Shropshire houses POWs of both world wars. Here, German POWs work at Shawbury Airfield during WW1.

“One of our jobs was to empty the planes of petrol every night. In the morning the first thing we did was to fill them with petrol again. I struggled up this icy wing to open the cockpit – and there he was, a very beautiful blond German pilot, who was asleep. I let out a bloodcurdling scream.”

That brought everybody running to the spot and also woke up the fugitive.

While they awaited the arrival of the Military Police, the Group Captain invited the German into the crew room for a drink of hot cocoa.

“He conveyed to the Group Captain he would not go until he found me. By this time I was hiding at the back of the crowd. He found me and beckoned me. He said: ‘You cocoa with me’.”

And so it was that she found herself drinking cocoa with a German escapee. As she left, he clicked his heels and bowed.

She knew nothing at the time of his makeshift knife.

“I think I would have died.”

Margery, who lives near Hereford, never found out which camp he came from, but says it was in the Oswestry area.

There was another escape attempt, if that is what it was, which ended tragically on May 1, 1945, when the end of the war in Europe was only days away.

According to a short newspaper report at the time, two German prisoners were shot dead as they rushed a guard at an American military site near Wem in an apparent escape attempt. The sentry was opening a warehouse door when the prisoners rushed him. Their names were given as Grenadier Mullenhordd and Lance Corporal Frederich Wolter. They were buried at Wem Parish Church.

Nor were escapes peculiar to World War Two. German prisoners were held in Shropshire in World War One too.

The prisoners seem to have been put to work at various places, including at Shawbury airfield.

There was at least one escape from a camp in Shrewsbury.

In the immediate post-war period, Admiral von Reuter and his comrades who scuttled German warships at Scapa Flow were taken as prisoners of war to a camp near Oswestry in 1919, while in July 1919 a prisoner named Oster was shot by a sentry at Park Hall camp.

By Toby Neal