by Leo Kessler
Hawkins walked across to the filing cabinet and opened the door marked ‘Light Entertainment’ to produce a bottle of whisky. ‘I know the sun hasn’t gone down yet, Dicksey. But I think this calls for a bit of a celebration. What about a wee dram? The glasses are over in the corner.’
Captain Harry Hawkins had been a quarter-master sergeant with an infantry battalion for twenty years in India by the time 1939 graced the pages of his daily diary. In those two decades he had gone virtually native. He had enjoyed the native women, taken to eating pilau in rancid ghee, and had adopted Indian sanitary habits that didn’t just include hawking and spitting after virtually every second sentence and cleaning his nostrils in public. Those in the know were very canny about giving Quarter-Master Sergeant Hawkins a handshake and the occasional outbreaks of dysentery were always traced back to him by the medics.
It had come as an unpleasant surprise when he was ordered to France with his Battalion. Indeed it was a surprise for the whole command. They had arrived on the Western Front in a raging snowstorm, dressed in starched shorts and solar topees, with officers who still carried swords. Hawkins hadn’t liked the food, the women, the cold, and above all, the fighting.
In June 1940, he had brought out what was left of B Company at Dunkirk and had been awarded the MBE (Military Division), an immediate commission for bravery in the field (‘I nicked some abandoned frog trucks before a bloke in the next battalion did’, he confessed later to drinking buddies). Thereupon he had promptly got himself downgraded temporarily, while he looked around for a safe billet.
The York POW Camp had been right up his street. He knew immediately that if he played his cards right, it would provide him with ‘the cushy number’ he needed until he could go back to India and the world he understood and loved: char in the charpoy, and such. There, he would serve out the next thirty years until he got his pension.
His one problem in this cunning little plan? Not enough prisoners to warrant keeping the York Camp open. Now that he had those prisoners, his only worry was keeping the bastards!
CHAPTER 6
‘It was once an English racecourse,’ Pastor Mueller, the camp’s senior German, explained. ‘They’ve tried their best to make it into a prison camp, but they haven’t done a good job.’ Pastor Mueller was dressed in a shabby, blue suit. The only indication that he was a man of the cloth was a black pullover with white, tie-less collar protruding from it. He pointed to the straddled wooden-legged watch-towers some ten metres high, each housing sentries armed with Bren guns, complete with searchlights on the parapets used to illuminate the huts set below inside the triple barbed-wired fences. ‘Look closely. Their chaps are rather old and a little careless.’
‘Of course,’ the wooden air-gunner sneered, as the newcomers moved on in their guided tour of their new home. ‘Typical Tommy. Completely inefficient. Didn’t even note the scar on my backside when I had my particulars taken.’
‘Perhaps they were too polite,’ Pastor Mueller suggested mildly.
‘Lazy, that’s what it was,’ the air-gunner snapped. ‘All a bunch of perverts anyway. Like to be beaten by canes, they do, and that’s just what they deserve.’
‘You might have been lucky, then,’ Otto suggested, ‘that they didn’t want to look at your arse – excuse me, Pastor, please!’ he added hastily to the camp's senior German.
Pastor Muelle was a rotund, middle-aged man with a mouthful of gold teeth and a twinkle in his faded blue eyes. He waved a pudgy hand and said, ‘Not to worry, my boy. I was in charge of the Lutheran Mission to German Seamen in Hull for eighteen years. I can assure you I have heard worse things in my time, much worse.’
The air-gunner glared at Otto.
They wandered on through the camp, with Otto noting that, in spite of the careless guards, the barbed-wire fence was new and taut. Some effort would be needed to get across it, especially as there were little sign points running its whole length stating that any prisoners moving within one metre of it would run the risk of being shot. He wondered, for a moment or two, if there might be any chance of getting under it, then dismissed the thought.
‘You must realise, comrades,’ Pastor Mueller was saying, ‘that we’re slightly peculiar in this place, naturally.’
The air-gunner took his eyes off an Italian who wore an ankle-length evening gown made of black-out material and was painting his lips delicately with the aid of a mirror held up adoringly by a burly companion, and whispered hoarsely, ‘That I can see.’
‘Sometimes I wish I had not taken over this task.’ Mueller smiled at the four new Germans a little sadly. ‘If I had not been a Catholic priest, I would have automatically been classified as an officer and gone elsewhere. But the Tommies must have some sort of prejudice against us. So I am classified as an NCO and land here.’ He sighed. ‘It is all very strange.’
‘The Whore of Rome,’ the air-gunner said hotly.
The pastor sniffed, and pointed to a little hut all by itself a little way from the other buildings, and closest to the wires. ‘The Hole,’ he explained. ‘That’s where they send the bad boys.’
‘Bad boys?’ Otto queried.
‘Yes, any of our people who break the commandant’s rules. One of the Italians is in there now for having eaten the captain’s cat. The skin didn't flush down the lavatory properly, and was traced back to him. Ten days for “unnatural consumption of domestic animals” – that’s what the commandant called it. The Italians say cats are a great delicacy in their own country. Taste like rabbit.’ He shrugged. ‘Interesting place the Hole. Very well located.’ He glanced at Otto, a searching look in his eyes, as if he expected something of him. ‘Very well located indeed.’
They walked on slowly, while the pastor explained the hobbies and recreations the camp offered, poor as they were, concluding with the information, ‘Of course we have our weekly tea dancing punctually at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon. It breaks up the long weekend. A small extra ration of cornflour to be used as face powder and charcoal for doing the eyebrows are available for those so inclined.
‘We prefer our people not to dance with the Italians if possible, and naturally too intimate a contact during tangoes and fox-trots is verboten.’ He winked at Otto, who echoed, ‘Naturally.’
Otto's eyes had been darting over every aspect of the camp during Muelle's talk, but now he took in the pastor properly for the first time. Somehow or other he thought there was more to the senior German than met the eye.
Blond-haired, young Otto Stahl settled into the simple but safe routine of prison camp life. Food was the first consideration, as always in such places. As Pastor Mueller would often maintain, quoting Brecht, ‘erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.’
In the main it consisted of corned beef, which the inmates called ‘monkey-flesh’; kohl-rabi, known as ‘cold-rabbi’ or ‘chilled Yid’; and the soft English white bread so abhorrent to the German taste. It soon became obvious that the air-gunner was a complainer: ‘Christ, how can a man crap with that white stuff inside yer? It doesn’t give a man’s guts anything to grab onto. What a people, the Tommies, they chill their baths, boil all their bloody grub, including the bread, and they warm their beer! No wonder they’re a bunch of warm-brothers, with nasty complexions and rotting teeth.’
Tackling the English language was the second consideration. Whatever his next move was going to be, an understanding of the enemy's native tongue would help matters considerably.
The time would pass with grub, a lesson on morality given by the Pastor, followed by an English lesson given by the mild-mannered, bespectacled Bible Student. The lessons were somewhat academic rather than useful, such as learning all the English words for ‘cold’, while the cross-eyed cook passed hours drawing up tremendous menus, taking his drooling listeners on tours of all the pubs and restaurants he had ever been to in his native city of Hamburg, introducing them with almost academic pedantry to new dishes with his usual opener:
‘Now I know you will not
believe me, but on the Waterfront they do eat a mixture of beans and pears…’
Despite the Bible Student's rigorous lesson plan, time hung heavily on everyone's hands, and the hours between first parade at eight o’clock until the last one at five, before the sentries had their tea – ‘Tea! If I ever hear that word again when I’m armed,’ the air-gunner had threatened more than once, ‘I’ll shoot down the man who says it like a dog’ – that time passed on leaden feet.
Otto, then, was not particularly surprised when on their second Saturday in the camp the wooden-faced air-gunner began to take very special care with his toilet. He took his second pair of pants from beneath his bunk to reveal a knife-edged crease, obtained by lining the inside with soap and sleeping on them. He shaved carefully, stropping the razor-blade with which they were issued once a month, on the inside of a drinking glass, and then completed his toilet by spraying his pubic hair with talcum powder.
‘You never know who you might meet,’ he said defiantly, seeing Otto’s look.
‘Yeah,’ Otto said casually from his bunk, looking back to his Shakespearian sonnet that the Student had scribbled down from memory for Otto to learn. ‘They tell me Greta Garbo is doing a tour of the camp this Saturday. She’s supposed to go for blond blokes like you.’
The air-gunner made a certain suggestion.
‘No can do, old friend,’ Otto answered. ‘Got a double-decker bus up there already.’ And then, with another glance, ‘I suppose you’re going to the tea dance, eh?’
The air-gunner flushed slightly. ‘I thought it might be a change,’ he said defensively.
‘Yes,’ Otto remarked. ‘Don’t get caught, otherwise they might throw you in the Hole to cool off, without your tin of Vaseline!’
‘Arse!’ the air-gunner cursed and vanished with a new slight trembling of his buttocks, taut in the well-pressed pants, which Otto had not noticed until now.
‘Yes, it definitely seems to be,’ Otto agreed.
Otto wandered through the darkening camp, unable to settle down in the hut. The place seemed deserted; everyone was in the recreation hut, it appeared, enjoying the doubtful pleasures of the tea dancing.
He paused for a while and stared through the recreation hut’s window at the flushed, excited faces, and the Italian accordionist on the stage, sweating heavily, as he provided the music for the dancing couples.
The air-gunner drifted by, waltzing with stiff, manly dignity in the arms of the Italian in the evening dress made of blackout curtain, who gazed up at him in dreamy admiration. Otto laughed shortly. ‘Good job he used his talcum powder after all,’ he said to himself and wandered on, his brow creased in a preoccupied frown.
What am I going to do? he asked himself, idly kicking at an empty tin. When he'd arrived here on that sunny morning in October, the decision to escape had been so easy to make. But even if he did manage to escape from the camp, where could he escape to?
England was an island, surrounded by sea. Where would he get a boat from? Hell, even if he did, how would he find Europe again? – He knew nothing about the sea and navigation. What had the little Camp commandant, who looked like an undersized monkey, said to them on the morning parade the previous day?
‘Channel fog today, men. Europe cut off.’ He had laughed at his own joke, the only one to do so, even after Pastor Mueller had translated it yet once again. Now Otto knew what Captain Hawkins had meant. The continent of Europe was a long, long way off from this forgotten northern English city.
He dismissed the depressing thoughts from his mind and strolled through the growing October gloom. With the long Saturday evening stretching before him with absolutely nowhere to go and nothing to do (the Camp library consisted of Mein Kampf, the Bible and Struwwelpeter, illustrated, and he had no interest in any of the three). At York, there was no friendly pub, where he could be swallowed into its smoky noisy warmth, its zinc bar awash with beer suds. There was also no girlfriend to provide two hours of sweating, red-faced exertion in the hot darkness, fighting to cross that invisible frontier, the distance between the stocking top and the first exhilarating feel of knicker elastic; and no ‘Kabarett’ with its fantastically long-legged chorus girls in old-fashioned pickelhausen and black silk stockings and nothing much else, and honestly vulgar comedians who stopped drunken hecklers with the old crack, ‘Oh, don’t pay any attention to him, meine Damen, he’s had an unhappy love affair. He’s just broken his right hand, ha, ha!’
Otto cursed under his breath. A year ago, the thought of peacefully living out his war in a British POW camp might have seemed like a jolly good career decision. But now, after months of tedious touting to the troops in France, he had a yearning to return to his homeland, to a life of skulduggery and quick bucks with the odd mission thrown in by the Count. At this very moment he would have welcomed the Count – wherever he might be now – soutane, shovel-hat, crazy schemes and all, with open arms. Since their first meeting, Otto had come to rely on the wacky gentleman as a companion in his adventuring. I'd have escaped into England by now, Otto thought, if the Count was around to escape with. Where the devil was he right now? Did he need Otto's help?
He needed to get out of this place.
It was just then that he caught sight of a familiar figure hobbling ahead of him in the thickening darkness. It was Pastor Mueller. But there was something peculiar about the fat Protestant priest. He was moving in a strange, stiff legged manner, dribbling something behind him onto the ground, as he did so. Had the pastor had an unfortunate accident, the thought flashed through Otto’s mind. The ‘chilled Yid’ did have a rather precipitous effect on the bowels.
Pastor Mueller heard Otto’s footsteps, just as the younger man realised what the stuff was that was trickling so strangely out of the bottom of the priest’s right trouser-leg. It was soil!
Mueller turned and Otto could just see his gold-capped teeth gleam in a smile, as he recognised who was behind him. He relaxed and said, ‘I thought you would be at the tea dancing, Herr Stahl?’
‘No, I didn’t fancy the – er – ladies.’
Pastor Mueller followed the direction of Otto’s gaze and knew it was no use attempting to lie now. He said softly, ‘Home or Homo by Christmas, Herr Stahl.’
CHAPTER 7
‘I don’t usually wear these bags,’ Pastor Mueller said, as Otto stared at him in the gloom, wondering what he was talking about.
‘You mean the trousers?’
‘Yes. You see under my own, I have two legs chopped off a pair of woollen underpants – the nights are cold in York, I can tell you. The tops are tied to each end of a piece of string. I loop the string around my neck under my pullover and suspend the underpant legs that way inside my outer trousers.’ He beamed at the completely bewildered Otto, who was still trying to make sense of his original cryptic remark, ‘home or homo by Christmas’.
‘I have a pin attached to a piece of string stuck in each inside bag, with the strings running into my trousers’ pockets. As I walk – or hobble might be a better description, Herr Stahl – I let the soil loose that way in a steady trickle. Afterwards I walk back the way I’ve come and tread it into the surface of the earth.’ He ground his foot down and around to illustrate his method. ‘See, indistinguishable from the normal top soil.’
Otto had already realised that camp life quickly turned people slightly mad, and the plump priest had been the Tommies' prisoner since 1939 after all. Was he cracked, too? ‘But why,’ he managed to croak, ‘why do you go around getting rid of soil like this, Herr Pfarrer?’ He edged away from the beaming parson a little, just in case he was dangerous as well as crazy.
‘Why?’ Pastor Mueller chuckled and his jowls rumbled in the semi-darkness. ‘Because I and a few other like-minded spirits are getting out.’
‘Out?’ Otto echoed. ‘Out of here?’
‘Yes, out of here. Out of England.’
‘Christ!’ ejaculated Otto.
‘Shush, my boy,’ the parson said hastily. ‘You don’t w
ant the sentries to hear. Besides, I have reason to suspect that there is a Tommy spy in the camp.’ He took Otto by the arm and made him start walking.
‘You said out,’ Otto whispered, while over at the recreation hut, the accordionist swung into Solo Mio and suddenly the night air was full of liquid Italian tenors, as someone opened the hut’s windows and began to fix the blackout shutters.
‘Get them sodding lights dowsed!’ one of the sentries shouted roughly from a watch-tower. ‘Lot of bloody macaroni pansies!’
Over at another of the stork-legged towers another sentry laughed and called, ‘I don’t know, Charlie. It’s better than wanker’s doom and going blind.’
‘Who wants to be a pilot anyway?’ Charlie called back mysteriously and laughed raucously.
Otto could hardly wait till the little exchange was over, questions jostling to be voiced in his youthful mind. ‘You said out. Why? How? Do you have a plan?’
‘One question at a time, my boy,’ the plump parson replied calmly. ‘Firstly, why? Because I have not wasted these last eighteen years in Hull ministering to drunken seamen in the Mission, only to be jailed at the first whiff of war. I’ve been up and down the Yorkshire and Humber coastline. I know it like the back of my hand. I have information that will be vital to our High Command when they invade England. I have no doubt they will reward me for my diligence. I rather fancy a pastorship in Hamburg’s St Pauli. Very upper-class, you know.’
Otto said nothing. He had come to think of Mueller as an intelligent, like-minded, peace-loving gentleman. He hadn't realised how much of a die-hard this pastor actually was.
‘Two: how will I escape? Through the Hole.’
‘The Hole?’ Otto repeated.
Pastor Mueller chuckled softly. ‘Exactly. It's the building closest to the wire, and it's easy to get into. Why, to coin a phrase, it is as easy to gain entry to the Hole as it is for a sinner to go to Hell. Three, the big plan. Through the port of Hull. On the north-east coast,’ he added for Otto’s information. ‘Some sixty kilometres from here.’