Escape by Moonlight

Elizabeth propped her bicycle against the barn door and stood a moment to watch a buzzard circling above the meadows, searching for prey. She saw it plummet to earth and then rise clutching something in its talons before it flew off towards the line of trees higher up the slopes. She loved this little farm in the foothills of the Haute Savoie, home of her maternal grandparents. To her it was a place of holidays, a place where she was free to wander about the paths and meadows, to enjoy the shade of the woods, to cycle along its narrow paths, swim in the lakes, ice-cold though they were, and come back to huge delicious meals, cooked by Grandmère. In the summer everywhere was lush and green, the meadows where Grandpère’s cattle and goats grazed were dotted with wild flowers. Higher up, above the forest, the peaks of the Alps poked upwards, bare rock in summer, covered in snow in winter.

The summer would come to an end soon, though it was taking its time this year, and she would go home to make
up her mind what she was going to do with her life. Would Max ask her to marry him? Would she say yes? She was not altogether sure. She loved him, but was she ready to settle down to domestic life as the wife of a regular soldier? Wouldn’t she rather have her own career, do something useful, learn to live a little first? And if there was a war, what then? Max had said war was inevitable, even after Chamberlain came back from Munich waving that piece of paper which he said meant ‘peace in our time’. All it did, according to Max, was give the country time to step up its armaments, build more ships, aeroplanes and tanks, and train more troops in readiness. Would there be work for her to do in that event? After all, in the last war, women had done all sorts of jobs normally done by men, and done them well too.

Scattering the farmyard chickens, she turned towards the house. It was a squat two-storey building, half brick, half timber, with a steeply pitched, overhanging roof so the snow would run off it in winter. It was surrounded by a farmyard but there were a few flowers in a patch of garden on the roadside, and pelargoniums tumbled in profusion from its window boxes. It was not large, but roomy enough for her grandparents to have brought up three children: Pierre, who lived a few kilometres to the west of Annecy and had his own small vineyard; Annelise, Elizabeth’s mother; and Justine, who had been born when her mother was in her forties and was only nine years older than Elizabeth. She taught at a school in Paris.

The kitchen was the largest room and the warmest – too warm in summer because the cooking and heating of water was done on an open range. A large table, flanked by two benches, stood in the middle of it covered with a red check
cloth. It was laid with cutlery and dishes taken from the dresser that filled almost the whole of one wall. Grandmère, her face red from the fire, was standing at the range stirring something in a blackened pot that smelt delicious. She was a roly-poly of a woman, dressed in a long black skirt, a yellow blouse and a big white apron. Her long grey hair was pulled back into a bun.

‘Where’s Papie?’ Elizabeth asked. Brought up by a French mother who had brought her and her siblings to visit her parents frequently as they grew up, she was completely bilingual.

‘He went into Annecy to see the butcher. The old cow is past milking and will have to be slaughtered. He said he would be back in time for dinner.’ To Marie Clavier the midday meal was always dinner, the evening meal supper.

Elizabeth busied herself fetching out the big round home-made loaf, glasses and wine in a jug which she put ready on the table. ‘I saw a buzzard dive for a mouse just now. It always amazes me that they can see such a tiny creature from so high up.’

Her grandmother laughed. ‘What is it they say, “eyes like a hawk”?’

They heard the noisy splutter of the ancient van her grandfather used to drive into town and two minutes later he came into the kitchen, followed by his black and white mongrel. ‘It’s all arranged,’ he said, sitting in his rocking chair by the hearth to remove his boots. He wasn’t a big man, but had a wiry strength that years of working a farm single-handed had bred in him. He had thin gingery hair and an untidy beard streaked with grey. ‘Alphonse Montbaun will come for the cow at the end of the week. He’ll cut it up and keep it in his deep freeze for us.’

‘Will you buy another?’ Elizabeth asked him. She had become inured to the idea of eating cattle she had seen munching grass on the slopes. Grandpère had called her soft when, as a small girl on her first visit, she had recoiled at the idea.

‘I think I’ll get a couple of heifers and introduce them to Alphonse’s bull.’ He came to the table and sat in an armchair at its head while his wife ladled the soup into bowls. ‘When are you going home, young lady?’ he asked.

Elizabeth laughed. ‘Do you want to be rid of me, Papie?’

‘You know I don’t, but the rumours are flying. The German army is gathering on the Polish border and this time it won’t be like Czechoslovakia; there’ll be no appeasement. You’ll be safer, at home.’

‘
Sacredieu!
’ the old lady said, crossing herself. ‘You are never suggesting we are not safe here?’

‘I don’t know, do I? But we haven’t got an English Channel between us and the Boche.’

‘We’ve got the Maginot Line.’

‘A fat lot of good that will do against aeroplanes and bombs.’

‘Albert, you are frightening me. It was bad enough last time, I don’t want to go through that again.’

‘Perhaps you won’t have to. If they come, our armies will drive them back again. That nice young man who came to stay earlier in the summer will see to that.’ The ‘nice young man’ was Captain Max Coburn who had come to share a few days of his leave with Elizabeth. He had charmed her grandparents with his old-fashioned manners, his smart uniform, his blue eyes, golden hair and neatly clipped moustache. It had been a glorious few days; the weather had been perfect and she had taken him all round
her favourite haunts: the glittering ice-cold lakes, the little hamlets with their agile goats and the canyon at the Devil’s Bridge Gorge, not to mention the breathtaking scenery with Mont Blanc crowning it all. Not until his last day had either of them mentioned war.

‘It’s going to come, Liz,’ he had said. ‘Hitler will not be satisfied with Czechoslovakia; he wants the Danzig corridor and he’ll go for Poland next. Britain and France will have to honour their commitment to help. Don’t stay here too long.’

‘Oh, Max, you can’t think the Germans will come here, surely?’

‘I don’t know, but I would rather you were safe at home in England.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ll go where I’m sent.’

‘I hope you’re wrong. I couldn’t bear to think of you in the middle of the fighting and Papie and Mamie put in fear of their lives. They remember the last war so vividly. Perhaps I should try and persuade them to come home with me.’

‘Yes, do that. I’m sure your parents would approve.’

‘Mama has tried to get them to come to Nayton many times over the years but Papie would never leave the farm. He always said he wouldn’t trust anyone else to look after his livestock: cows, goats, chickens and his beloved dog. And I think he is a little in awe of Papa, though he would never admit it.’

‘Surely not? Lord de Lacey is the mildest of men and he adores your mother.’ Her paternal grandfather had died when she was small and her father had inherited the baronetcy and Nayton Manor, her Norfolk home.

‘I know.’

Everyone in the family knew how her father had met her mother; it was a tale Papa loved to tell. Already a widower, though childless, he had been a major in the British army in the Great War and had been taken prisoner and shipped off to Germany. He had jumped from the train on the way and made his escape. Annelise, who was working in the hospital at Châlons at the time to be near Jacques, her soldier fiancé, had found him wounded, hungry and thirsty in a ditch, too weak to move. She had fetched help and he had been carried on a stretcher to the hospital where she continued to look after him until he was strong enough to return to duty. He had not forgotten her and when the war ended in November 1918, went to see her at her home in Dransville before going back to England. By then she had a small son, Jacques, whose father had been killed in the fighting.

They had fallen in love and, defying the conventions of the aristocracy and the ill-concealed disapproval of Papa’s friends, were married in March 1919. He had adopted Jacques. Nine months later Elizabeth had been born, then Amy in August 1921, and finally young Edmund in 1927.

‘I hope you are wrong. I hope you are all wrong,’ she had told Max. ‘I can’t bear the thought of people being killed and maimed. Why can’t governments settle their differences without going to war?’

He had no answer to that and the following day had left to rejoin his regiment, but he left her wondering about her grandparents. Would they come to England with her? ‘My Channel crossing is booked for the ninth of September,’ she told them as they ate their soup. ‘I don’t see any need to go before that.’

‘Good, then we will have you for a little longer,’ her grandmother said.

‘I love being here, you know that, don’t you? If I could, I’d live here all the time, except that I should miss Mama and Papa.’

‘Of course you would. We love to have you, but they will want you home.’

‘Come with me.’

‘Me?’

‘Both of you. Uncle Pierre will look after the farm for you.’

‘He’s got his own home and the vineyard to see to,’ her grandfather put in. ‘And what would I do in England? I can’t even speak the language.’

‘You would soon learn and I’m sure you would find something to do. There is a farm on the estate.’

‘Do you think I’d want to work like a labourer on someone else’s property?’ He was indignant. ‘I’ve always had my own farm, handed down to me by my father. I won’t leave that.’

‘It was only an idea. If there’s a war …’

‘If there’s a war, we’ll carry on as we did before. It can’t last. In any case, who’d want to trouble us here? We’ve got nothing.’

Alphonse Montbaun fetched the cow on the day the German army swept into Poland. The poor beast, aware that something dreadful was about to happen to her, was not at all keen to go into the truck Alphonse had brought to convey her to the slaughterhouse and it took a great deal of coaxing, pushing and pulling to get her into it. Her lowing struck at Elizabeth’s heart and she wished it didn’t have to happen. The cow was not the only one to
be filled with dread of the future; everyone in the village, all of France, indeed the whole world, was in turmoil. And Elizabeth received a telegram from her father. ‘Come home at once,’ it said.

Nayton Halt was a typical country station which served the Norfolk village of Nayton and the estate of Lord de Lacey. It had an up line and a down line, two platforms, a waiting room, a ticket office and a house for the stationmaster. On the other side of the crossing gates was a signal box and a few yards beyond that a siding which had been used in the early days of the railways to transport goods from the estate to the main line. Now it was unused and overgrown.

‘Lucy, the bell!’ Her father always seemed to think it necessary to remind her of her duty as if she hadn’t been doing the job ever since she was big enough and strong enough to manage the levers which held the gates open or closed.

‘I heard it.’ Lucy, who had been weeding the flower beds alongside the platform, took off her gardening gloves, threw them down on the border and went to shut the gates against the traffic on the lane just as a gig came bowling up.

Dressed in an impeccably cut country suit of houndstooth check cloth, the young man driving it was a toff, but a very pleasant toff in Lucy’s eyes. He was tall and muscular without being heavy and had the unusual combination of curly fair hair and deep brown eyes. His mouth was firm and usually smiling. Or was it only when he encountered Lucy?

‘Good afternoon, Lucy,’ he called as he drew the horse to a stop in front of the closed gate. ‘Beautiful day.’

‘Yes, sir, it is.’

‘Sir?’ he queried with an amused smile which made her blush to the roots of her hair. ‘How long have we known each other?’

‘Twelve years, I suppose, considering it is that long since Pa first came here as stationmaster.’ Stationmaster was a euphemism because he was also the porter, ticket collector and general dogsbody.

‘Then why the formality?’

She was flustered. She always was when he was anywhere near and especially if he was looking at her like that, as if he could see right through the plain black skirt and flowered blouse she wore, right inside her, to the muscle and bone and the warm blood coursing through her veins and growing warmer under his scrutiny. She should not have feelings for this man; he was Lord de Lacey’s son and lived at the big house and she was a stationmaster’s daughter who lived in a two-up two-down beside the line, with its workaday kitchen, simply furnished parlour and narrow twisting stairs to its two bedrooms, all of which she was quite sure would fit easily into the smallest room at the Manor. It wasn’t that she was cowed; she was simply overcome by an intense emotion she could not control. ‘Mr de Lacey,’ she said. ‘I am on duty.’

‘So you are.’ He got down from the gig and walked to the gate, putting his hand on the top so close to hers it was almost touching. The contrast between that beautifully manicured hand and the workaday one with its nails ingrained with soil was marked and Lucy hastily took hers away. ‘And so am I.’

‘You? What duty do you have?’

‘I have to meet my sister, Amy, off the train.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ She was dismissive.

‘All? Why, my dear, it is a very onerous task, the horse has to be groomed and harnessed to the gig …’

‘Which, I am quite sure, you do not do yourself.’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But I have to see that it is done. Then I have to change out of my riding clothes into something more fitting for driving and escorting a lady, put on a tie and comb my hair and remember to bring a parasol, for the sun is warm today and Amy is bound to have forgotten hers …’

‘As you say, very onerous,’ she said, knowing he was teasing her. ‘But you could have sent Mr Bennett with the motor.’