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After being captured we were transported to a grassy compound near Doulens, where we slept in the open with more prisoners who had been rounded up in the area. Inside a wire-netted compound were hundreds of French Moroccans locked in with guards patrolling the perimeter, but we were left outside. I don’t know how it came about, but I was found wandering about on my own. I was probably asleep under a bush when the rest were on their way. I was picked up and taken to Doulens prison.

Inside it was packed with Moroccans and the stench was over-powering. Another young German guard took my arm and said he couldn’t possibly put me in there, so I spent the night with him as he made the rounds between the prison and the outside walls. Again nothing to eat. The following day I was returned to the English contingent of P.O.Ws. By this time I was probably only semi-conscious, having had nothing to eat or drink for several days, apart from the half slice of toast.

For a day or two we were slowly marched up and down the main street of, I think Amiens. My Father, years later, told me that he didn’t know if I had survived, until later in August, but the British bombers, which often passed overhead, did not drop any bombs, because they knew we were being used as a shield to protect the town.

At one point, which I have never forgotten, a young French girl, standing on her front door step, went in and came out with a large slice of gateau. The guard made to push her away, but shrugged his shoulders and I was the lucky one to receive it with a kiss and a smile. Eventually we went on a long march in the heat, over 100oF all day long, down the endless steep road, through the border of Luxemburg, down into the Ardennes to Trier in the Saar Valley. There we walked down the main street, every building festooned with huge Swastika banners. Once again the streets were lined with people pelting us with anything they could find.

We were taken to the railway station and loaded on to closed wagons, 80 men to a wagon, which had the words ‘8 horses or 40 men’, painted in French on the door. We spent forty-eight hours in there in the stifling heat, lying on top of each other without air or water. You can perhaps imagine the atmosphere, no different to Doulens prison.

On the way to Poland we stopped at a station in the outskirts of Berlin where a Red Cross contingent was awaiting us with large cauldrons of hot soup. As we filed past we were told to get our mess tins, but I had long ago lost mine. The prisoner in front of me had two tins, and told me he would get two helpings. When the tins were full, he leered at me, said ‘bad luck, chum’, and walked off with both. So much for British Army camaraderie!

We eventually finished up somewhere on the old border with Poland, on what was known as the Oder-Neisse Line, and taken to some underground bunker. There we were given a blanket and one rye bread loaf, which meant four thin slices each. Also a pat of ersatz butter and a dob of jam. Having had nothing to eat for days I had lost the pangs of hunger, and could only manage a couple of slices, and hid the other two under my bunk. In the morning they had disappeared, presumably into the stomach of the man sleeping next to me. After a day or two there we were almost too weak to stand upright. We had a competition to see who could crawl the furthest up the grassy slope leading from the bunker to the top where wire netting enclosed the site. I did not get very far.

We were transferred to Stalag xx11B at Marienwerder, near the town of Marienburg. We were now on the other side of the Vistula(Weichsel) south of Danzig (now Gdansk). This was in Prussia, formerly the northern half of Poland. Southern Poland had been allowed access to the port of Gdynia (now Gdingen, close to Danzig) through the “Polish Corridor” along a road on one side of the Vistula. In the Stalag we lived in long wooden huts, slept on bunk beds, and each hut had an old-fashioned stove in the middle to warm the place. Our rations, as throughout the war, were the daily ration of the rye bread, five to a loaf, the pat of butter and spoonful of jam; plus, at mid-day and the early evening a small bowl of watery potato soup. During the entire five years I never saw any meat, fish, fruit, or fresh vegetables. We worked from 6.30 am to 7.30 pm, six days a week, but almost never on a Sunday.

So, in the summer of 1940 I found myself in a gang of around 40 prisoners transported from the Stalag to a large building site, close to the Baltic coast near Danzig. Here we were billeted in a completed part of the main building, on an upper floor. There were rows of deep wooden shelves, which served as bunks, and we were quite comfortable. As I was too small to be employed as a hod carrier, climbing up ladders with bricks and mortar, I was consigned to help the German on the cement mixer. (Maybe he was Polish or a half and half as the mixed parentage population was known).

At the end of each week we lined up at the site manager’s office and were given a packet of tobacco and rolling paper. As, at the time, I didn’t smoke and couldn’t roll a cigarette anyway, the cement mixer man offered me German money, which, of course, was strictly forbidden. Some days a local baker came around selling small cakes so, when he arrived, I sneaked off to get the small amount of cash I had hidden under my blanket. Unfortunately a guard had spotted me in the act at my bunk. I was marched off to the German Army Commandant in charge of us and interrogated. After obtaining an agreement that the cement mixer man would not be punished, I explained the situation. I went back to work and told the two men waiting at the mixer what had happened, and they were not pleased.

Later that day I was called to the Commandant’s office, expecting some form of punishment, but he just smiled and handed me a bag of cakes worth more than the money he had confiscated. I did not need telling not to do it again. At the next weeks handout I got cakes instead of tobacco.

Whilst we were there we were asked if we would like to have a Sunday church style service, which a young Crusader Union type offered to lead. He still had his bible with him. There was no trouble with the hymns as there were a number of old regulars there who knew all the popular hymns by heart from their church parade on Sundays.

The young Crusader was a bit wishy washy when trying to address the mob, so I offered to give him a hand the following Sunday, as he seemed to have rather bored the congregation. The next Sunday I led the service, but gave them hell fire and damnation from the Old Testament prophets and Revelations. That seemed to cheer them quite a lot. More like what they were used to.

We were there until nearly Christmas when the temperature drops to around —30C to —40C and the snow gets up to 12’ deep. Then we were sent back to the Stalag for Christmas 1940. This turned out to be a ghastly experience.

Every morning and evening, in Arctic conditions, we had to stand on parade and be counted. How anyone could contemplate escaping in those conditions I cannot imagine. The count sometimes took what seemed like hours, as they usually had difficulty in getting the number to tally.

One day, after several counts of the hundreds on parade, they decided to make a search of the huts. Eventually they found someone in the latrines writhing in agony, suffering from extreme dysentery, so a couple of prisoners were sent in to clean him up and fetch him out.

For a while all we heard were screams of agony from the latrines; they gradually faded away into silence. Then the men sent in to bring him out came out laughing, and the guards went back in, to find the man dead. The Commandant shrugged his shoulders and in obvious disgust informed us that the guards had had no hand in the death. From their boasting afterwards, I think they must have cleaned him up by dousing him with buckets of freezing cold water until he finally succumbed. The prisoners, that is, as they were in there alone at the time. The dead man was a Jew.

Otherwise I do not have even a vague recollection of how long I was in the Stalag or much of what went on. Not many days, I think, as I found myself in a gang of 20 taken to a large farm called Gross Wadkeim, a few kilometres away. The farm, a large house, and a row of cottages, was a small, self-contained village, owned by a Herr Tasmacher, who lived there with his wife, two daughters either side of twenty years old. There was also a son, who was away serving in the Luftwaffe. He was shot down and killed in 1941. We stayed until January 1945.

Perhaps, at this stage, I should say that never did we receive any deliberate ill-treatment from any member of the Wehrmacht, the German Army. Even on the occasional visit from the brainwashed lunatics of the Blackshirts or Brownshirts, the Gestapo or the S.S, never did I see any civilian or guard give, or acknowledge the ‘Heil Hitler; or Nazi salute. They returned these with an Army salute, much the same as ours.

We were too tired to do much other than sleep most of the year. But we did have some leisure time during the winter. We had no contact with the outside world for at least the first year or so, although I believe my father knew I was a prisoner by August 1940.

In due course, we were allowed to receive letters, also we were allowed to send back small postcards regularly and sometimes were given letters to write, along the lines of the modern air-mail letter. We were also allowed to receive gift parcels, although many were sent, as I discovered later, few were received. While family and friends gave up ration cards and paid for things to be sent to us, they must in fact have ended up on the huge black market that lasted for years after the war.

After many months the Red Cross had set up a pipe line for prisoners-of-war to receive a steady supply of their own food parcels, also much better parcels from the Canadian Red Cross; also cigarettes and books from donors etc. While the Red Cross, whose HQ was in Switzerland, were quite efficient in arranging the transit from England to Switzerland by sea and then overland, they could not control what happened to the goods between the supplier and the ports.

There was a prisoner on the farm who had worked as a docker at Southampton, who told us of the shenanigans that went on at the port. As they unloaded a long consignment they put the contents of cigarettes, books or whatever in four heaps, chanting ‘one for me, one for you (the truck driver), one for Churchill and one for them (us). Which means only a quarter or less actually left this country. Where the one for ‘Churchill’ went was presumably the black market.

As a result the prisoners who were working got few parcels of any description. The bulk of those who benefited were in the Stalags. After a while the actual running of the Stalag as far as the prisoners were concerned was handed over to British N.C.O.s so they could make sure they had their weekly Red Cross food parcel. Then the rest of the prisoners in the Stalag got theirs. As a result of all the pilfering, the bulk of the P.O.Ws working permanently outside got little.

Instead of one parcel a week we would go for months without any and then perhaps two or three in quick succession. My father tried to send me a parcel or two, but I wrote to him to say that anything of value was not likely to reach me and not to send them. As a result of that he would just send a slab of chocolate, his ration, presumably in view of the small size of his parcel The Red Cross would rap the contents in balaclavas, socks and woolen gloves, of which I built up a huge stock. The women of England all knew how to knit in those days, and they never stopped. But wool had little value on the black market so their contribution came through in toto.

There were of course also some generous people around. My former employer paid the well known cigarette manufacturers in Nottingham to send me a hundred cigarettes every month, of which I perhaps received around six boxes in four years. I believe they had the same system going in their warehouses as in the docks. The cigarettes were loaded on to vans but I have little doubt the warehouse staff and the drivers took their illegitimate shares.

They also paid for me to be sent a book a month, but I got only a couple. There was also a young woman I had known who paid for a book to be sent to me periodically over three years, but again I only received a couple. When I was recuperating after the war I went to see her, to thank her for her generosity. I was appalled when she told me how many she had contracted for, but managed to control and conceal my inward rage at the way she had been conned.

When the opportunity was offered in 1944 to be sent the necessary study books to be able to sit for an exam in Foreign Exchange, they arrived promptly. There were ten exams to be passed to become an associate of the Institute of Bankers and I had already passed seven by 1939, leaving three to go. Amazingly just before Christmas, 1944 I was taken into the Stalag, where I and a few others, studying other subjects, sat an invigilated exam. To my amazement when I got home, six months later, I found that I had passed. Perhaps the examiners took pity on me.

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