The Long Way Home (2 page)

About My Father

I thought I knew my father as a peace-loving, modest family man. When in 1995 he announced that he had finished writing his wartime story, I simply complied with his request
that I make a number of photocopies of his manuscript. These he sent to various publishers. He was disappointed when he got rejection letters from them all, but his habitual modesty made him accept
rejection graciously. I thought no more about it.

With an important birthday approaching in 1997, we (the family) decided to produce a bound volume to let him see his account as a finished book. I asked my wife Mary to key in the manuscript on
our PC and arranged to have the book formatted and printed digitally.

When Mary asked me, ‘Have you read this?’ I had to admit that I hadn’t. I was astonished at what I read, and asked my brother John, fourteen months my senior, if he knew any
more about our father’s escapades – but drew a complete blank.

There were many elements of my parents’ relationship that I couldn’t understand before reading Dad’s book. The hardships that they each endured during the war resulted in their
being fantastic parents, valuing family life and spending time together, above all else in life.

On 20 June 1997, his 80th birthday, we presented him with a handful of digitally printed copies of his book. I had never seen him so emotional on receiving a present. It also steeled him into a
renewed belief that the book should be published. With some help from a friend who acted as agent, the book was eventually published by Birlinn in 2005.

Born in Glasgow in 1917, John McCallum was the thirdborn of Annie McCallum’s four sons and two daughters. His youngest sister Lucy died as an infant, and Annie was widowed for the second
time, leaving her to look after five children.

My father’s two elder brothers (both O’Neills) were sent to work at an early age to help provide for the family. In order to make ends meet, Dad was sent to stay in Oban with his
uncle (also a John McCallum) and aunt to continue his schooling until he was old enough to work.

Dad loved his adopted parents and accepted Oban as his new home, enjoying going fishing on his way home from school. But being sent away from his family shaped his future character. He was
always comfortable in his own company and made few close friends throughout his long life. He had little interest in material possessions and considered home to be wherever his family were at the
time. As a family, we lived variously in Glasgow, Cardross, Strathaven and East Kilbride. Much later my parents made their homes also in Lochearnhead, Blairgowrie and Comrie.

Dad returned to Glasgow from Oban in 1929, by which time his eldest brother William was an engineer with Post Office Telephones (part of the Civil Service), and his brother Jimmy had joined a
shipping line as a cabin steward. His mother Annie told him to go out and find a job and not to return until he had found one. William managed to get him an interview with the Post Office and my
father started the following week as a ‘teleboy’ (delivering telegrams) at the ripe old age of twelve.

William and James had both joined the Territorial Army, and as soon as Dad was of age he signed up with the TA too. His principal reason, he claimed, was to get the annual bounty, which was
enough to pay for a suit, shoes and some other finery. That decision would shape the rest of his life. One of his passions was rifle shooting, and he was an excellent shot. He spent many hours
lying in a quarry honing his skills with his beloved .303. His expertise with his rifle cost him the hearing in one ear and almost cost him his life – as this book explains.

Dad was shot in May 1940, hospitalised and then imprisoned. After nearly four years in captivity, he made his remarkable escape with Jimmy and Joe. Then came the debriefing. The three men were
given a month’s leave and told that they would then be returned to their units. Dad had other ideas, and persuaded his superiors to retrain him. In view of his experience, he was sent to a
military intelligence unit near Sheffield. After training he was posted to Hamburg in charge of repatriating British soldiers and families.

His Hamburg posting represented one of the most adventurous episodes in his life. It led to his meeting his wife and lifelong love, Franziska, who figures only at the end of this book. He lived
in a lovely house in Bentheim, near Hamburg, and had a driver on call and a launch to provide access to all of the Port areas. Indeed, he could have written a second book about his Hamburg
experiences, but I got the feeling that many of the stories were not suitable for his children to read, never mind the general public.

My father spent his entire life until he retired working for PO Telephones in Glasgow. Subsequent to taking early retirement at fifty-five he was presented with an Imperial Service Medal, a
Civil Service long-service award.

After his early retirement, my parents moved to Germany to work of a different kind. It was a status symbol for wealthy German families to have a British couple acting as ‘house
overseers’, ensuring the smooth running of the household and providing backup as drivers, party organisers and simply good company. They worked for one of the top directors of the Vereinsbank
Bank who lived in Blankenese near Hamburg, a German industrialist in Schweinfurt, the Duke and Duchess of Bavaria and a Bavarian baron and baroness.

They gained some fascinating insights into German life of that kind, but neither of my parents was particularly well suited to service roles and they returned after two and a half years. John
then took a job as a security guard with a transport firm in East Kilbride, where the family had lived for around thirteen years, until his retirement at age sixty-five.

My parents then rented a cottage in Lochearnhead, only five minutes’ walk from Loch Earn, so Dad could enjoy his favourite pastime of fishing, and spent 18 years blissfully happy years
there. Their love of family was rewarded in later life by watching five grandchildren growing up, and Dad had the added happiness of the birth of a greatgrandchild in September 2008.

Dad’s beloved wife Franziska (Frankie) passed away peacefully in 2006. A few months after Mum’s death, we organised a trip back to Bad Karlsbrunn (now Karlova Studanka in the eastern
Czech Republic), the village in which Dad had spent four years as a POW, which plays a central role in the story told here. After over 60 years, the village was completely unchanged from the time
of his imprisonment. It was one of the most memorable holidays of my life. There was a surreal quality about being in some of the rooms and buildings that featured so prominently in the story, and
to stand on the station platform from which they made their escape.

Later in 2006 we made a four-day trip to northern France, looking for the exact spot on the St Omer road where Dad had been shot. He had volunteered to test his shooting skills by firing a Bren
gun at a tank which appeared on the road in front of him. This piece of bravery cost the other ‘volunteer’ beside him his life, and cost Dad some shrapnel in his leg, a shattered ankle
and a four-year stint in POW camp.

Fishing remained one of his passions until the end. In May 2011, only five months before he died, he and I spent four days in a 37-foot cruiser on the Caledonian Canal, our third such trip in
consecutive years. Despite recent illness, Dad was still able to pull the boat through the flight of locks at Fort Augustus and steer the boat through the lochs, bridges and waterways.

Looking back over what my parents went through in wartime, I think of the role that luck had in shaping their lives. After he survived being wounded, Dad’s luck held out when he had two
captured Harley Street surgeons working on his leg and ankle, with the result that he could still walk without a stick in his nineties.

Once I had read his account in full, I asked Dad why he hadn’t told us this incredible story earlier. He said that he had signed the Official Secrets Act and he couldn’t disclose the
information prior to the 60-year period it enforced. To him, it was as simple as that.

Author’s Preface

You’ve seen it on TV a dozen times, you may have read the book and, if you’re old enough, you may have discussed it after it happened. When they filmed it, they
called it
The Great Escape
.

What I cannot understand is who christened it with a name that is totally misleading. Rembrandt’s painting ‘The Man in the Golden Helmet’ is a great masterpiece, as is
Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
a great piece of classical writing. The list of Greats that spring to mind is unending, but most of them were successful achievements.

There are exceptions to everything in life, like the Great Plague and the Great War, neither of which could have been great to anyone who was involved in them.

The dictionary quotes ‘great’ as meaning ‘large, big, important or distinguished’. The Stalag Luft Drei escape was definitely big, but was only distinguished by the
deaths of the fifty brave airmen who misguidedly made the attempt.

Truth being stranger than fiction, three Scots escaped from their camp at the same time as the sixty-seven airmen and, as luck would have it, they unfortunately chose a route which passed
through the town of Sagan, which was the railhead for Stalag Three.

Just as the mass escape story is true, so also is the story of the three Glasgow men who escaped at the same time – they were my brother Jimmy, my friend Joe and myself.

Map drawn by Mary Spence

When I reached the glorious age of nineteen, I signed up as a Supplementary Reservist with the Royal Corps of Signals, whose Drill Hall was situated in Yorkhill in Glasgow. I
was merely following a family tradition, as my two older brothers had set the pattern for me previously. My brother, William, had completed his service but my other brother, James O’Neill,
was still in. The three of us were telephone engineers in the Post Office, so it made good sense to give our services to the Signal Corps and this particular unit consisted almost entirely of Post
Office personnel.

This was when I first met Joe Harkin, who was already a Reservist, and from this time on, as long as we were in uniform, we were almost inseparable – Jimmy, Joe and Johnny.

J
oe was a slim, good-looking young man with wavy brown hair, fairly energetic and a few years older than myself. At that time he was an external lineman and, as I
had joined the Corps in this capacity, we had something in common, including a mutual liking.

Brother Jimmy was a different type of character from Joe – slightly older, reddish-blond hair, mainly cool goodhumoured nature, but with a temper which could flare and then disappear as
quickly as it had come. He was the most solidly built of the three of us and, being the eldest, naturally assumed the lead figure in our trio.

I was the lightweight of the party in all departments – age, height and weight, with no distinguishing features that anyone would ever remember me by – which, in life, could also be
an asset.

We were paid an annual bounty, which we received quarterly, and although it was not a lot, it did provide a new suit and a pair of shoes every year as long as you restricted yourself to the less
expensive tailors. The money was laughingly referred to as ‘Blood Money’. Much as I enjoyed spending this extra cash, little did I dream that the day of reckoning would come and that I
would be called upon literally to repay in blood, with bullet-wound scars as a receipt for having paid up! But that, as they say, is another story.

It is strange to think that our lives are made up of stories of adventure, drama, romance and other things, and all these happenings are either gilded or eroded, sometimes enhanced, by our
memory and imagination.

Jimmy, for instance, had spent some years in the Merchant Navy and so had a background of world travel, which stood us in very good stead later, as without his intimate knowledge of port
operations and seamen’s habits, we could not possibly have succeeded in our big adventure. After his time at sea, Jimmy took a job ashore and became a cable jointer with the Post Office, and
this was the only difference between the three of us – Joe and I were external linemen and Jimmy was a cable specialist.

Being a lineman was, on the whole, very hard work. Imagine sitting at the top of a telephone pole in winter with a heavy safety belt supporting you and the steps cutting off the circulation to
your feet, the wind and rain slowly freezing you, making for awkward cold hands. Yet I loved it: when my external training was completed, I was transferred to an internal section fitting
switchboards. I wriggled, pleaded, cajoled and left no stone unturned to get back to the outdoor work that I so much enjoyed, but all to no avail. The rest of my time in the Engineering Department
was spent doing work from which I derived no pleasure whatsoever.

However, the Royal Signals were willing to let me exercise my prowess at being a lineman. If I had thought that I had seen some hard times doing the job in a Scottish winter, what was still to
come was devastating.