The Separation (17 page)

I handed my papers to the sergeant, together with the sealed envelope I had been given by a member of Mr Churchill’s staff before I left Ditchley Park that morning. The sergeant took the envelope unopened to the guard post and I saw him speaking on a telephone.

The driver and I sat in the car, the engine idling smoothly.

After about five more minutes I saw a young Guards officer walking briskly down the driveway towards us. He glanced in the direction of my car, saluted quickly but courteously, then joined his sergeant inside the guard post. He emerged a moment or two later, holding a sheet of paper and the envelope it had been in.

He came to the car, saluted again, then leaned down towards me.

‘Group Captain Sawyer?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good morning. We have been expecting you. Captain Alistair Parkes, Brigade of Guards.’

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Captain Parkes.’

I reached through the open window of the car and we shook hands. I opened the door and climbed out.

‘Let’s walk across to the house,’ said Captain Parkes. ‘Your driver can wait for you there. Gives us a chance for a brief chat before we take you in.’ He slipped my letter of accreditation into his pocket and set off along an earthen path that ran through the trees, roughly parallel with the main drive. Once we had walked far enough for the guard post to be out of hearing, he said, ‘[Do you speak German, my gentleman?]’

‘[Yes, I do,]’I said.

‘[We speak English to the prisoner, partly as a matter of principle but also because we have reason to believe he understands more English than he admits to. It won’t hurt him to learn a bit more, since he’s likely to be with us for some time. But he sometimes insists on speaking German only, so it’s useful to have some.]’

‘[I’m fluent in German,]’ I said and explained about my mother.

Captain Parkes seemed to assume that I knew as much as he did about the German-speaking prisoner, because he added no more information. He said, ’[In my own case, I was sent to school in Berlin because my father was military attaché at the embassy. Another language comes more easily when you’re a child. I never thought it might be an advantage one day. How about you?]’

We chatted for a while in German about growing up bilingually, then slipped back naturally into English. On the way through the woods we passed a defensive position consisting of slit trenches, a small concrete pillbox and a lot of camouflage netting. There was also a sophisticated system of telephone communications, with wires strung high between the trees.

We emerged at last into sight of the house, which was an unprepossessing building. My life recently seemed to have become a progress from one large country residence to another. Many of the great English estates had been requisitioned and made over to war use for the duration; this one, Mytchett Place, was a Victorian manor house built of pale brick with a red-tile roof. One wing looked as if it was in need of renovation, although the main part of the house was in good repair. The grounds had not been tended properly for some time and long grass and weeds grew in profusion. Untidy creeper spread over most of the walls that I could see, covering some of the lower windows of the neglected wing. A number of temporary buildings had been erected in the grounds and around them visible efforts had been made at tidying up and instituting the customary sense of military order. I saw several soldiers on guard duty.

‘We have two or three unique problems here,’ said Captain Parkes. ‘It is technically a prisoner-of-war camp, so naturally we have to be sure we can keep the prisoner locked up inside. At the same time, in this particular case we think there’s a reasonable chance someone might get it into their head to try to push their way in and snatch him, so we have to be ready for that too. There are other special features, as well.’

‘Such as?’

‘You’ll be monitored the whole time you’re here. All the parts of the house you’ll be visiting are wired up with hidden mikes. Conversations are recorded. We’re trying to get whatever information we can out of him, so long as there’s still a chance he might have something we can use. Also, there are several MoD

intelligence officers in the building. You’ll meet them before you go in to see the prisoner. They will brief you with anything you need to know.’

I was intrigued by what the captain was telling me, but even then it did not occur to me to guess who the solitary prisoner might be. I think I was assuming it must be a captured senior German officer who needed to be interrogated in his own language. It did not occur to me to wonder why this agreeable young army officer was not qualified to do the job himself. Once again, I remembered what my brother Joe often said in the past, that I did not fully connect with what was going on around me. I was led up to the first floor of the house, where I was introduced to the three Ministry of Defence intelligence officers on duty that morning. At last I was led through a solidly constructed metal door and along a short hallway to the rooms where the prisoner w7as being kept. As I entered the first of the two rooms, he was lying on his back in the centre of the floor, full-length on the bare boards. He was dressed in the uniform of a Luftwaffe Hauptmann. His eyes were closed and his hands were folded across his chest.

It came as a considerable shock to discover that the man being held in the building was Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess.

19

In the first nine months of the war, until the beginning of May 1940, I notched up only eleven sorties against the enemy. After the German invasion of France and the Low Countries I was posted to 148

Squadron, which until recently had been operating the obsolete Fairey Battle in France, with horrific losses of both men and machines. Now back in the UK, based at Tealby Moor, the squadron itself was being re-manned and re-equipped, this time with the Wellington night bomber. Although the summer of 1940 was a period of maximum danger for Britain, the squadron had been pulled back from the front line while the process of reconstruction went on. Everyone was anxious to do what we could, to give back to the Germans what we were taking from them, but for several weeks the squadron to which I was attached did not even have aircraft to fly.

At the beginning of August, when I was going through a dull refresher course on night-time navigation, I received a letter from Birgit.

The last time I had seen her was during the disastrous family reunion the previous Christmas, during which she hardly spoke to me or even looked in my direction. After that I had not expected to hear from her again, although I had in fact received an earlier letter from her, back in May. It was a short, semi-formal note telling me that Joe had been beaten up by some off-duty squaddies. They apparently took exception to his not being in uniform. That at least was how my mother described it when I phoned her to find out more. She told me that Joe was not badly hurt and that after a short spell in hospital he would be back to normal.

But now Birgit had written to me again. When her letter was brought round during the daily distribution at the airfield, she was so far from my thoughts that I did not recognize her handwriting on the envelope. The letter was short and written in her plain, almost formal English. I could sense her straining to write carefully and correctly to me. Without explaining why she had decided to write at that particular moment, she told me the circumstances of her present life. She said she had not heard from her parents for more than three years and feared they were dead. She was trying to find out what might have happened to them, but the war made communications with Europe almost impossible. A problem that seemed to her connected was that she was in danger of being interned by the British authorities, as she was known to have been born in Germany. She had already been visited twice by the police but on both occasions Joe had persuaded them to let her stay at home. Now there was a new danger: she said that Joe had been sent to London to work for the Red Cross and he was therefore away for weeks on end. Travel was so difficult with all the fears of invasion, the defensive preparations going on, that he had been home for only one weekend since he left. Being alone terrified her, but because of everything else that had happened she felt especially vulnerable.

That was all her letter said: she made no requests, no suggestions, asked for no help. It threw me into an emotional quandary. I was living with the idea of her marriage to Joe by ignoring it. The latest row-between Joe and me made that easier, of course. Because Birgit did not intervene at the time, and because she was after all his wife, I assumed she was allied with him on whatever it was, whatever new thing we rowed about that evening. She was still Birgit, though. Now she was in her early twenties, Birgit, as I witnessed from a distance during the Christmas reunion, had matured both physically and emotionally. The slightest thought of her would tip me into a long reverie about what might have been had events worked out differently.

Now I had a whole letter from her.

I wrote back to her the same day. I composed what I intended to be a thoughtful letter, one that was helpful and sympathetic without trying to interfere in any way. At the end I said, as blandly as possible, that if she thought it would help, I could probably obtain a short leave and make a hurried trip across to see her.

Two days later I received a one-sentence reply from her: ‘Come as soon as you can.’

I immediately put in an application to the station commander’s office for a forty-eight-hour pass, but at the same time I felt I should take a final precaution against the impulses of the heart. I too wrote a one-sentence letter to her.

‘If I come to visit you,’ I said, ‘am I likely to see my brother Joe?’

She did not reply. As soon as my leave was confirmed I went anyway.

20

My meetings with Rudolf Hess at Mytchett Place extended over three days. As soon as I realized who the prisoner was, I assumed that I had been sent because he remembered me from our meeting in Berlin, or he had asked to see me for some other reason. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He showed no sign of recognition at all, was suspicious of me and for the first day the only responses I had from him were hostile or uninterested.

Hess’s circumstances had changed a great deal in five years. In 1936 he was one of the most important and feared people in Germany, but by the time he was incarcerated in Mytchett Place he had become a prisoner of war allowed only the minimum of comforts or privileges. The easy bullying manner had gone. The small talk did not exist. When he spoke at all, it was to complain about his treatment or to make demands to which I was simply unable to respond. For most of that first day he was sullen and silent, unwilling even to acknowledge my presence in the room.

Matters changed and improved on the second day. Although his suspicions remained, I think it finally sank in that I really had been sent by Churchill himself. For that day, and the next, I made much more progress than at first. It wasn’t an ideal meeting, because of the circumstances, but by the time I finished I felt I had gained some important information for the Prime Minister.

I left Mytchett Place on the fourth morning, immediately after an early breakfast. I did not see Hess again before I left. The car drove swiftly to London, taking me to Admiralty House. My mind was swirling with a heady mixture of excitement, intrigue, anticipation and the more prosaic memories of many hours of awkward boredom. Whatever the circumstances, Hess was the worst of social company. As soon as my arrival at Admiralty House was known I was taken to a two-roomed suite of offices which had been set aside for me on the top floor of the building. That my investigation was something of a priority was borne in on me because, as well as being allocated the rooms, I also had assigned to me a secretary and a translator. I was promised that the archivists in the library would treat any requests from me as a priority. Still feeling as if I had been thrown suddenly into a world of intrigues I barely understood, I settled down to assemble my thoughts and try to write them down in a coherent form. I worked solidly for the next few days, travelling into central London every morning from my base at Northolt. In that time, two reminders came through to me from the Prime Minister’s office, asking when my report might be ready. Time was of the essence and I was not to be allowed to forget it. I had never been involved in this sort of work before, so organizing the material sensibly was a serious problem. My first version of the report was a lengthy and ill-arranged affair. I presented it as a verbatim account of each of my several meetings with Hess, including unedited transcriptions of the recordings of our conversations (translated into English when we had spoken in German) and supported by much other detail and elaboration that I was able to obtain from the library archives. I tried to produce a comprehensive account, a definitive record, comparing my own observations of Hess with what facts I could find about him in the Foreign Office archives. They had been observing him for years and the files were stuffed with information.

Miss Victoria MacTyre, the War Office secretary who was assigned to me, took the report away and had it typed out in full. She distributed it among four typists downstairs in the pool. If I say that it took them a day and a half of intensive typing this will give some impression of how many pages the report comprised.

Miss MacTyre brought the finished report to my office. While the secretarial work was going on, she managed to read the whole thing. She complimented me generously on it and told me that in the two years since the outbreak of war she had never read such an interesting piece of work. However, she said, there was a particular problem.

‘Group Captain, I must warn you that Mr Churchill will not read it,’ she said.

‘I think he will. He commissioned it personally and has been pressing me to deliver it to him as quickly as possible.’

‘I do understand that, sir. The fact remains that he will take one look at it and send it back to me.’

‘Why should he do that?’