Twenty-four years later I entered Boulters Lock again, this time with a chartered cruiser. The lockkeeper stared at me, then walked off to operate the gates. He came back, stared some more, scratched his head and said: ‘Wuurrent you the Gentleman who troyed to knock me gate down a while back?’ ‘I wurr,’ I replied. Clearly an impression made with a bang appears to be a lasting one – Confucius, he say.
We made some lovely trips on that old boat. It slept four and we had the most enjoyable company. One particularly memorable excursion took us down the Kennet-Avon Canal from Reading to Bristol. The canal, though no longer used by freight barges, had to be kept in navigable condition because of an ancient piece of legislation.
There were four of us aboard, Pat and I plus Hugo Rignold,[2] who was the then musical director of the London Casino, and his exceedingly glamorous girlfriend (and later his wife) Phyllis Stanley who had played the leading nun in Reinhardt’s The Miracle and was then an up-coming star under Charles Cochrane, the famous London producer of musicals. Phyllis called the much-shorter Hugo ‘The Woozle’ and their nightly activities in the forward cabin made almost as much of a bang as my collision with the lock gate.
It took us twelve days to make the 105-mile journey and we were hanging over the stern of the boat most of the way cutting off the weeds which were wrapping themselves around the propeller. When we arrived at a spot a few miles before Bristol, where I had arranged to meet a pilot who would take us across the mouth of the River Severn and up-river, Phyllis and the Woozle returned to London and another friend of ours was due to join us. I was to pick him up at Bristol station at 01.50 hours, but when I tried to start the car I had rented I found the battery was flat. The village was sleeping peacefully and I was reluctant to disturb anyone.
Looking around I spotted a light in a railway signal box and clambered up the stairs. The lone occupant who was making tea greeted me without surprise. I explained my predicament – there was this friend coming down from Gloucester on the night express and he expected to see me at the station. He didn’t know where the boat was moored. Was there a way to get a message to him on arrival at Bristol? ‘Before we go into that you’d better have a cup of tea’ said the signalman ‘aye – there’ll be something we can do. No hurry, though. Train’ll not be here for forty minutes’.
He poured me a cup of strong, sweet tea from an enamel can on the stove. ‘I reckon your friend can get off right here’, he said. And when the express approached half an hour later he set the signal for his sector at ‘closed’. The train stopped. I got aboard and quickly discovered my friend in a first class compartment. A few seconds later we were off the train and the signal went up. My tea-making friend refused a tip. ‘I like to do things for people.’ he said. ‘Have another cup of tea’.
They liked to do things for each other in England then, and what a change that was from Germany where people were busy doing things against each other most of the time!
One wonderful aspect about Pat’s and my relationship was that there was no jealousy – we were simply too close for that.
There had been one rather surprising incident at the Cafe de Paris when a hop-headed Swedish nightclub singer, Inga Andersen,[3] made a rather obvious pass at me. Pat accompanied her to the ladies’ room and poured a lot of cold water over her head to stop her from ‘getting too hot about Wolfe’. I never saw the doused Miss Andersen again.
When Pat was in a show I saw a lot of the actor Ferdy Mayne,[4] and his several girl friends. In fact, his charmingly dynamic activities in that area earned him the nickname of ‘The West End Stallion’ and I have sworn statements that he deserved it. My nickname was ‘Big Bad Wolf’.
16. GATHERING STORM CLOUDS
TIME WAS MOVING FAST, as it always does when life is full of joy and worry free. Then, in the autumn of 1938, came the Czechoslovakian crisis[1] and my first performance as a simultaneous interpreter – I translated one of Hitler’s maddest radio speeches for a group of friends. We dispersed, shattered, to burn the candle at both ends before disaster struck.
In February 1939, I made one last pre-war skiing trip to Davos[2] and, on the last day, I skied the whole of the ten miles downhill from the mountain’s top to the station to catch the train back to England. It was a glorious winter morning and fresh snow had fallen during the night.
The world was white and blue and golden. I stopped in the sun for a while and, leaning on my poles, I let my eyes wander over the endless ranges of the Alps.
Not fifty miles away was the German border. As I stood there, breathing it all in, I had a strong premonition that I would not see this beautiful picture again for a long time. It seemed unbelievable to me that men behind that border were planning war and destruction. There are moments in life one will always remember very clearly – that was one of them for me.
I thought long and seriously about freedom and decency and how fortunate I had been. I pictured England at war and thought of the friends I had left behind in Germany, who were now in German uniforms, and I sought to visualize the long, long road to victory. I thought about myself and I knew that I wanted to be in that war and yet had no idea how it would be done. To the British authorities I was a former German. What would I be allowed to do in this war to come? Would I be interned? Surely, with my political past and my father’s citizenship, which would have to be unearthed, this could be avoided.
During the train journey back to England I made plans to get into the British Army there and then. On my return I began to pull strings. The answer was utterly discouraging in every instance. It ranged from the reply that, ‘I was being silly since there would be no war’, to the statement that, ‘once a German always a German and I had no business trying to get into the British Army’. There were 40,000 similarly placed Austrians and Germans in England at that time, all of who shared my status.
Towards the middle of August 1939, I walked into the War Office and began asking where an alien could enlist in the British Forces. After wandering around the building for some time I reached a backroom where an official produced a form that, he thought, might apply to a case like mine. I filled in the form. It was the only form I have ever completed in England that didn’t, at some time or another, catch up with me again. It probably ended up in the wastepaper basket.
I called on the officer in Scotland Yard who knew me as the, ‘Hitler-abusing friend of Humphrey Sykes’. I wanted to know if I would be interned. No, he thought, certainly not. ‘Scotland Yard,’ he explained, ‘had all enemy aliens well taped’. There were no arrangements to intern anybody if war were to break out, and more useful information could be gathered by watching us whilst we were free – and anyway Scotland Yard had my dossier and I would be the last to be affected even if internment were to come.
A few days after war was declared on 3 September 1939, the orders affecting ‘enemy aliens’ were published. All would have to go before Aliens Tribunals[3] who would base their decisions on the police file, a personal statement and a testimony by sponsors who had to be British.
2
Hugo Henry Rignold (1905–1976) was an English conductor and violinist, who is best remembered as having been Musical Director of the Royal Ballet and conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
3
Known during the Second World War as ‘The Blackout Girl’, Inga Andersen was a Canadian actress and singer who entertained troops in Italy and was known as ‘Hildegarde of England’. She was also a record-holding speed skater, and an accomplished violinist.
4
Born Ferdinand Philip Mayer-Hocrckel in Mainz in 1916, Ferdy Mayne appeared in over 230 films and countless West End productions.
1
The German occupation of Czechoslovakia began in 1938 with the invasion of the Sudetenland, the former German-Austria border regions.
2
Davos, an Alpine town in Switzerland, was Wolfe Frank’s favourite place. He loved skiing and visited Davos often over much of his lifetime. He eventually had homes there and hoped that would be where his ashes would be scattered.
3
Aliens Tribunals were set up in September 1939 to make certain that no one who ought to be interned remained free. They also dealt with the proper disposal of all aliens whose activities, status, general character and disposition towards this country were investigated.