Rosie's War

by Rosemary Say

  ‘Au revoir, Mam’zelle Rose … Ayez courage,’ they all wished me when we got to the mairie.

  The building was packed and noisy. A crowd of women were waiting around, all laden down with bags and possessions. I joined them. A few more came in as the morning wore on. We all chatted, wondering just what was going on. Most of them seemed to be English. There were numerous French policemen and German soldiers all busily checking and stamping various papers and passports. They looked very focused. I began to realize that the situation was more serious than I had first thought. At one point the rumour went round that we were to be imprisoned in a camp in Germany. The police told us nothing. I doubt if they knew anyway.

  I recognized one of the policemen from the canteen who had been friendly towards me and I asked him if he would deliver a note to Madame Izard. I scribbled it in pencil on a scrap of paper. Amazingly it has survived. In translation it went:

  I am writing you a quick note – we are still waiting at the Commissariat. There are about thirty old Englishwomen but the morale is magnificent. I think I shall be interned for at least the winter. There is talk of our being taken near Tours. In the end nobody knows anything. I thank you for all your kindness. See you soon. Rosemary.

  In the afternoon we were piled into black police vans and driven fast across Paris. I could see little out of the high-barred windows to tell where we were going but I guessed it would be to one of the train stations.

  We were unloaded at the Gare de l’Est. The scene that confronted me was quite awesome. There were hundreds and hundreds of people. They were mainly women, but also numerous children and some elderly men. I noticed a group of nuns huddled together and some sick or infirm people being helped along. Everyone seemed to be milling about confusedly, clutching their personal possessions. The noise was deafening, with people shouting and protesting. German soldiers were everywhere but they were having a hard job keeping the crowd under control.

  After a short period of total confusion we were bundled onto a train. We waited for several hours in the freezing cold, eventually moving off in the dark. As we scrambled to lean out of the windows, some French railwaymen who were working on the tracks waved and called out, ‘Bonne chance, bonne chance.’

  My journey to imprisonment had begun. I felt curiously detached and calm. I understood, of course, that the situation was grave: we were almost certainly going to be imprisoned somewhere as enemy aliens. Yet I seemed to have no feelings and no reactions. How could I be afraid when I was surrounded by so many people in a worse state than me?

  The journey was to last for two days. Conditions on board the train were horrendous. There were no toilets or running water. The compartments were unlit and unheated in that bitterly cold winter. There was a constant noise of crying and high-pitched wailing. With all the self-absorption of youth, however, I couldn’t appreciate the great misery and suffering around me for the infirm, the sick, those with young children and the elderly. In my carriage there was a lady who must have been at least eighty. She was almost totally blind. Another was bedridden. Looking back on it now, I dread to think what they must have gone through during those two days. Later I learnt that a couple of babies were actually born on the train and that a poor, three-day-old child had died on the journey, his mother having been taken from her bed at the maternity hospital.

  On and on we travelled, being shunted into sidings for hours at a time. Occasionally we stopped briefly at unknown stations and were given thin soup or sausage meat and bread by German nurses. We were desperate for water. I read later in an account by a nun that her group so longed for something to drink that they refreshed themselves with eau de cologne until a little old Nazareth nun managed to spill the lot. The stop-overs were frantic affairs, as we all scrambled to get some food or water before the train pulled away.

  After two days the lavatory situation was unimaginable. We managed as best we could at any stop when we were allowed down beside the tracks. It was an extraordinary sight to see women of all sorts and ages openly relieving themselves in front of the guards. In between the stops we had to use our compartment as a toilet; the stench by the end was overwhelming. I was told later of one resourceful lady who used her toilet bag as a container, with the contents being emptied out of the window.

  Who were all these women and why had we been carted off in this way? My initial impression of the huge crowd at the Gare de l’Est had been that we were an incredible mixture of people. I was right. But all of us had one thing in common: somewhere, at some time, in some way, we all had the word ‘British’ stamped on our papers. Purely because of this fact we were now prisoners; a reprisal, the rumour went, for the British Government having incarcerated enemy aliens on the Isle of Man earlier in the year.

  Many of the people on the train had quite tenuous links to Britain. In those days a woman took her husband’s nationality and his name would be on the passport. This meant that there were bewildered French widows on the train who had married Tommies in the First World War. They spoke hardly a word of English and had no desire to lose their French identity. I talked to a couple of women who were fishwives from Arcachon, where they sold their fish in baskets at the quayside. Long ago they had had brief marriages to English soldiers, who had since died or returned to England. A number of women had English husbands who had simply left France at the beginning of the war, thinking that their French wives and children would be safe. There were White Russians with so-called Nansen passports.3 There were Jewish women from Palestine, a British Mandated Territory at the time. There were also women from all parts of the Commonwealth, including some Afrikaners who were deeply unsympathetic to Britain. In all, there must have been some thirty-odd nationalities among us.

  Some of the women were – like me – ‘proper’ English, for want of a better phrase. That is, born of English parents and with an English home, but in France for various reasons. There were the Bluebell Girls, dancers from the Folies Bergère (traditionally English), girls who looked after the horses at the Longchamps racecourse, women in fur coats and leopard-skin hats straight out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, middle-aged governesses or nannies and prostitutes from the French Channel ports and the maisons closes. There were many quite elderly women who had lived in France for years, some since before the First World War. They had survived that war unscathed and many were bewildered by their arrest. We ‘proper’ English probably made up less than a quarter of the total. I didn’t realize at the time how protected that made me. I was told later that even in the allocation of seats on the train we were given preferential treatment. I don’t know if this was true.

  In my compartment there was a young English girl with blonde hair tightly curled into a bun. She was one of the most typical examples of a prefect at an English girls’ public school that I had ever set eyes on. I looked at her superb self-possession and slightly questioning manner towards me with complete understanding. As the train lumbered through the Parisian suburbs we regarded each other blankly for a while and then smiled with open relief.

  ‘How long have you been in Paris?’ she asked.

  ‘A few months.’

  ‘Did you come over with your parents or to see friends?’

  ‘I was working in the South of France and was advised to go home via Paris.’

  It seems bizarre to think now that we were sitting on that train delicately finding out each other’s social position. But then nothing had actually happened yet to jolt us out of ourselves. We had seen the Germans in Paris and had not been hurt. And unlike most of the passengers, we were already away from home.

  A young girl with black, curly hair was crouched in the corner watching us. She had been crying and seemed very young and frightened. This was my first sight of Shulamith Przepiorka, or Shula, as she was known. She wrote to me after the war:

  When we got to the train I looked for young people among all these poor, old, grey, frightened women. I saw you, Pat, with your curly hair and your unmistakeable English manner. You we
re talking to another very English girl and I didn’t understand a word. Then you said hello to me and started talking in French, which gave me back my nerve. I hoped we would stick together.

  Shula told us that she was the daughter of a Jewish leather worker and an immigrant Polish woman living in Porte Saint-Martin. She was born in Haifa during a family visit to Jerusalem, then in Palestine, where a British official had registered her birth. She thereby had a British passport unlike the rest of her family. She spoke no English and was desperately worried about her relatives.

  We stopped for a long time at Belfort, very near the Swiss and German borders. Rumours had gone round that we were going to work in a munitions factory near Hamburg or that we were being sent to a prison camp somewhere in Germany. I suppose this was the unspoken fear of us all; if we could somehow stay in France we would be safe. But there was no definite news. The German guards in the corridors refused to tell us anything when we finally got going again.

  ‘We’re changing direction,’ someone called out excitedly. ‘We’re going south.’

  ‘We’re headed for Besançon,’ a bossy woman in the carriage told us. ‘It’s an old garrison town near Switzerland. It can’t possibly be our destination. There’s nothing there.’

  But it was at Besançon that we stopped. It was almost worth it just to see that woman’s face. It was a scene of utter chaos as we spilled out onto the platform after our two-day ordeal, shuffling and cursing as we gathered our belongings together. A reception committee of German officers and guards awaited us. They did not have the same smooth, self-satisfied manner we had got to know among the occupying forces in Paris. These soldiers seemed flustered and disorganized. Our official reception involved lots of roll calls, shouting, dogs barking and waiting around for what seemed like ages. It was all unpleasant and frightening. After such a long and uncomfortable journey we were in a state of shock, exhausted and famished. And the cold! It was early December and we were in the foothills of the Jura Mountains.

  Eventually we set off. In front of me were the nuns in their traditional headgear of great, white cornettes wrapped over stiff hats. I counted five different religious orders on that walk. We climbed a steep road, watched by sullen, blank-faced inhabitants. We discovered later that they thought we were a consignment of British spies. Perhaps they could see nothing but trouble ahead. We passed the remains of old medieval walls. The town below to our left was wonderfully picturesque. It was enclosed by a river and several hills, each one topped with what looked to be an old fortress.

  Finally we approached huge, grey barracks. As we shuffled through the entrance gates we saw the sentries in full battledress, with rifles at the ready. The barracks, in traditional Napoleonic style, were made up of three huge blocks of four-storey buildings on two sides of a large, cinder-covered courtyard that was at least the size of a football pitch. There were outhouses and offices at the far end of the yard, thereby enclosing them on three sides. A further set of buildings on our left extended the barracks. On each corner of the yard there was a primitive lavatory open to the sky. The buildings were bleak and surrounded by a high brick wall that was festooned with barbed wire.

  As at the town station, our reception from the German soldiers here was one of confusion and much waiting around. I was surprised to see a number of male prisoners at work in the camp. It was not until later that we heard how Besançon had been a last-minute choice for us. The Caserne Vauban barracks had until the previous day been occupied by thousands of British and French male prisoners of war who had been captured before they could reach the beaches of Dunkirk.4 Dysentery had broken out in the stifling heat and dirt of that summer tragedy. Most had been marched away to Germany the day before we arrived but a hundred or so French prisoners had been kept behind to clean up these Augean stables. They had hurled buckets of water around the rooms and down the stone steps, burned infected rubbish and generally attempted to restore some degree of order to the place. They were just finishing when we got there but they had left behind them an indescribable mess.

  The luggage carts appeared and spilled out our things into the snow. There was a rush for them, which was halted by an impeccable English officer who stood barring the way. He was very suave and self-confident and looked just like the screen heart-throb of the day, Leslie Howard.

  ‘Now ladies,’ he shouted above the melee. ‘I want you to line up in three groups. Those under thirty on the right, those over fifty on the left and the rest of you in the middle here.’

  He had a clear, commanding voice that could easily reach across a crowd of several hundred women. He also had an officious NCO who went around repeating the officer’s instructions and trying to prod us into action. Unfortunately, most of the women didn’t understand much English and those who did took no notice. A male prisoner started to translate the instructions into French but even he didn’t seem to have much grasp of English. The confusion worsened as women milled about the courtyard trying to keep an eye on their belongings while being pushed and shoved into three groups. Eventually we were sorted. I wasn’t much interested in the proceedings as I only had the small bag that I was carrying.

  Each group was (with much relief) allowed to collect its possessions. We were then marched across to our block, Bâtiment A. Some French male prisoners, true to form, attached themselves to our younger age group. They led the way. ‘Wait and see how clean your room is!’ one of them shouted gleefully.

  We were led up a steep, stone staircase. At each floor I could see long, dark, narrow corridors with rooms going off at either side. Reaching the fourth floor, I walked into Room 101, my future home. I stood there, dazed and dismayed. We were in a room about the size of a small hospital ward. Straw palliasses and army-issue blankets were strewn about on the stone-flagged floor, which was swimming in filthy water. A wood-burning stove stood in the middle of the room. Over the walls were the numerous marks of swatted bugs and insects. There was an overpowering stench of urine. The wooden bed frames had been piled down at the far end of the room, where there was a vast hole in the ceiling.

  The other girls looked equally aghast. My stupefaction lasted only a few moments before all my boarding school training came to the surface; it had at least taught me to look after myself.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Shula. ‘Let’s get our bedding sorted then we can go and see what else they’ve given us.’

  We rooted around to find the least damp straw mattress and blankets and dragged the bed frames near the stove. Hearing a commotion in the courtyard, we ran outside and over to the far end where a crowd was gathered. We both drew back in shock. Women were already fighting to grab anything from the pile of sorry equipment left over by the previous occupants. They were watched with amusement by the sentries. We looked on in horror for a few minutes. Then a middle-aged woman near me marched up to a sentry and poked him in the chest with her index finger.

  ‘Can’t you do anything about helping us clean up this place?’ she shouted. She sounded Canadian.

  The soldier looked at her in astonishment and growing fury. Then he fired three shots rapidly in the air. His superior officer came rushing up for an explanation.

  ‘He’s telling the officer that the woman was laughing at him,’ a stout lady translated for us. The woman was quickly bundled away by her companions.

  We both grabbed a spoon and a bowl and quickly went back to our room where we found that our group was beginning to sort itself out. It was a good couple of hours before a French prisoner barged in to tell us with a smirk on his face that dinner was served. I went back down to the courtyard to queue for soup, ladled out from vast urns by German soldiers with aprons over their uniforms. The portions were tiny and I asked for more. The soldier responded by spitting into my bowl with great accuracy.

  As dinner came to an end there was a sudden commotion among the Germans. A white-haired man had arrived with a smartly dressed woman and a small child. He was theatrically attired and wore a wide, black hat. The Germans s
eemed deferential and rapidly escorted his party away. I never saw him again. I was told later that this was Edward Gordon Craig, the son of the famous Victorian actress Ellen Terry and a distinguished figure in the theatre himself. Apparently, he was sent back to Paris soon after this where he spent the rest of the war.

  Most people were desperate to wash away the dirt after that long train journey. The facilities were bleak, as we soon discovered: the bathhouse was out of use and some rooms had a single cold tap and a stone basin. We had nothing. Like many others, we had to make do with the large horse troughs in the communal washroom on the ground floor of our building. On that freezing evening there was pandemonium and something approaching panic as hundreds of women tried to attend to their own toilet. The few lavatories at the corners of the courtyard were totally exposed. They did nothing to answer the needs of such a large number of internees, many of whom were elderly and infirm. I turned away as I saw two nuns approach the open latrine. I couldn’t bear to witness their humiliation.

  I could not even attend to my own meagre toilet. I had already made the devastating discovery on the train that I had forgotten to pack my sponge bag at the Izards’ flat. As I lay on my mattress that first evening, with the raw December wind coming in through the hole in the ceiling, I was totally preoccupied by the fact that I didn’t have a toothbrush. I had no idea how or when I would get another. It was as if I couldn’t or wouldn’t believe the whole horrendous situation. So my mind focused obsessively on this one small thing.

  My forgetfulness certainly affected me deeply in the months and years to come. I think sponge bags must be the luggage equivalent of handbags, full of treasures that only you know the reason for: the jar of cream with the last bit at the bottom that you are saving or the special flannel which has the rough corner to rub away any dry skin. I know that ever since this oversight I have found packing totally stressful, even for a short weekend away. And it was to be my toothbrush (or lack of it) that would become the centre of my screaming nightmares when I finally got home to London. For a long time after my return I would have the same dream: I had returned to the POW camp from which I had escaped and would be asking the German sentry if I could just go back in to make sure that my toothbrush was there!