Essinger, told me that an English family was prepared to give a home to a musical boy or girl and give him/her musical training.
Would I like to go? Before I could say ‘Yes please' she added: ‘I would advise you not to go. You can't make a living with art or music in England.' Do you know who went in my place? The late Peter Schidlof of the Amadeus Quartet! I have never stopped kicking myself from that day to this, regretting the only opportunity I had and lost.

Children in Flight
was broadcast on the evening of 3 January 1939. Gladys Rushbrook heard the programme at her home in Leigh-on-Sea. Her husband had just finished the day's work at his butcher's shop and they were settling down to supper.

It was so terribly sad, we felt surely there was something we could do. So we decided that at the weekend we would go to Dovercourt to see the children and find out if we could help in any way.

We were introduced to four boys, all of about seventeen. Each Sunday we used to go to Dovercourt and take them for a ride in the country and then to Clacton, where we had tea before bringing them back to the camp: This was our first contact with the Jewish world.

One of the boys was Ernest Jacob.

At that time I was in hospital but my best friend mentioned my name to them and they came to see me. I was on the danger list for two or three days and Mr Rushbrook contacted my parents in Cologne. The result was that the Germans permitted my father to come over and one morning, at about seven o'clock, my father stood at my bedside. He was given permission to be in England for a fortnight, and during that time Mr Rushbrook went with my father to Bloomsbury House where their application to come over to England had been registered. But my parents' file couldn't be found. Mr Rushbrook told the man in charge that if he couldn't find the file by the time Bloomsbury House closed at 5.30 he would go to the Home Office first thing the next day. Mr Rushbrook and my father returned at 5.30, by which time the file had been found. It was now of course time for my father to go back. I was so desperate that he shouldn't go, but the Rushbrooks said that if he didn't go there wouldn't be any chance for my mother ever to come out. I drove the matron at the hospital so mad that she got hold of my father at Croydon airport and I was able to talk to him there. But he said ‘No, I must go back.'