... And the Policeman Smiled (34 page)

Summing up my army experiences – it was a good life. Going on parade and route marches didn't do a healthy young female any
harm. I made many good friends and enjoyed the comradeship. Also I felt useful in contributing to the war effort. Alas, the uniform did not suit me. For other ranks there were two sizes – too large or too small. My hair should have been well above the collar and somehow it never seemed to be. That was very important. It barred promotion if one's appearance was not up to scratch. So I remained a glorious private. I became an expert in shining up shoes and brass buttons. Thinking back, I realise there was much more to it and I learned a lot more about the art of living.

Six alien companies of the Pioneer Corps accompanied the allied invasion. Many refugee servicemen were decorated and many gave their lives to their adopted country.

In 1943, men who had been invalided out of the Pioneer Corps formed an ex-servicemen's club, identified by the initials NB – non-British. The club survives and organises reunions every year.

‘…
Such failures exist where so great an upheaval has
taken place and it was not to be expected that the Movement's
records should be free from shadows.'

Children who were required to go out to work at fourteen, that is, the great majority of British teenagers, could hardly be blamed for assuming the right to lead their lives as they saw fit. In reality, their freedom was closely confined. Those who came from more or less stable families were generally restrained from the wilder flights of liberty by parental influence, an influence reinforced by the economic advantages of continuing to live at home.

But for refugee children these social conventions seldom came into play. An overcrowded hostel was naturally keen to dispose of its more mature residents to make way for a fresh intake, while the foster parent was, by definition, a temporary parent offering short-term security against long-term uncertainty. With rare exceptions, refugee children were expected to leave home as soon as they could fend for themselves. With only the staff at Bloomsbury House and their regional offices as the long stop for advice and modest practical assistance, it is not surprising that a high proportion of
Kindertransporte
veterans, possibly as many as one in ten, found themselves up against the police or other bastions of social authority.

The personal files held by the RCM reveal a sorry procession of young people who tried to solve their problems by turning to petty crime. A typical example was Gert, a complex boy who confused Bloomsbury House visitors. To one he was ‘highly intelligent and showing creative ability'; to another his ‘intelligence
was not above the ordinary'; he was more the show-off who had an ‘exaggerated idea of his age and importance'. Both observers were disturbed by Gert's laughter, ‘which appears to ring with hysteria'. A few days short of his fifteenth birthday, Gert attempted suicide, cutting his wrist and jumping from a third-floor window. He had been caught stealing from a friend and had reacted ‘hysterically' to the inevitable reprimand. There followed a succession of minor criminal offences, mostly against youngsters with whom he shared lodgings. No record of medical or psychiatric treatment appears in Gert's file, though there were persistent efforts to persuade him to pay off his debts from his earnings as a packer on an assembly line.

By August 1941, when he was sixteen, he had an evening and weekend job as a trolley boy in Lyons Piccadilly Brasserie. Whatever he was doing with the extra money, he was not settling accounts with those he had defrauded. The police were called in. Gert had been reported for selling torch batteries, which he said his employer had given him. He was put on two years' probation. The last heard of Gert was in 1943 when he tried and failed to join the RAF. Bloomsbury House urged him to settle for the Pioneers.

At this distance it is impossible to tell if Gert could have made more of his early life if he had been given the chance to make use of the ‘creative ability' spotted early on by one of his helpers. But it is a fair assumption that many young refugees fell foul of authority out of sheer frustration with undemanding and tedious work, usually at subsistence wages.

The intervention of Bloomsbury House forestalled a likely prison sentence for Otto, who stole money from his landlady and his employer. What made the case stand out was the motivation for Otto's pilfering. The proceeds went on tickets for West End theatre, where the boy spent all his free evenings. Predictably, he wanted above all else to be an actor but, when he had the chance of realising his ambition by working overseas, for some reason the Home Office refused an exit permit. But in 1945 he was allowed to join the US Army – as a civil censor.

Because it was hard for young refugees to find decently paid jobs (all else being equal, refugee status was a disqualification in the eyes of most employers), they were frequently in debt. The more assertive and imaginative found honest ways to supplement their regular wage packet.

Margaret and her friends collected old clothes, converted them into dusters and sold them out of a suitcase in the Camden market and to old clothes dealers. Others just continued borrowing until they ran out of luck or excuses. Then came the blustering denials of any intention to act dishonestly, which did little to help their cause though many were sincere.

Appeals for advice on how to handle this boy or that girl who owed money arrived daily at Bloomsbury House. The appeals were made as often in sorrow as in anger. What more, for example, could Mr Marshall have done for Helmut? Out of the kindness of his heart he had let him have a job in his shoe repair shop. The boy showed little talent for the business and hardly earned the £2. 10s Mr Marshall paid him at the end of the week. But his employer recognised that, after Helmut had paid for his lodgings (fifteen shillings for a room and ‘a rather meagre breakfast'), there was little enough to live on. No wonder Helmut was seen ‘loitering around after working hours'; no wonder he burst into tears at the slightest provocation; and no wonder he was in debt. Little was done for him in the three years up to his seventeenth birthday when, like so many others, he found companionship and, ironically, the security he craved for by joining the army.

Helmut's problems were compounded by an unsatisfactory relationship with his landlady who ‘is just on eighty years of age and has a large house to keep clean with no help whatever'. Predictably, she was not sympathetic to the boisterous ways of a young teenager, though she did not go so far as a Mrs Dudley who complained to Bloomsbury House that one of her fifteen-year-old lodgers, Willy, had ‘broken the beading on a wardrobe and had also broken a chair', offences which most parents of healthy teenagers would have accepted as part of growing up.

Friction led to furious rows and the rows led to Willy demanding that he should be allowed to take a room where he could look after himself. The RCM seemed to be prepared to go along with this, until they discovered that Willy was also in trouble with his employer, a jeweller who caught the boy pocketing a silver cigarette case. No excuses were offered. Willy voiced the philosophy he had learned by experience – it was everyone for himself; if you didn't take what you wanted, no one was likely to give it to you.
It was only because his employer did not want to waste his time in court proceedings that Willy escaped probation and a possible jail sentence.

There were those in the Movement who regretted that the police were not brought in. This was not so heartless as it might seem. Before the Guardianship Act of 1943, the RCM had next to no real power to restrain a youngster who showed signs of getting out of control. The police and the probation service, on the other hand, could impose sanctions, though whether they would have had any effect on Willy, who ‘was extremely rude and behaved very badly towards all authority', is open to doubt. In the end it was Dorothy Hardisty, ever patient but determined, who persuaded Willy to take up agricultural training in North Wales. In this way, she reasoned, he would be removed fronjthe temptations of the city. Willy agreed to go as long as he was given a return fare. He wanted to be sure he could return to London if he didn't like his new job. His file closes with his departure to Brecon in March 1942. Since further complaints against him would almost certainly have been recorded, it is a fair guess that he took to the open life.

As a first cause of resentment against authority, falling out with employers was as common as falling out with landladies. Too often a job, any job, for a refugee child was seen as bestowing a great favour in return for which sacrifices were expected. Heinz was a sheet metal worker. In January 1945 ‘he was welding a tank which contained two gallons of paraffin. The heat of the welding compressed the air inside the tank which, together with the acetylene flame, blew the tank open, causing a flame to shoot out and burn Heinz.' It turned out that the foreman had not warned Heinz that the paraffin might explode. Indeed, he had categorically denied that there was any danger. This may have been because he was ignorant or stupid but, reading between the lines of Heinz's file, it is more likely that the foreman had taken against his young charge who was ‘very intelligent and conceited'. (How often are those two descriptions juxtaposed in RCM reports, the apparent ‘conceit' paraded as justification for distrusting cleverness.) In any event, Heinz was off work for two months before embarking on a steady descent of menial jobs, ending up as a kitchen cleaner. In 1948 he was found guilty of breaking and entering. Despite representations from the RCM, Heinz was deported to Germany.
It was, as one refugee worker put it, ‘the easy way out' and it solved nothing.

There were many cases where Bloomsbury House was involved not at all, or only at the last moment when it was generally too late to offer any constructive help. When Max ‘lifted' some cash at his hostel in north London, ‘the only person who appeared at court was the German who ran the hostel. I didn't like him at all and we didn't get on. He wanted to tell the judge how to deal with me, but fortunately the judge was more understanding. I had to stay in prison for a couple of weeks before going to an approved school in Hayes, Middlesex.'

The first the Movement knew of Beno's trouble was when a sharp-eyed refugee worker spotted a news item in the
Evening Standard
. Beno was brought up before the magistrate at Bow Street, accused of posing as a Russian Air Force officer, and being in possession of eleven rounds of rifle ammunition without a certificate. As the case was held over there was just time for Dorothy Hardisty to intervene. She told the court that she had known eighteen-year-old Beno for three years, that in 1941 he had lost his power of speech when his lodgings suffered a direct hit, and that thereafter he had lived with the fantasy of becoming an air force officer. Beno was fined five pounds and told to get a job more suitable to his talents.

While Bloomsbury House sensibly avoided general rules for dealing with problem cases, there was one guiding principle in the campaign against delinquency. ‘At all costs', wrote Dorothy Hardisty in one of her reports to the RCM executive, ‘we must try to dissuade our boys and girls from believing that London is the answer to all their prayers.' Her concern was entirely understandable. The big city was a powerful draw to youngsters who were looking for the chance to better themselves. By the spring of 1943, there were nearly 2200 RCM children in London, an increase of one-third on the previous year. With the labour force depleted by the military, there were jobs to be filled, and at better rates of pay than elsewhere in the country. But London offered too many hostages to fortune at a time when all foreigners were suspect, and the police were inclined to arrest first and ask questions afterwards. The most common offence was to break the curfew, aliens were not supposed to be out on the streets after eleven. Seldom was any harm intended but, however genuine, excuses
were invariably noted by the police under the heading of suspicious behaviour. When Philip Urbach was pulled in, he was on a tour of discovery of the East End.

There had been these terrible air raids in the Jewish district and I wanted to see what had happened. Maybe it was foolish but I went out of concern. Well, I was wandering between bombed houses almost in a dream and someone asked me what I was doing there. When they heard my foreign accent, the police were called.

A more ambitious escapade took Johnny Blunt and a friend on a hitchhike from London to Glasgow. Here they were committing two sins of omission – the failure to be indoors by 11 p.m. and the failure to notify the police of a change of address.

At about midnight Henry and I slipped out of the hostel, walked to the main road and started thumbing. We got to Glasgow early the next morning and went to the local refugee committee. There we had the biggest telling-off of our lives. ‘Don't you know you're breaking the law? You could get into serious trouble. We ought to tell the police.'

But luck was with them. The row blew over as it did for Kurt Weinburg, who was taken out by an older friend for a night on the town. They had dinner at the Trocadero in Shaftesbury Avenue before taking in the late show at the Windmill Theatre.

When I got back to Camden Road it was near midnight. I didn't have a key and everybody had gone to bed. So I knocked, but not too hard in case I woke up the neighbourhood. But I was heard by a policeman on patrol. He walked up the garden path and shone his torch in my face. He wanted to know what I was doing and asked to see my registration book. He knew I should have been in by 11 p.m. Then he started knocking so hard I thought he would break the door down. At least he saved me from a night on a park bench. The next day I had to report to the police station and promise not to disobey the rules. But no further action was taken.

Less fortunate was Karl, whose troubles were noted at Bloomsbury House.