THE PRIVILEGED NIGHTMARE

 Romilly and Alexander, Pan illustrated paperback 1956.

The Privileged Nightmare, (which was a Daily Mail book of the month) tells of war adventures of an exceptional kind. For two years Giles Romilly and Michael Alexander shared a room in Colditz Castle, the notorious German prison camp. Romilly, Sir Winston Churchill’s nephew, had been captured as a war correspondent at Narvik. Alexander had been taken prisoner behind the German lines in North Africa wearing German uniform – only a last minute revelation of his relationship to the Field-Marshal (later Earl Alexander of Tunis) had saved him from summary execution. The Germans, deciding to hold Romilly and Alexander as possible hostages, classified them as Prominente and kept them apart from the other prisoners in Colditz. Later they were joined by other Prominente; Viscount Lascelles (nephew of King George V1 and now the Earl of Harewood), Earl Haig (son of the famous Field-Marshal of the First World War), the Earl of Hopetoun (now the Maquess of Linlithgow), the Master of Elphinstone (nephew of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother), John Winant (son of the wartime U.S. Ambassador to Britain) and the Polish General Bor Komorowski, the heroic defender of Warsaw.

 The covers are a tad grubby and have the usual creases and upturns. The pages of approximately the first quarter of the book have the lower tips turned up. Because this is an earlier paperback, although the pages have some light tanning, it is only light compared to later paperbacks, perhaps the quality of the paper was better. The book is complete and still tightly bound and there is a list in the back of similar titles in the series.