beginning again. Our daily routine was simple. We got up at 6am, had a mug of ersatz coffee (you got used the awful bitter taste of roasted barley) and wash, if it wasn’t winter and the tap was frozen. We went out to the farm yard where we assembled in front of the officer who counted us and then divided us up into five teams.
Work schedules were given out – so and so to go there and so and so there, and we walked with our guards out to our various jobs on the farm. Some work lasted weeks, some just days, depending on the season and what was needed. We came back at 6 or 7 in the evening, washed, ate supper, which might be soup or bread and butter and perhaps some sausage and then went to bed. That was the routine pretty much from then onwards.
I was lucky working with the same fellows most of the time. That’s when I got to know my four new pals. I think we must have made a good team not to be split up. Sometimes when you first meet somebody, you feel at ease with them and there is an instant bond. It was like that for me and my pals. We shared the same room and our bunks were close together and then we found ourselves out working together. We talked about the usual things men talk about – home, families and jobs. Even though we had different backgrounds and personalities, it didn’t matter when we had so much in common: being far from home and loved ones and hating the Germans.
Laurie, Laurence Neville, who came from Prestiegne in Radnorshire, was in the Royal Artillery and had been taken prisoner somewhere near Saint-Valery-en-Caux. He was a butcher and his knowledge of animals and ways of killing them was to come in handy. We got on well and liked to share a joke or two. Heb or Hebby, Albert Hebner, who came from Perth, had his head screwed on tight and was always willing to help you out if you were in a bit of bother. There was Sid, Sidney Bentham, who came from St Albans. I wasn’t as close to him as the others. He seemed a bit different, a bit aloof. I think he was from a better class family, possibly even been to public school but we got on all right and he stuck by us.
Then there was Jimmy, James Sellar, who really was the Boss. We none of us could have done without him. He was a great chap. Great, not just because he was tall and well-built, a real asset when you are doing hard physical work together, but his strength of character, common sense and kindness helped see us through the war. He really watched out for us; I’m sure we wouldn’t have survived without him.
He was in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders and, like Laurie, had been captured at Saint-Valery-en- Caux. When the weather improved he would put on his tartan trousers and black Glengarry cap with red check band. I can picture him now on The Long March, two black ribbons swinging from his cap, as he marched proudly along. He was a gamekeeper on a large estate near Dalwhinnie in the Scottish Highlands and a natural man of action. Which was just as well, because I could hardly understand a word he said in his thick Scottish accent. His resourcefulness and skills proved invaluable throughout our stay and during our long journey to our final liberation.
When people talk about prisoner of war camps now, they have a picture in their mind of Colditz and The Great Escape but I was never an inmate in a place like that, locked up with thousands of other men behind electrified fences, with tall watch towers and patrolling guards. We had no concert parties or officers planning escape routes and digging tunnels. We were an
We lived and worked in the local community providing labour for farms, factories, quarries and mines. We were in the middle of nowhere, far from towns or cities, thousands of miles from home, locked in at night, starved of food, worn out by work. We were better off, however, than many of the thousands left behind elsewhere. We were free in our own way in The Great Outdoors. We didn’t always have guards breathing down our necks. Work toughened us up. How do you think I survived those terrible winter months of starvation and marching over 1600km?
People ask me whether I tried to escape. You didn’t think of escaping, even if your guard had gone off somewhere to have a smoke and left you standing in the middle of a frozen field with just a spade. Where would you go? You had no money, didn’t speak the language, locals weren’t particularly friendly, or didn’t dare to be, more like. They feared the German officers and guards as much as we did. If you managed to escape and you were caught what would happen to you? I didn’t want to think about that as it frightened me more than staying put. Keep your head down, get on with the work, and make the best of it.
Farm work kept us busy. The main crops were wheat, potatoes, cabbages, sugar beet and mangel-wurzels. There was always plenty to do: digging, ploughing, sowing, planting, harvesting; clearing up, cleaning out, cutting down, carrying away. We sifted, sorted, picked and packed. Whatever we were told to do, seven days a week during the summer and six days a week in winter.
Funny how things turn out, finding myself forced to work on a German farm, spending my days handling vegetables, when I’d spent the last ten years lugging them about at market and selling them in the family shop. I didn’t like eating my greens back then, but here the only greens I got were stringy bits of cabbage or beet tops in my soup. We were always hungry and on the lookout for something else to eat. What with the hard physical labour we did twelve hours a day, and the poor diet, we were never full and never satisfied.
We didn’t start getting Red Cross parcels for quite a while so we kept our eyes skinned for ways of supplementing our diet. Anything. You wouldn’t have thought mangel-wurzels which were grown as cattle fodder would be something we craved. But we did.
Mangel-wurzels. Huge, ugly blighters. They didn’t taste very nice but they were food and if we were out working and digging them up, we would pocket a few as we went along. We sneaked them into the front of our tunic tops but we couldn’t carry many as they bulged and that gave the game away. We took them back, sliced them up, put them on a stick and toasted them in the fire of the wood stove. That is if we were able to get the wretched thing going.
Once the load of logs had gone, which the local farmer supplied to our cooks, we had to do without unless we got some wood ourselves. Hell of a job keeping a fire going if the bits of the twigs and branches we brought back were not dry. The guards weren’t bothered what we did; they expected us to find our own fuel if we could. Always on the lookout, not just for food but for anything which might be useful to us. Later on the five of us were on a two months’ work detachment in a local forest. Plenty of wood there.
Of course, potatoes were always a favourite. We couldn’t get away from them anyway as they were a staple crop. Planting, growing, digging them up and storing them took up a lot of our time. And if we sneaked some back, so much the better although a handful each wasn’t much, particularly if you were going to share it with others. So going out on night-time raids for potatoes and other food was another way to supplement our diet. I suppose it was also a bit of an adventure and one-up on our German guards if we were successful.
We found a way of getting out of the camp at night. It all had to be planned carefully. The beauty of it was that we knew if there was anybody about because we could hear the guards’ big boots outside or making the floor boards creak if they were nosing around inside. They rarely were; they preferred staying snug inside their quarters. We waited until midnight or one o’clock in the morning when it was all quiet. We were always locked in at night which is why the guards thought we were all safely tucked up in bed. Our house had a set of double doors and the front ones had bolts, which weren’t always put across. The inner ones were just locked with a key. If we were lucky we only had one door to deal with and somebody would pick the lock and let out whoever was going out that night.
We decided that it was best if we went out in pairs for safety reasons although, come to think of it now, Jimmy did go off on his own midnight raids. So we sneaked out round the back of our building and through part of the wire fencing we had cut, enough for a man to get through. We folded it back, squeezed through and then folded it back again so nobody could see where the hole was. Favourite places we went to were the storage clamps to get potatoes, which were easy to find because we had built them.
There were four or five clamps in different parts of a field not too far away. What we did to build them was to dig down about 6' and clear an area about 8' x 12' then spread a layer of straw down followed by a layer of potatoes, then more straw and so on. We kept building it up into a big mound and then finally covered it all with earth. The potatoes could be stored for a long time like that. When they were ready to move we dismantled the clamp, digging out the potatoes with special forks with wide prongs, so we didn’t spike any and spoil them. We put the potatoes in large baskets which we had brought with us from the farm, carried them to the edge of the field and tipped them into the farm carts. Next day a crowd of us would be sent down to Freystadt railway station where we shovelled them into railway trucks. They then went to factories to make
