Free Fathers and Sons by Richard Madeley Page A

raked out from the night before; pots and pans banging on the kitchen range. Suddenly everything went quiet. Then, his father’s voice bellowing from the foot of the stairs: ‘Come down, everyone, now! It’s on the wireless! It’s started!’
    German soldiers had swept into the Low Countries at dawn. The fight was on.
    The phoney war hadn’t just ended; it was being blasted into oblivion by events which followed each other with dizzying speed. Within a few weeks Belgium had capitulated, France had fallen and the British were fighting a desperate rearguard action in the Pas de Calais so its army could escape across the Channel. Dunkirk was a catastrophe and a deliverance. But with most of its battered army’s equipment left behind, many wondered if Britain would fare any better than France if Germany invaded.
    My grandfather and his neighbours working other farms in Shropshire and in the Welsh Marches met in secret soon after the fall of France. This was before the formation of the LDV–the Local Defence Volunteers, which would later become the Home Guard–and most of these men had served on the Western Front a quarter of a century before. They had a fair idea of what living in enemy-occupied territory would be like.
    Late one night my father, just twelve years old, eavesdroppedon one of the meetings, which were always held in the kitchen. He hid behind the door that opened on to the back staircase leading to the maid’s room. What he heard astounded him. Far from the confident predictions of ultimate British victory they usually made to their families, the men were gravely pessimistic. None of them believed it would be more than a few weeks before Germany invaded. They reckoned British forces would fight bravely, but be swiftly crushed.
    The occupation that followed would be brutal and murderous.
    There must be a resistance movement–and they would organise the regional arm of it. They would have to make do with their shotguns, hunting rifles and the occasional revolver smuggled back from France twenty-odd years ago, but attacks on German patrols and outposts would quickly yield deadlier weapons.
    My father never forgot the next part of the discussion. One farmer was saying that they would probably have to hole up in the Welsh hills. What would happen to their families? Could they manage? And what if the Germans discovered the men’s identities? There would be terrible reprisals on their wives and children, without doubt. Perhaps it would be best…that is to say, kindest, considering these terrible possibilities…to…well…before they left for the hills, to…
    The silence that followed seeped into my father’s hiding place like a cold fog. His heart pounded and he could hardly breathe. Finally another voice spoke.
    ‘If you mean what I think you mean, I’m out. What the hell would we be fighting for if we did that?’
    ‘All right, Ted, all right, keep your hair on. But we must talkabout these things, we must think it all the way through…Look, let’s just forget that part for now.’
    Later, the men gone and Kiln Farm asleep, my father crept to his bedroom. To his horror he found he could see the brutal logic in the suggestion. If these unthinkable things came to pass and he, his brother and his mother were arrested by the Germans, it would go very badly for them. My father was fully aware of the Nazis’ readiness to use extreme measures. Looked at like that, maybe it would be kinder to…get it all over beforehand; what people called being cruel to be kind.
    But he couldn’t possibly discuss it with his father; he’d be furious at being spied on. He couldn’t tell his mother for the same reason. She probably wouldn’t believe him anyway. He himself could hardly credit what he had just heard.
    In the end he made a compromise with himself. If the Germans invaded and looked like winning, my father would tell Kitty everything. Otherwise he would keep quiet. It was all he could think of. And with that,