by Thomas Wood
I felt my heart stop dead as he looked over at me. There was something behind his eyes that told me that he knew who I was. My whole body flushed with a chill as I made my way over to him.
There were plenty of others already there by the time I got to him, but for all I cared, it could have just been me and the baby.
“Come on, Johnny, let’s get you out of here. You don’t need to see this,” Mike tugged at my shoulder, compassionately.
“No!” I found myself screaming as the dirt rolled down my cheeks, beaten away by the tears. I felt a surge of bile and vomit burning at the back of my throat and nose, but I somehow managed to keep it down long enough to utter a few more words.
“That’s my son. That’s my boy…”
The pain in my knees, as I stumbled over an old dining room table, connecting with the bricks that surrounded me, didn’t seem to register. Not above the amount of pain that was coursing through my heart anyway.
The people all around me parted, compassionately, as one or two helped the quivering wreck to be reunited with his son.
Henry’s eyes were closed. Which was a merciful blessing, as I stared at him. He looked as though he was asleep. I spoke to him gently, as if he was snoozing and that I could wake him up at any moment.
Grace had always told me off about that. Even when I had not seen him in a number of weeks, she resented the fact that I would pick him up from his basket, no matter the time of day or night, and cradle and talk to him as if he was wide awake. Inevitably, he would wake, and scream and shout at the top of his little lungs when he did so.
And I loved every second of it.
“I’m sorry, my little man. I’m so sorry.”
But now, no matter how hard or loudly I talked, there was nothing that I could do to wake him. There was nothing that I could do to protect him.
My tears splashed on his perfect little face, all his features barely formed, completely unblemished by the pains of the world, now frozen in time.
“Come on, old fruit. Let’s get you both out of here.”
I looked up at Mike, my eyes in almost as much agony as my heart.
“My boy. My little boy.”
“I know, old fruit. I know.”
“What about Grace?”
“They’ll find her soon enough. I’m sure she’s fine. Let’s just get you and Henry somewhere safe, shall we?”
Through my grief, I almost didn’t hear the shouts of “UXB!” but still, they somehow managed to permeate into my consciousness, as they rippled down the street.
“UXB!”
“We’ve got a UXB over ‘ere.”
“Let the BD boys know they’re needed in Peldon Avenue!”
I thought it odd, as I turned around to face the young boy who had found Henry, that he had somehow managed to find my son, before he spotted the large German bomb. But finding Henry he had, which I put down to some sort of divine providence, that I managed to spend a few moments with my son before the whole street was closed down by the Bomb Disposal boys.
But the BD boys needn’t have bothered making their way to Richmond that night. They were only needed for a brief window of ten to fifteen seconds. After that, it had been pointless.
The first thing that I knew about it, was feeling the excruciating heat on my right arm as I turned. After that, everything else had gone black.
23
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Whatever it is that has been occupying your mind since we left Alfred’s house.”
I looked across at her. Her eyes did not seem at all interesting, there was nothing really to note about them, but she somehow had the ability to command my entire attention with them. I wondered whether that was how she had got her German to confide in her or if she had some other hypnotic powers to do the heavy lifting.
“That depends,” I said, my eyes scanning over her freckles, joining them up like a dot-to-dot.
“On what?”
I thought for a moment, wondering whether or not this was a good game to be playing with a woman like her. I still did not know if I could trust her, despite the innocent twinkle in her eye, and the plumpness to her skin similar to that of a child’s.
As I continued to stare at her face, I wondered how on earth she could have possibly been some sort of double agent. She just didn’t seem to have it in her. But, then again, she was out in the forest with us, preparing to execute our mission which, judging by her face at least, didn’t seem part of her repertoire.
But, then again, maybe that was what made her such a good fighter. She didn’t look like one. It was probably how she had managed to gain the German’s trust.
We had told her that now was the best time to break it off with her German friend. Security was paramount to us, and we could not verify how secure her friendship was, especially as we could not guarantee what kind of information she was giving back the other way.
If Mike and I were to survive there, in the long-term, we would need to establish our own network, our own intelligence sources. Which meant severing the ones that already existed. I wondered if she knew yet what that meant for her German friend. There had been no hint in her eyes that she knew we would have to kill him.
He knew too much and, if he had not done so already, would eventually hand Suzanne over to the authorities the minute he guessed that she was no longer playing his game. So, we had to get to him first. But we would have to deal with that later, there were more urgent things in the mix at the moment. Like our Genrealfeldmarschall.
“It depends on whether you start talking to me.”
“I have spoken to you.”
“You know what I mean. I want to know what you are hiding from us. We are here to help you, not hinder us. To be able to do that, we need to know everything.”
“I have told you everything!” she protested with vigour.
Mike glanced backwards towards us angrily, from his hide that he had created out of more twigs and stones. There was no sharpened branch this time, but an MP40, a German submachine gun that one of Suzanne’s helpers had somehow managed to accumulate.
Mike was nervous, not just about the operation, but about the weapon he had been given. The MP40 was as smooth as butter to fire, quite as if it wasn’t a gun at all, but a paintbrush, when it felt like firing that was. It had a tendency to jam, and we had spent many hours up in the Highlands of Scotland, deliberately jamming and unjamming the gun to get used to the way it worked.
It was the first time that Mike had operated one under pressure before, and that’s where things always went wrong.
We got the message from his glare and made sure to lower our voices as we camped out in the bushes. There were about fifteen of us, all told, hidden alongside the same stretch of road that Mike and I had hidden in a few days’ before.
In fact, it would take us less than two minutes to find the unfortunate German’s body, somewhere over to my left.
“You know what I mean, Suzanne. You’ve been so obsessed with who we are, that you’ve barely told us a thing about yourself. Every time we’ve tried to poke into your life, the shutters have come down. You ran away to the north. Then you came back, why was that? Why does Alfred seem so scared of you? Monsieur Plantier too.”
“I do not know why they are scared of me. Perhaps it is because they have made one mistake too many. I do not like mistakes. If people keep making them, they’re out. I no longer use them. I am not as unconcerned by security as you seem to think.”
“Fair enough.”
She gave a sigh, as if what she was about to tell me was not entirely voluntary, but that she had grown tired of hiding it any longer.
“I have told no one this,” she began, looking around as if someone might be listening in. There was nobody with us, except for one disgruntled Brit and twelve other Frenchmen.
“Madame Soyer was English. I, of course, had known her for a very long time.”
She looked at me as i
f to say that I should have known exactly who Madame Soyer was and that the confused look on my face was completely unwarranted.
She rolled onto her side for a moment, withdrawing a twig that was embedding itself into her belly, before tossing it over her shoulder. I had already grown used to the discomfort that we would inevitably be in for the next few hours, but figured that it would take Suzanne a little while longer before she gave up.
“Madame Soyer…Elizabeth Soyer was a well-connected and well-known English woman. She came to France some years ago with her family, to meet the man that she was betrothed to be married to. Some sort of a business arrangement,” she added, flitting her hand away as if none of it really mattered anymore.
“But there was a scandal. She ran away, with another man. He was the footman to her father while he was here in France. She lost everything; her family, her home, her inheritance. She married someone else.”
“A Frenchman?”
“You really have no idea who it is, do you?”
“Am I meant to?”
“Monsieur Soyer…Alfred Soyer.”
“Alfred was the footman?”
“He lost everything too. His family disowned him. He lost his livelihood. No one would employ him after what had happened. But they did it all in the name of love.”
“And they all lived happily ever after?”
The sarcasm, as ever, sailed high over her head. I made a mental note to simply stop with the quips, as I was getting nowhere with her.
“No. They did, for a while, I suppose. Until they had a child. A son. But they could not afford to live any longer. So, they decided that Elizabeth and Charles should go back to England. To plead with her family for support and send him to school there. Since then, Alfred has not seen either of them.”
I stopped her for a moment, as Mike signalled to us that he had heard something. To begin with, I struggled to hear anything that resembled a threat, apart from a pair of flapping wings as a bird hunted down its dinner for the evening.
But then, just above the flapping wings, I heard something odd. Mike had very good ears to have heard that sort of thing from such a distance.
But quickly, the higher-pitched drone of an aircraft engine came within earshot, and everyone was silent, holding their breath in for as long as possible.
Then, as if it was following the road for some sort of bearing, a Fieseler Fi 156 came into view. It was a flimsy-looking aircraft, almost like a child’s toy, where everything seemed to be made out of the most vulnerable of materials possible.
But it had an excellent engine, which meant that it could take off in such a short area, that it could find a clearing anywhere it liked and, at that moment, my thoughts were obsessed with trying to recall if we had seen one in the middle of the forest somewhere.
Our main concern, however, as it slowly trundled past, at almost eye-level, was that it was looking for something, or more worryingly, someone.
Within a matter of seconds, I heard the pitch of the engine change, as the pilot throttled forwards, and put the aircraft into a steep climb, banking away to the west to chase the setting sun.
“Did he see us?” I rasped, in Mike’s direction.
“Not sure, but we’ll find out soon enough.”
The engine throbbed off into the distance, and for the time being, we were safe. At least he wasn’t coming back around for a second glance.
“How do you know so much?” I asked Suzanne, who had obviously thought that her story-telling time was up.
“About what?”
“About Alfred and his family.”
She mumbled apologetically, as she tried to get comfortable for a second time.
“Madame Soyer and I wrote to each other quite frequently. Until about October ’39. She was worried about the war, worried about Alfred. But more urgently, she was worried about her son.”
“Why?”
“He had joined your air force and was sent to France as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force. He was one of the first British servicemen to get here. So, I went up to Mourmelon to find him. I figured that if I could turn his head, keep him focused, then he would get home to his mother and father after the war.”
“What happened?”
“It didn’t go to plan.”
“In what way?”
“We fell in love. Got married. No one was particularly approving of it. Not least the Group Captain who Charles had to get permission from. It was all rather frowned upon.”
There was a silence, that lingered a little too long for my liking, it had not taken me long to process the fact that Suzanne was Alfred’s daughter-in-law. I did not know how long we were going to be laying there for, but it could be as little as sixty seconds, and I wanted as much information from her as I could.
“What happened to him?”
She looked at me, frustrated, as if I hadn’t had to ask such a foolish question. I already knew the answer.
“He was killed. May 1940. He was flying Fairey Battles, shot down as the Germans advanced. Died in the crash, apparently.”
“I’m sorry.”
I couldn’t fake my remorse that her husband had been killed. I had known many good pilots to die in much the same way, not that she knew that. But there was a twinge in my soul each and every time that I heard another pilot had gone down, on either side. I knew what it felt like, to feel all-powerful, up there in the sky, only to be told otherwise by a short cannon-burst, which for some would be the last thing that they ever heard.
“It’s funny,” she continued, quite voluntarily this time. “Do you know what their squadron motto was?”
I shook my head.
“En garde. That always tickled us both for some reason.”
En Garde. En Garde. I had seen that squadron motto printed somewhere but struggled to recall where I had seen it.
But then, as I strained to conjure up where I had seen it, it began to come to me. The crest, in the same shape as all the other squadron crests, had a serpent, tangling its way through the middle, its forked tongue out and ready to strike.
En Garde ran along the bottom.
“Eighty-eight Squadron.”
Her head flicked around, so fast that I feared she may have done herself some damage in the process.
“How would you know that?” she spat, accusingly, as if I had just made her spit out all of her history completely needlessly.
I smiled weakly, to try to ease the tension somewhat.
“I’ve seen the squadron crest. In a pub, near Boscombe Down…the photo, the one on Alfred’s fireplace, is that Charles?”
She nodded, tearfully.
“I’ve seen it before. Only in uniform. What rank was he?”
“Squadron Leader. Squadron Leader Talbot. He took his mother’s maiden name when he moved back to England.”
“Squadron Leader Talbot. I’ll have a drink for him next time I’m in that pub. Maybe one day you could join me.”
“I would like that very much.”
She shuffled over again, brushing a series of ants from her stomach and insisting that she be made as comfortable as she could.
I suddenly felt quite warm, as if I had opened up a new side to her, one that she had kept hidden for many years. There was even a chance that we could start to trust each other soon.
But I wasn’t going to count my chickens just yet.
24
I sat in a contented silence, for some time, just allowing the final few rays of sunshine to warm my skin, before they retired for the evening. For the first time since I had arrived in France, I found myself to be quite contented, relaxed almost. A few more days of this and I could be classed as someone who was, in fact, enjoying themselves.
Mike, however, was not. He fidgeted and rustled around behind the barricade of branches that he had made for himself, as he fretted over the positions and hiding places of the Frenchmen that were laying alongside us.
I could see, in the way that his body moved, all tense and
rigid, that he was concerned. Our plan was to wait for a vehicle to come along, any vehicle, before we acted but, so far, the only one that we had seen in the five hours that we had been there was one that was a hundred feet from the ground.
For our plan to work, we needed something firmly on the ground. Preferably with tyres.
My body ached and groaned as I slowly leant on either side of my hips, allowing a rush of blood to fill the void that had been denied any real sustenance for hours. We were getting closer to when we expected it all to kick off, and I needed to be ready for what was about to happen.
At the thought of what might happen, I pulled the old revolver out of the waistband of my trousers, that I had tucked away a couple of hours ago. It was impractical to have it in my palm the whole time while I was laying on the floor, but I wanted to have it touching a part of my body at all times, for fear of what might happen if I lost it.
It was an 1892 revolver, which had seen plenty of action in the last war amongst the French officers. Where Suzanne and her team had managed to find this one was beyond me, but it seemed well maintained enough to still work when I pulled the trigger.
It was small, moulded well enough to look almost pretty in one’s grip, but the front seemed far heavier than I had expected, which gave it an almost downward trajectory the moment you lifted it up to fire. It was either that, or it had been so long since I had handled a weapon, that I had forgotten what it felt like.
According to Alfred, the gun was produced mainly with French cavalrymen in mind, the cylinder swinging out to the right to reload, rather than the left, so that a man on horseback would be able to reload with his dominant hand.
It was a handy feature, for the cavalryman. But it made it awkward and cumbersome to reload for someone who was not on horseback. Someone like me.
Nevertheless, Alfred had taken great pleasure in showing me the basics of the revolver, prompting me to ask the inevitable question of how he knew so much.
“This continent has been at war for centuries, Jean. Every man for generations has been taught how to kill another, in the easiest way possible.”