This is a remarkable story of a boy born in the 1930s to a Nora Briscoe, a woman who greatly admired Adolf Hitler and the Nazi cause. Paul Briscoe’s mother struggled to be a writer and journalist and seemed extremely disinterested in her son, referring to him in her autobiography as “the child”. She travelled in Germany with young Paul, leaving him with a German family in Miltenberg, and when war broke out, she was unable to reclaim him, the only answer to his situation being for the German family to adopt him as their own son.
Paul rapidly became thoroughly “Germanised”, soon losing his memories of England and even the English language. He attended German schools, and was swept up in the nationalist mood to the extent that he joined the Hitler Youth, proudly wearing his uniform and joining in the militaristic parades and drills, along with the more “boy scout” aspects of the movement.
In the early years of the war, Paul’s mother worked as a secretary in a government department and tried to sell secrets to the Germans. She failed to realise that her German contact was an MI5 agent provocateur, and ended up being imprisoned for treason, only avoiding a very long sentence because of her evident naivety. Paul meanwhile was so swept up in the Nazi movement that he actually participated in Miltenberg’s own “Kristallnacht” when Jewish shops and synagogues were smashed.
When the war was over, Paul was forcibly repatriated to his mother in England, and we read of the difficulty of living in post-war Britain, particularly when German was your first language!
Paul Briscoe comes across as a genuinely good man, loyal to his mother despite the cavalier way she treated him throughout his life. She comes across as a fantasist, absorbed in herself and capable of recreating herself as the need arose. It is a relief to read that Paul was able to build a good life for himself in England despite his extremely bizarre childhood.
This is an excellent book, recounting as it does a unique story, but with the compassion and understanding years of reflection have brought to it. Apart from Paul’s remarkable story and his unique perspective on the Nazi movement, anyone who wishes to understand more about the way “ordinary” German people thought during the war years will find this book a rich source of material.
