Dearest Jane...

by Roger Mortimer

  I still find the following letter about the turn of events in 1940, written to me in 1970s, to be one of the most poignant I ever received from my father.

  Dampwalls

  Burghclere

  May [early 1970s]

  Dearest Jane,

  Yesterday, listening in the garden to the melancholy sound of church bells, my mind went back to a beautiful May morning in Belgium in 1940. The Germans had attacked the Low Countries and started the Blitz. My battalion moved up to Belgium from Lille and we assembled at a sort of Belgian Virginia Water, large well-kept houses with children and dogs playing on the lawns. It did not seem much like war. Suddenly a motorcyclist appeared with a message for all company commanders to meet the commanding officer at a church some miles away. Off we went – I rode a motorcycle – and as we reached the little church the locals were going into morning service in their best clothes just as they did every Sunday. They took no notice of us.

  The Colonel told us that the German armour had broken through the first line of defences and we were to counterattack forthwith. The war really had started: for some of us it had ended before the day was done.

  Best love to you all,

  RFM

  3

  Roger the Prisoner

  Roger Mortimer supplied a lot of the laughter, for which many of us are eternally grateful.

  Francis Reed, POW

  The Nazis invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940. The fierce Battle of Belgium – or Flanders as it is sometimes known – lasted for two-and-a-half weeks before the evacuation of British troops across the Channel back to England. In the meantime, Captain Roger Mortimer carried out his orders to defend a rearguard position beside a canal in Louvain, central Belgium, against the oncoming Germans. During the ensuing action, he was knocked unconscious. When he regained consciousness, it was to discover that he was now a prisoner of the Germans. According to the Coldstream Guards records, it was 17 May 1940.

  His captivity commenced in an unusual manner. Within the first twenty-four hours, my father found himself wearing clean clothes and having an excellent and enjoyable dinner with a general. A civilized occasion with a hospitable host. Except that the general in question was German and his guest was a British prisoner.

  The General von Reichenaw and Roger were not strangers to each other. Both were racing enthusiasts and they had met at Ascot on a few occasions before the war. On the evening following my father’s capture, the General was running though the list of British prisoners taken and spied my father’s name. He gave immediate orders for a driver to collect my father from the prisoner’s holding station and chauffeur him back for dinner at his commandeered residence.

  On his arrival, the General greeted Roger warmly. He was shown upstairs to a bedroom with a change of clothes laid out for him. Over dinner, these two educated men enjoyed the kind of conversation that they might have held in peacetime, much of it about racing. After a good night’s sleep between clean sheets in a comfortable bed, the last my father would experience for many years to come, Captain Mortimer, now POW 481, was given breakfast before once again climbing back into his dirty uniform. As the staff car drew up by the door, the General shook his hand, saying with regret, ‘I’m awfully sorry about all this – I would far rather be at Ascot.’

  Back in England, the information came through to my father’s family that he was dead, killed in action. This alarming error was soon corrected by a report in The Times, of those prisoners taken in the Battle for Belgium.

  Much later, in November 1940, my father was mentioned in The Times again, this time in an article on the role played by the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards in the defence of Belgium. My father’s bravery was commended.

  When the enemy broke through on the Belgian front and brought fire to bear on the rear, another company held their positions on the canal, thanks to the inspiring leadership of Captain Mortimer who was knocked unconscious and captured.

  That my father’s next destination should have been a castle – Spangenberg in central Germany – was not to suggest further privileged treatment for himself or his fellow British officers, no matter what their social connections. The castle was the first of the five prison camps behind whose walls and fences my father was to pass the following five years.

  At this chaotic point, as Britain concentrated its defences against the anticipated invasion from Hitler, there was not yet a reliable system for dispatch of parcels of clothes, food, medicines and basic necessities to prisoners of war. My father recalled having no change of clothes for quite some time and being compelled to tear off the tail of his shirt as a handkerchief. A fellow POW had a copy of Gone with the Wind – every one of its many pages were torn out for use as lavatory paper. There are no letters from Roger in those first months in existence – if indeed he had been in a position to write any.

  Innovative measures for survival – or equally, to raise morale – occupied prisoners’ waking hours, as described here by Freddy Corfield who was to become one of Roger’s closest friends in prison. It was early autumn at Spangenberg Castle.

  Roger and I grew beards, which, despite the expert attention of a bearded naval officer, we both found uncomfortable and later abandoned. We also endeavoured to produce a passable smoke from the rapidly fading leaves of Virginia creeper which covered the castle walls. It was not a success.

  A photo of a bearded, beaming, big-jumpered Roger is a handsome one – if one didn’t know better, one might think he was enjoying a sailing holiday. That beard came in for comment from John Surtees, one of a new autumn intake of prisoners, on his arrival at Spangenberg. John had met Roger once before in discouraging circumstances. Their second meeting was no more auspicious:

  My first sight of Roger was at Corps Camp at Tweseldown in July 1935, when we young Etonian cadets struggled onto Parade in front of the tall, fair-haired moustached and immaculate Guards Officer Mortimer, under whose temporary command fell the Eton College Training Corps contingent. We were not smart, and it was not long before we became aware of it. Those who collapsed in the sweltering heat, some of them suffering from hangovers, had their names taken without delay. No one was seriously penalised, but we regarded this officer with a certain amount of opprobrium, or at least, disfavour.

  Five years later, in the autumn of 1940, on my arrival at the prison camp at Schloss Spangenberg, there was the fall, fair-haired, luxuriantly bearded and now far from immaculate figure, dressed in a pale sweater and battledress trousers. He was dispensing a plate of lettuce sandwiches to members of our two-dozen party. It was my bad luck not to be awarded a sandwich – an oversight which Roger was not allowed to forget for the next fifty years.

  It was the last sight of a lettuce I had until 1945. We had been travelling by barge and cattle truck for 14 days and we were famished.

  These were the opening shots between John Surtees and Roger. It was the beginning of a friendship – unswerving in its loyalty – consolidated in prison and lasting for the next half a century.

  When, after the war, John and Roger wrote to each other, they addressed the other by their prison number, i.e. ‘Dear 481’. A prison number is not a typical term of endearment but nicknames of any kind were a little hobby of my father’s – they bubble to the surface of his later letters, long after he had absented the notorious nickname territory of public school and the Army. Roger got off very lightly himself in the nickname game. He was known as ‘Paul’ in his earlier years as a Guards officer, a name inspired by the dry fizz of Pol Roger champagne. A compliment. Now, in prison, he was initially called Gort – possibly because ‘Mort’ happened to rhyme with the name of the erstwhile Commander of the BEF in France, Lord Field Marshal Gort, under whose command Roger had fallen in the Battle of Belgium.

  As ‘Gort’, my father enjoyed a week of solitary confinement in August 1940, according to John Mansell, POW:

  Gort had back chat with a sentry yesterday when gardening. The sentry had said to him – ‘London will be entered in eight da
ys.’ Gort had bet him something or other that it wouldn’t be and was arrested for bribing the sentries. The sentry, gesticulating, said that in six days Winston Churchill would be so high – bending down to illustrate the height. Gort pointed out that Hitler would be so high – bending even lower. The charge for this offence is ‘Insulting the Fuhrer’. Gort was given eight days confinement for his bribery and insults.

  Roger’s new POW friend Fred Corfield turned out to have an agricultural background and was soon christened ‘Dungy Fred’ by Roger. On Fred’s request, Roger gave him some lessons in German. ‘But Roger’s sense of humour always got the better of him, and I only learnt the rudest words and expressions, which, being quite unrepeatable, I consequently found of rather limited use.’ Dungy Fred later became better known as a Conservative minister, Sir Frederick Corfield.

  At the outset, Roger spoke a smattering of German. He took his studies further in prison, remarkably even taking advanced exams in the language while incarcerated. Later in life he was prone to season his speech with the odd bit of Deutsch. He liked its crispness. Zimmer (room), appealed to him, describing his own room as his Zimmer Z. Feigning annoyance he might bark at you – or his dog – ‘Du bist ein Schweinhund!’

  Whether for study or pleasure, books offered a retreat into a private refuge from the enforced, unrelenting intimacy of community living. For POWs, reading was one legitimate route of escape. Parcels of books somehow managed, some of the time, to make safe passages around the world without being bombed into smithereens or torpedoed and sunk. Roger was a voracious reader so gifts of books – novels, biographies, military history and books on racing – were an absolute lifeline, as well as a talking point in his letters home.

  The meaning of leisure was somewhat different in prison. There was rather an excess of it, filled by conversations, cards, music, artistic endeavours, shows, sport, gardening, knitting and sewing. It might nearly sound an idyll. It wasn’t. The German commandants of the Offizierlager or Oflags – camps for officers – were not permitted to inflict extremes of brutality as they were constrained by the Geneva Convention, but the line was a fine one. Conditions were devoid of physical comfort, often unpleasantly cold and wet, with hunger a regular companion. Any activity could be summarily interrupted by impromptu roll calls at any hour of the day or night, with POWS sometimes standing outside for long periods; there were frequent inspections and searches where any possessions might be confiscated or destroyed. There was no lack of Nazi ingenuity in devising humiliations – countered by plenty of inventive British humour.

  In these camps, fellow prisoners became close friends and groups in a hut became like a family, but of course one half of the human race was completely absent – women. My father’s letters home and the memories of his fellow POWs explain a little of the camaraderie, humour, highs and lows they shared over those long years:

  18 September 1941

  I’m afraid I must be a dreadful nuisance to you but all your efforts are certainly appreciated at this end. The Red X too is settling down and we get one parcel a week from them at present. The garden has rather a bedraggled look at the moment, but our roses are quite nice and sunflowers and pumpkins are also successful. I’m having a small party here tomorrow in my new room, which has a most lovely view and is easily the best I’ve had – very quiet and only two others in it, both old friends. Did I tell you that Sophie’s friend Philip Moore is here? He is minus a leg and one of the nicest people you could meet anywhere. His leg is off at the thigh but has healed well. He does the most astonishing high-jumps, well over four feet. Could you send a possible book or two on racehorse breeding and if possible, also some gramophone records? We’re settling down now for the winter and I feel sure that another two Christmases will see me home again. The worst of life here is its awful pettiness, lack of privacy, and the fact that captivity brings out the worst in you. I’m really delighted to have no peacetime friends with me here. One really sees so much of people that you suddenly find yourself hating people you know are really very nice. You’ve got to be pretty tolerant to be on terms of more than honeymoon proximity with people for fifteen months, day in, day out, and not occasionally go off the deep end.

  Love

  Roger

  British Officers were obliged, by military law, to concentrate their energies on escaping from prison. In 1941 at Warburg, the third prison camp which Roger graced with his presence, two escape attempts were recorded. The motivation to escape had additional impetus at this prison. The site was almost a cliché of a Nazi prison camp, the kind seen in war movies. It was a mud heap on which sat prison huts stretching far into the distance across a high, exposed plain. The desolation was completed in the traditional manner – twelve-foot high fences with the area between the inner and outer fence packed with rolls of barbed wire. Every hundred yards or so was a watchtower with searchlights and armed guards. The good news for Roger was that he shared the pleasures of Warburg with many of his new friends – including John Surtees and Desmond Parkinson – with whom he embarked on what might accurately be described as escapades. John describes one foiled attempt that he and Roger planned.

  [We substituted] ourselves for members of a working party who went outside the camp to collect stores, coal, parcels and so on. Our haversacks, which had been taken out and concealed in bushes by the cooperating men a day or so before, were discovered. We were threatened with reprisals to the whole camp if we didn’t declare our identities. That earned us fourteen days each of solitary confinement; Roger regarded it as rather a peaceful alternative to camp routine, but his cell had a better light for reading than mine did.

  Desmond Parkinson, then in his early twenties, recollected another escape plan involving a team and a lot more effort.

  Shortly after arrival at Warburg, Roger started a tunnel from the bath house and I was one of his slaves on the project. Others included John Surtees, Fitz Fletcher, Freddie Burnaby-Atkins, Michael Price. In those days tunnelling techniques were very primitive and, as we had to dig a shaft sixteen feet deep before starting on the tunnel proper, fresh air at the working end was non-existent and I still remember the terrible headaches we all had after doing our stint at the face. But, as you can imagine, with Roger as our tunnel master, there were many light moments. But I don’t think any of us had much faith that we would eventually emerge on the other side of the wire. This lack of faith was not misplaced, since after a heavy rainstorm, a senior major decided that this was the moment to dig his little vegetable patch outside the bath house. This led, in short order, to the collapse and flooding of the tunnel and then the subsidence of the bath house itself . . . This did not deter our intrepid tunnel master, Roger, and we were soon at it again, starting from a room in one of the huts, but our efforts were discovered by the Germans after a very short time indeed.

  When Roger wrote in caustic tones to his father from Warburg in February 1942, he had been incarcerated for nearly two years:

  I’m afraid my letters are the last word in dullness but I am up against the same difficulties as yourself. I have had to give up skating as my knees wouldn’t stand it and I could only progress rather unsteadily like a rabbit with a broken leg. Time fairly flies in prison and I can’t believe it is over two years since I was last in England. One’s occupations are very varied here today; I’m room orderly and have many menial duties to perform: in addition I’ve had a German lesson and darned a three-inch hole in my socks. I think I only have two ambitions in life left: to possess a water closet and to be able to hire someone to darn my socks. I hope you won’t entirely give up golf as I intend to stage my first comeback against you at the New Zealand Club. With any luck I may have forgotten my previous style and will launch out with something new and hard enough to achieve any measure of success. I wonder which of us two will age most: if you keep your head and don’t overdo things, you’ll probably find yourself taken for my younger brother. I suppose there will be a lot of nice, young, rich widows knocking about after the war
. I only hope they won’t all be sold out before I get back. Well, Best Love to you all. I am confident I shall be home within two more years.

  Roger

  Roger was allowed just the statutory two letters per month on narrow, prison-issue paper with twenty-five cramped lines to fill. Roger’s handwriting shrank to the smallest legible size. I suspect that the style of his later paternal letters, often devoid of paragraph breaks, was developed in prison when space on the page was limited. To pass the censors, POW letters home permitted only innocuous content – the topic of war was verboten – but irony and satire tended to escape attention. War or not, Roger’s consistent concern was not to bore others. Writing from Warburg in July 1942, he shares the pleasures of his current modus vivendi with his father.

  The weather here is perfect and I just lie about in the sun without any clothes on and let my mind go completely blank. The time passes admirably and I only emerge from a state of semi-coma at mealtimes. I played my first game of prison tennis last week – half an hour on a mud court, two balls both wet and black, no stop netting at all. Prison life has several advantages. For the first time for twenty years I’m free from financial embarrassment; however many letters arrive, it’s long odds against a bill. Secondly, even if I have to live at a very humble scale after the war, it can hardly fail to be a slight rise on my present condition. Also it’s marvellous having no dreary routine: if I feel like it, I just go back to bed after breakfast and stay there all evening until appel. Thank God I’ve always been bone idle and never felt the restless urge to do something.

  In fact Roger was doing something. He was engaged in subterfuge on a nearly daily basis for four years at different camps. The penalty, should his high security risk activities have been discovered, would have been severe. He could have been shot.