youâve made to know them well â it might seem that when youâre together youâre wasting your time. But naturally the mercy is that when they go youâll be there with them: dying too. Youâll be together. Or, even better, the chances are that youâll go first. So itâs OK, you can be fond of them, or have any other feelings you decide.
By that afternoon Alfred had firm orders to take things easy â they were having a rest from the crowd scenes, anyway â so he sat on a borrowed chair beside a few vegetable patches and started on his Sherlock Holmes stories,
His Last Bow.
This was a book (not paid for) that heâd brought with him from the shop, but heâd first read a copy in Germany, inside the wire.
At some point in â44 some WRVS women, perhaps from Epsom, had sent out a crate of reading matter, mainly crime fiction and adventures, which they must have supposed would please your average captured combatant â combining as they did both gunplay and imprisonment.
We couldnât fault their logic: derring-do and shooting, a pinch of death, and adventures mostly ended by a long spell in the bag. Why wouldnât we all adore that? So we thanked them for their kindness and their letters and did not in any way explain that holiday camps and prison camps were sometimes not quite alike â less, hiking, for example, and no tennis courts for us.
And ta very much, though I never said so, for the taste, when I opened your books, of thin gravy and old pruning shears and long, dry maidenly evenings, tucked up tight.
But the Kriegies had been genuinely grateful for the books. Even though the Epsom matrons had managed to omit anything racy: they wouldnât want to shock the boys, or lead them astray. So no
Iâll Say She Does
and no
Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief.
The boys had looked very thoroughly to make sure, searched high and low, in fact. Still, Alfred â good lad and, by then, a keen reader â had worked his way through every book, enjoying the Conan Doyle most, because it was so long ago. He would try to have dreams of the Baker Street fireside: bustle down in the horse road beyond the windows, Holmes and Watson off defeating evil and nothing for him to do but be warm and slow and read papers chock-full of completely irrelevant news. Then Mrs Hudson might come up and lay out their tea: kedgeree, chops, bread and butter, a roast of beef. Some days the tea was all heâd picture â other times he couldnât stand it.
And trying not to see her, not to act another chase out through your sleep, searching houses you donât know, bomb sites, running round a strange, deserted aerodrome, knowing that Joyce is there and hiding, that she doesnât want you.
Dreams: ninety-nine times out of the hundred, you could shove them up your arse. Bloody hopeless.
He started the first story and made himself highly interested in the urgent telegram of Mr John Scott Eccles, but the paragraphs still slipped and fell, not letting him in. He drifted into staring at a Ukrainian in ferretâs overalls who was hoeing the earth between rows of young leaves, occasionally smiling in Alfredâs direction, but mainly just smiling.
Of course, in the beginning the film people made the gardens. Theyâd bought up a load of cabbages and such, raked out squares of ground and then sat the vegetables on them to dry up and die in the heat. Which was bloody ridiculous. And anyone could have told them what would happen next.
Within days, everything had been stolen, sold, bartered, cooked and eaten in the DP camp, or elsewhere. How could it not be? Food left and going to waste like that: it
had
to be stolen â stealing was the only possible, moral response.
This made the film people unhappy, because they needed scenes showing prisoners working at cultivation and, in the process, concealing the soil they had sneaked up from their tunnels. These sections would
By that afternoon Alfred had firm orders to take things easy â they were having a rest from the crowd scenes, anyway â so he sat on a borrowed chair beside a few vegetable patches and started on his Sherlock Holmes stories,
His Last Bow.
This was a book (not paid for) that heâd brought with him from the shop, but heâd first read a copy in Germany, inside the wire.
At some point in â44 some WRVS women, perhaps from Epsom, had sent out a crate of reading matter, mainly crime fiction and adventures, which they must have supposed would please your average captured combatant â combining as they did both gunplay and imprisonment.
We couldnât fault their logic: derring-do and shooting, a pinch of death, and adventures mostly ended by a long spell in the bag. Why wouldnât we all adore that? So we thanked them for their kindness and their letters and did not in any way explain that holiday camps and prison camps were sometimes not quite alike â less, hiking, for example, and no tennis courts for us.
And ta very much, though I never said so, for the taste, when I opened your books, of thin gravy and old pruning shears and long, dry maidenly evenings, tucked up tight.
But the Kriegies had been genuinely grateful for the books. Even though the Epsom matrons had managed to omit anything racy: they wouldnât want to shock the boys, or lead them astray. So no
Iâll Say She Does
and no
Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief.
The boys had looked very thoroughly to make sure, searched high and low, in fact. Still, Alfred â good lad and, by then, a keen reader â had worked his way through every book, enjoying the Conan Doyle most, because it was so long ago. He would try to have dreams of the Baker Street fireside: bustle down in the horse road beyond the windows, Holmes and Watson off defeating evil and nothing for him to do but be warm and slow and read papers chock-full of completely irrelevant news. Then Mrs Hudson might come up and lay out their tea: kedgeree, chops, bread and butter, a roast of beef. Some days the tea was all heâd picture â other times he couldnât stand it.
And trying not to see her, not to act another chase out through your sleep, searching houses you donât know, bomb sites, running round a strange, deserted aerodrome, knowing that Joyce is there and hiding, that she doesnât want you.
Dreams: ninety-nine times out of the hundred, you could shove them up your arse. Bloody hopeless.
He started the first story and made himself highly interested in the urgent telegram of Mr John Scott Eccles, but the paragraphs still slipped and fell, not letting him in. He drifted into staring at a Ukrainian in ferretâs overalls who was hoeing the earth between rows of young leaves, occasionally smiling in Alfredâs direction, but mainly just smiling.
Of course, in the beginning the film people made the gardens. Theyâd bought up a load of cabbages and such, raked out squares of ground and then sat the vegetables on them to dry up and die in the heat. Which was bloody ridiculous. And anyone could have told them what would happen next.
Within days, everything had been stolen, sold, bartered, cooked and eaten in the DP camp, or elsewhere. How could it not be? Food left and going to waste like that: it
had
to be stolen â stealing was the only possible, moral response.
This made the film people unhappy, because they needed scenes showing prisoners working at cultivation and, in the process, concealing the soil they had sneaked up from their tunnels. These sections would
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