The winter of 1947, the second one of peace, was a dreadful one as older forum members will remember. Temperatures barely climbed over freezing between late January and early March and easterly winds brought many blizzards with them. For some children this was the source of great entertainment, such as these three schoolboys - who have appeared in this forum before - enjoying the icy conditions on the Chester Road (the A452) in Streetly.
But as the winter progressed the snow and ice on that road, initially so wonderful for tobogganing, deteriorated into a dirty, rutted surface of compacted ice and grit, as hard as rock. Eventually a squad of German POWs was drafted in to deal with it and they inched their way from the Parson & Clerk onward in the direction of the Hardwick Arms and perhaps even beyond. I watched them from the front window of our house as they toiled away in the road outside. They were the survivors of the Afrika Corps, or the long, slow withdrawal up the Italian peninsula or the retreat through France and the Low Countries. But now they were here outside our house, dressed in drab clothing, dark donkey jackets with POW stencilled on the back and many of them still wearing their Wehrmacht soft caps. One group patiently hacked away at the hard shell on the road with their pickaxes whilst the other shovelled the debris onto an accompanying lorry. Dreams of conquest and the heady days of summer 1940 with all its glory and swagger must have been a distant memory and by now, for most of them, their captivity was being measured in years. A few of them would elect to stay in this country but eventually most would go home, to pick up their lives in still ruined cities and within sundered families.
There was never any contact with them. My mother would hurry me past whilst my own attitude was always one of mild curiosity mixed with a modest, lingering apprehension - after all it was not so long ago that I had been firmly convinced that the aim of every single German was to arrange my personal demise by bomb, gas or bullet. I don't know what my parents' attitude would have been. Perhaps by then it would have been softening a little - but the indignation and anger of having been pitchforked into war by Germany for the second time in their lives, then all the fear and finally in early 1945 the outrage and hatred which erupted when the details of the camps, particularly Bergen-Belsen, were revealed would linger for a long time and perhaps leave its traces for the remainder of their lives. My father once said that the Germans were always either at your throat or at your feet. These fellows labouring away a few yards from our front door were definitely at our feet and it would have been difficult not to feel sympathy for them as individuals, the vast majority of them probably deserving our goodwill.
Of all the German and Italian prisoners I saw from time to time I only ever identified one as a separate human being. This was not in Birmingham but on a farm in South Devon where we had our first postwar holiday in August 1945. "Hans" was a sunburnt, blond-haired fellow who had been allocated to the farm and I regularly saw him going about his various duties. Again, for me, mild curiosity but little more and I don't think I ever spoke to him. During the following winter the "Daily Mail" told us what later happened. The story was that the lonely Hans had developed some sort of fondness for the farmer's daughter and when that became obvious he had been warned off by her two brothers, no doubt in fairly uncertain terms. Hans in due course went into one of the old barns, set it on fire, sat down in a corner and used a shotgun on himself. Revenge? Loneliness? Hopelessness? Just one further individual tragedy after so many others.
Chris