Post
by Currie » Wed May 26, 2021 7:41 am
Hello Wilma,
I think this has pretty well ended up in everyone’s too-hard basket. There has been much indulging in flights of fancy about what his real name may be.
Here’s the story of a Black Watch member of the 51st Division who managed to remain hidden after St. Valery.
Dundee Courier, Friday, September 15, 1944
DODGED NAZIS FOR 4 YEARS
Black Watch Man’s Narrow Escapes
A Homecoming Coincidence
When a bus drew up in Forteviot Mrs Walker, wife of the local blacksmith, said to herself, “It would be fine if Cameron was on that bus.”
Cameron is her 25-year-old son, a member of the Black Watch, who was reported missing after St Valery 1940.
Truth is stranger than fiction, for her son was on the bus, but he travelled on it to their old home at Dunning, where he found the blacksmith’s shop a ruin. Mr Walker, sen., moved from there in 1940.
Half an hour later, while Mr Walker was working in the smithy, he turned round to find his son standing beside him. He said, “Hullo, dad.” It was a typical Scots reunion.
During the four and a half years which he had been hiding from the Germans in France Pte. Walker had several narrow escapes. Once when he was a passenger in a motor lorry it was stopped by the Gestapo. The driver jumped down, produced his papers, and the other member of the Gestapo walked over to the cabin where Pte. Walker was sitting.
“Luckily,” he told a “Courier” reporter yesterday, “there was no handle to the door on that side, so the man just looked me up and down and walked away. It was a near thing.”
In the farmhouse where he hid he constructed a false wall in a small room, making a sort of cupboard which he could close by fastening two bolts.
FRENCH OR BROAD SCOTS
Now and then Germans came to the farmhouse looking for parachutists or searching for wheat or butter. They drove the occupants out of the house at the point of a gun while the search was conducted.
“I could look through a crack in the wood and see an officer’s polished boots six inches from the end of my nose,” said Walker, “but they failed to find me.”
While in France he learned to speak French like a native, so that when the Germans were driven out and Canadians appeared Walker rushed up to them addressing them volubly in French.
“I'd been so accustomed to speaking French during that time I could scarcely speak my own language,” he said. “It took about five minutes before I could ask for a packet of cigarettes, and even at that it was broad Scots which the Canadian found almost as difficult as my French,”
He reckons it was worse than four and a half years in prison. Eggs were fetching about 10s a dozen, while black market butter was as high as 30s a pound.
All the best,
Alan