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Speaking the same language

by Carol Summers

My Jewish family had fled Hitler’s Germany in the mid 1930’s and settled in Wimbledon, where I was born in January 1943. The household consisted of my parents, grandparents and great-grandmother so the language I learnt to speak was German. We often went for walks on Wimbledon Common, just up the road and long before the Wombles. One of my earliest memories — I must have been about three at the time - was of going to the Common in autumn to collect conkers from the horse chestnut trees that line its edge. At that time Prisoners of War were housed in enclosures under these trees so that most of the conkers fell within their wire fences. You can imagine the German prisoners’ surprise when the little girl whom they must have supposed to be English, asked them to pass conkers to her through the fence in perfect German. I got my basket full of conkers

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