THE POW'S NEXT DOOR

By Gill Wootten 

Did you dream of the sunshine and vino

In the wide, flat fields of the fen

As you laboured to bring in the harvest,

A gang of drab-overalled men?

The war you were caught in was over, 

Your leader hanged upside down

And you waited for repatriation

To war-ravaged village and town.

Did you think of your dark-haired bambini?                                                                                    

Would they know you when you walked in?

Then you saw, through a gap in the fencing,

A mop of black curls and a grin.

The men saw the children they’d left at home.

“She’s just like one of ours”,

And the little girl slipped through the palings 

To enliven their resting hours.

The fields you once toiled in grow houses,

There’s a bypass where Nissen huts stood

But an elderly woman remembers

That bad times can hold something good.

As a small girl just after the end of the Second World War we lived in a village on the edge of the fens in what is now Cambridgeshire.Next door was a pubThe King of the Belgians. During the Second World War the pub sign was taken down and the pub was requisitioned by the Army as a Prisoner of War Camp for Italian soldiers - with the Army personnel in the pub building, and the Italian prisoners in Nissen huts in the grounds behind the pub. 

When I was three, the war was not long over and the prisoners were still there. There was no barbed wire, no guard house, just a chestnut paling fence and a few British soldiers to keep an eye on things. I would often go to the camp and get lifted over the fence and spend time in company with the prisoners; the men made quite a fuss of me! 

Perhaps the fact that I was a small child, with a mop of black curls to remind them of their own children, gave me entry to their world … and to little treats such as a square of chocolate or a few raisins from their parcels of comforts. 

My special friend was Domenico, but don’t ask me his surname - I never knew it. He was just Domenico. He must have had some English, and I think he was a teacher in civilian life. Some of the prisoners were skilled at basketry and they made a wicker-work child seat for me on the back of my mother’s bicycle. Domenico also promised me that, if we could get some osiers, I could have a little shopping basket as well. 

My father had been demobilised by then so, one hot Saturday afternoon, my parents and I took the punt (with its motheaten gingery velvet cushions) up into the water lily strewn backwaters of the river and cut some osiers - a tall, whippy bunch, and plenty enough to make a small shopping basket.

We walked back from the river along the narrow path which divided our garden and the PoW camp … but there was a strange silence. No voices and no sound of movement came from the huts. “Domenico!”, I called. And again. And despairingly, “DOMEN-EEE-CO.” No response. No sign of life except a still-smoking cooking fire. We propped the osier bundle against his hut, hoping that because of some quirk of prisoner life everyone was elsewhere for the afternoon.

Next day we heard that, while we were on the river, lorries had suddenly arrived and the men had begun their journey home. I’m sure they were delighted. I cried for the loss of my friend.