My wife’s Joan Bull triumph in Germany

THE BBC’s drama, SS-GB, showing scenes of prominent London buildings draped in swastika flags, took me back to the Seventies, when I was living in Hamburg, Germany. My wife and I lived in the top flat of a building directly opposite another road. One day we learned that a film company was planning to be shooting down the road opposite, giving us a grandstand view. The film was set during World War II, so to add authenticity, several houses were asked to display from their windows a large flag bearing a swastika. During a quiet moment I took a stroll down this road, and found it unnerving: just 30-odd years earlier, and still in my lifetime, all of this would have been for real! Later in the day, my wife answered the door and got involved in a heated argument with someone. She explained it had been a man from the film company and, as our flat would have been in just about every shot, would we also display a flag? My wife gave him an emphatic ‘No!’, saying she was British and felt insulted to have been asked to do such a thing. The chap was promptly sent packing down five flights of stairs with his flag between his legs! Later, she said it’s a pity we didn’t have a Union Jack, even if only a small one. She said we could have surreptitiously displayed it to great effect. Imagine, then, the poor tired director late into the night studying his rushes and discovering, in among all of his flags, there lurking in the background, a Union Jack! Oh, Mrs C — what a wicked, wonderful wife you are!

David H. cox, Kidlington, Oxford.