As Nell packed a bag for each of them, her thoughts went back three-and-a-half years to the time when they had come from Marc-en-Bareuil. Was there no end to this madness? When and how was it all going to end? How she wished she was back in Calais, doing nothing more adventurous than spending the afternoon making jam with Clothilde and waiting for Tom’s cheery, ‘Hello Nell, I’m home!’ The only thing she was sure of is that she had promised Tom that she would get herself and the girls out of this wretched mess in one piece, and that is why they were leaving Cambrai. Having got this far she didn’t want them to perish in an air raid at the very last minute, just as the war was taking a turn for the better.
So now they were on their way again, not even knowing where they were going to sleep that night. What Nell didn’t know was that the bombings were a ‘softening’ operation in preparation for the D-day landings, just six weeks away.
Her thoughts were interrupted by three men: neighbours armed with large hammers. They had come, they said, to knock a hole in the cellar wall through to next door. If the bombings were to carry on, and people were trapped, they could crawl through the hole into next door’s cellar.
Jeanne followed them down and watched as they knocked their hole – about two feet square – and then, crouching down, she could see holes in all the cellars going right down the street.
Nell called her up from above and sent her to the baker’s to buy the biggest loaf in the shop. When she returned, the loaf was strapped to the luggage carrier of Marie’s bike. Two more bags were criss-crossed on the handlebars. They each had their own bag to carry and Nell also had her handbag with her ‘papers’ in it.
They set off in the late afternoon. As they walked out of the town, Jeanne thought how lovely it was to be in the country. They felt like naughty children breaking the rules, leaving without permission.
At ten to seven precisely, at exactly the same time as two days before, the bombers were back directly overhead. Marie shouted, ‘Quick, quick, in here!’ and they dived into the nearest shelter. It was a First World War British army cemetery. They lay down and hid amongst the neat white tombstones – hundreds of them – in beautiful symmetrical rows.
As the planes made their bombing run just above their heads, two bombs collided, exploding in mid-air and sending shrapnel falling all around. Jeanne screamed. She was terrified. She lay sobbing, huddled against a gravestone, right up against it as close as possible. Irene shouted from the shelter of her own tombstone, ‘Oh, shut up, Jeanne!’
They now knew what to expect. The first wave of bombers, having dropped their load, circled above the town. Then there was a lull of a few minutes, before the second wave grouped right above their heads and dropped their own bombs. They heard them whistling as they fell, right there just above them.
Jeanne was sobbing loudly. Irene shouted above the din, ‘Oh, do tell her to shut up, Mum!’
Then, after a couple of hours, the all-clear sounded far away in Cambrai. The air raid was over.
They stood up, and as they dusted themselves down found they had not been alone in the cemetery. It had been full of people sheltering among the tombstones. They smiled at each other sheepishly, exchanged a few words, and went on their way.
Marie picked up her bike from the spot where she had thrown it in the ditch and they carried on towards Rieux.
They weren’t the only ones on the road that evening. They encountered similar groups of people walking or cycling to friends and relatives, also seeking a safe place in the country.
A lorry laden with furniture sped past them and a voice called out, ‘Marie! Marie!’ It was her headmaster and his family. The college’s proximity to the railway station had proved too much for them.
Nell and the girls were very tired by the time they turned off the main road and walked into the village looking for Rue de la Gare. Exhausted, they knocked on the door of number thirteen. A large woman in her mid-thirties opened the door and they explained who they were and how Pere Cadier had sent them.
She exclaimed, ‘Pere Cadier must be losing his marbles! I was expecting a couple from Dunkirk!’ Then, seeing their crestfallen faces, said, ‘Oh well, you’d better come and see, but I warn you, it isn’t much. Come on, follow me, it’s next door.’
She led them to number fifteen and, opening the door, called, ‘It’s all right, Auntie, it’s only me!’ Unlocking the first door on the right, she said, ‘This is it.’
Nell’s heart sank. On the left of the room was a massive old-fashioned bed; in the middle, against the wall, a small cooking stove; and on the right, a washstand and bucket; in the window alcove was a table and four chairs. That was it. One room. One bed, for four of them. In comparison, the Cambrai ‘flat’ had been a palace.
Nell gulped, dismayed. She had no choice. ‘All right. We’ll take it,’ she said.
Nell found that things were not as bad as they had at first seemed. She was used to making the best of a bad job and soon got into a routine.
She did not have the facilities to warm water up, but luckily the summer was coming, and they could wash in cold water. As in Cambrai they took it in turns to have an all-over wash once a week, the slop-bucket doubling as a chamber pot. Nell carried it through to the garden every morning, and tipped it at the base of the old plum tree just outside the back door. She swore the plums it gave that summer were the most delicious she had ever tasted! Otherwise, they were allowed to use the earth closet next door, but didn’t like to intrude too much.
The old aunt lived in the back room of the ancient house. Her old frame was so wasted that she held a lamb bone under her right arm when she knitted, this acted as a prop for her knitting needle. Jeanne watched, fascinated, as the needles click-clicked, the lamb bone rising and falling in rhythm.
Rieux in 1944 was still an agricultural village, its main crops being wheat and sugar beet. Life had gone on unchanged for centuries. Nell would stand at the window and watch as two large, patient cream-coloured oxen lumbered up the hill every morning out towards the fields. They were yoked together, and lumbered down again in the evening, pulling a heavily laden flat cart. All of the farm horses had been requisitioned by the Germans.
‘Oh look!’ she would say, predating the Flowerpot Men by twenty years. ‘There go Bill and Ben!’
Nell and the girls took to attending the tiny Protestant church just over the road from them. If the church in Cambrai had been small, this one was minute. It only held a congregation of fifteen or so.
Their ample landlady, Julienne, stood in the family pew next to her thin, puny husband, Jules, and their two small children. She gave praise to the Lord in a loud, strong voice that nearly raised the roof and drowned out everyone else’s efforts.
Soon after their arrival in Rieux, Nell and the girls witnessed a procession coming through the village. A statue of the Virgin Mary, ‘Our Lady of the Bombs’, was being carried from village to village, resting in the village churches overnight. The villagers followed the procession to the next village, praying that they might be protected from the bombs.
The brightly-painted statue was carried on a plinth by six men and followed by the whole village, arms outstretched, barefoot, with their eyes raised heavenward in supplication, singing, ‘Ave, Ave, Ave Maria. Ave, Ave, Ave Mari-ia’. The Protestants decided that they should hedge their bets and join the procession, though they nudged and winked at each other.
Halfway to the next village, Jeanne, walking barefoot somewhere towards the back of the procession, noticed that something was wrong up in front. People were jumping in the air, stepping sideways and crying out. A non-believing joker had sprinkled tintacks on the road with a view to disrupting the procession. The faithful, still singing, were hopping about painfully, trying to avoid the offending nails. For a few minutes, chaos reigned but calm was eventually restored, and the procession went on its decorous way towards the next village.
Jeanne stood looking in the mirror, smiling to herself. Today was the tenth of May, her twelfth birthday. She was wearing a stripy, pale-blue dress, and liked what she saw. She felt on the edge of something . . . a beginning.
The girls soon made friends in the village. Irene had a friend from school living near the church, and Marie always had a string of two or three admirers in tow.
Jeanne was hardly ever home. Her particular best friend was Claudette. She was a weaver’s daughter. This part of northern France was traditionally a weaving area. On rainy days Jeanne and Claudette danced among the now-silent looms, la-la-ing tunes, making up dances and pretending to be beautiful ballet dancers.
Otherwise they spent much of their time in the fields on the edge of the village. The villagers grew large mauve poppies as big as saucers, the seeds of which were crushed and made into oil. It was not as good as olive oil but it was oil nevertheless. Jeanne and Claudette helped themselves to the seeds rattling inside the dried heads. They tasted nutty and were delicious crushed between one’s teeth. However, they caused Jeanne to be violently constipated and she had to stop eating them.
Josette was Claudette’s cousin. When the very first new potatoes were picked, Josette’s mother called Claudette and Jeanne over to the house. The three girls sat on the doorstep and dipped small, warm potatoes, still with their skins on, into a bowl of vinaigrette. They popped them in their mouths and the juice trickled down their chins. Delicious! Jeanne hadn’t had French dressing for a very long time. What a treat it was!
In the early evenings she helped Claudette get rid of the dorifores (Colorado beetles) on her father’s potato patch. They were pretty looking bugs, like ladybirds, but four times as large and with black and gold stripes. They climbed up the potato plants in the evening, ate the leaves, and the plants died. It was Jeanne and Claudette’s job to pick the beetles climbing up the plants and put them into an old tin. When the tin was full, they took it to the path and either emptied it and stamped on them, or else set fire to the tin and watched as the beetles wriggled and writhed in the flames. As Jeanne looked up, she could see people all around, busy on their own potato patch, clearing it of pests. The French called the Germans dorifores because they helped themselves to French potatoes and took them back to Germany!
There were planes everywhere from one edge of the sky to another. The noise was such that Jeanne thought her head would burst. Where were they all coming from? Could there really be so many planes in the whole world?
The grown-ups were laughing and nudging each other. ‘They’ve started daylight raids, they’re not wary any more. They know very well they’ve as good as won the war!’
Jeanne thought the big planes, the flying fortresses, looked like whales and the fighters, hovering protectively around their sides, like small fishes, swimming about in the bright blue sea of the sky. The continuous thud-thud from the anti-aircraft guns sent puffs of smoke among the whales and fishes.
Then, there was a massive explosion right there above their heads. One of the whales had been hit and, in exploding, had hit the two whales on the other side. The air was full of smoke and falling debris clouding out the sun.
Now all the villagers were pointing and exclaiming. Out of the smoke and confusion two parachutes appeared. To everyone’s horror, the first one didn’t open and plummeted to earth. The people watching below gasped. ‘Oh, le pauvre!’ Old women crossed themselves, praying for the poor unfortunate airman.
The other parachute opened and gaily, unhurriedly, swayed down, looking for all the world like the opalescent jelly-fishes on the beach back at Calais. It came down, gradually getting larger and larger, until it finally disappeared behind a clump of trees at the edge of the village.
When a German army lorry arrived ten minutes later to collect their prisoner, the airman and his parachute had gone. Mysteriously vanished, spirited away . . .
Three men had gone to work in the fields that morning and four returned to the village that evening.
Two days later, when they were walking through the village, Marie and Jeanne were stopped by Monsieur Paul, the village policeman. He drew Marie to one side and held a hurried, whispered conversation with her.
‘Go home, Jeannot,’ Marie said. ‘I’ll be home later.’ Jeanne skipped home, wondering what it was all about this time. The adult world never failed to mystify her. It was full of unspoken, secretive, unfathomable things.
Marie burst in late for tea in a state of high excitement. ‘I’ve seen him! I’ve been talking to him!’ It didn’t take them long to work out that she was talking about the missing parachutist.
‘He’s at a farm near here,’ she went on. ‘A safe house. I’m not allowed to say where. He was so pleased to speak English. His name’s Edward Torres, his family’s from Mexico. He’s petrified. You know Denain was bombed last night? Well, he was scared stiff. He had no idea what it was like to be bombed and he’s been bombing people for two years. Isn’t that a scream? I told him, “This is nothing, Denain’s ten miles away. Wait till they bomb Cambrai again then you’ll know about it!” But I don’t think he believed me!’
Marie visited him every day while he was in the village. It was difficult to keep him in one place. In such a small community everyone right down to the smallest child knew exactly where he was, and he had to be moved every few days for safety’s sake.
The Resistance were extremely well organised by 1944 and the villagers breathed a collective sign of relief when Edward, accompanied by a Frenchman, left the village on an old bike dressed as a farm worker. At a pre-arranged meeting place they met a car with two other stranded Allied airmen in it. They would be driven to a place where, at dead of night, they would be picked up by a plane and taken to England, back to their airfields to resume their bombing duties.
The last they heard of Edward, he had deserted from the US air force. Had the bombings of Denain proved too much for him?
It was at about this time that Marie let it be known that she wished to be called by her English name: she wanted to be known as Betty. She felt it was more suited to the times they were living in. But Jeanne kept forgetting and calling her Marie. It was so difficult to remember to change someone’s name after all these years!
Each time Jeanne offended, Marie/Betty got hold of one of her arms and twisted it behind her back. ‘What’s my name?’ she asked menacingly.
‘Ouch, ouch . . . You’re hurting me! Leggo, leggo . . . Ouch, ouch!’
‘What’s my name?’ Betty sadistically twisted Jeanne’s arm a little higher, enjoying her power over her younger sister.
Jeanne was almost speechless and tears were beginning to spurt down her cheeks. ‘Argh! B-B-Betty!’
‘Right,’ said Betty and let her go abruptly. ‘Let that teach you a lesson, and don’t forget! Next time, I’ll really hurt you.’
Jeanne, nursing her wounded arm, retreated into a corner of the room, thinking, Just you wait! One day I’ll be as big as you, and then we’ll see!
On the evening of the fifth of June they listened as usual to the news from London but the coded messages went on and on – for twenty minutes or more. Nell’s eyes sparkled. ‘Something’s up! We’ve never had so many messages. I’m telling you, something’s up.’
That night, as they fell asleep in the large old country bed, they wondered just what was up, and where, and when?
‘They’ve landed! They’ve landed!’ Francois, the big farm lad from over the way, shouted excitedly through their open window. It was early on the morning of the sixth of June: D-Day.
They sprang out of bed, jumping up and down with joy and excitement. ‘Where? Where?’
‘I dunno yet, but they say Normandy, or maybe Brittany.’
‘But that’s just down the road! They’ll be here in no time . . .’
They got dressed hastily and ran out into the road. It was already full of laughing, chattering people, reporting all sorts of rumours to each other and swearing they were true.
A single plane flew overhead, the RAF red, white and blue clearly visible on its wings. The girls waved and cheered at it. Surely they were going to be freed that day, or maybe tomorrow at the very latest.
When they tuned to Radio Londres that evening, they realised that it wasn’t going to be that easy after all. The Allies had landed in Normandy but there was heavy fighting over a broad front, and it was going to be a hard fought battle. They now understood they weren’t going to be freed that week, or even that month. They would have to sit it out and wait patiently.
Betty found a map of northern France and pinned it to the wall. She and Irene spent a whole day making and colouring little flags which they glued to pins: the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack, the Tricolour, the Swastika. Every evening, as news of the Allied forces’ progress was broadcast, they moved the little flags, sometimes imperceptibly, at other times a good half-inch or so, and eventually a dirty finger mark appeared in the area on the map around Cambrai as they measured and pointed in turn to see just how far away they were from the battle zone.
So started the long wait while the life of the village went on within the rhythm of the seasons as it had always done. Irene went potato picking, riding home on the long cart behind Bill and Ben the oxen, lolling among the heavy sacks with a group of laughing teenagers. Betty hung around with a gang of older teenagers, as she had done in Cambrai. Jeanne and Claudette gleaned. They picked up the stray ears of corn after the horse-drawn reaper had passed, more out of fun than necessity. Jeanne rode home, thrilled, on one of Yves Wallez’s strong horses. Yves was sixteen, one of four sons who lived in the large house behind a high wall opposite the church. He had dark, curly hair and talked laughingly to Jeanne as though she were an adult.
Nell and the girls also played card and board games by the hour, just to pass the time. The table was placed by the open window, so they could wave and chat to acquaintances as they passed by. People stopped, leaning on their spades, or putting down their shopping bag for a minute or two. Everyone seemed to be killing time. There was much to talk about, notes to compare, rumours to argue over.
‘How long do you think it’ll be?’
‘D’you think they’ll want to free Paris first, before they come north?’
And there were tales of gun-toting, parachuting nuns, or a single US tank spotted down Avesnes way. It was difficult to know what to believe. The villagers referred to Nell, hoping she knew more than they did because she was English. But she only knew what she heard each evening, listening to the BBC just as they did.
So Nell and her girls played games, whiling the time away. Whist was their favourite; they became experts. Or they played Nain Jaune (Yellow Dwarf ), a boardgame similar to Ludo. They used haricot beans as counters and, as the afternoon wore on, chewed them like sweets as they played, and at the end nobody knew who had won because the evidence had been eaten!
It was one such afternoon that Jeanne, looking up from her cards, said, ‘Oh look, there’s a German!’
Germans were a rarity in village areas, especially solitary Germans.
Nell stood up and put her hand at her throat. Her cards scattered on the floor. ‘Oh my God, it’s Emil!’
Emil walked slowly past the house, looking neither right nor left, and carried on up the hill as if he was on a Sunday afternoon stroll.
Nell waited a good half an hour. Then she put on her hat and coat, picked up her handbag, and followed him up the hill.
It was August. The Allies had reached the outskirts of Paris, and Emil had been ordered home. There, among the flat wheat fields of northern France, they said goodbye.