Madame Barbara
Madame Barbara
Helen Forrester
A wonderful new novel from Liverpool’s best-loved author. A tale of loss and love set in post-Second World War England and France.This is the story of a young Liverpool woman widowed in the Second World War before she can know the happiness of having a family. With the blessing of her mother, with whom she runs a B&B, she goes to Normandy to see where her husband was killed in the D-Day landings. Once she is there, she meets an impoverished French poultry farmer, now reduced to driving a beaten up (and still rare) taxi and looking after his old mother and dying brother. Will these two find happiness together?A touching love story, a compelling portrayal of the aftermath of war and above all a testament to the courage and endurance of oridinary people, Madame Barbara will delight Helen Forrester’s countless fans.
HELEN FORRESTER
MADAME BARBARA
Dedication (#ulink_48148a8b-2a88-5691-8f84-ce36c314b15f)
To the memory ofPrivate Kenneth Andrew Pagett,5th Battalion, The East Lancashire Regiment,killed in action in the battle for Caen,July 1944.
Epigraph (#ulink_abbbe389-6e68-5916-9bb0-5f8affb1aa34)
From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.
Isaiah 34:10
Contents
Cover (#ued5809e2-c835-5ce6-bd3d-2f7aacda47c7)
Title Page (#uc3683c19-e1e7-53c0-8f21-ccb5b6f9c43e)
Dedication (#ud320dffc-1b17-511f-b06f-37cbfd2865bf)
Epigraph (#uf40de233-dc5a-56a0-af5e-933b7ffffea8)
Chapter One (#u10bc40d8-0b29-5652-9d9f-f967db6b2d4e)
Chapter Two (#ud598fa79-baa5-53ce-bf55-a50bf0c8d144)
Chapter Three (#uf2908308-77c1-5da5-a1b9-7645bd560ed2)
Chapter Four (#u4cc6cb10-4eb8-557f-9978-0c2fd35b18cd)
Chapter Five (#ua79fc417-c3c1-5a07-8d9b-3b926305f33d)
Chapter Six (#u4d70bd57-a53e-5d57-bc03-fe7efa75a70a)
Chapter Seven (#ufe021457-b836-57ed-a02d-30d0d03532c0)
Chapter Eight (#u6a1890d8-1d0d-5922-98fe-149bf987b3ec)
Chapter Nine (#uc7c15fa7-f2d3-536a-93a9-064473b5d79c)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Helen Forrester (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One Spring 1948 (#ulink_ff09cc0c-021b-51a9-b217-748a2b8beeaa)
‘Permit me, Madame.’ The taxi driver lifted out of Barbara Bishop’s arms the ornate bunch of flowers she was carrying. He was careful not to crush the red, white and blue bow which held the stems together. ‘I’ll lay them beside you on the back seat.’ He spoke in French, but his gestures made the meaning clear.
Tired by her long journey from Liverpool, the young widow said mechanically, ‘Merci, Monsieur,’ and climbed into the cab.
She had been told by the English-speaking receptionist at the Bayeux hotel into which Messrs Thomas Cook had booked her that this precious vehicle was the only taxi remaining in Bayeux. He had gone on to say, with a sardonic grin, that the German Army had failed to find it when they had requisitioned every French vehicle to aid their retreat from Normandy.
‘When the Allied Army invaded Normandy in 1944, Madame, and, after the Battle for Caen, Germany was defeated, the German soldiers became desperate. They took cars, lorries, every bicycle they could find to help them get away.’ He threw up his hands. ‘We’re still very short of transport of any kind – even work horses.’
As Barbara Bishop climbed into the taxi, she noted with disdain that its interior still had a faint aroma of manure from the old racing stable in which the receptionist said it had been hidden since 1940. She wrinkled her nose; in England it was widely believed that the French were dirty – but a taxi smelling of manure …?
Its seats were upholstered in cracked black oilcloth, and the glass in one of its side windows had been replaced by a piece of roughly cut celluloid.
The taxi driver held Barbara’s flowers with decent reverence – were they not destined to be laid on a grave? As he waited for her to get in, he observed with interest a pair of remarkably pretty legs, and a neat little bottom clad in a plum-coloured corduroy skirt.
She was wearing heavy, plum-coloured shoes which matched her skirt, and nylon stockings. He noted the nylons and wondered if she had an American lover; even in this quiet spring of 1948, nearly three years after the war had finished, he knew of no other way that a young woman could obtain nylon stockings.
Lover or not, the smart little rear end was enough to make him sigh wistfully at his bachelor state. And her light brown hair looked so bright as it glinted in the sunlight; it had been carefully set in a bunch of curls and clasped at the back of her neck by a fine old-fashioned tortoiseshell hairslide.
This thin slip of womanhood did not look like most of the English widows he had recently driven to the local military cemeteries. Despite her long stride and the determined lift of her chin, she looked poorer, and the taxi driver wondered how she had afforded to make the journey from England. Most of the others had been obviously well-to-do, with hair professionally dressed and, on their left hands, huge diamond engagement rings as well as wedding rings. They had asked to see the graves of officers, and had been condescendingly polite to him.
He knew that type of English woman. Long before the war, he had sold eggs and fresh chickens from his father’s poultry farm to an older generation of just such women. They had been part of a large number of English retirees who had settled near the coast of Calvados. They had, of course, expected their orders to be delivered; women like that did not come to the market. So he had done the deliveries on his bicycle. Some of them lived permanently in Normandy, some only for the winter months. Not quite rich enough to live in Deauville or Trouville, they were, however, very aware of their status, particularly, he recollected with amusement, when dealing with peasants like himself.
Driven by an ambition to improve himself, he had, from the age of ten, patiently learned a great deal of English from them. They rarely spoke good French. He could, he thought with conceit, discuss in detail in the best of English the merits of a dressed chicken, even if, before knocking on their back doors, he had had to look up in his pocket dictionary the new words he wanted to try out on them.
During the first year of the war, when nothing much militarily had happened in France, the ladies had, nevertheless, quietly retreated back to England, taking their retired husbands and their horrid little dogs with them.
This young woman – Madame Barbara Bishop, according to the slip of paper the receptionist had given him when booking the taxi – had greeted him with friendly politeness, which had been a pleasant relief. She was, Reservations had said, going to the grave of an ordinary private.
Her wedding ring was a plain band; she wore no engagement ring. He presumed that wartime marriages in Britain, as in France, did not allow for much show in the shape of jewellery – unless one had suitable pieces already in the family.
Furthermore, unlike most of the other ladies, she was shorter than he; she could not literally look down on him. He was unable to place her exactly, but decided that she might be the daughter of a small shopkeeper.
Unaware of the fast analysis of her social standing, Barbara seated herself. She laid her black, heavily embroidered handbag on her lap.
He enquired, this time in English, ‘Madame is comfortable?’ He smiled at her. But if he hoped to encourage her to flirt with him, he was unsuccessful.
Barbara Bishop looked up at the lined nut-brown face of her driver with little interest.
He had a thin face, its outline, by English standards, a surprisingly aristocratic one. Norman forebears, she supposed idly, the same as some Englishmen had. His smile exposed uneven teeth heavily stained by nicotine. On his head was perched a black beret. His much-darned sweater was also black, as were his loose trousers. A very thin man, his heavy boots seemed too big for him. She noted absently that his left shoulder was slightly hunched, and, like his taxi, he smelled as if he could do with a wash.
‘Madame is comfortable?’ he repeated.
She nodded wearily and replied, ‘Oui. Merci bien.’ She was dulled by grief, drained by a long night of useless weeping, while her whole body still ached from years of work too heavy for her small frame. Until last night she had not cried for months; life without George had become a dull ache which she lived with as best she could.
The driver closed the taxi door and went round to the door on the other side. He opened it and laid the flowers carefully beside his passenger on the seat, with the ends of the stems nearest to her. In that position, she could easily grab them if they threatened to slip onto the floor when he started up the ancient vehicle.
During the three months he had been doing it, he had become quite experienced at driving young widows and weeping mothers to cemeteries, and he prided himself on knowing all the possible small snags that could occur, like expensive wreaths slipping off the seat as the taxi bumped its way over hastily repaired roads.
As he laid down the flowers, he glanced at this widow and smiled again. As with most of the women he drove, his passenger was interesting in her foreignness. She was, he noted, wearing a flowered scarf draped around her neck over a shabby pink tweed jacket. So unlike a perfidious French woman in black skirt and white blouse, he thought, his mouth tightening with long-suppressed rage.
As he climbed into the driver’s seat, he asked in English if this were her first visit to Normandy.
‘Yes,’ she answered with a sigh.
He nodded as he started the taxi and put it in gear. It shuddered in protest and then, as he feared it would, when he pressed the gas pedal, it suddenly bolted forward like a startled horse.
She caught the flowers before they fell, but her handbag slid off her lap and onto the dusty floor.
‘Oh dear!’ she exclaimed. The black embroidered handbag was precious; she had fashioned this one herself from remnants of an old overcoat bought in a second-hand shop; the body of the coat had yielded a plain, black skirt, very useful in a tightly rationed country. She had spent several late evenings embroidering the bag with scraps of knitting wool and was proud of the design of roses on its sides.
As the taxi shot out into the main street of Bayeux, narrowly missing a heavily laden hay wain, she clutched an old-fashioned safety bar by the door rather than attempt to retrieve the handbag.
The hay wain’s horse reared, and the beret-crowned wagoner shouted angrily at the taxi driver.
The taxi’s bald tyres shrieked as the vehicle skidded round the back of the cart and into the outside lane.
The taxi driver muttered furiously to himself. Then, as he passed the cart, taking with him wisps of hay from its protruding load, he leaned out of the open window and shouted what was obviously an epithet at the wagoner.
In the cracked side mirror, his passenger caught a glimpse of the wagoner shaking a fist after them.
As the taxi driver sped down the almost empty street, he turned to reassure her. ‘Pardon, Madame. These farmers think the road is for horses only. Germans steal all mechanical vehicles to facilitate their retreat, you understand?’ He chuckled as he went on, ‘The owner of this taxi hide it in an old racing stable – long time no horses – beautiful horses sent to America for safety, just before the Germans arrive. Lots of straw and horse shit left behind in the stable – Germans never look under it.’
She merely nodded at the driver’s remark while, agitated by his poor driving, she continued to clutch the safety bar with one hand, and with the other held on to the bouquet. She had no desire to take the erratic driver’s attention away from the street.
Despite the noise of the ancient engine, she had caught the gist of his remark about farmers – his English was surprisingly good, she thought. She herself had little French beyond the schoolgirl version taught her in her last year at school and the contents of the phrase book which she had studied earnestly for some weeks before embarking on her journey. She was, however, far from stupid, and in the few days she had been travelling in France she had begun bravely to use the words she knew, though she pronounced them very badly. She had gratefully accepted correction by persons with whom she attempted to communicate, whether their remarks sounded good-natured or irate.
Barbara saw that the driver was watching her through his rear-view mirror, and she again nodded polite agreement with his remark regarding farmers and their horses. Though there were quite a number of carts, vans and even small carriages being pulled by horses through the streets of Bayeux, there were only a couple of cars and a small delivery van to be seen. Even bicycles were few and far between. She had, at first, assumed that an acute shortage of petrol was the cause of the unexpected return to horsepower in the streets, but it was apparently not the basic cause.
‘The Germans took all the motor vehicles?’ she asked in English, when the taxi seemed to be being safely driven in a straight line.
‘Yes, Madame.’ The driver cogitated for a moment, trying to collect for her benefit his knowledge of English. ‘The Germans fight very hard to defend themselves here in Calvados; they were brave men, the Germans. Finally, they see that Caen and Lisieux are – what you say? – finish.’ He let go of the wheel and threw up his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘They lose faith in Adolf Hitler. He does not send them enough ammunition. Their generals are confused. They fight well. They despair, retreat fast – in our lorries, our cars, our bicycles, when they find them.’ His English was imperfect, but he did not appear to be short of vocabulary.
She nodded. The explanation confirmed what Reservations had told her.
The taxi began to veer towards the ditch and the driver hastily grabbed the steering wheel again.
Despite her alarm at his driving, it was a relief to Barbara to reply in English, ‘Didn’t they believe that Hitler was invincible?’
‘Non, Madame. That is big story. When Normandy is invaded by the Allies, he not agree with the plans of his generals. Support troops not come when needed. If he permit the German generals to fight as they plan, invasion very difficult for the Allies.’
‘It must have been terrifying, anyway, for the French civilians?’
‘Madame, it was most dreadful. After the Germans kill so many of us and they deport so many to Germany – 180,000 deportees die in Germany, 18,000 when the British bomb the railways and airports before they invade. Then, when invasion come, when we hope for freedom at last, so many more innocents die.’ His uneven shoulders were shrugged. ‘I do not know how many. I hear one-third of the people of Caen die. My fiancée’s parents die somewhere on their farm. They are not yet found. In addition, how many injured, only the good God knows. The bombardment was terrible. It never stop. Hospitals round here are still full.’
‘And yourself?’
‘Myself? My family?’ He swallowed. He was not used to being asked personal questions by strangers, and his experiences had been so traumatic that he found it difficult to talk about them. Then he said slowly, almost reluctantly, ‘We are three. Mama, my big brother, Anatole – he is very sick – and me, Michel Benion. We live now in Bayeux; my two married sisters in Rouen – Rouen is enormous ruin. Sisters and their husbands is alive.’ His tone dropped, as he added sadly, ‘One little nephew killed.
‘Mama, Anatole and me, we wait for our poultry farm to be clear of anti-tank traps and mines. We cannot work the land – not walk on it – until it is clear. One neighbour go to his home and – boom-boom – he is dead.’
Barbara was interested. The sad story took her mind off her own misery. She murmured in English, ‘It must have been terrifying. I’m so sorry about the little boy.’
Encouraged by her sympathy, Michel went on, ‘Anatole, my brother, come home from Germany very sick. He was slave in Germany, Madame. Can you believe it, nowadays? A slave. No pay. Hardly any food.’
‘I do believe you. I have heard about such things – and I saw a list outside the hôtel de ville – a long list of those transported who had died in Germany.’ She sighed, and then enquired politely, ‘I hope your brother is getting better? Relever?’
‘Merci, Madame. He cough very bad.’
She quailed, as the driver again took one hand off the steering wheel to pat his chest.
‘La tuberculose,’ he explained. ‘He is long time without help. Incroyablement, he try to walk back to Normandy. The Americans find him with civilian refugees from East Germany – they flee from the Russians.’
Barbara nodded sympathetically. ‘Poor man. Tuberculosis, you say?’
‘Oui, Madame.’
The driver swerved to avoid a stout woman in a black skirt, who was riding a bicycle slowly towards him down the middle of the road.
‘People still have bicycles,’ Barbara remarked, as she resignedly settled down to a rough ride.
‘Ah, yes, Madame. There are a few. A bicycle is easy to hide. Not like a bus or a lorry. But the Germans, they take lots of them. This taxi is hid inland. The stable has much bocage round it – how you say?’ He saw her smile slightly.
‘A thicket round it?’ she suggested. Her voice faltered as she added, ‘My husband wrote in his letters about bocage – thickets and hedges. He said there were a lot of them. And it was hard to get through them.’
‘Yes, Madame. Very difficult for tanks and soldiers to fight through.’
She smiled wanly.
He was pleased to see the smile. He had forgotten his irritation at the traffic.
They were out of the city now, and bowling along a straight road which seemed to stretch to the horizon. It was lined on either side by Lombardy poplars. Between the tall trees, weathered stumps indicated haphazard cutting of some of them, and Barbara leaned forward and asked, ‘Were the trees cut for firewood in the war?’
At first, the driver did not quite understand her, so she repeated the question slowly and pointed to some stumps as they passed them.
‘Mais non, Madame. The Resistance cut the trees and lay them across the road. They block the roads to make the German retreat more difficult – Germans are caught and killed by invasion instead of safe retreat.’
He gestured with one hand, and added, ‘No good. Tanks and big lorries go across the fields. Naturellement, this winter we burn the trunks – firewood – a bad winter.’ He sighed at the memory. ‘Very, very bad winter, Madame.’
Barbara leaned back to rest her head. ‘It was awfully bad in England as well.’ Her voice sounded weary. ‘The very worst winter I ever remember. No coal, no electricity, hardly any gas. Even bread was rationed this winter – and potatoes.’
‘Yes, Madame. Also here. Bread ration. Sometimes no bread in bakeries.’
‘My stars!’ Barbara exclaimed, shocked by his remark. ‘At least we get our ration.’
‘English are lucky. Farms not fought over.’
‘They don’t feel very lucky.’
‘Very difficult for everybody,’ Michel responded diplomatically.
They were passing what seemed to have been a village. Only broken walls remained. Already weeds were growing between the stones. The driver gestured towards it and said laconically, ‘Here they fight backwards and forwards. Nothing left.’
In the rear-view mirror, he saw the slight movement of her head in acknowledgment of his remark. He went on, ‘Our farm like this village. It is within ten kilometres of the coast.’ He slowed the taxi and turned his head towards her, old rage resurfacing as he said bitterly, ‘So much is our farm fought over, and the one next to it, that there is nothing left – nothing. No house, no horse, no hens, no hen coops or brooders, no barn, no pigs, no cow – no people.
‘Father die in 1941. Until the invasion, Mama and I work on the farm to keep it somehow until peace come. What peace, Madame?’
He had really caught Barbara’s attention. This was information about the French side of the war that she had rarely seen reported in England, except for a line or two as back-page news.
He went on, ‘When the invasion of the Allies begin, Mama and me – we hide in la cave. We are very afraid. House is destroy. La cave is very, very old storehouse – very strong, only little window. When the armies move away, we escape – walk to Bayeux.
‘My uncle, Uncle Léon, sail out of Port-en-Bessin not too far away, you understand? We do not know, however, where the ships of the coast is gone. We hope news in Bayeux. Uncle will help us. You understand, Madame, the coast is in great disturbance. Where are our fishermen? Where are our little boats? Good question.’
She nodded to convey her understanding of the problem.
‘As we walk, advancing Allied troops say Bayeux is not damage …’ He took both hands off the wheel, to indicate with gestures a sense of turmoil.
Barbara held her breath until he hastily gripped the wheel again and continued to drive down the middle of the road.
‘In Bayeux, very small damage. Much chaos because many refugee arrive suddenly. Help will be there – but maybe not for many days. I must find work – to eat. Monks give us clean clothes, and I work two weeks in hotel kitchen in Bayeux. I cook and clean – German Army cooks not very clean. Then the British Army requisition it. They not like French cooking.’ He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘They bring their own cooks.
‘What I do? Our neighbours caught in the battle – we have not found them. We cannot go on to our land. Too dangerous.’ Yet again with his hands he expressed the enormousness of the damage, of the crowds of panic-stricken refugees swarming into the city.
Barbara swallowed as the taxi once more began to edge towards the ditch.
Michel quickly regrasped the wheel and did a theatrical turn towards the centre of the narrow road.
‘Le Maire – hôtel de ville – is, how you say, overwhelm? Later, the Government – they promise money, ’elp for Normandy. But ’elp is for cities, Madame, not for poor peasant.’ He sighed. ‘It is always so. Government not care for peasants. They clear some roads OK. But now we wait and we wait.’
‘I thought the Americans poured in help?’
‘Americans give to Britain, to Germany. At first, they not trust the French or our General de Gaulle – we are forty per cent Communists.’
Aware of Communism in the back streets of Liverpool, Barbara said in surprise, ‘But we have Communists too. The Americans are giving it to us.’
‘Communists in France are – how you say? – a force political. Americans now fear revolution – perhaps a Communist one – may happen in France, if they do not give us help. So now it is that Marshall Aid comes – but first for the railways, the roads, the air fields, all destroyed by Allied bombing; and then for Le Havre, for Rouen, Cherbourg – the cities.’
‘It must be very hard for your mother.’
‘Hard for all,’ he assured her gloomily.
Barbara changed the subject. She said slowly in English, ‘It was very kind of the American soldiers – the undertakers at the hotel – to permit you to take me to the cemetery. The hotel says they booked this taxi for four whole months. The reservations clerk said that you usually stay with the Americans at the cemeteries throughout the day while they work.’
The length of Barbara’s remark made it a little difficult for Michel to understand. He replied cautiously, ‘American Army very good, soldiers most kind, Madame. Lots of petrol! Certainement, they pay taxi four months – not like the Boches – he never pay for anything he can take, les sales Boches.’
Though he laughed, he sounded cynical, as he remembered how some German soldiers had demanded his best poultry breeding stock and had wrung their pretty necks in front of him. Then they had made his mother clean and pluck them ready for cooking. Cook some of the world’s best breeding stock? It was murder. His poor Chanticleer and his pretty, fertile wives. Hélas! How would he ever find the money to replace them?
As he mourned his dead hens, Michel edged the vehicle round a pothole filled with water, and then continued, ‘Taxi is the only transport to cemeteries, Madame. Now many people want to visit their dead. This is the only taxi in Bayeux. So I ask Americans, can I take civilians to the cemeteries, while they work? I promise to collect them from their American cemeteries exactly when they order. You understand taxi cannot be left for one moment unattended. Someone steal, dead cert.’ Michel was rapidly extending his vocabulary while working for the Americans.
‘They say OK. Take some lady to cemetery. Make a buck. So I drive American ladies, English ladies, one lady from Poland – widow of man who fight with British, je crois.’
He cleared his throat and spat out of the window. ‘Two German ladies come – they omit to tip me.’ He half turned his head towards her. He sounded mystified, as he added, ‘You know, they cry like everyone else.’
‘I am sure they did,’ Barbara agreed.
She felt fiercely that she did not care whether the Germans flooded the earth with their tears; they could never undo the ruination of her life by the taking of her George’s life.
Let the German widows cry. Let them suffer. She hoped their cities remained shattered, their factories empty, looted by both Americans and Russians, their farms fought over and desolate. Let them pay.
After a while, to take her mind off her own troubles, she asked the taxi driver, ‘What are the Americans doing here? Are they really undertakers? Aren’t all the dead buried yet?’
‘Ah, simple, Madame. They arrange for dead American soldiers to go home. Bury them in America.’
‘What a lovely idea!’
‘Very, very expensive, Madame.’ Michel obviously did not believe in such a waste of money, even if it resulted in work for himself.
They swung round a corner into a narrow lane. At the end of it, an open ironwork gate faced them, and, beyond that, what at first looked like a sea of white and green.
As they drove through the gateway, the sea resolved into masses and masses of white crosses set in neat rows amid green lawns, stretching, it seemed to Barbara, into infinity.
She caught her breath. So many! Her mild amusement at the taxi driver’s disapproval of American extravagance was forgotten in the shock of being suddenly surrounded by the evidence of so much death. Surely, it could not be?
But the evidence lay there, crying out in its silence.
She was appalled.
Just inside the gate, the taxi came to a halt. Michel opened Barbara’s door and took her hand to help her alight. Her normal self-confidence left her. She was so shaken by the scene before her that she was grateful for the man’s firm grip; though he smelled at least it was the smell of a man – a man such as she was used to, who worked hard.
‘I get the flowers for Madame,’ he said gently.
She looked at him a little helplessly, and then she pointed to her dropped handbag and asked him if he could reach in and rescue it for her.
‘Mais oui, Madame.’
The cloth bag was covered with dust and not a few hayseeds, blown in when they had passed the hay wain. Michel carefully brushed it as clean as he could, before handing it to her.
He smiled. ‘Very pretty bag, Madame.’
‘Thank you,’ she answered, and then, looking a little rueful, she muttered absently, ‘I made it myself. It’s still difficult to buy things.’
He made a wry face. He, too, knew about the shortages of everything. He leaned into the taxi to retrieve the flowers for her.
As he handed the bouquet to her, he saw that despite her casual remarks about her handbag she had gone as white as her lilies. Her dark blue eyes were wide with fright.
Pauvre petite! So little, so sweet, and, at this moment, looking so helpless. He wanted to take her in his arms to comfort her and tell her that all would be well, that she could be sure that Jules, the gardener, was very kind and that he looked after the graves with great care.
In the silence of the cemetery, his voice sounded harsh, as, instead, he cleared his throat and enquired hastily, ‘Number of the grave, Madame?’
She told him.
He took her arm. ‘I walk with you. Then wait by taxi.’
She was shaking, and simply nodded acceptance. Fearing she might faint, he held her arm firmly and guided her further along the little lane on which the taxi stood. ‘Germans that side, Allies this side,’ he explained.
She nodded again. They walked across the grass for a minute or two. From a little fenced enclosure at the back of the cemetery, a figure emerged.
‘He is Jules – the gardener,’ Michel told her.
She was pressing her arm against the driver’s guiding hand, as if she never wanted him to let go, but she showed some sign of animation by saying, ‘Oh, yes. I remember the name. I wrote to the Head Gardener of this cemetery. He replied that the cemetery was, at last, open for visitors. His letter was so kind. So I knitted a pullover – out of wool from old pullovers – and sent it to him as a thank you present for, for …’ Her voice broke for a moment, then she went on more firmly, ‘for looking after George.’
The taxi driver showed surprise. ‘He like that. Nobody thank gardener before – certainement.’
As Jules approached, she smiled at him as bravely as she could. The driver repeated the number of the grave to him.
‘Come, Madame.’
She unlinked her arm, and, hugging her flowers, her chin up, her face suddenly old and grim, she walked forward – like St Joan going into the fire, the driver told his brother, Anatole, sometime later.
Chapter Two (#ulink_c6b132d8-a976-5cc7-9f6d-65b402f3379f)
All the modest hopes of George and Barbara had come to naught. Without George, his young widow considered, life was not worth living. She wished passionately that she had a child to console her, but they had deferred having a family until the end of the war.
From the day the war began, Barbara and her mother, Phyllis Williams, had fought a stalwart battle to save their home and their means of livelihood until peace should be declared. It had been a hard, very long struggle, and, on top of that, to be bereaved was difficult to bear.
They owned a small bed-and-breakfast establishment abutting the seashore on the Wirral peninsula. It was about eight miles from Liverpool, on the other side of the River Mersey, and not far from the estuary of the River Dee. They had worked for years to build it up as a nice place for commercial travellers to stay overnight, and for people in search of a family holiday during the summer.
Their home was an old farmhouse, lovingly restored by its original owner. Barbara and her mother ran the business while her father went to sea. He had been torpedoed in 1941.
For the sake of her daughter, Phyllis wept for her husband in secret and dealt firmly with the other problems the war had brought her.
‘We’ve got to eat, luvvie,’ she had told twenty-two-year-old Barbara, who had been devastated by her father’s death. And with considerable courage, like other Merseyside bereaved women, mother and daughter continued to try to live as normal lives as possible. It was not easy.
As far as Barbara was concerned, the battle had seemed worth it once she had met George.
She had actually seen him once or twice in the village, a rather ponderous youth a couple of years older than herself.
She had met him again when he was on leave, handsome in his Army uniform, at a Red Cross dance held in the church hall. He had, he told her, not been much at home since leaving school; at first he had been learning his trade as an apprentice to a stone mason, working on repairs to Chester Cathedral. Then once he had his journeyman’s papers, he had found a place working on the new Church of England Cathedral in Liverpool. He loved his work; he was devoted to his cathedral. But cathedral building can be put on hold until wars are finished, so George had been called up.
After Barbara and George’s marriage in 1942, the newlyweds and Phyllis Williams had all three cherished hopes of living together in the bed-and-breakfast after the war was over. The women would continue to run it, and George looked forward to returning to his full-time work as stone mason on the unfinished cathedral.
Phyllis Williams had been very pleased to acquire such a well-placed, sensible young man as a son-in-law. Suddenly, the need to keep the bed-and-breakfast going had acquired new meaning for her; it would be a great place for grandchildren, and the three of them would be quite comfortable financially.
Both women had been crushed and bewildered by George’s death. But other people were dependent upon their business, and both women worked mechanically to keep the shabby farmhouse open.
‘It’s the small nightmares wot keeps driving you crazy,’ Phyllis would lament. ‘Some of them is the last straw.’ And they would both blow their noses, and do their best.
Phyllis, however, became very worried about her widowed daughter as she watched her decline into a dull, disinterested woman, who rarely went out socially. It wasn’t that Barbara did not do her share of the work of their little business; she did more than enough, and she knitted and sewed industriously to help eke out their sparse clothes-rationing coupons.
‘You know, Ada, there’s no life in her; and she’s too young to give up like she is,’ Phyllis had said anxiously to George’s mother. Ada was herself a widow who did not have much life in her either, except when talking about her garden, when her face would occasionally light up.
‘You know and I know, Ada, that you just have to put the war behind you and start again.’
Ada Bishop sighed deeply. Phyllis Williams was the bravest little soul she knew.
‘Perhaps, in the back of her mind, she hopes he’ll turn up again; it’s been known to happen,’ suggested Ada. ‘You don’t always think quite sensible when you’re young, do you? I know he’ll never come home. But she may still hope.’
‘You don’t always think sensible even when you’re older,’ replied Phyllis, with a wry smile. It had been hard for her to accept that her own husband had been torpedoed in Liverpool Bay in 1941, and would never return. But a lot of seamen never had a grave other than the sea. Then she said, with sudden inspiration at the thought of a grave, ‘Perhaps she’d see different if she could look at George’s grave! She’d really know then.’
The mothers agreed. They persuaded Barbara that she should take a break and go to Normandy.
So, after some argument, a listless Barbara had drawn on her wartime savings – it had been easy to save in wartime, because there was very little to buy – and had gone to see Thomas Cook.
Until catching the ferry at Dover and her subsequent arrival in Bayeux, she had felt fairly calm about the visit; in fact, she had regarded it as an unusual, but welcome break, taken to please Ada and Phyllis.
Now, thin and workworn, Barbara faced her loss as bravely as she could. She was physically exhausted, despairing in her own loneliness and that of her overworked half-fed mother, bedevilled by the continued strict rationing – and by the cold, the everlasting cold which Britain had endured in that hopeless winter of 1947–48, the lack of gas and electricity – and food. Would there ever be any let-up, she wondered. There seemed to be absolutely nothing to look forward to.
While travelling to France, she had dwelled on the miserable condition of her home. It had been, in 1939, such a pretty seaside bed-and-breakfast establishment, with an excellent reputation.
The declaration of war had put an end to that. The house and garden had been ruined a few days before the war actually began.
Children and their mothers were evacuated from Liverpool and billeted upon them. She and Phyllis, with three extra mothers in the kitchen, had been thrown into chaos. They had accepted, however, that these refugees from the heavy bombing that was daily anticipated had to be housed. They did their best to cope.
She shuddered when she remembered the day she had discovered that all their beds had bugs in them and the pillows had lice, brought in by evacuees from some of the worst slums in Britain.
Mercifully, the evacuees had decided they hated living in what they regarded as countryside, where there was not even a decent fish-and-chip shop, and had returned home to Liverpool, as yet unbombed.
Phyllis Williams and Barbara had had to burn the pillows, boil the bedding, and ask the Town Council to get the entire house stoved for them. It stank for days afterwards.
They painstakingly went through the bedrooms again, armed with a local store’s last tins of Keating’s powder. To their relief they found no more invaders. The kitchen and all the floors in the house were scrubbed and polished.
The front garden was a mess, tramped over by both children and adults.
Barbara wanted to weep. Originally, she had herself planted the garden and it had become her hobby. Looking back, she thought how stupid it was to weep over a small garden; she had wept many more bitter tears since then.
Her mother, made of sterner stuff, said, ‘We’ll get a lad to dig it over, and seed it with grass. And we’ll put a couple of flowerpots on either side of the front door.’
Barbara acquiesced.
‘The main problem is, Barbie, it looks as if we’re not goin’ to get our usual customers. The commercial travellers is all going into the Army, and, if this summer’s any example, the older couples what used to spend their holidays with us don’t seem to be taking holidays any more. So what to do?’
‘I don’t know, Mam, but if we don’t fill up this house quickly, it’ll be requisitioned again for something.’
They sat in silence, staring at their kitchen, once more restored to order.
Then Barbara said, ‘You’re right, Mam, about the elderly couples not coming. But I wonder if they’d come if we pointed out that if France falls – and it looks as if it might – the South’ll be in range for bombing. We could offer them permanent accommodation well away from it.’
Her mother slapped her knee. ‘I think you’re right, luv. There’s one or two people as has come up from London, staying in the village already.’
They had sat down and written to some twenty elderly couples from the South-East of England, who had in times past spent holidays with them. They made Barbara’s point about likely bombing, and the comparative safety of the North.
The nervous anticipation in the South of being bombed was sufficient. Within two weeks, they had all their eight bedrooms filled, housing a total of seventeen people. Their biggest bedroom held three quarrelsome, complaining old sisters, who proved to be the most trying of their hastily acquired visitors.
The overwhelmed local housing authority, themselves disorganised by the sudden weight of responsibility thrust upon them by the immediacies of war, decided that they could not very well dislodge such elderly refugees from the South without causing a scandal. They accepted the situation.
As grossly overworked Phyllis remarked, with resignation, ‘At least this lot knows what being clean means, thanks be to Mary.’
Phyllis and Barbara agreed that it was advisable to keep the house more crowded than it had ever been, lest the authorities suddenly change their collective mind and try to thrust additional, unwanted guests upon them. And there was always the overriding fear that the Army or the Air Force might requisition the entire property, though this did not happen.
So, for nearly seven years, as a constant background to their personal grief at the loss of their menfolk, the harassed hostesses faced continuous complaints about the difficulty of climbing stairs; and, though each bedroom had a sink, that there was only one bathroom and three lavatories in the place.
Regardless of the fact that almost every home in Britain was cold from lack of fuel, running wars were fought between old gentlemen trying to hog the chairs nearest the meagre gas fire in the lounge. Ladies complained of lack of hot water for washing clothes and having baths – even of getting into the bathroom in the first place.
Accusations regarding the unfair distribution of rationed food, particularly the tiny amounts of sugar, butter, cheese, jam and marmalade, flew back and forth between the little round tables in the dining room. Sometimes, perfectly respectable couples would accuse each other of theft of jam from their private pots, which had been specially provided by Phyllis to ensure fairness.
Frequently, Phyllis had to intervene in the altercations and point out the minuscule amount of individual rations. It all seemed so stupid to her. There were men like her husband Hugh, victim of a U-boat attack, and George, who would give their lives for them – and they screamed with rage over marmalade!
Anybody would imagine that they had no one in their families serving in the Forces; yet Phyllis knew that they did.
When, in 1944, George was killed, Barbara thought the refugees would drive her insane. She was sorely tempted to scream, ‘Shut up! Get out!’ at them, and she wondered how her mother could endure them so patiently.
When the war ended, most of them lingered for a while. A number had wrecked or damaged homes, which had to be restored before they could move down south again. A few, perhaps because they had been protected for so long from the reality of existence in a drained country, seemed unable to make up their minds what to do, and, meanwhile, had stayed on.
Particularly in 1947, the worried hostesses had had a real problem finding enough food, rationed or unrationed, to provide three meagre meals a day for the old curmudgeons. They had thankfully said farewell to the last of them at Christmas.
That same year Barbara and her mother had been very relieved to see the return of some of their usual clientele, commercial travellers. The gentlemen had little to sell. Wholesalers were anxious, however, to keep their company name in front of their old clients, so that, as soon as adequate goods were available, their pre-war share of the market would not be lost.
Once or twice, thought Barbara, the old folk had been very nice to her. Back in June 1942, when she had married George, they had insisted that Phyllis use some of their points rations, which meant very limited amounts of tinned food, like Spam or golden syrup, to make a wedding breakfast for the young couple.
In addition, all the ladies had set to work to embroider or knit or crochet little wedding gifts. Even the gentlemen, whom Barbara swore were the laziest bunch of old so-and-sos she had ever met, bestirred themselves. The result was a number of beautifully hand-carved gifts. Though she could no longer bear to look at them because it made her want to cry, she still treasured in her dressing-table drawer three neatly carved wooden spoons made from driftwood found on the shore.
She went round the lot of them to kiss them in gratitude.
They had been equally kind when they heard about George’s death; they had all expressed their sorrow at her loss, as those who knew about it had done earlier, when her father was killed. There had not been a single quarrel for at least two weeks.
During the weeks following the loss of George, two of the residents lost grandsons and at last, it seemed to Barbara, the reality of the war truly came home to them; not even a string of bombs dropped across the Wirral peninsula, nor the news some had received of their homes being damaged or requisitioned had been able to achieve that.
When the war began, Barbara herself had wanted to volunteer for military service and join the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. It sounded exciting.
Her mother would not hear of it. ‘With your dad at sea, I need you. Who else can I turn to?’
So Barbara, who loved her mam, stayed home.
When France fell to the Germans, Barbara broached the subject again. But Phyllis still would not hear of it either. Nice girls stayed at home with their mams. ‘And, anyway, wot am I going to do without you, and a house full of old folks to run?’ When her father was torpedoed, her mother was certainly glad to have her there.
A domestic crisis had occurred when, in December 1942, all married women under the age of forty were called up for war work. Barbara was directed to a contractor who was busy repairing damaged docks in Birkenhead. She worked on shift as a labourer together with one other girl. Her hours were long and the work, with all its lifting and carrying, was very heavy.
‘At least it’s better than the ATS,’ Phyllis said, as she rubbed Barbara’s back with surgical spirit. ‘You can sleep in your own bed.’ She imagined that she was being comforting.
Barbara’s bed was exceedingly cold, especially without George. She shrugged and looked down at her hands, which were rapidly being ruined by hard labour, and felt that the Army would probably have been easier. She had not, however, wanted to quarrel about it. She admitted to herself that, in comparison with pre-war earnings for women, her wages were very good. Since there was nothing much in the shops to buy, she saved as much as she could by opening a bank account and also purchasing war bonds. Between her work shifts she helped her mother, so her social life was negligible. They all prayed for a rapid end to the war.
George’s fourteen-year-old sister had left school the previous summer. She had since been working as a shop assistant for a greengrocer. When Barbara was called up, she volunteered, for a slightly better wage, to come to work for Mrs Williams, to make beds and clean floors. In addition, two elderly women from the village came in as part-time help.
As a result of these changes, the elderly residents found plenty more to complain about. None of them, however, moved out; the bombing of London was by then unremitting, and the heavy bombing of Liverpool earlier in the year was sufficient to keep them in the comparative safety of the village by the sea. Though, occasionally, their provoked hostesses wished them dead, not a single one of them died during the many years that they boarded with Phyllis.
‘We looked after them too well – or it was the good sea air,’ Phyllis replied acidly when Ada once pointed this out to her.
When travelling to France, Barbara had passed through Birkenhead and Liverpool on her way to catch a train to London. She had been forcibly reminded of the toll of war in Britain by the destruction she could still see there, and she remembered, with a pang, the long civilian casualty lists pinned up in the city, the pitiful treks each night that the inhabitants had made to the outer suburbs such as Huyton, in the hope of survival. How had George’s few surviving comrades felt when they returned home to this?
She was shocked at the miles of ruins she had observed in London. How many homeless people must there be in London? How many dead? She realised, with genuine distress, that there must be returning ex-service men who had lost their entire families in the broken, once close-packed streets of the capital. They must wonder what they had fought for.
Wrapped in her own sorrow while she grappled with the day-to-day problems of existence, she had not thought of such a situation before.
Seated in the train as it rumbled slowly into Euston, Barbara had queried mentally how careful, phlegmatic George might have faced coming home to a ruin – there had been bombs dropped close enough to the bed-and-breakfast for this to have been a possibility. And, in her self-searching, it dawned on her that she did not know; she really had not known him well enough to understand how his mind might have worked. And worst of all, now she would never know him any better – because he was gone.
As she walked towards George’s grave, she thought her heart would break. Because she did not want to cry in front of Jules, she held back the heaving sobs that rose within her. Instead, she clenched her teeth and walked blindly beside him.
Chapter Three (#ulink_ff3bc5a0-5dce-5c5a-bb87-3dc2451de19a)
Michel Benion, temporary taxi driver, ex-poultry farmer, slowly rolled up the front of his old black jersey and took his precious packet of cigarettes from inside his undershirt. Abstractedly he watched the little widow as she went with Jules to find the grave.
As he lit a cigarette and then sat down to wait on the step of the antiquated taxi, he felt again the well of pain and humiliation under which he himself still laboured.
It was ridiculous, he fretted in complete frustration, that nearly three years after the end of the war, because the Government had not yet cleared it of land mines, his chicken farm was still unworkable. In fact, the authorities, those mighty gods in Paris, were talking of buying the land from his family and making it into a park. Nearly three years – and they had still not made up their collective minds about it.
Just now, American money is being poured into Rouen and Le Havre where there are lots of voters, he fumed for the hundredth time. Simply because we are only small farmers with no clout, we can wait for ever, exactly like the farmers on the Western Front after the First World War.
And even if we got the farm back, would they lend us money to start again, build barns, buy breeding stock, sustain us financially until our flocks were rebuilt? What about our draught horse? Our cow, our pigs and vegetable garden that fed us?
Save as he and his mother did, in a desperate effort to collect a modicum of capital – living on little more than vegetable soup, bread and cheese, and occasional cigarettes when they could get them – he was beginning to realise that, alone, the family themselves could never acquire enough money to start again.
Of course, like most land in Normandy, their farm was owned jointly by all the members of the family: Michel’s sick brother, Anatole, their mother and their two married sisters in Rouen. It had been hard enough, even before the war, to scratch a living from two and a half hectares, when so many people held rights to it. It had meant intensive use of every inch of land.
Michel’s father had succeeded in buying out his own sea-going brother’s share, which feat had taken him most of his life to achieve; Michel doubted, however, that he would ever manage to buy out his own siblings’ shares, even under the best of circumstances.
And he had begun to ask himself whether he truly wanted to recommit his life to boundless hard work, just to stay alive and pay the rest of the family their share of what he managed to make. Would Anatole, perhaps, recover and be able to help him?
When their father had been alive, Anatole and his two sisters had, in addition to helping on the farm, all worked at other outside jobs and, with the extra money earned, the family had collectively managed quite well.
The girls were gone now, Anatole was very ill, and their mother had aged immeasurably during the ruthless occupation by the German Army. Michel knew he could not carry the burden of work alone; he would have to employ at least one labourer, a great expense when first starting up again, while for a time no money would be coming in.
Even if the Government bought the land to make a park, the resultant money would, after paying their debts, have to be divided between all the family members. Michel himself would still not have capital enough from his share to start a little business of any kind.
For the moment, his mother received an old age pension, and Anatole received a regular allowance and medical care because he was a very sick returned deportee who was being nursed at home. Without these, they would undoubtedly have starved, thought Michel gloomily.
But the value of the franc fell daily, and the cost of everything on the black market was, in consequence, rising formidably – and without the black market, which dealt in everything from bread to boots, they would be in desperate straits.
His mother and Anatole had refused to move further away from their land than Bayeux until a decision was made by the Government. Madame Benion had a fixed belief that if they did not remain close, someone would say the Benions were all dead and would try to claim it. ‘And what is a peasant without land?’ she had asked. ‘Just a body without a soul,’ Michel had fretted. Land was supposed to be the foundation of life.
In the meantime, he had worked for his Uncle Léon as a deckhand on his little coaster, and then had applied for all kinds of jobs in Bayeux in order to keep a roof over the family’s heads. But the only special skill he had was in raising hens – and cooking.
In refugee-filled, but undamaged Bayeux, there were very few jobs for the unskilled, so competition was keen for any work available.
If he could have persuaded his mother to move to the wreckage of Rouen, he could have easily found construction work. He would, he told himself, have cheerfully endured the pain in his shoulder, damaged since childhood, that heavy labour would have given him. But she woodenly refused. So, here he was, a taxi driver for old Duval, who owned the vehicle.
Duval had rented both driver and vehicle to three huge American Army officers for four months. The Americans were really civilian undertakers and were happily engaged in enjoying France, while they arranged for the bodies of their dead compatriots to be dug up and shipped home to the United States. The American Army had not seen fit to provide these civilian employees, even if they wore uniform, with transport; hence their use of the taxi.
Michel grinned slightly. At least, as far as he himself was concerned, the US Army was the soul of generosity. He was doing nicely on the side, ferrying to the local cemeteries people like the sad young English woman this afternoon – and the Americans had said quite blithely that it was OK for him to do so. He hoped old Duval would not wake up to this happy arrangement and demand a cut of whatever extra he earned.
Michel carefully blew a perfect smoke ring, and his thoughts reverted to the carnage on the chicken farm.
Four years earlier, when the hopes of liberation from the German occupation had run high, whispered about in every small café, the French had been filled with new hope. The reality of the cost of being set free had been unexpectedly brought home to the whole district with terrifying suddenness.
At the commencement of the Allies’ preliminary bombardment, many of the Benions’ neighbours fled inland. Unable to believe that French lives or French property would be destroyed, a number remained, including Michel, his mother, and his fiancée’s parents, whose plot abutted that of the Benions.
For a day or two, it seemed that the Benions’ choice had been correct. The attacks appeared to be directed at railway junctions and airports, the coast itself, and towards the destruction of the German Army and its likely escape routes.
While planes of every description flew over and occasionally fought pitched battles with each other above her head, Madame Benion remained determinedly calm. She fed her few remaining hens and collected some eggs, while Michel tended the vegetable garden, their frightened cow, and the squealing sow, which was about to farrow and was terrified by the noise of the diving planes.
The small detachment of German soldiers, camped amid the apple trees at the end of the Benion land, fled one night, leaving their anti-aircraft gun to its fate.
Madame Benion thanked God she would not be further bullied by them and placidly harvested some salad greens. Michel cursed the Germans, because the stable which should have contained their solitary horse was empty.
‘The Boches must have taken it in the night,’ he told his mother.
‘It’s more important that they are gone too,’ she said calmly. ‘We shall manage, somehow.’
But the next afternoon, a hot and summery one, a shell whistled through the clear blue sky over their home and exploded very near the house, blowing out all the windows.
Madame Benion stood in her tiny living room, soup ladle poised over Michel’s empty bowl, and looked bewilderedly down at tiny slivers of glass caught in the hem of her thick serge skirt. It was a miracle that she had not been cut.
The whistle was followed a few seconds later by another one and then a whole series. The sound of the explosions was deafening.
Madame Benion dropped her ladle, while Michel shoved back his chair. ‘La cave, Maman!’ he cried. ‘Quick.’
He herded his mother ahead of him, through the arch that divided the room from the kitchen itself. In the far wall was the door leading to the vegetable garden. He pushed his mother through it. He hastily followed her, after swinging shut behind them the heavy fifteenth-century wooden back door. He did not latch it, which proved to be a mistake.
Very few homes in Normandy have cellars. A couple of strides, however, took the Benions across a narrow garden path to a small outhouse much older than the farmhouse. It had walls two feet thick and, at the far end, it was half buried in the earth. Its tiled roof was held up by ancient, handcut beams. It had long since been chosen by Madame Benion as the safest place to take cover during air raids; the family had, at various times during the war, already spent a number of uncomfortable nights in it.
Michel’s father, alive at the beginning of hostilities, had pointed out that the outhouse had the advantage of there being no second storey to collapse on it and bury those taking refuge.
Its door, like the rest of it, had been built with medieval thoroughness to withstand the attacks of armed men in earlier frays; it was braced by a succession of iron bolts to hold its several layers of wood together. Huge hinges extended an iron grip halfway across the woodwork.
To give some light in the cave, there was one small window high in the far wall. It had a single bar across its centre, to deter anyone small enough from crawling through it. The aperture was further barricaded by an inside wooden shutter, closed by an iron bar across it. Now, through the cracks in the shutter, came narrow flashes from the explosions outside.
This small refuge was normally the storeroom for barrels of cider, a primitive cider press and a small apple grinder, a stock of root vegetables and of eating apples. It also held firewood and odds and ends of farm implements not in daily use. Most of the consumable contents had long since been drunk or eaten by the Germans manning the nearby gun emplacement. It did, however, contain a covered bucket full of water, which Madame Benion changed daily, and a tin of homemade biscuits.
This afternoon, she regretted that she had not had time to bring with her a couple of old feather duvets, which she kept in the kitchen cupboard so that they did not go mouldy in this rather damp outhouse. After the heat of the day, however, the place felt blessedly cool, and she hoped the attack would not last long.
She sat down on an old bench in a corner where in a hollow above a beam, she had, long ago, stored a small parcel of family papers, her personal savings of little silver coins in a tiny canvas bag, Michel’s Post Office savings book, and, best of all, a candle and matches.
Now, she felt around in the half-dark for the candle, found it and lit it.
By the light of the candle, she began pains takingly to pick out of her thick serge skirt the small shards of glass which had caught in the hem. ‘I was lucky not to get this in my face,’ she said, and then winced as she cut her finger.
Michel had come to sit cross-legged beside her. He nodded in agreement with her remark about her face. He did not believe, however, that their luck was continuing. It seemed to him, with the racket outside growing, that they were caught in the midst of a real battle.
As the noise increased, Madame Benion asked Michel to get down the small packets hidden above her. He did so, and she stowed them in the capacious inner pockets of her skirt.
With their faces buried on their knees most of the time, their arms clasped over their heads, they remained in the cellar for thirty-six agonised hours, as the earthen floor shuddered and heavy dust was shaken down on them from the roof. Despite the water and biscuits, their hunger grew.
At first, they screamed with terror; then, nearly out of their senses, numbed by fear, they fell silent. But the noise nearly drove them mad: explosion after explosion, the roar of shells from the ships anchored on the coast, the whistle of bombs, the rattle of machine-gun fire, the terrified shrieks of the farrowing pig nearby, and, worst of all, the dreadful screams of wounded and dying men, as the battle raged backwards and forwards over their precious hectares of land.
The candle burned down and finally went out. Amid thick dust and total darkness, they clung to each other, petrified.
When they heard the unmistakable rumble and crash of heavy tanks, the screech of brakes and tyres of personnel carriers, they were sure their refuge would be crushed and that they would die beneath the outhouse’s heavy beams; and half-forgotten prayers were mechanically mumbled by both of them.
Roaring like a furious elephant, a tank ground its way through the further end of the house and sent stones rattling on to the cave’s roof. Later, something heavy exploded on the other side of the house. The pain in her ears from the blast made poor Madame Benion scream again. Michel held his mother close.
The huge handcut beams held, the thick walls shuddered again and again, but did not give.
As the hard-fought battle finally moved relentlessly on towards the River Orne and the Allies’ target, the city of Caen, the noise gradually lessened.
Limp with exhaustion, Michel and his mother, miraculously not seriously hurt, finally stood up in the darkness. Michel held his mother in his arms, while they both trembled helplessly.
They did not realise until they spoke that they were nearly deaf, that the reduced roar of the bombardment from the naval ships along the coast, and the shaking menace of heavy tanks and personnel carriers rumbling past, were still quite close. The screech of fighter planes and bombers diving over them, however, was sharp enough to make Madame Benion again scream with terror, and they crouched back into their corner.
At last, it seemed that the vibrations under them had eased. Still not realising how deaf they were, it appeared to them quieter outside. They ventured to rise again.
Michel went to the little window first and opened the shutter. Together with a rush of dust, the faint light of dawn filtered in; to him, the noise had become a confused rumbling. He turned to edge his way round the apple crusher to get to the door. He confidently turned the iron ring to open it, but the door did not budge. He turned the handle again and, at the same time, gave it a hearty shove with his good shoulder. It gave slightly.
Encouraged, he pushed as hard as he could. It scraped open a crack.
He turned to his watching mother. ‘Something’s wedged behind it,’ he said.
Madame Benion could not completely hear what he said but she saw the need for help. When he tried again, she added her small weight to his and pushed.
It gave slightly more.
Michel pressed his mother’s hand to indicate that she should keep pushing. Hoping that it would not slam shut again and smash his fingers, he braced himself against it and ran his hand along the opened space. Halfway down the outer side of the door, his fingers touched wood. Below that, there seemed no further impediment. Whatever was there had certainly wedged the door shut.
He withdrew his hand. Already nearly frantic from that which had gone before, panic rose in him.
He stood firm, however, while he tried to control himself. Beside him, his mother shifted slightly. She said something but he could not hear what it was.
Keep your head, he warned himself. You must; otherwise you may starve in this rathole.
Again, he braced himself as firmly as he could to keep the door open as far as it would go. Then he shouted into his mother’s ear, ‘Quickly, Maman, bring me some wood chips and a couple of small logs.’
Despite the loudness of his voice she had not heard him clearly. Uncertainly, she picked up some pieces of firewood.
‘That’s right,’ he shouted at her.
She rapidly collected some more wood and held it towards him in her arms. With one hand, he picked three or four chips to wedge the door as far open as it would go. Very slowly, he eased away from it. The wooden chips cracked with the door’s pressure, but held.
With a sigh of relief, he stepped back.
Gesturing to his mother, he said, ‘Put the wood down here, Maman, and bring me the big mallet we use for pounding in fenceposts.’
While she hesitantly complied, uncertain that she had heard properly, he gave the recalcitrant door another heavy shove. It refused to shift any further.
‘I’m going to give the door several blows with the mallet to see if I can loosen it. Stand back, Maman,’ he shouted.
He swung the heavy tool with all his might, hitting the door several times in quick succession. He wanted to scream with the resultant pain in his shoulder. Undeterred, he aimed several more blows.
It sounded to him as if something outside slid. He stopped and then, once more, he shoved as hard as he could. The door opened about three inches.
Full of hope, he let it swing shut again and then continued to whack it with the heavy mallet, but the best he could achieve was an opening of about three inches – no more. Finally breathless, he gave up.
Her hands hanging loosely at her side, his mother was weeping helplessly. ‘Perhaps someone will come to help us,’ she sobbed.
He doubted whether there would be anyone in the vicinity who had survived. He did not, however, tell her this. He simply grunted and ruefully rubbed his shoulder while he considered what to do next. He was, however, desperately hungry and thirsty, and his usually clear mind was refusing to think constructively.
He leaned his head against the cold stone wall, and then, when he felt steadier, he walked over to the little window with its prisonlike bar, to look out again at a June morning marred by a fearsome amount of dust. In the near distance there was the scarifying sound of continuing conflict, though it was definitely receding; even his troubled ears noted that.
Beside him, his mother sounded as if she were speaking from a vast distance away. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her voice cracking.
He had to shout to make her hear. ‘I’m going to try the door once more.’
She followed him trustfully as he returned to the recalcitrant door.
He felt for the smallest log he had picked out. With this in hand, he shouted, ‘Push.’
They gave a concerted shove, and the door opened as much as it had before. Michel quickly pushed the log into the gap to wedge it open. On this more sheltered side of the cave he could now see light a little more clearly than through the tiny window. ‘It must be nearly mid-morning,’ he decided.
He then picked up another log of uneven width. This he handed to his mother, and told her what to do. Making her stand back, he swung the mallet as hard as he could, in a blow to hit the door at the edge of the opening. Then he flung his weight against it. His mother swiftly dropped the second log into the slightly further opened aperture as a rattle of debris came from outside.
Michel paused for breath.
After a moment, he cautiously stretched himself across the door as far as he could reach and ran his fingers down the open edge of it. He could feel that the wooden obstruction now lay wedged against the bottom of the door.
Several more tries failed to shift the door further.
Furious with frustration, he turned from his mother so that she should not see the intensity of his despair and strode again to the window. His mouth tight as he boiled with anger, he seized the bar across the middle of the window and shook it.
In a split second, he found himself thrown back by his own impetus, flat against the apple grinder, the bar still in his hand. From the window a small slither of debris fell to the floor.
He stared in astonishment at the bar, and then he began to laugh hysterically.
Startled, his mother eased herself round the grinder.
Bewildered, she could not understand what had happened. Then her son shook the bar at her. ‘It came out,’ he shouted. ‘But the window’s still too small to get through! It’s so absurd.’ He continued his manic laugh.
When she understood, her own mind began to clear. She went to look up at the aperture. ‘It’s too small for me – in my clothes.’
She continued to stare at it, ‘Anyway, it’s too high for me to reach.’
The laughter behind her died away. She heard Michel drop the iron bar. He came to stand beside her and looked down at her. She was indeed small, like a young girl, a wisp of a woman, just bones from lack of adequate food.
She said, ‘If I could reach, I could get through – without my skirts.’
He made her repeat the remark, not sure that he had heard correctly. ‘Could you?’
‘I believe so,’ she said slowly. ‘I should go face down and feet first, because I don’t want to drop on my head on the other side.’
He rubbed his ears in the hope of persuading them to clear, so that he could hear better. Then he said loudly, ‘I don’t think you would have much of a drop, Maman. The potato patch slopes slightly up towards the window – and it would be soft.’
She made a wry face. ‘I would still need to be face down because my old body won’t bend backwards much in order to ease myself down the wall. I don’t think even a young girl could do it face up.’
Despite the dire need to get out of their prison, this cold assessment of what a lifetime of toil had done to her body distressed Michel beyond measure. Maman was like a little tree constantly exposed to an east wind – she was indeed permanently bent forward.
Though she said with determination that she was prepared to try to ease through the window naked, and go for help, she was shy at appearing unclothed even before her son, never mind any foreign soldiers who might be around.
‘I could push your clothes through after you,’ suggested Michel. Then loath to put her through such an ordeal, he said, ‘We could first try shouting for help. There might be somebody out there after all.’
They shouted and yelled at the tops of their tired voices. To no purpose.
Michel then tried to move the windowsill. It had, after nearly a thousand years, crumbled partially under the constant vibration of the attack, and had thus loosened the bar. The sill was badly cracked, but little more of it could be moved out of its stony, foot-long depth. Michel cursed his forefathers for building so soundly.
Women can be so brave, thought Michel now as he smoked peacefully in the sunshine at the cemetery while he waited for Barbara Bishop.
He remembered suddenly a story of the first day of the British invasion. A young French girl had run down to the beach, through the heavy fire and the general carnage, and had waded out into the sea to drag wounded soldiers to the shore before they drowned. She had stayed there, a lone woman, doing her best to reduce the suffering. She must eventually have been killed, he decided, but nobody knew for certain. Without doubt, alive or dead, women rarely got any credit for their bravery.
He and his mother had lifted the bench, on which they had been sitting for most of their incarceration, to a spot under the window. While Michel looked the other way, Madame Benion shyly divested herself of everything except her black stockings and shoes and her shift.
Michel had never seen his mother naked, so it was with embarrassment that he made several efforts to lift her into the window aperture; it was difficult, while facing him, for her to slide in feet first, though she kept her legs straight and held her arms high over her head, like a diver preparing to plunge.
They did finally manage the manoeuvre; and with further agony of mind he watched her face mirror the pain of her naked flesh sliding through such a rough wall.
There was a moment, when she was far enough through to have her legs dangling out of the other side, that he feared she was wedged. She used her hands, however, to push herself onward; and she cried out as the skin on her stomach and on her bottom was badly scraped by the cruel stones of the long narrow aperture through which she had to force herself.
She finally flipped out of the space, and he heard her call that she had fallen without breaking anything and would rest for a little while. He anxiously pushed her clothes out to her.
It was surprisingly quiet outside, and Madame Benion, so brave as long as her son could see her, crouched at the foot of the wall and cried bitterly. She was bleeding from numerous scratches and grazings. Her stockings were torn and her knees, elbows and buttocks were bruised and raw.
As she finally drew on her petticoat and skirt and put on her black blouse, once more catching her hand on a piece of glass still embedded in the serge of her skirt, she wondered what she had done in her life to deserve such misery. As she dressed she looked anxiously around her.
Through smoke and dust driven by the wind, she could see that her house was a ruin, as were the barn, the hen houses and brooders and their runs. Where the apple trees had been was a series of stumps.
Then she became aware of the bodies in various uniforms – or rather, shreds and pieces of them – of a smoking tank not too far away, of something that looked like meat spread near it. She shuddered.
She wondered if there was anybody out there still alive.
‘Are you all right, Maman?’ came an anxious enquiry from the hole in the wall.
She took a large breath and made herself shout cheerfully, ‘Yes.’ Then she added, ‘First, I’m going to look to see what’s wedging the door.’
‘Bless you, Maman.’ Michel began to feel a little relieved.
Heaps of rubble and a teetering kitchen chimney above it made the door difficult to approach.
Very cautiously, Madame Benion mounted the pile of debris. It slipped and slithered under her. She froze.
Yet the problem was so simple. It looked as if the unlocked back door had been swung off its hinges by a blast. It lay across the garden path, one corner firmly pressed against the door of the outhouse, the other corner against the stone back doorstep. Though there was a scattering of debris on it, it was not deeply buried.
Very carefully Madame Benion turned her head. She was looking for something she could use as a walking stick to help to balance herself. Nothing offered.
While the sound of battle growled on in the distance and flashes in the sky told of continuing aerial combat, she stood contemplating the problem. Then she kneeled down and crawled slowly across the pile, testing every stone before she put down knee or hand to go forward. Her thick long skirt, though an impediment, was painstakingly heaved forward each time she moved a knee, and it saved her already lacerated skin from further serious cuts. She was, however, crying with pain by the time she found a steady footing on the door itself.
Michel heard her and tried again to push the cave door open. The fallen house door wobbled under her.
‘Wait,’ she said sharply, and then as he obviously did not hear her clearly enough, she shrieked almost hysterically, ‘Wait, can’t you?’
Subdued, he waited.
She swiftly began to clear the debris. Whatever was not heavy, she threw as far as she could, so as not to disturb the pile over which she had climbed. On the other side of her, a sliver of pathway was bare before the commencement of a further pile of treacherous stones and broken beams; it might just give sufficient room to push the door to that side, she decided.
Some of the stones from the house walls were heavy, and these she laid carefully onto the slithery piles, hoping that she would not set off a cascade of debris back onto the door.
Finally, she had cleared everything up to the outhouse door. She was so exhausted that she prayed to the dear Virgin that she would not die before she got her beloved Michel out.
Swaying on her feet, she now very carefully considered how to move the door. Finally, she staggered the length of it to the outhouse.
‘Michel,’ she shouted.
‘Yes, Maman.’
‘Be ready – when I shout – to push hard and squeeze right through. Use the mallet, if necessary.’
‘Exactly what are you going to do?’
She explained how the unhinged house door was the wedge. Her voice was hoarse from dust, from exhaustion, from simply having to shout.
‘Don’t touch your door for a moment. Let it shut entirely to give me leeway. I’m going to try to lift the corner of the back door – it’s pressed against the rise of the back doorstep – so that it will clear the step. Once I shout, you do everything you can to get your door ajar.’
The first time she tried, she could not lift the corner. The damp, muddy grass seemed to suck the heavy wood down. She paused for a moment, and then with every scrap of strength she had she gave a frantic heave.
It lifted.
‘Push!’ she shrieked.
The door of the outhouse moved, as Michel pushed it from the inside.
‘Push!’ she screamed again.
Suddenly her end of the door jumped in her hands and slid upwards onto the second step of the house. She instinctively released it, and it bumped heavily down onto the top of the second step.
‘Push.’
The corner of the door slid unwillingly across the step, wedging again when it hit the sill of the gaping house doorway. It was sufficient, however, to give space for Michel to squeeze out of his prison.
As he emerged, his mother collapsed.
‘Maman,’ he gasped, as she fell against the house wall.
Weak with relief, he stood for a second leaning against the outside of the sturdy little outhouse; then he stumbled towards her.
At first, he thought the effort had killed her. He burst into tears, as he tenderly laid her on top of the fallen door, the only clear spot. ‘Maman!’
It seemed an eternity before she opened her eyes, to observe her younger son on his knees before her, crying like a child.
It took a moment or two more to realise where she was and what had happened. She smiled weakly at him.
‘We did it!’ she whispered.
He smiled back at her.
Amid the total destruction of their home, he knew that nothing really counted except that they had each other.
‘Clever, clever Maman,’ he told her, as he pushed back the thin grey hair from her filthy, bleeding face.
They lay exhausted under the shadow of the teetering chimney for some time. Then Michel said, ‘I’ll try to get into the kitchen to get some food.’
‘Mais non!’ she responded forcefully. ‘You haven’t yet looked at it. See, the roof is broken in.’ She glanced above her. ‘And this wall is threatening to come down. We must move – very carefully, very softly.’
He raised himself on his elbow, and glanced around him.
He understood the danger immediately.
As, very cautiously, he got up and helped his mother to her feet, he was dumbfounded by the destruction which surrounded them. Aghast, he stared at it in disbelief.
He finally whispered to his trembling mother, ‘Maman, what are we going to do? What can we do?’
But she could not answer him. What had happened to victory, to liberation? she wondered in dazed amazement. Here was no victory: it was yet another defeat.
Chapter Four (#ulink_c0bef616-9165-5129-8650-16717c4dd41c)
As Michel and his mother stood shakily in what had been the vegetable patch, their ears eased slightly and they became more aware of the high-pitched shriek of shells directed over their heads at the near distance, where heavy gunfire made a steady roar. Occasionally, through the general cacophony, they caught the distant screams and shouts of troops in hand-to-hand combat, while high in the sky planes dived purposefully towards the sound of battle. The horizon was flushed with fires.
Both of them were so covered with dust – faces, hair, hands, clothing all blackened – that they resembled statues carved from coal. In addition, amid the grime, Madame Benion’s face was marked by copious tears and drying blood from abrasions on her forehead and one cheek.
Barely able to stand upright, together they surveyed, aghast, the utter decimation of their farm. They imagined, from the flushed skyline, the further destruction still being wreaked on the hapless countryside.
Two dead Germans, one decapitated, lay nearby in a churned-up hen run. A burned-out tank stood, still smoking, amid the stark skeleton of the barn. Even the apple trees had been blasted practically out of existence. The stable, where their horse had lived, the pigsty and, worst of all, the hen coops, were piles of smouldering wood; and from them, as from the tank, came the nauseating odour of cooked meat and burned feathers, mixed with the smell of death from human corpses. Michel sniffed and reckoned that there were other dead nearby.
Nauseated, the Benions swayed unsteadily on their feet, overwhelmed by sickening terror. While shells continued to whistle over their heads and the heavy gunfire persisted on the horizon, they were unable to move further themselves.
From low in the sky, through the dust, they saw that a few German fighter planes were rising to challenge a further wave of Allied bombers.
Michel pushed his mother to the ground, close to the protection of the wall of the storeroom.
‘We could go back into the cave,’ he shouted into her ear. But she feared being shut into it again, and yelled passionately back, ‘Non! Non!’
As they lay with eyes closed, Michel realised that the naval guns from the coast now seemed to have altered their range to a setting to the south-east of this little homestead. Frequently shrapnel hissed to the ground, but the Benions barely heard it. The dogfights above them had also shifted further away.
Michel’s instinct was to flee, to get out of this frightful carnage. But where could they go?
Both of them were much too panic-stricken to consider that, amid the chaos, there might be wounded in need of help. Or if they did, they were past caring; the wounded were unlikely to be French.
As Madame Benion lay with her unscraped cheek close against the earth that had nourished her for most of her life, she found it unbelievable that she could be the innocent victim of this outrageous ferocity. She had never thought that the Allies would, perforce, destroy the French countryside as they tried to oust the German Army.
They were both dreadfully hungry and their thirst was acute. They simply lay paralysed, barely able to keep sane, as they shook with fear, fear of the conflict still being waged overhead, fear of being attacked by equally scared, furious German soldiers that might still be around.
As they tried to gather themselves together, a further scarifying realisation broke in upon them – that without home or land they might as well be dead. Unless their disorganised Government helped them, they had no future except starvation, even if they survived this terrible battle.
In the colossal racket of the night it had been impossible to communicate properly; they had simply clung together and prayed. Now, in the warm sunlight, their throats dry and dusty, they mouthed words at each other. Both turned instinctively to look towards where the well should be, but there remained only mud and a trace of its round wall. They glanced back at each other in despair.
As they became steadier, the depth of their loss was further borne in on them. Everything that, as a family they had worked to create through generations was gone, obliterated. The Germans had been unmerciful predators; but this complete loss, when freedom was so near, seemed to both to be the cruellest blow of all.
Michel’s brave little mother again wept helplessly, the tears making more white streaks through the dust on her cheeks.
Michel thought his heart would break.
As they surveyed the ruin of their lives the terrifying naval guns suddenly ceased firing, though flights of Allied planes continued to sweep overhead.
Michel did not care whether the planes were bombers or fighters, German or Allied. Instead, he was certain that the price of freedom from the Germans was likely to be starvation.
Madame Benion refused to be left alone while he stumbled over nearby rubble to assess more carefully whether any small structure had survived. Without much hope he called his watchdog, but there was no response.
For the moment, Michel decided not to walk right round their little property to see more exactly if anything whatever could be salvaged. It was a decision, he later realised, that had saved his life; the authorities had subsequently told him that the whole place was sown with unexploded munitions, and mines planted by the Germans as they retreated.
He did climb a part of a wall, despite his mother’s protestations that it would collapse under him. He wanted to look further down the hill towards the home of his fiancée’s parents to see how it had fared. He was not quite certain that the family had stuck with their decision not to evacuate their home, though Monsieur Fortier had, a couple of days before, again discussed leaving.
The remains of the walls of their home were barely visible. It was clear that their holdings had been equally badly damaged. Michel had been thankful that his Suzanne was working in Caen; he had, as yet, no idea of the havoc about to be wreaked upon that ancient city.
His mother was tugging anxiously at his trouser leg, so he jumped down. The Fortiers would have to look after themselves.
Now, as he stood beside his taxi parked in the lane which crossed the cemetery, he silently finished his kick-boxing exercises, which he did daily; waiting in cemeteries was the only period of his busy day during which he was not otherwise occupied. As he did them, he cursed the Boches and his own erratic governments of France. He heaped maledictions upon the political manoeuvring of a United States Government fearfully obsessed with anything savouring of socialism, who used the Marshall Plan to their own advantage, so that it did not help humble French peasants, who might be communistically inclined.
He remembered how he and his mother had dragged themselves through the drying mud to what had been the lane, and had then picked their way down what had been a reasonable gravel road to the village, to seek water and temporary shelter.
On the way, stumbling over the churned-up road, they met small groups of soldiers in British uniform. Though the soldiers looked filthy and exhausted, Michel feared that he would be stopped and questioned. The Britons, however, ignored them; a small male civilian and a weeping old woman, who were obviously as dishevelled as they were, held no terrors for fighting men driven nearly insane by the appalling noise and chaos of battle.
Michel was certain that nearly all of the inhabitants had fled the tiny village a day or two before. Like the road leading to it, it was in ruins and now appeared deserted. Not a groan, not a whimper; not a twitter of a bird, not a dog’s bark. Only the distant roar of battle.
A terrified dusty cat cringed in silence in the corner of a broken wall. Traumatised, it stared unblinkingly at Michel.
Michel pulled off his dirty beret and scratched his equally dirt-laden head. He shouted, and then tried to listen intently.
No response.
Though he still could not hear very well, he mouthed to his mother, ‘Everyone must have left.’ He barely stopped to wonder what had happened to the villagers’ animals, which they must have left behind. He was sure that his own livestock, even his watchdog, tethered near the hen coops, was dead.
A teetering wall crashed suddenly. Madame Benion jumped with fright. She looked as if she would faint.
Michel hugged her closer. ‘Courage, Maman. It seems the Allies are advancing – those soldiers were British. We may find support troops of some kind, who will give us water.’
Though she did not believe him, she gradually steadied.
‘Wait here,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll see if I can find something to eat or drink. There may even be somebody hiding here.’
‘Germans?’
‘No. I mean Claude or Maurice or the Desrosiers.’
He looked along the tiny street for a house not too badly damaged. As he went towards one, his mother, memories of the First World War ever before her, shrieked, ‘Be careful. It may be mined!’
He nodded acknowledgement of the warning, as he paused at the doorless front entrance. Then tentatively he stepped inside.
Five bodies lay in the tiny living room. He knew them. Though the one window had imploded, it was not clear in the half-light how they had died, but the smell of faeces and decay was already strong. They must have been dead for some time.
It could have been concussion, he decided. From the dark stains around them, he adjudged that they had bled. Once more, he felt sick with primeval fear.
He took a large breath and then looked carefully round. Hesitantly, he stepped over the corpses of poor Madame Lefebvre, her father, who had been the village shoemaker, and the three grandchildren. Michel knew the house from many a visit and he went straight to a cupboard at the back of the room. In it, he found a very dry loaf, a jug of milk, which had soured, and some cheese. There was nothing else. He gazed in amazement at the milk, which had, in its heavy pottery jug, survived whatever explosion had killed the family.
He hesitated again. He was well acquainted with the family lying on the floor and would not, for the world, have stolen from them. Then he told himself not to be a fool; they would never have need of bread again. He picked up the loaf and blew the dust off it. The cheese had been in a covered dish and the milk had several layers of butter muslin draped over it; they were not so impregnated with the all-pervading dust.
Balancing the milk carefully, he took the food back to his mother. She was still standing in the middle of the street, a lost soul with nowhere to go.
Afraid of booby traps left by the Germans, they remained standing where they were. They gulped down the whey from the milk and ate the bread and cheese between them.
The food revived them. Desperate to find some safety, they had a hasty consultation, during which they had to continue to speak loudly to each other.
‘We should walk down to Bayeux,’ Michel said. ‘The other day, the postman mentioned that it was taken at the beginning of the invasion – undamaged. I can’t think of anywhere else to get help, can you? And we might find out where Uncle Léon and his boat are.’
Madame Benion agreed. Anything to get out of the hell so quickly created round them.
As they walked slowly along the road leading out of the village, they were greeted, with relief, by four other terrified survivors whom they knew by sight, all rather deaf, each with faltering tales of dead children, ruined homes and ruined farms.
As they proceeded, people emerged, by ones and twos, out of side lanes or from the trampled fields and devastated villages. They were few, most having fled earlier, and fewer still were children. All were bent on reaching Bayeux in an effort to get behind the Allied lines and not be caught again between the opposing armies.
Apart from personal safety, they sought medical help for wounded relations and friends, who were too badly hurt to be moved or who still lay amid the rubble. This made Michel feel guilty that he had not searched the village for wounded French before he left it. The silence had, however, convinced him that there was nobody there. He forgot his impaired hearing.
One demented man demanded that they all turn round and go to his village, in order to dig out his family from the ruins of their home. The frightened little group stopped to argue about this for a few minutes, and then agreed that it would be madness to tramp back through the battlefield again; perhaps be blown up by Allied fire if the Germans managed to mount a counteroffensive. It would be better to press on to Bayeux from whence medical help, ambulances and soldiers who understood land mines – les démineurs – might be sent into the countryside.
They met Allied infantry being moved up to the front in personnel carriers. The procession was closely followed by tanks and Jeeps with a vanguard of motorcyclists, who tried, not always successfully, to push refugees off the roads to make way for the advancing military.
The weary civilians found it difficult to walk on the verge of the road. They struggled through the long wet grass and, occasionally, flung themselves to the ground at the menacing sound of diving aircraft. Though they were equally afraid of mines lying in the undergrowth of the great hedges which often marked the edge of a property, the greenery did give an illusion of cover, when, in the hope of impeding the Allies’ advance, the few planes the Luftwaffe had available swept low overhead to machine-gun all and sundry.
The forlorn little group struggled grimly on, trying not to stumble into the roadside ditch, which had several inches of water in it.
They were twice hastily scattered, however, by a British tank pressing its way through the heavy, deep-rooted hedges and on to the road. They also met a foot patrol of English soldiers with red crosses on their sleeves, which eased its way through the hedgerows from a field behind them.
A little surprised to find civilians whom, they had imagined, would have earlier fled the area, the medics said briefly, in English, that they were checking for wounded. They enquired of the refugees if they had seen anyone, Allied or German, lying hurt; they did not mention French casualties.
Seeing the bewilderment of the refugees at being queried in English, Michel appointed himself interpreter.
Once the soldiers had managed to make themselves understood, they were told sadly in chorus that only the dead had been seen. There were, however, frantic inter-jections that there were French casualties in the villages, for whom the refugees hoped to find help.
The patrol leader, a lance corporal, obviously shaken by their stories, kindly promised to do his best to inform civilian authorities. ‘They’re probably out there somewhere already,’ he said rather helplessly.
‘This is the last call for lunch,’ he added, with an attempt at humour. ‘Most of the wounded has been took in – a few Jerries amongst them.’ And on being asked, he replied cheerfully with all the optimism of a nineteen-year-old that yes, he thought it was true that Bayeux was still standing, undamaged. He turned to his fidgeting patrol and chivvied the men forward. As the group began to move, some of them looked back at the refugees and shouted, ‘Good luck!’
The little group of villagers, trailing behind three people going slightly faster through a deserted hamlet, were horrified by a sudden explosion which blew up those ahead, spattering their remains on those following them. It was the first time that Michel had seen his tough, silent mother so distressed that she vomited.
They were further very shocked and frightened at the sight of small, loose groups of British commandos casually looting the remains of homes, and shooting out windows or booting open shut doors. One soldier came out of a wrecked church, brandishing joyfully a glittering cross from the altar. A stranded car formed a great entertainment to the invaders as they reduced it to wreckage. A terrified horse was used as a target. When the frightened owner protested, he was shoved roughly to one side.
Since there were no officers with any of these groups, Michel assumed that they were deserters. He felt that since they had nothing to lose, they were probably much more dangerous than the more orderly units they had seen.
The tiny band of refugees, unanimous in their fear of the plunderers, edged in and out of nearby lanes or scattered through the hedgerows to avoid such menaces, and when they had passed, whispered to each other that they had never expected this of the Allies. ‘Worse than the godforsaken Bodies,’ one man said.
‘Every army has some criminals in it,’ replied an exhausted elderly man with almost saintly acceptance. ‘Saw it in the Great War.’
That evening, filthy, blood-bespattered, foodless and footsore, they walked into Bayeux, which looked blessedly normal after what they had seen en route, though there were crowds of civilians as well as military personnel in the streets.
While shocked passers-by, both troops and civilians, stared at them, Madame Benion looked at her son and mourned, ‘Whatever shall we do?’
Michel had been thinking about this, as they struggled through the ruined countryside, and he replied, ‘Find a church. The priests will surely be helping refugees. There must be some kind of help for people like us. Or the hôtel de ville?’
His mother was reeling with exhaustion. ‘Find a church,’ she muttered. She had a real distrust of French officialdom in the shape of a town hall with which she was unacquainted.
And now, as he smoked his second Gauloise and waited for Barbara Bishop, Michel was again thankful for the monks into whose hands they had literally fallen, too weary and hungry to go another step.
His mother had been put to bed in a narrow cell, where she had remained for a week until her skin had begun to heal. Her grief at the loss of her home was beyond healing.
Chapter Five (#ulink_f3111795-65d2-537a-b1ad-3c8d075e7c16)
When Barbara looked down at the neat white cross which indicated the last resting place of Private George Bishop, 6th Batt., East Lancashire Regiment, died 27 July 1944, aged 28 years, she felt the same stunned emptiness she had endured when she had first heard of his loss through the War Office.
The gardener watched her from a discreet distance. One never knew how these women, whether mothers or wives, might react. He had had some who had flung themselves onto the wet grass and had lain there, crying for hours. Others had had hysterics and screamed so hard you could have heard them in Tessel. Still others came and went without a word, their expressions frozen into grim endurance.
Fathers occasionally came alone, to stand uneasily before a cross, tears running silently down their cheeks. Frequently, they wore their own medals, won in the First World War, as if to identify themselves as sharing the suffering of their boy who lay beneath the sod.
Barbara made no noise, though tears ran down her face.
When she felt steadier, she kneeled down on the damp lawn and carefully laid the flowers in front of the cross, tucking them close round its base, as if tucking a baby up in bed.
She felt she should say a prayer, but if God tolerated the horrors represented by this single white cross, He must be insane and would not understand her prayer or her dire need for comforting. There was no point in praying.
Given different times, she thought with a burst of anger at fools who made war, George could have been watching a football match with the Germans on the other side of this carefully groomed cemetery. What was it about men that allowed them to be led by the nose into ghastly cruelty against each other? It didn’t make sense.
These days, nothing made sense. The war was over, but George would not return; at home on Merseyside, each cold and hungry day seemed worse than the previous one. And this French countryside of shattered, deserted villages and towns had shocked her beyond measure. In the glory of a successful invasion, and the Allies having at last beaten the Germans, she realised that few people in England had given a thought to the suffering French civilians who had been caught in the middle.
She looked again at the cross before her. Is this how her mother had felt when her seaman husband had drowned in the Atlantic in 1941, his freighter sent to perdition by Germans, may they rot in hell? Mam had looked like a ghost for over two years. Even now, she was not the same woman who had kissed him goodbye before his last voyage; she had aged immeasurably.
The hopeless tears increased, running down Barbara’s face to drip onto her flowered scarf.
She had not felt so alone in her entire life.
From his seat on the step of the taxi, the driver observed her a little anxiously. Her face had blenched as if she might faint. Then he saw that Jules was watching her, ready to go to her if needed.
A solitary ray of sunshine lit up her shaking shoulders, her white, set face bent over the flowers, her hands clasped in her lap, as she finally sat back on her heels and bowed her head in helpless submission to forces beyond her control.
Death is truly the end, thought the apprehensive driver. There is nothing you can do to reverse it. As he frequently did, he silently cursed the name of Adolf Hitler and all his German brood.
After about five minutes, Barbara crossed herself mechanically, and then stumbled to her feet. She stood looking down at the flower-bedecked grave for a moment, heaved a mighty sigh, and said to it in a tremulous voice, ‘Goodbye, luvvie. Goodbye, my dearest.’
She raised her eyes and saw Jules staring at her as he stood diffidently by the gate at the edge of the lawn. He smiled gently. Like a priest, he saw daily so much sorrow.
She forced herself to gather her wits together. ‘Thanks, Monsieur Jules,’ she said heavily in faltering French. ‘Thanks for keeping the grave so well.’
She turned slowly back to the taxi. Realising that many of George’s friends must be buried around him, she picked her way carefully between the crosses, anxious not to step on anyone.
Before she reached the taxi, she paused and gave one last, long look back. Then she slowly turned away.
She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and carefully wiped her face clean of tears. With dead eyes, she observed the patient driver hastily rise from his seat on the step of the taxi. She did not say anything as she approached him.
‘Madame wish the hotel?’ he enquired softly. He put his arm lightly round her to guide her to the taxi door.
‘Yes, please.’ Where else to go? What else to do?
She had allowed sixteen days for her visit to Normandy itself. She had planned that, after seeing George’s grave, she would have a walking holiday, exploring Calvados. She had never in her life had a real holiday and she had a vague hope that fresh air and good food would help to restore something of her pre-war energy.
But she had not allowed for this abject sense of loneliness, of desolation; and now, as far as she could judge, it seemed that most of Normandy had been wrecked – wrecked by armies sent to free it. The suffering it must have caused; it did not bear thinking about. To have visitors like her stare at it all must make the Normans feel that they were being reduced to a tourist attraction.
Now all she wanted to do was to lie down and be very quiet until she gained the strength to face, if she could, the rest of her empty life.
As the taxi driver cautiously shifted gears, she leaned her head back against the upholstery. Helplessly, she began to cry in earnest, deep rending sobs torn from her very heart.
Michel glanced back at her. He was tremendously disturbed by her obvious grief; she was too little, too pretty to suffer like this.
‘Madame, chère Madame, please don’t cry,’ he implored. He was weeping himself, for himself, for all the hurt people he carried in his taxi, and particularly for the nice young woman behind him.
She barely heard his plea, though she did try to muffle the noise she was making.
‘Please, please don’t cry, Madame.’ He paused while he aimed the vehicle carefully through the cemetery gates and onto the lane leading from it. Then he tried again.
‘Believe me, Madame, if I own this taxi, I marry you myself!’ He sighed. ‘Hélas, Monsieur Duval own it.’
There was a sudden cessation of the sobs, as the humour of the practical remark struck Barbara; the hard common sense of a presumably penniless young man anxious to help. She laughed through her tears, but after a second or two, she leaned forward and laid her head on her knee and commenced more quietly to weep again.
The taxi was carefully slowed, as the penniless one found that, with eyes clouded by tears, he could not see the road properly. He felt he too had reason to weep. Was not his own life shattered?
‘I stop,’ he announced. ‘We sit down on grass. We smoke, eh? We are better. Then nobody at the hotel stare at you.’
She did not answer.
He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Then he drew in to the side of the road. A drainage ditch ran alongside the asphalt; beyond it was a grassy bank, shadowed by a huge hedge.
He jumped down and opened the door for Barbara. ‘Come, Madame,’ he urged persuasively. ‘We rest. You become calm before we go to hotel, eh?’
Numbly, she allowed herself to be helped out. She looked uncertainly down at the ditch.
‘Jump,’ Michel instructed, gesturing towards the grass on the other side. He himself cleared the ditch as effortlessly as a circus performer, and held out his hand for her to grasp.
In her flat-heeled shoes, the ditch was no real problem. Barbara held his hand and jumped. As she landed, he put his arm quickly round her waist to steady her. It was instinctive on his part.
To her, it was an unexpected shock, not because he seemed presumptuous but it gave her a sense that somebody cared enough to do so, even if that person was a total stranger.
In and around the docks, where she had toiled through the war and even since peace had been declared, she had often hit out at men who, in her widowhood, felt she was fair game, and had importuned or otherwise harassed her with their coarse familiarity. Now, as she still shuddered with sobs for her husband, she felt the warmth of the slim, tired-looking stranger beside her, smelled the strong tobacco and male sweat of him, and she was honestly grateful for his sober, sensible presence.
He eased her round and sat her down on the grassy bank. Then he sat down cross-legged in front of her, so that he could look straight at her face. He fumbled under his jersey and brought out his precious packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.
‘Smoke?’
There were only three cigarettes left in the packet, and she hesitated; cigarettes were hard to obtain, and like gold in her particular English village.
He smiled and thrust the package closer to her. She heaved a sob, and then helped herself. He struck a match and held the light to her cigarette.
The lines on his face deepened and his brown eyes twinkled as he endeavoured to cheer her. ‘Cigarette good,’ he said firmly, as she inhaled the strong acrid smoke of a Gauloise.
She coughed, and smiled tremulously.
She watched him stick a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and light it. His face shone wet in the light of the tiny flame, and she realised with astonishment that he had really been crying. She wondered, with a feeling of profound compassion, if, in addition to the loss of his farm, he had lost someone in the war. Perhaps his fiancée? He had mentioned a fiancée’s parents on the way to the cemetery. He had not directly mentioned the lady herself.
Chapter Six (#ulink_f47f5082-6fcc-5cf8-961e-8f67ec91ee62)
For a while they sat in silence. As she smoked, Barbara’s sobs slowly decreased, became dryer and finally came to an end. Occasionally, she sighed shakily.
The persistent drizzle of the morning had stopped, though the sky was still overcast. Damp from the grassy bank on which they were sitting slowly seeped through their clothing. Neither of them, however, seemed inclined to move. A few trees, interspersed with huge hedges behind them, offered a protective canopy in the wrecked countryside.
Except for an occasional raindrop falling and the breeze rustling through the heavy foliage, it was very quiet. No traffic passed them. It was as if they were suspended in space, insulated for a few minutes from a world destroyed.
Barbara took out her handkerchief again and carefully dried her face, while Michel watched her through the tobacco smoke. She looked ruefully at her handkerchief, pink-stained with smudged makeup.
‘I must look awful,’ she said apologetically.
‘But no,’ he reassured her. He smiled slightly and continued to look at her gravely. His eyes, sad now, reminded her suddenly of her golden retriever at home, who, if anyone cried, would lay his head on the sufferer’s knee and gaze up at her in similar compassionate communion. Throughout the war, Simba had had to do a lot of comforting of both her mother and herself. He had done his best with Ada, George’s mam, too, when she came to sit in their kitchen and have a cup of tea and stare emptily into the fire.
Now, she had a stranger seated before her, trying to do the same thing, to comfort her and – she had a sudden flash of insight – to be himself comforted.
The persistence of his gaze compelled her to look back at him and smile a little. She wondered what else he had been through to cause the multitude of lines on his face, the patient resignation in his attitude, as if there were no reason to hurry back to the cold real world, plenty of time simply to sit and recover what one could of one’s sanity. Apparently impatient American morticians could wait.
At the remembrance of the Americans waiting for their taxi in the American cemetery, Barbara felt compelled to move.
‘Oh, dear me, I forgot. You have to collect your Americans.’
Michel leaned forward slightly and put his hand on her arm to restrain her. ‘There is much time, chére Madame. Rest a little longer. The Americans work as long as there is light – perhaps two more hours. And they are not far distant.’
He drew on his cigarette. ‘They stay in your hotel. I collect them en route. OK for Madame?’
‘Me? I don’t mind. They look like nice fellows. I saw them at breakfast this morning.’
She smiled at him, woebegone, her cigarette smouldering between her fingers, and he continued to sit quietly with her, to give her time to regain her equilibrium.
The Americans are generous, he thought. He had, however, grave doubts about how they might behave with an unescorted young woman; Americans seemed to have pockets full of nylons and piles of chocolate bars with which to seduce unwary females. It distressed him to think that his pretty passenger was herself wearing a pair of nylon stockings. That she might have bought them on the black market, which flourished as merrily in the port of Liverpool as it did in France, did not occur to him. Nevertheless, despite her obvious fall from grace, he would be in the taxi to protect her, and would see her safely into the hotel foyer.
He was not in the least afraid of three very tall, out-of-condition Yanks. Though he himself was so thin and had a hunched left shoulder, he had a long reach, which he found very useful when defending himself. Was he not a very effective kick-boxer, a master of old-fashioned savate, so quick on his feet as to be respected by all? The Americans did not seem to be aware of this particular art, and knowledge of it gave him considerable confidence when he met them in the streets of Bayeux, rather drunk – and where did they get enough to be drunk on, he’d like to know? The Boches had not left much worth drinking. Fortunately, Michel had never got into a real fight with them; sheer weight would very likely have overcome any skill he had.
While enduring the humiliation of the German occupation, it had been essential not to draw attention to oneself and to accept every obscenity without a word of response. It was a relief nowadays to feel that you did not have to salute or otherwise show respect to the Americans when some of them were drunk or abusive.
With regard to Barbara, such a respectable woman, he finally decided, could have come by her nylons legitimately; someone in the family might have brought them home as a gift. He hoped he was right.
He found her gentle, particularly now that she had lost her look of self-confidence and was crushed by grief. She appeared to have no pretensions and to treat him as an equal. The way she had given that choking, good-natured laugh at his remark about not being able to marry her suggested that a ready sense of humour might lie beneath her tear-soaked exterior; under other circumstances, he sensed she would be great fun.
He thought of her in her hotel bedroom, crying silently all night. He wanted to prevent this, if he could, by easing her into a better mood before he let her go. She was much too nice to be left to weep.
In the back of his mind he considered that probably the most comforting thing he could do for her would be to accompany her to bed. But he did not want to offend a foreign lady; and there was, of course, the practicality of the fury of Monsieur le Patron, if Michel were found in one of his hotel bedrooms.
Also, Englishwomen were notoriously faithful; she might feel she must be faithful to her dead husband.
He was astonished that he cared enough that he wanted to be careful what he said or did. What did it matter? She would be gone in a few days’ time, and he would be driving other widows with the same polite indifference that he had driven previous ones. Except that this little lady was different.
He sensed that to a man like himself she could give real pleasure. He felt free to consider this point, since his own love life was, after all, absolutely nonexistent at present; so he could honestly let his thoughts stray.
Finally, as he regretfully stubbed out his cigarette, he had an inspiration about taking her mind off her sorrow. He asked her if she had seen any other parts of Normandy. ‘Not all of it is damage,’ he assured her.
She gave a shivery sigh. ‘Yesterday I walked down to Arromanches, to see where some of the British troops landed. I saw the remains of the floating harbour we built.’
He was astonished. ‘A long walk, Madame!’
‘Not really. I found a little café there and had an omelette, and rested – and then walked back. It was late by the time I returned, of course.’
‘Bravo!’ He was impressed.
She gave a little shrug; she had hiked before the war, and the hard toil she had endured during the war had made her muscles strong. Even the steady physical work she did in her mother’s bed-and-breakfast provided daily exercise.
‘I’ve still eleven full days here,’ she confided, ‘if I want to use them.’ She looked up at him suddenly, and said with more enthusiasm, ‘You know, I would really like to see Caen, because George died on a bridge across the river during the battle for Caen. His friend told me.’ She paused, and then said with bitterness, ‘I want to know what kind of a city was worth his death – and thousands of other English lads.’ Her face twisted in renewed pain.
He thought she was about to cry again, and did not answer her for a moment. Then he said reflectively, ‘Caen is still ruin, Madame. Streets are clear. A few people try to make new life.’
She replied absently, her mind deflected as she pictured narrow bridges choked with dead soldiers, ‘Is it very difficult for them to have to start again? Is it all destroyed?’
‘Yes, Madame, practically all of it is. They are without much help. You understand, the Government give plenty attention to the big ports – lots of votes. Very little thought to smaller cities like Caen – and nothing to small farmers like myself. Peasants’ votes are not in one place – we are spread out. So not much power.’
He was back to his earlier complaints. He shrugged, and sighed. Then he added more fairly, ‘Government must also repair all the roads, the railways, the airports of France – much bomb damage by Allies. But here we all wait – and hope. The railway train now come to us – that is something.’
Then, as a detail which might amuse her, he told her that the churches that William, King of England and Duke of Normandy, and his wife, Matilda, had built in Caen, in thanksgiving for the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, were still there, practically undamaged. ‘The Duke and Duchess thank God for victory and they build good. Those churches last nearly a thousand years – through many wars, many invasions.’ He grinned suddenly at her, as if the churches’ survival of the recent conflict was something of a joke.
He had recaptured her interest. ‘Really? How strange.’ She appreciated the irony of the survival of the churches after such a huge British bombardment during a reverse invasion.
He grinned. ‘British miss good chance to revenge on William – bomb them!’
There was a slight movement on the other side of the empty road, and Michel glanced across. On the verge opposite sat a rabbit, its nose quivering. Suddenly it vanished into the hedge.
He was diverted. Wildlife is returning, he reflected with a gleam of hope.
He looked again at the young woman opposite him, and said impetuously, ‘I take you to Caen tomorrow. Americans go to Paris for the weekend. We go, yes? Take a little lunch? Look around.’
‘How much would it cost? I owe you already for this trip. I had thought I would walk round the countryside. I’m a good walker and the distances are not very great. I can do twenty miles in a day – easy.’
She would be safe enough walking, he considered, but Caen was a bit too far to do in one day. Worst of all, he would probably never see her again and, even though her stay in Calvados was to be very brief, he longed to talk with her again.
He responded quickly. ‘I take you. No charge. You pay me for this trip to the cemetery, and I do tomorrow free. OK?’ While she considered his offer, he went on, ‘I went there just after battle finish. And I take Americans once or twice. I believe most roads now clear.’
And when I went there the first time what a shock I had, he thought, fury surging through him once more.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_b453bcca-bf86-587f-8df5-988189001014)
From the moment he had first glimpsed the totality of the destruction which had hit his little poultry farm and that of the Fortiers, Michel had been worried to distraction about the fate of Suzanne.
He had had no direct news of her for nearly three months, though her parents had told him that they had had just a few letters from her before the invasion. He had promised himself then that he would, as soon as possible, go to see her, but his mother had not been able to manage the poultry farm alone, and he could not easily leave her. His first thought, once he was in Bayeux, was to try to get through to her employer, at the café where she worked, but he had no success. All lines were down.
He could not find her on any casualty list available to him in Bayeux, but he was told that, so soon after the Germans had retreated, the casualty lists were, sadly, far from complete. The Fortier family was listed as missing; Suzanne’s name was not included. This added to Michel’s fears that she might have been killed in Caen during the subsequent battle; it was said that one-third of the population had been killed and another third wounded.
Though the engagement had been arranged by their parents, Michel was fond of his lifelong friend who was to become his wife, and he racked his brains for further sources of enquiry.
Patiently, he had asked at the hospital in Bayeux, in case she had been brought in there. She was not listed. However, he was invited to visit a woman so traumatised that she had not yet been able to identify herself, in the hope that he might recognise her. The woman was so hurt that he was thankful that she was a stranger to him.
Suzanne’s parents would remain listed as missing, presumed dead, until such time as the Army could demine a path into their farm and confirm it. Michel argued that whoever put the Fortiers’ names on that list – probably another neighbour – must have known that Suzanne was not at home on the day her father’s farm was destroyed; otherwise her name would have been there along with those of her parents.
He reminded himself that Suzanne was an only child, so he could be the sole person from nearby who would immediately set in train a hunt for her. She had other relations, he knew, somewhere near Falaise, another place which had been devastated. If he had no luck in Caen, he would go there to ask the few survivors if they had news of her.
Meanwhile, he had to find at least temporary work, and a place in Bayeux where he and his mother could stay.
Once Maman had recovered a little, they had been billeted in a house with a small empty attic room to spare. There was no fireplace in it, and even in July the bare floor was cold to lie on. Their reluctant landlady, moved by their plight, had lent them a straw mattress, and an old duvet liable to spill feathers from every corner.
She allowed Madame Benion to use her kitchen occasionally, to make the thin fish soup which, together with bread – and cheese when they could get it – was all the food they could afford in a city where the price of everything was soaring.
Madame Benion applied to the hastily reorganised civilian authorities in Bayeux for the re-establishment of payment of her old age pension at her new address. Unfortunately, the steady fall in the value of the franc made it harder and harder for her to manage on it.
After much hasty hunting, Michel found a job in the kitchen of a hotel recently vacated by the retreating Germans. The desperate owner was trying to get it cleaned and in shape as fast as possible. So Michel scrubbed and disinfected with the same thoroughness that he had cleaned hen coops and brooders for his parents.
He was occasionally able to augment his and his mother’s diet by hoarding table scraps from the dining room of the hotel; he was supposed to throw all food scraps into a pig bin, but some were still edible. He was also allowed a meagre midday meal with the hotel staff, part of which he often took home for his mother.
In their attic room, water was their greatest problem, since the only source in the house was a pump in the ground-floor kitchen.
With a few of the precious francs hoarded in Michel’s Post Office savings book, which Madame Benion now carried stuffed inside the top of her corset, they bought a large bucket and a washbasin. Once or twice a day, Michel filled up the bucket in the house kitchen and carried it up to their eyrie under the eaves.
The whole telephone system appeared hopelessly damaged, but on the chance that at least some mail was getting through, Michel had, after moving into the attic room, written to Suzanne at her lodgings in Caen, to tell her his new address. The local post office had accepted the letter, but there had been no response to it or any subsequent ones.
On his enquiry for news of her from her parents at the beginning of April, they had told him that the few letters they had received since she left for Caen simply said that she was all right and was enjoying her work in the café. She had sent no message for him. Madame Fortier was very troubled. Had the young people quarrelled, she wondered.
They had not quarrelled, and Michel had been mystified by his fiancée’s silence. Despite his uneasiness, he made every possible excuse for her neglect of him. He never doubted her integrity; she was going to be his wife. She would surely write soon.
In view of warning movements of German troops in the month prior to the invasion, it occurred to Michel that she might, at the last possible moment, have come home to be with her parents. So he went back to the hôtel de ville and checked the casualty lists yet again.
The official there said flatly that the list was still incomplete. What else did Michel expect, he asked helplessly; there were still pockets of fighting all too near to Bayeux. And on no account, said the harassed man, should Michel try to get back to either the Fortiers’ or his own farm. There were already too many civilians killed or injured by exploding anti-personnel mines and live ammunition: three men dead – they had tried to collect the bodies of their families in order to bury them – and two who had had their feet blown off, a woman shockingly wounded in the face. And two young boys with no hands, poor kids.
Bearing in mind the hopeless state of his own little poultry farm and others nearby, all well-nigh reduced to a mud heap, Michel accepted the stricture without comment. He did not need to be reminded of the dangers of explosives; he had seen, on his way to Bayeux, a whole family blown up by a heavy explosion, triggered by their passing. Only the good God knew what they had accidentally trodden on.
He was fairly certain that Suzanne’s parents were indeed dead, and both he and his mother grieved for them; they had been good friends.
Feeling that they might just possibly have escaped, however, he had again enquired assiduously amongst other refugees who had straggled into Bayeux, many of whom knew each other at least by sight. He invariably heard the same sad story that a great many of the population of that area were believed dead or wounded. He continued to pray that his wife-to-be had not been with them.
If she had returned to her home just before the attack, he comforted himself, the first thing she would have done would have been to run across to see him – and she had not.
For some days more, as he worked in the Bayeux hotel, he continued to watch the casualty lists, while the battle to take Caen continued.
He soon learned that peasants were regarded as of little account unless the authorities wanted to get food delivered to the stricken city.
One day, before Anatole’s return, he had, in bitter terms, expressed his anger to his mother about the destruction of Calvados.
‘We’ve suffered so much from the occupation. We risked our lives – including you, Maman. A good many died horribly for it – and now we are being killed or hurt or ruined in the name of peace. It’s crazy,’ he said in furious frustration.
Madame Benion had been resting on the mattress laid on the floor of their attic. Her deep exhaustion since the destruction of her home was still apparent.
She said wearily, ‘It’s true and it grieves me – and I worry daily about Anatole. Where is he? What did the Germans do with him when they took him away? What’s happening to him now?’
Michel replied slowly, doubt apparent in his tone, ‘They said he would be put to work in Germany.’
‘Well, why hasn’t he ever written?’
To this Michel had no answer. He thought bitterly that it was probable that his brother was dead, but kept this to himself.
‘I don’t know why he doesn’t write, Maman. Maybe German mail is disrupted by the bombing of their cities. I’m more worried about Suzanne – she doesn’t write either. It’s obvious that the Boches are defending Caen with everything they have. The bombardment’s constant.’
Madame Benion agreed. ‘It is. The noise is maddening. My head aches and my ears ring.’ She turned restlessly on the mattress. ‘I’m sure that some kind of build-up is going on. General Montgomery himself is here in Bayeux. I heard the news when I went out to try to buy some potatoes.’
It was as if Michel had not heard her. He said, ‘Maybe Suzanne doesn’t know where we are – never received any of my letters. I hope to God she’s found some safe shelter.’
‘All we can do is wait, Michel. And pray.’
‘I don’t care what happens; I’m going to try to get into Caen, Maman. Some people have done it.’
His mother shot up from her recumbent position.
‘No,’ she stormed. ‘How can you think of such a thing? If you’re killed and Anatole is missing, I have no one, no one except your sisters – and only the good God knows what is happening to them in Rouen. Suppose you are stuck there, in Caen, and can’t get out? Mon Dieu, it’s not even that safe here,’ she glanced at the sloping ceiling, and added wryly, ‘particularly in an attic. It’ll be much worse in Caen.’
As if to confirm the latter, there was a roar of planes overhead, followed by explosions in the near distance.
She was right. He knew it. Her own survival depended largely on him, not on her two married daughters in Rouen, which was itself being pulverised by the Allies.
Poor Maman, she was still so shaky from what she had been through. She must rest a little longer, before even thinking of finding work herself. Meanwhile, he must earn for her; she would starve on her miserable pension. The fact that he was himself worn out, very distressed by all that was happening to them, he accepted as a burden which, somehow, must be borne.
In a city crowded with desperate refugees, she had, anyway, almost no hope of getting work herself; she had aged dreadfully in the last few weeks, due to grief over the loss of her home and, he considered with a tinge of jealousy, the constant worry about Anatole.
‘It’s all right, Maman. I’ll wait till the Allies have rooted the Boches out of Caen – and then go. Don’t cry, Maman. This won’t last for ever.’
He had to wait for weeks. The Battle of Caen was long and bitter, and when he finally did walk into it, there was little left of the beautiful Norman city.
He went first in search of the café where Suzanne worked as a waitress. There were very few people about, and the whole street was a shambles; he could not even say for certain exactly where the café had stood; the road was simply a narrow lane dug through piles of rubble, along which a few people sidled on their way elsewhere.
In panic, Michel followed the remains of the railway line, where it had been partially cleared, and began to climb a slope where the damage was not quite so heavy. He toiled up towards the Abbaye aux Hommes, which was still standing.
He began to have hope. Suzanne had a room behind the Abbaye, away from the city centre.
He was right.
He found her sitting listlessly on the front doorstep of her house, as if waiting for him. The windows had been boarded up and part of the roof was broken open to the sky. Smoke from fire had painted feathers of soot up its walls. An older woman, her landlady with whom Michel was acquainted, was seated alongside her. The street was silent, without traffic or even a pedestrian. Most of the houses were obviously derelict.
When Michel shouted a cheerful greeting to them it echoed eerily.
Both turned, as if shocked. As he waved, and increased his pace towards them, Suzanne did not spring up to greet him.
He saw with a pang that she looked wan and tired, poor darling, and that she had had her hair cut very short. It was about an inch long and she had combed it close to her head, like that of a little boy.
As he reached them, he laughed with the sheer relief of finding her alive. He bent down and joyously flung his arms round his Suzanne.
Her companion gave a little snigger.
In his embrace, Suzanne rose slowly. She did not respond to his greeting, and turned her face away as he tried to kiss her.
He leaned back, still holding her. ‘It’s me – Michel,’ he said, and then his voice faded, as he realised the significance of the haircut and that the body in his arms was curiously clumsy and heavy; it did not have its usual willowy suppleness.
He slowly dropped his arms and stepped back.
‘What happened?’ he asked, though he knew already. ‘Suzanne! Answer me.’
To cover the silence her companion spoke up. She sounded cold and cynical, a woman embittered by war, as she said, ‘Can’t you see?’
He looked at her, appalled. ‘A goddamned Boche – and you got your head shaved for it?’ He exploded with rage. Words of condemnation poured out.
She didn’t say a word to him in her own defence, never pleaded that she had been misunderstood, that it had been indeed rape, nothing that might have excused her behaviour.
Her pregnancy was now obvious. Michel had seen her about four months before; she must have suspected it then. It could not have been rape – the locals would never have touched her if it had been that. To be set upon by a mob, have her head shaved, be stripped to her underwear, and then paraded through the streets, she must have been seen to be fraternising regularly with the enemy.
She now began to giggle at his stupefaction.
He lifted first one hand and then the other, and gave her the hardest slap of which he was capable, one on each cheek. Scarlet patches stained her face. She probably carried the bruises for weeks, he thought maliciously.
‘You dirty bitch!’ he screamed, and the empty walls around them echoed, ‘Bitch! Bitch!’ Then he hissed at her, ‘So that’s why you didn’t write! Well, you can thank God your father and mother are dead – he’d have beaten you to death for this.’
She must have been suddenly afraid for her physical safety because, without a word, she turned and ran clumsily up the steps into the house, and slammed the door. He heard the bolts being shot. The other woman had risen, also suddenly nervous. He turned and spat in her face.
Now, over three years later, seated at the side of the road to the cemetery on a damp, cold April day, Michel looked at a girl whose heart had been broken because a foreign soldier had given his life for the freedom of Caen, and for a bitch who had betrayed them all.
He repeated to Barbara, a trifle depressedly, ‘Caen is still a ruin, Madame.’ He stopped, as if his thoughts had strayed elsewhere, and then said with forced cheerfulness, ‘Nevertheless, when I took the Americans there recently, there was some life. People try to begin again.’
He sighed, and Barbara became aware of his deep fatigue. He suddenly ceased to be the rather quaint taxi diver, and became a fellow human being who looked as exhausted as she herself felt.
He went on, ‘Everybody in Caen lose somebody. Much sorrow.’ With her big eyes puffed from weeping, she herself looked like our Lady of Sorrows, he thought. He repeated tentatively, ‘I take you tomorrow, yes? Americans go to Paris for the weekend. We go to Caen, yes?’
He could barely admit to himself that he was desperately lonely for friendly female company. Not normally communicative about his private affairs, he had, on their way to the cemetery, talked a little to her about his family’s misadventures, and had felt a certain amount of relief.
Since his fiancée’s desertion of him, he had made no effort to find himself another girl; he was acutely aware that he was no hero, that his shoulder was hunched, and that he had no assets to attract a matchmaking father.
Even his engagement to Suzanne had been arranged by their parents, a marriage of convenience which would eventually, with a little luck and much hard saving, make it possible for the young couple to buy out Michel’s mother and his siblings.
Originally faced with this same nationwide problem of the subdivision of land in each generation, Suzanne’s father had already bought out his own brother’s share of the Fortier farm, and Suzanne was his only surviving child; because of the problems of land tenure, peasants tended to keep the number of their children small.
But there had been no romantic love between him and Suzanne, Michel admitted frankly to himself, just affection and an agreeable sexual contentment. It could have been a reasonable marriage.
Now, inside him lay an unhealed wound, as if she had stabbed him. She had deserted him for a German, an enemy, probably some great hulking brute of a Prussian. He felt that he also had thereby been publicly shamed, stripped of his self-respect.
Another Frenchman he might have accepted with better grace. But he had felt sick at the idea of a German, one of Hitler’s cohorts, who had tortured and killed men, like his friend Henri, because they continued to fight them underground.
She had got off more lightly than if she had been a man, Michel thought. Men known to be quislings, collaborators who betrayed the Freedom Fighters to the Germans, had been summarily shot, if they did not commit suicide first.
To a degree, justice had been done, admitted Michel, but it did not mean that he had come to terms with the betrayal.
If she had not had a good woman friend to help her, she would have starved to death, he was sure of that. She would have been an outcast.
The ultimate insult had, however, come only the previous month. He had heard, through one of his mother’s friends, also a refugee in Bayeux, that Suzanne’s German had recently sent for her and his child to join him on his farm, a farm which had apparently escaped the ravages of both the Russian and American advances. He was said to be now sowing his second year of crops. It was quite a story and the news spread fast in the back streets of Bayeux.
It seemed to an outraged Michel very wrong that his own land, and that of his fiancée’s parents, should have been decimated, while one of the enemy’s farms remained inviolate.
And who would ever have expected a German to do the honourable thing, and marry the girl? Enemy soldiers were not expected to do that, particularly a Boche.
Michel asked himself again and again why her father had, in the first place, allowed her to go to work in Caen as a waitress in such troubled times – miles away from parental supervision.
He supposed that the family must have had an urgent need for ready money during a time when farms were being stripped of their produce to be sent to Germany. It seemed the only explanation. He still felt, however, that her father had been most unwise – and so had his unfaithful trollop of a daughter. Though there did not seem much hope of it, Michel wished savagely that she would eventually starve amid the ruin which was Germany.
He had been truly happy and surprised when Anatole had eventually been sent home by train by the American Army in Germany; they had discovered him amongst a group of refugees from Eastern Germany fleeing the Russian Army; he was trying to walk back to France.
At least, Michel agreed with Maman, they could nurse Anatole, make him as comfortable as possible, until he died. And Michel was the first to say that, even confined to bed, his brother had given both their mother and Michel some moral support.
Anatole was allowed by the Government a small regular sum with which to maintain himself, because he was a returned deportee very ill with tuberculosis. He also had free medical care. Because there was nothing much that could be done to help him medically, he had elected to be brought home to his mother rather than be put into an overcrowded hospital.
Michel’s small savings account was emptied in an effort to buy extra comforts for him, such as second-hand pillows to prop him up, and black market milk and eggs to augment his diet.
Madame Benion was almost beside herself as, in addition to losing her home and livelihood, she had to watch her elder, stronger son die. She and Michel tended him far better, however, than he would have been looked after in hospital, and while they did it she leaned, pitifully at times, on her younger boy for comfort.
The lifelong sibling jealousy between the two brothers had melted amid the burning need to cope with disaster; and their mother, who had always had to work to the point of exhaustion and could not, therefore, give much attention to her children, had opened up to show her deep attachment to her sons. Misery, instead of separating them, seemed to fuse the remnants of the family together.
As Michel arranged to meet Barbara again, he told himself that he was being driven simply by need for a break from a ruthless routine. To break loose just for a few hours would do him good. If he took this unknown English widow to Caen, he had a hazy hunch that he would be setting out on a new path. What kind of a path he could not yet envisage, since, whatever she was, she was certainly not a peasant woman.
The widow was obviously quite startled at his offer of a trip to Caen and he could see that she instinctively hesitated.
He understood women well enough to read her mind. ‘I take great care of you, Madame,’ he promised. ‘Have no fear.’
He lit his last cigarette after first offering it to Barbara, who politely refused it. He carefully compiled another sentence. Finally, he said grandly, ‘I take you a little from your grief, Madame, and also you may see what happen to our cities.’
While she still hesitated, he added, ‘The Americans produce petrol like a cow make water! Lots of it. They say to me “fill her up”. And I do.’
She considered this and then unexpectedly chuckled, as she realised how apt his simile was. She decided that she might as well accept his offer. She really did, rather morbidly, want to see Caen.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask the hotel if they can provide a picnic lunch.’
And I hope I don’t disgrace myself by crying in public again, she thought.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_c42e1d1d-f8df-5c5f-89ca-4d2b82118687)
Barbara spent a sleepless, tear-sodden night. She was, like almost everybody else, so deeply worn out with hard work, poor food and generally doing without that she wondered how she had ever managed to get up the energy to take this trip to France; yet, haunted by the lines of crosses she had seen that day, she could not sleep.
Why on earth had she come?
The answer was, she ruminated between sobs, because her mother, Phyllis Williams, and her mother-in-law, Ada Bishop, had been so persistent about it. She had given in simply to please them.
Her mother had said, ‘Don’t be afraid, luv. Seein’ the grave’ll settle you a bit. Your dad never had one, being at sea, like. But your George has one. You go and look at it. Then you’ll know.’
Know what? More grief? She cried on.
When talking to Barbara, Phyllis had not added what she was thinking: See the grave and then you’ll know it’s finished. You got to march forward, not look back. She wanted her girl to look at other decent men, like Graham in the village, who had been in a reserved occupation throughout the war. Barbara could marry again, have kids, be normal. Not always a widow, as she herself was likely to be.
Her Barbara had had nearly four years of mourning, on top of the ruthless grind of the labouring job to which she had been directed during the war. It was enough plain misery for any girl, Phyllis considered.
Now the war was over and Barbara was free to work at home again. Since neither Phyllis nor Barbara had any but domestic skills, she believed that both of them must work to build up their bed-and-breakfast. No matter how unpromising the business seemed at present, it appeared to Phyllis to offer the best prospect of a decent living for herself and her daughter. Even if Barbara did remarry, it would still offer her and her husband a home as well as employment; the country was so short of housing that any man would be glad to live in such a place.
Despite Barbara’s now being able to help her at home, the end of the war had not brought much rest to either of them. Added to their fatigue had been the continued daily monotonous struggle against rationing and shortages of everything; particularly hard for those like themselves, who had to be hospitable to an equally weary, irate clientele.
Further, many had to cope with the return of disoriented or wounded men, or, like Barbara and herself, the knowledge that their men would not return at all. Of the men who had come home, many had returned to homes and jobs that no longer existed, and to wives who were prematurely old – and so tired. They had also had to face children who had never seen their father and resented this strange man who took up so much of their mother’s attention; several of Phyllis’s neighbours had faced this problem, and had, in seeking comfort, wept helplessly on Phyllis’s shoulder.
No matter which way you looked, the day-to-day struggle to revert to a normal life seemed unending. It was nearly as bad as when they had lived in a slum in the north of Liverpool.
Before the war, while her husband was at sea, Phyllis and her daughter had moved from Liverpool to run their little business. It was a fortuitous move, for during the war the little dockside street in which they had lived had been bombed out of existence.
In 1934, the Williamses had been desperate to get out of the city, as crime increased in their overcrowded, dockside district. Unemployment was rife and, even at that time, there was such an air of hopelessness that Phyllis was anxious to try to get her only daughter away from the area. Barbara’s father was lucky to have a job which was likely to last for a while: ‘But you could never be sure,’ Phyllis would say darkly to Barbara. ‘So many ships is laid up.’
One pleasant summer Sunday, as a treat, they took the train to Hoylake on the Wirral peninsula and went for a long walk along the seashore. At West Kirby, they turned inland to catch a return train from its station back to Liverpool.
One side of the road they took marked the end of West Kirby. On the other was a stone wall which ran down as far as the shore and then turned to continue along the sea frontage. They paused for a moment to lean on it and look out over the field which it shielded.
The field looked so neglected that Phyllis guessed that it had not been cultivated for several years.
‘There’s a house further up, Mam,’ remarked Barbara idly.
Her mother turned to look. ‘So there is,’ she said, and peered at it. ‘It’s empty by the looks of it. What a big garden it must have had.’
They moved on and came to the garden gate. Unlike a farm gate, it was a slightly rusty, elegant ironwork gate. Grass had grown up round it, and suggested that it had not been used much for a long time.
‘Let’s have a look,’ suggested Barbara. She lifted the latch and, with an effort, pushed the gate open.
‘The place is empty,’ said Phyllis, surveying the dusty, curtainless windows. ‘I think it’s an old farmhouse.’
Driven at first by curiosity, they walked round it. There must, originally, have been a huge garden, though no cultivated plan was now evident. The house itself, however, looked quite sound. Even the black enamel on the front door was unblistered by weather.
Phyllis looked slowly round. Gulls screamed overhead; the sea was close enough for the women to hear the incoming tide dashing against a breakwater. Distantly, there was the sound of a steam train approaching West Kirby station.
Spurred by sudden, almost absurd ambition, Phyllis said excitedly, ‘You know, Barbie, this’d make a great place for a holiday. Looks as if it’s got lots of bedrooms – and all this for kids to play in.’ She made a sweeping gesture with one hand towards the enormous neglected garden. ‘And there’s sea and sand right here – and it’s quiet, except for the train – and, as I remember, they stop round eleven at night.’
Barbara had laughed a little derisively. ‘You mean a boarding house?’
‘Yes, like your gran had in Blackpool. I had a good time in it, I did, when I were a kid.’
‘It’s so big! We couldn’t even furnish it,’ replied the practical fifteen-year-old, with a hint of scorn in her voice. ‘And what’s more, it’d be a lot of work – and wouldn’t the rent be something awful? And who could manage a garden that big – it goes on for ever.’ She kicked a stone along the asphalt path at the side of the house. Then she added, ‘And what on earth would Dad say? He were born in our street. He’s used to it.’
‘He could get unused to it – and he likes fishin’,’ Phyllis replied quite savagely. Her husband was currently serving in a ship on the Australian run. She grinned, and then added, ‘We’d need a farmer to do the garden, ’cos it’s certain your dad wouldn’t! He likes his rest when he’s ashore.’
They plodded over to the back of a line of houses which abutted the garden at the far end, to look over a dilapidated wooden fence to enquire of a woman pegging out washing on her clothesline whether she knew if the house were to let.
‘I don’t know,’ the woman replied. She shook out a nappy, took a peg out of her mouth and pinned the garment on the line. ‘It’s a real sad story, you know. It were bought by a Mr Travis, and made all ready for him and his new bride to move into a couple of years back. You’d nevaire believe it – it’s got a washbasin with hot and cold in every bedroom!’ She turned from the line of baby clothes, and folded her red arms across her chest while she contemplated the enquirers.
‘Nice man, he were – businessman from Liverpool, quite old, he was. He’s never lived in it, though. She were killed in a motor smash when they was on their honeymoon in Italy. They always say them Eyeties are mad drivers, don’t they?’
The woman was highly interested. Why would such an ordinary woman want such a big house? She said she was not sure whether Mr Travis would rent.
‘It were up for sale for ages. But who’d want seven bedrooms nowadays? You’d have to have a maid. And it’s too close to the railway track to please them what could afford a servant. They say his wife were an artist, though, and loved painting round here.’
Phyllis and Barbara did not show any signs of walking on, so she said, ‘You could have a look at it, no doubt. Mrs Jones what has the sweetshop in the village, she’s got a key – looks over the place from time to time for him.’
The idea began to blossom between mother and daughter. A bed-and-breakfast by the sea, with a huge garden – and a beach for kids just down the road. And waking up every morning to clean air.
‘Could I go bathing?’ asked Barbara.
Phyllis laughed. ‘Every day if you wanted to, when the tide’s in.’
Barbara began to have visions of splashing amid the waves in a scarlet swimsuit and dazzling all the local lads with her glamour.
At first, Mrs Jones looked doubtfully at the working-class woman and her daughter who were interested in a house meant for gentry. She did, however, finally agree to show them round it, and afterwards gave them Mr Travis’s address.
He proved to be a well-to-do businessman living with a manservant in a big flat near Sefton Park.
Phyllis plucked up courage and, accompanied by a silent, rather scared Barbara, went to see him.
It was clear to them that he did not care much what happened to the property; in truth, the very thought of it evoked memories he would rather forget.
At a time when the country was suffering a great depression, a large house with over four acres of unproductive semi-wilderness round it seemed to have little appeal to anyone. Even the council had refused to buy it for public housing, because the land lease was not long enough to suit them.
Like Mrs Jones, Mr Travis was surprised to be faced with such an eager woman and her daughter, whose accent betrayed that they came from the backstreets of Liverpool. What interest could she have in such a big house, far beyond her means?
When he understood what they wanted the house for, however, he lost his distant manner. It seemed to him a laudable ambition that they should want to improve their lives; they did, indeed, look very clean and respectable. He relaxed a little, and explained carefully to them that he did not own the land and would not renew the lease of it when it ran out.
‘If you buy the house and the lease – which has about forty years to run – you’d be on your own when the lease ends, and your business would be at stake,’ he warned. ‘You’d have to persuade the landlord to renew the lease. Then you might have to pay a lot for the renewal.’
Their faces fell. ‘We hoped you’d let it,’ they chorused.
Anyway, forty years before they faced trouble seemed more like a century to two women who lived in a city where lives were often short and nasty.
‘I could never buy it,’ Phyllis owned up. ‘But maybe you’d consider renting it?’
He smiled suddenly at their persistence. He liked this sturdy woman and her pretty daughter. Why not?
They cheerfully beat down the rent he then suggested, on promise of great care of the property. He was amused, and asked Phyllis if her husband was in agreement with their plans.
‘Any debts you run up would be his responsibility,’ he warned. ‘What does he do for a living?’
Though young Barbara was a bit shocked that her father might be drawn into this wildcat scheme, Phyllis hushed her.
She said placidly, ‘He’s First Mate on a P&O boat. Takes immigrants to Australia. Nice new ship, it is.’ She sighed. ‘He’s away most of the time. It’ll be months before he docks. Can’t complain, though. He’s never been out of work.’
When asked, she unhesitantly named the ship. ‘Been on it ever since it were launched,’ she added.
‘In the absence of your husband, who did you have in mind to be responsible, then?’
‘Well, I’d be responsible. If it’s the rent you’re worried about, I reckon I can manage to pay it.’
‘What with?’
‘Well, me hubby and me – we got a bit saved, and I can cash it, if I have to. And me allotment from him is paid regular. And Barbara here is in service. Add to that, I wouldn’t have to pay ten shillin’ a week rent in Liverpool, like I do now.’
In those days, women on their own couldn’t get bank loans or credit; even if they worked, it was always presumed that the employment was transitory or so badly paid that they could not afford to repay.
As Phyllis looked tensely at the elderly man in front of her, she thought: I’m mad. Why do I want this so badly? And putting up with being made to look so small, just to get it?
She answered herself: For clean countryside and sea air for Barbie. Maybe, just maybe, I could make enough money to send her back to school for a year longer – give her a better chance than I had – though her dad would think I were crazy if I did.
For his part, Geoffrey Travis wondered idly whether he cared a damn what happened to this house. He had other properties, and nobody to leave them to when he died. He had, legally, to pay the ground rent of this one until the lease ran out – but the amount was small. Other than that, he had kept the house watertight, and it would be sensible to continue to do so, whoever was in it.
If it were to be a bed-and-breakfast, it would be in the interests of these women that they keep the house decent.
He asked for references. After a little consideraton, Phyllis gave the name of the priest at her church, and her father. Mentally enlarging her father’s corner store, she said, ‘Me dad’s a grocer. And he knows about bed-and-breakfasts, he does. He owned one in Blackpool till he saved enough to buy his grocery.’ She paused, to consider what more she could add. Then, inspired, she said with great pride, ‘He’s got a telephone.’
About the best that can be hoped for, I suppose, Travis decided. He hoped that the priest also had a telephone, so that he could talk to him directly.
He took Phyllis’s name and address, and promised to give her a decision in a few days’ time.
Faced with the possible reality of her mad idea, Phyllis asked, ‘Could you ask Mrs Jones to show us round it again, sir?’
This was the first indication Travis had had that Mrs Jones had already shown the house. He was a little annoyed. He would have been furious if he had known that most of the village had, at different times, been shown it, just to see the washbasins and the pretty wallpaper.
Considering the two women, the reclusive owner was left wondering at the extent of human optimism.
The greatest advantage of the house to Phyllis and Barbara was that, in addition to the washbasins in three of the bedrooms, it also had a complete, modern bathroom, and a washroom on the ground floor.
‘Perfect for a B-and-B,’ Phyllis breathed quietly to Barbara.
A servants’ lavatory outside the back door made a total of three lavatories, which, both women agreed excitedly, was remarkable. ‘Have to watch they don’t all freeze up in the winter,’ Barbara warned.
It took them two years to get every bedroom reasonably furnished, though it was surprising how well the modest pieces from their existing home looked when spread out. They went to bailiffs’ sales, where one could pick up chairs and tables for sixpence or a shilling each; and an estate sale yielded a massive amount of bedding and bedlinen for a few pence apiece, simply because the heirs wanted to get rid of it. The women completed the bedrooms one at a time, and immediately advertised them in the windows of local newspaper shops, at twopence a week, as superior bed-and-breakfast accommodation.
They risked near bankruptcy by buying new single beds from the Times Furnishing Company in Liverpool on monthly payments.
Because of their excellent new beds, they found an unexpected market amongst travelling sales representatives, a much less destructive clientele than families were. Burdened by suitcases full of samples as they travelled from city to city, usually by train, these men were always looking for places with good beds and a well-cooked breakfast; they ached with years of sleeping on ancient, hammock-like mattresses. The word went round about the comfort of Phyllis’s beds.
Phyllis also placed a modest advertisement in a holiday magazine. This attracted elderly couples from the London area, in search of easily accessible, inexpensive holidays, less noisy than those offered in Margate or Brighton, at a weekly rate which included midday dinner and tea. This meant a lot of extra work, but it paid quite well.
The nearby railway station, so useful to the representatives on their way to do business on Merseyside, also allowed holiday guests easy access to the entertainment of Liverpool and Birkenhead; it proved to be a great asset instead of a liability.
A few months after they obtained the house, Barbara had thankfully left her job as maid-of-all-work to a big family in Neston; keeping a bed-and-breakfast was much more interesting than going back to school, especially as some of the representatives were single young men.
Much to Barbara’s chagrin, her mother kept a very close eye on her. ‘This is a respectable house,’ she would say, ‘and you mind your Ps and Qs, me girl. And you’re going to night school, milady, to get a bit more learnin’.’
And to night school she went, at first protesting, and then quite happily, because she realised that the commercial subjects she studied would be of use in the bed-and-breakfast; or, better still, might get her a post as a private secretary, preferably to somebody rich and famous who would marry her.
Not long after they moved to West Kirby, her mother had given Barbara the job of tidying up the front of the house, which had once been a little flower garden.
‘Oh, Mam!’ she wailed in protest.
‘It won’t hurt you, luv. It’ll take you out in the fresh air,’ replied Phyllis firmly. The girl must help if they were to make a success of the place.
Not too sure where to start, Barbara weeded the cracked asphalt path between the gate and the front door. This attracted an elderly man pottering in the front garden of one of the houses across the road. He wandered across and admired her efforts to tidy up.
‘It’s a proper mess, miss, isn’t it?’
She agreed mournfully that it was, and that she had no idea how to make it look nice.
He suggested she use a sickle to cut down the very long grass, and offered to lend her one. He brought it to her and showed her how to use it.
Much to Phyllis’s amusement, he became her daughter’s friend and mentor. She worked under his instruction much more cheerfully than if her mother had told her what to do, and it was he who suggested that she attend the upcoming church fête, where people would offer for sale, quite cheaply, surplus plants from their gardens.
Armed with a shilling, she bought peonies from a middle-aged lady, who said she was Mrs Ada Bishop and that she lived over by the Ring o’ Bells, a pretty pub on the other side of the village. So she became acquainted with George’s mother long before she met her son. Mrs Bishop was a keen gardener, and suggested some pansies and lilies of the valley.
Barbara and Phyllis had had no garden when they lived in a terraced house in Liverpool, so this world of gardening enthusiasts was quite new to the young girl.
‘That place was beginning to be an eyesore,’ Ada confided to Barbara, as she filled an old seeding box with plants at a ridiculously low price. ‘I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing the garden for your mam. You’ll find you’ll love doing it after a bit. Just wait till them peonies come out. Now, all you have to do is make a little hole, put some water in it and cover the plants’ roots. Pat ’em down gently – and don’t forget to leave plenty of room for the peonies; they’ll grow really big.’
As Barbara told George, years later, ‘I never realised what would come out of it, I never did. She made me interested in flowers, and now I love the garden. I didn’t even know she had a son, ’cos you was away so early to get to work, and you was in Chester for ages. It was real funny when I met you at the Red Cross dance and found I knew your mam.’
Since the end of the war, Barbara had done her best to rebuild the garden. Again, it was Ada who brought her plants to set it up, Ada who had her own grief to contend with. She never said much, but she had tried to help Barbara, and, in return, Barbara hoped she was a bit of a comfort to her mother-in-law.
A week after they had moved out to the new house, Phyllis’s husband, Hugh Williams, had been informed of his change of address. In a letter posted from Sydney, he had approved Phyllis and Barbara’s idea of living by the sea. The front garden was looking quite decent by the time he returned from a six months’ voyage round the ports of Australia.
He nearly had a fit. He found he had a house far better than anything he could ever have hoped to live in, where strange men, whom he regarded with deep suspicion, came and went like some weird, briefcased merry-go-round. And his wife owed nearly thirty pounds to the Times Furnishing Company – just for single beds!
‘How did you get credit?’ he asked disbelievingly. ‘You’re only a woman.’
‘Charm,’ she replied, neglecting to tell him that her own father had chanced his savings and had co-signed with her for the purchase.
His little daughter, who suddenly seemed to have become a young woman, had produced a penny notebook, in which she had kept an account, something she said she had learned how to do in night school.
‘See, Dad. It’s not paying much yet, because we’re still buying stuff for it and paying the Times, but it’s broken even for the last three months.’ She grinned at him happily. ‘The word’s going round about it. And whoopee! You know, we can now charge ten shillings and sixpence a night for the high-class chaps from the big firms!’
Hugh expostulated, raged, to no avail, said his prayers and went back to sea. He did, however, give them one good idea: he suggested that, to increase their income, they rent part of the land round the house to a farmer, either for grazing or haymaking – which they did.
Either because of his prayers or the unremitted hard work and business acumen of the two women, the enterprise began to pay off.
None of them gave credit to Phyllis’s grocer father for the coaching he gave them. He made numerous helpful suggestions to limit theft, produce meals quickly, buy wholesale.
‘Grandpa talks ’is head off,’ Barbara remarked to her mother; nevertheless, she was learning from him without realising it.
She found herself with more pocket money than many of her own age in the village; it wasn’t a wage, but it was generous spending money.
Grandpa counselled saving. ‘No matter what you earn, put ten per cent by, luv. When you want somethin’ big, you’ll have the money.’
Barbara wanted a bicycle, but Phyllis said it was an unnecessary expense; she must save up and buy it herself. Barbara wept in frustration. But she learned and eventually Grandpa gave her a whole ten shillings for her birthday to make up the sum required.
He had long been dead before Barbara realised how wise he had been – and how kind.
In the depression of the 1930s, young people were having real problems finding work, and when she saw the pittances which her girl friends in the village earned, and how they envied her, Barbara had enough sense to take a serious interest in a business which could, in time, be hers.
And, who knows, she thought as she dealt daily with very decent men, one day I might marry one of them.
As she lay, unable to sleep, on a decidedly old bed in a foreign country, Barbara remembered her parents, all her mother’s hard work, and the happy days before the war. And now, all that work – her whole life, indeed – seemed to her to have come to naught.
Their clientele had been, on the whole, so pleasant. But then the war had come. Though it had not been bombed directly, her home had been in the path of German bombers on their way to Liverpool; a pile of earth like an outsized mole hill, at the back of the house, still bore witness to the explosion of a bomb jettisoned by a frightened pilot. Their home had, however, been very nearly destroyed by misuse.
The sales representatives had vanished into the Forces. The evacuees and their mothers billeted on them had been a disastrous intrusion.
After the evacuees decided to return to Liverpool, as yet unbombed, Barbara and Phyllis had recovered from the worst of that invasion; but, even, subsequently, as a refuge for the elderly from the bombing of London and the South of England, they had been unable to keep the house up. Civilians had to make do with what they had for the duration: no paint, no new bed linen or china dishes, no plumbing repairs, no flower garden – just a vegetable patch. And never enough coal for heating.
When peace came, practically everything they owned was worn out. There was not an unpatched sheet in the house, not a curtain left other than blackout ones.
The problems of repair and renovation, even now in 1948, seemed almost insurmountable, though damage to their property had been almost nothing in comparison with the havoc wreaked on Liverpool and its environs, or the almost total destruction of parts of Normandy. It had, however, the same overwhelming look of shabbiness and neglect which most of England had. And the faces of the people in the village shared with their French counterparts the same look of intense fatigue and of bad health.
Barbara spared a compassionate thought for the French people round her. Betrayed by their Governments, despised for their surrender to the Germans, their young men still being killed in the war in French Indo-China, and in Algeria, living in a province which was a heap of ruins, how must they feel each time they were called cowardly? Ready to collapse?
As she finally got up to wash and dress in preparation for going with Michel to Caen, she wondered if, in similar circumstances, without the Channel to protect them, the British would have done any better than the French had.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_22d760cc-7fec-5fd7-841d-2cb3025c3d90)
Michel found Barbara sitting waiting for him in the foyer of the hotel. She wore a pink woollen dress with the same jacket that she had worn the day before. Despite makeup, carefully applied, her eyes were black-rimmed from lack of sleep; her tears and ruminations of the night had not been conducive to sleep.
She was not particularly looking forward to the promised expedition; she had been stupid to have even mentioned Caen to the driver. She told herself crossly that she was bound to feel even more depressed after looking at such a place. Still less, however, did she wish to spend the day by herself, wandering round Bayeux. And George’s mam had said, when kissing her goodbye, that she wanted all the information that Barbara could collect about what had happened to her son.
She felt numb, unable to think clearly. It was as if she were floating in space, afraid to put a foot down on the earth, lest she be roused and burst into tears again, in mourning not only for all that she personally had lost, but also for a sad, sad world.
As on the day before, she was hatless. Hats were another small thing that had vanished during the war – unless one was in the Services, where a hat was still part of a uniform. Her hair was elaborately swept up on either side of her face, to become curls on the top of her head. Similar curls were, as usual with her, confined at the nape of her neck by a precious tortoiseshell hair slide. This style tended to make her look taller than she was.
As Michel walked into the foyer, he noted her makeup, and found himself wondering exactly where she had obtained such powder and paint.
The paint reminded him how foolish he was to get involved with a foreign woman who had access to such luxuries as makeup. What chance had a poor French peasant against the irritatingly rich American soldiers still scattered around Europe – particularly the three who were staying in the same hotel? Then he pulled himself up. ‘I’m not in competition with anybody,’ he told himself firmly; ‘I’m simply taking a woman, for whom I feel sorry, to Caen because her husband died there.’
In spite of her swollen eyelids and the shabbiness of her dress, however, she looked to him as exotic and interesting as if she had come from some faraway oriental country, instead of from just across the English Channel. It seemed to him a pity that all he could offer her was a taxi ride – no nylons, no chocolates, no makeup, no handsome uniform by her side.
When he had told his mother and Anatole that he would be busy this Saturday, neither of them had queried it. If Barbara was seen in his taxi, it would be assumed that he was carrying yet another war widow to yet another grave. The most important point, he felt, was that old Duval should not notice a lady in his taxi on a day when the Americans were out of town, and, therefore, not easily available to say that he had their permission to help war widows.
The old taxi had only one seat in front, for the driver. At his side was a platform on which heavy luggage could be carried. Today, of course, it was empty. Barbara managed to smile quite cheerfully at him as he opened the door for her and saw her comfortably ensconced in the back seat.
He drove her along a main road which, he said, was newly repaired. There was not much traffic, and, occasionally, he would slow down to show her damage done to villages and farms in the great battle. It amazed her that the famous, huge bocages, dense thickets of bushes and young trees, had, in many places, withstood the onslaught of tanks, artillery and bombing, whereas walls and stone cottages had been pushed down and crushed.
They passed a quaint, moated farmhouse. With pride, he told her that it had, occasionally, been a meeting place for the Partisans.
He laughed, and then went on, ‘The owner pull up the drawbridge – difficult for the Boches to get in without noise.’
From that house, he told her he had, one night, taken a downed British airman and hidden him in one of his chicken coops. He laughed again, as he added, ‘How he complain of the smell! He nice guy. Very grateful to us. His papa big guy in England. I learn much English from him. I write to him sometimes – old friend now.’
He eased the taxi a little to the side, to allow a van to pass him. He waved to the driver.
‘Another old friend,’ he told his passenger. ‘He teach me to drive. He is engineer electrical – very clever fellow.’ Then he went on with his story, ‘Later, we keep the airman in the roof of our cottage for six weeks until my father take him to Port-en-Bessin.’
‘What happened when he arrived there?’ Barbara asked.
‘Uncle Léon put him in his boat – he is Master of a tramp coastal, you understand. Les Boches watch the fishing fleet very closely – difficult to do anything but fish. It is difficult to put someone on a fishing boat. Tramps not quite so much – Uncle Léon have regular route to Cherbourg and often carry cargo for the Germans. None of his cargo ever lost or stolen. He is very careful – so they trust him a little. However, he wait for the dark of the moon. Airman dress like me and use my seaman’s book, looks like crew. In Cherbourg, he land like the rest of crew going ashore. There he go to safe house. From there the British have system to get him to Britain.’
‘Did the British really work from Cherbourg?’
‘They come and go in Normandy, sometimes, je crois, by air – parachute. Spies. Information. Guns for the civilian Partisans and for the maquis. Regular service!’ His laugh was grim this time.
‘Who were the maquis?’
‘Many of them were very brave soldiers of our Army, Madame. They fight on throughout the war – civilians feed them; Germans kill many.’
‘Humph. I never heard about them.’ She reverted to his story of the airman. ‘It must have been very dangerous for your uncle – and for you, if it was your seaman’s book which he carried?’
‘Certain. Big, big danger that someone betray us. Germans have spies, French ones.’
She felt it would be indiscreet to comment on his being betrayed by his own people. She had read in British newspapers of the deadly revenge taken on such people, the minute the war was over – and even during the war, where the opportunity arose. ‘I was told the Partisans were in touch with Britain,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘When Germans first come to Normandy, they demand we give them our radios.’ He half turned and grinned at her. ‘Some families have more than one radio. We say we are very poor, say we have no radio. We keep ours. Lots of hiding places for small radio on a chicken farm. We have electric – keep chicks warm. We plug in the radio.
‘We listen to the BBC and tell news to our friends. Some Partisans very clever – build good radios themselves. Sometimes, Germans jam British broadcasts.’ He was silent as he negotiated a woman pushing an ancient wheelbarrow full of logs down the road. Then he said very soberly, ‘Sometimes the radio of the Freedom Fighter is traced – not all Germans are fools. Then the SS come – and always some are taken and tortured to say who help them. This cause – how you say? – a run of arrests and executions by the cursed SS. We not always know names of men helping us – difficult for Germans to squeeze names out of us. We are all very afraid – nearly all the time.’
Barbara shuddered. Hitler’s SS had been dreaded throughout Europe. The very thought of their ever getting into England had, on more than one occasion, made her flesh crawl.
The taxi was entering Caen, and she was immediately staggered by the vast amount of damage. Like the cemetery, it was overwhelming.
The road on which they were travelling was clear, but their route was lined on either side by huge piles of rubble, or what had once been basements, now filled with rainwater. In one great pile of debris, three young boys were dodging, slipping and sliding amid the wreckage, shouting ‘Bang-bang’ at each other as if they were fighting an imaginary battle.
Barbara saw here again a picture she had already seen in Liverpool – a duck swam placidly across one of the pools of water, and, from hollows between the broken stones and concrete, long sprays of pink willow, yellow ragwort and coarse grass waved in the breeze.
At the side of one of the roads there was a series of little stalls. One, she could see, was selling children’s clothing, another small trinkets, whether new or second-hand she could not judge. Two women pedestrians had stopped to examine the goods, and were being attended to by a woman in a black blouse and long black skirt. Other than this little group and the boys playing, the place looked deserted.
Michel turned the taxi into a side road and went up a slight slope, towards a series of buildings, either churches or monasteries, which appeared to have survived with little or no damage. For a moment, it was as if they had left the war behind them. However, the same uncanny stillness, the sense of lack of human occupation, pervaded the area as it had the ruins. Barbara wondered if these ancient monuments had been abandoned.
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Helen Forrester
A wonderful new novel from Liverpool’s best-loved author. A tale of loss and love set in post-Second World War England and France.This is the story of a young Liverpool woman widowed in the Second World War before she can know the happiness of having a family. With the blessing of her mother, with whom she runs a B&B, she goes to Normandy to see where her husband was killed in the D-Day landings. Once she is there, she meets an impoverished French poultry farmer, now reduced to driving a beaten up (and still rare) taxi and looking after his old mother and dying brother. Will these two find happiness together?A touching love story, a compelling portrayal of the aftermath of war and above all a testament to the courage and endurance of oridinary people, Madame Barbara will delight Helen Forrester’s countless fans.
HELEN FORRESTER
MADAME BARBARA
Dedication (#ulink_48148a8b-2a88-5691-8f84-ce36c314b15f)
To the memory ofPrivate Kenneth Andrew Pagett,5th Battalion, The East Lancashire Regiment,killed in action in the battle for Caen,July 1944.
Epigraph (#ulink_abbbe389-6e68-5916-9bb0-5f8affb1aa34)
From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.
Isaiah 34:10
Contents
Cover (#ued5809e2-c835-5ce6-bd3d-2f7aacda47c7)
Title Page (#uc3683c19-e1e7-53c0-8f21-ccb5b6f9c43e)
Dedication (#ud320dffc-1b17-511f-b06f-37cbfd2865bf)
Epigraph (#uf40de233-dc5a-56a0-af5e-933b7ffffea8)
Chapter One (#u10bc40d8-0b29-5652-9d9f-f967db6b2d4e)
Chapter Two (#ud598fa79-baa5-53ce-bf55-a50bf0c8d144)
Chapter Three (#uf2908308-77c1-5da5-a1b9-7645bd560ed2)
Chapter Four (#u4cc6cb10-4eb8-557f-9978-0c2fd35b18cd)
Chapter Five (#ua79fc417-c3c1-5a07-8d9b-3b926305f33d)
Chapter Six (#u4d70bd57-a53e-5d57-bc03-fe7efa75a70a)
Chapter Seven (#ufe021457-b836-57ed-a02d-30d0d03532c0)
Chapter Eight (#u6a1890d8-1d0d-5922-98fe-149bf987b3ec)
Chapter Nine (#uc7c15fa7-f2d3-536a-93a9-064473b5d79c)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Helen Forrester (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One Spring 1948 (#ulink_ff09cc0c-021b-51a9-b217-748a2b8beeaa)
‘Permit me, Madame.’ The taxi driver lifted out of Barbara Bishop’s arms the ornate bunch of flowers she was carrying. He was careful not to crush the red, white and blue bow which held the stems together. ‘I’ll lay them beside you on the back seat.’ He spoke in French, but his gestures made the meaning clear.
Tired by her long journey from Liverpool, the young widow said mechanically, ‘Merci, Monsieur,’ and climbed into the cab.
She had been told by the English-speaking receptionist at the Bayeux hotel into which Messrs Thomas Cook had booked her that this precious vehicle was the only taxi remaining in Bayeux. He had gone on to say, with a sardonic grin, that the German Army had failed to find it when they had requisitioned every French vehicle to aid their retreat from Normandy.
‘When the Allied Army invaded Normandy in 1944, Madame, and, after the Battle for Caen, Germany was defeated, the German soldiers became desperate. They took cars, lorries, every bicycle they could find to help them get away.’ He threw up his hands. ‘We’re still very short of transport of any kind – even work horses.’
As Barbara Bishop climbed into the taxi, she noted with disdain that its interior still had a faint aroma of manure from the old racing stable in which the receptionist said it had been hidden since 1940. She wrinkled her nose; in England it was widely believed that the French were dirty – but a taxi smelling of manure …?
Its seats were upholstered in cracked black oilcloth, and the glass in one of its side windows had been replaced by a piece of roughly cut celluloid.
The taxi driver held Barbara’s flowers with decent reverence – were they not destined to be laid on a grave? As he waited for her to get in, he observed with interest a pair of remarkably pretty legs, and a neat little bottom clad in a plum-coloured corduroy skirt.
She was wearing heavy, plum-coloured shoes which matched her skirt, and nylon stockings. He noted the nylons and wondered if she had an American lover; even in this quiet spring of 1948, nearly three years after the war had finished, he knew of no other way that a young woman could obtain nylon stockings.
Lover or not, the smart little rear end was enough to make him sigh wistfully at his bachelor state. And her light brown hair looked so bright as it glinted in the sunlight; it had been carefully set in a bunch of curls and clasped at the back of her neck by a fine old-fashioned tortoiseshell hairslide.
This thin slip of womanhood did not look like most of the English widows he had recently driven to the local military cemeteries. Despite her long stride and the determined lift of her chin, she looked poorer, and the taxi driver wondered how she had afforded to make the journey from England. Most of the others had been obviously well-to-do, with hair professionally dressed and, on their left hands, huge diamond engagement rings as well as wedding rings. They had asked to see the graves of officers, and had been condescendingly polite to him.
He knew that type of English woman. Long before the war, he had sold eggs and fresh chickens from his father’s poultry farm to an older generation of just such women. They had been part of a large number of English retirees who had settled near the coast of Calvados. They had, of course, expected their orders to be delivered; women like that did not come to the market. So he had done the deliveries on his bicycle. Some of them lived permanently in Normandy, some only for the winter months. Not quite rich enough to live in Deauville or Trouville, they were, however, very aware of their status, particularly, he recollected with amusement, when dealing with peasants like himself.
Driven by an ambition to improve himself, he had, from the age of ten, patiently learned a great deal of English from them. They rarely spoke good French. He could, he thought with conceit, discuss in detail in the best of English the merits of a dressed chicken, even if, before knocking on their back doors, he had had to look up in his pocket dictionary the new words he wanted to try out on them.
During the first year of the war, when nothing much militarily had happened in France, the ladies had, nevertheless, quietly retreated back to England, taking their retired husbands and their horrid little dogs with them.
This young woman – Madame Barbara Bishop, according to the slip of paper the receptionist had given him when booking the taxi – had greeted him with friendly politeness, which had been a pleasant relief. She was, Reservations had said, going to the grave of an ordinary private.
Her wedding ring was a plain band; she wore no engagement ring. He presumed that wartime marriages in Britain, as in France, did not allow for much show in the shape of jewellery – unless one had suitable pieces already in the family.
Furthermore, unlike most of the other ladies, she was shorter than he; she could not literally look down on him. He was unable to place her exactly, but decided that she might be the daughter of a small shopkeeper.
Unaware of the fast analysis of her social standing, Barbara seated herself. She laid her black, heavily embroidered handbag on her lap.
He enquired, this time in English, ‘Madame is comfortable?’ He smiled at her. But if he hoped to encourage her to flirt with him, he was unsuccessful.
Barbara Bishop looked up at the lined nut-brown face of her driver with little interest.
He had a thin face, its outline, by English standards, a surprisingly aristocratic one. Norman forebears, she supposed idly, the same as some Englishmen had. His smile exposed uneven teeth heavily stained by nicotine. On his head was perched a black beret. His much-darned sweater was also black, as were his loose trousers. A very thin man, his heavy boots seemed too big for him. She noted absently that his left shoulder was slightly hunched, and, like his taxi, he smelled as if he could do with a wash.
‘Madame is comfortable?’ he repeated.
She nodded wearily and replied, ‘Oui. Merci bien.’ She was dulled by grief, drained by a long night of useless weeping, while her whole body still ached from years of work too heavy for her small frame. Until last night she had not cried for months; life without George had become a dull ache which she lived with as best she could.
The driver closed the taxi door and went round to the door on the other side. He opened it and laid the flowers carefully beside his passenger on the seat, with the ends of the stems nearest to her. In that position, she could easily grab them if they threatened to slip onto the floor when he started up the ancient vehicle.
During the three months he had been doing it, he had become quite experienced at driving young widows and weeping mothers to cemeteries, and he prided himself on knowing all the possible small snags that could occur, like expensive wreaths slipping off the seat as the taxi bumped its way over hastily repaired roads.
As he laid down the flowers, he glanced at this widow and smiled again. As with most of the women he drove, his passenger was interesting in her foreignness. She was, he noted, wearing a flowered scarf draped around her neck over a shabby pink tweed jacket. So unlike a perfidious French woman in black skirt and white blouse, he thought, his mouth tightening with long-suppressed rage.
As he climbed into the driver’s seat, he asked in English if this were her first visit to Normandy.
‘Yes,’ she answered with a sigh.
He nodded as he started the taxi and put it in gear. It shuddered in protest and then, as he feared it would, when he pressed the gas pedal, it suddenly bolted forward like a startled horse.
She caught the flowers before they fell, but her handbag slid off her lap and onto the dusty floor.
‘Oh dear!’ she exclaimed. The black embroidered handbag was precious; she had fashioned this one herself from remnants of an old overcoat bought in a second-hand shop; the body of the coat had yielded a plain, black skirt, very useful in a tightly rationed country. She had spent several late evenings embroidering the bag with scraps of knitting wool and was proud of the design of roses on its sides.
As the taxi shot out into the main street of Bayeux, narrowly missing a heavily laden hay wain, she clutched an old-fashioned safety bar by the door rather than attempt to retrieve the handbag.
The hay wain’s horse reared, and the beret-crowned wagoner shouted angrily at the taxi driver.
The taxi’s bald tyres shrieked as the vehicle skidded round the back of the cart and into the outside lane.
The taxi driver muttered furiously to himself. Then, as he passed the cart, taking with him wisps of hay from its protruding load, he leaned out of the open window and shouted what was obviously an epithet at the wagoner.
In the cracked side mirror, his passenger caught a glimpse of the wagoner shaking a fist after them.
As the taxi driver sped down the almost empty street, he turned to reassure her. ‘Pardon, Madame. These farmers think the road is for horses only. Germans steal all mechanical vehicles to facilitate their retreat, you understand?’ He chuckled as he went on, ‘The owner of this taxi hide it in an old racing stable – long time no horses – beautiful horses sent to America for safety, just before the Germans arrive. Lots of straw and horse shit left behind in the stable – Germans never look under it.’
She merely nodded at the driver’s remark while, agitated by his poor driving, she continued to clutch the safety bar with one hand, and with the other held on to the bouquet. She had no desire to take the erratic driver’s attention away from the street.
Despite the noise of the ancient engine, she had caught the gist of his remark about farmers – his English was surprisingly good, she thought. She herself had little French beyond the schoolgirl version taught her in her last year at school and the contents of the phrase book which she had studied earnestly for some weeks before embarking on her journey. She was, however, far from stupid, and in the few days she had been travelling in France she had begun bravely to use the words she knew, though she pronounced them very badly. She had gratefully accepted correction by persons with whom she attempted to communicate, whether their remarks sounded good-natured or irate.
Barbara saw that the driver was watching her through his rear-view mirror, and she again nodded polite agreement with his remark regarding farmers and their horses. Though there were quite a number of carts, vans and even small carriages being pulled by horses through the streets of Bayeux, there were only a couple of cars and a small delivery van to be seen. Even bicycles were few and far between. She had, at first, assumed that an acute shortage of petrol was the cause of the unexpected return to horsepower in the streets, but it was apparently not the basic cause.
‘The Germans took all the motor vehicles?’ she asked in English, when the taxi seemed to be being safely driven in a straight line.
‘Yes, Madame.’ The driver cogitated for a moment, trying to collect for her benefit his knowledge of English. ‘The Germans fight very hard to defend themselves here in Calvados; they were brave men, the Germans. Finally, they see that Caen and Lisieux are – what you say? – finish.’ He let go of the wheel and threw up his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. ‘They lose faith in Adolf Hitler. He does not send them enough ammunition. Their generals are confused. They fight well. They despair, retreat fast – in our lorries, our cars, our bicycles, when they find them.’ His English was imperfect, but he did not appear to be short of vocabulary.
She nodded. The explanation confirmed what Reservations had told her.
The taxi began to veer towards the ditch and the driver hastily grabbed the steering wheel again.
Despite her alarm at his driving, it was a relief to Barbara to reply in English, ‘Didn’t they believe that Hitler was invincible?’
‘Non, Madame. That is big story. When Normandy is invaded by the Allies, he not agree with the plans of his generals. Support troops not come when needed. If he permit the German generals to fight as they plan, invasion very difficult for the Allies.’
‘It must have been terrifying, anyway, for the French civilians?’
‘Madame, it was most dreadful. After the Germans kill so many of us and they deport so many to Germany – 180,000 deportees die in Germany, 18,000 when the British bomb the railways and airports before they invade. Then, when invasion come, when we hope for freedom at last, so many more innocents die.’ His uneven shoulders were shrugged. ‘I do not know how many. I hear one-third of the people of Caen die. My fiancée’s parents die somewhere on their farm. They are not yet found. In addition, how many injured, only the good God knows. The bombardment was terrible. It never stop. Hospitals round here are still full.’
‘And yourself?’
‘Myself? My family?’ He swallowed. He was not used to being asked personal questions by strangers, and his experiences had been so traumatic that he found it difficult to talk about them. Then he said slowly, almost reluctantly, ‘We are three. Mama, my big brother, Anatole – he is very sick – and me, Michel Benion. We live now in Bayeux; my two married sisters in Rouen – Rouen is enormous ruin. Sisters and their husbands is alive.’ His tone dropped, as he added sadly, ‘One little nephew killed.
‘Mama, Anatole and me, we wait for our poultry farm to be clear of anti-tank traps and mines. We cannot work the land – not walk on it – until it is clear. One neighbour go to his home and – boom-boom – he is dead.’
Barbara was interested. The sad story took her mind off her own misery. She murmured in English, ‘It must have been terrifying. I’m so sorry about the little boy.’
Encouraged by her sympathy, Michel went on, ‘Anatole, my brother, come home from Germany very sick. He was slave in Germany, Madame. Can you believe it, nowadays? A slave. No pay. Hardly any food.’
‘I do believe you. I have heard about such things – and I saw a list outside the hôtel de ville – a long list of those transported who had died in Germany.’ She sighed, and then enquired politely, ‘I hope your brother is getting better? Relever?’
‘Merci, Madame. He cough very bad.’
She quailed, as the driver again took one hand off the steering wheel to pat his chest.
‘La tuberculose,’ he explained. ‘He is long time without help. Incroyablement, he try to walk back to Normandy. The Americans find him with civilian refugees from East Germany – they flee from the Russians.’
Barbara nodded sympathetically. ‘Poor man. Tuberculosis, you say?’
‘Oui, Madame.’
The driver swerved to avoid a stout woman in a black skirt, who was riding a bicycle slowly towards him down the middle of the road.
‘People still have bicycles,’ Barbara remarked, as she resignedly settled down to a rough ride.
‘Ah, yes, Madame. There are a few. A bicycle is easy to hide. Not like a bus or a lorry. But the Germans, they take lots of them. This taxi is hid inland. The stable has much bocage round it – how you say?’ He saw her smile slightly.
‘A thicket round it?’ she suggested. Her voice faltered as she added, ‘My husband wrote in his letters about bocage – thickets and hedges. He said there were a lot of them. And it was hard to get through them.’
‘Yes, Madame. Very difficult for tanks and soldiers to fight through.’
She smiled wanly.
He was pleased to see the smile. He had forgotten his irritation at the traffic.
They were out of the city now, and bowling along a straight road which seemed to stretch to the horizon. It was lined on either side by Lombardy poplars. Between the tall trees, weathered stumps indicated haphazard cutting of some of them, and Barbara leaned forward and asked, ‘Were the trees cut for firewood in the war?’
At first, the driver did not quite understand her, so she repeated the question slowly and pointed to some stumps as they passed them.
‘Mais non, Madame. The Resistance cut the trees and lay them across the road. They block the roads to make the German retreat more difficult – Germans are caught and killed by invasion instead of safe retreat.’
He gestured with one hand, and added, ‘No good. Tanks and big lorries go across the fields. Naturellement, this winter we burn the trunks – firewood – a bad winter.’ He sighed at the memory. ‘Very, very bad winter, Madame.’
Barbara leaned back to rest her head. ‘It was awfully bad in England as well.’ Her voice sounded weary. ‘The very worst winter I ever remember. No coal, no electricity, hardly any gas. Even bread was rationed this winter – and potatoes.’
‘Yes, Madame. Also here. Bread ration. Sometimes no bread in bakeries.’
‘My stars!’ Barbara exclaimed, shocked by his remark. ‘At least we get our ration.’
‘English are lucky. Farms not fought over.’
‘They don’t feel very lucky.’
‘Very difficult for everybody,’ Michel responded diplomatically.
They were passing what seemed to have been a village. Only broken walls remained. Already weeds were growing between the stones. The driver gestured towards it and said laconically, ‘Here they fight backwards and forwards. Nothing left.’
In the rear-view mirror, he saw the slight movement of her head in acknowledgment of his remark. He went on, ‘Our farm like this village. It is within ten kilometres of the coast.’ He slowed the taxi and turned his head towards her, old rage resurfacing as he said bitterly, ‘So much is our farm fought over, and the one next to it, that there is nothing left – nothing. No house, no horse, no hens, no hen coops or brooders, no barn, no pigs, no cow – no people.
‘Father die in 1941. Until the invasion, Mama and I work on the farm to keep it somehow until peace come. What peace, Madame?’
He had really caught Barbara’s attention. This was information about the French side of the war that she had rarely seen reported in England, except for a line or two as back-page news.
He went on, ‘When the invasion of the Allies begin, Mama and me – we hide in la cave. We are very afraid. House is destroy. La cave is very, very old storehouse – very strong, only little window. When the armies move away, we escape – walk to Bayeux.
‘My uncle, Uncle Léon, sail out of Port-en-Bessin not too far away, you understand? We do not know, however, where the ships of the coast is gone. We hope news in Bayeux. Uncle will help us. You understand, Madame, the coast is in great disturbance. Where are our fishermen? Where are our little boats? Good question.’
She nodded to convey her understanding of the problem.
‘As we walk, advancing Allied troops say Bayeux is not damage …’ He took both hands off the wheel, to indicate with gestures a sense of turmoil.
Barbara held her breath until he hastily gripped the wheel again and continued to drive down the middle of the road.
‘In Bayeux, very small damage. Much chaos because many refugee arrive suddenly. Help will be there – but maybe not for many days. I must find work – to eat. Monks give us clean clothes, and I work two weeks in hotel kitchen in Bayeux. I cook and clean – German Army cooks not very clean. Then the British Army requisition it. They not like French cooking.’ He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘They bring their own cooks.
‘What I do? Our neighbours caught in the battle – we have not found them. We cannot go on to our land. Too dangerous.’ Yet again with his hands he expressed the enormousness of the damage, of the crowds of panic-stricken refugees swarming into the city.
Barbara swallowed as the taxi once more began to edge towards the ditch.
Michel quickly regrasped the wheel and did a theatrical turn towards the centre of the narrow road.
‘Le Maire – hôtel de ville – is, how you say, overwhelm? Later, the Government – they promise money, ’elp for Normandy. But ’elp is for cities, Madame, not for poor peasant.’ He sighed. ‘It is always so. Government not care for peasants. They clear some roads OK. But now we wait and we wait.’
‘I thought the Americans poured in help?’
‘Americans give to Britain, to Germany. At first, they not trust the French or our General de Gaulle – we are forty per cent Communists.’
Aware of Communism in the back streets of Liverpool, Barbara said in surprise, ‘But we have Communists too. The Americans are giving it to us.’
‘Communists in France are – how you say? – a force political. Americans now fear revolution – perhaps a Communist one – may happen in France, if they do not give us help. So now it is that Marshall Aid comes – but first for the railways, the roads, the air fields, all destroyed by Allied bombing; and then for Le Havre, for Rouen, Cherbourg – the cities.’
‘It must be very hard for your mother.’
‘Hard for all,’ he assured her gloomily.
Barbara changed the subject. She said slowly in English, ‘It was very kind of the American soldiers – the undertakers at the hotel – to permit you to take me to the cemetery. The hotel says they booked this taxi for four whole months. The reservations clerk said that you usually stay with the Americans at the cemeteries throughout the day while they work.’
The length of Barbara’s remark made it a little difficult for Michel to understand. He replied cautiously, ‘American Army very good, soldiers most kind, Madame. Lots of petrol! Certainement, they pay taxi four months – not like the Boches – he never pay for anything he can take, les sales Boches.’
Though he laughed, he sounded cynical, as he remembered how some German soldiers had demanded his best poultry breeding stock and had wrung their pretty necks in front of him. Then they had made his mother clean and pluck them ready for cooking. Cook some of the world’s best breeding stock? It was murder. His poor Chanticleer and his pretty, fertile wives. Hélas! How would he ever find the money to replace them?
As he mourned his dead hens, Michel edged the vehicle round a pothole filled with water, and then continued, ‘Taxi is the only transport to cemeteries, Madame. Now many people want to visit their dead. This is the only taxi in Bayeux. So I ask Americans, can I take civilians to the cemeteries, while they work? I promise to collect them from their American cemeteries exactly when they order. You understand taxi cannot be left for one moment unattended. Someone steal, dead cert.’ Michel was rapidly extending his vocabulary while working for the Americans.
‘They say OK. Take some lady to cemetery. Make a buck. So I drive American ladies, English ladies, one lady from Poland – widow of man who fight with British, je crois.’
He cleared his throat and spat out of the window. ‘Two German ladies come – they omit to tip me.’ He half turned his head towards her. He sounded mystified, as he added, ‘You know, they cry like everyone else.’
‘I am sure they did,’ Barbara agreed.
She felt fiercely that she did not care whether the Germans flooded the earth with their tears; they could never undo the ruination of her life by the taking of her George’s life.
Let the German widows cry. Let them suffer. She hoped their cities remained shattered, their factories empty, looted by both Americans and Russians, their farms fought over and desolate. Let them pay.
After a while, to take her mind off her own troubles, she asked the taxi driver, ‘What are the Americans doing here? Are they really undertakers? Aren’t all the dead buried yet?’
‘Ah, simple, Madame. They arrange for dead American soldiers to go home. Bury them in America.’
‘What a lovely idea!’
‘Very, very expensive, Madame.’ Michel obviously did not believe in such a waste of money, even if it resulted in work for himself.
They swung round a corner into a narrow lane. At the end of it, an open ironwork gate faced them, and, beyond that, what at first looked like a sea of white and green.
As they drove through the gateway, the sea resolved into masses and masses of white crosses set in neat rows amid green lawns, stretching, it seemed to Barbara, into infinity.
She caught her breath. So many! Her mild amusement at the taxi driver’s disapproval of American extravagance was forgotten in the shock of being suddenly surrounded by the evidence of so much death. Surely, it could not be?
But the evidence lay there, crying out in its silence.
She was appalled.
Just inside the gate, the taxi came to a halt. Michel opened Barbara’s door and took her hand to help her alight. Her normal self-confidence left her. She was so shaken by the scene before her that she was grateful for the man’s firm grip; though he smelled at least it was the smell of a man – a man such as she was used to, who worked hard.
‘I get the flowers for Madame,’ he said gently.
She looked at him a little helplessly, and then she pointed to her dropped handbag and asked him if he could reach in and rescue it for her.
‘Mais oui, Madame.’
The cloth bag was covered with dust and not a few hayseeds, blown in when they had passed the hay wain. Michel carefully brushed it as clean as he could, before handing it to her.
He smiled. ‘Very pretty bag, Madame.’
‘Thank you,’ she answered, and then, looking a little rueful, she muttered absently, ‘I made it myself. It’s still difficult to buy things.’
He made a wry face. He, too, knew about the shortages of everything. He leaned into the taxi to retrieve the flowers for her.
As he handed the bouquet to her, he saw that despite her casual remarks about her handbag she had gone as white as her lilies. Her dark blue eyes were wide with fright.
Pauvre petite! So little, so sweet, and, at this moment, looking so helpless. He wanted to take her in his arms to comfort her and tell her that all would be well, that she could be sure that Jules, the gardener, was very kind and that he looked after the graves with great care.
In the silence of the cemetery, his voice sounded harsh, as, instead, he cleared his throat and enquired hastily, ‘Number of the grave, Madame?’
She told him.
He took her arm. ‘I walk with you. Then wait by taxi.’
She was shaking, and simply nodded acceptance. Fearing she might faint, he held her arm firmly and guided her further along the little lane on which the taxi stood. ‘Germans that side, Allies this side,’ he explained.
She nodded again. They walked across the grass for a minute or two. From a little fenced enclosure at the back of the cemetery, a figure emerged.
‘He is Jules – the gardener,’ Michel told her.
She was pressing her arm against the driver’s guiding hand, as if she never wanted him to let go, but she showed some sign of animation by saying, ‘Oh, yes. I remember the name. I wrote to the Head Gardener of this cemetery. He replied that the cemetery was, at last, open for visitors. His letter was so kind. So I knitted a pullover – out of wool from old pullovers – and sent it to him as a thank you present for, for …’ Her voice broke for a moment, then she went on more firmly, ‘for looking after George.’
The taxi driver showed surprise. ‘He like that. Nobody thank gardener before – certainement.’
As Jules approached, she smiled at him as bravely as she could. The driver repeated the number of the grave to him.
‘Come, Madame.’
She unlinked her arm, and, hugging her flowers, her chin up, her face suddenly old and grim, she walked forward – like St Joan going into the fire, the driver told his brother, Anatole, sometime later.
Chapter Two (#ulink_c6b132d8-a976-5cc7-9f6d-65b402f3379f)
All the modest hopes of George and Barbara had come to naught. Without George, his young widow considered, life was not worth living. She wished passionately that she had a child to console her, but they had deferred having a family until the end of the war.
From the day the war began, Barbara and her mother, Phyllis Williams, had fought a stalwart battle to save their home and their means of livelihood until peace should be declared. It had been a hard, very long struggle, and, on top of that, to be bereaved was difficult to bear.
They owned a small bed-and-breakfast establishment abutting the seashore on the Wirral peninsula. It was about eight miles from Liverpool, on the other side of the River Mersey, and not far from the estuary of the River Dee. They had worked for years to build it up as a nice place for commercial travellers to stay overnight, and for people in search of a family holiday during the summer.
Their home was an old farmhouse, lovingly restored by its original owner. Barbara and her mother ran the business while her father went to sea. He had been torpedoed in 1941.
For the sake of her daughter, Phyllis wept for her husband in secret and dealt firmly with the other problems the war had brought her.
‘We’ve got to eat, luvvie,’ she had told twenty-two-year-old Barbara, who had been devastated by her father’s death. And with considerable courage, like other Merseyside bereaved women, mother and daughter continued to try to live as normal lives as possible. It was not easy.
As far as Barbara was concerned, the battle had seemed worth it once she had met George.
She had actually seen him once or twice in the village, a rather ponderous youth a couple of years older than herself.
She had met him again when he was on leave, handsome in his Army uniform, at a Red Cross dance held in the church hall. He had, he told her, not been much at home since leaving school; at first he had been learning his trade as an apprentice to a stone mason, working on repairs to Chester Cathedral. Then once he had his journeyman’s papers, he had found a place working on the new Church of England Cathedral in Liverpool. He loved his work; he was devoted to his cathedral. But cathedral building can be put on hold until wars are finished, so George had been called up.
After Barbara and George’s marriage in 1942, the newlyweds and Phyllis Williams had all three cherished hopes of living together in the bed-and-breakfast after the war was over. The women would continue to run it, and George looked forward to returning to his full-time work as stone mason on the unfinished cathedral.
Phyllis Williams had been very pleased to acquire such a well-placed, sensible young man as a son-in-law. Suddenly, the need to keep the bed-and-breakfast going had acquired new meaning for her; it would be a great place for grandchildren, and the three of them would be quite comfortable financially.
Both women had been crushed and bewildered by George’s death. But other people were dependent upon their business, and both women worked mechanically to keep the shabby farmhouse open.
‘It’s the small nightmares wot keeps driving you crazy,’ Phyllis would lament. ‘Some of them is the last straw.’ And they would both blow their noses, and do their best.
Phyllis, however, became very worried about her widowed daughter as she watched her decline into a dull, disinterested woman, who rarely went out socially. It wasn’t that Barbara did not do her share of the work of their little business; she did more than enough, and she knitted and sewed industriously to help eke out their sparse clothes-rationing coupons.
‘You know, Ada, there’s no life in her; and she’s too young to give up like she is,’ Phyllis had said anxiously to George’s mother. Ada was herself a widow who did not have much life in her either, except when talking about her garden, when her face would occasionally light up.
‘You know and I know, Ada, that you just have to put the war behind you and start again.’
Ada Bishop sighed deeply. Phyllis Williams was the bravest little soul she knew.
‘Perhaps, in the back of her mind, she hopes he’ll turn up again; it’s been known to happen,’ suggested Ada. ‘You don’t always think quite sensible when you’re young, do you? I know he’ll never come home. But she may still hope.’
‘You don’t always think sensible even when you’re older,’ replied Phyllis, with a wry smile. It had been hard for her to accept that her own husband had been torpedoed in Liverpool Bay in 1941, and would never return. But a lot of seamen never had a grave other than the sea. Then she said, with sudden inspiration at the thought of a grave, ‘Perhaps she’d see different if she could look at George’s grave! She’d really know then.’
The mothers agreed. They persuaded Barbara that she should take a break and go to Normandy.
So, after some argument, a listless Barbara had drawn on her wartime savings – it had been easy to save in wartime, because there was very little to buy – and had gone to see Thomas Cook.
Until catching the ferry at Dover and her subsequent arrival in Bayeux, she had felt fairly calm about the visit; in fact, she had regarded it as an unusual, but welcome break, taken to please Ada and Phyllis.
Now, thin and workworn, Barbara faced her loss as bravely as she could. She was physically exhausted, despairing in her own loneliness and that of her overworked half-fed mother, bedevilled by the continued strict rationing – and by the cold, the everlasting cold which Britain had endured in that hopeless winter of 1947–48, the lack of gas and electricity – and food. Would there ever be any let-up, she wondered. There seemed to be absolutely nothing to look forward to.
While travelling to France, she had dwelled on the miserable condition of her home. It had been, in 1939, such a pretty seaside bed-and-breakfast establishment, with an excellent reputation.
The declaration of war had put an end to that. The house and garden had been ruined a few days before the war actually began.
Children and their mothers were evacuated from Liverpool and billeted upon them. She and Phyllis, with three extra mothers in the kitchen, had been thrown into chaos. They had accepted, however, that these refugees from the heavy bombing that was daily anticipated had to be housed. They did their best to cope.
She shuddered when she remembered the day she had discovered that all their beds had bugs in them and the pillows had lice, brought in by evacuees from some of the worst slums in Britain.
Mercifully, the evacuees had decided they hated living in what they regarded as countryside, where there was not even a decent fish-and-chip shop, and had returned home to Liverpool, as yet unbombed.
Phyllis Williams and Barbara had had to burn the pillows, boil the bedding, and ask the Town Council to get the entire house stoved for them. It stank for days afterwards.
They painstakingly went through the bedrooms again, armed with a local store’s last tins of Keating’s powder. To their relief they found no more invaders. The kitchen and all the floors in the house were scrubbed and polished.
The front garden was a mess, tramped over by both children and adults.
Barbara wanted to weep. Originally, she had herself planted the garden and it had become her hobby. Looking back, she thought how stupid it was to weep over a small garden; she had wept many more bitter tears since then.
Her mother, made of sterner stuff, said, ‘We’ll get a lad to dig it over, and seed it with grass. And we’ll put a couple of flowerpots on either side of the front door.’
Barbara acquiesced.
‘The main problem is, Barbie, it looks as if we’re not goin’ to get our usual customers. The commercial travellers is all going into the Army, and, if this summer’s any example, the older couples what used to spend their holidays with us don’t seem to be taking holidays any more. So what to do?’
‘I don’t know, Mam, but if we don’t fill up this house quickly, it’ll be requisitioned again for something.’
They sat in silence, staring at their kitchen, once more restored to order.
Then Barbara said, ‘You’re right, Mam, about the elderly couples not coming. But I wonder if they’d come if we pointed out that if France falls – and it looks as if it might – the South’ll be in range for bombing. We could offer them permanent accommodation well away from it.’
Her mother slapped her knee. ‘I think you’re right, luv. There’s one or two people as has come up from London, staying in the village already.’
They had sat down and written to some twenty elderly couples from the South-East of England, who had in times past spent holidays with them. They made Barbara’s point about likely bombing, and the comparative safety of the North.
The nervous anticipation in the South of being bombed was sufficient. Within two weeks, they had all their eight bedrooms filled, housing a total of seventeen people. Their biggest bedroom held three quarrelsome, complaining old sisters, who proved to be the most trying of their hastily acquired visitors.
The overwhelmed local housing authority, themselves disorganised by the sudden weight of responsibility thrust upon them by the immediacies of war, decided that they could not very well dislodge such elderly refugees from the South without causing a scandal. They accepted the situation.
As grossly overworked Phyllis remarked, with resignation, ‘At least this lot knows what being clean means, thanks be to Mary.’
Phyllis and Barbara agreed that it was advisable to keep the house more crowded than it had ever been, lest the authorities suddenly change their collective mind and try to thrust additional, unwanted guests upon them. And there was always the overriding fear that the Army or the Air Force might requisition the entire property, though this did not happen.
So, for nearly seven years, as a constant background to their personal grief at the loss of their menfolk, the harassed hostesses faced continuous complaints about the difficulty of climbing stairs; and, though each bedroom had a sink, that there was only one bathroom and three lavatories in the place.
Regardless of the fact that almost every home in Britain was cold from lack of fuel, running wars were fought between old gentlemen trying to hog the chairs nearest the meagre gas fire in the lounge. Ladies complained of lack of hot water for washing clothes and having baths – even of getting into the bathroom in the first place.
Accusations regarding the unfair distribution of rationed food, particularly the tiny amounts of sugar, butter, cheese, jam and marmalade, flew back and forth between the little round tables in the dining room. Sometimes, perfectly respectable couples would accuse each other of theft of jam from their private pots, which had been specially provided by Phyllis to ensure fairness.
Frequently, Phyllis had to intervene in the altercations and point out the minuscule amount of individual rations. It all seemed so stupid to her. There were men like her husband Hugh, victim of a U-boat attack, and George, who would give their lives for them – and they screamed with rage over marmalade!
Anybody would imagine that they had no one in their families serving in the Forces; yet Phyllis knew that they did.
When, in 1944, George was killed, Barbara thought the refugees would drive her insane. She was sorely tempted to scream, ‘Shut up! Get out!’ at them, and she wondered how her mother could endure them so patiently.
When the war ended, most of them lingered for a while. A number had wrecked or damaged homes, which had to be restored before they could move down south again. A few, perhaps because they had been protected for so long from the reality of existence in a drained country, seemed unable to make up their minds what to do, and, meanwhile, had stayed on.
Particularly in 1947, the worried hostesses had had a real problem finding enough food, rationed or unrationed, to provide three meagre meals a day for the old curmudgeons. They had thankfully said farewell to the last of them at Christmas.
That same year Barbara and her mother had been very relieved to see the return of some of their usual clientele, commercial travellers. The gentlemen had little to sell. Wholesalers were anxious, however, to keep their company name in front of their old clients, so that, as soon as adequate goods were available, their pre-war share of the market would not be lost.
Once or twice, thought Barbara, the old folk had been very nice to her. Back in June 1942, when she had married George, they had insisted that Phyllis use some of their points rations, which meant very limited amounts of tinned food, like Spam or golden syrup, to make a wedding breakfast for the young couple.
In addition, all the ladies had set to work to embroider or knit or crochet little wedding gifts. Even the gentlemen, whom Barbara swore were the laziest bunch of old so-and-sos she had ever met, bestirred themselves. The result was a number of beautifully hand-carved gifts. Though she could no longer bear to look at them because it made her want to cry, she still treasured in her dressing-table drawer three neatly carved wooden spoons made from driftwood found on the shore.
She went round the lot of them to kiss them in gratitude.
They had been equally kind when they heard about George’s death; they had all expressed their sorrow at her loss, as those who knew about it had done earlier, when her father was killed. There had not been a single quarrel for at least two weeks.
During the weeks following the loss of George, two of the residents lost grandsons and at last, it seemed to Barbara, the reality of the war truly came home to them; not even a string of bombs dropped across the Wirral peninsula, nor the news some had received of their homes being damaged or requisitioned had been able to achieve that.
When the war began, Barbara herself had wanted to volunteer for military service and join the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. It sounded exciting.
Her mother would not hear of it. ‘With your dad at sea, I need you. Who else can I turn to?’
So Barbara, who loved her mam, stayed home.
When France fell to the Germans, Barbara broached the subject again. But Phyllis still would not hear of it either. Nice girls stayed at home with their mams. ‘And, anyway, wot am I going to do without you, and a house full of old folks to run?’ When her father was torpedoed, her mother was certainly glad to have her there.
A domestic crisis had occurred when, in December 1942, all married women under the age of forty were called up for war work. Barbara was directed to a contractor who was busy repairing damaged docks in Birkenhead. She worked on shift as a labourer together with one other girl. Her hours were long and the work, with all its lifting and carrying, was very heavy.
‘At least it’s better than the ATS,’ Phyllis said, as she rubbed Barbara’s back with surgical spirit. ‘You can sleep in your own bed.’ She imagined that she was being comforting.
Barbara’s bed was exceedingly cold, especially without George. She shrugged and looked down at her hands, which were rapidly being ruined by hard labour, and felt that the Army would probably have been easier. She had not, however, wanted to quarrel about it. She admitted to herself that, in comparison with pre-war earnings for women, her wages were very good. Since there was nothing much in the shops to buy, she saved as much as she could by opening a bank account and also purchasing war bonds. Between her work shifts she helped her mother, so her social life was negligible. They all prayed for a rapid end to the war.
George’s fourteen-year-old sister had left school the previous summer. She had since been working as a shop assistant for a greengrocer. When Barbara was called up, she volunteered, for a slightly better wage, to come to work for Mrs Williams, to make beds and clean floors. In addition, two elderly women from the village came in as part-time help.
As a result of these changes, the elderly residents found plenty more to complain about. None of them, however, moved out; the bombing of London was by then unremitting, and the heavy bombing of Liverpool earlier in the year was sufficient to keep them in the comparative safety of the village by the sea. Though, occasionally, their provoked hostesses wished them dead, not a single one of them died during the many years that they boarded with Phyllis.
‘We looked after them too well – or it was the good sea air,’ Phyllis replied acidly when Ada once pointed this out to her.
When travelling to France, Barbara had passed through Birkenhead and Liverpool on her way to catch a train to London. She had been forcibly reminded of the toll of war in Britain by the destruction she could still see there, and she remembered, with a pang, the long civilian casualty lists pinned up in the city, the pitiful treks each night that the inhabitants had made to the outer suburbs such as Huyton, in the hope of survival. How had George’s few surviving comrades felt when they returned home to this?
She was shocked at the miles of ruins she had observed in London. How many homeless people must there be in London? How many dead? She realised, with genuine distress, that there must be returning ex-service men who had lost their entire families in the broken, once close-packed streets of the capital. They must wonder what they had fought for.
Wrapped in her own sorrow while she grappled with the day-to-day problems of existence, she had not thought of such a situation before.
Seated in the train as it rumbled slowly into Euston, Barbara had queried mentally how careful, phlegmatic George might have faced coming home to a ruin – there had been bombs dropped close enough to the bed-and-breakfast for this to have been a possibility. And, in her self-searching, it dawned on her that she did not know; she really had not known him well enough to understand how his mind might have worked. And worst of all, now she would never know him any better – because he was gone.
As she walked towards George’s grave, she thought her heart would break. Because she did not want to cry in front of Jules, she held back the heaving sobs that rose within her. Instead, she clenched her teeth and walked blindly beside him.
Chapter Three (#ulink_ff3bc5a0-5dce-5c5a-bb87-3dc2451de19a)
Michel Benion, temporary taxi driver, ex-poultry farmer, slowly rolled up the front of his old black jersey and took his precious packet of cigarettes from inside his undershirt. Abstractedly he watched the little widow as she went with Jules to find the grave.
As he lit a cigarette and then sat down to wait on the step of the antiquated taxi, he felt again the well of pain and humiliation under which he himself still laboured.
It was ridiculous, he fretted in complete frustration, that nearly three years after the end of the war, because the Government had not yet cleared it of land mines, his chicken farm was still unworkable. In fact, the authorities, those mighty gods in Paris, were talking of buying the land from his family and making it into a park. Nearly three years – and they had still not made up their collective minds about it.
Just now, American money is being poured into Rouen and Le Havre where there are lots of voters, he fumed for the hundredth time. Simply because we are only small farmers with no clout, we can wait for ever, exactly like the farmers on the Western Front after the First World War.
And even if we got the farm back, would they lend us money to start again, build barns, buy breeding stock, sustain us financially until our flocks were rebuilt? What about our draught horse? Our cow, our pigs and vegetable garden that fed us?
Save as he and his mother did, in a desperate effort to collect a modicum of capital – living on little more than vegetable soup, bread and cheese, and occasional cigarettes when they could get them – he was beginning to realise that, alone, the family themselves could never acquire enough money to start again.
Of course, like most land in Normandy, their farm was owned jointly by all the members of the family: Michel’s sick brother, Anatole, their mother and their two married sisters in Rouen. It had been hard enough, even before the war, to scratch a living from two and a half hectares, when so many people held rights to it. It had meant intensive use of every inch of land.
Michel’s father had succeeded in buying out his own sea-going brother’s share, which feat had taken him most of his life to achieve; Michel doubted, however, that he would ever manage to buy out his own siblings’ shares, even under the best of circumstances.
And he had begun to ask himself whether he truly wanted to recommit his life to boundless hard work, just to stay alive and pay the rest of the family their share of what he managed to make. Would Anatole, perhaps, recover and be able to help him?
When their father had been alive, Anatole and his two sisters had, in addition to helping on the farm, all worked at other outside jobs and, with the extra money earned, the family had collectively managed quite well.
The girls were gone now, Anatole was very ill, and their mother had aged immeasurably during the ruthless occupation by the German Army. Michel knew he could not carry the burden of work alone; he would have to employ at least one labourer, a great expense when first starting up again, while for a time no money would be coming in.
Even if the Government bought the land to make a park, the resultant money would, after paying their debts, have to be divided between all the family members. Michel himself would still not have capital enough from his share to start a little business of any kind.
For the moment, his mother received an old age pension, and Anatole received a regular allowance and medical care because he was a very sick returned deportee who was being nursed at home. Without these, they would undoubtedly have starved, thought Michel gloomily.
But the value of the franc fell daily, and the cost of everything on the black market was, in consequence, rising formidably – and without the black market, which dealt in everything from bread to boots, they would be in desperate straits.
His mother and Anatole had refused to move further away from their land than Bayeux until a decision was made by the Government. Madame Benion had a fixed belief that if they did not remain close, someone would say the Benions were all dead and would try to claim it. ‘And what is a peasant without land?’ she had asked. ‘Just a body without a soul,’ Michel had fretted. Land was supposed to be the foundation of life.
In the meantime, he had worked for his Uncle Léon as a deckhand on his little coaster, and then had applied for all kinds of jobs in Bayeux in order to keep a roof over the family’s heads. But the only special skill he had was in raising hens – and cooking.
In refugee-filled, but undamaged Bayeux, there were very few jobs for the unskilled, so competition was keen for any work available.
If he could have persuaded his mother to move to the wreckage of Rouen, he could have easily found construction work. He would, he told himself, have cheerfully endured the pain in his shoulder, damaged since childhood, that heavy labour would have given him. But she woodenly refused. So, here he was, a taxi driver for old Duval, who owned the vehicle.
Duval had rented both driver and vehicle to three huge American Army officers for four months. The Americans were really civilian undertakers and were happily engaged in enjoying France, while they arranged for the bodies of their dead compatriots to be dug up and shipped home to the United States. The American Army had not seen fit to provide these civilian employees, even if they wore uniform, with transport; hence their use of the taxi.
Michel grinned slightly. At least, as far as he himself was concerned, the US Army was the soul of generosity. He was doing nicely on the side, ferrying to the local cemeteries people like the sad young English woman this afternoon – and the Americans had said quite blithely that it was OK for him to do so. He hoped old Duval would not wake up to this happy arrangement and demand a cut of whatever extra he earned.
Michel carefully blew a perfect smoke ring, and his thoughts reverted to the carnage on the chicken farm.
Four years earlier, when the hopes of liberation from the German occupation had run high, whispered about in every small café, the French had been filled with new hope. The reality of the cost of being set free had been unexpectedly brought home to the whole district with terrifying suddenness.
At the commencement of the Allies’ preliminary bombardment, many of the Benions’ neighbours fled inland. Unable to believe that French lives or French property would be destroyed, a number remained, including Michel, his mother, and his fiancée’s parents, whose plot abutted that of the Benions.
For a day or two, it seemed that the Benions’ choice had been correct. The attacks appeared to be directed at railway junctions and airports, the coast itself, and towards the destruction of the German Army and its likely escape routes.
While planes of every description flew over and occasionally fought pitched battles with each other above her head, Madame Benion remained determinedly calm. She fed her few remaining hens and collected some eggs, while Michel tended the vegetable garden, their frightened cow, and the squealing sow, which was about to farrow and was terrified by the noise of the diving planes.
The small detachment of German soldiers, camped amid the apple trees at the end of the Benion land, fled one night, leaving their anti-aircraft gun to its fate.
Madame Benion thanked God she would not be further bullied by them and placidly harvested some salad greens. Michel cursed the Germans, because the stable which should have contained their solitary horse was empty.
‘The Boches must have taken it in the night,’ he told his mother.
‘It’s more important that they are gone too,’ she said calmly. ‘We shall manage, somehow.’
But the next afternoon, a hot and summery one, a shell whistled through the clear blue sky over their home and exploded very near the house, blowing out all the windows.
Madame Benion stood in her tiny living room, soup ladle poised over Michel’s empty bowl, and looked bewilderedly down at tiny slivers of glass caught in the hem of her thick serge skirt. It was a miracle that she had not been cut.
The whistle was followed a few seconds later by another one and then a whole series. The sound of the explosions was deafening.
Madame Benion dropped her ladle, while Michel shoved back his chair. ‘La cave, Maman!’ he cried. ‘Quick.’
He herded his mother ahead of him, through the arch that divided the room from the kitchen itself. In the far wall was the door leading to the vegetable garden. He pushed his mother through it. He hastily followed her, after swinging shut behind them the heavy fifteenth-century wooden back door. He did not latch it, which proved to be a mistake.
Very few homes in Normandy have cellars. A couple of strides, however, took the Benions across a narrow garden path to a small outhouse much older than the farmhouse. It had walls two feet thick and, at the far end, it was half buried in the earth. Its tiled roof was held up by ancient, handcut beams. It had long since been chosen by Madame Benion as the safest place to take cover during air raids; the family had, at various times during the war, already spent a number of uncomfortable nights in it.
Michel’s father, alive at the beginning of hostilities, had pointed out that the outhouse had the advantage of there being no second storey to collapse on it and bury those taking refuge.
Its door, like the rest of it, had been built with medieval thoroughness to withstand the attacks of armed men in earlier frays; it was braced by a succession of iron bolts to hold its several layers of wood together. Huge hinges extended an iron grip halfway across the woodwork.
To give some light in the cave, there was one small window high in the far wall. It had a single bar across its centre, to deter anyone small enough from crawling through it. The aperture was further barricaded by an inside wooden shutter, closed by an iron bar across it. Now, through the cracks in the shutter, came narrow flashes from the explosions outside.
This small refuge was normally the storeroom for barrels of cider, a primitive cider press and a small apple grinder, a stock of root vegetables and of eating apples. It also held firewood and odds and ends of farm implements not in daily use. Most of the consumable contents had long since been drunk or eaten by the Germans manning the nearby gun emplacement. It did, however, contain a covered bucket full of water, which Madame Benion changed daily, and a tin of homemade biscuits.
This afternoon, she regretted that she had not had time to bring with her a couple of old feather duvets, which she kept in the kitchen cupboard so that they did not go mouldy in this rather damp outhouse. After the heat of the day, however, the place felt blessedly cool, and she hoped the attack would not last long.
She sat down on an old bench in a corner where in a hollow above a beam, she had, long ago, stored a small parcel of family papers, her personal savings of little silver coins in a tiny canvas bag, Michel’s Post Office savings book, and, best of all, a candle and matches.
Now, she felt around in the half-dark for the candle, found it and lit it.
By the light of the candle, she began pains takingly to pick out of her thick serge skirt the small shards of glass which had caught in the hem. ‘I was lucky not to get this in my face,’ she said, and then winced as she cut her finger.
Michel had come to sit cross-legged beside her. He nodded in agreement with her remark about her face. He did not believe, however, that their luck was continuing. It seemed to him, with the racket outside growing, that they were caught in the midst of a real battle.
As the noise increased, Madame Benion asked Michel to get down the small packets hidden above her. He did so, and she stowed them in the capacious inner pockets of her skirt.
With their faces buried on their knees most of the time, their arms clasped over their heads, they remained in the cellar for thirty-six agonised hours, as the earthen floor shuddered and heavy dust was shaken down on them from the roof. Despite the water and biscuits, their hunger grew.
At first, they screamed with terror; then, nearly out of their senses, numbed by fear, they fell silent. But the noise nearly drove them mad: explosion after explosion, the roar of shells from the ships anchored on the coast, the whistle of bombs, the rattle of machine-gun fire, the terrified shrieks of the farrowing pig nearby, and, worst of all, the dreadful screams of wounded and dying men, as the battle raged backwards and forwards over their precious hectares of land.
The candle burned down and finally went out. Amid thick dust and total darkness, they clung to each other, petrified.
When they heard the unmistakable rumble and crash of heavy tanks, the screech of brakes and tyres of personnel carriers, they were sure their refuge would be crushed and that they would die beneath the outhouse’s heavy beams; and half-forgotten prayers were mechanically mumbled by both of them.
Roaring like a furious elephant, a tank ground its way through the further end of the house and sent stones rattling on to the cave’s roof. Later, something heavy exploded on the other side of the house. The pain in her ears from the blast made poor Madame Benion scream again. Michel held his mother close.
The huge handcut beams held, the thick walls shuddered again and again, but did not give.
As the hard-fought battle finally moved relentlessly on towards the River Orne and the Allies’ target, the city of Caen, the noise gradually lessened.
Limp with exhaustion, Michel and his mother, miraculously not seriously hurt, finally stood up in the darkness. Michel held his mother in his arms, while they both trembled helplessly.
They did not realise until they spoke that they were nearly deaf, that the reduced roar of the bombardment from the naval ships along the coast, and the shaking menace of heavy tanks and personnel carriers rumbling past, were still quite close. The screech of fighter planes and bombers diving over them, however, was sharp enough to make Madame Benion again scream with terror, and they crouched back into their corner.
At last, it seemed that the vibrations under them had eased. Still not realising how deaf they were, it appeared to them quieter outside. They ventured to rise again.
Michel went to the little window first and opened the shutter. Together with a rush of dust, the faint light of dawn filtered in; to him, the noise had become a confused rumbling. He turned to edge his way round the apple crusher to get to the door. He confidently turned the iron ring to open it, but the door did not budge. He turned the handle again and, at the same time, gave it a hearty shove with his good shoulder. It gave slightly.
Encouraged, he pushed as hard as he could. It scraped open a crack.
He turned to his watching mother. ‘Something’s wedged behind it,’ he said.
Madame Benion could not completely hear what he said but she saw the need for help. When he tried again, she added her small weight to his and pushed.
It gave slightly more.
Michel pressed his mother’s hand to indicate that she should keep pushing. Hoping that it would not slam shut again and smash his fingers, he braced himself against it and ran his hand along the opened space. Halfway down the outer side of the door, his fingers touched wood. Below that, there seemed no further impediment. Whatever was there had certainly wedged the door shut.
He withdrew his hand. Already nearly frantic from that which had gone before, panic rose in him.
He stood firm, however, while he tried to control himself. Beside him, his mother shifted slightly. She said something but he could not hear what it was.
Keep your head, he warned himself. You must; otherwise you may starve in this rathole.
Again, he braced himself as firmly as he could to keep the door open as far as it would go. Then he shouted into his mother’s ear, ‘Quickly, Maman, bring me some wood chips and a couple of small logs.’
Despite the loudness of his voice she had not heard him clearly. Uncertainly, she picked up some pieces of firewood.
‘That’s right,’ he shouted at her.
She rapidly collected some more wood and held it towards him in her arms. With one hand, he picked three or four chips to wedge the door as far open as it would go. Very slowly, he eased away from it. The wooden chips cracked with the door’s pressure, but held.
With a sigh of relief, he stepped back.
Gesturing to his mother, he said, ‘Put the wood down here, Maman, and bring me the big mallet we use for pounding in fenceposts.’
While she hesitantly complied, uncertain that she had heard properly, he gave the recalcitrant door another heavy shove. It refused to shift any further.
‘I’m going to give the door several blows with the mallet to see if I can loosen it. Stand back, Maman,’ he shouted.
He swung the heavy tool with all his might, hitting the door several times in quick succession. He wanted to scream with the resultant pain in his shoulder. Undeterred, he aimed several more blows.
It sounded to him as if something outside slid. He stopped and then, once more, he shoved as hard as he could. The door opened about three inches.
Full of hope, he let it swing shut again and then continued to whack it with the heavy mallet, but the best he could achieve was an opening of about three inches – no more. Finally breathless, he gave up.
Her hands hanging loosely at her side, his mother was weeping helplessly. ‘Perhaps someone will come to help us,’ she sobbed.
He doubted whether there would be anyone in the vicinity who had survived. He did not, however, tell her this. He simply grunted and ruefully rubbed his shoulder while he considered what to do next. He was, however, desperately hungry and thirsty, and his usually clear mind was refusing to think constructively.
He leaned his head against the cold stone wall, and then, when he felt steadier, he walked over to the little window with its prisonlike bar, to look out again at a June morning marred by a fearsome amount of dust. In the near distance there was the scarifying sound of continuing conflict, though it was definitely receding; even his troubled ears noted that.
Beside him, his mother sounded as if she were speaking from a vast distance away. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, her voice cracking.
He had to shout to make her hear. ‘I’m going to try the door once more.’
She followed him trustfully as he returned to the recalcitrant door.
He felt for the smallest log he had picked out. With this in hand, he shouted, ‘Push.’
They gave a concerted shove, and the door opened as much as it had before. Michel quickly pushed the log into the gap to wedge it open. On this more sheltered side of the cave he could now see light a little more clearly than through the tiny window. ‘It must be nearly mid-morning,’ he decided.
He then picked up another log of uneven width. This he handed to his mother, and told her what to do. Making her stand back, he swung the mallet as hard as he could, in a blow to hit the door at the edge of the opening. Then he flung his weight against it. His mother swiftly dropped the second log into the slightly further opened aperture as a rattle of debris came from outside.
Michel paused for breath.
After a moment, he cautiously stretched himself across the door as far as he could reach and ran his fingers down the open edge of it. He could feel that the wooden obstruction now lay wedged against the bottom of the door.
Several more tries failed to shift the door further.
Furious with frustration, he turned from his mother so that she should not see the intensity of his despair and strode again to the window. His mouth tight as he boiled with anger, he seized the bar across the middle of the window and shook it.
In a split second, he found himself thrown back by his own impetus, flat against the apple grinder, the bar still in his hand. From the window a small slither of debris fell to the floor.
He stared in astonishment at the bar, and then he began to laugh hysterically.
Startled, his mother eased herself round the grinder.
Bewildered, she could not understand what had happened. Then her son shook the bar at her. ‘It came out,’ he shouted. ‘But the window’s still too small to get through! It’s so absurd.’ He continued his manic laugh.
When she understood, her own mind began to clear. She went to look up at the aperture. ‘It’s too small for me – in my clothes.’
She continued to stare at it, ‘Anyway, it’s too high for me to reach.’
The laughter behind her died away. She heard Michel drop the iron bar. He came to stand beside her and looked down at her. She was indeed small, like a young girl, a wisp of a woman, just bones from lack of adequate food.
She said, ‘If I could reach, I could get through – without my skirts.’
He made her repeat the remark, not sure that he had heard correctly. ‘Could you?’
‘I believe so,’ she said slowly. ‘I should go face down and feet first, because I don’t want to drop on my head on the other side.’
He rubbed his ears in the hope of persuading them to clear, so that he could hear better. Then he said loudly, ‘I don’t think you would have much of a drop, Maman. The potato patch slopes slightly up towards the window – and it would be soft.’
She made a wry face. ‘I would still need to be face down because my old body won’t bend backwards much in order to ease myself down the wall. I don’t think even a young girl could do it face up.’
Despite the dire need to get out of their prison, this cold assessment of what a lifetime of toil had done to her body distressed Michel beyond measure. Maman was like a little tree constantly exposed to an east wind – she was indeed permanently bent forward.
Though she said with determination that she was prepared to try to ease through the window naked, and go for help, she was shy at appearing unclothed even before her son, never mind any foreign soldiers who might be around.
‘I could push your clothes through after you,’ suggested Michel. Then loath to put her through such an ordeal, he said, ‘We could first try shouting for help. There might be somebody out there after all.’
They shouted and yelled at the tops of their tired voices. To no purpose.
Michel then tried to move the windowsill. It had, after nearly a thousand years, crumbled partially under the constant vibration of the attack, and had thus loosened the bar. The sill was badly cracked, but little more of it could be moved out of its stony, foot-long depth. Michel cursed his forefathers for building so soundly.
Women can be so brave, thought Michel now as he smoked peacefully in the sunshine at the cemetery while he waited for Barbara Bishop.
He remembered suddenly a story of the first day of the British invasion. A young French girl had run down to the beach, through the heavy fire and the general carnage, and had waded out into the sea to drag wounded soldiers to the shore before they drowned. She had stayed there, a lone woman, doing her best to reduce the suffering. She must eventually have been killed, he decided, but nobody knew for certain. Without doubt, alive or dead, women rarely got any credit for their bravery.
He and his mother had lifted the bench, on which they had been sitting for most of their incarceration, to a spot under the window. While Michel looked the other way, Madame Benion shyly divested herself of everything except her black stockings and shoes and her shift.
Michel had never seen his mother naked, so it was with embarrassment that he made several efforts to lift her into the window aperture; it was difficult, while facing him, for her to slide in feet first, though she kept her legs straight and held her arms high over her head, like a diver preparing to plunge.
They did finally manage the manoeuvre; and with further agony of mind he watched her face mirror the pain of her naked flesh sliding through such a rough wall.
There was a moment, when she was far enough through to have her legs dangling out of the other side, that he feared she was wedged. She used her hands, however, to push herself onward; and she cried out as the skin on her stomach and on her bottom was badly scraped by the cruel stones of the long narrow aperture through which she had to force herself.
She finally flipped out of the space, and he heard her call that she had fallen without breaking anything and would rest for a little while. He anxiously pushed her clothes out to her.
It was surprisingly quiet outside, and Madame Benion, so brave as long as her son could see her, crouched at the foot of the wall and cried bitterly. She was bleeding from numerous scratches and grazings. Her stockings were torn and her knees, elbows and buttocks were bruised and raw.
As she finally drew on her petticoat and skirt and put on her black blouse, once more catching her hand on a piece of glass still embedded in the serge of her skirt, she wondered what she had done in her life to deserve such misery. As she dressed she looked anxiously around her.
Through smoke and dust driven by the wind, she could see that her house was a ruin, as were the barn, the hen houses and brooders and their runs. Where the apple trees had been was a series of stumps.
Then she became aware of the bodies in various uniforms – or rather, shreds and pieces of them – of a smoking tank not too far away, of something that looked like meat spread near it. She shuddered.
She wondered if there was anybody out there still alive.
‘Are you all right, Maman?’ came an anxious enquiry from the hole in the wall.
She took a large breath and made herself shout cheerfully, ‘Yes.’ Then she added, ‘First, I’m going to look to see what’s wedging the door.’
‘Bless you, Maman.’ Michel began to feel a little relieved.
Heaps of rubble and a teetering kitchen chimney above it made the door difficult to approach.
Very cautiously, Madame Benion mounted the pile of debris. It slipped and slithered under her. She froze.
Yet the problem was so simple. It looked as if the unlocked back door had been swung off its hinges by a blast. It lay across the garden path, one corner firmly pressed against the door of the outhouse, the other corner against the stone back doorstep. Though there was a scattering of debris on it, it was not deeply buried.
Very carefully Madame Benion turned her head. She was looking for something she could use as a walking stick to help to balance herself. Nothing offered.
While the sound of battle growled on in the distance and flashes in the sky told of continuing aerial combat, she stood contemplating the problem. Then she kneeled down and crawled slowly across the pile, testing every stone before she put down knee or hand to go forward. Her thick long skirt, though an impediment, was painstakingly heaved forward each time she moved a knee, and it saved her already lacerated skin from further serious cuts. She was, however, crying with pain by the time she found a steady footing on the door itself.
Michel heard her and tried again to push the cave door open. The fallen house door wobbled under her.
‘Wait,’ she said sharply, and then as he obviously did not hear her clearly enough, she shrieked almost hysterically, ‘Wait, can’t you?’
Subdued, he waited.
She swiftly began to clear the debris. Whatever was not heavy, she threw as far as she could, so as not to disturb the pile over which she had climbed. On the other side of her, a sliver of pathway was bare before the commencement of a further pile of treacherous stones and broken beams; it might just give sufficient room to push the door to that side, she decided.
Some of the stones from the house walls were heavy, and these she laid carefully onto the slithery piles, hoping that she would not set off a cascade of debris back onto the door.
Finally, she had cleared everything up to the outhouse door. She was so exhausted that she prayed to the dear Virgin that she would not die before she got her beloved Michel out.
Swaying on her feet, she now very carefully considered how to move the door. Finally, she staggered the length of it to the outhouse.
‘Michel,’ she shouted.
‘Yes, Maman.’
‘Be ready – when I shout – to push hard and squeeze right through. Use the mallet, if necessary.’
‘Exactly what are you going to do?’
She explained how the unhinged house door was the wedge. Her voice was hoarse from dust, from exhaustion, from simply having to shout.
‘Don’t touch your door for a moment. Let it shut entirely to give me leeway. I’m going to try to lift the corner of the back door – it’s pressed against the rise of the back doorstep – so that it will clear the step. Once I shout, you do everything you can to get your door ajar.’
The first time she tried, she could not lift the corner. The damp, muddy grass seemed to suck the heavy wood down. She paused for a moment, and then with every scrap of strength she had she gave a frantic heave.
It lifted.
‘Push!’ she shrieked.
The door of the outhouse moved, as Michel pushed it from the inside.
‘Push!’ she screamed again.
Suddenly her end of the door jumped in her hands and slid upwards onto the second step of the house. She instinctively released it, and it bumped heavily down onto the top of the second step.
‘Push.’
The corner of the door slid unwillingly across the step, wedging again when it hit the sill of the gaping house doorway. It was sufficient, however, to give space for Michel to squeeze out of his prison.
As he emerged, his mother collapsed.
‘Maman,’ he gasped, as she fell against the house wall.
Weak with relief, he stood for a second leaning against the outside of the sturdy little outhouse; then he stumbled towards her.
At first, he thought the effort had killed her. He burst into tears, as he tenderly laid her on top of the fallen door, the only clear spot. ‘Maman!’
It seemed an eternity before she opened her eyes, to observe her younger son on his knees before her, crying like a child.
It took a moment or two more to realise where she was and what had happened. She smiled weakly at him.
‘We did it!’ she whispered.
He smiled back at her.
Amid the total destruction of their home, he knew that nothing really counted except that they had each other.
‘Clever, clever Maman,’ he told her, as he pushed back the thin grey hair from her filthy, bleeding face.
They lay exhausted under the shadow of the teetering chimney for some time. Then Michel said, ‘I’ll try to get into the kitchen to get some food.’
‘Mais non!’ she responded forcefully. ‘You haven’t yet looked at it. See, the roof is broken in.’ She glanced above her. ‘And this wall is threatening to come down. We must move – very carefully, very softly.’
He raised himself on his elbow, and glanced around him.
He understood the danger immediately.
As, very cautiously, he got up and helped his mother to her feet, he was dumbfounded by the destruction which surrounded them. Aghast, he stared at it in disbelief.
He finally whispered to his trembling mother, ‘Maman, what are we going to do? What can we do?’
But she could not answer him. What had happened to victory, to liberation? she wondered in dazed amazement. Here was no victory: it was yet another defeat.
Chapter Four (#ulink_c0bef616-9165-5129-8650-16717c4dd41c)
As Michel and his mother stood shakily in what had been the vegetable patch, their ears eased slightly and they became more aware of the high-pitched shriek of shells directed over their heads at the near distance, where heavy gunfire made a steady roar. Occasionally, through the general cacophony, they caught the distant screams and shouts of troops in hand-to-hand combat, while high in the sky planes dived purposefully towards the sound of battle. The horizon was flushed with fires.
Both of them were so covered with dust – faces, hair, hands, clothing all blackened – that they resembled statues carved from coal. In addition, amid the grime, Madame Benion’s face was marked by copious tears and drying blood from abrasions on her forehead and one cheek.
Barely able to stand upright, together they surveyed, aghast, the utter decimation of their farm. They imagined, from the flushed skyline, the further destruction still being wreaked on the hapless countryside.
Two dead Germans, one decapitated, lay nearby in a churned-up hen run. A burned-out tank stood, still smoking, amid the stark skeleton of the barn. Even the apple trees had been blasted practically out of existence. The stable, where their horse had lived, the pigsty and, worst of all, the hen coops, were piles of smouldering wood; and from them, as from the tank, came the nauseating odour of cooked meat and burned feathers, mixed with the smell of death from human corpses. Michel sniffed and reckoned that there were other dead nearby.
Nauseated, the Benions swayed unsteadily on their feet, overwhelmed by sickening terror. While shells continued to whistle over their heads and the heavy gunfire persisted on the horizon, they were unable to move further themselves.
From low in the sky, through the dust, they saw that a few German fighter planes were rising to challenge a further wave of Allied bombers.
Michel pushed his mother to the ground, close to the protection of the wall of the storeroom.
‘We could go back into the cave,’ he shouted into her ear. But she feared being shut into it again, and yelled passionately back, ‘Non! Non!’
As they lay with eyes closed, Michel realised that the naval guns from the coast now seemed to have altered their range to a setting to the south-east of this little homestead. Frequently shrapnel hissed to the ground, but the Benions barely heard it. The dogfights above them had also shifted further away.
Michel’s instinct was to flee, to get out of this frightful carnage. But where could they go?
Both of them were much too panic-stricken to consider that, amid the chaos, there might be wounded in need of help. Or if they did, they were past caring; the wounded were unlikely to be French.
As Madame Benion lay with her unscraped cheek close against the earth that had nourished her for most of her life, she found it unbelievable that she could be the innocent victim of this outrageous ferocity. She had never thought that the Allies would, perforce, destroy the French countryside as they tried to oust the German Army.
They were both dreadfully hungry and their thirst was acute. They simply lay paralysed, barely able to keep sane, as they shook with fear, fear of the conflict still being waged overhead, fear of being attacked by equally scared, furious German soldiers that might still be around.
As they tried to gather themselves together, a further scarifying realisation broke in upon them – that without home or land they might as well be dead. Unless their disorganised Government helped them, they had no future except starvation, even if they survived this terrible battle.
In the colossal racket of the night it had been impossible to communicate properly; they had simply clung together and prayed. Now, in the warm sunlight, their throats dry and dusty, they mouthed words at each other. Both turned instinctively to look towards where the well should be, but there remained only mud and a trace of its round wall. They glanced back at each other in despair.
As they became steadier, the depth of their loss was further borne in on them. Everything that, as a family they had worked to create through generations was gone, obliterated. The Germans had been unmerciful predators; but this complete loss, when freedom was so near, seemed to both to be the cruellest blow of all.
Michel’s brave little mother again wept helplessly, the tears making more white streaks through the dust on her cheeks.
Michel thought his heart would break.
As they surveyed the ruin of their lives the terrifying naval guns suddenly ceased firing, though flights of Allied planes continued to sweep overhead.
Michel did not care whether the planes were bombers or fighters, German or Allied. Instead, he was certain that the price of freedom from the Germans was likely to be starvation.
Madame Benion refused to be left alone while he stumbled over nearby rubble to assess more carefully whether any small structure had survived. Without much hope he called his watchdog, but there was no response.
For the moment, Michel decided not to walk right round their little property to see more exactly if anything whatever could be salvaged. It was a decision, he later realised, that had saved his life; the authorities had subsequently told him that the whole place was sown with unexploded munitions, and mines planted by the Germans as they retreated.
He did climb a part of a wall, despite his mother’s protestations that it would collapse under him. He wanted to look further down the hill towards the home of his fiancée’s parents to see how it had fared. He was not quite certain that the family had stuck with their decision not to evacuate their home, though Monsieur Fortier had, a couple of days before, again discussed leaving.
The remains of the walls of their home were barely visible. It was clear that their holdings had been equally badly damaged. Michel had been thankful that his Suzanne was working in Caen; he had, as yet, no idea of the havoc about to be wreaked upon that ancient city.
His mother was tugging anxiously at his trouser leg, so he jumped down. The Fortiers would have to look after themselves.
Now, as he stood beside his taxi parked in the lane which crossed the cemetery, he silently finished his kick-boxing exercises, which he did daily; waiting in cemeteries was the only period of his busy day during which he was not otherwise occupied. As he did them, he cursed the Boches and his own erratic governments of France. He heaped maledictions upon the political manoeuvring of a United States Government fearfully obsessed with anything savouring of socialism, who used the Marshall Plan to their own advantage, so that it did not help humble French peasants, who might be communistically inclined.
He remembered how he and his mother had dragged themselves through the drying mud to what had been the lane, and had then picked their way down what had been a reasonable gravel road to the village, to seek water and temporary shelter.
On the way, stumbling over the churned-up road, they met small groups of soldiers in British uniform. Though the soldiers looked filthy and exhausted, Michel feared that he would be stopped and questioned. The Britons, however, ignored them; a small male civilian and a weeping old woman, who were obviously as dishevelled as they were, held no terrors for fighting men driven nearly insane by the appalling noise and chaos of battle.
Michel was certain that nearly all of the inhabitants had fled the tiny village a day or two before. Like the road leading to it, it was in ruins and now appeared deserted. Not a groan, not a whimper; not a twitter of a bird, not a dog’s bark. Only the distant roar of battle.
A terrified dusty cat cringed in silence in the corner of a broken wall. Traumatised, it stared unblinkingly at Michel.
Michel pulled off his dirty beret and scratched his equally dirt-laden head. He shouted, and then tried to listen intently.
No response.
Though he still could not hear very well, he mouthed to his mother, ‘Everyone must have left.’ He barely stopped to wonder what had happened to the villagers’ animals, which they must have left behind. He was sure that his own livestock, even his watchdog, tethered near the hen coops, was dead.
A teetering wall crashed suddenly. Madame Benion jumped with fright. She looked as if she would faint.
Michel hugged her closer. ‘Courage, Maman. It seems the Allies are advancing – those soldiers were British. We may find support troops of some kind, who will give us water.’
Though she did not believe him, she gradually steadied.
‘Wait here,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll see if I can find something to eat or drink. There may even be somebody hiding here.’
‘Germans?’
‘No. I mean Claude or Maurice or the Desrosiers.’
He looked along the tiny street for a house not too badly damaged. As he went towards one, his mother, memories of the First World War ever before her, shrieked, ‘Be careful. It may be mined!’
He nodded acknowledgement of the warning, as he paused at the doorless front entrance. Then tentatively he stepped inside.
Five bodies lay in the tiny living room. He knew them. Though the one window had imploded, it was not clear in the half-light how they had died, but the smell of faeces and decay was already strong. They must have been dead for some time.
It could have been concussion, he decided. From the dark stains around them, he adjudged that they had bled. Once more, he felt sick with primeval fear.
He took a large breath and then looked carefully round. Hesitantly, he stepped over the corpses of poor Madame Lefebvre, her father, who had been the village shoemaker, and the three grandchildren. Michel knew the house from many a visit and he went straight to a cupboard at the back of the room. In it, he found a very dry loaf, a jug of milk, which had soured, and some cheese. There was nothing else. He gazed in amazement at the milk, which had, in its heavy pottery jug, survived whatever explosion had killed the family.
He hesitated again. He was well acquainted with the family lying on the floor and would not, for the world, have stolen from them. Then he told himself not to be a fool; they would never have need of bread again. He picked up the loaf and blew the dust off it. The cheese had been in a covered dish and the milk had several layers of butter muslin draped over it; they were not so impregnated with the all-pervading dust.
Balancing the milk carefully, he took the food back to his mother. She was still standing in the middle of the street, a lost soul with nowhere to go.
Afraid of booby traps left by the Germans, they remained standing where they were. They gulped down the whey from the milk and ate the bread and cheese between them.
The food revived them. Desperate to find some safety, they had a hasty consultation, during which they had to continue to speak loudly to each other.
‘We should walk down to Bayeux,’ Michel said. ‘The other day, the postman mentioned that it was taken at the beginning of the invasion – undamaged. I can’t think of anywhere else to get help, can you? And we might find out where Uncle Léon and his boat are.’
Madame Benion agreed. Anything to get out of the hell so quickly created round them.
As they walked slowly along the road leading out of the village, they were greeted, with relief, by four other terrified survivors whom they knew by sight, all rather deaf, each with faltering tales of dead children, ruined homes and ruined farms.
As they proceeded, people emerged, by ones and twos, out of side lanes or from the trampled fields and devastated villages. They were few, most having fled earlier, and fewer still were children. All were bent on reaching Bayeux in an effort to get behind the Allied lines and not be caught again between the opposing armies.
Apart from personal safety, they sought medical help for wounded relations and friends, who were too badly hurt to be moved or who still lay amid the rubble. This made Michel feel guilty that he had not searched the village for wounded French before he left it. The silence had, however, convinced him that there was nobody there. He forgot his impaired hearing.
One demented man demanded that they all turn round and go to his village, in order to dig out his family from the ruins of their home. The frightened little group stopped to argue about this for a few minutes, and then agreed that it would be madness to tramp back through the battlefield again; perhaps be blown up by Allied fire if the Germans managed to mount a counteroffensive. It would be better to press on to Bayeux from whence medical help, ambulances and soldiers who understood land mines – les démineurs – might be sent into the countryside.
They met Allied infantry being moved up to the front in personnel carriers. The procession was closely followed by tanks and Jeeps with a vanguard of motorcyclists, who tried, not always successfully, to push refugees off the roads to make way for the advancing military.
The weary civilians found it difficult to walk on the verge of the road. They struggled through the long wet grass and, occasionally, flung themselves to the ground at the menacing sound of diving aircraft. Though they were equally afraid of mines lying in the undergrowth of the great hedges which often marked the edge of a property, the greenery did give an illusion of cover, when, in the hope of impeding the Allies’ advance, the few planes the Luftwaffe had available swept low overhead to machine-gun all and sundry.
The forlorn little group struggled grimly on, trying not to stumble into the roadside ditch, which had several inches of water in it.
They were twice hastily scattered, however, by a British tank pressing its way through the heavy, deep-rooted hedges and on to the road. They also met a foot patrol of English soldiers with red crosses on their sleeves, which eased its way through the hedgerows from a field behind them.
A little surprised to find civilians whom, they had imagined, would have earlier fled the area, the medics said briefly, in English, that they were checking for wounded. They enquired of the refugees if they had seen anyone, Allied or German, lying hurt; they did not mention French casualties.
Seeing the bewilderment of the refugees at being queried in English, Michel appointed himself interpreter.
Once the soldiers had managed to make themselves understood, they were told sadly in chorus that only the dead had been seen. There were, however, frantic inter-jections that there were French casualties in the villages, for whom the refugees hoped to find help.
The patrol leader, a lance corporal, obviously shaken by their stories, kindly promised to do his best to inform civilian authorities. ‘They’re probably out there somewhere already,’ he said rather helplessly.
‘This is the last call for lunch,’ he added, with an attempt at humour. ‘Most of the wounded has been took in – a few Jerries amongst them.’ And on being asked, he replied cheerfully with all the optimism of a nineteen-year-old that yes, he thought it was true that Bayeux was still standing, undamaged. He turned to his fidgeting patrol and chivvied the men forward. As the group began to move, some of them looked back at the refugees and shouted, ‘Good luck!’
The little group of villagers, trailing behind three people going slightly faster through a deserted hamlet, were horrified by a sudden explosion which blew up those ahead, spattering their remains on those following them. It was the first time that Michel had seen his tough, silent mother so distressed that she vomited.
They were further very shocked and frightened at the sight of small, loose groups of British commandos casually looting the remains of homes, and shooting out windows or booting open shut doors. One soldier came out of a wrecked church, brandishing joyfully a glittering cross from the altar. A stranded car formed a great entertainment to the invaders as they reduced it to wreckage. A terrified horse was used as a target. When the frightened owner protested, he was shoved roughly to one side.
Since there were no officers with any of these groups, Michel assumed that they were deserters. He felt that since they had nothing to lose, they were probably much more dangerous than the more orderly units they had seen.
The tiny band of refugees, unanimous in their fear of the plunderers, edged in and out of nearby lanes or scattered through the hedgerows to avoid such menaces, and when they had passed, whispered to each other that they had never expected this of the Allies. ‘Worse than the godforsaken Bodies,’ one man said.
‘Every army has some criminals in it,’ replied an exhausted elderly man with almost saintly acceptance. ‘Saw it in the Great War.’
That evening, filthy, blood-bespattered, foodless and footsore, they walked into Bayeux, which looked blessedly normal after what they had seen en route, though there were crowds of civilians as well as military personnel in the streets.
While shocked passers-by, both troops and civilians, stared at them, Madame Benion looked at her son and mourned, ‘Whatever shall we do?’
Michel had been thinking about this, as they struggled through the ruined countryside, and he replied, ‘Find a church. The priests will surely be helping refugees. There must be some kind of help for people like us. Or the hôtel de ville?’
His mother was reeling with exhaustion. ‘Find a church,’ she muttered. She had a real distrust of French officialdom in the shape of a town hall with which she was unacquainted.
And now, as he smoked his second Gauloise and waited for Barbara Bishop, Michel was again thankful for the monks into whose hands they had literally fallen, too weary and hungry to go another step.
His mother had been put to bed in a narrow cell, where she had remained for a week until her skin had begun to heal. Her grief at the loss of her home was beyond healing.
Chapter Five (#ulink_f3111795-65d2-537a-b1ad-3c8d075e7c16)
When Barbara looked down at the neat white cross which indicated the last resting place of Private George Bishop, 6th Batt., East Lancashire Regiment, died 27 July 1944, aged 28 years, she felt the same stunned emptiness she had endured when she had first heard of his loss through the War Office.
The gardener watched her from a discreet distance. One never knew how these women, whether mothers or wives, might react. He had had some who had flung themselves onto the wet grass and had lain there, crying for hours. Others had had hysterics and screamed so hard you could have heard them in Tessel. Still others came and went without a word, their expressions frozen into grim endurance.
Fathers occasionally came alone, to stand uneasily before a cross, tears running silently down their cheeks. Frequently, they wore their own medals, won in the First World War, as if to identify themselves as sharing the suffering of their boy who lay beneath the sod.
Barbara made no noise, though tears ran down her face.
When she felt steadier, she kneeled down on the damp lawn and carefully laid the flowers in front of the cross, tucking them close round its base, as if tucking a baby up in bed.
She felt she should say a prayer, but if God tolerated the horrors represented by this single white cross, He must be insane and would not understand her prayer or her dire need for comforting. There was no point in praying.
Given different times, she thought with a burst of anger at fools who made war, George could have been watching a football match with the Germans on the other side of this carefully groomed cemetery. What was it about men that allowed them to be led by the nose into ghastly cruelty against each other? It didn’t make sense.
These days, nothing made sense. The war was over, but George would not return; at home on Merseyside, each cold and hungry day seemed worse than the previous one. And this French countryside of shattered, deserted villages and towns had shocked her beyond measure. In the glory of a successful invasion, and the Allies having at last beaten the Germans, she realised that few people in England had given a thought to the suffering French civilians who had been caught in the middle.
She looked again at the cross before her. Is this how her mother had felt when her seaman husband had drowned in the Atlantic in 1941, his freighter sent to perdition by Germans, may they rot in hell? Mam had looked like a ghost for over two years. Even now, she was not the same woman who had kissed him goodbye before his last voyage; she had aged immeasurably.
The hopeless tears increased, running down Barbara’s face to drip onto her flowered scarf.
She had not felt so alone in her entire life.
From his seat on the step of the taxi, the driver observed her a little anxiously. Her face had blenched as if she might faint. Then he saw that Jules was watching her, ready to go to her if needed.
A solitary ray of sunshine lit up her shaking shoulders, her white, set face bent over the flowers, her hands clasped in her lap, as she finally sat back on her heels and bowed her head in helpless submission to forces beyond her control.
Death is truly the end, thought the apprehensive driver. There is nothing you can do to reverse it. As he frequently did, he silently cursed the name of Adolf Hitler and all his German brood.
After about five minutes, Barbara crossed herself mechanically, and then stumbled to her feet. She stood looking down at the flower-bedecked grave for a moment, heaved a mighty sigh, and said to it in a tremulous voice, ‘Goodbye, luvvie. Goodbye, my dearest.’
She raised her eyes and saw Jules staring at her as he stood diffidently by the gate at the edge of the lawn. He smiled gently. Like a priest, he saw daily so much sorrow.
She forced herself to gather her wits together. ‘Thanks, Monsieur Jules,’ she said heavily in faltering French. ‘Thanks for keeping the grave so well.’
She turned slowly back to the taxi. Realising that many of George’s friends must be buried around him, she picked her way carefully between the crosses, anxious not to step on anyone.
Before she reached the taxi, she paused and gave one last, long look back. Then she slowly turned away.
She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and carefully wiped her face clean of tears. With dead eyes, she observed the patient driver hastily rise from his seat on the step of the taxi. She did not say anything as she approached him.
‘Madame wish the hotel?’ he enquired softly. He put his arm lightly round her to guide her to the taxi door.
‘Yes, please.’ Where else to go? What else to do?
She had allowed sixteen days for her visit to Normandy itself. She had planned that, after seeing George’s grave, she would have a walking holiday, exploring Calvados. She had never in her life had a real holiday and she had a vague hope that fresh air and good food would help to restore something of her pre-war energy.
But she had not allowed for this abject sense of loneliness, of desolation; and now, as far as she could judge, it seemed that most of Normandy had been wrecked – wrecked by armies sent to free it. The suffering it must have caused; it did not bear thinking about. To have visitors like her stare at it all must make the Normans feel that they were being reduced to a tourist attraction.
Now all she wanted to do was to lie down and be very quiet until she gained the strength to face, if she could, the rest of her empty life.
As the taxi driver cautiously shifted gears, she leaned her head back against the upholstery. Helplessly, she began to cry in earnest, deep rending sobs torn from her very heart.
Michel glanced back at her. He was tremendously disturbed by her obvious grief; she was too little, too pretty to suffer like this.
‘Madame, chère Madame, please don’t cry,’ he implored. He was weeping himself, for himself, for all the hurt people he carried in his taxi, and particularly for the nice young woman behind him.
She barely heard his plea, though she did try to muffle the noise she was making.
‘Please, please don’t cry, Madame.’ He paused while he aimed the vehicle carefully through the cemetery gates and onto the lane leading from it. Then he tried again.
‘Believe me, Madame, if I own this taxi, I marry you myself!’ He sighed. ‘Hélas, Monsieur Duval own it.’
There was a sudden cessation of the sobs, as the humour of the practical remark struck Barbara; the hard common sense of a presumably penniless young man anxious to help. She laughed through her tears, but after a second or two, she leaned forward and laid her head on her knee and commenced more quietly to weep again.
The taxi was carefully slowed, as the penniless one found that, with eyes clouded by tears, he could not see the road properly. He felt he too had reason to weep. Was not his own life shattered?
‘I stop,’ he announced. ‘We sit down on grass. We smoke, eh? We are better. Then nobody at the hotel stare at you.’
She did not answer.
He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. Then he drew in to the side of the road. A drainage ditch ran alongside the asphalt; beyond it was a grassy bank, shadowed by a huge hedge.
He jumped down and opened the door for Barbara. ‘Come, Madame,’ he urged persuasively. ‘We rest. You become calm before we go to hotel, eh?’
Numbly, she allowed herself to be helped out. She looked uncertainly down at the ditch.
‘Jump,’ Michel instructed, gesturing towards the grass on the other side. He himself cleared the ditch as effortlessly as a circus performer, and held out his hand for her to grasp.
In her flat-heeled shoes, the ditch was no real problem. Barbara held his hand and jumped. As she landed, he put his arm quickly round her waist to steady her. It was instinctive on his part.
To her, it was an unexpected shock, not because he seemed presumptuous but it gave her a sense that somebody cared enough to do so, even if that person was a total stranger.
In and around the docks, where she had toiled through the war and even since peace had been declared, she had often hit out at men who, in her widowhood, felt she was fair game, and had importuned or otherwise harassed her with their coarse familiarity. Now, as she still shuddered with sobs for her husband, she felt the warmth of the slim, tired-looking stranger beside her, smelled the strong tobacco and male sweat of him, and she was honestly grateful for his sober, sensible presence.
He eased her round and sat her down on the grassy bank. Then he sat down cross-legged in front of her, so that he could look straight at her face. He fumbled under his jersey and brought out his precious packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.
‘Smoke?’
There were only three cigarettes left in the packet, and she hesitated; cigarettes were hard to obtain, and like gold in her particular English village.
He smiled and thrust the package closer to her. She heaved a sob, and then helped herself. He struck a match and held the light to her cigarette.
The lines on his face deepened and his brown eyes twinkled as he endeavoured to cheer her. ‘Cigarette good,’ he said firmly, as she inhaled the strong acrid smoke of a Gauloise.
She coughed, and smiled tremulously.
She watched him stick a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and light it. His face shone wet in the light of the tiny flame, and she realised with astonishment that he had really been crying. She wondered, with a feeling of profound compassion, if, in addition to the loss of his farm, he had lost someone in the war. Perhaps his fiancée? He had mentioned a fiancée’s parents on the way to the cemetery. He had not directly mentioned the lady herself.
Chapter Six (#ulink_f47f5082-6fcc-5cf8-961e-8f67ec91ee62)
For a while they sat in silence. As she smoked, Barbara’s sobs slowly decreased, became dryer and finally came to an end. Occasionally, she sighed shakily.
The persistent drizzle of the morning had stopped, though the sky was still overcast. Damp from the grassy bank on which they were sitting slowly seeped through their clothing. Neither of them, however, seemed inclined to move. A few trees, interspersed with huge hedges behind them, offered a protective canopy in the wrecked countryside.
Except for an occasional raindrop falling and the breeze rustling through the heavy foliage, it was very quiet. No traffic passed them. It was as if they were suspended in space, insulated for a few minutes from a world destroyed.
Barbara took out her handkerchief again and carefully dried her face, while Michel watched her through the tobacco smoke. She looked ruefully at her handkerchief, pink-stained with smudged makeup.
‘I must look awful,’ she said apologetically.
‘But no,’ he reassured her. He smiled slightly and continued to look at her gravely. His eyes, sad now, reminded her suddenly of her golden retriever at home, who, if anyone cried, would lay his head on the sufferer’s knee and gaze up at her in similar compassionate communion. Throughout the war, Simba had had to do a lot of comforting of both her mother and herself. He had done his best with Ada, George’s mam, too, when she came to sit in their kitchen and have a cup of tea and stare emptily into the fire.
Now, she had a stranger seated before her, trying to do the same thing, to comfort her and – she had a sudden flash of insight – to be himself comforted.
The persistence of his gaze compelled her to look back at him and smile a little. She wondered what else he had been through to cause the multitude of lines on his face, the patient resignation in his attitude, as if there were no reason to hurry back to the cold real world, plenty of time simply to sit and recover what one could of one’s sanity. Apparently impatient American morticians could wait.
At the remembrance of the Americans waiting for their taxi in the American cemetery, Barbara felt compelled to move.
‘Oh, dear me, I forgot. You have to collect your Americans.’
Michel leaned forward slightly and put his hand on her arm to restrain her. ‘There is much time, chére Madame. Rest a little longer. The Americans work as long as there is light – perhaps two more hours. And they are not far distant.’
He drew on his cigarette. ‘They stay in your hotel. I collect them en route. OK for Madame?’
‘Me? I don’t mind. They look like nice fellows. I saw them at breakfast this morning.’
She smiled at him, woebegone, her cigarette smouldering between her fingers, and he continued to sit quietly with her, to give her time to regain her equilibrium.
The Americans are generous, he thought. He had, however, grave doubts about how they might behave with an unescorted young woman; Americans seemed to have pockets full of nylons and piles of chocolate bars with which to seduce unwary females. It distressed him to think that his pretty passenger was herself wearing a pair of nylon stockings. That she might have bought them on the black market, which flourished as merrily in the port of Liverpool as it did in France, did not occur to him. Nevertheless, despite her obvious fall from grace, he would be in the taxi to protect her, and would see her safely into the hotel foyer.
He was not in the least afraid of three very tall, out-of-condition Yanks. Though he himself was so thin and had a hunched left shoulder, he had a long reach, which he found very useful when defending himself. Was he not a very effective kick-boxer, a master of old-fashioned savate, so quick on his feet as to be respected by all? The Americans did not seem to be aware of this particular art, and knowledge of it gave him considerable confidence when he met them in the streets of Bayeux, rather drunk – and where did they get enough to be drunk on, he’d like to know? The Boches had not left much worth drinking. Fortunately, Michel had never got into a real fight with them; sheer weight would very likely have overcome any skill he had.
While enduring the humiliation of the German occupation, it had been essential not to draw attention to oneself and to accept every obscenity without a word of response. It was a relief nowadays to feel that you did not have to salute or otherwise show respect to the Americans when some of them were drunk or abusive.
With regard to Barbara, such a respectable woman, he finally decided, could have come by her nylons legitimately; someone in the family might have brought them home as a gift. He hoped he was right.
He found her gentle, particularly now that she had lost her look of self-confidence and was crushed by grief. She appeared to have no pretensions and to treat him as an equal. The way she had given that choking, good-natured laugh at his remark about not being able to marry her suggested that a ready sense of humour might lie beneath her tear-soaked exterior; under other circumstances, he sensed she would be great fun.
He thought of her in her hotel bedroom, crying silently all night. He wanted to prevent this, if he could, by easing her into a better mood before he let her go. She was much too nice to be left to weep.
In the back of his mind he considered that probably the most comforting thing he could do for her would be to accompany her to bed. But he did not want to offend a foreign lady; and there was, of course, the practicality of the fury of Monsieur le Patron, if Michel were found in one of his hotel bedrooms.
Also, Englishwomen were notoriously faithful; she might feel she must be faithful to her dead husband.
He was astonished that he cared enough that he wanted to be careful what he said or did. What did it matter? She would be gone in a few days’ time, and he would be driving other widows with the same polite indifference that he had driven previous ones. Except that this little lady was different.
He sensed that to a man like himself she could give real pleasure. He felt free to consider this point, since his own love life was, after all, absolutely nonexistent at present; so he could honestly let his thoughts stray.
Finally, as he regretfully stubbed out his cigarette, he had an inspiration about taking her mind off her sorrow. He asked her if she had seen any other parts of Normandy. ‘Not all of it is damage,’ he assured her.
She gave a shivery sigh. ‘Yesterday I walked down to Arromanches, to see where some of the British troops landed. I saw the remains of the floating harbour we built.’
He was astonished. ‘A long walk, Madame!’
‘Not really. I found a little café there and had an omelette, and rested – and then walked back. It was late by the time I returned, of course.’
‘Bravo!’ He was impressed.
She gave a little shrug; she had hiked before the war, and the hard toil she had endured during the war had made her muscles strong. Even the steady physical work she did in her mother’s bed-and-breakfast provided daily exercise.
‘I’ve still eleven full days here,’ she confided, ‘if I want to use them.’ She looked up at him suddenly, and said with more enthusiasm, ‘You know, I would really like to see Caen, because George died on a bridge across the river during the battle for Caen. His friend told me.’ She paused, and then said with bitterness, ‘I want to know what kind of a city was worth his death – and thousands of other English lads.’ Her face twisted in renewed pain.
He thought she was about to cry again, and did not answer her for a moment. Then he said reflectively, ‘Caen is still ruin, Madame. Streets are clear. A few people try to make new life.’
She replied absently, her mind deflected as she pictured narrow bridges choked with dead soldiers, ‘Is it very difficult for them to have to start again? Is it all destroyed?’
‘Yes, Madame, practically all of it is. They are without much help. You understand, the Government give plenty attention to the big ports – lots of votes. Very little thought to smaller cities like Caen – and nothing to small farmers like myself. Peasants’ votes are not in one place – we are spread out. So not much power.’
He was back to his earlier complaints. He shrugged, and sighed. Then he added more fairly, ‘Government must also repair all the roads, the railways, the airports of France – much bomb damage by Allies. But here we all wait – and hope. The railway train now come to us – that is something.’
Then, as a detail which might amuse her, he told her that the churches that William, King of England and Duke of Normandy, and his wife, Matilda, had built in Caen, in thanksgiving for the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, were still there, practically undamaged. ‘The Duke and Duchess thank God for victory and they build good. Those churches last nearly a thousand years – through many wars, many invasions.’ He grinned suddenly at her, as if the churches’ survival of the recent conflict was something of a joke.
He had recaptured her interest. ‘Really? How strange.’ She appreciated the irony of the survival of the churches after such a huge British bombardment during a reverse invasion.
He grinned. ‘British miss good chance to revenge on William – bomb them!’
There was a slight movement on the other side of the empty road, and Michel glanced across. On the verge opposite sat a rabbit, its nose quivering. Suddenly it vanished into the hedge.
He was diverted. Wildlife is returning, he reflected with a gleam of hope.
He looked again at the young woman opposite him, and said impetuously, ‘I take you to Caen tomorrow. Americans go to Paris for the weekend. We go, yes? Take a little lunch? Look around.’
‘How much would it cost? I owe you already for this trip. I had thought I would walk round the countryside. I’m a good walker and the distances are not very great. I can do twenty miles in a day – easy.’
She would be safe enough walking, he considered, but Caen was a bit too far to do in one day. Worst of all, he would probably never see her again and, even though her stay in Calvados was to be very brief, he longed to talk with her again.
He responded quickly. ‘I take you. No charge. You pay me for this trip to the cemetery, and I do tomorrow free. OK?’ While she considered his offer, he went on, ‘I went there just after battle finish. And I take Americans once or twice. I believe most roads now clear.’
And when I went there the first time what a shock I had, he thought, fury surging through him once more.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_b453bcca-bf86-587f-8df5-988189001014)
From the moment he had first glimpsed the totality of the destruction which had hit his little poultry farm and that of the Fortiers, Michel had been worried to distraction about the fate of Suzanne.
He had had no direct news of her for nearly three months, though her parents had told him that they had had just a few letters from her before the invasion. He had promised himself then that he would, as soon as possible, go to see her, but his mother had not been able to manage the poultry farm alone, and he could not easily leave her. His first thought, once he was in Bayeux, was to try to get through to her employer, at the café where she worked, but he had no success. All lines were down.
He could not find her on any casualty list available to him in Bayeux, but he was told that, so soon after the Germans had retreated, the casualty lists were, sadly, far from complete. The Fortier family was listed as missing; Suzanne’s name was not included. This added to Michel’s fears that she might have been killed in Caen during the subsequent battle; it was said that one-third of the population had been killed and another third wounded.
Though the engagement had been arranged by their parents, Michel was fond of his lifelong friend who was to become his wife, and he racked his brains for further sources of enquiry.
Patiently, he had asked at the hospital in Bayeux, in case she had been brought in there. She was not listed. However, he was invited to visit a woman so traumatised that she had not yet been able to identify herself, in the hope that he might recognise her. The woman was so hurt that he was thankful that she was a stranger to him.
Suzanne’s parents would remain listed as missing, presumed dead, until such time as the Army could demine a path into their farm and confirm it. Michel argued that whoever put the Fortiers’ names on that list – probably another neighbour – must have known that Suzanne was not at home on the day her father’s farm was destroyed; otherwise her name would have been there along with those of her parents.
He reminded himself that Suzanne was an only child, so he could be the sole person from nearby who would immediately set in train a hunt for her. She had other relations, he knew, somewhere near Falaise, another place which had been devastated. If he had no luck in Caen, he would go there to ask the few survivors if they had news of her.
Meanwhile, he had to find at least temporary work, and a place in Bayeux where he and his mother could stay.
Once Maman had recovered a little, they had been billeted in a house with a small empty attic room to spare. There was no fireplace in it, and even in July the bare floor was cold to lie on. Their reluctant landlady, moved by their plight, had lent them a straw mattress, and an old duvet liable to spill feathers from every corner.
She allowed Madame Benion to use her kitchen occasionally, to make the thin fish soup which, together with bread – and cheese when they could get it – was all the food they could afford in a city where the price of everything was soaring.
Madame Benion applied to the hastily reorganised civilian authorities in Bayeux for the re-establishment of payment of her old age pension at her new address. Unfortunately, the steady fall in the value of the franc made it harder and harder for her to manage on it.
After much hasty hunting, Michel found a job in the kitchen of a hotel recently vacated by the retreating Germans. The desperate owner was trying to get it cleaned and in shape as fast as possible. So Michel scrubbed and disinfected with the same thoroughness that he had cleaned hen coops and brooders for his parents.
He was occasionally able to augment his and his mother’s diet by hoarding table scraps from the dining room of the hotel; he was supposed to throw all food scraps into a pig bin, but some were still edible. He was also allowed a meagre midday meal with the hotel staff, part of which he often took home for his mother.
In their attic room, water was their greatest problem, since the only source in the house was a pump in the ground-floor kitchen.
With a few of the precious francs hoarded in Michel’s Post Office savings book, which Madame Benion now carried stuffed inside the top of her corset, they bought a large bucket and a washbasin. Once or twice a day, Michel filled up the bucket in the house kitchen and carried it up to their eyrie under the eaves.
The whole telephone system appeared hopelessly damaged, but on the chance that at least some mail was getting through, Michel had, after moving into the attic room, written to Suzanne at her lodgings in Caen, to tell her his new address. The local post office had accepted the letter, but there had been no response to it or any subsequent ones.
On his enquiry for news of her from her parents at the beginning of April, they had told him that the few letters they had received since she left for Caen simply said that she was all right and was enjoying her work in the café. She had sent no message for him. Madame Fortier was very troubled. Had the young people quarrelled, she wondered.
They had not quarrelled, and Michel had been mystified by his fiancée’s silence. Despite his uneasiness, he made every possible excuse for her neglect of him. He never doubted her integrity; she was going to be his wife. She would surely write soon.
In view of warning movements of German troops in the month prior to the invasion, it occurred to Michel that she might, at the last possible moment, have come home to be with her parents. So he went back to the hôtel de ville and checked the casualty lists yet again.
The official there said flatly that the list was still incomplete. What else did Michel expect, he asked helplessly; there were still pockets of fighting all too near to Bayeux. And on no account, said the harassed man, should Michel try to get back to either the Fortiers’ or his own farm. There were already too many civilians killed or injured by exploding anti-personnel mines and live ammunition: three men dead – they had tried to collect the bodies of their families in order to bury them – and two who had had their feet blown off, a woman shockingly wounded in the face. And two young boys with no hands, poor kids.
Bearing in mind the hopeless state of his own little poultry farm and others nearby, all well-nigh reduced to a mud heap, Michel accepted the stricture without comment. He did not need to be reminded of the dangers of explosives; he had seen, on his way to Bayeux, a whole family blown up by a heavy explosion, triggered by their passing. Only the good God knew what they had accidentally trodden on.
He was fairly certain that Suzanne’s parents were indeed dead, and both he and his mother grieved for them; they had been good friends.
Feeling that they might just possibly have escaped, however, he had again enquired assiduously amongst other refugees who had straggled into Bayeux, many of whom knew each other at least by sight. He invariably heard the same sad story that a great many of the population of that area were believed dead or wounded. He continued to pray that his wife-to-be had not been with them.
If she had returned to her home just before the attack, he comforted himself, the first thing she would have done would have been to run across to see him – and she had not.
For some days more, as he worked in the Bayeux hotel, he continued to watch the casualty lists, while the battle to take Caen continued.
He soon learned that peasants were regarded as of little account unless the authorities wanted to get food delivered to the stricken city.
One day, before Anatole’s return, he had, in bitter terms, expressed his anger to his mother about the destruction of Calvados.
‘We’ve suffered so much from the occupation. We risked our lives – including you, Maman. A good many died horribly for it – and now we are being killed or hurt or ruined in the name of peace. It’s crazy,’ he said in furious frustration.
Madame Benion had been resting on the mattress laid on the floor of their attic. Her deep exhaustion since the destruction of her home was still apparent.
She said wearily, ‘It’s true and it grieves me – and I worry daily about Anatole. Where is he? What did the Germans do with him when they took him away? What’s happening to him now?’
Michel replied slowly, doubt apparent in his tone, ‘They said he would be put to work in Germany.’
‘Well, why hasn’t he ever written?’
To this Michel had no answer. He thought bitterly that it was probable that his brother was dead, but kept this to himself.
‘I don’t know why he doesn’t write, Maman. Maybe German mail is disrupted by the bombing of their cities. I’m more worried about Suzanne – she doesn’t write either. It’s obvious that the Boches are defending Caen with everything they have. The bombardment’s constant.’
Madame Benion agreed. ‘It is. The noise is maddening. My head aches and my ears ring.’ She turned restlessly on the mattress. ‘I’m sure that some kind of build-up is going on. General Montgomery himself is here in Bayeux. I heard the news when I went out to try to buy some potatoes.’
It was as if Michel had not heard her. He said, ‘Maybe Suzanne doesn’t know where we are – never received any of my letters. I hope to God she’s found some safe shelter.’
‘All we can do is wait, Michel. And pray.’
‘I don’t care what happens; I’m going to try to get into Caen, Maman. Some people have done it.’
His mother shot up from her recumbent position.
‘No,’ she stormed. ‘How can you think of such a thing? If you’re killed and Anatole is missing, I have no one, no one except your sisters – and only the good God knows what is happening to them in Rouen. Suppose you are stuck there, in Caen, and can’t get out? Mon Dieu, it’s not even that safe here,’ she glanced at the sloping ceiling, and added wryly, ‘particularly in an attic. It’ll be much worse in Caen.’
As if to confirm the latter, there was a roar of planes overhead, followed by explosions in the near distance.
She was right. He knew it. Her own survival depended largely on him, not on her two married daughters in Rouen, which was itself being pulverised by the Allies.
Poor Maman, she was still so shaky from what she had been through. She must rest a little longer, before even thinking of finding work herself. Meanwhile, he must earn for her; she would starve on her miserable pension. The fact that he was himself worn out, very distressed by all that was happening to them, he accepted as a burden which, somehow, must be borne.
In a city crowded with desperate refugees, she had, anyway, almost no hope of getting work herself; she had aged dreadfully in the last few weeks, due to grief over the loss of her home and, he considered with a tinge of jealousy, the constant worry about Anatole.
‘It’s all right, Maman. I’ll wait till the Allies have rooted the Boches out of Caen – and then go. Don’t cry, Maman. This won’t last for ever.’
He had to wait for weeks. The Battle of Caen was long and bitter, and when he finally did walk into it, there was little left of the beautiful Norman city.
He went first in search of the café where Suzanne worked as a waitress. There were very few people about, and the whole street was a shambles; he could not even say for certain exactly where the café had stood; the road was simply a narrow lane dug through piles of rubble, along which a few people sidled on their way elsewhere.
In panic, Michel followed the remains of the railway line, where it had been partially cleared, and began to climb a slope where the damage was not quite so heavy. He toiled up towards the Abbaye aux Hommes, which was still standing.
He began to have hope. Suzanne had a room behind the Abbaye, away from the city centre.
He was right.
He found her sitting listlessly on the front doorstep of her house, as if waiting for him. The windows had been boarded up and part of the roof was broken open to the sky. Smoke from fire had painted feathers of soot up its walls. An older woman, her landlady with whom Michel was acquainted, was seated alongside her. The street was silent, without traffic or even a pedestrian. Most of the houses were obviously derelict.
When Michel shouted a cheerful greeting to them it echoed eerily.
Both turned, as if shocked. As he waved, and increased his pace towards them, Suzanne did not spring up to greet him.
He saw with a pang that she looked wan and tired, poor darling, and that she had had her hair cut very short. It was about an inch long and she had combed it close to her head, like that of a little boy.
As he reached them, he laughed with the sheer relief of finding her alive. He bent down and joyously flung his arms round his Suzanne.
Her companion gave a little snigger.
In his embrace, Suzanne rose slowly. She did not respond to his greeting, and turned her face away as he tried to kiss her.
He leaned back, still holding her. ‘It’s me – Michel,’ he said, and then his voice faded, as he realised the significance of the haircut and that the body in his arms was curiously clumsy and heavy; it did not have its usual willowy suppleness.
He slowly dropped his arms and stepped back.
‘What happened?’ he asked, though he knew already. ‘Suzanne! Answer me.’
To cover the silence her companion spoke up. She sounded cold and cynical, a woman embittered by war, as she said, ‘Can’t you see?’
He looked at her, appalled. ‘A goddamned Boche – and you got your head shaved for it?’ He exploded with rage. Words of condemnation poured out.
She didn’t say a word to him in her own defence, never pleaded that she had been misunderstood, that it had been indeed rape, nothing that might have excused her behaviour.
Her pregnancy was now obvious. Michel had seen her about four months before; she must have suspected it then. It could not have been rape – the locals would never have touched her if it had been that. To be set upon by a mob, have her head shaved, be stripped to her underwear, and then paraded through the streets, she must have been seen to be fraternising regularly with the enemy.
She now began to giggle at his stupefaction.
He lifted first one hand and then the other, and gave her the hardest slap of which he was capable, one on each cheek. Scarlet patches stained her face. She probably carried the bruises for weeks, he thought maliciously.
‘You dirty bitch!’ he screamed, and the empty walls around them echoed, ‘Bitch! Bitch!’ Then he hissed at her, ‘So that’s why you didn’t write! Well, you can thank God your father and mother are dead – he’d have beaten you to death for this.’
She must have been suddenly afraid for her physical safety because, without a word, she turned and ran clumsily up the steps into the house, and slammed the door. He heard the bolts being shot. The other woman had risen, also suddenly nervous. He turned and spat in her face.
Now, over three years later, seated at the side of the road to the cemetery on a damp, cold April day, Michel looked at a girl whose heart had been broken because a foreign soldier had given his life for the freedom of Caen, and for a bitch who had betrayed them all.
He repeated to Barbara, a trifle depressedly, ‘Caen is still a ruin, Madame.’ He stopped, as if his thoughts had strayed elsewhere, and then said with forced cheerfulness, ‘Nevertheless, when I took the Americans there recently, there was some life. People try to begin again.’
He sighed, and Barbara became aware of his deep fatigue. He suddenly ceased to be the rather quaint taxi diver, and became a fellow human being who looked as exhausted as she herself felt.
He went on, ‘Everybody in Caen lose somebody. Much sorrow.’ With her big eyes puffed from weeping, she herself looked like our Lady of Sorrows, he thought. He repeated tentatively, ‘I take you tomorrow, yes? Americans go to Paris for the weekend. We go to Caen, yes?’
He could barely admit to himself that he was desperately lonely for friendly female company. Not normally communicative about his private affairs, he had, on their way to the cemetery, talked a little to her about his family’s misadventures, and had felt a certain amount of relief.
Since his fiancée’s desertion of him, he had made no effort to find himself another girl; he was acutely aware that he was no hero, that his shoulder was hunched, and that he had no assets to attract a matchmaking father.
Even his engagement to Suzanne had been arranged by their parents, a marriage of convenience which would eventually, with a little luck and much hard saving, make it possible for the young couple to buy out Michel’s mother and his siblings.
Originally faced with this same nationwide problem of the subdivision of land in each generation, Suzanne’s father had already bought out his own brother’s share of the Fortier farm, and Suzanne was his only surviving child; because of the problems of land tenure, peasants tended to keep the number of their children small.
But there had been no romantic love between him and Suzanne, Michel admitted frankly to himself, just affection and an agreeable sexual contentment. It could have been a reasonable marriage.
Now, inside him lay an unhealed wound, as if she had stabbed him. She had deserted him for a German, an enemy, probably some great hulking brute of a Prussian. He felt that he also had thereby been publicly shamed, stripped of his self-respect.
Another Frenchman he might have accepted with better grace. But he had felt sick at the idea of a German, one of Hitler’s cohorts, who had tortured and killed men, like his friend Henri, because they continued to fight them underground.
She had got off more lightly than if she had been a man, Michel thought. Men known to be quislings, collaborators who betrayed the Freedom Fighters to the Germans, had been summarily shot, if they did not commit suicide first.
To a degree, justice had been done, admitted Michel, but it did not mean that he had come to terms with the betrayal.
If she had not had a good woman friend to help her, she would have starved to death, he was sure of that. She would have been an outcast.
The ultimate insult had, however, come only the previous month. He had heard, through one of his mother’s friends, also a refugee in Bayeux, that Suzanne’s German had recently sent for her and his child to join him on his farm, a farm which had apparently escaped the ravages of both the Russian and American advances. He was said to be now sowing his second year of crops. It was quite a story and the news spread fast in the back streets of Bayeux.
It seemed to an outraged Michel very wrong that his own land, and that of his fiancée’s parents, should have been decimated, while one of the enemy’s farms remained inviolate.
And who would ever have expected a German to do the honourable thing, and marry the girl? Enemy soldiers were not expected to do that, particularly a Boche.
Michel asked himself again and again why her father had, in the first place, allowed her to go to work in Caen as a waitress in such troubled times – miles away from parental supervision.
He supposed that the family must have had an urgent need for ready money during a time when farms were being stripped of their produce to be sent to Germany. It seemed the only explanation. He still felt, however, that her father had been most unwise – and so had his unfaithful trollop of a daughter. Though there did not seem much hope of it, Michel wished savagely that she would eventually starve amid the ruin which was Germany.
He had been truly happy and surprised when Anatole had eventually been sent home by train by the American Army in Germany; they had discovered him amongst a group of refugees from Eastern Germany fleeing the Russian Army; he was trying to walk back to France.
At least, Michel agreed with Maman, they could nurse Anatole, make him as comfortable as possible, until he died. And Michel was the first to say that, even confined to bed, his brother had given both their mother and Michel some moral support.
Anatole was allowed by the Government a small regular sum with which to maintain himself, because he was a returned deportee very ill with tuberculosis. He also had free medical care. Because there was nothing much that could be done to help him medically, he had elected to be brought home to his mother rather than be put into an overcrowded hospital.
Michel’s small savings account was emptied in an effort to buy extra comforts for him, such as second-hand pillows to prop him up, and black market milk and eggs to augment his diet.
Madame Benion was almost beside herself as, in addition to losing her home and livelihood, she had to watch her elder, stronger son die. She and Michel tended him far better, however, than he would have been looked after in hospital, and while they did it she leaned, pitifully at times, on her younger boy for comfort.
The lifelong sibling jealousy between the two brothers had melted amid the burning need to cope with disaster; and their mother, who had always had to work to the point of exhaustion and could not, therefore, give much attention to her children, had opened up to show her deep attachment to her sons. Misery, instead of separating them, seemed to fuse the remnants of the family together.
As Michel arranged to meet Barbara again, he told himself that he was being driven simply by need for a break from a ruthless routine. To break loose just for a few hours would do him good. If he took this unknown English widow to Caen, he had a hazy hunch that he would be setting out on a new path. What kind of a path he could not yet envisage, since, whatever she was, she was certainly not a peasant woman.
The widow was obviously quite startled at his offer of a trip to Caen and he could see that she instinctively hesitated.
He understood women well enough to read her mind. ‘I take great care of you, Madame,’ he promised. ‘Have no fear.’
He lit his last cigarette after first offering it to Barbara, who politely refused it. He carefully compiled another sentence. Finally, he said grandly, ‘I take you a little from your grief, Madame, and also you may see what happen to our cities.’
While she still hesitated, he added, ‘The Americans produce petrol like a cow make water! Lots of it. They say to me “fill her up”. And I do.’
She considered this and then unexpectedly chuckled, as she realised how apt his simile was. She decided that she might as well accept his offer. She really did, rather morbidly, want to see Caen.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask the hotel if they can provide a picnic lunch.’
And I hope I don’t disgrace myself by crying in public again, she thought.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_c42e1d1d-f8df-5c5f-89ca-4d2b82118687)
Barbara spent a sleepless, tear-sodden night. She was, like almost everybody else, so deeply worn out with hard work, poor food and generally doing without that she wondered how she had ever managed to get up the energy to take this trip to France; yet, haunted by the lines of crosses she had seen that day, she could not sleep.
Why on earth had she come?
The answer was, she ruminated between sobs, because her mother, Phyllis Williams, and her mother-in-law, Ada Bishop, had been so persistent about it. She had given in simply to please them.
Her mother had said, ‘Don’t be afraid, luv. Seein’ the grave’ll settle you a bit. Your dad never had one, being at sea, like. But your George has one. You go and look at it. Then you’ll know.’
Know what? More grief? She cried on.
When talking to Barbara, Phyllis had not added what she was thinking: See the grave and then you’ll know it’s finished. You got to march forward, not look back. She wanted her girl to look at other decent men, like Graham in the village, who had been in a reserved occupation throughout the war. Barbara could marry again, have kids, be normal. Not always a widow, as she herself was likely to be.
Her Barbara had had nearly four years of mourning, on top of the ruthless grind of the labouring job to which she had been directed during the war. It was enough plain misery for any girl, Phyllis considered.
Now the war was over and Barbara was free to work at home again. Since neither Phyllis nor Barbara had any but domestic skills, she believed that both of them must work to build up their bed-and-breakfast. No matter how unpromising the business seemed at present, it appeared to Phyllis to offer the best prospect of a decent living for herself and her daughter. Even if Barbara did remarry, it would still offer her and her husband a home as well as employment; the country was so short of housing that any man would be glad to live in such a place.
Despite Barbara’s now being able to help her at home, the end of the war had not brought much rest to either of them. Added to their fatigue had been the continued daily monotonous struggle against rationing and shortages of everything; particularly hard for those like themselves, who had to be hospitable to an equally weary, irate clientele.
Further, many had to cope with the return of disoriented or wounded men, or, like Barbara and herself, the knowledge that their men would not return at all. Of the men who had come home, many had returned to homes and jobs that no longer existed, and to wives who were prematurely old – and so tired. They had also had to face children who had never seen their father and resented this strange man who took up so much of their mother’s attention; several of Phyllis’s neighbours had faced this problem, and had, in seeking comfort, wept helplessly on Phyllis’s shoulder.
No matter which way you looked, the day-to-day struggle to revert to a normal life seemed unending. It was nearly as bad as when they had lived in a slum in the north of Liverpool.
Before the war, while her husband was at sea, Phyllis and her daughter had moved from Liverpool to run their little business. It was a fortuitous move, for during the war the little dockside street in which they had lived had been bombed out of existence.
In 1934, the Williamses had been desperate to get out of the city, as crime increased in their overcrowded, dockside district. Unemployment was rife and, even at that time, there was such an air of hopelessness that Phyllis was anxious to try to get her only daughter away from the area. Barbara’s father was lucky to have a job which was likely to last for a while: ‘But you could never be sure,’ Phyllis would say darkly to Barbara. ‘So many ships is laid up.’
One pleasant summer Sunday, as a treat, they took the train to Hoylake on the Wirral peninsula and went for a long walk along the seashore. At West Kirby, they turned inland to catch a return train from its station back to Liverpool.
One side of the road they took marked the end of West Kirby. On the other was a stone wall which ran down as far as the shore and then turned to continue along the sea frontage. They paused for a moment to lean on it and look out over the field which it shielded.
The field looked so neglected that Phyllis guessed that it had not been cultivated for several years.
‘There’s a house further up, Mam,’ remarked Barbara idly.
Her mother turned to look. ‘So there is,’ she said, and peered at it. ‘It’s empty by the looks of it. What a big garden it must have had.’
They moved on and came to the garden gate. Unlike a farm gate, it was a slightly rusty, elegant ironwork gate. Grass had grown up round it, and suggested that it had not been used much for a long time.
‘Let’s have a look,’ suggested Barbara. She lifted the latch and, with an effort, pushed the gate open.
‘The place is empty,’ said Phyllis, surveying the dusty, curtainless windows. ‘I think it’s an old farmhouse.’
Driven at first by curiosity, they walked round it. There must, originally, have been a huge garden, though no cultivated plan was now evident. The house itself, however, looked quite sound. Even the black enamel on the front door was unblistered by weather.
Phyllis looked slowly round. Gulls screamed overhead; the sea was close enough for the women to hear the incoming tide dashing against a breakwater. Distantly, there was the sound of a steam train approaching West Kirby station.
Spurred by sudden, almost absurd ambition, Phyllis said excitedly, ‘You know, Barbie, this’d make a great place for a holiday. Looks as if it’s got lots of bedrooms – and all this for kids to play in.’ She made a sweeping gesture with one hand towards the enormous neglected garden. ‘And there’s sea and sand right here – and it’s quiet, except for the train – and, as I remember, they stop round eleven at night.’
Barbara had laughed a little derisively. ‘You mean a boarding house?’
‘Yes, like your gran had in Blackpool. I had a good time in it, I did, when I were a kid.’
‘It’s so big! We couldn’t even furnish it,’ replied the practical fifteen-year-old, with a hint of scorn in her voice. ‘And what’s more, it’d be a lot of work – and wouldn’t the rent be something awful? And who could manage a garden that big – it goes on for ever.’ She kicked a stone along the asphalt path at the side of the house. Then she added, ‘And what on earth would Dad say? He were born in our street. He’s used to it.’
‘He could get unused to it – and he likes fishin’,’ Phyllis replied quite savagely. Her husband was currently serving in a ship on the Australian run. She grinned, and then added, ‘We’d need a farmer to do the garden, ’cos it’s certain your dad wouldn’t! He likes his rest when he’s ashore.’
They plodded over to the back of a line of houses which abutted the garden at the far end, to look over a dilapidated wooden fence to enquire of a woman pegging out washing on her clothesline whether she knew if the house were to let.
‘I don’t know,’ the woman replied. She shook out a nappy, took a peg out of her mouth and pinned the garment on the line. ‘It’s a real sad story, you know. It were bought by a Mr Travis, and made all ready for him and his new bride to move into a couple of years back. You’d nevaire believe it – it’s got a washbasin with hot and cold in every bedroom!’ She turned from the line of baby clothes, and folded her red arms across her chest while she contemplated the enquirers.
‘Nice man, he were – businessman from Liverpool, quite old, he was. He’s never lived in it, though. She were killed in a motor smash when they was on their honeymoon in Italy. They always say them Eyeties are mad drivers, don’t they?’
The woman was highly interested. Why would such an ordinary woman want such a big house? She said she was not sure whether Mr Travis would rent.
‘It were up for sale for ages. But who’d want seven bedrooms nowadays? You’d have to have a maid. And it’s too close to the railway track to please them what could afford a servant. They say his wife were an artist, though, and loved painting round here.’
Phyllis and Barbara did not show any signs of walking on, so she said, ‘You could have a look at it, no doubt. Mrs Jones what has the sweetshop in the village, she’s got a key – looks over the place from time to time for him.’
The idea began to blossom between mother and daughter. A bed-and-breakfast by the sea, with a huge garden – and a beach for kids just down the road. And waking up every morning to clean air.
‘Could I go bathing?’ asked Barbara.
Phyllis laughed. ‘Every day if you wanted to, when the tide’s in.’
Barbara began to have visions of splashing amid the waves in a scarlet swimsuit and dazzling all the local lads with her glamour.
At first, Mrs Jones looked doubtfully at the working-class woman and her daughter who were interested in a house meant for gentry. She did, however, finally agree to show them round it, and afterwards gave them Mr Travis’s address.
He proved to be a well-to-do businessman living with a manservant in a big flat near Sefton Park.
Phyllis plucked up courage and, accompanied by a silent, rather scared Barbara, went to see him.
It was clear to them that he did not care much what happened to the property; in truth, the very thought of it evoked memories he would rather forget.
At a time when the country was suffering a great depression, a large house with over four acres of unproductive semi-wilderness round it seemed to have little appeal to anyone. Even the council had refused to buy it for public housing, because the land lease was not long enough to suit them.
Like Mrs Jones, Mr Travis was surprised to be faced with such an eager woman and her daughter, whose accent betrayed that they came from the backstreets of Liverpool. What interest could she have in such a big house, far beyond her means?
When he understood what they wanted the house for, however, he lost his distant manner. It seemed to him a laudable ambition that they should want to improve their lives; they did, indeed, look very clean and respectable. He relaxed a little, and explained carefully to them that he did not own the land and would not renew the lease of it when it ran out.
‘If you buy the house and the lease – which has about forty years to run – you’d be on your own when the lease ends, and your business would be at stake,’ he warned. ‘You’d have to persuade the landlord to renew the lease. Then you might have to pay a lot for the renewal.’
Their faces fell. ‘We hoped you’d let it,’ they chorused.
Anyway, forty years before they faced trouble seemed more like a century to two women who lived in a city where lives were often short and nasty.
‘I could never buy it,’ Phyllis owned up. ‘But maybe you’d consider renting it?’
He smiled suddenly at their persistence. He liked this sturdy woman and her pretty daughter. Why not?
They cheerfully beat down the rent he then suggested, on promise of great care of the property. He was amused, and asked Phyllis if her husband was in agreement with their plans.
‘Any debts you run up would be his responsibility,’ he warned. ‘What does he do for a living?’
Though young Barbara was a bit shocked that her father might be drawn into this wildcat scheme, Phyllis hushed her.
She said placidly, ‘He’s First Mate on a P&O boat. Takes immigrants to Australia. Nice new ship, it is.’ She sighed. ‘He’s away most of the time. It’ll be months before he docks. Can’t complain, though. He’s never been out of work.’
When asked, she unhesitantly named the ship. ‘Been on it ever since it were launched,’ she added.
‘In the absence of your husband, who did you have in mind to be responsible, then?’
‘Well, I’d be responsible. If it’s the rent you’re worried about, I reckon I can manage to pay it.’
‘What with?’
‘Well, me hubby and me – we got a bit saved, and I can cash it, if I have to. And me allotment from him is paid regular. And Barbara here is in service. Add to that, I wouldn’t have to pay ten shillin’ a week rent in Liverpool, like I do now.’
In those days, women on their own couldn’t get bank loans or credit; even if they worked, it was always presumed that the employment was transitory or so badly paid that they could not afford to repay.
As Phyllis looked tensely at the elderly man in front of her, she thought: I’m mad. Why do I want this so badly? And putting up with being made to look so small, just to get it?
She answered herself: For clean countryside and sea air for Barbie. Maybe, just maybe, I could make enough money to send her back to school for a year longer – give her a better chance than I had – though her dad would think I were crazy if I did.
For his part, Geoffrey Travis wondered idly whether he cared a damn what happened to this house. He had other properties, and nobody to leave them to when he died. He had, legally, to pay the ground rent of this one until the lease ran out – but the amount was small. Other than that, he had kept the house watertight, and it would be sensible to continue to do so, whoever was in it.
If it were to be a bed-and-breakfast, it would be in the interests of these women that they keep the house decent.
He asked for references. After a little consideraton, Phyllis gave the name of the priest at her church, and her father. Mentally enlarging her father’s corner store, she said, ‘Me dad’s a grocer. And he knows about bed-and-breakfasts, he does. He owned one in Blackpool till he saved enough to buy his grocery.’ She paused, to consider what more she could add. Then, inspired, she said with great pride, ‘He’s got a telephone.’
About the best that can be hoped for, I suppose, Travis decided. He hoped that the priest also had a telephone, so that he could talk to him directly.
He took Phyllis’s name and address, and promised to give her a decision in a few days’ time.
Faced with the possible reality of her mad idea, Phyllis asked, ‘Could you ask Mrs Jones to show us round it again, sir?’
This was the first indication Travis had had that Mrs Jones had already shown the house. He was a little annoyed. He would have been furious if he had known that most of the village had, at different times, been shown it, just to see the washbasins and the pretty wallpaper.
Considering the two women, the reclusive owner was left wondering at the extent of human optimism.
The greatest advantage of the house to Phyllis and Barbara was that, in addition to the washbasins in three of the bedrooms, it also had a complete, modern bathroom, and a washroom on the ground floor.
‘Perfect for a B-and-B,’ Phyllis breathed quietly to Barbara.
A servants’ lavatory outside the back door made a total of three lavatories, which, both women agreed excitedly, was remarkable. ‘Have to watch they don’t all freeze up in the winter,’ Barbara warned.
It took them two years to get every bedroom reasonably furnished, though it was surprising how well the modest pieces from their existing home looked when spread out. They went to bailiffs’ sales, where one could pick up chairs and tables for sixpence or a shilling each; and an estate sale yielded a massive amount of bedding and bedlinen for a few pence apiece, simply because the heirs wanted to get rid of it. The women completed the bedrooms one at a time, and immediately advertised them in the windows of local newspaper shops, at twopence a week, as superior bed-and-breakfast accommodation.
They risked near bankruptcy by buying new single beds from the Times Furnishing Company in Liverpool on monthly payments.
Because of their excellent new beds, they found an unexpected market amongst travelling sales representatives, a much less destructive clientele than families were. Burdened by suitcases full of samples as they travelled from city to city, usually by train, these men were always looking for places with good beds and a well-cooked breakfast; they ached with years of sleeping on ancient, hammock-like mattresses. The word went round about the comfort of Phyllis’s beds.
Phyllis also placed a modest advertisement in a holiday magazine. This attracted elderly couples from the London area, in search of easily accessible, inexpensive holidays, less noisy than those offered in Margate or Brighton, at a weekly rate which included midday dinner and tea. This meant a lot of extra work, but it paid quite well.
The nearby railway station, so useful to the representatives on their way to do business on Merseyside, also allowed holiday guests easy access to the entertainment of Liverpool and Birkenhead; it proved to be a great asset instead of a liability.
A few months after they obtained the house, Barbara had thankfully left her job as maid-of-all-work to a big family in Neston; keeping a bed-and-breakfast was much more interesting than going back to school, especially as some of the representatives were single young men.
Much to Barbara’s chagrin, her mother kept a very close eye on her. ‘This is a respectable house,’ she would say, ‘and you mind your Ps and Qs, me girl. And you’re going to night school, milady, to get a bit more learnin’.’
And to night school she went, at first protesting, and then quite happily, because she realised that the commercial subjects she studied would be of use in the bed-and-breakfast; or, better still, might get her a post as a private secretary, preferably to somebody rich and famous who would marry her.
Not long after they moved to West Kirby, her mother had given Barbara the job of tidying up the front of the house, which had once been a little flower garden.
‘Oh, Mam!’ she wailed in protest.
‘It won’t hurt you, luv. It’ll take you out in the fresh air,’ replied Phyllis firmly. The girl must help if they were to make a success of the place.
Not too sure where to start, Barbara weeded the cracked asphalt path between the gate and the front door. This attracted an elderly man pottering in the front garden of one of the houses across the road. He wandered across and admired her efforts to tidy up.
‘It’s a proper mess, miss, isn’t it?’
She agreed mournfully that it was, and that she had no idea how to make it look nice.
He suggested she use a sickle to cut down the very long grass, and offered to lend her one. He brought it to her and showed her how to use it.
Much to Phyllis’s amusement, he became her daughter’s friend and mentor. She worked under his instruction much more cheerfully than if her mother had told her what to do, and it was he who suggested that she attend the upcoming church fête, where people would offer for sale, quite cheaply, surplus plants from their gardens.
Armed with a shilling, she bought peonies from a middle-aged lady, who said she was Mrs Ada Bishop and that she lived over by the Ring o’ Bells, a pretty pub on the other side of the village. So she became acquainted with George’s mother long before she met her son. Mrs Bishop was a keen gardener, and suggested some pansies and lilies of the valley.
Barbara and Phyllis had had no garden when they lived in a terraced house in Liverpool, so this world of gardening enthusiasts was quite new to the young girl.
‘That place was beginning to be an eyesore,’ Ada confided to Barbara, as she filled an old seeding box with plants at a ridiculously low price. ‘I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing the garden for your mam. You’ll find you’ll love doing it after a bit. Just wait till them peonies come out. Now, all you have to do is make a little hole, put some water in it and cover the plants’ roots. Pat ’em down gently – and don’t forget to leave plenty of room for the peonies; they’ll grow really big.’
As Barbara told George, years later, ‘I never realised what would come out of it, I never did. She made me interested in flowers, and now I love the garden. I didn’t even know she had a son, ’cos you was away so early to get to work, and you was in Chester for ages. It was real funny when I met you at the Red Cross dance and found I knew your mam.’
Since the end of the war, Barbara had done her best to rebuild the garden. Again, it was Ada who brought her plants to set it up, Ada who had her own grief to contend with. She never said much, but she had tried to help Barbara, and, in return, Barbara hoped she was a bit of a comfort to her mother-in-law.
A week after they had moved out to the new house, Phyllis’s husband, Hugh Williams, had been informed of his change of address. In a letter posted from Sydney, he had approved Phyllis and Barbara’s idea of living by the sea. The front garden was looking quite decent by the time he returned from a six months’ voyage round the ports of Australia.
He nearly had a fit. He found he had a house far better than anything he could ever have hoped to live in, where strange men, whom he regarded with deep suspicion, came and went like some weird, briefcased merry-go-round. And his wife owed nearly thirty pounds to the Times Furnishing Company – just for single beds!
‘How did you get credit?’ he asked disbelievingly. ‘You’re only a woman.’
‘Charm,’ she replied, neglecting to tell him that her own father had chanced his savings and had co-signed with her for the purchase.
His little daughter, who suddenly seemed to have become a young woman, had produced a penny notebook, in which she had kept an account, something she said she had learned how to do in night school.
‘See, Dad. It’s not paying much yet, because we’re still buying stuff for it and paying the Times, but it’s broken even for the last three months.’ She grinned at him happily. ‘The word’s going round about it. And whoopee! You know, we can now charge ten shillings and sixpence a night for the high-class chaps from the big firms!’
Hugh expostulated, raged, to no avail, said his prayers and went back to sea. He did, however, give them one good idea: he suggested that, to increase their income, they rent part of the land round the house to a farmer, either for grazing or haymaking – which they did.
Either because of his prayers or the unremitted hard work and business acumen of the two women, the enterprise began to pay off.
None of them gave credit to Phyllis’s grocer father for the coaching he gave them. He made numerous helpful suggestions to limit theft, produce meals quickly, buy wholesale.
‘Grandpa talks ’is head off,’ Barbara remarked to her mother; nevertheless, she was learning from him without realising it.
She found herself with more pocket money than many of her own age in the village; it wasn’t a wage, but it was generous spending money.
Grandpa counselled saving. ‘No matter what you earn, put ten per cent by, luv. When you want somethin’ big, you’ll have the money.’
Barbara wanted a bicycle, but Phyllis said it was an unnecessary expense; she must save up and buy it herself. Barbara wept in frustration. But she learned and eventually Grandpa gave her a whole ten shillings for her birthday to make up the sum required.
He had long been dead before Barbara realised how wise he had been – and how kind.
In the depression of the 1930s, young people were having real problems finding work, and when she saw the pittances which her girl friends in the village earned, and how they envied her, Barbara had enough sense to take a serious interest in a business which could, in time, be hers.
And, who knows, she thought as she dealt daily with very decent men, one day I might marry one of them.
As she lay, unable to sleep, on a decidedly old bed in a foreign country, Barbara remembered her parents, all her mother’s hard work, and the happy days before the war. And now, all that work – her whole life, indeed – seemed to her to have come to naught.
Their clientele had been, on the whole, so pleasant. But then the war had come. Though it had not been bombed directly, her home had been in the path of German bombers on their way to Liverpool; a pile of earth like an outsized mole hill, at the back of the house, still bore witness to the explosion of a bomb jettisoned by a frightened pilot. Their home had, however, been very nearly destroyed by misuse.
The sales representatives had vanished into the Forces. The evacuees and their mothers billeted on them had been a disastrous intrusion.
After the evacuees decided to return to Liverpool, as yet unbombed, Barbara and Phyllis had recovered from the worst of that invasion; but, even, subsequently, as a refuge for the elderly from the bombing of London and the South of England, they had been unable to keep the house up. Civilians had to make do with what they had for the duration: no paint, no new bed linen or china dishes, no plumbing repairs, no flower garden – just a vegetable patch. And never enough coal for heating.
When peace came, practically everything they owned was worn out. There was not an unpatched sheet in the house, not a curtain left other than blackout ones.
The problems of repair and renovation, even now in 1948, seemed almost insurmountable, though damage to their property had been almost nothing in comparison with the havoc wreaked on Liverpool and its environs, or the almost total destruction of parts of Normandy. It had, however, the same overwhelming look of shabbiness and neglect which most of England had. And the faces of the people in the village shared with their French counterparts the same look of intense fatigue and of bad health.
Barbara spared a compassionate thought for the French people round her. Betrayed by their Governments, despised for their surrender to the Germans, their young men still being killed in the war in French Indo-China, and in Algeria, living in a province which was a heap of ruins, how must they feel each time they were called cowardly? Ready to collapse?
As she finally got up to wash and dress in preparation for going with Michel to Caen, she wondered if, in similar circumstances, without the Channel to protect them, the British would have done any better than the French had.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_22d760cc-7fec-5fd7-841d-2cb3025c3d90)
Michel found Barbara sitting waiting for him in the foyer of the hotel. She wore a pink woollen dress with the same jacket that she had worn the day before. Despite makeup, carefully applied, her eyes were black-rimmed from lack of sleep; her tears and ruminations of the night had not been conducive to sleep.
She was not particularly looking forward to the promised expedition; she had been stupid to have even mentioned Caen to the driver. She told herself crossly that she was bound to feel even more depressed after looking at such a place. Still less, however, did she wish to spend the day by herself, wandering round Bayeux. And George’s mam had said, when kissing her goodbye, that she wanted all the information that Barbara could collect about what had happened to her son.
She felt numb, unable to think clearly. It was as if she were floating in space, afraid to put a foot down on the earth, lest she be roused and burst into tears again, in mourning not only for all that she personally had lost, but also for a sad, sad world.
As on the day before, she was hatless. Hats were another small thing that had vanished during the war – unless one was in the Services, where a hat was still part of a uniform. Her hair was elaborately swept up on either side of her face, to become curls on the top of her head. Similar curls were, as usual with her, confined at the nape of her neck by a precious tortoiseshell hair slide. This style tended to make her look taller than she was.
As Michel walked into the foyer, he noted her makeup, and found himself wondering exactly where she had obtained such powder and paint.
The paint reminded him how foolish he was to get involved with a foreign woman who had access to such luxuries as makeup. What chance had a poor French peasant against the irritatingly rich American soldiers still scattered around Europe – particularly the three who were staying in the same hotel? Then he pulled himself up. ‘I’m not in competition with anybody,’ he told himself firmly; ‘I’m simply taking a woman, for whom I feel sorry, to Caen because her husband died there.’
In spite of her swollen eyelids and the shabbiness of her dress, however, she looked to him as exotic and interesting as if she had come from some faraway oriental country, instead of from just across the English Channel. It seemed to him a pity that all he could offer her was a taxi ride – no nylons, no chocolates, no makeup, no handsome uniform by her side.
When he had told his mother and Anatole that he would be busy this Saturday, neither of them had queried it. If Barbara was seen in his taxi, it would be assumed that he was carrying yet another war widow to yet another grave. The most important point, he felt, was that old Duval should not notice a lady in his taxi on a day when the Americans were out of town, and, therefore, not easily available to say that he had their permission to help war widows.
The old taxi had only one seat in front, for the driver. At his side was a platform on which heavy luggage could be carried. Today, of course, it was empty. Barbara managed to smile quite cheerfully at him as he opened the door for her and saw her comfortably ensconced in the back seat.
He drove her along a main road which, he said, was newly repaired. There was not much traffic, and, occasionally, he would slow down to show her damage done to villages and farms in the great battle. It amazed her that the famous, huge bocages, dense thickets of bushes and young trees, had, in many places, withstood the onslaught of tanks, artillery and bombing, whereas walls and stone cottages had been pushed down and crushed.
They passed a quaint, moated farmhouse. With pride, he told her that it had, occasionally, been a meeting place for the Partisans.
He laughed, and then went on, ‘The owner pull up the drawbridge – difficult for the Boches to get in without noise.’
From that house, he told her he had, one night, taken a downed British airman and hidden him in one of his chicken coops. He laughed again, as he added, ‘How he complain of the smell! He nice guy. Very grateful to us. His papa big guy in England. I learn much English from him. I write to him sometimes – old friend now.’
He eased the taxi a little to the side, to allow a van to pass him. He waved to the driver.
‘Another old friend,’ he told his passenger. ‘He teach me to drive. He is engineer electrical – very clever fellow.’ Then he went on with his story, ‘Later, we keep the airman in the roof of our cottage for six weeks until my father take him to Port-en-Bessin.’
‘What happened when he arrived there?’ Barbara asked.
‘Uncle Léon put him in his boat – he is Master of a tramp coastal, you understand. Les Boches watch the fishing fleet very closely – difficult to do anything but fish. It is difficult to put someone on a fishing boat. Tramps not quite so much – Uncle Léon have regular route to Cherbourg and often carry cargo for the Germans. None of his cargo ever lost or stolen. He is very careful – so they trust him a little. However, he wait for the dark of the moon. Airman dress like me and use my seaman’s book, looks like crew. In Cherbourg, he land like the rest of crew going ashore. There he go to safe house. From there the British have system to get him to Britain.’
‘Did the British really work from Cherbourg?’
‘They come and go in Normandy, sometimes, je crois, by air – parachute. Spies. Information. Guns for the civilian Partisans and for the maquis. Regular service!’ His laugh was grim this time.
‘Who were the maquis?’
‘Many of them were very brave soldiers of our Army, Madame. They fight on throughout the war – civilians feed them; Germans kill many.’
‘Humph. I never heard about them.’ She reverted to his story of the airman. ‘It must have been very dangerous for your uncle – and for you, if it was your seaman’s book which he carried?’
‘Certain. Big, big danger that someone betray us. Germans have spies, French ones.’
She felt it would be indiscreet to comment on his being betrayed by his own people. She had read in British newspapers of the deadly revenge taken on such people, the minute the war was over – and even during the war, where the opportunity arose. ‘I was told the Partisans were in touch with Britain,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘When Germans first come to Normandy, they demand we give them our radios.’ He half turned and grinned at her. ‘Some families have more than one radio. We say we are very poor, say we have no radio. We keep ours. Lots of hiding places for small radio on a chicken farm. We have electric – keep chicks warm. We plug in the radio.
‘We listen to the BBC and tell news to our friends. Some Partisans very clever – build good radios themselves. Sometimes, Germans jam British broadcasts.’ He was silent as he negotiated a woman pushing an ancient wheelbarrow full of logs down the road. Then he said very soberly, ‘Sometimes the radio of the Freedom Fighter is traced – not all Germans are fools. Then the SS come – and always some are taken and tortured to say who help them. This cause – how you say? – a run of arrests and executions by the cursed SS. We not always know names of men helping us – difficult for Germans to squeeze names out of us. We are all very afraid – nearly all the time.’
Barbara shuddered. Hitler’s SS had been dreaded throughout Europe. The very thought of their ever getting into England had, on more than one occasion, made her flesh crawl.
The taxi was entering Caen, and she was immediately staggered by the vast amount of damage. Like the cemetery, it was overwhelming.
The road on which they were travelling was clear, but their route was lined on either side by huge piles of rubble, or what had once been basements, now filled with rainwater. In one great pile of debris, three young boys were dodging, slipping and sliding amid the wreckage, shouting ‘Bang-bang’ at each other as if they were fighting an imaginary battle.
Barbara saw here again a picture she had already seen in Liverpool – a duck swam placidly across one of the pools of water, and, from hollows between the broken stones and concrete, long sprays of pink willow, yellow ragwort and coarse grass waved in the breeze.
At the side of one of the roads there was a series of little stalls. One, she could see, was selling children’s clothing, another small trinkets, whether new or second-hand she could not judge. Two women pedestrians had stopped to examine the goods, and were being attended to by a woman in a black blouse and long black skirt. Other than this little group and the boys playing, the place looked deserted.
Michel turned the taxi into a side road and went up a slight slope, towards a series of buildings, either churches or monasteries, which appeared to have survived with little or no damage. For a moment, it was as if they had left the war behind them. However, the same uncanny stillness, the sense of lack of human occupation, pervaded the area as it had the ruins. Barbara wondered if these ancient monuments had been abandoned.
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Helen Forrester
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Стоимость: 580.23 ₽
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A wonderful new novel from Liverpool’s best-loved author. A tale of loss and love set in post-Second World War England and France.This is the story of a young Liverpool woman widowed in the Second World War before she can know the happiness of having a family. With the blessing of her mother, with whom she runs a B&B, she goes to Normandy to see where her husband was killed in the D-Day landings. Once she is there, she meets an impoverished French poultry farmer, now reduced to driving a beaten up (and still rare) taxi and looking after his old mother and dying brother. Will these two find happiness together?A touching love story, a compelling portrayal of the aftermath of war and above all a testament to the courage and endurance of oridinary people, Madame Barbara will delight Helen Forrester’s countless fans.