Tendring Topics......on Line
‘Underneath the Street Lamp…….’
Last
week in this blog I wrote of how a recent photograph of a Red Cross Parcel had
brought back memories of my life long ago.
These were reinforced a few days later by a tv interview with Vera Lynne,
several years older than me but still very active and living quite near those ‘white cliffs of Dover’ over which her
metaphorical bluebirds can now fly freely! No-one, ex-service or civilian, who
lived through World War II can ever forget her melodious voice on the radio
assuring us all that ‘We’ll meet again,
don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day’ and
that some day we and our girl-friends would again be, ‘Arm in arm together, just like we used to be. Arm in arm with you sweetheart meant all the
world to me’.
I
was reminded of another song of World War II that is not primarily associated
with Vera Lynne (though she did sing an English paraphrase of it to its by-then-familiar
tune) It is the one song that became
popular with the rank and file of the opposing armies. Originally a German song, loved by the
Afrikakorps and broadcast over the German forces radio in occupied Belgrade, it
was first ‘captured’ by the British 8th Army in the North African
desert. I understand that it was equally
popular on the Eastern Front and that there was a Russian as well as an English
version!
It
was Lili Marlene (the Germans spell her surname Marleen) derived from a poem
entitled The Song of the Lonely Sentry’
written in World War I, about a young woman who stood
under the street-light by the gate of the barracks, waiting for her boy-friend
to emerge. It did not have a happy ending. Her boy-friend, a young soldier,
kissed her ‘beloved mouth’ in his dreams and vowed that when the cold mist of
death overtook him he would return to that street-light ‘Wie einst Lili Marleen, Wie einst Lili Marleen’ (‘where once was Lili
Marlene, where once was Lili Marlene’).
It
was a universal theme among soldiers of every nation on active service. We all knew that some of us would never go
home to our wives or girlfriends. Out of
my own artillery regiment of some 700 to 800 men, mostly volunteers still in
their early twenties, 100 never returned. Needless to say it was not a message
that the Nazi authorities wanted spread.
Goebbels tried to ban the song but General Irwin Rommel commander of the
Deutsch Afrikakorps, then a popular hero, liked it and his will prevailed. Its singer though, Lale Andersen, Vera
Lynne’s German opposite number, was regarded with suspicion and forbidden to
sing her most popular song on the radio.
She remained out of the limelight for the latter part of World War II.
Browsing
the internet with the aid of Google I was astonished to come across a statue of
Lili Marlene, standing beneath a street lamp, on the German North Sea Island of
Langegoog (according to Google it means ‘Long Island’ in the Platt Deutsch
dialect). It is, in fact, a memorial
to singer Lale Andersen who lived for several years on the island and, after
her death in Vienna
in the 1970’s, was buried there.
It
is a fine and appropriate memorial but I have to say that the attractive young woman sculpted there isn’t my idea of Lili Marlene. My wartime memories of both England and Germany suggest that, at that time,
no young woman of either country would have dreamed of wearing trousers,
particularly on a date.
Heather Gilbert aged 19, my ‘Lili
Marlene’! A photo taken while I was overseas, and posted to me while I was a
PoW in Germany
I have two mental images of the
Lili who waited under the streetlamp.
The first is of a young girl still in her teens wearing her best dress,
perhaps a little faded after three years of war. Her trusting blue eyes anxiously
scan the uniformed figures emerging from the barrack gate for a young man whom
she hadn’t known for long but whose life she feels she is destined to share. Yes, I am thinking of my own girlfriend as
she was at that time. I believe that we all, British and German alike, saw
something of our own girlfriends in that patiently waiting Lili Marlene!
The other Lili
of my imagination is older – in her early thirties perhaps; quite sure of herself
and possibly wearing a well-cut raincoat over a tweed skirt, together with a beret,
or perhaps a cap, at a jaunty angle. She
would have a friendly smile for everyone, with a surreptitious wink for one or
two favoured ones, and a warm embrace for her evening’s escort. She is perhaps the more likely Lili Marlene
of the two.
The
sculpture is of a charming young lady – quite possibly engaged to an ambitious
young lieutenant and destined (though not in those trousers) to grace the
officers’ mess, delighting the colonel with her respectful smile and impeccable
manners. I don’t really think though
that she would have evoked romantic daydreams in rank-and-file soldiers such as
I was.
She is clearly the sculptor’s vision
of Lili Marlene - but she isn’t mine!
Nick Clegg – Champion of the poor?
That
is how he would undoubtedly like to see himself and that is how, before the general election, thousands
of misled voters were persuaded to see him.
I was one of them!
Now
he has caused a flutter in the coalition dove-cote by making the suggestion
that, on a purely temporary basis, the rich might perhaps be persuaded to make
a rather larger contribution to the national economy than they do at
present. This suggestion, timid and
half-hearted as it is, comes strangely from a politician who a few months ago
raised not a discordant voice when the Chancellor of the Exchequer decided to
reduce the tax liability of the very wealthy by lowering the top rate of income
tax.
Even
this latest very modest suggestion has provoked a wholly predictable response
from Chancellor George Osborne. We
mustn’t try to make the wealthy pay their fair share of the nation’s debt
because if we do so they might up sticks and depart elsewhere, taking their
wealth with them. Does he really
suggest that wealthy folk have so little patriotism and love of their country
that they would desert it for a few extra millions?
I have an
abiding memory of hundreds of young British men who, in 1939, voluntarily
abandoned their careers for a paltry two shillings (10p) a day, and offered
their very lives to their country when it was in peril. I can’t believe that
seventy-three years later a substantial number of wealthy Brits would abandon
their homeland when it is in economic peril rather than surrender to it a fair
proportion of that wealth. And is it not
almost equally incredible that also-wealthy top politicians should consider
that behaviour to be perfectly reasonable?
Surely great wealth can’t have quite such a corrupting influence.
Sir Walter
Scott asked incredulously. Breathes there
a man with soul so dead that to himself he hath not said, ‘This is my own, my
native land?’ Today it appears that
we could assure him; Well yes, there are quite a few of them. They have all got a few millions safely
tucked away offshore – and they are prepared to live anywhere in the world in
order to hang on to every penny of them. Sir Walter concludes in his poem
that, if there are any such wretches, they are destined to go to their graves 'unwept, unhonoured and unsung’. I doubt if that thought bothers them
much.
If it is
indeed true, then ought not David Cameron and George Osborne be thinking of
ways of stemming that defection, instead of simply shrugging their shoulders and
regarding it as inevitable? Is it right
for instance, that those who have deserted their country to preserve their
wealth, should continue to hold British passports, have the right to vote in our elections, and to enjoy the
very considerable privileges of British citizenship?
Once again I suggest that the main source of
our national income should be a ‘citizenship subscription’, of say 20 percent
of gross income, levied on every British citizen from the poorest of the poor
to the wealthiest of the wealthy! Then we will value and honour our citizenship and only
then will the UK
become a true ‘commonwealth’ and politicians be able to claim with truth that ‘we’re all in this together’.
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