A World of My Own

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Authors: Graham Greene
were arrested. Apparently they possessed a complete dossier on me, including a photograph taken with a concealed camera of my meeting in a hotel room with a German whose face I remembered from my trip down the Occupied Territories in 1924. They also appeared to have a tape recording of our voices. The game now seemedreally up, and I felt almost resigned to the torture chamber, with an intellectual curiosity as to how long I would hold out. They possessed a radiogram of my body which would be of help to them.

    A full-scale German invasion started on June 23, 1965. They were moving into London from the south in a wide sweep. I and a friend, with one heavy gun—a mortar—between us, were operating as guerrillas on the flank. With our mortar we had attacked a German post and several hundred men and an officer had surrendered to us. Now we argued about our next move. Were the Germans aiming at London or did they intend to cut the road between London and the west? We decided to take a train, but we realized too late that it passed through German-held territory and we would be inspected.
    A young German officer came up to see us. I stuck a revolver in his back and told him to go to the lavatory. There we intended to take his uniform. (Once before, my companion had escaped in this way.) But there was another German at the door and I could see from his look of triumph that he had pulled the emergency cord. The train stopped in a railway shed under blazing arc lights.
    Suddenly I seemed detached from the situation and saw it as an observer. I was outside the shed and watched one man—my friend—dash out carrying our mortar. He found an empty cart with a huge cart-horse which reared up and leapt forward so that the car for a moment took to the air. Then a second man—surely myself—came out and ran after the cart.

    In 1966, only six months after the German invasion, civil war broke out. I was in my home town of Berkhamsted and, returning to the town after a walk on the Common, I found leaflets strewn around bearing what was obviously the code name for a military operation. I remembered what a close woman friend had said to me as a joke when I told her I was leaving England to live in France: ‘You’ll be back for the civil war.’
    Near the station I saw in the sky a multitude of small planes and parachutes all the same colour as the leaflets, and as I hastened up Castle Street I found the parachutists were coming up behind me in a dense body filling the streets. It was some kind of an attempted Fascist take-over. A platoon of soldiers came down the road and a clash was inevitable becausethe Fascists would not give way, nor I hoped would the troops. But I was unprepared for the savage way in which the troops bayoneted the leading Fascists, for they were unarmed and it was a massacre.
    I took refuge in a house where I found the Prime Minister, who was then Wilson. No one there seemed to want to know that fighting had started. Wilson appeared weak, worried, indeterminate. His only action was to go to another room to be left in peace.

    There was an occasion which I am proud to remember when I was instrumental in capturing Hitler. I happened to be waiting on a railway platform when I saw two men leave a train. One I knew was a general in German Intelligence, and when I looked at his companion I felt sure I recognized Hitler, though the absurd moustache had gone and his face was crumpled and more human. I shouted to all who were standing around, ‘Hitler. Hitler’s alive.’
    The two men were descending into a subway. People looked at me as if I were mad, but I continued my cries and the escape of the two was stopped.Hitler returned angrily to me. We went up to the end of the platform, where we sat down and talked a long while. I can’t remember the subject of our conversation. A few others were there helping to guard him and presently a squad of soldiers arrived and took him away.

    Europe was under German occupation and I had

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