Ormerod's Landing (45 page)

'There's half a dozen krauts out there,' panted Ormerod. 'At the front.'

'They have a car at the back,' she said with stiff calm. She smartly opened another door and they ran down a wooden corridor towards daylight coming over the top of a fanlight window. The girl wrenched the door open and they were in the street. It was unnaturally quiet considering the shooting. A cat scratched itself in the middle of the cobbles and a child regarded them with only minor interest from a garden opposite. A German military car was standing against the building. With some strange feminine acknowledgement she tossed the keys she had taken from the desk at him. He caught them as he ran and then they both jumped into the vehicle.

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It started first time. Ormerod sent the cat scurrying away as he drove the car along the first stretch of street. He knew
where the hill was. A right-hand bend and then another left the
rising road before them. Marie-Thérèse turned and looked
back and down at the sunlit village. The footballers were gath
ered foolishly at the door of the police station. There was no one to give them orders. Otherwise the streets and the square were as quiet as the smoke that eased itself from the stone chimneys of the houses.

'Good, Dodo, it was beautiful,' said Marie-Thérèse squeezing his arm.

'Lucky,' he said. 'Bloody lucky. Another ten minutes and no
body could have got you.'

'You came like an English knight in armour,' she laughed.

'I still don't understand why you had to shoot the Frenchman,' said Ormerod after a week. He had waited for her to offer an excuse, with prompting, but she had said nothing. The matter seemed to have gone from her mind. Now she shrugged.

'He was a traitor. He was working with the Germans.'

'Didn't it occur to you that he had no choice? He's a policeman and a policeman has to obey orders and do what he's told. I know that only too well.'

She sniffed. 'So he was in the way. He would have given a
description.'

He did not believe that it was just that. She had wanted to shoot him. Ormerod lay on the grass beneath a horse-chestnut
tree laden with autumn spikes and rich red leaves, standing out like an explosion against a cool blue sky. Marie-Marie-Thérèse sat on the grass beside him. For seven days they had been hiding and on the run. They had escaped from the small area of Le Mesnil
des Champs as the Germans searched the surrounding fields, hills and hamlets.

They had carefully moved east from the immediate region and they were hiding in the modest forest of St Sever, a place of sharp little hills and dense trees. There was a winter hut for the woodman in an almost concealed valley and they had waited there for three days. Ormerod looked up at the trees and the sky. "When are we going to move?' he said. 'I'd like to

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get towards Bagnoles. Albert Smales may be dead by now. I'll have come all this way for nothing.'

She smiled wryly. 'You would really like to catch him, your Smales, would you not? You have one ambition. I have so many.'

"What
are
you proposing to do next, then?' he asked. 'You're in charge.'

'My orders have come from Paris. I received them at Mesnil just before the police took me in,' she said a trifle stiffly. 'It would not be good for both of us to know everything, but I will tell you that a man will come here. They call him by a code-name, Jean Le Blanc. He will be a great resistance leader. Perhaps it will take a year yet, but he is the one. I have great faith in him. He will put some iron into these people. He will make them resist.'

A bird flew high against the stainless sky and Ormerod followed it with his eye until it had cleared the horizon of the trees.

'Jean Le Blanc was the famous horse of the Perche region,' she said quietly. 'He was the stallion who was the father of the Percheron horses. This man comes from that region. That is why he has taken this name.'

'Have you ever played conkers?' asked Ormerod, gazing up into the trees.

'No. What is conkers?'

'Every English kid knows how to play conkers,' he said.

'I was a French kid, remember?'

'All right. Sorry. I'll show you.'

He stood up in his heavy way and walked down the slope from the tree. Many of the green, spiky horse-chestnut cases had fallen among the dying leaves down there. The interior of the husk was like white velvet. The horse-chestnuts shone as round and smooth as the finest wood. He bent and picked up two, rejected them and carefully selected another pair. 'They have to be exactly right,' he said.

When he turned up the incline again he saw she was smiling indulgently towards him. He returned the smile and went back to where she was sitting. 'We need some string,' he said. 'Or better still ... here ...' He sat down and began to remove the

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laces from his boots. At that moment two German armoured cars and two companies of troops in lorries were moving along the forest road, a mile away and several hundred feet above them.

Ormerod went into the hut, his now laceless boots flapping comically on his feet. He returned with a slim nail and made a central hole in each of the hard chestnuts. Marie-Thérèse watched him with tolerant amusement. The sun striking through the high trees touched her face and neck. The forest stirred. Above them the German soldiers left their trucks and began to move along the rutted hunting rides, the split sunlight making chevrons on their bodies as they advanced. Ormerod threaded the bootlaces through the pierced conkers and secured them with a tight knot at the end. He held them in his hands. 'Choose,' he invited. 'Take one.'

Marie-Thérèse picked one up and admired its warm gloss. 'It is a pity they cannot be eaten,' she said. 'They look very good to the appetite.'

'Eaten? Oh God, where's your soul?' he sighed. 'Conkers are for playing conkers. Hold it by the lace and I'll show you.' She did as he said, standing small and smiling while he took a pace away and considered the target. He drew back his conker on its string and aimed. He looked up and grinned at her. 'This takes me back, I can tell you,' he said. "Way back. I had a conker once at school - a hundred-and-oner. That means it had beaten a hundred and one conkers.'

'Conquered them,' she said, pleased with the joke.

'Very good. Right, ready...'

He drew the brown nut back and struck at her suspended conker. He missed, the lace becoming entangled with hers. 'Now your turn,' he said. 'Take it steady, aim carefully.'

Mare-Therese put her tongue between her teeth, her eyes narrowing. With great precision she drew back her conker and swung it quickly. It caught the target beautifully, with a clear crack, splitting it into four or five pieces which scattered to the earth. Ormerod stared at her, disconsolate.

'Beginner's luck,' he muttered.

'My killer instinct, as you say,' she smiled. Her eyes wandered for an instant and she saw the German soldiers moving

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against the treed skyline. 'Boche!' she hissed. 'Quick!'

Ormerod turned and saw them too. He swore. 'In the pipe,' he said. 'Get everything from the hut.'

She was already on her way. Running at a crouch through the trees, up the slope to the woodman's hut. He was right behind her. Fortunately there was little to collect, a haversack with some food, two tin mugs, and two small boxes of ammunition. They gathered them quickly. They had slept in their clothes on the two bare mattresses, part of the equipment of the hut, so there were no blankets to give them away.

Ormerod got to the door again first. The skyline seemed clear, then the flat cap of one of the armoured cars appeared, moving gracelessly against the woods. Ormerod crouched. The vehicle rumbled on. Now he could hear its ungainly engine. But the horizon was blank. 'Right - now,' he whispered to Marie-Thérèse behind him. 'Run.'

At a crouch they scampered across the open ground around the hut, half running, half tumbling down the grass slope and into some firs beyond the horse-chestnut trees. The lack of laces in his boots made Ormerod's descent both difficult and comic. There was a wide-mouthed drainage pipe half buried in the ferns and brambles down there. He reached it, turned and helped the girl to wriggle into its aperture. She went in feet first. He could hear her panting breath echoing from within the tube.
'Voilá,’
she whispered. Ormerod flattened himself and wriggled in backwards.

It was dank and full of smells in there. He pulled some of the dying ferns across the opening at his end and lay face down against the curved bottom of the pipe. They waited. There was nothing else they could do. He could hear the girl breathing near his heels.

It took the Germans another half an hour to reach the hut. Throughout that time the forest sighed and stirred above the culvert and the tube and the air within the enclosed space became fetid. Insects of various sorts promenaded in front of the fugitives' noses. Then they heard a bird call out in alarm and the sounds of the soldiers' steps and voices coming through the woods. Someone called an order when they spotted the hut and the troops clumsily surrounded it, taking cover while a sergeant

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and two men approached and first looked cautiously through the window before kicking in the door and entering with a great deal of dramatic noise.

Ormerod heard the sergeant shout that the hut was clear. He felt the soldiers moving again. A pair of German boots appeared almost at the opening of the pipe, so near that he could have tied the laces together. First the heels were pointing in his direction. Then the man began to urinate. Ormerod grimaced horribly and tried to turn his head. He could not. The urine ran in a river into the pipe, flowing right past the nose of the hiding man.

The sergeant gave an order for the men to take a five minute break and they sat around the hut in the striped autumn sunlight, smoking and talking. Another man relieved himself against the pipe. It was amazing that they had to find somewhere vaguely lavatorial when they had the entire forest at their disposed. Ormerod, lying in the pipe almost below their feet, was all but overcome by the stench of urine. Because his body almost blocked the pipe it had soaked into his jersey. He closed his eyes and tried to think of happier times.

Eventually there came the sound of further orders and the German soldiers, grumbling, prepared to move away. Ormerod and Marie Therese lay stiffly while they heard the boots moving through the ferns and trees. The forest fell to silence. They remained imprisoned in the pipe, shifting only an inch one way or another, for a further two hours. They were aware of the daylight seeping away. The birds began their final chorus before darkness came down. Then, when they thought it was safe, the man and the woman emerged like animals from their burrow.

I wonder if they were looking especially for us,' said Ormerod when they were in the hut again, the blank black night closed in all around them. 'Or was it just routine?'

'Does it matter?' she shrugged in the shadows. 'We are caught here and in some way we must move. But before we move we must wait for Jean Le Blanc. Let us hope he gets here soon, Dodo. We need him.'

It was thirty hours later that a forest worker on a bicycle came bumping down the forest path. They heard him a good

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distance away and as a precaution concealed themselves again in the pipe. He stood in the clearing and imitated the call of the turtle dove. The fugitives emerged from their concealment.

'Jean Le Blanc,' said the man dully, as if he did not want to
show enthusiasm for the message, 'has arrived in Villedieu. The Germans are quieter now. Tonight you will make your way to the road at the top of the forest, by the crucifix, and
you will be met by a man who will take you to Villedieu. His
signal will be the call of the dove.'

seven

Villedieu-les-Poëles was, in 1940, a town of just under four
thousand inhabitants, noted for its copper utensils (Poëles
means pots and pans) and its milk churns, used throughout the dairy country of Normandy. It also had, and indeed still has, a bell-foundry, in the Rue du Pont Chignon, which was first
established in the twelfth century. When the Germans occupied
the town in the summer of 1940 three large bells were being cast for a church in the Pyrénées-Orientales
département
of France.

The German commandant of the area which included Ville
dieu, General Wolfgang Groemann, was, by chance, a campanologist, and took much interest in the casting of the three bells in the long barn-like building. When the church in the
eastern Pyrenees, in the Unoccupied Zone of France, decided
that, because of the national situation and the lack of funds, they could not after all take delivery of the bells, General
Groemann contacted the ecclesiastical authorities in his home
town, the cathedral city of Minden, and arrived, very pleased,
at the bell-foundry one morning in his staff car to personally
purchase the bells (at a bargain price it should be said) for a church in the German city. The work on the casting and fin
ishing was completed in September and a date in early October
was fixed for their transportation by rail to Germany.

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For hundreds of years it had been customary for bells cast in
the foundry to be blessed in the centre of the little town and to be carried off in procession on the first part of their journey
to the church where they were to hang. Because of the circumstances in October 1940, it was doubted in Villedieu that this
ceremony would take place, in fact a great number of the townspeople were against it; but General Groemann was insistent that it should be as always, with a religious ceremony and a colourful procession through the narrow streets. And
this time he and his soldiers would take part. (A photograph of
the bells being taken away, incidentally, appeared in a Free French newspaper and a number of British newspapers under the heading 'Nazis Loot Bells from French Town'.)