The Polish Connection 15

March 1916

Dear Barbara, Rebecca and my own dear Beth,

I am pleased to hear that Beth is doing so well with her friends, and how you say that nobody can tell that she is not a born English child. This is very good. I am improving in my English, both in speech and in writing with the help of my good friend Paul.

Paul has provided me with so many things. He has a trunk full of clothing which was kept from him, but now it has been returned to him, (another one is lost) and he is sharing his things with me. It is quite funny to see him walk around the camp. He wears pure white flannels – and certainly sticks out. Paul has found two nails, and he has hung up some of his garments on them, and it makes our area look almost like one of normality. Another time he was enriched by two small boards which he used to make a head-rest, and sleep became more possible for him. He has his trunk packed in such a way that the most necessary things are to the top – but underneath he seems to have a lot of very unnecessary things like dress suits.

Love from Peter

I have put together two of Paul's letters - as one continues from the other.

Dear Barbara,

I must say a sincere thank you from both of us for the box of goodies which you contrived to send to us. It arrived fine, and we were the envy of all around as we ate our homemade cake – you say you call them brownies. And the soap and flannels were most welcome too. Thank you again.

I do not know how it came about, but all at once the camp seems to have become a sort of organized community. In the first days it was a rabble, or rather two rabbles, for when our rabble arrived the camp was already half filled with a previous batch of prisoners. The two batches are very unlike. Ours consists mostly of men who have lived for years, in some cases nearly all their lives, in England: business-men, merchants, well-to-do people, but also waiters, hairdressers, small tradesmen. A middle-class collection of many shades. Our predecessors are entirely different. They are people who had been taken off steamers and cargoes, German or others. They are mostly sailors, but there are a good many nondescript and some rather romantic individuals amongst the lot. I don't know the reason of this incongruous mixture. It is rather exceptional, for the authorities try as a rule to keep the classes separate.

There is a perfect example of that policy in one of the compounds of Knockaloe which is inhabited solely by men live on the earnings of women more poetically called 'filles de joie' There had been, I learnt, a flourishing trade in that article of export from Hamburg to London, and these men had followed the daughters of joy in order to keep an eye on them. The neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road had been their gathering-place, but at the outbreak of war the men had been interned and later on sent to Knockaloe. The women have been, I suppose, sent out of the country, but the fate of the men seems more extraordinary, for surely of all prisoners they are the least capable of carrying on with normal jobs in an internment camp. What can one thousand such individuals do with not one daughter of joy between them? There is no way of finding out the truth, for we do not come into contact with inmates of other compounds, except of the two adjoining our own to whom we can shout through the wire.

Our compound, at any rate, is mixed, and perhaps that makes some sort of interior administration all the more necessary, but all the same, I wonder how it managed to create itself out of nothing. There is a ‘captain’ to every hut, and a ‘chief-captain’ to head them all and they must have been elected, but why one should have voted for anyone in particular out of that crowd of unknown people I cannot imagine. I didn't vote, and I don’t know if Peter did or not. But I was certainly surprised when I discovered our hut has a captain who looks like one of the stout, middle-aged gentlemen in frock-coats in one of London's great emporiums. He quite feels the importance of his position though; he really looks on himself as a superior officer, and the strange part was that there are a good many people who share his opinion and who like having a person of authority above them.

Best wishes,

Paul

Not only could I share John’s letters with Peter and Paul, but I had a good time telling John about their adventures when I wrote to him. I felt like our lives had been brightened up enormously with all this correspondence. And of course I also had the articles from the local paper to share with them.

SWORN IN

On Wednesday night at the Scout Drill Hall, Mellor, 23 of the Mellor Platoon of the Derbyshire Volunteer Regiment were sworn in as Special Constables to serve in the case of air raids. Mr. William Jowett and Colonel C.R. Wainwright were the officiating magistrates.

I wonder if Peter remembers that Mr. Jowett was one of his potential employers.

John’s latest letter was very English, all about the weather.

Dear Barbara, Rebecca and Beth,

Here I think the summer is on the way at last. The temperatures are getting on towards the 70º-80º mark now but the nights are very cold though the contrast is much more marked than in England. Last Wednesday night we had a most fierce tropical storm. There was a ripple of thunder about during the evening and then about 11 when I was just going to bed there was a terrific succession of blasts and the wind rose to from absolute stillness to gale force almost instantaneously in fact during the time it took me to walk over to my tent, about 50 yards. Just as I reached my tent it started to rain and the water came straight through the top canvas fly sheet and the roof of the tent as if they were wide mesh netting or something. The water also drove in under the walls in a great river across the floor. After about three minutes during which time about 12 tents were flattened or blown away in the camp, and nearly every bed was soaked through the rain changed to hail, with stones about the size of golf balls. This lasted about a minute and then it stopped just like that. Near all the telephones in the camp were out of order, a large number of the posts were blown down and goodness knows what else. It will take the rest of the week to get straight. I much enjoy your letters and hearing about your friends in the Isle of Man.

Love from John (daddy)