I am, your loving daughter-in-law,
Yours faithfully,
Birgit Sawyer
iii
June 3, 1940 to Mrs Elise Sawyer, Mill House, Tewkesbury,
Gloucestershire
Dear Mrs Sawyer,
I am pleased you and your husband were able to visit Joseph and me at the weekend and that you could satisfy yourself about the care I am giving your son. Of course it would be impossible to live up to your high standards, but I do my best. Always we are short of food and even medicines. The difficulty is caused by the rationing but also because it is so hard for us to reach the shops in Macclesfield. This will change once Joseph is able to ride his bicycle again. You are probably correct to point out my mistakes in the kitchen and you may be sure that in future I shall make greater efforts to provide Joseph with the kind of food and clothes that you think he should be having. You need not inform me of this again.
I have been talking to Joseph and we are agreed that in future it will be best if he visits you on his own, at your house in Gloucestershire.
Yours sincerely,
Birgit Sawyer (Mrs)
5
From the holograph diary of J. L. Sawyer (Collection Britannique, Le Musee de Paix)
June 4, 1940
This evening I found that I was moved to tears after listening to the Prime Minister on the wireless. B was there with me, listening too. She tried to comfort me but I don’t think she understood. I certainly couldn’t have explained to her, mainly because I don’t understand myself. I’m still amazed by my reaction. That odious man Churchill moved and inspired me. For a moment he even began to persuade me that it was right to fight.
But I am in an impressionable state of mind, depending on B for everything, still in pain. Churchill’s warmongering rhetoric has had a disproportionate effect on me. In spite of it, I feel I am almost better. I hobble around on my stick, I am even able to stand unsupported as I use the toilet. B says I should rest as much as I can. I use the time to prepare my recovery: each day I plan to make progress, aiming to be back to normal by the end of next week. Is it possible? Mrs Woodhurst is coming to visit me next Thursday afternoon, which I hope will mean that I can get back to work quickly.
Winston Churchill apparently took over from Neville Chamberlain on the same day as I was beaten up. It was confusing to wake up in hospital and find so many changes. The war has lurched further into unstoppable chaos. Churchill’s speech tonight made a clear distinction between the German people and the Nazis who are their dictators. He seems to be almost alone in maintaining that. Ordinary people can only commit themselves wholeheartedly to fighting a war when they demonize the enemy. Dad said this is what happened in the last war: the German people became Fritz, the Hun, the Boche. Now it is starting again: they have become Jerries, Nazis, Huns.
It was difficult enough to argue for peace before the latest events. In the present climate, with Churchill whipping up war fever, bracing the country for the worst, it is impossible. I simply do not know what to do any more.
His speech ended with simple words of calm determination: we will defend our island against invasion whatever the cost, fighting in the streets and fields and hills, never surrendering. His words mysteriously and powerfully evoked an England I know and love, a country it is right to defend and one that is worth dying for. Churchill made me proud of my heritage and nervous of losing it. He aroused my eagerness to hold my home safe. Without being able to resist, I started to cry.
June 21, 1940
Today I went to the Society office in Manchester, in preparation for my return to work in four days’ time, on Monday. I was not nearly as nervous as B at the prospect, but she went with me to Macclesfield Station and insisted on being there to meet me when I returned. We agreed the time of the train I would catch home, while she would do what shopping she could in the town.
All signs and place-names have been removed or obliterated, windows have been taped up as a precaution against blast, sandbags are heaped against many doorways. Everywhere there are posters and notices, warning, advising, directing. In the centre of Manchester, public air raid shelters have been opened at the end of almost every street. Most people carry gas masks or steel helmets. Many are carrying both. You see people in uniform everywhere. This is what it is like to live in a country at war. Now it is in earnest.
Tonight is by chance the shortest of the year. It is nearly 11 p.m. and it is not even fully dark outside yet. The sky is mostly black but there is a band of silvery blue touching the horizon in the west. A deep-grey, beautiful light washes across the plain below my window. No lights show, but in the charcoal shading of the long twilight most main features are visible. If the German bombers were to come now, they would find all the targets they want. The thought makes me nervous and I realize that this must be what everyone else is going through at the moment.
France surrendered to the Nazis today.
June 30, 1940
I have been back at work for a week, while the threat of invasion continues to worsen. Everyone talks about it, where and when it will happen, what Churchill will do about it, how strong our army might be after the disaster at Dunkirk. The newspapers and wireless report that German forces are gathering in France, that invasion barges are being prepared, that the Luftwaffe is massing its aircraft in the thousands. Every day we hear that shipping in the English Channel has been attacked by dive bombers. The harbour in Dover has been bombed several times.
All this talk of war. Few people seem to know that talk of peace is also in the air!
It is being kept out of the newspapers, but through my work at the Red Cross I know for certain that Hitler has made two peace offers to Churchill this week. One was sent by way of the Italian government. The other was passed through the Papal Nuncio to Red Cross HQ in Switzerland. Churchill immediately rejected both offers.
I was despairing and furious when I first heard about it, but I have been having a think.
Churchill loves war. He makes no secret of it, even boasts about it. When he was a young man, ‘eager for trouble’, he pulled strings and even cheated his way into the front line of the wars in India and Africa. His reaction to the disgrace of the Dardanelles in 1915 was to join the British army and fight on the Western Front for several months. It is clear that he sees the present war as a culmination of his passion for fighting.
At the moment, though, Churchill is cornered. No warmonger will entertain an offer of peace while his back is to the wall. He would interpret it as capitulation or surrender, not peace, no matter that common sense would tell him that worse punishment is to come. Churchill undoubtedly believes that he needs a military victory of some kind, before he will talk to Hitler.
No sign of that, so how am I going to feel when England is invaded, as surely she must be? For all my beliefs I remain an Englishman. I can’t bear to think about a foreign army, any foreign army, marching across our land. Thought of the Nazis worsens that imagining by many degrees. B is more scared than I am - better than most people, she knows what the Nazis are capable of doing.