I have set my stories all over the world, and down through the ages too, from ancient times to yesterday. I have never invented worlds of fantasy, nor travelled into the future. Maybe I lack the imagination to do that. I need the canvas of places I know, or can find out about. I need the past or the present as firm foundations upon which I can build my stories. And the more connected places and events are to my own life, to my memory, half imagined or otherwise, or to the memory of others, the more confident I feel that I can dream up my plot through the people and places that will animate it. I have returned often in my stories to those places and people I know best, my home in Iddesleigh, in Devon, and to the Isles of Scilly, to memories of post-war London, and the Essex coast near Bradwell, where I grew up, to my years in boarding schools – all of these old familiar places, from which so many of my stories grow.
However, from time to time, and always by happy accident, it is spreading my wings and journeying over the seas that has provided me with fresh ideas and pastures new. My second country is France. It was the first foreign country I ever visited, when I went to the seaside in Normandy, to Sables-d’Or-les-Pins, as a small boy. Here I first discovered chocolate eclairs, and tasted my first sip of cider. Later, after I learnt to speak the language a bit, it became the only foreign country where I could communicate properly – Clare could already speak it fluently, as fast as the French do, so that helped. The more we went there, the more I felt at home. We made friends there, and often through them, became ever more aware of its people and culture, of how deeply connected we are to France historically, by language, by war, by kings and queens. As a writer, I am often translated into French. I have been into schools and colleges in France, attended book fairs and conferences all over the country, in the great cities, in tiny villages. In Sparrow, I even retold the story of Joan of Arc – an unlikely, and some said, ill-advised enterprise for an English writer.
I have a French side to the family too, four grandchildren, who have a family house in the Béarn region of France, in the South-West, not far from the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. It was after a family wedding down there many years ago that I happened upon a small remote village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, called Lescun. This tiny place was to provide me with the background to two of my favourite stories, but more than that, it provided me with the stories themselves. It was as if the village and the stories were simply waiting there for me to turn up and discover them.
We nearly didn’t get to Lescun at all. I had found the place on the map, chosen it because there was a small inn there where we could stay. I could see it was so close to the mountains that we could walk up into them from the village, up to the Pic d’Anie, and over the border into Spain. I had always had the rather ridiculous notion that it would be fun to stand with one foot in one country and one in another. Silly, I know. But here was my chance.
We lost our way – it was before satnav made that well-nigh impossible. I confess I was becoming just a little shirty with Clare, my map-reader, who as usual was insisting that we had to be very close to Lescun by now and that one way or another we would soon get there. When I’m negative she becomes positive, which is inclined to make me even more negative. I was becoming, I fear, ever more silent, impatient and thin-lipped.
Then she spotted a strange sign by the side of the road – a huge cut-out figure of a bear, holding a pot of honey in his paw, and an arrow, beside him, pointing off the road to the right. Across his stomach was painted one word in large letters, which read: MIEL.
“Honey,” Clare said. “We like honey, don’t we, dear? Let’s turn right here.” I was sulking too much even to argue by now. We turned off the road and drove into a village called Borce – just a few houses, a shop, a café and a village green. And on the village green there was a large cage. We got out of the car to have a closer look. There was a bear in the cage, and a notice on the bars: JOJO. EUROPEAN BEAR, FOUND AND REARED AS AN ORPHAN CUB BY A GIRL FROM THE VILLAGE. DO NOT FEED THE BEAR. The bear looked old, his fur tatty and ragged and matted. He seemed rather sad, heartbroken even, from the look in his eyes. He sat there swaying, longing to be let out, to be free. Clare bought her honey in the café, while I stood there looking into that bear’s eyes, already determined there and then to tell the story of the little girl and the bear cub.
A question or two over a coffee in the village café gave me a helping hand with my embryonic story. The bear cub had been found, it seemed, many years ago by a little girl who was playing Poohsticks by a stream on the edge of the village. She had picked the cub up in her arms, easily enough in its weakened state, and brought it back into the village. It caused quite a stir. Everyone came running. One of the old farmers said, “Knock it on the head – we don’t like bears here, they kill our sheep.” But someone else said, “No, let’s keep him. We’ll make a cage for him, call him JoJo, put his picture on our pots of honey, call it ‘JoJo’s Honey’ and sell all the honey our bees can make. Then we’ll put a notice down by the road, telling all those gullible tourists driving by to come and buy our honey.” So that’s what they had done, and of course that’s why we were there. As we were leaving the café, Clare happened to ask: “Are we anywhere near a village called Lescun, by any chance?”
“Oh, yes,” they said. “Just a kilometre up the road, before you come to the mountains. You can’t miss it.”
Clare didn’t say, “I told you so”, but I could tell she wanted to.
We found Lescun up the road, just as we had been told, and there, right in the centre, was the little village inn. As we walked in we saw two bearskins stretched out on the walls, and a huge black and white photo of village hunters, standing in the square in front of the inn, rifles at their sides, a dead bear stretched out on the ground at their feet. Maybe the mother of JoJo, I thought, and then looked away. It wasn’t a photograph you wanted to look at twice.
Next morning after breakfast, taking a picnic with us, we walked up out of the village towards the Pic d’Anie and the mountains. We were followed all the way by a huge white sheepdog, I remember. He was most definitely keeping an eye on us, we felt. We saw shepherdesses sitting in fields, knitting, their sheep all around them on the hills, bells tinkling softly, as we followed the trail up onto the high pastures, where we found cows being milked and cheese being made. We stopped and watched for a while, and then climbed on and up, until we were on top of the Pic d’Anie, the frontier of France and Spain. Now I could stand there, arms raised, one foot in Spain, the other in France, and breathe in the air of both!
We stayed a couple of nights in Lescun, and in that time got talking to people. We learnt that the village had been occupied by Germans during the Second World War. They had taken over the priest’s house by the church. They were patrolling the hills all around, trying to prevent people escaping over the border into neutral Spain – shot-down Allied airmen, Jews, Frenchmen escaping transportation to Germany. There was a cross by the side of the road outside the village where an escaping Jew had been shot and killed. We were also told that, although few knew about it at the time, there had been a safe house outside the village, a farmhouse where an old lady had courageously hidden away many of those who were trying to escape, before arranging for a guide to take them over the mountains to freedom – this at the risk of her life.
The bear story was one thing. I decided this was another. I put JoJo out of my mind, for the moment. I knew that in Lescun I had stumbled upon a remarkable story. I needed to learn more. It was difficult, though, to ask about how it was occupied. The subject is a sensitive one in France, was then, is now. But then, by great good fortune, I was given a window of opportunity. At supper one evening, the hotel manager’s daughter, a girl of about ten or eleven, approached our table. “Excuse me,” she said, “but my father says that when you came to the hotel, and signed in, he recognized your name from a book I am reading. This one.” She held out a copy of Cheval de guerre (War Horse). “I wonder if you would please sign it for me.” So I did, with pleasure. “And,” she went on, “my father says you are invited to our house tomorrow for wine and pâté.” She said she would come and fetch us, which was how we found ourselves sitting in a farmhouse kitchen at midday the next day, eating wonderful home-made pâté and sipping delicious wine. Her father was there too – it was he who was the most talkative and friendly, friendly enough for me to dare to ask him a question. “Did you live here in the war when the village was occupied?”
“Yes,” he said. “I was a boy. “The German soldiers used to give us sweets. We did not want to like them, but we did – the soldiers, I mean, not the sweets. They were mostly old soldiers, not fighting soldiers. They just wanted to go home. People got on quite well with them – some of the Germans had fought in the First World War, and so had many of the older men in the village. They were in a strange way all old comrades. Then one day after long years of occupation, we woke up, and they were gone. War over. We rang the church bell, put out the flag, had a big party.”
I left the village, my head full of the story that was already taking shape. One of our French family, the grandmother, later told me how as a child she had stood at the roadside and watched the Germans come marching in. “I don’t like to admit it,” she had said, “but in a horrible way, when I think about it, we children admired them in their smart black uniforms, handsome, victorious.” I was having quite unexpected and honest insights into how it was for children then to see their country occupied.
On the way up through France back to England, we stopped by a village called Oradour-sur-Glane, a village left in ruins as a memorial to the eight hundred or so villagers massacred by SS troops in 1944. The village was burnt out entirely, the charred remains of a few cars still there, the church and the barns where so many had been killed, still charred and gaping, open to the skies. This was the other face of the occupation. We stopped too by a wood and walked into its silence. Here were graves in among the trees. Here was all that was left of a concentration camp, a holding camp for those prisoners, mostly Jews, destined for Auschwitz or Treblinka or Bergen-Belsen – death camps.
In Waiting for Anya, I would tell my story of a shepherd boy in Lescun, of a bear who is shot, of the Nazi occupation of the boy’s village of Lescun, of the safe house he stumbles upon where Jewish children are kept hidden, of the secret he must keep. In The Dancing Bear, I would tell another kind of story altogether, but they both took root in and around Lescun, that little village in the mountains, which we so nearly didn’t find.
Then one blustery Autumn day, after the sheep had come down from the pastures and he was spreading out the bracken for the bedding in the barn, he saw Widow Horcada scurrying past, black scarf over her head, flowers in her hand. He knew she’d be making for the churchyard to put flowers on her husband’s grave. She’d stop to do her shopping on the way back, she always did. Jo knew he had a clear half hour to get up there and back: he could do it if he hurried. She’d never see him, not if he was careful. Rouf tried to come with him as he always did. He shut him in the barn and shouted to Maman that he wouldn’t be long.
He kept under the cover of the trees as long as he could. From there he could see without being seen. Her pigs were foraging in the field below the house and the cow was lying curled asleep in the middle of them. There was no one about. He threw caution to the wind because he had to – there was no time for anything else. He hared across the field until he reached the safety of the barn wall where he knew he could not be seen from the house. He ran around the back of the barn and into the courtyard behind. There was no sound except for the contented grunted of rooting pigs. He was creeping past the barn door when he heard something shuffling around inside. The bear cub, it must be the bear cub.
He looked about him and then opened the door slowly. Like all the barns it was long and low and dark, with bracken on the floor and hay in the wooden rack that ran the length of the wall. But there was no bear cub, and no other animals either. Yet he was sure he’d heard something, quite sure. He pushed the door wide open so as to throw as much light as possible down the barn. There was one small dirty window at the far end, and the shutters were banging open and shut, first one and then the other. Jo peered into the darkness. He would go no further. He could see well enough from the doorway. He was turning to go when he trod on something. He bent down and picked up a shoe, a child’s shoe. The strap was broken. He thought little of it at first. He would have dropped it and left had he not heard the breathing – a regular wheezing breathing.
It came quite definitely from the hayrack about halfway down the barn. Jo took a few steps towards it and the breathing stopped. He thought of the bear cub and of the hibernation Monsieur Audup had told them about, but he thought that it couldn’t be the bear cub because it wasn’t winter yet and anyway a bear cub would hardly be sleeping in a hayrack – but then perhaps it would. He took a few more tentative steps forward and peered into the hay. The breathing began again a little further on and quite suddenly he found himself not looking at hay at all but at two eyes that stared back at him unblinking and terrified. Jo could do nothing for a moment but stare back into them. They were not the eyes of a bear for the face that went with them was pale and thin under a fringe of dark hair.
Jo backed away slowly, swallowing his fear. He had the presence of mind to close the door quietly and it was just as well he did for across the yard Widow Horcada was bent over, holding a bucket under an outdoor tap. She had her back to him and was humming quietly to herself. For a few moments he stood looking at her disbelieving. How could she be back so soon? It wasn’t possible. Yet there she was in front of him. She had only to turn round. It was just a few steps to the corner of the barn and safety. He’d make it if he could move silently. Without taking his eyes off her he began to inch his way along the wall.
He knew he should have looked where he was going. He told himself so as the fork he blundered into clattered to the ground. Jo looked at the Widow Horcada, the bucket fell out of her hand as the black shawl swung round. Jo dropped the shoe, stumbled over the fork and ran and ran. He rounded the corner of the barn, but there he was stopped in his tracks, for up the hill, a large basket in one hand, a stick in the other, came Widow Horcada. She looked up, saw him and shouted at him. He could not hear what she was saying. Jo turned again and ran back into the yard – it was the only way he could go. She was there too and coming towards him. He looked now from one to the other. Fear crept up his spine like a warm cat and he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Never in all his life had he felt like screaming until this moment. He wanted to but he could not. And then one of them spoke, the one striding across the yard towards him.
“It’s me.” It was a man’s voice. “It’s me.” And he pulled the shawl off his head. The red beard was longer than Jo remembered but it was the same man. “Don’t you remember me?” he said.
It was a Sunday morning in April. We were in the café before lunch. The old man was going on about Roxanne again, and how she ate him out of house and home. He’d had a bit too much to drink, I think, but then he was often that way.
“Gone off again, she has,” he grumbled. “God knows what she gets up to. Nothing but trouble, that girl.”
Just then we heard shouting in the village square and, glad of any diversion, we all went out to look. Roxanne was staggering towards us, clutching a bear cub in her arms, with its arms wrapped around her neck. She’d been scratched on her face and on her arms, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She was laughing and breathless with joy.
“Bruno!” she said. “He’s called Bruno. I was down by the stream. I was just throwing sticks and I felt something stroking my neck. I turned round and there he was. He patted my shoulder. He’s my very own bear, Grandpa. He’s all alone. He’s hungry. I can keep him, can’t I? Please?”
If we hadn’t been there – and half the village was there by now – I think the old man might have grabbed the bear cub by the scruff of the neck and taken him right back where he came from.
“Look at him,” he said. “He’s half starved. He’s going to die anyway. And besides, bears are for killing, not keeping. You know how many sheep we lose every year to bears? Dozens, I’m telling you, dozens.”
Some people were beginning to agree with him. I looked at Roxanne and saw she was looking up at me. Her eyes were filled with tears.
“Maybe” – I was still thinking hard as I spoke – “if you kept him, you know, just for a while. It wouldn’t cost much: some waste milk and an old shed somewhere. And just suppose” – I was talking directly to the old man now – “just suppose you made ‘bear’ labels for your honey jars – you could call it ‘Bruno’s Honey’. Everyone would hear about it. They’d come from miles around, have a little look at the bear and then buy your honey. You’d make a fortune, I’m sure of it.”
I’d said the right thing. Roxanne’s grandfather had his beehives all over the mountainside, and everyone knew that he couldn’t sell even half the honey he collected. He nodded slowly as the sense of it dawned on him. “All right,” he said. “We’ll try it. Just for a while, mind.”
Germany invaded France on 10 May 1940. A little over a month later, Maréchal Pétain, the new prime minister of France, asked for surrender terms. The armistice, signed on 22 June 1940, split France in two. The north and west of France, including the Channel and Atlantic ports, were to be under German occupation. The rest of France – “Vichy France” – was “free” to be governed by the French.
Charles de Gaulle, an officer in the tank corps in the French Army, refused to surrender. He fled to England, from where, on the eve of the French surrender, he broadcast a radio message to the French people. This historic speech gave hope to many who disagreed with Maréchal Pétain, and helped to start the Resistance movement, with people fighting secretly to do anything possible to obstruct the Germans and support the British.
At first, resistance was patchy and disorganized. People escaped into the country and the mountains, joining the “Maquis”, groups of Resistance fighters in remote areas. (The word maquis is from the Corsican for “bush”, evoking an image of woods and mountains.) French Resistance fighters blew up bridges, derailed trains, collected information for the British, kidnapped and killed German officers. As the war progressed Resistance groups grew more organized and effective, but many fighters were captured, tortured and shot, or sent to concentration camps.
The Nazis followed a policy of “collective punishment” or civilian “reprisals” for any resistance actions across occupied Europe. On 10 June 1944, following the kidnapping of a German officer by the French Resistance, a Nazi Panzer (armoured tank) division rolled into the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. There was no evidence that Oradour locals had been involved in the kidnapping or the Resistance movement, but that day, 642 men, women and children were murdered. Nazi troops herded the men of the village into a barn and shot them before the building was set ablaze. Women and children were locked inside the church while the village was looted. Soldiers then set off an incendiary device in the church, trapping them in the flames. Finally the rest of the village was destroyed. The ruins can still be seen today.
Many French people chose a non-violent, but equally dangerous, form of resistance to Nazi occupation: they helped people escape from German-occupied Europe. At first these were British soldiers cut off from their units during the evacuation of Dunkirk, escaped prisoners of war, shot-down airmen. As the Allies intensified their bombing campaign from 1941, more and more Allied airmen were shot down. Helped by Resistance networks, many of them were escorted out of France and guided over the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. The “Comet” network, involving some 2,000 Resistance members, helped 700 Allied servicemen into Spain, hiding them, feeding them and providing them with forged identity cards and money. But it came at a price: 800 Comet members were arrested, and 140 were executed.
Meanwhile, other escapees included French civilians trying to avoid forced labour in Germany, and victims of discrimination of all kinds – foreigners, anyone who had been denounced to the authorities, and Jews. Vichy France was the only place in Europe without a German military presence that nevertheless voluntarily cooperated in the rounding-up and deportation of Jews, a cause for guilt in France to this day.
Many of these escapees braved the hazardous trip across the mountains of the Pyrenees. The Pyrenees, with their steep and treacherous paths, were hostile and well guarded, a formidable challenge, especially in winter and in the dark. Hundreds of the escapees were already malnourished and exhausted after weeks on the run hiding in barns and attics.
However, even after reaching Spain, escapees were not necessarily safe. Spain was technically neutral in the war, although ideologically leaning towards Germany. Those who were captured by Spanish frontier guards were returned and handed over to the German authorities. Nevertheless, particularly in the early part of the war, Spain allowed a large number of Jewish refugees to cross Spain on their way to Portugal. Later, German pressure reduced the number of Jews admitted entry into Spain.
Many French Jews decided not to escape through the mountains, but joined the Resistance movement themselves. Jews in France constituted only 1 per cent of the French population, but they comprised over 15 per cent of the Resistance.
It is thought that the efforts of Resistance networks helped around 33,000 men, women and children to escape successfully along the entire length of the Pyrenees. As one escapee, Jean Souque, said, “You never really know what freedom is until you’ve lost it.”
