"It was known to be the residence of a Nazi Sympathiser and if there had been a German invasion, the occupants of that house--us!--would have been interned instantly."
Ian is 70 years old and lives in Alsager.
This is a story about a consideration which has puzzled me for years.
It was summer 1940 and we'd just moved into a new home near Chester Zoo. In those days houses in rural areas didn't have numbers. They had names instead and ours--Tregenna--was on the front gate. One day the local police constable called round. 'You must take that name off the front of the house', he said, but wouldn't tell us why. We had a friend that worked in the Liverpool branch of The Home Office and when he heard from his wife what the policeman had said, he rang us to insist that we took the name down immediately. The house, he told us, was on the blacklist. It was known to be the residence of a Nazi Sympathiser and if there had been a German invasion, the occupants of that house--us!--would have been interned instantly. Fortunately the German invasion didn't take place, although of course we changed the name as quickly as we could! Then a few years later my father was promoted and we moved to Tring in Hertfordshire. The house was odd in that in one of the two living rooms was a lovely marble fireplace. But in the other room there was just a rather cheap-looking reproduction Adam fireplace which was coming away from the wall. It looked really out of place. We didn't find out why until the builders came to refit it...When they did, they pulled the fireplace out, turned it around, and revealed on the back of it a perfectly proportioned Swastika! Once again we'd moved into the former home of a NAzi sympathiser, over a hundred miles from the first! What are the odds on that?! It makes me wonder how many Nazi sympathisers there were up and down the country, and how many people must have brushed shoulders with them...without even knowing it. | 
