大象传媒

I am a war baby who was born in rather unusual circumstance. This was a unique consequence of the war.

My father was a Dane who served in the British Army from 1939 and on afterwards in the Control Commission in Germany. His twin brother was a Danish Naval officer, who suffered greatly as a result of occupation. Their older brother, also in the Danish Navy, was in London throughout hostilities, being on the Embassy staff as Naval Attach茅.

I was born in 1942 in Reykjavik, Iceland, my mother an Icelander. Her family used a family name (unusual in Iceland) she was Anna Flygenring until my parents married in September 1940.

We were therefore rather nomadic. My mother and I followed my father to London when I was six months old, (March 1943) being sent across the North Sea down to Fleetwood, on a fishing boat. Recently, with all the revelations of the cracking of the Enigma codes, it has become clear that this voyage ran through seas in which the German U-boats were operating with the greatest freedom from detection, because their coding regime was stricter and more effective than that of the other German forces. So we were lucky to arrive in one piece.

My poor mother used to look back on those years, both in London and later in Oxford, to which we were evacuated when she was pregnant with my sister, as the most uncomfortable, squalid, chilly and miserable of her entire life. By comparison, life in a devastated Hanover, and a border-zone Helmstedt ("Checkpoint Baker", I think) was rather pleasant.

When my father was no longer needed and was repatriated to Britain, we came to South London, early in 1950. Here it was my turn to be miserable, as by comparison with the beauty and grace of Copenhagen, where we had also spent some time, and the excitement of Germany where we enjoyed a privileged life, New Eltham offered only hardship, unfriendliness (I was a blond, German-speaking and rather lost little chap) and the misery of absolute shortage of all life's essentials. Added to this homes were chilly, draughty places, choking with the smoke of open fires (which I had never seen before) and unfathomable taboos about what small children were and were not permitted to do.

Our family was of course much more fortunate than most, although a cousin was killed flying for the Fleet Air Arm, none were bombed out of their homes or injured. To be sure, two of my aunts, in Copenhagen, were regularly raided by the Gestapo in futile search of their husbands, My Icelandic family, although some did very good business in ship repair (Reykjavik was a safe haven for damaged ships) suffered only slight disruption and against that, were able to look forward to establishing their new Republic, declared as soon as the Germans strolled into Denmark, of which Iceland had been a territory, just as Greenland still is. One of my uncles became a leading member of the Althing (Iceland's Parliament) and, I am proud to say, instrumental in the 'Cod War' later on.

How was it that my father got into all this? He and his twin brother had been boisterous sparring partners from infancy, and my Grandmother, part British, and a very peaceable lady, arranged that one of the two always spent school holidays with cousins in England. Around 1930 my father got into London University, and settled in London. Around 1937 he had a letter published in the Times, warning against appeasement and pointing to Hitler's aggressive intentions. He later claimed that the family name featured on the Gestapo hit list, possibly as a result.

On the declaration of hostilities he was an alien, and therefore rounded up and interred in the Isle of Man (he never admitted to this humiliation, preferring to say that he spent some time in a work camp in the Isle of Man, as though it had been some kind of altruistic volunteer activity). At any rate, in November 1939 he got naturalised and he enlisted in the Army, in the London Yeomanry. I was told by one of the English contingent in the family that he got himself out of jug by calling on his god father to influence a release, the god father in question being the then Danish King. At any rate he was soon back in the Isle of Man, this time as an Intelligence Officer, doing censorship work with the German inmate's correspondence. As are many Danes, he had studied German as well as English, and always claimed to pass as a German when necessary. Soon after he was in Norway in the doomed BEF - two weeks spent waiting to be pulled out. He used to say that they set their watches by the raids by Stuka dive bombers. The technique was to pop into a nearby railway tunnel just before the planes turned up.

Britain managed to thwart German plans to use Iceland as a U-boat base, at one time my parents had a beautiful book of the geography and natural wonders of Iceland, lavishly illustrated with fine photographs, part of the preparation by Germany to land and take over. But by some miraculous throw of the dice the Germans forgot to go and the British Army got there first. Had this not been so, the Murmansk convoys would have been decimated and the course of history been so different.

My father reckoned that he was the first Allied officer in Copenhagen once the Germans retreated. He had been based in London for some time, when one afternoon he was issued a railway warrant to somewhere in East Anglia and instructed to report to an airfield. There he was introduced to his pilot, and discovered that they were to go straight to Copenhagen. The pilot had no charts for Denmark, and so my father asked if he could find his way across the North Sea. This the man had done many times. My father told him that if he could find the port of Esbjerg, then if would simply be a matter of following the railway lines, as of course he had often been that way as a boy when travelling back and forth from Copenhagen to London. So it was that they touched down and the job of getting back to peace began. We followed soon after, my parents were able to buy a small house in the suburbs, and I had the pleasure of getting to know some of my cousins. The language presented no difficulties as my mother - not expecting father to master Icelandic - had used Danish as the language of the house. This was the most idealic time of my life. But by 1946 we were in the ruins of Hanover, making occasional visits back home to Copenhagen. One such was in the very severe winter of 1947/48, when the pipes in our little house had burst during our absence, and the beautiful parquet flooring risen up as some sort of waffle. To my mother, who as a Scandinavian had never experienced such domestic crisis, this was a typically British misfortune, and possibly the first time that I got an inkling of the privations that she had signed up to by becoming British. Denmark had of course been stripped bare by the Germans, and fuel shortages had been severe, so that people had been forced to use peat instead of coal in their furnaces. This caused problems with gummed-up chimneys. I suspect that my father had been having difficulty getting coal in the interim.

I think we were early passengers on BEA services, my mother told a story of how we were sent from Northolt - whether to Denmark or Germany I can't say, in the bomb bay of a Lancaster. Apparently they were furnished with what she called wooden park benches, and the passengers shivered as they sat there, given vivid views of the terrain below through the gap which ran the length of the floor.

In Germany my father's Colonel was a very kindly Northerner called Mike Mansfield. He and his wife, having no children, indulged my sister and me, they were really the only Brits with which we had contact. My father sat out his days in the Army as a Major, waiting Bunter - like for the letter confirming his promotion to Colonel. It never came. But on being transferred to the Control Commission I suspect he had a very pleasant life and stimulating jobs to do.

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