The Separation (40 page)

The bombing results against German targets for last month show no marked improvement on the previous month. The number of sorties is up but the photographic reconnaissance shows a remarkable lack of accuracy. Our new four-engined heavy bombers will be operational in the next week or two so I am looking for better results all round. I note also that losses of aircraft are increasing steadily and the numbers of our airmen posted as missing is almost twenty-five per cent up on the previous month. The war will not be won if we merely send our young men into danger and death, without prospect of result. I enclose a copy of the final report from the Min. of Works concerning the damage caused by the Luftwaffe to the city of Coventry. Since November, when the attack occurred, it has seemed that the nightly bombing of British cities has, if anything, been stepped up. Kindly report back to me with your proposals.

Prime Minister to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs

April 23, 1941

Red Cross representatives have been noticeably busy in recent weeks, using our airfields for their various enterprises in travelling abroad, presumably to neutral countries. Although the procedure for Red Cross use of our air space is well regulated, I note that we are provided with little information about the known destinations of their several flights, or indeed what is intended by them. We do enjoy excellent relations with all levels of the Red Cross, their work in the Blitz has been exemplary and much official gratitude has been expressed to them. We remain tolerant in every respect of Red Cross activities, hoping for the best. We do not actually need to know what they are about, nor should we officially enquire.

Pray let me have a summary of what intelligence on the British Red Cross you have to hand and any more that arises in the foreseeable future. We do naturally have vital national interests in all parts of neutral Europe.

Prime Minister to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Lord Privy Seal
April 25, 1941

In response to your several private memoranda I am content for Foreign Office staff to make yet another search for any files or written material concerning the Duke of Windsor, our former king. The papers to which I allude are the sort of papers to which I always allude in this context. All personal and state papers, to the point of his abdication, are naturally sacrosanct and are anyway safely in the usual repositories. I am concerned with the later period in His Royal Highness’s peregrinations, up to the point in August last year when he accepted Governorship of the Bahamas. I am particularly anxious to locate material that arose during the Duke of Windsor’s flight last year from the house called La Croe, now in the part of France controlled by the regime in Vichy, his time soon afterwards in Madrid and of course the weeks he spent near Lisbon. It still seems likely he received aid and comfort from agencies other than H. M. Government.

To suggest that there are likely to be no papers left from his period of flight and confusion is mistaken: no household as large as the Duke’s can fail to leave a trail behind it. For instance, several telegrams passed between myself and His Royal Highness while he was in Madrid. We possess those, but there would be others of similar ilk. Sir Ronald Campbell was our Ambassador in France at the time of the fall. He is now, of course, our Ambassador in Portugal and holds a substantial archive. Information from our Spanish embassy has been slow in coming forward, for some reason.

I have never discounted rumours that leading Nazi officials have been observed in Spain. I dare say Portugal is another place they favour with their presence from time to time. The Duke resided in a villa near Lisbon for a month, during which time he was out of contact with London except on the most superficial of business. Material related to that particular period, in that particular house, is that which is most urgently required.

Prime Minister to Secretary of State for War and Home Secretary

April 30, 1941

I am enclosing a report from D Section, under the usual classification. Pray respond with a detailed analysis and proposal for action as soon as you may.

It could amount to nothing, but on the face of it we should at least be better informed about this kind of thing. D Section are maintaining observation on the young man who is the subject of the report. For various reasons the section’s activities have been neither consistent nor continuous. The immense difficulty of mounting any sustained intelligence operation while the German air raids continue speaks for itself and I can only commend the sterling work they have so far achieved. In the present matter, which I find unusual, we have as the subject a serving officer with RAF Bomber Command, one Fit Lt Sawyer, apparently a pilot who has performed his duties with great bravery and skill, already decorated for gallantry, but who is said to have been associating with one of those anglicized German nationals we have not yet rounded up. In Sawyer’s case it is a young woman, to whom it is said he is married. She is a naturalized British subject who came to the UK before the war. D Section have not been able to confirm the marriage, saying that the register office where the records might have been found was destroyed in an air raid in September last year. They maintain Sawyer is not married to the woman but is merely cohabiting with her. There is evidence from neighbours which I have disdained to read. Taken in all, though, the matter and the circumstances surrounding it give rise to disquiet.

What makes the case unusual and worthy of attention is that Sawyer was registered, at least for a time, as a conscientious objector with links to the British Red Cross, for whom he has apparently been working in some capacity. How he rationalizes this while being a serving officer in the RAF is central to the mystery. I have no rooted objections to any of such behaviour, but not all in the person of one man, all at once or at all in wartime. He cannot be allowed to continue in this multi-faceted role, especially as a substantial portion of his life appears to be usefully involved with our bombing offensive against the Nazis. The report obscures more than it clarifies. It seems likely to me there has been some confusion of identity, but I require it to be cleared up. The German woman under suspicion should be left to her own devices, as I have an abhorrence of young people being locked up without good reason.

15

Holograph notebooks of J. L. Sawyer

xiv

After Lisbon, I returned to my life in Rainow with a sense that at last the war was about to finish. Granted leave of absence by the Red Cross, on full pay, the only memento I had of that extraordinary meeting in Portugal was a brief handwritten letter from Dr Burckhardt. He passed it to me before I boarded the aircraft for the long flight home. In it he asked me not to involve myself in the normal day-to-day work of the Red Cross, but to hold myself ready to travel at short notice. During those days at
Boca di Inferno
I had come to think of myself as a neutral in the war. I was an intermediary, a Red Cross official, someone who composed or translated important documents that could, quite literally, change history. But within a few hours of returning to Britain I felt myself become partisan once again: English, British, not neutral at all. I found it an enlightening experience. I had assumed, before I went to Portugal, that by being a pacifist I counted myself out of partisanship, but when you are in a war you cannot help but identify with your own people. It gave me a lot to think about. I slipped back into something that felt similar, but not identical, to my old life. Birgit was in the last weeks of her pregnancy, a situation which took on a whole extra level of meaning now there was the prospect of peace. While I was away, Birgit had become much more dependent on Mrs Gratton, the elderly woman who lived in the cottage down the lane. She seemed to be constantly in our house, often bringing her strange, middle-aged son with her. When I first returned from Portugal I felt I was almost an intruder in the house. Mrs Gratton was always fussing around, seeing to the laundry and washing up the dishes, making Birgit drinks and snacks, while Harry busied himself with odd jobs: cutting logs and bringing them in, cleaning windows, sweeping out the kitchen floor and that kind of thing. Perhaps for these reasons my first weekend at home, after Lisbon, was not a happy one. A distance had opened up between Birgit and myself. I wanted to be a loving, dutiful husband, involving myself in the last weeks of her pregnancy, but Birgit would say little to me about how she felt, or about her hopes and fears, or indeed anything about the plans she was making for when the baby arrived. I helped her clean out and paint the small spare room, which would eventually become the child’s own bedroom, but because of her condition I ended up spending most of the time working on my own. The off-white distemper, which like all house paint was normally almost impossible to obtain because of the war, had been provided by Harry Gratton. He called round a couple of times to remind me of the fact, while I was putting the stuff on the walls.

People in Rainow were still talking about the night of the heavy bombing in Manchester, which had happened while I was away. After two big raids in December the city had been left alone, but the previous week the bombers had returned. Harry Gratton told me that at the height of the raid the fires were so intense that the people of Rainow, watching from their hill many miles from the city, could feel the heat on their faces.

Irlam Street, where the Red Cross building had been, no longer existed. While waiting for the Red Cross to find alternative premises, I hung around the house, hoping in a vague way to make amends to Birgit for my long absences, trying to forge something like our old closeness together. I still felt cut off from her, but I reasoned that once our baby was born our lives would change for the better. Of course, once the secret I was carrying became a reality, life would be different for everyone. The prospect of that burned in me like a beacon. When I heard people complaining about the constant difficulties they were having in feeding their children, or their worries about their sons or husbands in the forces, or even the endless problems of simply travelling around, I knew I had it in me to reassure them with the greatest news of all. Another week, I could say to them - put up with it for another week or two, maybe a month, then it will be over. The broad, sunlit uplands Churchill promised last year are in sight at last.

But the weeks were starting to slip by. When I returned from Lisbon I expected to be summoned back to the next round of talks almost at once. Surely everything was in place and agreed? The terms for peace had been comprehensively negotiated: both sides had given way on several important elements of the original proposals, but in the end a realistic agreement had been reached, one that gave both Britain and Germany a way out of the war. One side could emerge with honour intact, the other with strategic freedoms in place.

Clearly there was an obstacle. Once I was back in my humdrum life, undergoing the same inconvenience and hardships as everyone else, overhearing conversations in buses and pubs, listening to small talk in shops, it was obvious where that obstacle lay. It was in Churchill himself. He had identified himself, or he had become identified, with a plucky British determination to fight on and on, whatever the odds. Churchill was the symbol of everyone’s hopes. It was not only inconceivable that Churchill would step down, it was inconceivable to millions of ordinary Britons.

I could not even imagine what the parallel situation in Germany would be like, in the way Hitler himself had come to personify the German nation.

The German night-time Blitz on British cities continued. During the five weeks in which I waited for Dr Burckhardt’s call, cities like Bristol, Birmingham, Plymouth, Liverpool, Exeter, Swansea, Cardiff and Belfast had their hearts blasted out of them by concerted bombing attacks. The Blitz on London continued at the same time as the attacks on the other cities, almost without a break. In the Atlantic, U-boats were sinking British ships every day of the week. In the North African desert the fight for Egypt and the Suez Canal went on, much more dangerously for the British since the arrival of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. In Greece the British were being beaten back.

All those deaths. All those losses. All that destruction.

The war was being prolonged when it could have been halted at any moment. One night, after Birgit and I had gone to bed, we heard the air-raid sirens drone out their chilling warning. We were both instantly awake, stiff with fear in the dark. I started to climb out of bed. Birgit said, ‘Don’t go from me.’

‘We should take shelter.’

‘They will not come near us. Stay here with me.’

‘No . . . it’s never safe.’

I helped her out of bed, first propping her up then swinging her legs around. She stood up unsteadily and for a moment we leaned on each other and embraced in the dark. The hard ball of our unborn child pressed between us. The sirens faded away, into ominous silence.

‘Are the planes coming?’

‘I can’t hear them,’ I said. ‘But we mustn’t take chances.’

We pulled on woollen garments for warmth, then picked up our pre-packed emergency bags and went downstairs. We had no special shelter in which to hide, but because the house was built of stone and the staircase ran next to the chimney we had put emergency bedding, lighting and water in the triangular space beneath the steps. I suspected that while I was away Birgit must have spent many nights alone in there.

We crawled into the narrow space and made ourselves as comfortable as possible. We lay with our arms around each other. I could feel the baby moving inside Birgit’s belly, as if it was picking up our feelings of fear.

The sirens started again and almost at once we heard the sound that everyone in Britain dreaded most: the droning, throbbing noise of engines overhead, a Luftwaffe bomber formation coming in, high above. I felt Birgit’s arms tighten around me. The aircraft were passing directly over the village, the characteristic drumming rhythm seeming to shake the stone walls of the house. We braced ourselves for the sound of bombs, the horrifying shriek of the tail whistles, the shocking explosions; I had lived with those for so long in London.