The FitzOsbornes at War (57 page)

That bloody Jacques was a double agent. No
wonder
he never had any problems getting official documents! I thought for one wild moment about trying to rescue those airmen, but I knew it was absolutely hopeless. So I sneaked off down the alley in the opposite direction, and once I was round the corner, I strode off as though I knew exactly where I was going. Of course, I had no
idea
what to do next. I might have been able to find my way back to Gare du Nord, but it was full of Nazis and I didn’t have any money to buy a train ticket, and where could I have gone, anyway? I knew no one in France, and even if I’d had some way of contacting the Resistance, they might well think that
I’d
been the double agent.

So I kept walking, feeling more and more panic-stricken and lost, until I was nearly bowled over by a barrel of cider. A man had been unloading them from the back of his lorry and one had escaped. So I grabbed it and rolled it back up the hill, and helped the man with the rest of the barrels, which he was delivering to the back of a shop. He was cursing away, about how his useless brother-in-law was supposed to have come along to help him, and why couldn’t that shopkeeper get up off his lazy backside and give him a hand, and so on. After we finished, we sat down to mop our faces and he said he couldn’t wait to get out of this stinking hot city, where everyone – present company excepted – was so rude and unhelpful. All he wanted was to get back home to Beauvais, even though it was fifty miles and that stupid
gazogène
he’d installed on his lorry to burn charcoal for fuel would probably conk out halfway there.

So I said, ‘Ah, Beauvais! What a coincidence, I’m heading that way, too!’

And he snorted, because he’d obviously picked up my accent and knew I wasn’t French, and said, ‘Oh, yes? What do you do there?’

I explained that I was a farmhand – which was what my fake work permit said – and that although I wasn’t familiar with the locality, I’d been told I might find work there.

And he nodded slowly, looking me up and down, and said, ‘You might. Lots of market gardens and dairy farms. Best to stay out of the town itself, though, unless you know someone there – and you’d need work papers.’ So I showed him my documents and he suddenly jumped up and said, ‘Right, let’s get going. But if we get stopped, I just picked you up on the side of the road, understand?’

He wasn’t part of the Resistance – he just hated bureaucracy, whether it was the German or the French variety. He pretty much spent the entire journey whingeing about rationing and regulations and red tape, and how the government was practically
forcing
him to sell his goods on the black market. He dropped me off just outside Beauvais, pointed out the best way to go, and warned me to avoid Compiègne in the east, because the Nazis had set up an internment camp there.

So there I was, somewhere in Picardy, starving, homeless, the sun starting to set – but at least I wasn’t being interrogated by the Gestapo. So I began walking along the path, thankful it was summer and not the middle of winter. I passed some farms, but every time I steeled myself to approach someone, I’d lose my nerve at the last moment. I felt I’d already used up all my good luck that day. I spent the night in a barn, pinched some carrots out of someone’s garden, drank from their well. The next day I kept walking. I had this mad plan I’d walk all the way to Spain, then get in touch with the British Embassy there. But I was already lost – I had no map, no compass – and my ankle was starting to hurt again. There was no way I’d make it all the way south without help. Still, the longer I wandered about like a tramp, the less likely it was that anyone would
want
to help me. I must have looked pretty disreputable even then, in my grubby old farmer’s clothes.

So I decided I’d stop at the next farm, and ask if I could work for them in exchange for food and board. The first farmer gave me some bread and cheese, but said I couldn’t stay. The second just shook his head. The third set his dogs onto me, but I ran off and climbed a tree, and they lost interest pretty quickly. I climbed down and kept on walking, avoiding the main roads, and as it started to get dark, I came to this falling-down cottage. A woman was staggering across the yard with some buckets of milk, and she plonked them down in the dust and gaped at me while I delivered my little speech. She didn’t say anything after I finished – I was beginning to wonder if she was a bit slow – so I just smiled and shrugged and was about to leave. But then I thought I might as well offer to help the poor woman carry the buckets into the house, because no one else seemed to be around, and she nodded. It wasn’t a very big farm – one outbuilding, a few cows standing about a field, a vegetable garden. We went through the back door of the cottage and set the buckets on the floor, and she gave me a long look, then said, ‘Sit down, I’ll bring you food.’

While I was eating, she told me her husband and his brother were prisoners of war and had been sent to a labour camp in Germany. Her mother-in-law had lived with her, but had died a few months ago. The woman – Marie – kept two cows and a few chickens. She made cheese, and lived off the vegetables she could grow in her garden. I felt so sorry for her. She was twenty-three, but looked forty. I said, ‘Why don’t I stay for a while? I could fix your roof and help with the gardening. If you grew more vegetables, you could trade them – maybe for a piglet or some ducklings.’ She frowned and nodded at everything I said, and I saw she wasn’t actually
slow
– it was just that she’d always relied on others telling her what to do, and now she felt terribly lost and lonely.

So I stayed. At first I was very careful not to be seen in daylight, but there were never any visitors. The farm was too small and too far off the main road for the Germans to bother raiding it. The nearest neighbours had had some sort of feud with Marie’s husband, so they mostly ignored her. She didn’t seem to have any relatives of her own. She only saw other people when she walked into the village, about four miles away, to sell her cheese. She never received any letters from her husband, or anyone else. I felt depressed just
hearing
about her life, but she’d never known anything better. She was so pathetically grateful any time I smiled at her, or paid her any compliments, or even
listened
to her, that I figured her husband must have been a complete bastard. She didn’t seem to miss him much, except as someone to run the farm. And after a while . . . well, she started to become fond of me.

And I didn’t discourage her. Of all the awful things I did to save my skin during all that time, I think that was the worst – taking advantage of how simple and unworldly and lonely she was. I pretended I returned her feelings because that way, she wouldn’t hand me in to the authorities. I
did
care about her – I felt awfully sorry for her – but I wasn’t in love with her. She thought I was, but only because I
wanted
her to think that.

Anyway, it backfired on me. She didn’t want me to leave. I hadn’t told her much about myself, but she knew I wanted to get back to England. I’d said I’d stay till the end of summer. I figured that would give me enough time to make contact with the local Resistance people, or at least find a map and work out a plan to travel south. But she didn’t seem to know anyone or anything. The furthest she’d ever travelled was to Beauvais. She didn’t have any money, and there didn’t seem any safe way I could earn some, so it would be impossible to buy train tickets – not that I’d get very far with my fake documents, especially if Jacques had told the authorities to look out for me. So I stayed on through autumn, still trying to figure out some scheme that might work. Then it was winter, too cold to travel. When spring arrived, we were so busy with the garden, then one of the cows got sick and . . . Oh, I don’t know. I’d sort of lost track of who I was, what I was supposed to be doing. It was so isolated there. Marie didn’t own a wireless or buy any newspapers – the news would have been censored by the Nazis anyway – so I had no idea what was going on with the war. I was just living from day to day, the way she always had.

Then one morning, late in spring, I was carrying the milk across the yard when a plane went overhead, one of ours. It shook me out of my trance. I marched into the kitchen and said to Marie, ‘This can’t go on. You have to go into the village more often, go to church, talk to people. You have to find out who the local Resistance people are.’

She stared at me, then threw down her dishcloth and shouted, ‘No! I won’t! Because if I do, you’ll end up leaving me!’ And we argued about it for weeks. I’d say, ‘If you loved me, you’d want to help me!’ and she’d say, ‘If you loved me, you wouldn’t abandon me like this!’ And I
did
feel awful for her, but I couldn’t stay there forever. I didn’t feel I could push it too hard, though, because if she got mad at me, she might just decide to hand me over to the police.

Finally, towards the end of July, she went off to the village with a basket of cheese to sell on market day. When she came back in the afternoon, she told me the name and address of a Resistance man in Beauvais, and then burst into tears. The horrible thing was that I didn’t trust her any more. I didn’t know whether she was crying because I’d be leaving, or because she knew I’d be picked up by the Gestapo as soon as I knocked on that door. Maybe they were already on their way to the cottage. Even if she herself hadn’t engineered it, I didn’t know who’d given her that name, or how trustworthy that person might be. I managed to calm her down and said, ‘Look, don’t worry about it now. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’

Then, as soon as I was sure she was asleep that night, I sneaked out of the house. I didn’t leave a note. I didn’t want to leave behind anything that might get her into trouble if the Germans searched the place – or if her husband ever came back. It was a cloudless night, so I could see well enough and I knew how to get to Beauvais without going along any main roads. I stopped halfway there and slept for a few hours under a hedge, then reached the town in the middle of the day. I knew the street was somewhere near the cathedral, and
that
was easy enough to find, and then I wandered round for an hour or two till I spotted the house. I kept an eye on it for a while, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I don’t know what would have been a suspicious sign, anyway, other than Nazis marching in and out. Eventually, I thought, ‘Well, there’s nowhere else for me to go. I don’t have any other options.’

So I went round the back and knocked on the door, and thank God, it turned out all right. The woman there asked me a few questions, then some boys arrived in a pony cart and took me off to a place in the country. I was there for weeks. Most of the leaders of that particular escape line had just been arrested by the Gestapo, so everything had ground to a halt. They suspected a traitor in their ranks – well,
I
could have told them that. I did, actually, I told them everything I could remember about Jacques. Then another man arrived to interrogate me. They were a lot tougher, a lot more systematic, than the Belgians had been the year before. They’d devised this questionnaire for British airmen, asking all sorts of things that only we’d know about how the RAF worked, but also trick questions about life in England – what was the cigarette ration, that sort of thing. When they were satisfied I wasn’t a double agent, they moved me to a safe house in Rouen and organised a new identity card and work permit for me. It was more complicated this time, because anyone travelling in the border zone around Spain needed a special certificate of residence. That would take time to arrange, and it was already September. Then I was moved on a few more times. The Gestapo were really putting pressure on the Resistance, and meanwhile, lots of American aircrew were crashing in the occupied territories, so all the safe houses were stretched to their limits.

Finally, in November, five of us Allied airmen, plus some guides, started to move south – first to Paris, then we took a series of local trains to Bordeaux, then on to Dax, which is close to the Spanish border. They had bicycles waiting for us there at the railway station, and we cycled to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the Americans moaning all the way about how tired they were. I suppose you know the rest – the Basques who ran the hotel there knew Captain Zuleta, and he came down to meet me, to confirm that I was who I said I was. It was so bizarre seeing him – not just because I’d thought he was dead, but because he was from a place so far away, so far back in my past. A lifetime ago –
more
than one lifetime ago, it seemed. And then, as you know, there were all those delays before we could set off over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Well, that was an experience. Clouds blocking out any moonlight, icy sleet, ridiculously steep paths – I think those Basque guides must have had goat hooves instead of feet – mud and brambles and slippery rock for hours and hours. Then towards the end, when we were at our most exhausted, we had to wade across the river in which two people had drowned not long before. We eventually clambered up the bank on the other side and were picked up almost at once by Spanish soldiers. Thank God the guides escaped. If
they’d
been caught . . . I don’t think I could have lived with any more guilt.

Luckily, that friend of Veronica’s turned up at the prison not long after we arrived. I thought it would be all right then. I honestly thought I’d made it home. So when our ship got hit, I was
furious
. I remember the explosion, remember being tossed up into the air and smacking into the sea, except
it
was on fire, too – there was a slick of oil on top of the water and it seemed the whole world was ablaze – and the only thing in my mind was, ‘How
dare
you!’ I don’t know whether I meant the crew of that bloody U-boat that torpedoed us, or Hitler, or God, but I was as mad as hell. I just
refused
to die in such a pointless, stupid way after all those people in Belgium and France had risked their lives to save me. So I ducked down and dived as far as I could, until I ran out of breath. When I popped up, I smashed my head on a broken door floating past, but at least I was out of range of the flames, so I grabbed the door with one arm and hung on grimly. I could hardly see, my leg felt like it was broken, the burns were agony in the salt water, but when I heard voices, I screamed back and kept on screaming, and eventually, I got hauled into a lifeboat . . .