Most of us are suffering from a serious lack of female company
Stuck in a German Pow camp for five years, Guards officer ROGER MORTIMER poured out his heart in highly indiscreet letters to a married woman — as we reveal in the final part of the acclaimed author’s acidly witty memoir
CAPTURED by the Germans in May 1940, Captain Roger Mortimer of the Coldstream Guards had now spent five months as a prisoner of war. All that time, he had kept up a spirited correspondence with Peggy Dunne — a married woman who had been urged to write to him by a mutual friend. As time slipped by and the war showed no sign of ending, Roger’s mood began to change…
13 NOVEMBER 1940 OFLAG VI-B [PoW camp, Warburg, Germany]
Our room [of nine PoWs] remains on excellent terms with one another: the conversation is pretty smutty but it has one great compensation: smut seldom leads to arguments and quarrels.
I’m afraid I’ve become a ghastly prig and have a cold shower every day, do PT after breakfast and teach German after lunch.
JANUARY 4, 1941
I’m Going slightly mad, long periods of intense gloom being varied with short spells of senseless hilarity. Luckily, I find that prison seems to banish one’s sexual desires, so I don’t suffer very badly in that respect.
I’m learning veterinary work under an rAVC [royal Army Veterinary Corps] colonel, which might be useful. I also do barber’s work, sewing, darning and have even scraped someone’s teeth.
In March, Roger was moved to a camp in Thorn, northern Poland. Some of the rooms were permanently flooded with several inches of water and the British PoWs were often freezing cold.
7 MAY STALAG XX A
I heard today that my very young cousin, david mitchell, has been killed. Our family war effort is now rather reduced — as out of five starters, two are dead, one in prison, one in hospital with boils on the bottom and only one in circulation.
In June, Roger was sent back to his original German camp.
JULY 12
Your photograph dropped out [of your letter] during censoring and was pinned on the public noticeboard to await claimant. I must say, it was remarkably unflattering and remained there for two days before I recognised it.
I laughed when you told me that my mother thought you were nourishing a secret passion for me: how disappointing for her if she only knew the circumstances of our friendship.
Well, I must be off for my evening stewed prunes, so trying for the palate but most beneficial for the bowels.
I think I’ve got a real life-sentence look about me now. I have just been told I look like an aged and despondent horse awaiting the arrival of the slaughterer.
5 AUGUST
I’m In such an unusually good temper I think I’d better write to you, as you may get a change from my usual whines. I attribute my improvement to ten days of compulsory solitude [unexplained].
Anyway, the change has done me a lot of good, as my behaviour before was so objectionable that some people thought I was going through the change of life.
I’ll send you a revolting picture of myself, so nasty in fact that I feel I’m taking a needless risk in sending it.
SEPTEMBER 2
I’m Moving to a very nice room next week — only two others in it. I’m looking forward to the change: after all, I’ve been living for a year on terms of honeymoon propinquity with nine very reasonable people, but we have all sensibly decided to have a change before we start to loathe each other.
That October, Roger was moved to a purpose-built camp in Warburg. It consisted of many huts surrounded by two 12ft-high barbed-wire fences, and watchtowers manned by heavily armed guards.
OFLAG VI/B
I’m Now settling in this new camp and feel in pretty good form in spite of a severe cold and a broken rib [unexplained]. I’ve succeeded at last in mastering the technique of detachment; in a room of 16, I can work or read in peace, regardless of what the other 15 do: it is quite impossible to disturb me or annoy me. DECEMBER 3 Do you know rachel Willoughby? Years ago, 12 at least, I nurtured a hopeless and desperate love for her. unfortunately, being morbidly shy, whenever I met her
I could only sweat and make friendly noises — a fairly unattractive combination.
however, I believe that even now if she switched those big eyes on to me, I should be reduced to the same awful condition in about five seconds.
DECEMBER 3 [postcard]
Provided I’m not in prison for long, I think it may have done me a certain amount of good. Anyway, I have several friends who laugh at the same things and am seldom unhappy except during prolonged constipation.
DECEMBER 18
I Luckily have an extremely retentive memory as regards racing and at the end of a season I can guarantee to give the correct breeding of 95 per cent of the courses during the year.
This may be due to an unsavoury habit of reading racing up-Todate in the bath and horses in Training on the WC.
By the way, the best way for your children to learn geography is to have a good map hung in the WC.
What hell for you losing your nurse [nanny]! I loved both of mine and wept horribly after they left, the last when I was 14.
God, how I hated my governesses. I remember flooring one with a well-timed uppercut to the left breast and I’ve never regretted it for a second.
This place is in some ways like a girls’ school — terrific ‘pashes’ and lots of smutty gossip.
JANUARY 16, 1942
In A place like this, what you mentioned is certain to crop up and it is amazing how it changes people’s characters. most of them take it terribly seriously, just like a boy of 18 having his first affair.
Were you ever at a girls’ school? If so, you can imagine the situations that arise. Luckily, lack of place and opportunity are a fairly good safeguard to things going too far. FEBRUARY 3 Most of us here are suffering from a serious lack of female company. A letter from any girl I’m at all fond of almost makes me blub!
MARCH 19
I Should like your opinion of how many wives of husbands who
are PoWs are likely to remain absolutely ‘faithful’ during the separation. I say about 45 per cent, but idealistic and optimistic married men reckon 85 per cent!
The thaw has come at last and the ditches are in full flow, so there has been a brief craze for racing small chips of wood down the drains. Entry fees are ten shillings or one pound and there are often 15 or 20 starters.
APRIL 4
Sometimes circumstances combine to drag me down until you eventually tire of struggle and are prepared to slip away from it all.
Usually, though, the instinct for self-preservation prevents you from doing anything more drastic than indulging in a period of very morbid self-pity.
I think insomnia, love and indigestion make me more miserable than anything else.
APRIL 6
I’ve just received your long letter, asking me to give a description of myself. I am frequently told I have ‘a very bitter tongue’. This is, I’m ashamed to say, fairly true, but I make a point of not applying it to friends. I have few moral scruples but loyalty to my friends is one of them. About other people, I admit I am not particular and probably mischievous and malicious.
I’m bone idle, loathe late nights, parties and shooting. I’m too lazy to have many serious love affairs but have short and not unhappy ones. I prefer married women to single (to be continued).
APRIL 6
Continuing from the [last] letter, I dislike possessive people, hearty jolly persons, people with an inflated sense of self-entitlement, a great many debutantes.
I’m quite keen on soldiering — I like coarse jokes and most tarts. I enjoy most riding at about 8am on a spring morning, playing real tennis at Lord’s, fooling with Ronald [their mutual friend, guardsman Ronald Strutt], reading history or just sneering at things in rather a cheap way.
JUNE 18
Some of the [german prison guards] are, I am afraid, very unpleasant indeed and from all accounts go far beyond the bounds needed in looking after young boys.
JULY 17
I Received a vast number of books the other day, mostly from you. I took them off to my bed, rather like a dog taking his bone to the basket.
In September, roger was transferred to a purpose-built camp in eichstätt, bavaria. SEPTEMBER 19 OFLAG VII B, Block II my only regret [about the move] is that I have had to leave my old mess with whom I’ve been for 27 months. Luckily, one of them has come with me and we are sharing a bed.
NOVEMBER 8
Life here is rather unsettled as a number of officers and other ranks are segregated and in handcuffs. However, it’s no earthly use worrying or thinking ahead: after all, the final result of the war is not in the least affected by what they choose to do to us here.
We all look as if we’ve been kept too long in a damp cellar, as if toadstools could grow on us anywhere.
NOVEMBER 30
I’vE decided to live quietly in Ireland after the war. In actual fact, I shall probably, if I’m lucky, get a dreary little job in London and live in a temperance lodging house in the Cromwell Road. DECEMBER 31 Our room has just been distempered and it’s made quite a difference to the combined bedroom, pantry, larder, kitchen and dining room where, with 17 others, I pass 23 hours out of 24. We live in our room with everything shared, which smooths out most petty squabbles and gives one more incentive to carry out the endless room chores. no one is allowed to take anything seriously and such things as one’s religion, parents, regiment, war experiences, come in for pretty severe chi-hiking [jeering].
We all think ourselves amazingly cynical and amusing, whereas in actual fact we’re very childish and sour about our own failures.
FEBRUARY 10, 1943
To improve my german, I’m laboriously translating Alice In Wonderland. frankly, I doubt my version would convey to a german much sense of the original.
I’ve had ample time to sit down and think what an awful bloody fool I’ve been in the past, and how I’ve wasted time, money and opportunities. I don’t grudge the money a bit, but I do grudge the time now I’m growing middleaged [Roger was then 33].
one thing I have learnt — when times are really hard and difficult, the veneer of birth, education, etc. is shown to be amazingly thin.
MARCH 4
I’m afraid I’ve been giving the wrong impression, as I’m not in chains myself. The chained people don’t wear them in bed or to go to the lavatory, a point which appeared to be puzzling you. By the way, I’ve always wondered how [aviator] Amy Johnson managed on her long flights.
Come for a month to germany with me after the war. It’s a lovely country.
APRIL 2
Sorry I haven’t written for over a month but for some time past I’ve been under a cloud and have had to rest by myself. In spite of advancing age [he was now 34], I feel pathetically full of spring feeling: as you can imagine, there is no outlet here for any seasonal urge that one may happen to possess. I’d give my ears for just one day at newmarket. APRIL 20 For the past two days, I’ve sat all day watching two goldfinches just outside my room — a simple pleasure but one I’ve never had enough leisure for before.
We get a lot of fun out of our actors here: they shoot a tremendous phoney line about art for art’s sake and sacrificing their leisure to entertain the camp. In
actual fact, they take up more room than they’re worth, squabble hideously over their parts, show off their dreary temperaments and usually provide only the dingiest type of amateur theatricals.
If one criticises the performers, one is either completely blind to real art or an ungrateful swine! Frankly, I’m afraid I must be both.
Today is the sort of day that makes me homesick — warm and wet, with rain dripping off the leaves and everything very green and new.
MAY 9
I’m cook (temporarily, thank God!) and feel about whacked after hacking up some spinach and pounding up stale crusts and broken biscuits with a chair leg.
MAY 31
IT’s a little depressing reading history — the same mistakes over and over again, the old lessons never learned, and the human race not merely imperfect but perennially foolish and often criminal and beastly as well.
JULY 4
Life has been very dingy here, as most of my friends have been sent to other camps. I’m more depressed and lonely than I’ve ever been before. I’m nothing like as mentally tough as I was, and prison without one’s friends is about the end.
AUGUST 1
I’ve just re-read two of my favourite books — Anna karenina and sassoon’s Fox-Hunting man. Frankly, I couldn’t live more than a fortnight with any of Tolstoy’s women. They spend their entire time in raptures of passion or floods of tears — an exceedingly tiring combination.
It’s very odd how many people turn Roman catholic in prison. can you account for it?
AUGUST 31
Well, here I am at the end of my fourth summer in prison — physically somewhat more bent and decrepit, mentally a great deal more childish, but on the whole not much to grumble about, and if needs be I daresay I could do another four.
SEPTEMBER 3
Quite honestly, I should be very lost without your letters: you are almost the only person I hear from whose letters aren’t a series of drab commonplaces mixed up with a few sops in the shape of foolish optimism — I’ve been told ‘next christmas’ since August 1940! can I come and stay with you for a few days after the war?
DECEMBER 20
I’ve got a sudden craze for theological philosophy, but find my slender knowledge makes me easy prey for cultured catholics and earnest atheists.
JANUARY 31,1944
I heard from one of the repatriated prisoners the other day, and he said what struck him most was how small women were!
I have only spoken to a woman once in the last three and a half years, when I had the good fortune to have a tooth stopped by a most charming and efficient woman dentist. The combined effect of being both a prisoner and totally unused to female company was to make me feel appallingly gauche and adolescent.
FEBRUARY 29
Now there is one thing I am anxious to know. Has the social order in england completely vanished? Are hunting, big houses, Ascot, the ‘privileged’ class mere memories of the past?
JUNE 30
I have got a knitting craze for the moment: yesterday I ran up rather a pansy little white tie out of the sleeve of an old tennis sweater, and today I’m fumbling feverishly away at a three-strand sweater for myself using the unexpended portion of some caggy old socks for the wool.
some new prisoners arrived last week: frankly I find them a little tiresome as a rule: they are either patronisingly sympathetic to us old deadbeats or else they bull***t most aggressively about the war.
1945 [UNDATED]
I don’t think any particular political party attracts me much. I rather prefer the Labour Party for home affairs but their ideas of foreign policy have always shown an almost contemptible lack of realism. I suppose the ideal statesman is the idealist who realises what can be accomplished in his own generation.
Personally, I welcome any scheme for social security, provided the country as a whole is made aware of its obligations as well, such as military service. Between the last two wars, we all got deplorably soft and any idea of service to the country was regarded as reactionary and tyrannical.
do you think sour old Gibbon [author of The History of The decline And Fall of The Roman empire] was right when he wrote: ‘History is but the catalogues of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’?
POSTSCRIPT BY ROGER’S SON, CHARLIE MORTIMER
On APRIL 14, 1945, as the u.s. Army finally approached the camp, my father and all the other prisoners were marched out by their German guards.
Before they could reach another camp, the column was attacked by American fighter planes.
The pilots had mistaken the PoWs for German soldiers. Fourteen British officers were killed and a further 46 wounded.
dad’s fellow PoW desmond Parkinson wrote in his diary: ‘The most tragic, terrifying and emotional day of my life — anyway, as a prisoner... as the first plane came over, it opened fire and all others followed suit.
‘Again and again, the planes swept down and strafed us from practically road level. mercifully, they must have used all their bombs on the lorries. By this time, Freddie, John, morty [Roger] and I were trying to make ourselves as small and inconspicuous as possible.
‘We felt horribly exposed and very frightened. my first instincts were of selfpreservation, but this soon gave way to complete fatalism, punctuated by prayers and thoughts of my family.’
my father escaped unscathed. Afterwards, in common with many other men of his generation, he seldom talked about being a PoW — and on the odd occasion he did, it was cushioned by humour.
For instance, I remember him telling me: ‘There was never a time as a prisoner of war that was quite as bad as the first term at my preparatory school.’
many of his fellow prisoners remained friends for life. He even made early overtures to Germans: a few years after the war ended, my parents — who had met and married in 1946 — invited some over for lunch on christmas day. my grandmother walked out in disgust.
Nevertheless, I clearly remember driving across the border into Germany with my father in 1966 on a family holiday to Baden-Baden. As he reached into his briefcase to hand over our passports to the border guard, he was visibly shaking.
did he meet Peggy after the war? He must have done, though I know little more about her beyond that she had three children, divorced in 1944 after 14 years of marriage and lived well into her 90s.
As for my father, he settled in Newbury, became a racing journalist, had three children and died in 1991.
Vintage Roger, by Roger Mortimer, edited by Charlie Mortimer, is published by Constable at £16.99. © Roger Mortimer and Charlie Mortimer 2020. to buy a copy for £13.60 (20 per cent discount), go to mailshop. co.uk or call 01603 648155. offer valid until February 28, 2020, P&P free.