Chapter 17

It was two days before the roar of large propeller engines shook that desolate house and I ran outside to see an RAF Dakota coming in low over the field to make a bumpy touch-down. It had barely turned to the side of the green strip when a second plane came in, bounced a few times on its main undercarriage before settling back on its tail wheel to run along the grass.

There was no one in charge, no control tower and no ground support that I could see. I dashed back inside, grabbed what stuff I had and set off across the field trying to anticipate where the plane would stop. The Dakota was sleek for its time but a workhorse nonetheless. The first plane taxied slowly, turned and came to a halt with its nose tilted towards the sky and its twin propellers still turning.

More lads appeared from distant corners of the field and raced towards it. A hatch opened in the side of the plane and a man in a thick leather jacket leaned out and shouted something. I couldn’t hear over the engines but from his gestures I realised they weren’t going to stop for long. I was amongst the first to climb in. It hardly mattered where it was heading, I was going anyway. About a dozen lads got in before the hatch was closed and I sat down on the narrow seats along the side of the ribbed metal interior. I twisted around to look over my shoulder and saw through the tiny window that the other lads were rallying around the second plane hoping to get in.

By then we were taxiing towards the end of the field and preparing to takeoff. Smiles spread infectiously across faces and I knew I wasn’t the only soldier going home after a rough war. I heard later that a third plane coming for us had developed engine trouble and had crashed in flames on the approach. By then we were climbing up through the clouds and turning towards Brussels. I slumped down, fiddled with the baseball bat I had carried with me since Regensberg and dared to hope at last that I was homeward bound. Thank God. It was over. I was still hungry.

I stood up and walked around during the flight, checking the view from the tiny windows on each side. The war was not quite over but no one doubted that it soon would be. I gazed down at the miles of liberated European fields below and wondered what the post-war years would bring.

We touched down on a military airfield near Brussels. I was taken to an army camp close by and given proper food for the first time in weeks. I had a wash but no shower or bath. I stayed there no more than a night and spoke to no one about my journey or my time in captivity. We had all endured terrible things; we didn’t go on about it and no one asked.

The next day I was taken back to the airfield and emerged to see a large four-engine bomber with a glass bubble for the bomb-aimer at the front below the cockpit and a smaller one halfway down the fuselage like a swelling on its back. There was a gun sticking out of it.

I knew it was a Lancaster bomber though I’d never seen one before. I had been captured before it was in common use but it was exactly as I had imagined it from the talk of fellow prisoners.

It was being readied for take-off and I clambered in with the other lads. There were no seats and it was severely cramped. I knew instantly where I wanted to be for the flight but the captain told me the bomb-aimer’s position – that flying glasshouse up front – was out of bounds. I refused to give up; arms were twisted, favours were begged and eventually my wish was granted.

I lay flat on my belly in that vulnerable transparent nose and felt the heady vibration of the props as the ground rushed beneath us and we lifted again into the air.

We circled the field, the course was set for home and after a while land gave way to sea.

I had seen what planes like those had done to Nuremberg and I feared what state Britain would be in. As we flew low over the Channel what I saw didn’t bode well. There were shipwrecks and debris all along the coast and slicks of oil as far as I could see. Then the water cleared and in the distance I saw the white cliffs of England in the haze and I knew they couldn’t have destroyed everything. I would get home.

Soon I could see green fields bisected by country lanes below me and hedgerows racing in all directions. I lay there prostrate in the front of the plane and eventually a landing field came into view. We dropped lower and lower until the grass became a blur of racing green that loomed up into my face as we landed with a bounce.

We came to a halt, the door was opened and before we could stray the captain insisted we signed the fuselage with a pen before saying goodbye. He must have flown countless combat missions but bringing the lads back home meant something to him.

My ears were still ringing from the noise when I heard a strangely familiar sound and one I hadn’t heard for many a year. They were the strange voices of Englishwomen and they were serving tea.

I was taken to a barracks and allowed a shower at last. They gave me socks, underwear and a fresh second-hand uniform plus a pair of heavy-duty black leather boots with studs on the sole and metal rims on the heels. I still have them today. I didn’t stay long. I had been beyond military discipline for a long time and I didn’t wait for permission to go. I left a note in the barracks, walked out of the camp and got a train towards London.

I arrived at Liverpool Street station, changed trains and went on out to Essex without paying a ha’penny and without seeing the damage to the city. I wanted to get back to the people I loved. It was a day or two before VE Day and I hadn’t been home for almost five years.

I climbed out of the train at North Weald station and looked over the wall into the coalyard and saw a man with a cart shifting sacks of the stuff. I recognised him instantly as my uncle Fred the coal merchant who had once played football for Fulham. I jumped over the wall and his words on seeing me alive were unprintable. He finished unloading and said he would take me the mile or so home from the station and he talked all the way without pause. After all those years I arrived back at the farm as a passenger on a coal cart, which he turned around at the gate leaving me to go in alone.

I passed by the yellow privet hedge and began that thirty-yard walk through the flower beds and up to the double-fronted house where I had grown up. That place had lived on somewhere in my mind, though thoughts of home had been a burden in the desert and in the camps. I couldn’t get there back then so why torture myself with the memory and feeling of the place? But now I could embrace it.

I hadn’t warned anyone I was coming. I knocked on the large oak door. There was a pause before it was opened by a woman who, though familiar, looked tired and drawn. She gasped on seeing me and I said to her, ‘Mother, you do look old.’

How I have wished over the years that I could take those words back. She hugged me at the door as if she never wanted to let go. I was home but what a sight I must have been. I had weighed around twelve and a half stone when I joined up. When I got home I was a little over eight.

My mother had been left to struggle on alone. My father had been taken prisoner too. They had told her I had been wounded in Africa. In my letters I said I was fine, but she assumed I was putting on a front. Then the irregular mail from E715 had stopped. The death marches and my long walk across central Europe had begun. She had no idea I was alive and feared the worst. She had her own declining health to wrestle with.

In the few years she had left to live she never asked me about my war, my captivity or that long march. The thinking then was, don’t talk about it. Soldiers and their families were encouraged to forget.

I don’t quite know when my father came home. He had lied about his age to join up and he had done so partly with the thought of looking out for me. He was wounded and captured when the German paratroopers dropped on Crete. He was taken to Austria and forced to build mountain railways, despite bouts of pneumonia.

I heard that he might be home soon but that could mean anything. Then one day I was occupying myself in one of the small rooms to the back of the house when I heard a shuffling noise outside. Someone was trying to get in the back door and having trouble. I opened it and there he was struggling with his kitbag. He dropped it when he saw me and embraced me for the first time since I was a child. He looked pretty haggard; I felt myself weeping and noticed he was too.

I remembered a time as a small child when I sat on his knee and he’d sing to me: ‘There will come a time one day when I am far away, There will be no father to guide you from day to day.’

The thought of him dying upset me as a child and I would hammer on his chest when he sang it until he stopped.

I had never seen him as an emotional man but I heard when his own mother died he went out into the middle of a field all alone and sang his heart out. His homecoming showed me we had both changed, though his embrace was still brief.

I never saw him meet my mother for the first time. I can only guess how it was. They were alone and that is how it should be.

I am sure he regretted leaving her to go and fight when he didn’t have to. I don’t think he ever picked up the pieces of his life after the war but if he was suffering the way I was, he never showed it.

He lived until 1960 but we never talked about the war, or compared our experiences of captivity. Not once. I don’t think he ever knew I had been in a camp near Auschwitz.

I wasn’t back long before the traumas began. By day I was in the friendly Essex village I had known, at night, in my sleep, I was thrown back into the obscenity of Auschwitz. The nightmares began; that boy being beaten around the head whilst standing to attention as blood streamed down his face. Countless times I relived that baby being punched by the SS guard. I would wake up with the sheets soaked with sweat, convinced I had smuggled myself into the Jewish camp and was about to be discovered.

Through the desert, the years of captivity and Auschwitz I had told myself, ‘You didn’t have to think, you had to do.’ It was decision-making by instinct and it had got me through. Now there was no danger and too much time to think. The dreams were starting to conquer me. I relived the powerlessness of seeing and not doing and I did it nightly.

There was no help for traumatised soldiers back then. It wasn’t even thought of. I know now I was a mess, a complete and total mess. Many of us were.

If my mother never asked about the war, people in the village couldn’t stop their questions. They didn’t really want to know, of course, they just wanted a few heroic anecdotes. They knew nothing about the concentration camps then and if I mentioned anything at all, it didn’t resonate with them. It didn’t fit in to what they knew or even what they wanted to know. People were just uncomfortable hearing about it and their response was to go blank. I called it the glazed-eye syndrome.

No one at home understood what we soldiers had been through. Some talked utter rubbish. The question that insulted me most was, ‘How many Germans did you kill?’ We were forced to do the things we had done and it cheapened the whole thing to talk about it like that. They were inviting us to gloat about the things we wanted to forget. The enemy soldiers we had killed had paid the price and going on about it showed a lack of respect.

One chap – a butcher from Epping who hadn’t served anywhere – told me bravely that he would have run his wife through with a knife to spare her falling into the hands of the Germans if they had conquered Britain. That clearly wasn’t meant for her ears. He squirmed when I ran into both of them side by side on the train a short time afterwards. I didn’t need to say anything.

Auschwitz was already a distant planet but the dreams brought back some of the faces. There was nothing I could do to enquire about Hans but with Ernst it was different. There were some things I would force myself to do whether I was up to the task or not. I had to find Susanne in Birmingham and tell her what I knew. I had managed to negotiate some official leave by now and I had some weeks to spare. It was a fool’s errand and I hadn’t thought it through.

I don’t know now how I made contact, whether I wrote, found a telephone number or whether I simply turned up on the doorstep. I knew she was called Susanne and I had connected her to the surname Cottrell. Ernst may even have given me that name from the start. I assumed she had been adopted by the family that had taken her in before the war so in my mind she was always Susanne Cottrell. The story of the cigarettes was one thing Mother did talk through very briefly. She was pleased I had got some of them and that it had helped. She didn’t need to know about the camps and I went no further than that with her.

My recollection is that I met Susanne in Birmingham, I can’t be sure. I was in no fit state to meet anyone and I hadn’t planned what I would say. What with the war and captivity I had none of the tact needed to break bad news gently. I didn’t really know why I was going to see her at all. She was on my list I suppose, along with Les Jackson’s folks and others I traced later.

I think I went to the house but it’s all very vague now. I have a feeling we went for a walk; I remember being outside. She was about twenty-two years old – pleasant but shy and small in stature. She still had an accent.

It was an anguished meeting. I wanted her to know that the cigarettes had got through, that Ernst had been overjoyed to have them and that it might have bought him some brief help and protection. I could tell her all that, if I could spit it out, but where would the story go then? There was no happy ending.

I had visions of the death march and those frozen corpses. We had walked over their bodies for miles. I knew the chances were Ernst had been murdered with the others. If he had survived the march he had probably been herded into another death camp and perished later. I couldn’t bring Susanne hope, nor could I tell her anything of Ernst’s death; I hadn’t witnessed it or seen his body.

I was suddenly alongside a young girl who had lost everything, but now had a chance to rebuild her life. Why burden her with the bestiality of Auschwitz? I couldn’t talk about it anyway. There were a lot of silences. I still partly thought in German. After losing so much weight I must have looked dreadful.

It was a traumatic meeting and I left wondering whether I had done more harm than good. The barbarity of Auschwitz had entered every pore. I was saturated in the memory but I couldn’t get it out. Who would I tell? Looking back I was in a terrible state. PTSD they call it now – post-traumatic stress disorder. It took me years to get back to rational thinking. I was weird all right.

Sometime later I tried half-heartedly to get in contact with Susanne again. I failed and gave up. I had done enough harm; I had to move on.

Around then, on 3 June 1945 I was given a new address book by an old girlfriend called Jane, a concert pianist. It was small and covered in brown leather and I pencilled in the details I had for the girl I still thought of as Susanne Cottrell: 7 Tixall Road, Birmingham. There’s also an address for Gerdi Herberich in Nuremberg – it must have been a good sandwich.

Les Jackson’s relatives are scribbled in there too. His folks were the next on my list for a visit but my experience with Susanne had shaken me. It took me months to go back to Aspen Grove in Liverpool and face them.

Eventually, I drove up to meet his father and we went to the pub and both drank too much. He had lost his son and I knew exactly how. I was there to fill in the gaps but I spared him the details. He didn’t need to know that Les had been blown apart. I said what we all said in those circumstances, that I was with him when he was killed, that it had been quick. I hope it helped. Mr Jackson wasn’t emotional about it, the sherbet saw to that. Dear old Les, he’s still out there somewhere in the sand.

We were slightly the worse for wear when we got back to the house, then in walked Marjorie, his sister. She was as beautiful as ever. I’d danced with her before embarkation and had her picture stuck on the cabin wall. She was with a feller called Evans and I realised she was married. To ease her embarrassment in front of her husband I pretended not to know her and introduced myself as if we were strangers; I was also protecting myself. Marjorie had been special, she moved beautifully in the ballroom, but I had been away a long time. Life had moved on and another door had closed. I slept at the house and left early next morning.

Les’s story is not quite finished. He had a wife who lived in Southampton and when I was back in barracks at Winchester I went to see her unannounced. I should have known better. I wasn’t thinking straight at all then. I introduced myself at the door and she was flustered and asked me to wait outside. After a few moments she appeared with her coat and suggested we go to a pub to talk.

I guessed straight away she had a new man. There was nothing wrong in that, Les had been dead a few years, but it was strange for me. I had come to bring comfort, pass on what details I felt I could, but she wasn’t that interested. I don’t know what I expected. I thought she would want to know what happened, to hear some of the escapades we had been through. She didn’t have much time and she seemed distracted and anxious. I told her what I could and we said goodbye outside the pub. I didn’t go back to the house.

It upset me, that meeting. The soldiers had gone away to fight and many had paid with their lives. The war had just ended and they were already lost and forgotten; the water had closed over their heads. It all added to my swelling mental turmoil.

I hadn’t been back long when I got a mysterious phone call at home in Essex. It was from a man who said he had been a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz III-Monowitz. He wasn’t someone I knew all that well from the camp, he had never asked for my help and I had never to my knowledge given him anything. We knew him by the nickname ‘Mops’. Somehow he had got hold of my real name and made contact through the Red Cross. I was intrigued, I had been so careful. He wasn’t even a prisoner I’d had dealings with and now he was calling from Paris at a time when international phone calls were rare.

He told me all about the Jewish death march. He said he had counted hundreds of gunshots each day they walked and that many had been slaughtered. Miraculously, he had come through. It confirmed what I had seen but it was the first indication that anyone had survived. I wrote his name down in my little book as ‘Merge’ with an address in Paris. I never heard from him again but two or three weeks later four Jewish boys arrived at the house unexpectedly. ‘Mops’ had sent them. The oldest was eighteen, the other three around fourteen. They were polite lads who had come across from Ilford. They were not camp survivors but had lived out the war in Britain. Perhaps they had escaped on a similar Kindertransport as Susanne. They never asked for anything and I couldn’t really help them. We chatted a bit, my mother gave them a meal and they set off again, leaving us mystified.