November, 1940. London
Catriona shivered on the hard wooden bench in the tube station, surrounded by terrified and traumatised Londoners. The pounding of the bombs dropping above them was grating on everyone’s already frayed nerves.
She and her father had barely moved into their house in Holborn before the bombing started. For so long everyone had been calling it the Phoney War, but Hitler had only been biding his time. Since the seventh of September, the city had been bombarded. The wail of the air raid sirens, the ominous humming of the German planes, the fire and ambulance bells, they never seemed to stop. The daytime attack of the fifteenth of September had been especially terrifying, but after that, Hitler seemed to restrict the air raids to the hours of darkness.
Kieran McCarthy had made his daughter promise that she’d take shelter in Chancery Lane tube station every time the air raid sirens sounded – even if he wasn’t there to make her. And of course, he never was there. She had dreamed of taking such good care of him in London, greeting him at the door every night, serving him the beautiful French cuisine she had learnt to cook at the convent. Instead, she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of nights he’d actually slept in the house she’d found for them.
Even now, he was in America. He’d left in the third week of September, to tour America lecturing about his experiences in Nazi-controlled Europe and urging them to join the war. She was glad he’d gone somewhere safe this time, but she still missed him horribly, and worried for his health. Before he’d left, she’d noticed his articles – so outspoken about the Nazi regime – had become less frequent, and he’d seemed increasingly stressed and harassed. Perhaps he was worried that newspapers no longer wanted his copy.
She herself was now working in the offices of the Daily Express on Lower Thames Street, as a junior copy editor. She longed to be a famous reporter like her father and would have liked him to get her a start higher up the ladder, but he’d only said that he had ‘started sweeping the floor of the Irish Press in Dublin and worked my way up, and if you want it badly enough, you’ll do the same.’
So she made tea, ran errands and occasionally got to proofread the classifieds where people sold furniture or looked for lost pets. Everyone was preoccupied, and she didn’t make any friends. She was the youngest by many years and she was one of only three women – the other two being a pair of sisters that worked in accounts and merely nodded at her whenever she saw them.
It seemed so pointless, being here in London all by herself without her father. He’d warned her that she wouldn’t like it, and he was right. Most of the time she was cold and hungry – and, above all, lonely. Her English friend, Margot, was busy with war work, and besides she lived on the other side of the city. Her other best friend from school, Trudi, had stopped writing to her some time ago. Trudi’s father was high up in the Nazi Party, and had told her that Kieran McCarthy was insulting the Führer with his lies. In her final letter, Trudi wrote that she was embarrassed that she and Catriona had ever been friends. The rejection hurt Catriona a lot, but there was nothing she could do about it.
Dust and plaster fell from the ceiling of the station as another huge bomb dropped overhead. The Central line was closest to her but it was the least deep of all the lines, so it felt the impact of the tonnes of incendiaries the most. She thought longingly of her bed. She had been taking a bath in the regulation five inches of water when the siren started. She had dragged on her nightie and dressing gown, pushing her feet into her shoes and run for the station. She tried to sleep, but the bench was hard and besides, she didn’t want to keel over on the teenage boy sitting miserably beside her. The raid went on and on, hour after miserable hour as the people waited, until eventually the bombs grew fewer and fewer and then there was silence. The all-clear was sounded and wearily she dragged her aching body up the steps.
The city was burning. All around her, Londoners were emerging from shelters and tube stations to find their homes in flames, shops destroyed, roads decimated. Today seemed particularly bad. People milled about, picking their way through the rubble, some glassy-eyed and exhausted, others distraught as they searched for loved ones. Last May, Prime Minister Chamberlain had stood aside and been replaced by Winston Churchill and now Churchill’s promise of blood, toil, tears and sweat was certainly being realised.
Catriona trudged home past the smoking bomb sites. She wondered if this raid would be on the front page of the Daily Express today. The reporters wrote endless copy on the brutish behaviour of Hitler and his Nazis, but they were scant in the detail of London bombings, passing it off as much less catastrophic than it actually was. Morale was bad enough and anyway, they didn’t want Hitler to think they’d been cowed.
As Catriona made her way back to her own street, flames, smoke, the smell of smouldering materials filled the air. A water hydrant had been hit and some ARP wardens were trying to fix it as she skirted around the spray. At least their house was still standing. The terraced redbrick had its windows taped and the downstairs window had cracked but remained in place. She’d try to patch it up with more tape after work.
She let herself in and turned on the gas heater to take the sting of cold out of the air. The tea caddy stood beside the empty bread bin and she groaned when she discovered there was less than a teaspoon of tea left. The rations were never enough, even when Kieran was away and she had double. She spooned the precious leaves into a cup and put the kettle on the gas ring, which miraculously still worked.
While waiting for it to boil, she went upstairs to dress for work, trying to ignore her lovely warm bed. She would give anything to crawl under the covers and sleep but that kind of behaviour didn’t win the war. As she peeled off her filthy dressing gown and nightie, black with smuts and fumes, the hem soaked because she couldn’t avoid the puddles, she heard a knock on the door downstairs. Probably one of the neighbours checking up on her. They knew she was alone, and they were very kind. Something about war made people more considerate for each other, she’d found.
She popped her head out of the upstairs window but she didn’t recognise the man in the hat and coat below. ‘Hello?’ she called down.
He looked up and took a step back to see her better. ‘Catriona McCarthy?’ He appeared to be in his fifties, short and heavy and he had a French regional accent which sounded familiar but which she couldn’t quite place.
‘Yes, look, hang on a tick, I’ll come down.’ She pulled a dress over her head, slipped her feet back into shoes, and went down to open the door, stepping outside rather than inviting him in. She didn't want to be rude, but something about this stranger made her uneasy. She held the front door half-shut behind her.
‘I’m Catriona McCarthy, can I help you?’
‘May I come in? I have a question for you.’ His eyes showed no expression and her feeling of unease grew stronger.
‘I’d rather you just asked me here, in the street.’
He hesitated, and then said, in his accented English, ‘I wish to know, do you know where your father is?’
Catriona nearly ran back into the house and slammed the door. She knew her father had enemies all over Europe – but here, in London? Maybe one of Hitler’s henchmen had tracked him down...
As if sensing she was about to flee, the man caught her wrist and whispered, ‘Mademoiselle, c’est très important, il faut que je vous parlez. Je suis un ami personnel de Gaston.’
Catriona stifled her panic. Now he’d told her where he was from, she realised it was true: he definitely had the accent of Saint-Émilion. But why would her mother’s brother Gaston, of all people, send a strange man to enquire about her father? Due to her grandparents’ distaste for their daughter’s husband, the two men had barely met.
‘Comment connaissez-vous mon oncle?’ she asked, suspiciously. How do you know my uncle?
He glanced surreptitiously around, still holding her arm. ‘Nous travaillons ensemble.’
That wasn’t good enough. Gaston was the vineyard owner now, since Mémé and Pépé had retired to a manoir on the estate. He was the boss. People worked for him, not with him. Still though, something stopped her from screaming out loud for help.
‘What is his son called?’ she asked quickly, in English, shaking off the man’s hand.
He answered promptly, ‘Loic.’
‘And which is his best vintage?’
The man smiled. ‘The ’37 of course. He keeps twelve full cases in the back of the deep cellar behind the water tank under the lilac tree. My family have a vineyard in the same Department as yours, though I am a professor of Greek at the University of Bordeaux. You do not need to be afraid of me, Mademoiselle Catriona. I do not plan to harm you or your father. I wish merely to ask …’
‘Which vineyard is your family’s?’ she interrupted. She wasn’t going to give away anything, not until she was sure.
‘Chateau de Riseau. It has a black railing all around and an ornamental pond in the front with... how do you say it… le martin pêcheur…’
‘A kingfisher!’ she cried, in amazement.
‘Yes, yes, a kingfisher. I recall you fell in that pond when you were a child.’
She was smiling now. ‘My cousin Loic was chasing me and I tripped.’ Still very surprised, but now sure this man was telling her the truth, she opened the door and allowed him to pass by her into the house. In the kitchen, the kettle was boiling and she switched off the ring: if anyone saw her wasting gas like that, she’d be in trouble. ‘Would you like tea, Monsieur…?’
‘Jean-Claude de Riseau.’ He had removed his hat; he was nondescript looking, with slightly thinning sandy hair and a prominent nose. She began to think there was something vaguely familiar about him. Even the name rang a distant bell.
‘Tea, Monsieur de Riseau?’ she asked again.
‘Non, Mademoiselle.’ Then he corrected himself: ‘I am sorry, no thank you.’
‘We can talk in French, if you prefer.’
‘No, I must practise, I studied here, at Oxford and I graduated in 1925 but I forget much of what I learned. It will return but I must speak it. After all, ostensibly I am here to connect with an old colleague for a book I’ve been working on.’
‘The Germans let you travel?’
‘Nobody suspects an old teacher, and the German officer running our area is not the worst. Because we are in the unoccupied zone, I think allowing me to travel was a gesture at trying to convince us nothing has changed, but of course everything has been altered so drastically. Though that is not the real reason I am here… May I?’ He gestured to a kitchen chair.
‘Of course, but come into the sitting room, it’s more comfortable.’
Leaving the tea, she led him into the large room at the front of the house and sat on the sofa while Jean-Claude took the fireside seat, perched on the edge of it with his hat in his hands, his brow furrowed.
‘So Mademoiselle Catriona,’ he said, ‘I have been sent to you by your uncle Gaston to ask where is Kieran McCarthy.’
She shook her head, puzzled. ‘Why does Gaston want to know my father’s whereabouts? They’ve barely ever spoken to each other.’
‘Let me explain. Some time ago, your father was badly beaten by the SS and barely escaped with his life…’
Catriona jerked upright in her seat, horrified. She remembered well her father’s story about an angry husband. How stupid she’d been to believe him! ‘He didn't tell me…’
He inclined his head. ‘Of course not. He wouldn’t have wanted you to worry. But that is what happened, and when he escaped, he made his way to the Chateau Saint-Émilion to hide while his wounds healed. Your uncle was happy to help your father for your sake, Catriona – even though hiding a wanted man from the Nazis was dangerous. The two of them talked a great deal about Hitler and the occupation and realised they were true brothers, not just reluctant brothers-in-law. Gaston was adamant that if the French only knew what was being done in their name, by Maréchal Pétain and the rest of the treacherous puppets we have to call our government, they would do more to resist the Nazis. And so Kieran decided to use his journalistic skills to...’
‘To help the Resistance?’ She felt her stomach churn in fear.
‘Exactly. Only in September he was at Dakar in French West Africa where the Free French were trying, with the British, to attempt to land…’
Her heart missed a beat, ‘No, you're wrong – he’s been in America since the third week of September!’
He shook his head. ‘No. He has been in Africa and France. The navy, under orders of the Vichy traitors, opened fire, and the expedition was called back. So your father wrote a pamphlet about the attempted landing, and the Vichy response of bombing Gibraltar, and I got it printed at the university, and we distributed it…’
‘Oh!’ The danger took Catriona’s breath away, and her stomach churned in fear for Kieran.
Jean-Claude nodded gravely. ‘And he had other projects planned. A few weeks ago, he heard Hitler was meeting Pétain in Montoire to make sure Vichy was in line with the Nazi regime. Your father had seen what that meant in real terms in Germany and he was determined to let the French know the reality of what they faced if they didn’t resist. But now nobody has seen him or heard from him in over a fortnight. And if he hasn't turned up here in London…’ He stopped, staring down at the carpet.
Catriona stood up, her heart hammering. ‘Please tell me what you mean, Monsieur.’
‘I mean, we fear he’s been… betrayed.’
Catriona heard the words, but it was as if they had come from far away – underwater almost. Her father was all she had. Kieran had talked of the fate of those who went against the Nazis and were caught, yet somehow she never believed he would come to any harm. He was a daredevil, he took chances, his stories were often hair-raising and hilarious in equal measure, but he always got out. She said wildly, ‘So at least he’s not dead? He’s still alive, in prison – or they might have let him go and he’s disappeared to stay safe?’
Pity and sadness warmed his brown eyes. ‘Catriona, I do not want to give you false hope.’
She collapsed on the sofa, and Jean-Claude came and sat beside her. He put his arm around her and she allowed her head to lie on his shoulder, but no tears came. She was frozen.
After what seemed like a long time, she felt strong enough to stand up. ‘Thank you, Jean-Claude, for coming over to tell me. It means a lot. That was a hard job.’ She could barely get the words out of her mouth. She wanted to be alone and he seemed to sense that. He stood up and gently placed both hands on her shoulders, kissing her on both cheeks.
‘Merci, Mademoiselle Catriona. You may have an Irish accent and an Irish passport but, vous etes une franҫaise fidèle. I wish I could take you home, to be with your family. But France, I am sad to say, is no place for anyone now. Here, Hitler’s bombs rain down, but you live as free people. Cherish it and repel them when they come.’
He saw himself out.
After he left, she crossed the room to the fireplace. On the mantelpiece was the photo of her and her father, taken on a day trip to Brighton. She picked it up and looked at his handsome, smiling face.
‘Don’t leave me, Kieran, I need you,’ she whispered, and only then did she allow her tears to fall.