When I Was a Criminal!

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 732, 3 August 1929, Page 18

When I Was a Criminal!

American-Born Authoress Who was Classed as Enemy Alien . . . Shadowed by British Secret Service . . . The Black Wig That Brought Trouble in its Wake

The Baroness von Jfutten, who has written many successful novels (include ing “ram,” “What Became of Pam,” and ■Pam at fifty”) writes amusingly of her wartime experiences when, although an American by birth, she was classed as an enemy alien. YEN now, i£ somebody suddenly touches my (ml* shoulder, I start like i llQWp'i \ the criminal that, dui> S3bSLks£j ins the war, I undoubtedly was. For, born in America, without a drop of German blood in my veins, I became, on the outbreak of the war, an enemy alien! This was because when, eleven years after I married Baron von Hutten, we secured an amicable divorce, I was not told by my consul in Munich that I should take steps to regain my lost nationality, and believed myself to be, once more, an American. I was living in England when war was declared; and when X discovered that I was a Gennan subject, and thus an objct of suspicion to the police, I was furious and indignant, for my brother had become a British subject in the hope of being allowed to fight with the British Army. It enraged me that my loyalty to the Allied cause could be doubted! My Five-Mile Limit My petition for naturalisation arrived at its destination over twentyfour hours too late to miss new prohibitive regulations (writes the Baroness in a London weekly). My car was taken from me; I was obliged to spend hours at police stations; my letters were all opened; and I was forbidden to travel more than five miles from any place where I was living under the eye of the local police. In May I was in Devonshire with my little boy, and on receipt of a telegram from my baby's nurse, saying that the bab£ had measles, back I rushed, forgetting to go to the local police, forgetting everything but my small maiden with the measles. On the morning after my return home I was arrested for travelling more than five miles from my police headquarters. Back they took me to Devon, ;where I was sworn in, reprimanded,

fined five pounds, and dismissed poorer, possibly a little sadder, but alas! not one bit a wiser woman. With the wife of a certain artist I occasionally lunched in a well-known Italian restaurant in Baker Street; and one day I noticed a very old man watching us in a lonely kind of way. His table was near ours, and hearing him order some “Spachetti alia Pologhesse’’ I felt a pang of sympathy for him, for he, too, was one of us outcasts—a German. (Their mismanagement of Italian consonants is unmistakable.) As he went out he bowed to us politely in the Continental manner, and my companion observed that he must be over eighty. The next time Mrs. D. H. and I lunched at C.’s there he was again, looking older and sadder than ever. And when he rose to go, he stopped and spoke to me In German. He said, I think, that the war was very dreadful; and Mrs. D.H., a very ten-der-hearted woman, suddenly asked him to sit down and have his coffee with us. He was charming, and to my surprise he told me he knew me. “I once lived in Clarges Street, Frau Bariniu; and from the balcony where, after my dear wife’s death, X used to sit to try to get stronger, I often saw you going in and out of your house.” One day, shortly after Christmas, my children and I were playing in our rooms in Bayswater when we heard a ring at the house door and an odd noise. I rushed out. There, gasping, and apparently having a heart attack of some kind, my German acquaintance leaned against the railings. Suspected as a Spy I helped him inside, gave him some tea, and for an hour or so he sat by the fire resting and talking. He said it had been entirely by accident that he had rung at that particular door! I remember that he asked me twice if 1 did not long to get back home—and that I answered with sincerity that Germany was not my home and' that I had no wish whatever to go there. Kissing my babies kindly and my hand with ceremony, my visitor departed, and I forgot all about him—until, in the course of a bout of questioning at Scotland Yard months later, I learned that he was a Secret Service man sent to watch me.

Forbidden to do any kind of war work in England, I decided to go to a

big American hospital in France. I have forgotten why, but a friend of a friend of mine, a man to whom much in the official line was possible was prevailed upon to make me a passport in an assumed name, so that I might go to Paris. Mrs. O’Brien I was to be, and Irish. Off to Mr. Willie Clarkson I sped, ordered a Mrs. O’Brienesque black wig—my now-white hair was brown in those days—and full of imbecile glee, I told the assistant who measured my folly-filled head all about the adventure. That wig-maker must have chuckled as I babbled; for the blow fell on the morning when—as Kathleen O’Brien I was to go to the place where the passport was already made out —I stopped at Mr. Clarkson’s and arrayed myself in the wig. I Stand in the Dock The assistant, too, had babbled. As I left the shop one of those large de-tective-men touched my shoulder. ’’Are you the Baroness von Hutten?” I said that I was, and he asked me very gently if I would "just” go to Scotland Yard with him. But first I rushed back into the shop and tore off the wig—it was paid for, but I never saw it aagin. At “The Yard” I was questioned for over an hour and finally let go on parole. What saved me from very serious trouble was that my letters had been watched, as I have said, and that they were innocuous. Thanking the inspector for his courtesy, I went home vowing to be wise and law-abid-ing in the future. Alas! Why, whence, or whither I next transgressed against the law, I have forgotten, but transgress I did, and re-arrested I was, and one morning X found myself In the dock. Yet, hilarious and distressing though some of these experiences have been, I will add that should I ever again come within the arm of the law, may it be in England!