Reaching Through History

The discovery of his grandfather’s wartime writings set one Sussex man on a pilgrimage to get to know a man he had never met

- David Bradford

Silhouetted against the blue night sky, the dark form of a helmeted figure on horseback glowered down disdainfully on our puny smartphone lights. After a tense 40 minutes trying to settle a restaurant bill with no cash, shared language, credit card facility or nearby ATM, then an hour haplessly navigating dingy suburban streets — not to mention the five long days of cycling to get here — finally we had found the spot. Only wait, no, we hadn’t. My heart sank as I realized that none of the surroundings matched the description: we were at the wrong statue, in the wrong city.

I was in Germany with my partner Anton, who had gamely agreed to join me on a quest to retrace the footsteps of my late grandfather Richard Wicker. We had reached our journey’s end, the northern port city of Kiel, on a tour that had begun 300 miles south near Hannover, at Fallingbostel — which 75 years ago was the site of the vast, sprawling prisoner-of-war camp Stalag 357.

Richard ended up here in spring 1945, aged 32, having spent four and a half years behind barbed wire as a POW. Until recently, this had been to me a mere second-hand fact, a bullet point of family history. Richard died in 1980, aged 67 — 18 months before I was born. I knew almost nothing about him, and nothing at all about his war experience, until three years ago when out of the blue my mum presented me with a tattered brown envelope containing 34 furled, musty-scented pages of the typed manuscript: “This is it,” she proudly announced, “Dad’s book.”