Among the scant correspondence from Wodehouse’s war years, a small white postcard has survived, the message bluntly pencilled in slanted capitals. ‘GOODNESS KNOWS WHEN YOU WILL GET THIS’, he begins. The handwriting pales against the bold institutional typeface, which reads ‘Kriegsgefangenenpost’ – or ‘Prisoner of War Post’. It was October 1940, and Wodehouse was being held captive by the Germans. His complex journey through Nazi-occupied Europe to the camp in Tost, Upper Silesia, had begun five months earlier, at a critical point during the war.
P. G. Wodehouse to Paul Reynolds, 21 October 1940.
In the initial months of 1940, a move from Le Touquet seemed unnecessary. They lived, Wodehouse wrote in February 1940, ‘in an odd sort of backwater’.1 As Ethel described, the early part of 1940 was ‘a very delightful time, with our beloved R.A.F. squadron dropping in at all moments for tea. […] We would turn up the rugs after dinner, and dance to “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”. We would listen to the radio and hear that there was a slight bulge but nothing serious, we believed that the Germans were beaten already […] didn’t think they had a kick in them, because we treated the B.B.C. as our Bible. Then the Germans really got a move on, and our R.A.F. disappeared. […] We became a little anxious, but not seriously so.’2
As time went on, the Wodehouses were among a number of expat families in Le Touquet who stood firm. This was partly a practical decision. They were reluctant to leave their house, and their beloved animals, before it seemed absolutely necessary. It was also a sign of their faith in the British troops, and of their sense of the importance of ‘morale’. They, like their neighbours, hoped that the German invasion of France could be halted by the Allied Forces. They were wrong. The speed of the Germans’ advance took everyone, including British Intelligence, by surprise.
In the spring of 1940, a massive panzer tank attack was planned on France. On 9 May, the German troops stormed into Belgium and the Low Countries. British troops raced to the aid of the Belgians, leaving the Germans free to burst through the Ardennes Forest in the south, aided by Luftwaffe bombers in close support. By 15 May, the panzers were advancing virtually unopposed. On 20 May, Ethel set off for the local military hospital to seek advice as to the timing of their departure. The Commanding Officer reassured her that they were in no imminent danger, but the rest of the day was spent packing.
A fortnight later, France would see evacuation on a huge scale, as the Allied forces were carried to safety from the encircling German army by a hastily assembled flotilla of boats. While Churchill was praising Dunkirk’s ‘miracle of deliverance’, a catalogue of snags, errors and mechanical problems was unfolding back in Le Touquet. From daybreak, nothing went smoothly. Less than two miles from home, the Wodehouses’ car broke down, forcing a return to Low Wood. On their next attempt, they were separated from their neighbours, the Grants, who were also trying to escape. The Wodehouses loyally returned to search for them, and found that the Grants’ car had also broken down. A second night in Le Touquet proved to be decisive. As Ruth Grant recorded, ‘before the dew was off the rosemary bushes edging the lawn, through the green forest they rolled. First, the motorcycles, noisy, brutal and fast, then car after car in which the grey-green officers seemed to sit in tiers, all facing forwards, two or three on the folded hood.’3 The Germans had arrived.
Le Touquet under occupation was a strange, tense place. Ethel recalls that ‘a German sergeant and soldiers, marched in the house, and asked to see all our food supplies’. They ‘took practically everything’, and frequently returned to the house.4 Wodehouse was later to make light of the fact that, at any moment, he might find a German officer using his bathroom, or occupying his front garden. In reality, one imagines that he was appalled and fearful. As an ‘enemy alien’, Wodehouse was under continual surveillance, forced to report on a daily basis to a Kommandant with a glass eye in the Hôtel de Ville.5
In July, the Nazis feared sabotage, and decided that it was unsafe to leave British civilians free in France. All enemy males under sixty were to be taken into captivity. Wodehouse was fifty-eight years old, thereby failing to avoid internment by some fifteen months. When the summons came, he was given little time to prepare. Ethel remembers one lunchtime in the garden when Wodehouse appeared ‘and told me there was a German soldier in the Garden […]. He only had ten minutes to pack a suitcase. I was nearly insane, couldn’t find the keys of the room for the suitcase, and Plum went off with a copy of Shakespeare, a pair of pajamas, and a mutton chop.’6
Arrangements for civilian prisoners were makeshift and often primitive, and the Le Touquet group experienced the full force of this chaos. First the Germans took them to a former prison in Loos. Sitting in his cell, Wodehouse describes the ‘whitewashed walls, bed in corner under window. Large window about 5 foot by 3, air quite fresh. Granite floor. Table and chair chained to it – toilet in corner near door.’ Despite the objective air, panic creeps in. Even the fixtures and fittings have a malevolent edge. He notes the ‘two staples’ over the bed ‘for chaining dangerous prisoners’, only to correct himself jokingly in the margins: ‘No. Merely for fastening bed up’. For Wodehouse, it was imperative to resist looking at the dark side of things. The cold, the hunger, the endless marches – all are refracted through comedy. ‘Amazing how soon one gets used to this’, he notes.7
The prisoners were soon moved on to a former Belgian army barracks in Liège. By August they were held in a citadel in Huy, before transfer to an Internierungslager, or Ilag, in the town of Tost, Upper Silesia – in a former lunatic asylum. Conditions during Wodehouse’s earlier internment were sometimes almost intolerable. At times, he was transported from one camp to another in crowded cattle trucks full of human excrement. For many nights, he was sleeping on a thin straw mattress and no blanket, with twenty other men in the same room. There were weeks when he had very little food, relying on stale bread to get through, and during his time in internment, he lost over sixty pounds in weight, leaving him ‘looking like something the carrion crow had brought in’.8
But the camp at Tost was quite different. While sometimes bleakly monotonous – it was, Wodehouse remembered, ‘an enormous place with bars on all the windows and a general air of gloom’ – the camp itself was never unbearable.9 As McCrum describes, many internees ‘were in regular contact with the outside world, following events with patriotic interest, and having a highly motivated attitude to self-improvement. There was an internees’ newspaper, the Tost Times, for which Wodehouse abridged a story.’10 The internees seemed to have adequate food, attended chapel, and played cricket. ‘I found’, Wodehouse wrote, ‘I could still skittle the rabble out, but was helpless when I came up against a decent bat. […] We used to play in the yard with a string ball, but towards the end of my stay they let us out once a week to the sports field, where we had a real ball.’11
Wodehouse also had access to books and paper, and, eventually, a place in which to write and even a borrowed typewriter. Indeed, throughout his time, Wodehouse kept a diary and, as an extraordinary testament to his determination, continued to write fiction: his tale of aristocrats and small-time crooks, Money in the Bank, was completed in captivity.
Indeed, it was through the act of writing that Wodehouse managed to ‘get used’ to camp life, reimagining his world with so many fictional analogies. His fellow inmates, ‘Jocky’, ‘Algy’, ‘Arthur’ and ‘Scharny’ feature in his diary like motley schoolboys in ‘a junior dormitory at school’; a German officer is the ‘equivalent of the Colonel living at Cheltenham or Bexhill’; prison camp is ‘rather like being on the road with a theatrical company’ and ‘also like being at Hollywood’ – ‘a smile from a German Sergeant is as if you were smiled at by Capra’.12
Wodehouse knew that such fictions could only take him so far. A snatch from Don Quixote, recalled and inscribed in his diary, suggests a longing for a more complete escape – ‘Blessings on him that first invented sleep. It wraps a man all round like a cloak.’ Repeatedly, Wodehouse’s diary records his fear and anxiety. ‘Monotony terrible’, he notes. ‘One man was taken away from 9 children with no mother. Another’s mother died of shock when he was taken away, and his wife was in hospital having a child.’ The ‘great drawback’ he notes, ‘is apprehension – one feels we are alright so far, but what about when it rains at food time, or if sickness breaks out’. The absence of news from Ethel, he notes, ‘stabs me like a knife sometimes’.13
Ethel was, in fact, displaced from Low Wood soon after Wodehouse left. She recalls that ‘a German major came with a General and said he wanted to look over the house. He sat on the terrace the entire afternoon enjoying the view, then looked over the villa, and announced he wasn’t going to move, and his soldiers brought over everything and put them in Plummie’s bedroom. I could have killed him!’ Clutching an address of a trout farm some fifty kilometres away, which had been given to her by a French officer, Ethel was ordered to leave her home, and was driven away by a German soldier. She was only allowed a few personal possessions, but managed to take Wonder, their beloved dog, and Coco the parrot, who belonged to their friend, Gertie Dudley. Her arrival at the trout farm was a bleak moment: ‘My hostess met me at the door at a rather dreary house in a neglected field, and I was shown into a small back bed-room, there I sat for an hour or so, wondering how I should keep up my courage, and nearly out of my mind about Plummie.’14
Wodehouse was equally troubled by his separation from Ethel. Indeed, of all the hardships of Wodehouse’s time in internment, the worst, for him, was the fact that he felt he was writing into a void. Nevertheless, while it was extremely difficult for the pair to communicate, they did, after a while, manage to send each other letters. Correspondence with those in Britain was impossible, but America’s neutral position meant that Wodehouse could also write to his agent, Paul Reynolds. However, the unreliability of the Red Cross postal system, and the hand of the censor, meant that Wodehouse had little faith in his letters getting to their destination.
After three months at the trout farm, Ethel managed to get a permit to go to Lille, but she found it extremely difficult to find anywhere to stay: ‘everything requisitioned, not a hotel anywhere. At 8-o clock I gave it up and went to a restaurant, sat in the corner, and shed a few tears.’15 A kindly cashier took pity on Ethel, and temporary accommodation was found. Later, she found a bed-sitting room in Lille, where she stayed for three months, before moving back to the countryside.
Wodehouse, meanwhile, remained at Tost.
1 PGW to S. C. ‘Billy’ Griffith, 2 February 1940 (private archive).
2 Ethel Wodehouse to Denis and Diana Mackail, 26 June 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
3 Ruth Grant, ‘Diary’, p. 12 (Wodehouse Archive).
4 Ethel Wodehouse to Denis and Diana Mackail, 26 June 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
5 P. G. Wodehouse, ‘Apologia’ (Berg).
6 Ethel Wodehouse to Denis and Diana Mackail, 26 June 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
7 The Camp Notebook (Wodehouse Archive).
8 See McCrum, p. 285. McCrum quotes Max Enke’s Tost Diary (Wodehouse Archive).
9 PGW to Raven von Barnikow, 26 July 1942 (Wodehouse Archive).
10 McCrum, p. 293.
11 PGW to S. C. ‘Billy’ Griffith, 17 July 1945 (private archive).
12 The Camp Notebook.
13 Ibid.
14 Ethel Wodehouse to Denis and Diana Mackail, 26 June 1945 (Wodehouse Archive).
15 Ibid.