a full uniform.’ Each girl was issued with a hat, a maroon scarf and a Guide belt, donated by Lady Roberts. ‘The best part was learning Morse code and being able to signal secret messages to each other. We did a lot of stalking in the woods. We would have used these skills if the Germans had invaded.’
The 1st Cockley Cley Guide company had two patrols — the Sky Larks and the Swallows. Ruth was Patrol Leader of the Larks, with Gretel as her Second; Celia was in the Swallows. Miss Gadsby acknowledged that the Cockley Cley Guides were not British by amending part of their Guide promise from ‘ To do my duty to God and the King’ to ‘ To do my duty to God and the country in which I am a guest.’ ‘We enjoyed doing the Guide salute,’ said Gretel. ‘It helped us to connect to Britain, and to what was going on elsewhere in the country.’
Miss Gadsby was not alone: running companies near her in Norfolk were other Guide Captains such as Miss Twiddy, Miss Jolly, Miss Cocks, Miss Flowerday, Miss Sparrow and Miss Capon. One day the President of the Guides, the Princess Royal, came to Cockley Cley on her way to Sandringham. The Guides polished their badges and belts to perfection. ‘We knew she was the sister of King George,’ said Gretel. ‘We all lined up and curtsied to her.’
Lady Roberts had given the Guides a wind-up gramophone and a few records. Their favourite was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. ‘Dot-dot-dot-dash, the Morse code V for Victory opening, became a code of hope for victory throughout England,’ Ruth said. ‘We played it constantly; it gave us courage as well as an appreciation of classical music, which most of us had been accustomed to at home.’
The teachers started a Victory Garden at the school, where the Guides grew vegetables for themselves and to sell to the villagers. ‘I got terrible blisters,’ said Celia, ‘but it was a joy growing things like carrots.’ Ruth, Celia and Gretel made up a song, in English, which they sang while working in the garden:
For days work and weeks work, As we go on and on, Digging many trenches Which is not much fun.
Teacher saw as lazy She thought we never knew. Oh teachers who like gardening, You can do ours too.
‘We knew that the teachers were watching us and yet, apparently, we were lazy and did not care,’ said Gretel. ‘We also made up a lot of secret sentences, in German, that concerned our matron.’ Matron was not very popular, especially as she told the other girls not to talk to Celia because she was ‘not really Jewish’.
‘The Guides taught us self-discipline, responsibility, provided adventure, a good respect for self-reliance, and to be helpful to others,’ said Ruth. ‘It helped us to cope. We also learned path-finding, knotting and semaphore with flags. The Guide principles played a big role in our formative years, especially since we had no parents to guide us.’ ‘I was very proud of being a Guide,’ said Celia. Guide meetings were among the few times when she was happy, and she was delighted to be photographed giving her three-fingered promise salute in her uniform.
Lady Roberts’ lady’s maid was Ellen Richardson. She looked after her mistress’s clothes, and due to her well-corseted body she bent down with an absolutely straight back. She insisted that the Kinder-transport Guides did their housework properly, but also invited them into her parlour for tea and to listen to her wireless. ‘That was the only way we could hear the news,’ said Ruth. ‘When we needed advice, which we were afraid to ask matron, we went to Miss Richardson. She never divulged our secrets. Whenever she needed to correct us, she came to us directly; we were fond of her and trusted her.’ She also gave them scraps of wool and cloth with which they could make presents. ‘She showed us how to make small mending bags with a crocheted thimble-cover attached, a most useless but unique gift.’
None of the Kinder Guides had lived in the country before, but they came to appreciate the beauty of Norfolk. ‘Near the village were the Spring Woods,’ remembered Ruth, ‘with their early splendour of blooms. The Hall had a beautiful formal garden, leading to a lake with swans, where I learnt Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud…”’
With the fall of France in May 1940, the British public, encouraged by newspapers and Churchill, began to panic about ‘fifth columnists’ — saboteurs and spies in their midst. Guides all over the country were on full alert, watching for flashing torches that could be German spies sending Morse messages to each other: the BBC warned Germany that any parachutists not wearing uniform would be shot on sight, rather than taken as prisoners of war.
As Britain prepared for invasion, the Prime Minister issued a leaflet which declared: ‘STAND FIRM. Do not run away, or stop work. Do the shopping, send the children to school, do not evacuate to other areas… With a bit of common sense you can tell whether a soldier is really British or only pretending to be so. If in doubt, ask a policeman. Disable or hide your bicycle, destroy your maps.’
The fear was so great that 27,000 German and Austrian refugees were interned on the Isle of Man, many of them Jews who had only recently fled from their homes. ‘We were not aware that we were enemy aliens,’ said Gretel, ‘until the British government started to intern the men, and announced that no “enemy alien” women over the age of sixteen years could live anywhere near the south or east coast. Miss Kohn and Mrs Reissner had to go back to London.’ Mrs Reissner’s daughter Hanna remained at Cockley Cley, and took over the cooking.
All refugees were subjected to tribunals at which they had to prove their allegiance to Britain. The Germans had overrun Belgium and Holland with ease, and the girls remembered that when they had left Germany the Nazi guards had told them, ‘You can go now, but we’ll get you in the end.’ When Holland was invaded, Germans who had lived there for years rose up to support the Nazis. Would the same thing happen in Britain?
For their own protection, the girls at the Hall were told to destroy all letters from their parents written in German. ‘For me it felt like cutting out a part of my life,’ said Ruth. ‘I always carried these letters with me in my gas mask case. Once war started we seldom got word from our parents. We could receive messages of twenty-five words via the Swiss Red Cross. These came seldom and usually were very carefully worded because of the German censor. Even before the war, all letters were opened by the Nazis.’
Celia had to do any household chores that her hosts required. Only girls who had already left school had the protection of the Home Office ruling which stated that refugee girls under eighteen could only work as domestic staff ‘where there are trained domestic servants, so that they can receive proper training’. This was intended to prevent exploitation by hosts who could not afford to pay domestic staff. But it did not apply to refugees who were still at school. Celia had some respite from the Howards’ cottage when she caught ringworm from the cows. ‘It was very contagious, and Peter Roberts’ young wife, Judith, took me into the Dower House where she lived in the village. She was very kind to me, something I had not felt since I left home.’ When Judith Roberts’ first daughter, Jane, was born in October 1940, the Kinder Guides presented her with crocheted clothes-hangers. ‘Getting to see the new-born baby was a great event for us,’ said Ruth. This tiny new life brought them some hope for the future.
With so many farm workers serving in the forces, the Guides at Cockley Cley weeded sugar-beet fields to help with the war effort. They were paid 1½ pence an hour — worth about 25p in today’s money. Even though nearly all the land in Britain was by now under the plough, Cockley Cley still had woods and thick hedges. ‘There were gorgeous old trees,’ remembered Ruth. ‘We could climb to a comfortable spot in the low branches of the beech trees where we could read. Privacy was a very precious commodity for us who lived dormitory style.’ The Guides received sixpence a week pocket money, which they could spend in the village post office. ‘I splurged my chocolate ration on a Milky Way. I would take a bite a day to make it last longer.’ Ruth saved up enough of her sugar-beet earnings to buy wool to knit herself a jersey, which lasted the entire war. She was also working hard at her Guide badges. By the summer of 1941 she had learned the names of thirty-two English wild flowers she had spotted in the Norfolk meadows. They included Viper’s Bugloss, hare’s foot clover and the ubiquitous stinging nettle. She also learned to identify