My father, Trevor Denniff, died a few months ago. He left his autobiograph which starts off:-
Southampton University College may well have had pretensions in those days before what we now call World War Two, but when I was offered an Open Scholarship in the Summer of 1939, I was not aware of it. Indeed I was not even aware that another Great War was about to begin. My friend Karl Heinz, a conscientious member of the Hitler Jugend's Kraftwagen Korps ( this section of the Hitler Youth had the appearance of a mechanised Boy Scouts. ), had been spending most of July and August with my family as the return half of a student exchange following my Summer of 1938 in Germany.
Perhaps my good german accent helped me to get that scholarship. Certainly I do not think that either Karl or I were aware that we were already mere pawns in a vicious political game that was to make us pay a heavy price. We were a couple of overgrown school kids, full of high hopes and ignorance.
Great Britain declared war on Germany on September 3rd, following Hitler's unprovoked aggression against Poland.. Karl had received an urgent telegram a few days earlier from his mother asking him to come home. I recall how annoyed he was. We had spent a delightful, hot Summer, swimming off Brighton beach, and making a tour of my relatives near Sheffield, where my curvaceous cousin had made us doubly welcome. Besides, Karl had ordered a real wool suit made to his robust measure from Burtons for 拢3 and he was reluctant to go home without it, because the ersatz, synthetics then available to him back home were nowhere near the Bradford quality. He went for the final fitting on the Thursday and caught the train to Dover next day and I heard no more of him until after the war when I learned that he had had the good luck to be blown out of his tank on the way towards Stalingrad and was so badly wounded that they sent him back to hospital in Germany.
I doubt whether the irony of that woollen suit from a Jewish tailor ever struck Karl- Heinz or that he related his need for it to the Rosental Emporium that was closed down, further along the High Street from his father's Bakery shop and outside which the Baker's apprentice swaggered in his Brown Shirt S A uniform.
I am not ashamed to admit that I had been pre-disposed to ' love my fellow men ' by the conscientious hammering I has received each Sunday from my Primitive Methodist Sunday School teachers, in those days when I still had a very broad Yorkshire accent. But as I had progressed into my teens and learned to improve my german accent from the warm lips of the Baker's counter assistant, I had broadened my understanding to include ' girls ' among my ' fellow men '.
The outbreak of war found me ignorant, confused and, no doubt, somewhat frustrated.For me, warm lips had never been easy to come by.
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