Four
This fortress built by Nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war.
Shakespeare, Richard II
Big, black capitals stand out starkly from the Ministry of Information’s poster: ‘If the INVADER Comes’. When the Phoney War ended, with the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk at the end of May 1940 and the capitulation of France in June, fear of a German invasion increased sharply. Within days of the fall of Paris on 14 June Hitler’s armies were on the Channel coast and starting to mass for Operation Seelöwe (Sealion), the assault on Britain. In his Directive No. 16, issued on 16 July, the Führer stated his intentions with characteristic subtlety:
As England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English mother country as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued, and, if it should be necessary, to occupy it completely.
His Army Commander, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, who was to take charge of Britain if the invasion succeeded, had clear ideas about his treatment of the conquered people. In his Directive No. 5 he proclaimed: ‘The able-bodied male population between the ages of seventeen and forty-five will … be interned and dispatched to the Continent with a minimum of delay.’ There were also rumours that all young British men were to be sterilized. In his Proclamation to the People of England von Brauchitsch stated: ‘I warn all civilians that if they undertake active operations against the German forces, they will be condemned to death inexorably.’
After the first evacuation of the cities in September 1939, many people had trickled back to their homes; but as Hitler’s forces massed across the Channel, fear reasserted itself and another emigration took place. Driving about the south coast, the American reporter Vincent Sheean got the impression that it was the better off who went first, boarding up their houses and moving further inland. In St Margaret’s, near Dover, a woman whom he had known before the war stood in the door of her cottage and told him ‘how it was’:
‘The gentry’s all gone away,’ she said, her eyes twinkling with some enjoyable malice. ‘It was the same in the last war. I never did ’old with going away the minute there’s a bit of trouble.’
‘For the second time the war is coming nearer, looming up large and threatening,’ wrote the author Frances Partridge (a pacifist and conscientious objector) in her diary on 3 April.
Air raids, invasion, refugees. One’s whole body reacts with a taut restlessness, as though one had a lump of lead for stomach and sensitive wires from it reaching to toes and fingers.
As a second exodus from cities took place, villages were flooded once more. Between 13 and 18 June about 100,000 children were evacuated from London and ‘invasion corner’ – the towns on the south coast. Some 17,000 went to the West Country and South Wales, in blazingly hot weather, and by the time one trainload reached Plymouth the young passengers were gasping for water. When drinks were administered by sailors waiting on the platform, some quick-witted young fellow called out, ‘Blimey, we must be near the sea!’
Frances Partridge was one of a reception committee in Hampshire, standing by in a village:
The bus came lumbering in … As soon as they got out, it was clear they were neither children nor docksiders, but respectable-looking middle-aged women and a few children, who stood like sheep beside the bus looking infinitely pathetic. ‘Who’ll take these?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Oh well, I can have these two but no more,’ and the piteous cry, ‘But we’re together.’ It was terrible. I felt we were like sharp-nosed housewives haggling over fillets of fish. In the end we swept off two women of about my age and a girl of ten … Their faces began to relax. Far from being terrified Londoners, they had been evacuated against their will from Bexhill, for fear of invasion, leaving snug little houses and ‘hubbies’.
By the end of June another 100,000 people had left the South East, and the population of some towns in Kent and East Anglia had shrunk by 40 per cent. The north country author and broadcaster J. B. Priestley recalled a visit to the ghost town of Margate:
In search of a drink and a sandwich, we wandered round, and sometimes through, large empty hotels. The few signs of life only made the whole place seem more unreal and spectral. Once an ancient taxi came gliding along the promenade, and we agreed that if we hailed it, making a shout in that silence, it would have dissolved at once into thin air.
With this second influx, the rural population again rose sharply. The village school at Thurgarton, in Nottinghamshire, which had taken in twenty-two children from Sheffield the previous autumn, now received another eighteen from Southend. The school became so crowded that some lessons took place in a barn next to the pub, the Coach and Horses. Among the evacuees was Gladys Totman, then seven, who remembered her foster-home, Hill Farm, as ‘sheer paradise’.
There was always something going on – new calves and lambs, pink silky piglets in an old galvanised bath in front of the kitchen range, hunting free-range eggs and picking plate-sized field mushrooms or blue buttons on late autumn mornings. We were all included in the farm activities such as hay-making, harvest, potato-picking, gathering blackberries, sloes and hazelnuts. At harvest time there was a school holiday, and we all joined in; we rode on the huge carts … we carried big baskets of bread, cheese, apples and cold tea in quart beer bottles up to the men who worked in the fields well into the dusk. Acorns were collected by the sackful to supplement the pigs’ diet, and rose hips to make syrup for vitamin C.
This time hundreds of people brought their domestic animals with them, so that the countryside was freshly inundated with cats and dogs which had survived the initial massacre; many dogs were destabilized by the sudden change of habitat, or by loud noises, and bolted when let out. Their arrival exacerbated the problems of farmers, who accused them of worrying sheep or killing chickens. Some were recovered after frantic hunts by their owners; others disappeared for good, and a few demonstrated uncanny powers of direction-finding, making their own way home over long distances. Later, there were reports of dogs sensing the distant approach of enemy aircraft and beginning to whine or bark long before humans picked up any audible warning of an air raid.
Spy fever became ubiquitous. It was assumed that if enemy agents were dropped by parachute, they would surely aim for the countryside, where they might come to earth unseen, rather than urban areas, where they would be spotted and apprehended. For this reason the land became rife with suspicion. Official orders issued to country people, should a parachutist be discovered, included the instruction: ‘DO NOT GIVE ANY GERMAN ANYTHING. DO NOT TELL HIM ANYTHING. HIDE YOUR FOOD AND YOUR BICYCLES. HIDE YOUR MAPS.’
Challenges at road blocks caused travellers untold irritation, for nobody could move across country at night without being stopped and questioned; rumours spread like fire, and there were countless false alarms – none more ridiculous than one which started when a young man with a furtive manner and a strange accent was discovered wandering about in Oxfordshire. Because the Canadian soldiers who found him could not understand what he was saying, they arrested him. When questioned, he gave an address that quickly proved false; and when taxed with being a German agent who had descended by parachute, he said he was exactly that. Moreover, he gave the name of a well-known local farmer, claiming that this man was the chief German agent in the area, to whom he had been ordered to report. To the chagrin of the farmer, and the disappointment of the