How the Girl Guides Won the War

After Hitler’s Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland in May 1941, the fear of invasion grew amongst the girls. ‘The Germans had been so successful at invading France, Poland and the Netherlands. Why would the English Channel stop them?’ said Gretel. ‘We knew we would have been the first to be imprisoned if the Germans came.’ ‘It affected us refugees especially,’ explained Ruth. ‘We Jewish, we feared that we would be the first victims and be caught. We started preparing ourselves to cope, defend ourselves and fight.’

The Swallow patrol decided that they must Be Prepared, so they worked out a plan: as soon as they heard that the invasion of Britain had started, the younger Guides would climb trees. If they saw the enemy approaching they would signal in Morse with their torches to the older Guides, including Ruth, waiting nearby. The older Guides would then lure the enemy soldiers into the stinging-nettle fields by running ahead of them. ‘When we had them in the field we would hit them in the face with the stinging nettles,’ said Ruth, ‘and then cut them with our Girl Guide penknives, which had blades about one inch long. In order to prepare for this grand plan we needed to make ourselves immune to the nettles’ sting. We began to run though the fields with our bare legs, and fought each other with the nettles. When we all came home with swollen legs, arms and faces, matron was very angry with us. We never revealed to her that all we really wanted to do was to protect England and ourselves.’

One day while Gretel and Ruth were hoeing a field they saw something that terrified them. ‘A white half-round shape appeared on the horizon,’ said Ruth. She and Gretel were sure it was a parachute, and that they would have to put their plan into action. ‘A few minutes later a man clad in khaki, with a gun slung over his shoulder, came by on a bicycle.’ The girls were certain that the invasion had begun. Panicked, they ran to the nearest house, which happened to be where Sir Samuel’s son Peter and his wife Judith lived. The door was answered by the butler, Arthur, a handsome young man, small, thin and dark-haired. ‘We told him what we had seen, and immediately he hurried with us back to the field with his Charlie-Chaplin-like stride. We arrived breathlessly at the field, to discover that our parachute had risen to become a bright, full moon. We were embarrassed. The man on the bicycle was a rabbit hunter coming home from a hunt. How could we have known?’

‘To begin with, the English evacuees stood apart, but once our English improved, we all mixed together,’ said Gretel. ‘But we foreign evacuees were quite a tight bunch. All of us had left our parents behind, so we stayed close together.’ The older girls — aged twelve or thirteen — set standards and tried to guide the younger ones. ‘We told the younger ones how to behave: we told them off if their behaviour was wrong. For example, all our possessions were kept in our suitcases under our beds. One by one we noticed that our underwear was going missing. One girl was very poor and had few clothes. When we asked her to open her suitcase, she had taken our knickers. We knew that her father had been deported from Germany to Poland, so we didn’t punish her, we just took the underwear back.’ ‘Whining was not tolerated,’ said Ruth. ‘We were all in the same boat and knew how the others felt. Our youth was over, and we had to look out for each other, like a family.’

In May 1941 Ruth led a discussion at a Guide meeting on ‘How do you think we the Guides can help win the war?’ She then taught the Sky Lark patrol the art of square-lashing two poles together with string, part of her Second-Class Test, which she completed later that year. The Guides put on entertainments in the Village Hall, including a ballet choreographed by Ruth. ‘Whenever I see a simplistically poorly performed ballet I think they must have seen mine.’

Even though they wore their Guide uniform and were learning English fast, the Kindertransport girls were constantly reminded that they were foreigners in a remote part of Britain. Some of the adult villagers made it very clear that they were not sure about these foreign children. When Miss Payne asked the senior class to sing the hymn ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, the girls refused. It wasn’t because they were Jews, but because the hymn shared the tune with the German national anthem. Only when the teacher threatened them with punishment did they comply. When a passerby heard them singing, he complained: ‘First the British children sing God Save the King, and then the Germans sing their national anthem. Are they spies?’ One of the London evacuee children called the girls ‘Nazis’, and others followed his taunting. ‘We just ignored them,’ said Celia, ‘but it hurt.’ The path the girls took to school ran through a wood in which a Scottish army battalion was camping. When the soldiers heard them speak in a mixture of broken English and German, Ruth felt even more alien when she heard one say, ‘Who are these children?’ His friend replied, ‘Oh, they’re prisoners of war.’

As the girls grew, they handed their clothes on to the younger ones. Harry Watts, a member of B’nai B’rith in London, brought them gym-dresses ‘which seemed to grow with us’. One memorable day, when all their shoes were worn out, he brought them each a pair of Wellington boots.

After 1941 any ‘enemy aliens’ over sixteen years of age with no passports could not live in Norfolk, which was considered too close to Germany for comfort. In August of that year, when Ruth, Gretel and Celia were fifteen, the Committee decided that it was time they left school and returned to London to begin work. The trio became such close friends that they were known as ‘the Clover Leaf’ — also the symbol of the Girl Guides. The Clover Leaf girls shared a room in a North London hostel. ‘Ruth had an older sister in London and she told us useful things like the facts of life,’ said Gretel. They volunteered as Air-Raid Wardens, and their friends were fellow refugees, musicians, artists and writers. Celia started work as a junior clerk in Marshall and Snelgrove’s department store in Oxford Street, but was soon trained to use a capstan lathe and found herself in an ammunitions factory. ‘I made the screws for the end of bombs,’ she said. ‘I had nightmares, because although I wanted Britain to win the war, I knew that any one of those bombs could have killed my parents. I wanted Germany to be taken off the map but not with my parents in it. I missed them terribly. I used to have this recurring dream where I was on one side of the road and they were on the other and this Doodlebug was going down the road on legs.’

Celia last heard of her father in 1941, when he was deported to the Minsk ghetto as slave labour — but he never returned. Her mother kept in touch with Red Cross letters. One day in 1945, as Celia was getting off a London bus, she met and instantly fell in love with Ken Lee, a British soldier on leave from serving in Germany. Ken later found her mother in Hamburg, but it was not until 1949, when they were married with a daughter, that Celia visited her for the first time in eleven years. She realised then how much living in Britain had changed her. ‘I was embarrassed by the big emotional show when I arrived,’ she recalls. ‘I’d become pretty English by then. That sort of thing wasn’t done.’ Although she continued to visit her mother, she never wanted to stay in Germany. ‘I felt horrible the first time I went back. I looked at everyone and wondered what the hell they had been doing during the war.’ Celia Lee now says emphatically, with a slight accent from her childhood, that her nationality is definitely British.

After the war, Ruth Wassermann settled and married in America, where she studied art in Chicago and worked with problem children. In late 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, Gretel Heller received word that her parents had managed to emigrate to the United States. She never saw her father again — he died two years later — but she met up with her brother and mother in the USA in 1946, and married a Kindertransport man originally from Austria.

On the night of 27 April 1942 the Luftwaffe bombed Norwich, destroying thousands of buildings and killing hundreds of people. Even Cockley Cley, thirty miles away, was not spared when an incendiary bomb dropped on the Hall roof. The remaining refugee girls were woken up and shepherded to the back staircase while the local Air-Raid Warden put it out.

By the end of 1942 only the oldest servants were left at Cockley Cley Hall; the Guides had all gone. Sir Samuel closed up his home and moved into a smaller house in the village. He wrote, ‘We are beaten. The army is all around us every day. We have hardly any servants left, and next winter it will be impossible to get fuel to heat this very large house… the little German Jewish girls have gone.’ The Hall became the headquarters of the 22nd Armoured Brigade in preparation for D-Day.

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