Chapter 8

We were loaded on board another ship. It was warm down below, a pleasant change from the chilly camp and this time, we didn’t have to travel in a cargo hold. There were Italian soldiers on board, going home on leave. One tried to talk to me as we filed past, asking in Italian, then in French who we were and where we had come from. He didn’t get very far.

One torpedoing had been quite enough for me but looking at the maps now, I think we took the safe route, hugging the Greek coast inside the islands of Cephalonia and Lefkas before entering the Strait of Corfu to make a rapid dash across the Strait of Otranto to the heel of Italy.

We spent the journey sitting on the floor. At night an Irishman with a tender voice sang a sad song and two South Africans talked about their home. We arrived at a harbour full of guards, maybe Bari or Brindisi, and were marched off to a tree-lined field with a little grass. There were hundreds of us by now and there was no barbed-wire fence so they needed more soldiers to watch us. Some of the lads there were in a terrible state, with swollen faces and limbs from lack of vitamins.

They gave us little to eat and those who had any strength left soon kicked up a rumpus about it. We shouted and jostled the guards until it all got out of hand. We were lucky no one was shot. In the end they regained control and five of us were isolated from the rest. They chained us to trees, shackling our arms and legs and we cursed our way through a miserable day. I’d usually been the one in charge. Now I was tethered like an animal. It seemed an age since I’d set off from Liverpool in the Otranto, expecting adventure. We stayed in that field for three or four days and then we were moved to a proper camp.

It had long low barracks of stone and concrete, divided into five bays with timber bunks for around fifty people in each. We were given a couple of warm blankets and a thin palliasse stuffed with straw for a mattress. This was Campo Concentramento Prigioniero di Guerra, Sessantacinque. That’s Prisoner of War Camp PG 65 to you and me. It was close to Altamura in southern Italy.

One of the Italian officers was a major who looked like Jimmy Cagney. He was a reasonable feller and he was as pleased as punch when we told him. There was no forced labour and no brutality but the extreme lack of food made it a shocking place.

We had an outdoor cookhouse and the Italians dumped trees in the camp to fuel the fire. One of the lads who still had some strength chopped them up. He probably got extra rations. A huge cooking pot was placed on the flames and in it went whatever they had, which was usually not much more than macaroni. When the soup was done it was carried around the camp in ten-gallon aluminium containers and dished out, just one ladle of thin liquid per man, per day. To start with we got a small piece of bread on top but that was soon halved in size. There was a slurp of ersatz coffee for breakfast and that was it. I started to feel my body deteriorating and none of us were well to start with.

The lice in our clothes had a better diet. I could take my shirt off and squash a hundred between my fingers. Within half an hour there would be a hundred more. They drove you scatty.

Soon after arriving we were lined up and asked what we did in civvy-street. The interpreter’s English wasn’t great and I remained suspicious, so said I was a cat burglar. He looked up from his list, clearly baffled.

‘What?’

‘Cat burglar,’ I repeated.

‘Gat bugglar?’ he said looking towards his superior for a reaction. There wasn’t one. He wrote something down and moved on to the next man.

When the first Red Cross parcels arrived we thought we were in heaven, though we had to share each parcel between many people. There would be a tin of powdered Klim – milk spelt backwards – a little coffee or tea, a tin of vegetables or some processed cheese, sometimes dried eggs, plus a small bar of chocolate, sugar or raisins.

The boredom was crushing. There was no military discipline in the camp. We had to look after ourselves. We had nothing to cut the bread with but we did have tiny metal mirrors and I found a way of splitting them to create blades. I added wooden handles to make pretty good bread knives and traded them for extra food. The camps worked on barter. You had to have something to swap. As the months passed, I set about making a sort of small suitcase out of flattened Klim containers. God knows why. I had hardly anything to put in it and it was not part of any daring escape plan. I flattened the cans then folded over the edges to link them together in larger sheets that I could bend into shape. It helped me get through the long days and a tin box of sorts emerged at the end of it.

Although we had Red Cross tea and coffee, we had no easy way to boil water. I decided to improvise so I made an enclosed drum with revolving fan blades inside like a sealed hamster wheel. I connected it by a pipe to a tiny metal box filled with cinders, lit a fire around them and when I cranked the fan, it created a mini blast-furnace. The cinders glowed red-hot and you could boil a tin of water on top. I was terribly proud of it and it meant we could drink tea for the first time. Others went on to adapt and perfect the blowers and they were a great success.

I suspect now that the Italians simply didn’t have the food to give us. Some of the ordinary guards had little more than we did. We even dried out our used tea leaves to trade with them.

I was still suffering from the ignominy of capture. I barely trusted anybody and I kept largely to myself. I do remember a couple of prisoners. There was a cockney called Partridge who would do favours without wanting anything in return. Then there was another chap called Bouchard who was desperately thin and dying on his feet. He spent his days scavenging for food around the camp. We talked sometimes but never about home. Why torture ourselves?

I heard later that some of those from other camps were taken outside to be disinfected, only to be spat on and abused by the public. We stayed where we were. Occasionally a Catholic priest would turn up and conduct a service for some of the more religious lads. Even that was done through the barbed-wire fence. He never came in.

There were other attempts to ease the monotony. If you knew anything about anything, you could hold a talk about it. The subjects ranged from history and geography to engineering. One chap talked for hours about his lathe and the principles of turning wood and metal and how to cut threads.

After a while they began building extra huts; we were already overcrowded and the camp was to expand. We didn’t usually do forced labour in Italy but when we were offered 150 grams of extra bread a day to help with construction we took it. The food situation was dire.

The huts we were to build were sited outside the perimeter. The plan was to complete them first and then extend the fence around them. Going outside the wire was a thrill in itself. There could be food to filch or a chance to get away.

I was one of six lads sent onto the roof to fasten tiles down with cement. It gave me my first real view of the surrounding land. There was just one guard watching over us and he was down below. My belly ached with hunger. It couldn’t be any worse on the run. I chose my moment and asked the guard if I could climb down to relieve myself. He reluctantly said yes, although I knew he couldn’t keep an eye on all of us.

Once out of sight I didn’t waste a second and bolted straight away.

I expected the hullabaloo at any moment but nothing happened and I managed to put some distance between me and the camp before resting. I have no idea when he raised the alarm but I was certainly well away.

I had a piece of bread with me and a tiny chunk of cheese. It was the only preparation I had made. I decided to avoid the coast and head north towards neutral Switzerland. I tried to be optimistic. A home run was more likely from here than Greece but it was still hundreds of miles over enemy territory.

The journey felt familiar. I avoided roads and large settlements and scavenged for food in remote farm outhouses. I didn’t get caught at it but I didn’t get much food either. The best I managed was the odd dodgy vegetable and something that tasted of aniseed, possibly fennel. I have never been able to eat it since. I covered a lot of distance on foot over the next three or four days but I was getting weak and hungry. I came across a small crop of wheat but it was going grey and rotting in the fields. Italy was not a happy place. It began to rain like the devil.

I took cover in a small deserted building and waited for the rain to stop. It was dark outside when I heard voices calling. My shelter had been surrounded and they were ordering me to come out. I had been spotted.

I stepped into the gloom. I was anxious. I couldn’t see how many Italian soldiers were waiting for me but it hardly mattered, they’d got me. I was put on a lorry and taken away. They never bothered to tie my hands and I wasn’t knocked about. They got me back to the camp quickly and I spent a day and a night in a punishment cell. Then the dreadful routine resumed. It had been an unplanned effort born out of frustration. I was back in the bag and I’d have to lump it.

Dysentery dominated life in the camp – not just some slightly inconvenient type of stomach upset but a life-threatening, demeaning illness which sapped all our energy leaving us weak, listless and in pain. We were all losing weight and with so many sick people, embarrassing accidents were common. Once you had messed yourself, getting properly clean was almost impossible with just cold water to do it. I saw lads in tears with the humiliation of it, grown men caked in diarrhoea. Many people in that camp died of preventable diseases and neglect. One man’s body was kept lying around for days in a shed before he was buried. I remember it because I inherited his trousers. Mine were ripped and filthy and the rest of my uniform was almost as bad.

I was relieved to have them, whether they had been taken from a corpse or not. It was practical. But as the days went by I started to itch badly, and this time it was more than lice. A blotchy, lumpy, red rash appeared on the insides of my thighs. It spread quickly until I had it all around the groin and God knows where else. I had picked up scabies. Tiny mites had burrowed into my flesh, and laid their eggs. As I scratched, the skin broke and bled and I knew it could get infected in all the filth. I’d survive a painful day but at night it seemed my skin was inflamed and crawling.

The bouts of dysentery and constant hunger meant I was horribly lethargic and getting thinner. If I stood up quickly, I would black out and keel over. After a while I began doing it on purpose just to knock myself out behind the barracks. It made the time pass more quickly. When I was out cold there was relief from the hunger, the lice and the torment of the bleeding rash. Most of us did it. The torment of scabies went on for weeks, maybe even months. Not until a bar of carbolic soap appeared in the camp to wash with did I start to bring it under control. My body was in a shocking state, but in my head, I wasn’t a prisoner at all. The enemy had done many things to me but they hadn’t captured my mind.

That year in Italy was hellish. Many of the lads died of disease and neglect. When news came that some of us were being moved I felt it couldn’t get much worse. I was too weak to march out of the camp. There were no officers with us and no military discipline to speak of. The best any of us could muster was a slow listless walk to the lorries. We were loaded into cattle trucks at a railway siding. In better days I would have leapt straight in but it was now a struggle to get up. A sign on the outside said ‘Forty men or ten horses’. There was one bucket for everything. I wanted to be as far away from that as possible. Many of the lads still had dysentery. I dropped down in the corner, relieved to have found a place below the only window. It was a twelve-inch square gap with barbed wire stretched across. It provided air, light and a restricted view of the world rolling by. It was also the only place to empty the bucket, which was soon overflowing. Something had to be done.

A couple of the boys lifted it to the window but pouring a bucket of excrement through a wired-up hole above head height was messy. Much of it blew back and ran down the inside of the carriage where I had sat. There was some verbiage about that. All the shit from Shanghai and I was sat underneath it.

We had the same old dog biscuit to eat and a container of water between us all. We didn’t know where we were going. As the train wound its way slowly north, we passed miles of deserted beaches and I saw a sign with the name ‘Rimini’. I had heard of that before the war. We turned inland and passed through villages where people came out to wave. Maybe they thought we were Italians.

I had no idea then that this was the same route they would use to transport Italy’s Jews and other enemies of the Reich northwards to the concentration camps. Our trucks might be stinking and filthy, but at least we had the space to lie down. The Jews were crammed in much tighter, weaving their way across Europe to a fearful destination with no protection at all from the Geneva Convention, not that it had done us much good so far.

After days on the move the track began to twist and climb and trundled through the Brenner Pass. We had reached Austria. I got my first sight of the Alps through the barbed wire. I was awestruck by their magnificence and troubled by a contradiction. I associated myself with the countryside I had grown up with. Its beauty seemed to me to be linked to the beauty in mankind. It had made me the man I was. I wondered how such frightful things could be happening in a place of such natural splendour. I hadn’t seen the half of it.

When the train came to a halt, the station signs said ‘Innsbruck Hauptbahnhof’. We were shunted into a siding and put into covered lorries. Now the guards were German. After a long journey mostly through open countryside the truck stopped in a small forest clearing where we were allowed to get down to relieve ourselves. Instantly I was on edge. The German guards began setting up a machine gun on a tripod. It was facing our way. I thought they might shoot the lot of us there and then. We were miles from anywhere with no witnesses. If they began shooting should I run or try to attack the gunners? The moment passed. They dismantled the weapon and we got back on the trucks.

Over the next few months I passed through a number of camps. I wasn’t always sure where I was and looking back it’s hard to be certain in which order I visited them. After a lengthy journey we arrived at one camp where we were put in a compound and there were Russians on the other side of a barbed wire fence.

I tried to speak to them over the days but with no common language we didn’t get very far. I could see they were in a terrible state. They were trying to keep their spirits up and they put on a show for us, dancing behind the wire, but they were frail and malnourished and they could barely manage it. It was a sorry sight. There was a terrible stench and it was days before we learnt why. The putrid smell came from decaying corpses. The Russians were being slowly worked and starved to death. Their rations were insufficient to sustain them and we were told that in desperation they kept their dead alongside them in their bunks to claim their food for a few extra days.

The rats were thriving. They were the size of cats and certainly eating human flesh. I could smell it on them. They had no respect for barbed-wire fences. I slept on the floor and woke at night to find them running across my bed. I felt their breath on my face. They stank. One of my ancestors had been a rat catcher centuries ago. If he could have seen us in the middle of the twentieth century, an era of industrial miracles, with rats feasting on people, he’d have thought civilisation had collapsed. He would have been right. I felt the bite of strange creatures larger than cat fleas. We called them bed bugs. I don’t know what they were but when I squashed them, the blood they had drunk burst from them.

I was soon in trouble. Crossing the camp one day, I was pulled up short by a German officer who was screaming at me. I had failed to salute him. I tried to explain that in the British Army we didn’t salute anyone without a cap. He wasn’t having it. One of the lads shouted that I should salute and forget it. Reluctantly I did and the officer let it go.

After a while we were split into groups and I was sent to work with the Russians down a coal mine. I stepped into the lift-cage at the pithead and dropped into the darkness, the fragile frame creaking and bending under the strain, on the verge of falling apart. The armed guards at the bottom of the shaft ordered us to walk until we reached the seam. They barely spoke to the Russians at all, they just clobbered them instead. There was brutality there all right. I was the only Englishmen on that face and they were easier on me. I was set to work shovelling coal into a skip from morning until night. I worked standing in water. It was cold and grim. There were no helmets or protective clothing for anyone, but the Russians had the worst of it. Many were toiling barefoot, hacking at the seam with heavy tools. I was not allowed to talk to them.

I had been down there for three days when I heard screaming from one of the guards. The aggression in his voice drowned out the scraping of shovels and the sound of picks in the darkness. They were knocking one of the Russians about. He had improvised some protection from the sharp rocks by tying thin strips of rubber to his bare feet. I knew straight away he had cut them from a disused conveyor belt I had seen in an abandoned side tunnel.

The guard was hysterical and shouting about sabotage. More Russians were dragged from the coalface and all ten of us were shoved up against the tunnel wall, faces blackened and smeared. There was no begging or pleading. There wasn’t time. I wasn’t aware of an order. The shouting stopped. The five soldiers lifted their guns and one fired without hesitation. A deafening shot reverberated around the network of tunnels and poorly lit passages. It was followed by another, the second guard firing as the first pulled back the bolt to reload.

I had only seconds to react. There was nowhere to run. If I was going to die in that godforsaken pit I would take one of them with me. That much I could do. It would have been death whatever happened. There were more shots in rapid succession. Then it stopped. Five bullets and five dead Russians in the coal dust. I had been the eighth in line.

My eyes had been fixed on the firing squad so I never saw the Russian bodies hit the ground. My ears were still ringing as we were bundled away. I had faced death before but with a fighting chance. This time survival had been down to the whims of a brutal enemy. I had come as close to capitulation as I was to get. I had played no part in my own salvation. What happened in that satanic hole shook me more than anything before or possibly since.

I was taken to a sparsely furnished room. The guard gave me a violent shove towards a chair and the questions began. In broken English, the officer asked if I was behind the ‘sabotage’. Had I put the Russians up to it? Who had given the order? There was nothing I could say. There had been no plan, just an exhausted wretch trying to protect his cold, injured feet. If I was planning anything, they said I would be shot. I believed them.

The threats unnerved me but I still had a motor inside that wasn’t completely broken. I was marched to a train and thrown in with another group of prisoners. They were normal rail carriages with a corridor down one side and small, basic compartments. We didn’t know where we were going. I asked to be allowed to use the toilet and realised it was at the end of the carriage and near the door. The guard was standing far away. I didn’t know the other lads at all but I spotted a possibility. As the train came to a stop we got the door open, jumped onto the tracks and ran for the nearby fields. About half a dozen of us got out before the train began to move. There was no coordination and we scattered, running in all directions.

I was mentally exhausted. The shooting in the mine had taken its toll.

I should have learnt the lesson from Italy: you had to plan an escape properly to be successful. We were in uniform and stood out a mile. I don’t know how many were caught but I was soon looking down the barrel of a gun again. There was no shooting thankfully but it was over and I was taken to a room questioned and knocked about a bit. After that I was sent to a camp that I believe was Lamsdorf. I never got to find out. My card had been marked. I was a habitual troublemaker.

I was transferred almost immediately to the punishment camp at Graudenz in northern Poland. I was told to strip and a man puffed pungent white powder over me, between my legs and under my arms. My hair was cropped short and I was photographed like a criminal from the front and the side with a number board around my neck. I was Prisoner 220543.

They led me to a spartan barracks with three English fellers and a Scot already inside. They were rough types with shaven heads and they looked like they deserved to be there. We didn’t have much in common. We were allowed out briefly for exercise into a small yard surrounded by high walls. There was nothing to do but walk in endless circles. I didn’t have much to say. The shooting in the mine still weighed heavily on me.

There were no mattresses just bare timber bunks. To sleep I had to remove the wooden laths in the middle to give my bony hips space, otherwise it was agony. The wood-fibre blanket was so thin I could see through it. I turned too quickly on the first night and my elbow ripped a hole in the middle of it.

In the morning I was taken into another bare room with two officers sitting behind a table. As the questioning began again the guards moved in to stand on each side of me. I saw their heavy polished boots. It felt like I was going to get a pasting but they were going through the motions. I was relieved. They still thought I had been involved in something with the Russians but my uniform gave me some protection unless they could prove something.

I heard of terrible things going on around me in other parts of that huge camp but I was OK. I had been sent there as a punishment but at least I wasn’t working in that awful mine any more. After about three weeks I was on the move again, this time by train with a couple of guards.