Dearest Jane... (6 page)

When Roger wrote in caustic tones to his father from Warburg in February 1942, he had been incarcerated for nearly two years:

I’m afraid my letters are the last word in dullness but I am up against the same difficulties as yourself. I have had to give up skating as my knees wouldn’t stand it and I could only progress rather unsteadily like a rabbit with a broken leg. Time fairly flies in prison and I can’t believe it is over two years since I was last in England. One’s occupations are very varied here today; I’m room orderly and have many menial duties to perform: in addition I’ve had a German lesson and darned a three-inch hole in my socks. I think I only have two ambitions in life left: to possess a water closet and to be able to hire someone to darn my socks. I hope you won’t entirely give up golf as I intend to stage my first comeback against you at the New Zealand Club. With any luck I may have forgotten my previous style and will launch out with something new and hard enough to achieve any measure of success. I wonder which of us two will age most: if you keep your head and don’t overdo things, you’ll probably find yourself taken for my younger brother. I suppose there will be a lot of nice, young, rich widows knocking about after the war. I only hope they won’t all be sold out before I get back. Well, Best Love to you all. I am confident I shall be home within two more years.

Roger

Roger was allowed just the statutory two letters per month on narrow, prison-issue paper with twenty-five cramped lines to fill. Roger’s handwriting shrank to the smallest legible size. I suspect that the style of his later paternal letters, often devoid of paragraph breaks, was developed in prison when space on the page was limited. To pass the censors, POW letters home permitted only innocuous content – the topic of war was
verboten –
but irony and satire tended to escape attention. War or not, Roger’s consistent concern was not to bore others. Writing from Warburg in July 1942, he shares the pleasures of his current modus vivendi with his father
.

The weather here is perfect and I just lie about in the sun without any clothes on and let my mind go completely blank. The time passes admirably and I only emerge from a state of semi-coma at mealtimes. I played my first game of prison tennis last week – half an hour on a mud court, two balls both wet and black, no stop netting at all. Prison life has several advantages. For the first time for twenty years I’m free from financial embarrassment; however many letters arrive, it’s long odds against a bill. Secondly, even if I have to live at a very humble scale after the war, it can hardly fail to be a slight rise on my present condition. Also it’s marvellous having no dreary routine: if I feel like it, I just go back to bed after breakfast and stay there all evening until appel. Thank God I’ve always been bone idle and never felt the restless urge to do something.

In fact Roger was doing something. He was engaged in subterfuge on a nearly daily basis for four years at different camps. The penalty, should his high security risk activities have been discovered, would have been severe. He could have been shot
.

The subterfuge began one snowy February evening at Spangenberg when the guards neglected to search a batch of new prisoners prior to their entry into the camp. The new arrivals who were shepherded through the gates included some doctors who, on seeing a gathering of prisoners nearby, discretely tried to attract their attention, pointing to a medical case which one of them carried. The opportunity was seized at once. A POW who spoke fluent German distracted the guards in conversation, allowing just enough time for the medical case to be spirited away by some other prisoners, who included Roger and Fred. They hurried their plunder up to their room, a hayloft over the stables just inside the main gate
.

On opening the medical case, they found a small mahogany box containing an object of immense value – a radio. After nine months deprived of news from the outside world they now had the possibility of connecting to the BBC. The mahogany casing was quickly destroyed to reduce the radio, powered by four valves, to the smallest possible size. Dungy Fred recalled:

By the grace of God it worked off German voltage, and its flex was fitted with the necessary adaptor to fit in a light socket. Immensely excited, we tuned into the BBC and I shall never forget that first reception.

This life-transforming connection might so easily have been short lived if a safe hiding place had not been found. The loft floorboards were lifted and the radio secreted snugly between the joists. Roger and Fred were not just responsible for the security of the radio: they became the news broadcasters on a nightly basis. Notes on the news were taken down before summoning representatives from each prison barracks to a news conference. The deputy newscasters were sworn to secrecy and the notes had to be returned to Roger and Fred to be burnt
.

Spangenberg was the first receiving station for the radio, christened ‘The Canary Bird’, but it was to journey to several destinations before its time was done. After three weeks the Nazis announced that the entire camp was to be moved to Poland, and the POWs’ accommodation was now about to take a dramatic turn for the worse. It was essential that the Canary Bird made the journey too, and it was carefully hidden in a restitched medicine ball by a former saddler. On arrival in Poland, Roger and Fred and their comrades were marched to their new centre of confinement, a hideous fort at Thorn. They were led down cold stone corridors dripping with water to a stone barracks of equal dampness. When other senior officers reported that their room was actually under several inches of water, the responding laughter of the British contingent at the sheer bloody awfulness of it all confounded their Nazi guards
.

Roger wrote to his cousin Tom Blackwell from Thorn
.

I think you’d laugh yourself sick if you saw my new home. Dartmoor Castle simply isn’t in it. I’ve never lived below ground level before, but you soon get used to it. The weather is the worst part – bloody cold and still snowing. My winter clothing parcel has never arrived and I’ve had no news from my family for over three months as they won’t write by Air Mail. Have opened the cricket season and find I’m really rather good with a rubber ball.

Roger

My Dear Tom,

This letter may be a trifle incoherent as I’m feeling rather sleepy after a truly delightful lunch of turnip stew – you can imagine how pleased I am to get so much of my favourite vegetable. Most of all I miss a comfortable WC, the
Sporting Life
, women and music. I’ve been trying to learn Russian but my enthusiasm is dwindling and I think I prefer lying on my bed reading of past years’ racing and thinking of bygone, happier days. I still do PT every morning, as then my conscience permits me to do damn all for the rest of the day.

Roger and Fred continued to issue daily news bulletins. They learnt from the BBC that the Hitler/Stalin non-aggression pact was coming under strain. At Thorn, prisoners saw for themselves, from their mean fortress windows, that there were German troop movements in the area. The Germans did not want the inconvenience of a load of British POWs to deal with in a zone where conflict might increase and accelerate
.

This was good news for Thorn’s current guests who were sent packing back to Spangenberg at very short notice. This relatively pleasant interlude was brought to an end when, before Christmas 1941, Roger and his comrades were moved to the camp referred to earlier, the muddy dump of Warburg. The Canary Bird travelled once more, tucked into its medicine ball. A new camp meant a new hiding place. In Warburg, the little radio spent the larger part of its existence literally hiding in a shithole. The POWs kept their washing things in Red Cross boxes, and the radio was secreted in one. Fred described the process:

The box hung beneath the seats covering the latrines which were situated over a particularly noxious pit, in a hut four or five yards from one of the doors to our hut. Every morning and evening I marched to the wash house clutching my Red Cross box; in the evening I returned via the latrines and exchanged my washing box for the one containing the radio: in the mornings I repeated the action in reverse order.

In 1942 Roger and his comrades were moved yet again – this time to Eichstätt. There is little doubt that the Germans knew, by now, of the existence of a radio. Searches were continuously carried out and, as John Surtees said, ‘It was astonishing they never found it.’ At Eichstätt, an attic in one of the prison blocks was supported by roof beams so badly riddled with woodworm that it was no problem to carve out a niche for the radio
.

By the time Roger wrote to his father on 19 September 1942, it was obvious that his close friendships had become central to his survival of prison life. The deep bond of tolerance and understanding established between these imprisoned men was not going to be discarded once the war was over. The longer they had endured captivity, the deeper the damage, but there would be solace in these long-term friendships
.

I’m afraid you may not have heard from me for some time owing to us all moving camp. Most of us came on here but one of my oldest prison friends went off to a smaller camp, I think owing to the severity of his war wounds. The journey here was easily the most comfortable I have had in this country and we passed a very comfortable night in second-class carriages. The surroundings of the new camp and adjacent town are remarkably pleasant and a striking contrast to the last place. The camp itself is also rather better and will probably be alright once we have organised it efficiently. Unfortunately, I am separated from several old friends as I’m living in a special block for those with a ‘prison past’. However, I’m in a room with seventeen extremely nice people most of whom I know well and with whom I’ve been messing for the past twenty-seven months. Still, these partings and breakings-up of old messes are rather sad things in prison, where one’s whole existence and happiness depend on comradeship and living with people whose views and habits are roughly similar to one’s own.

Preparing for the joys of Christmas 1942, Roger’s tone was one of reflective resignation
.

We are spending Christmas quietly – a large breakfast and then lying in bed until supper-time. Very many thanks for 360 Players cigarettes. I have lots of Sept and Oct letters from you and Mummy. I’m reading as much history as I can and have just plugged gamely through 2,000 pages of Garven’s ‘Life of Joe Chamberlain’ and am now cleaning up on ‘Palmerston’ with Morley’s ‘Life of Gladstone’ as a little treat in store. The great thing about reading history is that it confirms my impression that human nature is not only nasty, but what is far worse, foolish too. Prison is an amazingly good eye-opener on human nature, especially in the early days when things were not too good. I’m playing in a knockout bridge competition. The only fun is the amazing people you find yourself playing against.

In January 1943, to ring the changes, Roger and a friend, Hector Christie, swap roles, each writing to the other’s parents. ‘Thank God 1942 is over. A drearier year I’ve never known’, wrote Roger as he introduced Hector, whose bulletin on Roger was upbeat
.

I thought perhaps you’d like to know that the old job is really well, in terrific form and confident, like me, that it will be any day now. We manage to laugh a lot and Roger has brought the art of living to a very fine point. I wish I could take things quite as easily and smoothly, although I find the good example of a morning in bed a most excellent one which suits me well. I really feel you will be seeing him this year, and you won’t find, I think, that this dreary time has done any harm whatsoever to a quite irrepressible person.

Home soon? There were another two-and-a-half years to go
.

At Eichstätt, a new craze was sweeping through the camp: gambling. Roger, along with role as newscaster and an additional responsibility on the camp security team, was appointed one of the chief stewards overseeing the gaming tables, along with Jack Poole, who had the particular distinction of surviving imprisonment in both world wars. In February 1943 Roger described Jack to his father
.

Jack Poole really is a splendid person, always even tempered and usually extremely amusing. He brings a welcome breath of White’s into the place. We are also partners in a humbler sphere every day, i.e. at either end of a long saw on the wood dump.

White’s is the prestigious London club
.

Roger, Jack and the committee had to blacklist a few cheaters from the gaming tables. Amongst those who played fair were quite a few ‘swells’ who played by rules of ‘settlement after the war’. On another level, an honest, middle-aged schoolmaster found himself in debt to the tune of £80 which he was quite unable to pay. He found a way of honouring his debt – mending worn-out socks of fellow POWs at five shillings a hole. Keeping their scant wardrobes in repair was a continuous process. My father became an accomplished knitter during that time and for many post-war years his tweedy gardening jumper with deliciously lurid cuffs in lime-green and pink was an enduring example
.

Eichstätt was an improvement on Thorn but the Germans continued to think up ingenious little ways to aggrieve the POWs. When my father first received a precious pair of warm corduroy trousers in a clothing parcel, the Germans chopped them off at the knee. Later, at another camp, a fresh pair of corduroy trousers got through to Roger, unmolested, and at some point an American friend of Roger’s sister sent him a thick, duck shooting coat from the US. He attributed his physical survival in no small part to the insulation of that coat. April 1943 brought snow, not springtime, to Eichstätt. Roger was being dispatched for regular spells of solitary confinement, or what he called ‘rest and solitude’ and ‘silence and meditation’. In a letter to his father, he wrote:

I must say I always give a fairly hollow laugh when I get letters saying I will be home soon. It is greatly to your credit that you have never indulged in nonsense like that.