your clothes for them. A lot of the time you weren’t even aware you were doing it. You would be playing cards or reading a letter from home, pausing to have a good scratch. Sometimes you would pick them off your clothes between your finger nails, squeezing them dead. If it was your turn to have a bath that week you hoped you might drown a load in the water.
There were forty-five of us fighting over one little tin bath – or bowl should I say. We could just about sit in it with our legs dangling over the end. We probably had a bath once a fortnight as it took most of Sunday to get enough hot water from the copper which was always on the go – if we had enough wood for the fire. It was a real palaver when it was Jimmy’s turn as he was tall and had to do a sort of Houdini contortionist’s act to get himself clean. Two of us usually shared the same water, which soon turned grey with our accumulated dirt. Unless you could be bothered to skim off the black specks of drowned fleas before your turn in the water, you shared those too. We all longed to have a proper shower and dreamed about the time we would.
But I always thought about those poor Jews we had seen and wondered what conditions were like for them in the camps they were being transported to. Of course, after the war I heard the full story about the concentration camps and that ‘taking a shower’ had another meaning altogether.
7
Bullseye
I always say that it was the International Red Cross who brought us home. Without the British and Canadian food parcels we received, a lot more people would have died. How would we have survived all those years without those extra rations? We thought of them as luxuries but really they were no more than what any ordinary man should have been getting every day. When those shoe boxes started arriving wrapped in brown paper tied with string it was like Christmas. We already had the snow so we were excited like little kids.
We were unlucky where we were, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, as all the consignments of Red Cross parcels were delivered to Stalag 20B. After sorting, our allocation was meant to be sent out to us but, of course, most did not get sent on to us. We never got our fair share. I suppose you can’t blame the chaps there for taking some of ours for themselves. Most men in the main camp got theirs once a week or fortnightly while we had to wait as long as seven weeks between deliveries. A basic parcel looked like it had everything a man could want although it was never enough and we often had to share a parcel with somebody else. We usually distributed what we had within our own particular group of friends; we five looked after ourselves.
As a rule we got a packet of tea, sugar and milk, either dried or condensed, and butter. There was some kind of meat like corned beef or streaky bacon, which came out of the tin coiled up in a long strip. There were sardines or pilchards and jam and cheese. There were biscuits, known as pilot biscuits, which were hard and didn’t get broken in transit. We had prunes or other dried fruit and always a bar of chocolate, usually Cadbury’s fruit and nut. We got extras like mints and jelly, soap and toothpaste and a sewing kit. And plenty of cigarettes, fifty Player’s in a round tin.
We all smoked, of course. What else was there to do to relax after a long day out working? But cigarettes were also useful for bartering with the guards for extra food, and occasionally with villagers. It had to be somebody you could trust and you were always careful not to let anybody see you do it. You would give the person twenty ciggies and he would see you got an extra loaf from the village. As they took the cigarettes first, you had to trust that they would come up with the goods. Of course, they could get into serious trouble if the authorities found them fraternising with prisoners so they kept their side of the deal.
When the food was gone, we kept the packaging to use again. We were all good at saving odds and ends for a rainy day. Cardboard boxes were good for storage or could be cut up and used for insulating your clothes and boots. String was useful for hanging up clothes to dry or came in handy at harvest time to tie round your trouser bottoms to keep mice from running up your legs in the hay barn. Empty tins and lids could be bashed out to make tools and containers. A tin of KLIM, the Canadian dried milk (the word Milk spelt backwards) made a good jug, thanks to Heb who got himself a job at the local smithy.
That came about one morning when the
At lunchtime the blacksmith went back home for his meal, leaving Heb on his own in the workshop to have the bread and soup which was brought out from the house. He used the time to make things like nails, hooks and kitchen utensils for us depending on what scraps of metal were available. He was treated well there and was always busy with one job or the other for the locals as well as helping us back at camp.
One of our favourite treats from the Red Cross parcels was Rowntree’s jelly, which came in cubes. If we got enough packets to make it worthwhile heating up some water and using our precious wood, we made one big one. When we opened our parcels and looked through the contents the shout, ‘Jelly!’ went up. Once we had three packets, two orange and a lemon, and for some reason my pals gave me the job of making it. It took ages for the water to boil on the wood burning stove as we kept feeding bits of twigs in to keep the fire going. I managed to get enough hot water to melt the jelly. It was winter and the snow was about 18” deep so I thought that it would set nicely outside in my tin bowl.
All the cubes melted and a lovely fruity aroma arose from the bowl as I kept stirring. I carried the hot liquid outside, walking carefully so as not to spill any on the way. I balanced it on a pile of snow outside and then went back in to get warm again. We all forgot about it until Laurie said, ‘Chas, when did you last check the jelly?’ So off I went back outside only to find that the bowl had turned upside down and there was nothing there. The snow had melted and the bowl had tipped over and all our lovely liquid jelly had disappeared into the ground. Pity I didn’t do any science at school or I might have thought of placing the bowl on a piece of wood, even a stone or brick, a surface which didn’t conduct heat. Terrible waste of jelly, hot water and fuel! It was a long while before we got any packets of jelly again in our parcels. And when we eventually did it wasn’t me asked to make it.
Gradually over time, we received more parcels and some of these came through from home. I wrote to my mother asking for new socks and underwear and a few months later they were delivered. Lily sent me a knitted scarf for my birthday once. It was amazing to think that items like these, requested by thousands of men like me, were able to get across war-torn Europe to us. Fantastic!
My brother-in-law, who was a fireman, sent me one of his jumpers. It was dark blue, in a sort of shiny material which was very warm. Unfortunately, it had a ribbed neck and bottom seam which caused a lot of discomfort to me, not just in the camp but especially on the Long March. Lice like nothing better than a warm, cosy place to settle down and start a family, and seams in clothes are ideal for that. It is, however, almost impossible to find and remove eggs from there. Some people used a lighted match and ran it along a seam to burn them off but it wasn’t always successful. Better to be warm and lousy, I believe, than die of cold.
Like all the other men, in all the POW camps everywhere, I treasured every single present I received. I didn’t like asking for things from my family. Even though they weren’t luxuries or treats but essentials, I always felt bad about my mother having to send stuff out to me. I was worried all the time. I didn’t know what she and other members of the family were really going through. Letters were always cheerful and didn’t tell me what was really happening at home. Was the family safe? Was the shop doing OK? How were they managing for money? I felt useless. Lily had a career of her own now because she knew that I might not come back. Not that she said that exactly in her letters but joining the ATS got her away from her family and helped her become financially independent. If only I had some proper money I could send home.
Who needs money when you’re stuck in the back of beyond with nothing to spend it on? What would be the point of paying wages for the work we did? So why would they give us this paper money which could only used in a POW camp? It might be OK for fellows in the big camps who could buy razor blades and soap but there was nothing here. You could gamble with it, use it to roll your own cigarettes or it might come in handy to wipe your bottom if you were caught short somewhere. Cigarettes were our main currency.
The German government introduced a system of payment to prisoners of war for the work they did in the
