An Ordinary Man - by Sue Purkiss

 

 

In my book, recently published by Writers Review, the hero, Harry Pilgrim, was captured back in May 1940 on the way to Dunkirk. By this time - the end of September - he is in a POW camp in Poland, in what is now called Torun but which was then known by its German name, Thorn.

He, and many others, reached the camp after a punishing march across the north of France in the summer heat. They were given very little food: they slept in the open, occasionally in barns. If you couldn't keep going, you were shot. They didn't know where they were going or what was going to happen to them. They eventually reached Trier, in Germany, where the streets were lined with scarlet banners emblazoned with swastikas and the people jeered and pelted them with stones and rotten vegetables. Then they were crammed into cattle trucks and entrained to Poland.

Much later, when things were more organised, their families would be notified where they were, and they would begin to receive letters from home and Red Cross parcels which would augment their meagre rations. They would be sent out on work parties - some of which weren't too bad: my father, on whom Harry is very loosely based, really quite enjoyed working as a forester.

But for now, there was nothing to do, except to sit around and wonder just how it was that they'd ended up here - wherever 'here' was.

My father - and Harry - came from Ilkeston, an industrial town between Derby and Nottingham. His father, who had worked at Stanton Ironworks, died of lung disease when Dad was about 14, which was also when he left school, leaving a wife and six children - five girls and Dad, the second youngest. They were a close family. The older girls were already working and bringing in money, which was just as well, because there was no other money coming in.  Dad worked in a coal yard - there were lots of pits around - eventually graduating to driving a lorry. When the war started and he joined up, that's what he did - drove a lorry in the Royal Army Service Corps.

When I began to work on this book, it really struck me what a culture shock the war must have been for a twenty year-old who had never been further from home than on a church trip to Blackpool. Would he even have known where Poland was? Would he have had any idea what had led to the war - apart, of course, from what he'd seen on news reels at the cinema? (To which, in any case, as the son of an evangelical family, he was not supposed to go.)

What a setting in which to do his growing up. But there he was, as were so many others, for five years.

He came through. But not without scars.

To find out more about Harry and what happened to him, you can find the book here.

And to all those of you who have read the book already, and sent kind messages or written reviews - thank you!

Letters - a treasure trove. By Sue Purkiss

 Far back in the distant past, O Best Beloveds, there was a time before emails, before WhatsApp, before Messenger - before any of these things which we now rely on. And in that time, if you wanted to communicate with someone far away, you wrote a letter. If you were in the same country, that letter might arrive very quickly - the post then was very efficient. It had to be, because apart from telegrams and the telephone (land lines only, of course, no mobiles), it was pretty much the only means of communication. If the letter had to go abroad, of course, it took much longer.

Many people kept the letters which were most important to them - indeed, some people kept the vast majority of the letters they received, but they were more likely to be people in the public eye, who had an eye towards future memoirs and biographies.

In the later years of his life, my father knew that I was interested in his stories about his childhood and family and about his experiences during the war. So he gave me this old chocolate box, which contained a few old photographs, his army record book and that of my Uncle George, who was a rear gunner in the RAF and was shot down just before the end of the war - a tragedy, one among so very many. 

It also contained a number of letters from Dad's mother and some of his five sisters. The reason these letter survived is that they never reached him. This was because at the end of May 1940, he was part of the British Expeditionary Force to France, about 400,000 men, which was retreating with all possible speed towards Dunkirk, where they were hoping to be picked up by the navy and taken back to Britain. This was the famous effort, involving hundreds of small boats, which did indeed rescue the majority of the men. But not all. Many were killed, and others were captured before they ever got there. Dad was one of these, and he spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Poland.

But back at home, my grandmother and Dad's sisters had no idea of this. So they kept on writing letters, chatty in the case of his sisters, increasingly anxious in the case of Granny Course. And eventually - extraordinarily - these letters were not just chucked into the nearest bin: someone examined them, investigated, and some months later, returned them to their senders, stamped 'Addressee reported Prisoner of War'. Granny kept them, and years later, gave them to Dad, their intended recipient.

Dad with his company at the beginning of the war - he is sitting on the front row on the far right. He was in the RASC, the Royal Army Service Corps. I don't know how many of these survived the war. 

There's a little side story to this. For months, in the chaos of war, no-one knew what had happened to Dad. At some point a telegram arrived back at home, saying that he was missing in action. My Aunt Connie intercepted it, and decided that Granny wasn't to be told: they would wait until they knew for certain whether he was alive or dead.

It's so moving to read these letters now, in the knowledge of what was happening in France. This is from a letter Granny wrote on the 15th of May, when Dad still had about ten days of freedom left. She is hoping that he will have leave before long.

...I have cleaned the house ready waiting to hear that quick step. I often fancy I hear you coming home early (in the) morning, so I do hope things won't be so long. It seems hard and furious now...

And then this one, written on the 25th, around the time that he was captured. She is obviously desperately worried, beginning:

Dear Bernard

    Do just let me know how you are as soon as possible, I know I am impatient... I am only wanting to know if you are well, and are quite alright...

And ending:

...if you are too tired I am sending you some ready addressed envelopes if you can only just say I am alright mam, that will suffice for your loving Mother/too anxious.

These letters were one of the many strands that fed into my book, An Ordinary War, which is very loosely based on Dad's experiences. I found, and still find, that image of my grandmother writing to her son, pausing and listening for his 'quick step', not knowing that she wouldn't see him again for five years, just so moving. If you'd like to read more, the book is available here.