The Glass Mountain by Malcolm Gaskill: My heroic POW great-uncle dug his way out of a
As a little boy, Malcolm Gaskill was mad for anything to do with the Second World War. For his birthday he got a Colditz Action Man and his bedroom was festooned with Airfix models of bombers.
He begged his mum to knit him a gas mask and, when that didn’t work, tracked a real one down in a junk shop which he proudly wore as a nine-year-old to celebrate Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.
Where this passion came from was a bit of a mystery – no one in Malcolm’s immediate family had been involved in the war. There was, though, a vague story about a great uncle, a man who was married to his nan’s younger sister.
A great escape?: Frank Sinatra, left, in the 1965 film Von Ryan’s Express
Family legend said that Uncle Ralph had escaped as a prisoner of war from a train in Italy by digging a hole in the rotten floorboards using a knife and fork.
But since this was similar to the plot of Von Ryan’s Express, an escapism Hollywood film starring Frank Sinatra that was shown on afternoon TV in the 1970s, this sounded a lot like wishful thinking.
In 2017, and now a distinguished professor of history, Gaskill decided to go in search of his long-dead great-uncle-by-marriage. Gathering up a handful of scuffed family photos, and a tatty memoir that had come to light in a cousin’s attic, Gaskill brings all his scholarly skills to bear on the life and times of Ralph Corps, a man whom he had never met and whom, to be honest, no one seemed to have liked.
According to surviving family members, Uncle Ralph was pedantic, snooty and, apart from his devoted wife Flo, a total loner.
Newly Weds: Ralph and Flo in a garden before the war
The story Gaskill unearths in the archives is remarkable. After being rescued from the Normandy beaches early in the war, Ralph was captured in North Africa and shipped off to a prisoner of war camp in the ‘heel’ of Italy.
In some ways it was better than being imprisoned by the Germans, in others worse. The guards might have been less trigger-happy, and the commanding officer seemed reasonable, but getting anything done – from fixing a roof to acquiring malaria medicine – proved impossible. It would happen, said the Italians, either ‘domani’ (tomorrow) or, even worse, ‘dopodomani’ (the day after tomorrow, aka never).
With his historian’s hat, Gaskill investigates the way in which the camp of 7,000 men soon settled down into a complex social and economic organism.
Making the most of things: Ralph, ‘Rodolpho’, in Contadino, 1944
Capitalism prevailed. Cigarettes were the main camp currency, but they plummeted in value whenever a large consignment from the Red Cross flooded the market. In which case, some other commodity – boots, chocolate, a haircut – saw its stock quickly rise.
There was blatant profiteering, which led to racial tensions among the POWs: Palestinian Jews and Greek Cypriots were deemed to be ‘shady dealers’. If men got really hungry, then enticing a dog through the perimeter fence and turning it into ‘a feast on four legs’ provided a much-needed hit of protein.
S ince he was one of the camp’s ‘policemen’, charged with keeping order and solving petty crimes, Ralph enjoyed superior rations and living conditions. But that didn’t mean that he had any intention of staying put.
Teaming up with another POW, Charlie West, Ralph managed to climb over the barbed wire and strike out for the Swiss border, which was an audacious 600 miles away. The two men lasted a few days before being returned to the camp as unofficial heroes.
By this time, Italy was clearly losing the war, and the Allies were expected to land on the coast at any moment. Consequently, the British prisoners were moved to a camp further north. After a miserable start, life in these new digs turned out to be productive, enjoyable even.
The men organised themselves into study groups and, with the help of exam papers sent out by the University of London, swotted for the civil service exams or to become barristers.
One Italian guard gave lectures on Tuscan art. Musical prisoners mounted Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, while others put on a cabaret, complete with burly men dancing the can-can in frilly knickers.
It wasn’t enough, though, to stop Ralph planning his next escape.
O n another train journey north he used his knife and fork to hack a hole in the bottom of the carriage and slip out on to the tracks and away to freedom. So it wasn’t a family myth after all!
But, for Gaskill, it is what happened next that is truly remarkable. Ralph was adopted by local peasants, who provided him with accommodation and food and hid him from both the Italian and German armies.
In this he was lucky, but far from unique. Gaskill explains that 18,000 Allied prisoners were on the loose in Northern Italy in the closing 18 months of the war ‘and only the selfless courage of ordinary Italians ensured their lasting freedom’.
It is these unsung heroes whom Gaskill decides to go in search of, managing to track down the children and the grandchildren of the farmers who sheltered ‘Rodolfo’ – as Ralph was nicknamed – despite knowing that they would be shot if their act of ‘treason’ was discovered.
After 15 months of living an idyllic life of wine and pasta, Ralph did eventually find his way back to freezing Yorkshire, and the wife he had left behind.
It was now that they both started becoming the people whom their families remembered in later years: aloof, selfish and snobbish, careful to erase their northern accents and quick to correct other people’s grammar. Always status conscious, there is even evidence that Ralph wore military medals to which he had no right.
But Gaskill is not the type of historian to linger on one man’s peccadillos. What drives him is the chance to show how complete strangers – poor ones at that – would risk their lives for a man whom they had been told was their enemy.
It is these acts of shining humanitarianism which stand out not only as remarkable but, in our own fractured and hate-filled world, beacons of hope, too.