If Britain Had Fallen (44 page)

Address: Edinburgh … . An open, honest and straightforward character, as was his whole presence. Although he was aware of the political disputes in which the Church in Germany was involved, he was very devoted to the new Germany. He demonstrated this in his discussions with his fellow-students and especially to me during German lessons, whenever a debate started between the foreigners. He was in every way averse to solitary tendencies. On Sundays, he often helped the farmers in the neighbourhood of Heidelberg, because it gave him pleasure to get to know the German farmer in and out; he often said that there was nothing like that in Scotland or England. In addition he helped voluntarily with the harvest in Pomerania … and returned home shortly before the war. An opponent of war between England and Germany.

‘Scottishness’ seems to have made a great appeal to the Germans for most of the entries relating to the other Scots, from Perthshire, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh, contain such phrases as ‘self-evident Scotsman’, ‘a true Scot’ or, even more approvingly, ‘a convinced Scot, who often inveighed sharply against the English character’. What is more alarming is that, like so many Christians in Germany, these Scottish theologians seem to have brushed aside all the evidence of the basic incompatibility between their religion and the Nazi philosophy, and of the persecution of the Protestant Church in Germany. (The Roman Catholic Church, which enjoyed Hitler’s grudging admiration, had never incurred the regime’s wrath by actively opposing it.) Thus one son of the manse (as his address reveals) ‘did not allow himself to be influenced by arguments between the Church and politics but formed his own sensible opinion on these phenomena, coming down in support of the new Germany’. Another academic from Edinburgh, who, it was said rather cryptically, ‘had a positive attitude to life and was worldly … rejected the prejudices of German theologians against National Socialist institutions’, while another theology student from the same city, ‘taking a world view … accepted all innovations of National Socialist Germany and … the church disputes in Germany did not affect his friendship’ towards it.

This curious willingness to be seduced by Nazi arguments about religion and to turn a blind eye to the Party’s excesses afflicted others besides the Scots, as the references to the eleven native-born Englishmen on the White List confirm. One of the most enthusiastic tributes is paid to a clergyman, from south-west London, who ‘came to Germany to study the social and educational institutions of National Socialism and to learn about the position regarding German theology. He expressed high praise for the former and regretted that large numbers of theologians had not formed a proper relationship thereto, as their outlook was too limited and too narrow.’ Another convert, described as ‘open-minded’, came from an unspecified theological college in Cambridge. Apart from this, however, and their similar social background, there was little in common between the other Englishmen pinpointed by the Security Service’s informant. They came from places as scattered as Southport, Cheltenham, Esher, St Ives in Cornwall, Birmingham, Odiham in Hampshire, Twickenham in Middlesex, Derbyshire, Brighouse in Yorkshire, Stockport and Kidderminster, and all seem to have had in common an admiration for
German achievements at home and a desire for peace, even at the price of returning the German colonies. One gains the impression that many were somewhat vain people, easily duped, genuinely anxious for peace, ready to let their heads too easily rule their hearts, but nowhere is there any real hint that they were ripe for treason.

Chapter 18:
Which way to the Black Market?

An Order will follow for the complete stopping of rations to the civilian population.

Directive from Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces
to the Commandant of the Channel Islands, 18 September 1944

If the Germans had plundered the British Isles as thoroughly as they planned, the surviving inhabitants would rapidly have found that problems of day-to-day living loomed larger in their minds than either the memories of absent loved ones or the dreams of liberation. It was difficult under such conditions to avoid becoming a human animal, concerned only with securing food, warmth and shelter. To survive from day to day was much; to endure until the nightmare had passed was the utmost limit of any man’s ambition. ‘We became very, very hungry indeed’, recalls one Jersey schoolteacher, and ‘there was in many cases no heating, no fires, no light and this also reduced people’s mental resistance in many ways … . I’ve met many people of the intellectual type whose intellectual interests dropped to a surprisingly low priority, where the main interest was virtually one of a kind of natural survival. One was more interested in discovering whether one could obtain something for the next meal rather than any deep philosophical thoughts.’

This man had seen in his own life as a wartime schoolboy the far-reaching effects of occupation. ‘Materials, writing books, pencils, paper … became worn out, textbooks became rather battered but generally teachers made every effort to continue things as normally as possible’, even though the time came when they were leading their classes down to the communal kitchen to queue up to cook for their dinner a solitary potato apiece. He had hoped to specialise in science but the school soon began ‘to run out of apparatus for physics and chemistry and … chemicals. Doubtless it was thought some of the chemicals might be put to far more illicit purposes than ever entered the ideas of a schoolboy.’ So science lessons soon became confined to theory and as it was no longer possible to take ‘Higher Certificate’ (the equivalent of the postwar ‘Advanced’ level GCE) he left school at nineteen to work in a local government office, using the German he had learned to read scientific textbooks, to translate instead German documents and interpret in ‘cases against local nationals who had been convicted of the tremendous crime of owning a crystal set or distributing leaflets dropped by the RAF’.

The schoolboys of Victoria College, St Helier, had one lesson in practical chemistry unnecessary in normal times, sometimes being given permission to ‘go on to the beach, where it wasn’t mined … to get a bucket of the ocean and boil it up for a bit of salt’. The lack of this vital flavouring was one of the greatest afflictions of the whole Occupation, and in St Peter Port the Model Yacht Pond became an open-air evaporation tank. Horse-drawn wagons toured inland areas offering sea water for cooking at twopence a quart, attracting much wry comment about the inhabitants having to buy back their own ocean. Larger establishments obtained their supplies wholesale, and two nuns from one nursing home could regularly be seen driving to and from the shore a horse-drawn carriage laden with a bath.

The Islands’ basic problem was its total lack of home-produced coal. Every lump was soon being cherished and a Guernsey farmer described in his diary in October 1944 the Very special ceremony of our Sunday treat’, when ‘after dinner all the family gathers in the sitting room to watch mother strike the match which lights the weekly ruddy glow’. Gas was by now on for only three hours a day and was expected to be permanently cut off by the end of the year, as it had already been on Jersey, and electricity was also available at that time only for a few hours a day, and was supposed to be used mainly for lighting. By midwinter the population were keeping warm and cooking by wood fires, and people visiting friends dragged a log along with them, but the shortage of kindling was so acute that even the small trees in ornamental gardens were being hacked down and a man might find his own front door missing. Much cooking was done in bakers’ large ovens or in communal kitchens set up by the authorities, to which one took one’s simple provisions, most commonly turnip stew, the various articles being identified by numbered discs.

Artificial light was equally scarce. As early as late 1940 the candle ration on Guernsey was only two a week. ‘Candles are like sovereigns and can’t be procured at all’, the Guernsey farmer already quoted noted in his diary four years later, and on the Black Market they changed hands at £1 apiece. In the hospital at St Peter Port the nurses on night duty sat in darkness, each becoming literally a ‘lady with a lamp’—though of a kind more primitive than any Florence Nightingale had carried nearly a century earlier. Churches ceased to take a pride in their stained glass, since it restricted what daylight was available, and it became the rule to sit in darkness while the clergyman conducted the service with the aid of a single candle, lights for the congregation being provided only for the psalms or hymns.

For much of the Occupation, lighting on Guernsey and Jersey slipped back to the standards not merely of the nineteenth but of the eighteenth century, before cheap wax candles became available, so that the commonest source of illumination was a home-made lamp. The Guernsey farmer mentioned earlier relied for his early-morning milking on the glimmer from a bootlace wick burning a mixture of paraffin and vinegar. In the hospital on the same island a piece of tape threaded through the lid of a jam-jar filled with diesel oil served the same purpose. One member of the Jersey lifeboat crew remembers using white spirit, used for dry cleaning, mixed with diesel or even lubricating oil, which produced a light that was ‘a bit smoky but better than darkness’.

Unless the Germans had deported all the younger miners, or dismantled and removed the generating and gas-production plant, it seems unlikely that the rest of the British Isles would have suffered a fuel shortage on such a scale, though even with mines and power plants working flat out there was from 1941 onwards a continuing fuel shortage, frequently reflected in empty coal scuttles and chilly offices. The picture which one writer has drawn of Jersey’s leading citizen, Governor Coutanche, sitting in his ‘fireless office, clothed in sweaters and overcoat, with his feet in a foot-muff containing a hot water bottle’, while ‘outside sat his interpreter swathed in blankets’, is little different from that which many people in Britain witnessed during the later years of the war, though the overall shortage was never as bad. The difference is well illustrated by the attitude towards the water supply. In Britain itself there were appeals to people not to waste water, for example by having only five inches of water in the bath, and by limiting the number of times a day they washed up. On Guernsey, where little washing up was needed and there was rarely enough hot water for baths, the Germans called for a ban on the use of flushing lavatories, to save power used in pumping, suggesting the use of outdoor earth closets or buckets, and when the local Medical Officer of Health protested he was dismissed. He was later reinstated and the original order was withdrawn, but even so the taps on the island ran for only three hours a day.

It seems unlikely, too, again assuming that the Germans did not, as they might well have done, remove vast quantities of British chemicals and chemical-manufacturing plant, that the British Isles would have suffered as badly as their kinsmen in the Channel Islands from a shortage of soap. Soap was rationed in England in February 1942 but the amount was adequate, if one were careful, unlike the situation on the Channel Islands, where the Germans regarded it as a luxury for which there was no shipping space to spare, so that by January 1944 a single tablet of English toilet
soap was fetching 10s 8d. Soap from France was available, on ration and at controlled prices, for much of the Occupation, but one resident remembers it as ‘terrible stuff. When you finished washing your hands there was always a little pile of sand left in the bottom of the basin.’

As suggested in an earlier chapter, one immediate effect of a German occupation would probably have been, as in the Channel Islands, an immediate reduction in both public and private transport due to the requisitioning of vehicles and the Germans’ constant demands for petrol. Britain had large stocks of fuel oils and gasoline in 1940 but these would soon have been run down and, as in the Channel Islands, bus services and taxis might have vanished altogether for a time. The horse and the bicycle would again have been lords of the road, with wedding guests, and even the happy groom, removing their bicycle clips as they entered the church, and mourners at funerals following, like their forbears, a horse-drawn hearse or farm-wagon. Bicycles, which became hard to buy in Britain and lost all their prewar refinements, would no doubt have commanded, as on Jersey, prices of up to £50, ten times the 1940 price, and one might perhaps have seen, as one did there, German soldiers carrying their saddle with them when they entered a shop to protect their machines from theft. In the
North Norfolk News
or
Glamorgan County Times
one would have seen the same ‘small ads’ as in fact appeared in the
Jersey Evening Post
or
Guernsey Star,
offering ‘cycle rear wheel, as new, for what permissible’ (i.e., whatever it was not illegal to sell in this way) or ‘exchange bicycle tyre for circular saw’. The Germans’ hunger for rubber was as insatiable as their thirst for petrol, and bicycle tyres and other spares would soon have been at a premium, the shortage being temporarily overcome by ingenuity, as on Guernsey, where one dealer made valve rubber from electric cable insulation and brake blocks from wood. The final substitute for the tyres themselves was garden hose or lengths of rope tied round the metal rim.

Clothes and footwear had gone on ration in England in June 1941 but, though there was much patching and making-do, no one ever went either ragged or barefoot, largely because Britain had large textile- and garment-producing industries, and manufactured its own boots and shoes. Here occupation would assuredly have made an enormous difference, for the Germans had long been jealous of the supremacy in world markets which Lancashire and Yorkshire cotton and woollen goods enjoyed, and might well have taken over many of their mills, while the supply of imported wool from Australia and of raw cotton from India, though not the United States, would have been cut off overnight. Garment manufacturing, especially for women, would also have suffered with the removal of
the Jewish population, and however hard the Civil Service had tried to apply a rationing system it could not have succeeded if the essential pre-requirement were absent, namely an adequate supply of goods to share out. The devices and expedients to which British families became accustomed between 1941 and 1945 would therefore have been more necessary than ever—the painted legs, the parachute-silk underclothes, the children’s dresses made of flour-bags, the overcoats made of Army blankets. One would have seen, as on Jersey, people working in the fields in shirts made of brightly patterned curtain material, and clothes being offered for sale at fantastic prices like £3 for a pair of imported underpants (the average weekly wage was then around £2), £17 10s for a raincoat and 16s for a pair of socks.