Down at the holiday chalet in Kent, the children return from an excursion with their grandparents, dripping wet, in a frenzy of excitement. “Daddy! Daddy!” shouts my daughter, racing up the slope from the swimming pool, forgetting for a moment that she recently abandoned this endearment on account of my being useless and embarrassing. “We saw Hitler in the pool!” “It’s true!” yells my son, coming up fast behind his sister, panting for breath. “Hitler!” (Gasp) “Evil!” (Gasp) “Swimming!” (Gasp). They throw their towels and goggles to the ground and await my reaction.
Do you mean, I say quietly, levering myself off my sun lounger, that Adolf Hitler, the former leader of Nazi Germany, generally considered to be the most evil man in the history of the world, is here, at Kingsdown Park, the UK Holiday Village With A Continental Look And Feel, right now? “Yes,” says Rachel impatiently, “he’s got the little moustache and the hair and everything.” “And he looks very vicious,” adds Sam. Was he wearing a long leather coat with an armband? I ask. “Don’t be stupid,” says Rachel. “He was in his trunks.” “A disguise?” suggests Sam. “Probably,” says Reg, my father-in-law, who has now joined us. “That’s exactly the sort of thing he would do.”
The children look from father to grandfather and back again, part-expectant, part-anxious, waiting to see how far this will go. Well, I say, starting to pace up and down, hands behind my back, there are two possibilities here. It could be that you merely saw a man who bore a passing resemblance to the long-dead Nazi dictator but isn’t in fact, him. Perhaps his hair became flattened and his moustache shrank into its trademark toothbrush style in the water; it could happen to any of us. The children don’t like the sound of this at all.
Or, I continue, hastily heading off a tearful protest, and I have to say I think this is far more likely, the man you saw was indeed Adolf Hitler, and he is over here, hiding, watching and waiting, laying plans for the invasion he failed to bring to fruition in 1940! What do you reckon, Pop? “I think on balance that’s exactly what’s happening,” says Reg solemnly. The children beam, everything back on track. This stretch of coast, I go on, here between the high cliffs to the south and the impenetrable marshes to the north, is, I’m sure you’ll recall, traditionally vulnerable to enemy action. They grin and nod. This is precisely the sort of dad-guff they like to hear.
Two thousand years ago, for instance, I say, getting into the full paternal fact-act, Julius Caesar stormed ashore at Walmer, not half a mile from where we’re sitting now, and right next to Kent’s premier dogging venue in that car park with the ice-cream van. Reg and Rachel look confused. “What’s a dogging venue?” ask the 7-year-old and 67-year-old simultaneously. “A place for dogs to play,” calls my wife, shooting me a warning look from inside the chalet. “The ice-cream van wouldn’t have been there then,” Sam informs his sister. “Idiot!” she hisses, aiming a kick.
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“Daddy,” says Sam, when the discussion resumes, “there’s a problem: I thought Hitler shot hisself in his Berlin lair as the Red Army was closing in at the end of the war!” (Yes, he really does talk like a nine-year-old mid-market feature writer, makes me very proud.) That is indeed the received wisdom, I say, but if you saw him here in the swimming pool, that can’t be true, can it? “I think maybe it was Hitler’s grandson,” says Sam. Excellent logic, I say, Hitler would after all be… let me see… 117 years old by now. But whether or not it’s Hitler or one of his no doubt equally evil descendants, it’s our duty to make inquiries and, if necessary, alert the authorities. “Winston Churchill?” asks Sam. “Absolutely,” says Reg. “What are we going to do?” asks Rachel. What we are going to do, I say, is hunt Hitler down without mercy. Fetch the binoculars.
My daughter and I set ourselves up behind a tree. She conducts a sweeping high- magnification scrutiny of our neighbours’ living rooms. It wouldn’t really do for me to do this myself, but she can get away with it. The succession of cheery waves she receives indicate the geriatric German genocide is not in the vicinity, and after ten minutes’ spying Rachel abruptly concludes this is all nonsense and runs off to talk to her mother and grandmother about more practical matters. I take a moment to grieve for the glory years 1999-2005 when her universe revolved around me.
“Daddy,” says Sam, breaking my reverie, “me and Pop think Hitler is hiding in the scout camp.” (There is a scout camp adjacent to the holiday village.) I notice my son and my father-in-law are both holding sticks, rifle-fashion. “I’ve got you a gun too,” says Sam. “Shall we investigate?” And thus do three generations of fantasists head off into the woods, and thus do the long days of summer pass, and thus are one family’s myths and memories banked up for the winter and the generations to come.
robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk