Dearest Jane... (7 page)

In this letter of 30 June 1943, Roger was extremely low, with very understandable reason
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This has been a wretched month. Today, to crown everything, most of my room have been moved to another camp, including Freddy Corfield whom I’ve lived with for over three years in quiet content and a considerable amount of laughter. What sanity I still possess is largely due to him. I feel very lonely and adrift now. Friendship is the only anchor one has in prison, and now after three years I feel just as if I was starting all over again. I suppose my resistance to the bleakness of things is decreasing, but at present I feel like attaching my old school braces to the lamp bracket, fitting a snug knot behind my ears and jumping off the table. I expect things will seem better soon and perhaps I’ll be home one day soon. Anyway, it might so easily be worse.

Roger

My father had lost the comradeship of a close friend and co-operator of the Canary Bird. Despite it all, the letter ends in brave filial style. Later that summer, in August, he recounts:

Two inmates made unsuccessful attempts to commit suicide last week – presumably from sheer boredom and despondency. I must say though, to fail even at suicide shows a deplorable lack of skill and determination. For myself, I’m bored but by no means despondent.

Two weeks later, deeply frustrated, Roger’s letter home is a sardonic response to his parents’ domestic preoccupations and grievances at home. Wartime was hard for them, too, but how their views must have grated
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I wish you hadn’t suggested my learning chartered accountancy this winter: it may be useful but it is hideously dull. I’m still hankering after law, especially as I can get a competent tutor. I hear you’ve been looking for a home in the country – how very exciting for you. I only wish I could be there too. Mummy writes very despondently as if she had already assumed the onerous duties of sole cook and housemaid – I take that to be merely an instance of that astonishing capacity for looking on the bleakest side of everything which is such a feature of our family life and which I myself share to the full. Ever since I can remember we’ve always been hovering on the edge of a bed sitting room in the Cromwell Road, but by tremendous good fortune we never seem to get there. I am quite prepared to be told that you are going up to the city in clogs, as you are unable to stump up for a new pair of prinkers. Never mind, with the money I’ve saved the last three years I’m quite a capitalist and will doubtless be able to assist in hiring a girl to come in once or twice a week to help with the heavy work. Of course I should like to stay in the Army if possible, but if that isn’t on, I should like something to do with the executive side of racing, or the police. How about the racecourse police? I’m also prepared for a small fee to succeed Bob Lyle on
The Times
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Best love,

Roger

Here is the first recorded suggestion by my father that he might make something of his racing interests, perhaps even finding himself a job in some capacity. If prison life had a silver lining, it was the time my father had been able to spend on enlightening himself through extensive reading on the bloodstock breeding of racehorses. For those who have rarely if ever set foot on a racecourse, that pursuit may sound as fascinating as gaining expertise in railway timetables. Yet reclining on his slatted prison bunk, lost in volumes of race form, Roger was transported to another world – the rolling green racecourses of England in peacetime
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Roger produced his first article on that esoteric subject whilst in prison, in a little POW magazine. A surviving copy of this publication was sent to me by a former POW comrade in Canada. I was thrilled to receive this little fragment of my father’s history. In his inaugural piece, though, his typical turn of phrase was yet to find its place in print and his article was delivered with respectful earnestness
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By the autumn of 1943, Roger’s tone was much lighter again – his life seemed to have settled into a more tolerable mode. He had achieved a first-class result in some Royal Society of Arts exams and the autumn sunshine had enabled him to enjoy plenty of cricket: ‘Some of it really high class considering the conditions – matting wicket, bumpy outfield etc.’ Later in September he sent home
‘A
Day in the Life of a POW
’.

I’ll endeavour to describe my routine at present. I usually get up with extreme reluctance at 8.30, shave, have a cold shower, make my bed and clean my shoes by 9 o’clock, when we have morning appel. At 9.15 we have breakfast in our room – a cup of tea without sugar, and two slices of bread with butter on one and jam and margarine on the other. After breakfast the room orderly, assisted by whoever is on duty for the room – sweeps and washes up. I usually work in the silence room at the other end of the camp and squat on a wooden stool peering vaguely at my German primer till 12 noon. Lunch is a plate of vegetable soup followed by biscuits and cheese. In the afternoon, I sit and read outside if it’s fine, or on my bed if it’s wet. Actually I invariably do more talking and mobbing than reading. Tea at 4 p.m., the same as breakfast. Afterwards I usually walk, have a net or take some form of exercise and a cold shower at 6 p.m. followed by appel at 6.30. Dinner at 8, the big meal of the day, meat (supplied by Red +) and potatoes followed by stewed fruit or a savoury (all Red +) and a cup of cocoa. 8.30–10 everyone talks their heads off and 10.30 lights out. One’s room is one’s castle. Other prisoners don’t ever come in unless asked, and after a year you probably don’t know half the people in the next room by name.

Roger

It was a day reminiscent of the better form of prep school. Francis Reed, a good POW friend, recalled my father as a raconteur regularly welcomed in his room during that period
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I was in a room of sixteen (eight of whom were Etonian, which the rest of us managed to survive) . . . Roger was in a room of six in the same building and was a very frequent visitor to ‘The Nursery’ as our room was known. He was about ten years older than most of us. He had done a stint in Palestine and had considerable experience of high, and sometimes low, life in London, altogether a man of the world. How we delighted in hearing his stories.

If I seem to be making Roger out to be rather a Wodehousian character, he certainly wasn’t. He was very well read and with a personal memory which must have stood him in very good stead as the famous racing journalist he became. It was said that of the 100 boys at his prep school in his final year, he could still reel off the names of 98 of them.

Francis Reed demonstrated his appreciation by knitting my father ‘a rather nice heather mixture tie out of an old sock’
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Additional stimuli for Roger could be found in some of the camp lectures and debates. Of universal interest was a proposal that was to revolutionize Britain after the war – the Beveridge Plan which initiated the welfare state, establishing the National Health Service and state pensions. My father’s response was a heartening one
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We’ve been having a number of lectures and debates on social reform and the Beveridge Plan: most people here are pretty progressive except one or two hide-bound landowners and a few RCs. I think many of the reforms are long overdue and to oppose them would be short-sighted and ungenerous, and perhaps a cause of serious trouble. Certainly the Conservative party will almost cease to exist if it continues to show such half-hearted enthusiasm for what is a general or reasonable demand. Whether our economic position will be able to stand it is a very different matter.

By September 1944, Roger derived some satisfaction from his new found domestic skills
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Well, I’m settling down for the fifth winter in gaol, not with any noticeable degree of pleasure, but with as good a grace as is permitted by my surly and melancholic nature. Many thanks to all kind persons who wrote and assured me ‘Home by Christmas’ (same for the third or even fourth year running). May they not have to do it many times more. I’ve taken on the job of chief of the woodpile again and am looking forward to smashing about 200 tons of gnarled old roots. My policy is to centralise as far as possible – in fact to do all the talking and very little of the work – a typical jack-in-the-office. In the evenings I half cook for the room. I’m beginning to get a sort of touch or flair after weeks of painful experimenting and I’m capable of dishing out really good stuff. There is very, very little that cannot be improvised from a basis of biscuit crumbs and a lump of margarine. At present my specialities are fishcakes, fried currant pudding and I’m coming on at ‘Shapes’ trifle, bubble and squeak and mock macaroni cheese. In the spare time left over I shall knit feverishly.

Best love to you all,

Roger

But the inevitable arrival of winter could always be depended upon to lower the most robust spirits
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A very dreary day with sleet and snow driving across from the west. It’s hard work on the woodpile these days as my clothes never seem to get dry and we can’t afford a fire in the evening yet. A lot of clothing parcels have come in recently, mostly sent off in June, July or August, but so far my luck is out. I’m getting very ragged in the trouser line but I’ve still got Tony Rolt’s Sandhurst knickers which are standing the strain well. Underclothes are truly hideous and I’m continually putting my feet through the wrong hole. However, by knitting, sewing and swopping I get along alright and it’s wonderful how the poor help each other. Cooking is rather dull on half a parcel a week and I try to save on that, as they’ve completely ceased to come through and we’re out on Dec 15th. Altogether this winter is rather bleak but we all remain cheerful and try to get over shortages by ingenuity.

A main course might still be ‘meat’ at this stage – typically, half a tin of bully beef between six men, mashed up with some low-grade turnips and potatoes, which were prison camp issue by the Germans. This would be followed by bread pudding – old crusts soaked in water and gingered up with a smattering of dried fruit, and baked. A month later, in his Christmas greetings to family and many named friends, Roger is rightly proud of his plum pudding – I’m told it also contained chopped bootlaces for currants . . .

After three months of saving, I hoarded enough to make a pretty big Christmas pudding – breadcrumbs, margarine, raisins, apricots, prunes, sugar, beer, marmalade, egg powder, a tinned apple pudding and biscuit crumbs. I wrapped it in greased lavatory paper, tied it up in Everard’s towel and steamed it madly for 7 hours. It is now hanging from a hook on the wall. The flat sounds nice, but I pity you moving. I know something about moves and they’re hell.

Roger means the trauma of being moved from one prison to another
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No sign of any clothes or food parcels, or I fear, those cigars you kindly sent. I had a record week on the woodpile last week and we cut up about 9 tons with three saws and 3 axes in spite of stinking weather. It doesn’t seem like five years since I saw you all, and as far as I’m concerned, absence only makes the heart grow fonder and I don’t mean that in the ironical sense.

Roger

The New Year did indeed have a move in store. His weary, resigned and cynical tone shows that my father knew little of the extent of the momentous changes which lay ahead, as the war ground horribly through its closing stages
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Well, here we are at the beginning of another dreary year of prison life; it is increasingly hard to visualise liberty. Prison has ceased to be an episode and has become one’s normal life. One’s pre-war friends are vague memories and one’s friends are those of your fellow convicts that you can still tolerate after living at close quarters with them for four-and-a-half years. Naturally, we get duller and more useless year by year and I think our worst feature is that we are all very great bores indeed, self-centred, critical and altogether dim. One’s existence in the winter is entirely based on food and fuel and it certainly hasn’t been a gala winter for either. Books never arrive, or at any rate, very rarely, and one’s correspondents dwindle away year by year. If anyone writes to me this year and assures me I shall be home for Christmas, I shall regard it as a very bad omen indeed. I hope prison life will become more normal during the coming year and books, clothes and cigarettes will start filtering though again.

In those final months of the war, the atmosphere at Eichstätt oscillated between hope and elation, fear and despair. As new prisoners were continuously being brought into the camp, they were full of news – often conflicting and confusing information – on military movements and manoeuvres on all sides. Germany was now a country in a state of collapse. There was intense speculation amongst the POWs as to when and by whom they might be liberated and what their fate was likely to be. Roger, in true acidic form, opined that ‘If you ask me, we’ll all be carved up like a bank holiday ham.’ However, his mordant wit was generally welcomed for its cheering effects, as Desmond Parkinson recorded in his diary
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Wed 24 January 1945: Morty came in for a brew and was in colossal form. He talked most amusingly of his experiences at Sandhurst and as a Subaltern.

Mon 29 January 1945: In the evening Morty came to visit us and was given stick by one and all.

Desmond’s account in his diary culminates in a dramatic day in April 1945, a brutal experience which had a most terrifying effect on himself, my father and their close friends. The heading in Desmond’s diary on 14 April 1945 speaks volumes:

BLACK SATURDAY. The most tragic, terrifying and emotional day of my life as a prisoner.

My father was beside Desmond on that fateful day. This is a summary of that day’s events, based on Desmond’s diary: the Nazi authorities ordered that POWs must be evacuated from Eichstätt and moved to another camp, Moosberg, where conditions were said to be dire. There was no transport – prisoners were to march the full distance, each with their entire possessions on their back. Leaving early in the morning, our POWs had been tramping on their road for barely an hour when a solitary US plane appeared in the sky. Immediately a great cheer was raised by the men and morale soared. Twenty minutes later, a formation of eight US Thunderbolt bombers appeared overhead. These planes commenced a bombing attack – not on our POWs – but on a convey of German lorries on a parallel road nearby. Alarming though this scenario was, it seemed clear that the pilots were taking pains to avoid the onward column of prisoners. That did not turn out to be the case. As soon as the lorries had been destroyed, the planes swooped over again and, dipping very low, opened a sustained attack of gunfire on the POWs, their allies. No amount of signalling and waving of handkerchiefs succeeded in halting the attack
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