Rosie's War (15 page)

Her persistence had paid off. They moved in that evening. We quickly learnt that persistence was one of Frida’s main qualities. She was a committed Communist who took the war and the Nazis much more seriously than most of us did. Her arrival brought the wider world to our room. She was determined to find out what was happening and was not content simply to read and then ignore the German propaganda notices we were given. She would argue and probe out information from anyone and everyone. It was she who made us aware of the RAF raids, the fighting in North Africa and the German successes in Greece and the Balkans. Frida would spend hours talking to the guards, trying to gauge what ordinary German people felt about the war. She was an enigma to many inmates and considered by some to be suspect. Why would she insist fiercely one day on blocking any German initiative in the camp yet the next day spend hours in earnest conversation with our captors?

Despite our different political views, I immediately understood and empathized with her. We came from the same English, middle-class world and had some London friends in common. Her father was the Dean of Trinity College at Cambridge University, where my brother had recently finished studying. I didn’t need her to tell me why she talked to the German soldiers. She was still in that academic world of enquiry and research. Her political beliefs were such that she felt that to challenge the German soldiers was in itself a political act. Like me, she had been arrested in Paris. She had been studying at the Sorbonne and had stayed on to sit her exams even as the Germans were entering the city.

Rosie (left) at work in the Kommandant’s office, by Frida.

Our real common interest was music. We both played the violin and requested instruments from the Red Cross as soon as their parcels started to arrive. We would challenge each other to faster and faster Scottish reels and duets, half the time playing just to keep warm. This would bring women from nearby rooms knocking on our door and asking us to ‘stop that racket’. The noise would intensify with Shula and Ronka dancing or pretending to fence to our music. The bugs would literally be dropping off the ceiling.

The violins were one of the many lifesavers from the Red Cross. Parcels, letters and telegrams all began to arrive once a post office was established early in the New Year. We now had contact with the outside world. The British authorities were notified of our existence with names, details and next-of-kin. The whole of the British bureaucracy rapidly swung into action to include us with the thousands of soldiers caught up in prison camps. I had been so worried about my family. Until the end of January I had no means of contacting them. In fact, my father did learn before Christmas that I had been interned but I didn’t, of course, know this at the time.

In the first letter to my parents, dated 30 January 1941, I did as much as possible to reassure them of my well-being. I wrote that I was ‘well fed and with lots of friends of my own age’. I did not lack for anything, I continued, given that Madame Izard ‘looks after me and sends me anything I need’.

This light-hearted tone, which made the Besançon camp sound almost like a French version of an Enid Blyton school, was to be present in all my letters home. In another I boasted of my superb ski suit sent from Paris by Lucile Manguin ‘in which I live all day long’. And in my last letter from Besançon I assured my parents that I was getting lots of food parcels from the Izard family in Paris. This was true, but it was followed by the blatant lie that I had put on at least a stone in weight, given the rich contents of these parcels!

Early in February, after nearly two months of imprisonment, I finally received my first communication from home. It was a Red Cross telegram of precisely nineteen words. After reading this I dashed up to my own private hideout on the roof of one of the camp buildings. Tucked in among the chimney pots, I perched on the steep slates to read and re-read the words:

ALL SAFE AND VERY WELL AT PATTISON. MUMMIE, DADDIE, DAVID JOAN BOBBY SEND LOVE. GOD BLESS YOU DARLING GIRL.

I began to cry quietly for only the third time since leaving Avignon. I was no longer isolated. The feeling that my family was still there at the same address in North London and that we were part of the whole POW machinery was very comforting. My mood could not even be depressed by the German sentry below, who was shouting and threatening to shoot me unless I came down.

The post office was great but it involved endless bureaucracy. Actually getting a letter was sheer luck, depending as it did on where your letter was in the vast pile waiting to be tackled by the German censors. On our side, we were all very clearly informed of the details of postal censorship. Letters had to be kept brief and each one was stamped with the reminder that ‘Brevity and Clearness in Writing Will Assure Greater Expedition.’ The war could not, of course, be mentioned. I spent long hours trying to think up meanings within meanings to write on the printed POW letterforms. I don’t think anyone, least of all my family, ever broke my complicated code. Not that they would have learned much more than that I was well and alive! But it was fun to feel that I had slipped something by the German censor.

It seems most extraordinary looking back, but the whole system of communicating with friends or relatives in enemy or enemy-controlled countries operated through the good offices of Thomas Cook & Son Ltd, which was appointed by the British Government as its intermediary. One condition for letters sent to the camp that I especially liked was the instruction that no reference could be made ‘to Thos. Cook & Son, Ltd, or any of their offices’. As if our family and friends would waste their precious few words talking about Thomas Cook!

We knew very little of what was going on in the outside world. Strict censorship meant that even with the postal service working, our knowledge of news from elsewhere was still very scanty. The letters we received gave us very little idea of life in Britain. Some news would be brought in by the French prisoners and doctors who had contact with the town and (in some cases) access to Swiss radio or the BBC. But everything was rather vague and we would speculate endlessly about any rumour.

Our German captors were the only other sources of information about the outside world. They related to us with great relish news of the Blitz over Britain that winter. One particularly nasty guard would taunt us at the daily food queue that our homes had been destroyed and our families killed. Somehow such news didn’t seem real: it is difficult to believe that any place you know well is changing while you are away from it. Or perhaps that was simply a defence mechanism in the face of the German taunts.

The arrival of parcels in the New Year meant for me the two lifelines of food and books. The food parcels were crucial to our well-being and survival. The first consignment arrived from the Red Cross in February 1941. It was only after they started that my weight began to stabilize. Canada sent powdered milk and maple syrup while from Australia came corned beef. Food-rationed Britain sent jam, butter, tinned steak and kidney pudding, marmalade and cigarettes. In the little parcels hut Christine and I eagerly opened the first package from Britain. The familiar labels of Crosse & Blackwell, Peek Frean and Cooper’s marmalade brought back such strong memories of England and our local grocer’s store that tears streamed down our faces. The three German soldiers seemed embarrassed and the sergeant brusquely asked us to leave. Only a few days later did it occur to me that they might have mistaken our tears of nostalgia for those of anger at the number of parcels being pinched for their own family homes.

Book parcels were also terribly important, given that the barracks library only contained musty, old military histories. There was an odd and arbitrary system of censorship towards any books sent to us. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to what you were allowed to keep and what was confiscated. I requested some specific books from the shelf in my bedroom at home. In the parcel that arrived the censor had refused Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
and D.H. Lawrence’s
Poems
yet had accepted Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray
, Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer
and even an anthology of Russian poetry! For some reason, Dickens seemed to be regularly banned for most people. Frida had a lot of trouble over a book of Matisse and Renoir reproductions, mainly nudes. The soldiers at the parcels offices made her stand there, furious and embarrassed, while they gloated over what they seemed to think was the last word in pornography. Eventually they handed it over with a smirk and ‘Nicht gut, Fräulein’ (‘Not good, miss’).

Friends and family sustained me with their parcels. All were meticulously searched and a couple of times were even requisitioned. The ski suit from Lucile Manguin that I boasted about to my parents was a magnificent, haute couture affair in navy blue, together with matching ski boots. From Madame Izard I received food, books and money. My family in London kept me well stocked. I later found a draft of a letter from home saying that my mother was sending various items including: ‘… soap, chocolate, toothpowder, old skirts and coat. Let us know if there is anything you want.’

The queue for Red Cross parcels, sketched by Frida.

The overcrowded, constantly bickering Room 13.

Any sort of prison has a drab routine to it. I settled into mine as the weeks passed. We were woken at 7.30 a.m. and began our daily preoccupation with keeping the stove lit and our room warm. After a breakfast of bread and water we had some time to ourselves to clear up and wash and then it was work for the rest of the morning. Given that I could type and knew shorthand, I applied for a job in the Kommandant’s office. It was boring and monotonous stuff, with lots of card indexing and archiving of documents. But at least it was warm and I could try to find out what was going on and get as much of the German news as my limited knowledge of the language would allow me.

The afternoons we had for ourselves. There were numerous exercise classes which were run by an ex-PE teacher nicknamed Stanley (I never learnt her real name). She inspired plenty of volunteers and organized a whole series of matches and tournaments in volleyball, netball, rounders and folk dancing. Her classes dominated the afternoons for me. All my school life I had played tennis and netball. I loved the feeling of being physically strong and fit. I felt better in myself when I had run, stretched and jumped away the depression and grumpiness inside me. I wanted to race around the courtyard and leave the others to their interminable debating about the future of the world. I would drag Frida out into the snowy yard and make her play reels and jigs while we bounced around doing folk dances until her fingers were blue with cold.