Living with the Germans - Sweets and a car ride

The first contact with a German was when we were at Ker Maria School. there is a house there called Doman, they had the Red Cross thing there, and the German Doctor was there. He was coming along the road and he was very good with children. Whether this was him or whether he was told to do it, but I asked him for sweets, ‘sugarreiden’, if I remember rightly. My mother would have beaten me to death if she had known I had asked a German for sweets!

I thought he was about 40 — 50 [years old], “Oh yes, come with me”, we went into this house, there was the red cross on the front, which had been painted on, that was their field hospital, and he gave me two tubes of sweets. He said, “Don’t you tell anyone, I can’t give them all away”. Then I went to school, put one tube in my pocket and the other one I was eating. They were very funny sweets, dissolved in your mouth, very sweet. Anyway it didn’t take long for the rest of the form to find out I was eating sweets. I wasn’t beaten for them but I had to share them out. I only had one tube, but they didn’t know I had another tube. And it wasn’t for years and years later I realized what he had given me, glucose tablets for the troops, energy!

The next German I met was a German officer, it must have been when they were building the Vardes and we were playing in the Salines Road. A car came along and it was the typical staff car you see in films, open top, summer this was, and this German officer in it and he stopped —I thought, “ Oh my God, that’s it, we’re dead!” — He got out and he spoke English. We thought well, that’s a good thing, anyway. He wanted to know the way to the Vardes, the Grand Maison Road. We said
“Do you want the gun emplacements?”
“ Yes,” he said.
We knew the way to the Vardes so we were able to direct him, but of course he wasn’t quite sure, so we said
“Shall we come in the car with you?”
He said “Yes, but just to the end of the road,”
So the first time I had ever been in a car was a German staff car.
I must have been 7, I suppose.
MALCOLM WOODLAND

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