大象传媒

My father, like most of his generation only spoke a little of the war to his family. But his eyes would fill with tears on Remembrance Sundays and he would stand (or later sit) a little straighter for the National Anthem or a military march past. In the end he died on Remembrance Sunday, 9/11/2003.
He had spent the last two years of the war in Oflag 7 B in Germany and what was always striking was that, after trying to escape on a number of occasions, he finally coped by concentrating his mind on the bricks and mortar, timber and tiling of British building construction!
A Scots Liverpudlian (from the Wirral) he had been taken prisoner in Tunisia, where he was an acting major aged 23 with the Lancashire Fusiliers. He spoke of trying to shelter in stony orchards where the German shells turned the rocks into lethal fragments, of constant forays with small platoons to try to take an impossible hill (one of his comrades told me my gentle father, who never raised his voice or threatened, was incredibly brave). But the one thing that always brought a shake of emotion to his voice was the death of his commanding officer, Colonel Manley. That man had clearly made my father feel safe, given reassurance, made sense of the senseless. Possibly replacing his own father and older brother who had both died in l940. The same arc of machine gun fire that killed Colonel Manley, and wounded two others, spared my father.
He fought on until the following April, always in the thick of things because six months makes you a tough, seasoned fighter compared with the newcomers. Slowly and painfully they were fighting towards Tunis with the long distant target of, it turned out, Monte Casino.
But in the April he was taken prisoner and for one clearly terrifying period handed over to the Gestapo (he and his colleagues had been charged with resisting arrest) before the German military claimed him back again.
His prison camp was to be Oflag 7B. The memories he shared were fragments. The childblains (so condensed milk from the red cross parcels was stored and shared out by the medic (vitamin D helps)); the watch changes to keep the stove in the middle of the hut alight through the night; the black grease-coated pan in which they cooked shared food when it arrived; getting a letter from Mum in which she said if he wrote another word about what he had or had not eaten she was leaving him!; the giant guard who would say "kommen sie hier... mine kleine kartoffelen" or "...meine kleine schmetterling" the only German words Dad brought home apart from ein, zwei etc, raus! and schnell! (although he did develop a lifelong love of Beethoven despite these being the only records they were allowed to play).
His main escape anecdote (apart from stopping a colleague trying to take over the plane from Tunisia when they realised no one could fly it if they did) was one against himself. In his words
" We got the idea of two of us slipping out of the line when we went out of the camp on daily work duty. And it worked, we ran into the woods and started tracking across country as fast as we could. We kept on this way overnight until, in the end we had to stop. So we hid in a ditch. We must have slept because when we woke up there were footsteps and shouting and when I peered through the grass at the edge of the ditch I could see army boots and legs in uniform. We thought they'd shoot us if they found us and it was better to surrender. So we put our hands above our heads and rose very slowly up out of the ditch.
"I don't know who was more surprised, us or them. As I stood up in full view I realised we were in the midst of a bunch of Hitler Youth out on a picnic in the woods with their girlfriends!
"They took such delight in marching us off to the local police station. That must have impressed their girls".
But then my father discovered another escape. Studying. The Red Cross were able to organise study materials and even exam papers for prisoners, so he started to study to be a Chartered Surveyor and Auctioneer.
" It was too painful to think of the battles still going on (he was both grateful and guilty about not being at Monte Casino) or even too much about your Mum and my baby son I'd not seen. I was hungry and cold (this lifelong non-smoker smoked during his time in Oflag 7B to stop the hunger pangs), but if I could immerse myself in the timber construction of a Liverpool roof I could both forget and be back home." So that's what he did.
And he worked as a Chartered Surveyor for the rest of his life.

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