How the Girl Guides Won the War. Janie Hampton

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СКАЧАТЬ or no English, including best friends Ruth Wassermann and Gretel Heller.

      The Robertses had been expecting twenty-five children, but by the time Lady Roberts arrived at the corrugated-iron village hall, she found that most of them had already been billeted around the village. She took nine of the Kindertransport girls, aged eight to thirteen, back to Cockley Cley Hall, a four-storey Victorian house where she and her husband lived with the ancient Dowager Lady Roberts and their son Peter, who worked on the farm. Working for them were a butler, two teenage footmen, a lady’s maid, a cook, a scullery maid and a head housemaid with several maids under her.

      Sir Samuel and Lady Roberts welcomed ‘the Jewish girls’, as they called them. Escorting them was their rather bossy matron, Miss Kohn, who had been a teacher in Germany, Mrs Reissner the cook, and her twelve-year-old daughter Hanna. Both women had arrived in London in early 1939 and found refuge in the B’nai B’rith hostel. Lady Roberts understood that they would need a special kosher kitchen, and gave them the scullery. ‘We had our own kitchen downstairs,’ said Gretel, ‘and the top floor for our bedrooms — five to a room — and a sitting room. We were not permitted to go into the Roberts family part of the house.’

      ‘We kept kosher in the sense that we did not eat any meat,’ said Ruth, ‘except on the rare occasions when it was sent from London. By the time it arrived in unrefrigerated trains, it was not the freshest, but “waste not want not” was the motto.’ The girls ate mainly turnips, potatoes, cabbages and greens grown in the Hall garden. In the summer, Lady Roberts treated them to baskets of soft fruit. ‘Lady Roberts was very elegant looking,’ said Gretel, ‘very stately, tall, always neat and properly dressed. She came into our sitting room about once a week and would pat a girl on the head.’ All the girls were homesick, but during the day they never showed it: they were expected to be grateful. At night their bedrooms were filled with the sound of muffled sobs as they cried into their pillows.

      Not all the Kindertransport girls lived in the Hall. Mr and Mrs Howard, the cowman and the dairymaid of the Cockley Cley estate farm, picked twelve-year-old Cilly-Jutta Horwitz from Hamburg and Lotte Levy from Cologne. In the Howards’ cottage, water came from a well in the garden, the floors were made of stone and there was no electricity. Cilly-Jutta, later known as Celia, and Lotte were both used to living in middle-class urban homes. Celia had been learning English at grammar school in Hamburg for two years, and had arrived on the first Kindertransport train in December 1938, so her English was already good, but even so, things were very difficult. ‘Living with the Howards in a small village in Norfolk was a real culture shock,’ she remembered. ‘Everything was a blur. You no sooner seemed to have settled somewhere than you were off again. My first homes in Britain were two holiday camps in the south-east. After three cold months I was taken in by a Jewish family in Hackney and then by a hostel for young refugees.’

      Lotte was braver than Celia, and told the cook, Mrs Reisner, that she was unhappy at the Howards’. The girls at the Hall were asked if any of them would swap places. ‘I was very stupid,’ said Gretel. ‘I said yes.’ Gretel, brought up in Berlin, found life with the Howards no easier than Lotte had: ‘There were paraffin lamps and we went to bed with a candle. Mrs Howard treated me and Celia like servants. There was no heating and I had perpetual colds living there. I soon regretted it, especially when winter came and it was so cold.’ The winter of 1939—40 was the coldest for decades: even the River Thames froze for the first time in over fifty years. ‘Mrs Howard cooked a delicious dumpling stew on our first night; she was a good plain cook,’ remembered Celia. ‘But after that she was quite mean with the bread and margarine. I liked the countryside, but not the outside toilets.’ Exiled from Germany for being Jewish, she was now taunted by some of the other refugee girls for being only half-Jewish — her mother had converted to Judaism before marrying her father. ‘That counted as Jewish to Hitler,’ she said. ‘When my parents divorced, my father insisted that my mother renounced being a Jew to save herself. In addition, standing up in class in England was agony when I had to say my name, “Cilly-Jutta”. The children always laughed.’ After she was married she changed her first name to Celia. Mr and Mrs Howard had two teenage sons — the oldest was Nigel, aged fifteen, who looked after the pigs and had a slight squint; his younger brother Geoffrey, who was fourteen, sometimes took Celia around the village on the horse-drawn milk cart, doling out fresh milk into housewives’ jugs. ‘I had a bit of a crush on Geoffrey,’ said Celia, ‘so that was always fun.’

      Cockley Cley village school had closed down a few years earlier due to a shortage of children. The few local children went to school in Swaffham, three miles away, and did not mix much with the evacuees. The village school was reopened for the British children from Hackney and the eighteen Kindertransport girls. Two teachers were drafted in from London — Miss Gadsby and Miss Payne — one for the five-to-eight-year-olds, the other for nine-to-fourteen-year-olds. ‘They had to cope with a wide range of children,’ said Gretel, ‘including some very naughty London evacuee boys. One was beaten with a cane often.’

      The teachers had to deal with both homesick London evacuees and girls who spoke little or no English and had even more reason to be homesick. ‘Miss Payne was a very good English teacher, especially for poetry,’ said Celia. Ruth described how the teachers ‘taught us songs and poetry by rote. Arithmetic was easier since they could use the blackboard. They also taught us drawing.’ Ruth enjoyed art: her grandfather had been a folk poet, and encouraged her to embellish his poetry with drawings while listening to music. The children learned English quickly: ‘The teachers took an interest in us, and found creative ways of teaching. We wrote essays, read English books and got a good appreciation of English songs, poetry and literature.’

      Miss Gadsby had been a Guide, and after a couple of months she suggested starting a Guide company in Cockley Cley. ‘Those of us from Germany had never heard of such a thing,’ said Gretel Heller. ‘Miss Gadsby explained to us that Guides were about doing daily Good Deeds, and taking badges. We thought this all sounded like a good idea. But we couldn’t afford a full uniform.’ Each girl was issued with a hat, a maroon scarf and a Guide belt, donated by Lady Roberts. ‘The best part was learning Morse code and being able to signal secret messages to each other. We did a lot of stalking in the woods. We would have used these skills if the Germans had invaded.’

      The 1st Cockley Cley Guide company had two patrols — the Sky Larks and the Swallows. Ruth was Patrol Leader of the Larks, with Gretel as her Second; Celia was in the Swallows. Miss Gadsby acknowledged that the Cockley Cley Guides were not British by amending part of their Guide promise from ‘ To do my duty to God and the King’ to ‘ To do my duty to God and the country in which I am a guest.’ ‘We enjoyed doing the Guide salute,’ said Gretel. ‘It helped us to connect to Britain, and to what was going on elsewhere in the country.’

      Miss Gadsby was not alone: running companies near her in Norfolk were other Guide Captains such as Miss Twiddy, Miss Jolly, Miss Cocks, Miss Flowerday, Miss Sparrow and Miss Capon. One day the President of the Guides, the Princess Royal, came to Cockley Cley on her way to Sandringham. The Guides polished their badges and belts to perfection. ‘We knew she was the sister of King George,’ said Gretel. ‘We all lined up and curtsied to her.’

      Lady Roberts had given the Guides a wind-up gramophone and a few records. Their favourite was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. ‘Dot-dot-dot-dash, the Morse code V for Victory opening, became a code of hope for victory throughout England,’ Ruth said. ‘We played it constantly; it gave us courage as well as an appreciation of classical music, which most of us had been accustomed to at home.’

      The teachers started a Victory Garden at the school, where the Guides grew vegetables for themselves and to sell to the villagers. ‘I got terrible blisters,’ said Celia, ‘but it was a joy growing things like carrots.’ Ruth, Celia and Gretel made up a song, in English, which they sang while working in the garden:

       For days work and weeks work, As we go on and on, Digging many trenches СКАЧАТЬ