I think the jail was
fairly full though you seldom actually met anybody except for the two French lads, also
doing time whose job it was to bring rations around our wing. They were'trusties' but
always came with a guard to unlock and lock the doors. They obviously were not locked in
their cells all thetime because in the evening
often one of the lads who I got to know quite well would come along the gallery and we
would hold a whispered conversation through the spy hole. This was about a centimetre in
diameter.
You will understand the conversation was fairly tortuous as his school boy English was on
about on par with my school boy French. Added to which we had to speak as if using a radio
telephone, only one at a time.
He was about eighteen or nineteen and was doing nine months for trying to transport some
forbidden pamphlets across the border between unoccupied and occupied France. Just two or three sheets
concealed in one of his school books. Never the less I was able to gather quite a a bit of
useful information, it helped pass the time and best of all he was able to pass me the odd
cigarette.
These
of course were Gauloise and quite an acquired taste. I was to smoke much worse things
before I was finished. He would also pass in a match. The French wartime matches were
something else! I got badly caught the first time I used one. They had a phosphorus head,
then for the first millimetre below the head the match had been dipped in sulphur. This
was so that you could
get the wooden part to burn at all. The trick was when you struck a light and the
head flared up, you had to wait till the sulphur had burned off otherwise you got choked
by inhaling sulphur dioxide fumes. On the other hand if you waited too long the match would go out. You
had to be spot on with your timing.
I would keep the butts, if you had five butts and a cigarette paper you had another
cigarette. If you rolled up the butts of the butts to have a third recycle as it were, you
had to lie down on the bunk before you lit up otherwise you'd fall down! We were allowed a
shower now and then, one at a time. Most days if you hadn't been taken off for
interrogation you would get an exercise period in a high walled yard.
This would be about twenty paces long by seven paces wide, at least you could see the sky
above. Sometimes there would be another prisoner pacing up and down in there too. There
was always a guard so you couldn't exchange much save a friendly glance.
Food was basically a chunk of bread in the morning and some mint tea, some watery
soup at midday and a dish of vegetables
in the evening. The food would be brought round in big wooden tubs that were dragged along
the gallery outside the cells by the French lads, escorted by a guard to
unlock/lock the doors one by one. We each had an old dixie and a spoon to eat with.
Galbraith Hyde |