Henderson's Boys: The Escape (9 page)

The people were the same desperate souls that Marc had seen on the road. The more he saw of them, the more he realised that they were dregs. The lucky few who owned cars, those with decent carts and even those who were simply healthy enough to maintain a good walking pace had passed through days earlier.

Only the truly desperate washed up at Beauvais station hoping for a train. Many were elderly and those that weren’t tended to be women with young children – sometimes as many as four or five spread around exhausted mothers like litters of pigs. Their men were either dead, fighting at the front, or imprisoned by the Germans.

Some people waited hopefully on the station platform, staring down the tracks as though the very act of looking might make the train come sooner. The ticket office was tiny so most sat in the street outside. Everyone was dirty and everywhere Marc looked he saw feet covered in vile scabs and blisters.

There was no queue at the ticket office, but the teenaged ticket officer had the weariness of someone who knew exactly what he was going to be asked.

‘There are three trains up the line to the north,’ the youth explained, as he whirled his cap around on his index finger. ‘I can sell you a ticket, but I can’t say if a train will come tonight, tomorrow or any other time. And when it does come I can’t say if it will stop, or if there will be space to board. The last train was three hours back. It was packed with injured troops and the driver didn’t stop.’

Marc nodded solemnly. ‘When will you know if a train is coming?’

‘All our telephones to the north are down. The stationmaster gets an automatic warning when a train reaches the water tower just up the line, but you’ll most likely have heard it coming by then anyway.’

Marc had led a sheltered life. He’d always imagined trains as huge invulnerable beasts. It hadn’t occurred to him that one bomb-damaged rail was all it took to bring a hundred kilometres of track to a standstill. He was visibly upset and the teenager took pity.

‘Are you alone?’ the lad asked.

Marc nodded. He thought about justifying himself by making up a background story about how his mother had been killed, but with regular bombings and streams of refugees on the road a twelve year old travelling alone was nothing out of the ordinary.

‘Is your bike any good?’

‘Fine,’ Marc said.

The young ticket officer smiled. ‘Why don’t you ride? Paris is less than sixty kilometres. If you set off now and keep a steady pace you’ll reach the outskirts by morning.’

Marc looked uncertain. ‘I have money. Is there a place in town I could rest? Then I could set off once it gets light.’

‘Your choice.’ The ticket collector shrugged. ‘But the German air force is targeting the main roads. They’re less active at night and you can take cover more easily if they do come at you.’

It was ten o’clock and Marc would normally be in bed by now, but after the craziest day of his life he reckoned he’d be unlikely to sleep even if he tried.

‘Is it easy?’ Marc asked. ‘I mean, I won’t get lost or anything?’

‘It’s Paris, for the lord’s sake,’ the ticket officer said, smirking. ‘The road leads straight there. You just ride back down towards the river and turn right. Within a few minutes you’ll come to the edge of town and a three-way fork. You take the middle road. There’s no mistaking it because it’s wider than the others. Then it’s basically a straight ride all the way to Paris.’

‘Great.’ Marc smiled. ‘Thanks so much for your help.’

Marc wheeled the bike away from the ticket counter and headed back to the street. He was daunted by the prospect of such a long ride, but as he looked at the pitiful humans around the station he realised that with money, a bike and decent health on his side he was much better off than any of them.

He was touched by pity as he pedalled away, but he also drew satisfaction from the sense that he wasn’t on the bottom of the pile. It took a painful twinge from his thigh to prick this bubble. His leg had been OK on the journey from the orphanage, but he wondered anxiously if it would stand an all-night ride.

After clearing the station, Marc decided to buy something to drink. No shops were open this late, so he took a left and headed back towards the cafés.

There seemed to be little difference between one café and another, so Marc stopped at the first and wheeled his bike towards the entrance. The circular tables outside were packed tight and while a couple of ladies pulled in their chairs to let him between the first set, a man sitting with his boots on the next table tutted and shooed him away with his hand.

Marc was perturbed, but he was spotted by a waitress holding a tray of beers and she came over to ask what he wanted.

‘Just some water for a journey,’ he explained, as he pulled out a ten-franc note. ‘I’m cycling to Paris.’

The waitress told him to wait and after dropping off the beers she came back holding a large mineral water bottle with a screw-on cap.

‘How much?’ Marc asked, as he realised that another of his weaknesses was that he had little idea of what things cost.

‘It’s on the house for a sweet boy like you,’ the waitress said warmly.

As Marc took the cool bottle and smiled gratefully a great roar of laughter went up from the table beside him.

‘He’s a bit young for one of your toy boys, Sabine,’ a drunken man jeered.

‘Would you fancy a roll in the sack with her, kid?’ his companion teased, as he reached out and grabbed the attractive waitress’s bum.

‘Thank you, miss,’ Marc said, trying to ignore the remarks.

‘Leave him be,’ Sabine said, as she cuffed one of the drunks around the head. ‘You’re embarrassing the poor kid.’

The laughter dried up as an orange flash erupted in the distance, followed by three thumps that set ripples through the glasses of beer on the table.

‘Bloody hell,’ the waitress said, as she looked over her shoulder towards the light. ‘Sounded more like artillery that time.’ Then she looked at Marc again. ‘You ride safe, OK? And say hello to Paris for me.’

‘Thank you,’ Marc said for what felt like at least the sixth time, as he pulled open the draw-string of his bag and placed the bottle inside, nestled between a cloth and his dirty shorts so that it didn’t break.

After backing the bike out, he gave a quick wave as he pedalled off. When he turned to face the road he noticed a soldier just a few metres ahead.

‘Coming through,’ Marc shouted, swerving to avoid the scruffy figure. His chest was bare beneath a muddy army jacket and Marc guessed he was drunk.

But as Marc pedalled by the soldier kicked out. The bike clattered over and Marc’s knee banged hard on the stone as the soldier pounced on top and slapped him across the mouth.

‘Stay down,’ the soldier ordered, shaking his fist in Marc’s face as he ripped the bike away.

Marc was less than twenty metres from the café and the waitress and the two men who’d teased him came running. But by the time they arrived the soldier was pedalling off into the night.

‘Are you all right, son?’ one of the men asked, as he gave Marc a hand up.

He’d taken a nasty blow in the mouth and gasped with pain when he put weight on his knee.

‘Damn nice bike that, too,’ the other drunk noted, as he picked Marc’s bag off the ground.

Marc tried not to cry as they helped him hobble towards the café, but he already had a tear streaking down his cheek.

‘Looks like a nasty cut,’ the waitress said. ‘Better bring him inside and I’ll clean it up.’

The first stretch out of Paris was a crawl, but the hard work really started when the Citroën joined up with the main road heading south. Mr Clarke had hoped to travel 120 kilometres to Orléans and then stop overnight with an old friend who was a buyer at the town’s department store.

Clarke had the advantage of a car, and the thousands of kilometres he’d driven as a salesman for Imperial Wireless had left him with excellent knowledge of France’s back roads. But the refugees formed an impenetrable mass of slow-moving carts and bodies. Driving through them was agonising – constantly stopping and starting, rarely managing to break out of first gear and, in spots where the road narrowed, the car was actually a disadvantage. A blast of the horn achieved nothing and he had to use the car to physically push people aside. This was easily overdone and arguments regularly flared between drivers and foot-sloggers.

The Citroën suffered small attacks – from people pounding it with fists and boots or scratching the paint with keys. In one instance a man whose daughter suffered a painful knock from the front bumper ripped off a door mirror. Fearing that he would smash a window next, Clarke placed a hand on the gun he’d seized from the German, but luckily the man hurled the mirror into a hedge and backed off in a volley of foul language.

Paul knew he was in the midst of something extraordinary. He grabbed a pad from his satchel and made quick sketches of refugees, overloaded carts and bombed cottages. Alarmingly, he kept seeing cars similar to their own that had succumbed to slow driving and warm weather and blown their radiators.

While Paul withdrew into himself Rosie did the opposite, and constantly expressed pity as she gave a running commentary on some of the more pathetic refugees. There were people on crutches, people so old that they could barely walk; while the dead and unconscious littered the sides of the road. A few casualties were the result of air raids, but most had simply collapsed after walking hundreds of kilometres, laden with possessions.

‘Enough,’ Mr Clarke said finally, after his daughter noticed a British serviceman with his arm in a sling amidst the crowd. ‘I
can
see! I have eyes! I can’t think straight with your constant babbling.’

Rosie sulked, crossing her arms and staring directly ahead. After a few minutes of defiance she opened the door and got into the back beside Paul. When it started getting dark they pulled the curtains in the spacious rear compartment and arranged the luggage so that they could put their feet up. It wasn’t as comfortable as a proper bed, but they both got to sleep well enough.

Mr Clarke looked back at them and welled up with parental pride. Rosie usually gave her brother a hard time but they’d pulled together now, just like they’d done when their mother died a year earlier. Paul even slept with his cheek resting on his big sister’s shoulder.

Clarke himself was exhausted, but the roads were opening up as the refugees on foot made camp for the night and he didn’t want to miss the chance to make progress. After driving further between ten and eleven o’clock than he’d managed in the previous four hours, he reached into the leather pocket inside his door, pulled out a small tin filled with Benzedrine pills and popped two into his mouth. The drug was a staple of salesmen, truck drivers and anyone else who couldn’t afford to go to sleep.

*

At sunrise the Citroën formed part of a vast queue of vehicles waiting to cross a bridge into the town of Tours. Clarke was satisfied with his night’s work, having driven more than a hundred kilometres beyond his original target of Orléans and making almost half of the distance between Paris and Bordeaux, where he hoped to find a ship to England.

But the car didn’t budge for the next two hours. The kids woke up and while Paul dashed into the grass verge at the side of the road to urinate, Rosie played mother, dividing up stale bread, jam and left-over slices of a bacon joint for their breakfast.

‘What’s the hold-up?’ Mr Clarke said, leaning out of the car and addressing a lanky man who was walking along the verge from the front of the queue.

‘Looks like the army,’ he explained. ‘The Germans have bombed two of the bridges into town and the other one took a blast. There’s a military convoy waiting to cross over, so the engineers are trying to shore it up.’

‘Doesn’t sound too good,’ Mr Clarke said gravely. ‘Is it possible to get over on foot?’

The man nodded, and rustled a paper bag containing two loaves of bread. ‘People are walking across the railway bridge,’ he explained. ‘The centre of town isn’t far. There are a few cafés open. I was dead lucky. I got to the bakery just as it opened; less than a dozen people in the queue.’

Mr Clarke thanked the man again and looked around at the kids in the back. ‘Looks like we’re going to be stuck here for a good while. How about we wander into town? We might be able to get some decent food and if the post office is open I might even have another stab at calling Henderson.’

‘I thought he’d left the Embassy for good,’ Paul said.

‘I expect he has,’ Mr Clarke said, nodding. ‘But I’ve got his home number. There’s a chance I’ll catch him there.’

‘What about the car?’ Rosie asked. ‘Is it safe to leave our things here? What if the Germans catch up with us?’

‘We’re still in French territory,’ Mr Clarke said, as he got out and slammed his door. ‘Our things should be safe for half an hour if we lock all the doors. The Germans didn’t follow us out of Paris and their chances of finding us with so many people on the road are slim to nil.’

It was a glorious morning and although Tours had been bombed, the damage was light compared with the cities further north. What’s more, it had been some time since the last air raid and there was a noticeable absence of smoke or the smell of burning.