WW2
Showing posts with label WW2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WW2. Show all posts

Jersey in WW2 - Organisation Todt

by Deborah Swift

Russian Slave Workers of Organisation Todt

My latest research has been into the German Occupation of Jersey during WW2. At first, the surrender by the British and the occupation by the Germans was polite, and the aim by both sides was to make as little disruption as possible, but inevitably as time progressed, relationships between the German occupiers and British citizens began to break down, leading to many reports of trauma and atrocity.

One of the things that caused fear and distress on the island of Jersey was the treatment of the forced labourers of Oganisation Todt. Named for its founder, Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi, Organisation Todt was a civil and military engineering confederation responsible for building infrastructure such as defence works and railways.

Hitler saw The Channel Islands as key to the control of Europe and Great Britain. With this in mind, he became obsessed with the idea that The Channel Islands should not be lost, and became determined to defend them, with the idea that eventually, after Europe was defeated, they would become the ideal base for Nazi families to enjoy holidays in a 'Strength through Joy' (Kraft Durch Freude) Camp. Worryingly, when I searched for more about the KDF, I found it still exists, and has branches in the North of England. Here is a typical Propaganda poster, the only one I could find not emblazoned with swastikas.


In order to defend the islands a massive programme of fortification began, and the Organisation Todt provided the labour. This obsession with Jersey was seen by many Germans as Hitlers inselwahn - island madness. Before Hitler's supposed final victory, the islands were to be a stronghold and submarine base for forays into English waters.

For those living on the island, they had to endure the appearance of nearly 500,000 metres of reinforced concrete to make anti tank walls, gun emplacements, underground barracks and bolt holes. Historic castles were fortified with concrete, and new roads cut through the previously quiet lanes to carry truckloads of building materials, plus the many workers needed for this enormous enterprise. To prevent landing by sea, the beaches were mined by more than 100,000 mines.


The workers for this frenzy of building were imported labourers and prisoners of war from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. According to Nazi propaganda, the Slav races were untermenschen and treated as slaves to the Nazi building machine.

To house the workers,  camps known as lagers were constructed in several places, all named after famous German poilots such as ‘Richthofen’ and ‘Immelmann’. The treatment of the workers was appalling, and most were on inadequate rations because the food was progressively stolen by German employees and guards - either for their own use, or for sale on the black market. The lorry that brought the inadequate soup to the quarries and construction sites, also took away the corpses of those who had died from malnutrition, cold, exhaustion or disease.

Note the armed guard supervising these construction workers

Jersey people were suddenly reminded through these atrocities, that their occupying force could treat pepople in this barbaric way, and this made the constant fear of the occupation much worse. The Germans shot workers caught stealing potatoes from the fields. Suddenly, their Germman neighbours seemed much less civilized when the treatment of their 'slaves' was exposed. Civilians were warned of the penalties for giving the workers food, but a number of Jersey people did try to rescue them, taking them into their homes at great risk to themselves.

According to 'The IslandWiki' - the Channel Island Website, German records show that by May 1943 there was a total of 16,000 foreign workers in Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney. In November of the same year, numbers had halved to 8,959 and by July 1944 only 817 remained.

Workers from Organisation Todt feature in one of the stories in a new collaboration by writers fron many countries - all proceeds are in aid of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The stories focus on the theme of Resistance, and the collection of ten novellas is available now.

More about the stories here


Sources: The Model Occupation - Madeleine Bunting
The First Casualty - Jersey's Occupation Experience
Jersey Evening Post
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Jersey Occupation Food in #WW2 by Deborah Swift

German soldiers on British soil
I've recently been working on a novella for a collection of stories set in WW2. My book is set on Jersey in the Channel Islands. Those of you who have read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (or seen the film) will know about the food shortages on Guernsey during the German occupation. All the Channel Islands suffered under the occupation, not just Guernsey.  The geographical position of Jersey meant the Germans saw it as an ideal place of fortification before their planned invasion of England.



When the Germans invaded The Channel Islands, Jersey was cut off from English food supplies, and with thousands more hungry Germans on the island, the finding of enough food became a priority. Potatoes and swedes were a staple, but food was so scarce in the Channel Islands that every last morsel of the potato was eaten, including the peel. By the Summer of 1941, the ration of meat was four ounces per person per fortnight. Bread was scarce, and soon become a rough, hard, mouthful, often adulterated with bran, chaff or sawdust. The British 'cuppa' was made with tea recycled by drying out the leaves.

'The shops were empty, you couldn't buy anything. If you went into town, everyone was talking about food.'
Dorothy Blackwell - farmer's daughter Jersey

Finding and preparing food mostly fell to the women, and was enormously time-consuming. On an island as small as Jersey, the beaches were a source of food, though the beaches were mined by the occupying forces, so it was a dangerous mission to collect mussels or crabs. Seaweed, and moss were avidly collected, and used as vegetables or to make setting agents for preserves or blancmange.

Sugar was not available, so islanders made syrup from sugar beet. Coffee substitute was made from collecting and drying dandelions or parnsips. In harvest time, corn was gleaned grain by grain from any missed by the Germans, and painstakingly ground in home mills originally intended for coffee or spices. Breeding rabbits for the pot, and catching sparrows from hedgerows supplemented the diet with a little protein. Bird's eggs of any type were filched from nests.


Occupation Menu
According to the book The Model Occupation by Madeleine Bunting - here is a typical day's diet on Jersey during 1943:

Breakfast
'Grape nuts' made from mangel-wurzel with drop of rationed milk
Bramble-leaf tea
Bread with smear of cocoa substitute mixed with sago

Lunch
Boiled potatoes, peas, swede or cabbage
Pudding made of baked breadcrumbs & milk thickened with maize meal.

Tea
Bread & 'butter'
Bramble-leaf tea

Supper
Vegetable soup
Stewed potatoes & peas

Living in Fear
Thousands of islanders traded on the Black Market, or stole from the Germans to survive. Farmers were luckier, if thery could hide a pig or chickens, but those in towns suffered real hardships. In the face of German authority, islanders were powerless. One wrong word could lead to an appearance before the court and transportation to a French or German prison camp. Islanders witnessed the inhumane treatment of the slave workers brought over from occupied territories in order to build the German fortifications, and they feared the same treatment. Between 1940 and 1945, more than 300 islanders were taken from Jersey to concentration camps and prisons on the continent, for crimes committed against the German occupying forces.


Cooking
As the occupation progressed, cooking grew difficult, as finding enough fuel became harder. The island was denuded of trees by the German forces. Not only was there no wood for fuel, but nowhere to hide for any type of Resistance, and no hope of escape from such a large invasion force, without capture.

Communal kitchens were set up to minimize the amount of fuel needed for cooking, but to stay warm in the winter months it was still essential to search for kindling and wood, and anything else that could be burned. Everything had to be made - soap soon ran out, and toothpaste had to be made by mixing soot and chalk dust.

By Christmas 1944, electricity was no longer available. Candles became scarce, and winter evenings were spent in semi-darkness by the light of a tin can full of oil, with a bootlace for a wick. Lack of warmth and gnawing hunger made winter on Jersey a true misery.

All food supplies were cut off altogether after the D Day landings of 1944 when France was liberated. Starvation began to stare people in the face. Many succombed to illnesses associated with malnutrition. When the first Red Cross parcels arrived on 27 December 1944, people wept.

My new novella, The Occupation is based on the story of  a Jerseywoman who hid her Jewish friend from the Germans. The real life story can be found here.

You can order the book (in an anthology with another ten WW2 novellas) by clicking the picture.


Links:
Channel Island website: https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Food_and_Rationing
Read more about the occupation of Jersey on the BBC
Or in The Telegraph

My website www.deborahswift.com
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The Meon Valley Railway - friendly, pleasurable, beautiful by Carolyn Hughes

Last month’s blog looked at the literary and historical associations of the route along which the Meon Valley Railway once ran, many of which associations referred to people and times well before the railway actually existed. This month, I am going to relate a little more about the railway itself, and the purposes it served during its brief half-century lifespan.
Route of the MVR, adapted from
the map in R.A. Stone’s book,
 The Meon Valley Railway, 1983,
Kingfisher Railway Productions.

Agriculture and horticulture

As might be expected in such an agricultural region, a good deal of non-passenger traffic for the Meon Valley Railway (MVR) came from shipping farm produce. In this part of Hampshire, the produce included watercress, fruit (especially strawberries and apples), milk and cattle. The London & South Western Railway (LSWR) put on special market-day trains, with both passenger carriages and livestock cars, that allowed farmers to accompany their livestock. There were local “pick-up/set-down” goods services all along the line, which called at every station to deliver and pick up any waiting goods.
Watercress has been grown in Hampshire for centuries. The area’s geology, with its chalky downlands, cut by clear chalk streams, provides perfect growing conditions. Apparently, in the 1800s, working people often ate watercress sandwiches, collecting the wild leaves themselves from rivers and streams. Watercress had a reputation as a panacea for everything from lethargy to baldness, scurvy and even freckles. Its popularity led to watercress farms being established throughout Hampshire. It was grown in gravel beds over which ran a constant flow of water from the mineral-rich springs fed by rainwater leaching through the chalk.
The commercial viability of Hampshire watercress received a boost in 1865, when a new railway line was opened between Alton and Winchester, connecting at each end with the existing LSWR line. The new railway was called the Mid-Hants Railway, although in time it became known as the Watercress Line, because it transported so much Hampshire watercress to London’s Covent Garden Market. One of the line’s principal stations was at Alresford, which was essentially the “watercress capital” of Hampshire. But watercress was also grown in the Meon Valley, at Warnford – in beds that are still actively producing watercress – and, when the MVR was built, it connected with the Mid-Hants railway at Alton, providing a fast route to London for the Meon Valley watercress growers. The Watercress Line is now a heritage railway.
Watercress beds at Warnford Photo © Tony Grant / cc-by-sa 2.0
The lower half of the MVR line ran through an extensive market gardening area. Strawberry growing was a very important industry for the area during the late 1800s to mid 1900s. An area just north of the Solent, around Titchfield and Fareham, bounded by the rivers Meon and Hamble, proved ideal for strawberry growing, the rather poor stony soil suiting the shallow-rooted plants, and a warm prevailing wind from the Solent reducing the risk of frost in the critical flowering weeks. In 1889, a LSWR station was built at Swanwick, a little to the north-west of Titchfield, specially to serve the local strawberry industry. In the late 1800s, the area produced as many as 7,000 tons of strawberries each year. During the weeks of the strawberry harvest, Swanwick station became one of the busiest stations on the south coast with the box vans of the “strawberry special” trains heading off to Covent Garden and across the country. But, while Swanwick was perhaps the focal point for the transport of strawberries, “strawberry specials” were also run on the MVR, with whole trains of strawberries being loaded at Mislingford and Wickham.
In the mid 1800s, the owner of the manor of Wickham, which included an area of the Bere Forest, built a settlement of houses for his forestry tenants, each house having an acre of land, at a place that was then, and still is, called Hundred Acres. The tenants found that the area was very suitable for growing fruit, and in particular for the production of early strawberries, and a few years later strawberries began to be grown there commercially. Initially the fruit was taken to Fareham station, six miles away, for onward transport to the London market and elsewhere. But the viability of the enterprise improved even further when the MVR was opened with a station at Wickham, only two miles from Hundred Acres.
It was in the 1960s that competition from imported fruit began to drive many producers out of business, and by the 1980s strawberry-growing as an industry in Hampshire was essentially over.
Strawberry fields in Hampshire
In the early days of the railway, all the MVR stations would have seen farmers bringing their milk in churns by horse and cart for despatch to the dairy at Portsea Island, in special milk vans attached to the normal passenger services. Livestock too travelled frequently on the line, to and from markets at Alton and Fareham. West Meon station was apparently the scene of the livestock of entire farms arriving by rail from such far away places as Cumberland and Northumberland, the farmers having hired special trains for the purpose. This must have been quite a sight!

Wartime use
With each outbreak of the two world wars, for the MVR, as for most railways, traffic increased, with the passage of troop trains bound for the docks and France. A box van was added to all MVR trains to cater for extra parcels and troops’ luggage.
In 1940, the MVR line received some attention from the German bombers. Droxford Station was hit and two railway workers' cottages were demolished. Bombs were dropped either side of the line at Soberton although they missed the track, but West Meon tunnel was also targeted and a stretch of track was damaged. Apparently, desperate telephone calls were made after this attack, in an attempt to stop the train coming down the line from Alton, and what might have been a serious accident was avoided. 
However, the MVR did have an important role in the Second World War. During the build-up to D-Day, men and equipment had to be moved to the south of England, and large numbers of tanks were moved by rail to Mislingford  goods yard, from where they were then dispersed to local lanes and fields for temporary storage. Mislingford was also the site of a temporary wooden platform to serve the large number of Canadian troops who were encamped in the Forest of Bere.
The remains of the Mislingford goods yard.
Public domain.
I have mentioned this before, in a previous History Girls post, but I will repeat a little anecdote about Mislingford. The old loading gauge at Mislingford still stands (if nowadays much hidden by vegetation) on what is now the Meon Valley Railway trail (which follows the old railway from West Meon to Wickham), so you can pass by it as you walk the trail. I’m not really a particularly mystical person, but I have occasionally sensed a “something” at this spot… The ghosts perhaps of those D-Day soldiers disembarking from the trains? The clanking of those tanks being unloaded from the trains? There is actually a timber yard close by, so maybe it has only ever been the rumble of machinery and the sound of workmen’s voices that I’ve heard…? Or maybe not…
But the railway’s most famous wartime role came in June 1944, when the War Cabinet met Allied leaders in a special train parked at a heavily guarded Droxford station. When the train arrived, in it were just the British prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, and the prime minister of South Africa, General Jan Smuts. Next day they were joined by Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, and Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, who arrived by car. And, the following day, the prime ministers of Canada, New Zealand, and Rhodesia came too, and Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, drove across from his nearby base at Southwick House. They were there to discuss the D-Day invasion.
Although the meeting was officially kept secret from Droxford residents, it seems that Churchill had chosen the station because it was near the coast and to the Allied command centre at Southwick. But there was also some speculation that the site was thought particularly secure because the train could be largely hidden by overshadowing beech trees, and there was a deep cutting into which it could be shunted if it came under attack.
Anyway, in the evening of the final day of their meeting, the 5th June, Churchill’s train pulled out of Droxford station and returned to London. And, shortly after midnight the following morning, Allied troops attacked Pegasus Bridge and, soon thereafter, the American airborne landings in Normandy began.
Droxford Railway Station in 1968 By Lamberhurst
[cc-by-sa/4.0] from Wikimedia Commons

Decline and death of the railway

With all the early excitement and anticipation of what the MVR might bring to the region, and despite its obvious value to the local agricultural and horticultural community, the line never fulfilled its initial promise.
As early as the years following the First World War, there seemed to be little or no demand for passenger traffic. The hoped-for London through-traffic never materialised, and after only a few years the London to Gosport services were cut back. During the summer months, Sunday excursion trains to the sea ran down the line, originating from Ascot and Farnham, but, without sufficient normal, daily passenger traffic, the line never really prospered, becoming only a rural branch line and a Hampshire railway backwater. The tourist traffic to the resort area of Stokes Bay (near Gosport) also failed to grow, with steamers preferring the more established ports at Portsmouth and Southampton. From then on the MVR only handled regular traffic between Fareham and Alton, and it wasn’t long before it became clear that there was no need for a frequent train service. Cutbacks were already being made by 1922.
It does seem that insufficient effort was made to promote the railway's services, with cheap fares, convenient schedules and more publicity. But, as early as the 1920s, there was also increasing competition from road traffic, with more and more commercial vehicles making serious inroads into railway revenue by competing for the carriage of goods. This applied to all railways, not just the MVR: rail passenger travel, as well as freight traffic, declined everywhere. And all railways began to make cuts.
Yet there did remain a demand for the MVR from local farmers: sometime in the 1920s, the parishes of Corhampton and Meonstoke asked LSWR to provide a halt in Meonstoke to “assist the local farmers in the transport of milk etc to the towns”. The potential site of such a siding was marked by a short piece of rail set into the ground, but the siding was never built. However, though the section of rail remained in place until 1960, when it was discovered by a farmer cutting hay, and damaged his machinery. The rail was then presumably pulled up!
But the MVR was an early candidate for closure and, in 1955, passenger traffic was withdrawn completely and freight traffic reduced. Local people protested, but to no avail. However, when the National Farmers Union made a strong objection to the closure on the grounds that the line was much used during the busy sugar beet season, an enquiry was at least launched into their case. But the closure proceeded nonetheless.
And so, in February 1955, a mere 52 years after the MVR had opened, the Hampshire Chronicle reported its final day:
“On Saturday last, February 5th, the Meon Valley Railway closed, and the last public trains left Alton to travel “down” at 4.30pm and Fareham to do the “up” journey at 7.46pm.”
Passenger numbers rocketed in the final weeks of operation, as people took their final ride on the railway. That very last train was apparently full of people, many of them, the paper asserted, people who often “attended the last rites of dying railways”. Many local people also watched the train’s final journey from the fields beside the track and from the stations’ platforms.
This MVR closure was long before the “Beeching Axe” of the 1960s, when many well-used yet still “uneconomic” railways were closed. Although goods services did continue for a few more years on the MVR, with a once-a-day service from Fareham as far as Droxford, and a similar service from Alton as far as Farringdon, by 1968 both services had ended.
There does seem little doubt that, when the Meon Valley Railway was closed to passenger traffic, it had been shown quite clearly to be unsustainable as a passenger railway. Yet it was nonetheless held in some affection.
When, on 5th February, that final train arrived back at Alton station, the Hampshire Chronicle reported that:
“…the final obsequies are observed. The Meon Valley Railway – friendly, pleasurable, beautiful – had come to its end.” 
Trackbed of the Meon Valley Railway, Chawton, Hampshire,
looking towards the south. Next stop along this line would
have been the halt at Farringdon. cc-by-sa/2.0

For detailed information about the old railway in the Meon Valley, see The Meon Valley Railway by R.A. Stone, 1983, Kingfisher Railway Productions.
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Publishing history by Mary Hoffman

This month's "guest post" is a bit unusual. Don't worry - you'll still have a chance to win a book tomorrow; it's not that different!

Readers may be aware that I run, with my husband, a small independent publishing company called The Greystones Press. We publish YA and adult fiction and most of our books have a historical element. Take the two we are bringing out on 4th October.

The adult novel is by Sophie Masson and is called Black Wings:
It is set in the French Revolution and covers many years in the lives of four people who started out as childhood friends but whose lives are pulled apart by the changes in France.


It’s 1788 in the Vendée in western France, and change is in the air. Reform is being talked of in the great world beyond, in Paris, and even the peaceful village inhabited by Jacques Verdun and his friends – aristocratic painter Edmond de Bellegarde, his beautiful cousin Flora, and young farmer Pierre Bardon – seems touched by new possibilities. But as events both in Paris and in the local community start to gather pace, as revolution breaks out and the traditions of centuries start to break down, friendships will be severely tested in the most unexpected of ways.
 
Jacques is a lawyer's son, madly in love with Flora, and friends with both Edmond the aristocrat and Pierre the farmer. The four of them take no notice of the social differences between them as they grow up and, as the three boys grow into men, they are all drawn in different ways to the principles behind the revolution. But when the Reign of Terror comes, they are pulled in different directions. Not all of them will survive.
 

 
Photo by Cat Sparks
 
Born in Indonesia to French parents and brought up in Australia and France, Sophie Masson is the award-winning, internationally-published author of over 60 books, for children, young adults and adults. Her latest books include the adult thriller duology, Trinity: The Koldun Code and Trinity: The False Prince, set in modern Russia; the YA historical thriller, Jack of Spades, and the picture book, Two Rainbows, illustrated by Michael McMahon. These are her social media details:
✽ Website: www.sophiemasson.org
✽ Blog: www.rebirdfeathers.com
✽ Facebook: www.facebook.com/SophieMassonAuthor
✽ Twitter: @SophieMasson1 

Obviously, since Sophie lives in Australia and The Greystones Press is UK-based, we had to conduct all the editing by email. This was a very enjoyable process, with a cordial to and fro across the ocean, through the ether, and we had enough time for the time difference between our countries not to matter.

I remember reading her submission on my Kindle, by a pool in a holiday home in Rhodes in the summer of 2016. It was a week after the Brexit vote and I was still traumatised by the result. Being plunged into another, older political upheaval was quite cathartic. And now, nearly two and a half years later, we have the finished book, with its fabulous cover designed by Justin Brown. 

In between, there has been a lot of hard work on both sides and yet, as we are now only a few days away from publication, it still seems like a kind of alchemy. Not base metal into gold, of course, but gold into even more polished gold.

The second book is YA fiction but also with a strong historical angle.


I have known this book, or its earlier incarnations, for many years. At one time it was called Blood and Roses but many other books share that name. There is no copyright in titles; you can call your novel Pride and Prejudice if you like, but I don't recommend it. We always search on the Net for existing books in order to avoid confusion but the best way to come up with the right one is to brainstorm and that is how this book was re-named.

This is its second cover, designed by Giorgia de Micheli, who is Italian herself, appropriately enough for a book set in Florence and the Tuscan countryside.
 
It's a story with a split timeline. The first hinges on family secrets. Three modern teenagers meet in Florence to discover the truth about a revered grandfather and a literary recluse. Their searches overlap and intertwine to reveal the shocking truth about past betrayal and present revenge.
For Jade and her twin sister Amber, it’s a family matter, trying to find out the truth about their Italian grandfather, who has just died. But they have no idea what a can of worms they are opening as they delve into a past full of betrayal, murder, sex and love.

Nico’s quest interweaves with the girls’ as he searches for the true identity of E J Holm, the author of the detective thrillers he devours. The victims and the killers in Holm’s books all seem to be linked to the Partisans who resisted the Fascists in Italy in World War Two.

Gradually, Jade discovers that her grandfather’s secrets are linked to that too. Who is E J Holm really? And what is his connection with the girls’ grandfather? 
 
We describe it as a double detective story that combines the secrecy and betrayal of Mal Peet’s Tamar with the search for an author as elusive as Elena Ferrante. 
 
It was easy working with Gill, who is UK-based and a regular visitor to Oxfordshire where the press is.
Gill won the Kathleen Fidler First Novel Award with her book The Ivy Crown (Hodder). Her later books include the DragonChild series and the Franklin’s Emporium series for A & C Black. She currently teaches Writing Fiction to adults in Rugby.

She has loved Italy ever since her first visit there in 1973 but it was 25 years later that she became fascinated by stories of the partisans who formed the WW2 resistance to Fascism. 
 
We share a love of Italy, and of Florence in particular, and an appreciation of Italian art. One inspiration for Gill was Botticelli's painting Primavera, in the Uffizi museum in Florence. You'll have to read the book to see how that fits in the plot, along with WW2 partisans and family secrets.

Publishers don't like YA historical fiction, which is odd, since it has never been more popular as a genre among adult readers. And it's one I feel comfortable writing myself, so we were delighted to take this book on.

So that's our list complete for this year and we hope you don't mind this ad and that you might want to read these yourselves.

www.greystonespress.com

 




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The Devil is in the detail by Rachel Hore




Rachel Hore is the author of nine novels, nearly all with historical settings.  Last Letter Home was chosen for the Richard & Judy Book Club in association with W.H. Smith.  She lives in Norwich and teaches creative writing part-time at the University of East Anglia. 

We hope that Rachel will soon be joining us on The History Girls. Meanwhile, here is a taster of her work.



Researching LAST LETTER HOME

Research for an historical novel can be a chaotic affair.  I’d always imagined a process whereby I’d read everything relevant I could lay my hands on, visit the sites, study objects in museums all before I began planning and writing the fiction. 

Unfortunately, I’m not the sort of novelist who discovers exactly what interests me about a subject until I start writing.  My relationship with research is therefore one that changes throughout the journey to the finished work. I thought it interesting to reflect on that journey with my recently published novel, Last Letter Home (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

Last Letter Homehas a dual narrative, featuring a youngish woman historian in the present, who investigates the story behind a collection of letters from the Second World War past between an English girl and a German refugee and finds in it connections to her own family.

I’d set novels in this period before (A Gathering Storm, A Week in Paris), so already had a general feel for the background. It was the locations and the characters that were different this time. Scenes in Norfolk, Egypt, Sicily and mainland Italy would all require detailed research, as would the possible trajectory of an enemy alien who was determined to join the British war effort.  I also intended to write about military engagement, a first for me. Part of my pleasure in writing is to try something challenging and new.

Before I thought of any of this a fuzzy, dreamlike scene of a woman in a wild garden kept coming to me, I think because I’d been visiting walled gardens in East Anglia. My favourites were the mature working garden at Felbrigg Hall, near Sheringham, and a more desolate one at Thornham Magna near Diss, which was being brought back into use.  I liked the communal purpose of these gardens, but also the sense of security they imparted; they felt like places of sanctuary from the troubles of the wider world.   A fictional walled garden became a central motif in my novel - a safe harbour for my wartime characters, and a liminal space between past and present.  A garden in Italy became important, too.

A garden in Italy rather like one in the novel


I love gardens, but am not a plantswoman, so I resorted to books and the advice of a good friend who is.  I relished an excellent tome published in 1930 entitled The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers by Sutton & Sons, and explored plans of walled gardens until the details of an imaginary one flowered in my mind.  Indeed it felt so real that I was dreadfully sad when I had to write about its spoliation as a result of wartime directives to grow more vegetables.

If a walled garden in Norfolk was where the past story began, wartime Italy is where it was to end.  The gruelling Italian campaign of 1943-45 particularly fascinated me because of the physical intensity of the fighting and the high level of psychological strain that participants endured.  The first scenes that I wrote take place in the present, in the mountains near Naples where historian Briony Wood is on holiday with friends. Here she views old wartime footage and is handed the all-important collection of letters.  By writing this episode I committed myself to featuring Italy, but in doing so my problems began.

It is my belief that historical fictions that purport to be realist, as opposed to fantastical, should be respectful of known fact and not betray the reader’s trust.  I  set out on this novel with Norfolk at one end of the past story and Italy at the other after reading in Frank Meeres’ Norfolk in the Second World War that infantry from the Norfolk Regiment took part in the Italian campaign, and in the firm belief that my German refugee, Paul Hartmann, could join the Norfolks and wind up in the aforementioned part of Italy where Briony went on holiday.  It was only when I was deep in the writing that I discovered to my annoyance that the movements of the Norfolk Battalion in Italy had not taken place where or when I had imagined them to, and nor had the men necessarily been involved in the preceding Egyptian battle that I’d planned to feature.

When faced with such a stumbling block the historical novelist has several options.  One involves substantial recasting and rewriting of the book.  Another involves fudging it and confessing this in an author’s note.  A third involves less rewriting, but more research – looking for evidence that underpins a slightly recast version.  In this case, the third option worked.  I uncovered examples of soldiers who’d become separated from their platoon, or whose companies had been decimated, who might then find themselves part of new ones in a completely different regiment.  In the chaos of war, all sorts of confusing and ridiculous things happen.  The challenge for the historical writer is to make  fictional versions of these seem authentic.   

Wartime chronology, again, nearly did for me when it came to tracing a realistic path for a German refugee who wished to fight for the Allies.  The King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens by Helen Fry recounts the experiences of many such men, but most of them had not become combatants until quite late in the war – the Normandy Landings being most commonly cited – because of earlier rules preventing them bearing arms.   How, therefore, could I credibly send Paul from an internment camp near Liverpool in May 1940 to fight near Cairo in June 1942?  Again, more detailed excavation provided the answers.  Paul could join the Pioneers, a non-combatant force.  From there appeals to his previous employer, a Norfolk baronet, led him to active service with the local regiment, then onto a ship bound for Suez. These odd kinds of things actually happened.

Should this level of detail actually matter to the historical novelist?  It depends how hardline you are, but they certainly matter to me and I believe they matter to readers.  Most often it’s even tinier details that thwart one, the ones not mentioned in the history books.  Fiction written at the time and memoir are good sources for discovering answers to problems such as how extensively electricity has been installed in rural areas, when people did and didn’t shake hands, who did someone’s laundry, how the telephone system worked.  Some of these snags the writer can save to check once they’ve finished writing, but occasionally key aspects of the story can hang on them so solutions can’t wait.  The writer must sigh, put down their pen and investigate.

The worst traps of all, though, are the questions you didn’t think to ask in the first place. I had no idea, for instance, when I wrote A Week in Paris, that a Wren wasn’t generally allowed on a ship until a reader with first hand knowledge pointed it out.   I’m still waiting for someone to challenge me with something similar in Last Letter Home. No doubt it will happen. It’s an occupational hazard, I’m afraid!
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The Kindness of Strangers By L.J. Trafford



Autumn is upon us. The summer is over. And I find myself reflecting on my holidays and my holiday reading.
One of my holiday reads was Eric Newby’s book Love and War in the Apennines. This is a memoir set during the Second World War and concerns a subject I knew little about prior to reading: the fate of British POW’s in Italy at the time of the Italian armistice in 1943.

Eric Newby was one such prisoner of war when on 8th September the Italians surrendered.
The British Authorities ordered the POWs to stay put in their camps thinking that the allied advance would be rapid. However, it was not and the Germans issued an order that all POWs should be marched northwards. 50,000 Allied troops were marched to new camps in Germany and Poland where conditions were far harsher than they had experienced in the Italian camps. Thousands died either from failed escape attempts or the harsh winter conditions.

Eric Newby managed to escape this fate. At his camp they had ignored the British order and the POWs had walked out on mass, their Guards letting them go. Though free of their incarceration they faced a new danger: the Germans
They had issued a proclamation that made their intentions clear:

“It is hoped the population will have the good sense to abstain from all inconsiderate activities - all acts of resistance - all acts of sabotage - all hostile acts against German Armed Forces will be constrained by severe counter measures.” 

With the Germans advancing Newby had to rely on the compassion and the help of the Italian civilians to avoid capture. A reward of 1,8000 Lira offered by the Germans per prisoner recaptured (around £4300 in modern terms) added to the danger faced by Newby and his fellow escapees.

But despite threats of execution for anyone caught harbouring escaped prisoners many of the Italian civilian population did offer help to those on the run. One Italian businessman Giuseppe Bacciagaluppi helped hundreds of British POWs escape to Switzerland. Bacciagaluppi was married to an English woman and with a home on the Italian/Switzerland border he was in prime position to help the escapees. He setup a network, with the aid of his factory staff, that helped the POWs cross over into Switzerland.
That Bacciagaluppi was betrayed by a colleague and arrested by the Gestapo in April 1944 shows the danger the Italian helpers were in. Indeed German proclamations stated clearly what anyone helping the loose POW’s might face.


4. Those giving refuge to Anglo-American escapees will be severely punished. 

5. Anybody that gives food, supplies or civilian clothing to Anglo-American escapees will be referred to the War Tribunal for the application of severe penalties. 


But help they did. As one RAF report said:
Italian civilians gave clothes, food, railway tickets and considerable 
sums of money to escaped POWs.

Iris Origo and family.
Iris Origo, an English biographer living in Italy during the war, recalls in her diary how four Englishmen were kept hidden by a Tuscan peasant:

“The peasant’s story is remarkable. He took in these four Englishmen at the beginning of October, when they were obliged to leave here, and fed and housed them –disregarding the danger as well as the expense – for over three months.” 

She herself assisted many allied prisoners of war evade capture.

This was the experience of escaped British POW John Mallen:

“I found what I considered to be good hideaways - one was a cave in an area of dense woodland and the other was a barn. It was just bare ground in the cave and I had just one blanket that I had been given. As I was still in the area I could still contact my Italian family through another person. The next night after I had done this, the 11 year old daughter arrived in darkness, at my cave. 'Giovanni, I heard... Camilla' And there she was with a big basket strapped onto her back loaded with meat, cheese, bread, a bottle of wine and a big bunch of grapes. Dear oh dear.... that was very welcome. Just imagine though a young girl going a mile and a half in the dark and taking that risk.” 


Newby himself evaded the Germans by hiding in the caves and forests of Fontanello in the Po Valley. He also experienced great kindness.

’No you can’t sleep in my hay," he said after another equally long pause. “You might set it on fire and where would I be then? But you can sleep in my house in a bed, and you will, too, but before we go in I have to finish with Bella." And he went back to milking her.

After injuring his ankle Newby was taken to the local hospital. Here he met a young Slovene nurse named Wanda. She gave him language lessons, a friendship formed. One which later became a romance.
But danger was ever present, as again John Mallen’s experience show:

“One early morning I was about to move off from my cowshed and I was looking around to see if anyone was around, any nasty people in German uniform, when I heard machine gun fire. The sound echoed round the valleys and it was hard to tell where it came from. Later I heard that a squad of Italian SS had tracked these Americans down to their hiding place. The sound I heard was them being shot. I was told by local people that it was the German SS.” 

Newby had his own encounter with the enemy up in the hills:
 “ I woke to find a German soldier standing over me.” 

Thankfully though this German’s interest was primarily butterfly catching. He had no intention nor desire to hand Newby over to his commanders.

Staying in multiple households, sometimes sheltered by shepherds, Newby evaded capture for five months. However, his luck ran out when he was betrayed by a villager and arrested. He spent the remainder of the second world war in camps in Germany and Czechoslovakia. After the war he tracked down Wanda and they married.


I found this book an engrossing read and formed a great admiration of the courage of both the POWs and the Italians who risked all to help them. 
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