by Alan Holmes
Someone commented that if the pilot of the plane had been trying to hit one of the villas about a hundred meters away, his aim was exceedingly poor. The crowd laughed. A man said that the lone German plane that had flown over Hardelot during the morning’s air raid had probably dropped the bomb; the beach had been deserted at the time.
The bomb’s fiery eruption ended abruptly, and the two soldiers returned to the spot where now only wisps of smoke were rising from the fragmented carcass of the incendiary bomb. Wearing thick gloves, the two men gathered up the various smoldering pieces of scrap metal, put them in a large, stiff canvas sack which they dragged to an army truck parked on the beach. After lifting it onto the truck, they drove away.
When the excitement over the bomb had subsided, most of the fort-builders indicated they wanted to complete the fortress, so we headed back to our diggings. Paul, who curiously believed that another exciting event would take place without him if he came with us, did not join us.
We returned to carving and detailing more crenellations and turrets on our fort, but I soon noticed that the sea was now much closer to us. The tide had risen substantially while we had been distracted from our task by the explosion. I called out for everyone to stop building towers and crenellations and begin the urgent business of raising the wall higher, especially on the side of the approaching sea.
“To the battlements! Carcassonne must be saved! Dig with all your might! Pile on the sand where the ramparts look the thinnest! Dig for your life!” My entreaties had the desired effect; the team took to the task with renewed vigor. Before long, the waves were lapping at the base of our fortress, and eventually the rising sea turned it into a beleaguered island. We fought valiantly for the next twenty minutes, shoveling like mad in places where the action of the waves was causing the wall to crumble.
Eventually, the sea gained the upper hand, and the waves lapped over the crest in too many places for us to repair. The wall was breached like a bursting dam. The break grew ever wider, and the water rushed in faster and faster until we were standing in cold water up to our knees.
We waded about two hundred feet to the shore’s new location and, before disbanding, our valiant crew all shook hands and agreed that it had been a marvelous and exciting afternoon.
Jacques, Pierre and I set off for Condette wet, happy, and exhausted. As we cycled along, the three of us side by side on the deserted Condette road, Jacques admitted, “I was under the impression Carcassonne was all sharp-angled in outline, more like a star—I had no idea it was an oval-shaped fortification.”
To which I solemnly replied, “Neither did I.” The three of us laughed our heads off.
That evening, Mother made a rare long-distance call to Paris to tell Father about the air raid and the bomb. She also wanted to see if he wished to change his mind about our staying in Condette. Father told her that he had read in the evening paper about the lone German plane that had flown across northern France and dropped a single bomb on some unspecified beach. He was stunned to hear that Hardelot was the beach in question and wanted more details about the bomb. Mother told him I knew all about it and put me on the phone. I had the first phone conversation in my life while describing the bomb and its eventual demise to Father.
When I was done with my tale, he asked that I put Mother back on the line. Father told her that all of Paris was talking about this first act of belligerence on French soil by the Germans and that the evening papers were full of editorials postulating the motives for such a flight. The consensus was that it was an exploratory flight to discover whether France had any defenses against an air attack. It was apparent that we had none; the plane had flown over the countryside unchallenged in any way. It was also conjectured that the German flight was intended to show the populace how defenseless and vulnerable we were. It seemed that, as a piece of propaganda, the plan had been quite successful.
Others surmised that the pilot was deranged and had undertaken the flight without authorization. This theory was based on the fact that the plane had dropped one small bomb on a meaningless target as it flew towards the sea and that the plane had not been observed returning from this flight anywhere along the coast of France or Belgium. Had the plane continued out to sea and gone down, unseen, into the ocean when it ran out of fuel?
Father decided that, mysterious as the incident was, there was no cause for alarm and that we should stick with his original plan to stay in Condette. The Germans were not going to waste their bombs on a small farming community like Condette.
Nevertheless, Father wanted Mother to go into Boulogne to see if the government were issuing gas masks, something they were already seriously talking about in England. A gas attack on Condette was highly unlikely, he explained. However, a cloud of poison gas could waft our way from some more plausible target—such as the harbor town of Boulogne or even Étaples, where there was an airport nearby as well as a small harbor. Furthermore, once we had purchased the gas masks, Father wanted us to take them with us whenever we went shopping in those two towns.
In Boulogne the next day, Mother spent all morning going from one government office to another without success in her quest for gas masks. No one seemed to have any idea what agency was in charge of issuing masks to the civilian population, nor had anyone even heard of any plan to do so.
Mother finally found a private company that made and sold gas masks to individuals, but the company had a waiting list for their product. Days later, and after several trips, Mother was able to buy six of their most expensive model. Each mask came stored in a well-made, imitation pigskin leather case, which was extremely large and surprisingly heavy. Raimond, Françoise, Brenda, Mother, and I hauled these around whenever we knew we would be some distance from home. On short errands or activities close by, we relied on being able to dash home as soon as the air raid siren sounded. And later, when we went to school, Brenda and I always carried the beastly things with us, cumbersome as they were.
Once armed with these gas masks, we saw no need to return to the high sand dunes to finish building our emergency shelter. But on the evening of that first air raid warning, Raimond described what might have happened if the bomber had dropped his incendiary bomb on the pine forest—the very spot where we had planned to build our shelter. Raimond’s scenario assumed that the bomb would have exploded as intended. His vivid description of the resulting forest fire (the first time I had ever heard of such a cataclysm) was enough to give me several nightmares on the nights that followed. In these dreams, we were camping in our lean-to, and the pine forest was a raging inferno about to consume us alive. My bad dreams stopped when we were finally able to buy the masks and no longer faced the prospect of heading for the high dunes if an air raid alarm sounded.
The days grew colder, and we wanted to turn on the new central heating. But a promised coal delivery had never taken place. When Mother went to the coal merchant in nearby Pont-de-Briques, the man told her that there was no coal allocated for private deliveries in this part of France, where most of the permanent residents, mostly farmers, relied on wood fireplaces in the winter. The merchant’s coal yard was brimming with coal, but the owner maintained that it was destined for large institutions and commercial enterprises.
Mother rummaged in her purse and dredged up all the cash she had and offered it to him sous la table (under the table), but he flat out refused her bribe, boasting brazenly that it was not nearly enough to tempt him.
Fortunately, our new furnace could burn wood as well as coal, and Mother immediately announced her intention to stockpile a large quantity of wood before the opening of school and before the onset of cold or wet weather would make wood gathering more of an ordeal.
Armed with a small bow saw, the Tourneau boys and I sought out fallen or dead trees in the forest of Hardelot. We sawed what we could into small, manageable logs, and gathered smaller branches for kindling. We contrived to take home all this
wood on our bikes, which was a slow process since we couldn’t carry much on each trip, and the nearest spot for gathering wood was half-an-hour’s ride from our house. Another solution was badly needed.
During the summer’s shopping trips to the weekly outdoor market in nearby Étaples, one of my favorite haunts had been a pawnbroker and bric-a-brac shop. This establishment was right on the town’s main square where, every Wednesday, they held the weekly open-air market.
I had seen there an old perambulator on sale for twenty francs (about half the cost of a child’s cheap bicycle in those days) and convinced Mother that this baby carriage would make a handy cart that I could tow behind my bike for hauling wood and pinecones. I had already discussed the project in detail with Raimond, who was enthusiastic about my idea and prepared to make certain alterations to the pram if we bought it.
Mother approved but declared that since petrol was now harder to obtain, we would have to cycle to Étaples to bring the perambulator home. Even if petrol had been abundant, we could not have loaded the rather large pram either into, or onto, Mother’s tiny Simca.
Raimond volunteered for the excursion to Étaples, and Mother offered him the use of her new bike. Raimond had ridden a bicycle only once before in his life, many years earlier. This detail didn’t seem to deter him from wanting to go on the expedition. He insisted he could ride well enough and valiantly agreed to command the enterprise.
Raimond and I tied our gas masks to our bicycle frames so we wouldn’t have them dangling from our shoulders and set out in high spirits immediately after lunch on our twenty-kilometer trip to Étaples. This was much farther (probably by a factor of three) than any trip I had ever undertaken on a bicycle, but with my new bike and its dérailleur, I was confident that I could go the distance. I could see that Raimond was a bit wobbly, but I reflected to myself that by the end of the trip, he would be an experienced cyclist and his wobbles would be washed out.
The road we used for most of the trip was the main road between Boulogne and Étaples, so it had bornes Michelin every kilometer. Bornes are literally milestones, or—to be strictly correct—“kilometerstones.” They look a little like miniature, round-topped tombstones and stand twenty or so inches above the ground with the wide flat face of the stone facing the oncoming driver. What the bornes tell you depends on the type of road you are driving on. For us, on an important but secondary road, there was only the distance to the next main town, which was Étaples. At first, Raimond and I seemed to pass these kilometerstones with reassuring regularity, but after about a dozen kilometers, the time interval between these encounters seemed to grow alarmingly. I began to wonder if we would ever reach our destination. Raimond, not used to working his legs in this fashion, was also starting to flag.
When I complained to Raimond that it was hard to keep pedaling, he pointed out that I didn’t need to have my headlamp on during daytime, and that turning it off would make the pedaling easier. “It takes energy to make electricity, and the only place it comes from is your legs,” he explained. Reluctantly, I turned off the light and had to admit he was right.
We finally arrived in Étaples shortly after four o’clock, only to find that the bric-a-brac shop had just closed. Bitterly discouraged, we proceeded to a nearby café to drown our disappointment, Raimond with a glass of wine and I with a glass of water flavored with bright red grenadine syrup. “Un rosé pour le jeune homme,” the barman sing-songed, as he handed me my beverage.
While sipping our drinks, we overheard a man lamenting that since the declaration of war, the junk business had fallen off—people seemed to be holding on to their old stuff, he said. The man had to be the owner of the closed bric-a-brac shop. Raimond went over to him and, and after chatting him up, confirmed that he was.
At first, the pawnbroker balked at Raimond’s request that he reopen his shop, maintaining that it was against the law for him to do so. But Raimond bought him un coup de vin, which in short order converted him over to our cause. Soon the man was proclaiming loudly that laws were for breaking, weren’t they? He took a long time to finish his drink and wanted another, but Raimond eventually coaxed him out of the café and over to his shop.
Just as I remembered, the wooden pram was an elegant and superb machine. It looked quite art nouveau with the great loops of its spiral suspension springs supporting its gracefully curved bodywork high above the ground. Four very large but thin-rimmed wheels added to the effect. Despite its light and airy appearance, the pram was huge, and the sturdy wood panels of its bodywork added to its considerable weight. Raimond commented that it must have been designed for twins. “Non, non, Monsieur! Des triplets!” exclaimed the pawnbroker.
I was elated at finding the carriage in such good condition and felt that our arduous journey had been well rewarded. I could hardly wait to bring it home and supervise all the changes I would talk Raimond into making.
It was after five o’clock when we set out from Étaples with my new pride and joy. We had brought some light rope for the purpose, and my plan, thoroughly reviewed and discussed before the trip, was for the two of us to ride our bikes side by side like a pair of dray horses, jointly towing the pram behind us.
We had only gone about a hundred meters when it became clear that the plan was flawed. Twice, the pram showed us it had a mind of its own and wandered off to the right, until it careened off the road, nearly pulling us with it.
I persuaded Raimond that the only solution was for one of us to cycle beside the pram. Then, whenever it deviated too far off its proper course, the rider of the rear bike could yank it back into line by a sharp jerk to its handle. The rider of the other bike would continue his job as the locomotive in front.
We set off again with Raimond in the lead position. This seemed to work, but the course-correcting yank (needed about every fifty meters) was an added burden to the rider in front and made it a jerky ride for the cyclist bringing up the rear.
Our progress was slow, and several long hill-climbs along the way made the going even slower. With ten kilometers still to go, darkness overtook us, and a large yellow full moon made its appearance over the pastures and fields that bordered our deserted road. I turned on my lamp to avoid the occasional potholes. I had been dreading the onset of this necessity; I hardly needed the extra drag that the dynamo created. Raimond, too, was growing tired, and we stopped frequently to exchange positions. When I was in the lead, our progress was substantially slower because the only way I could manage the load at all was in low gear, something Raimond’s bike didn’t have. Still, my brief intervals of towing afforded him a little rest.
Even with my bike in low gear, I soon found that the time I could spend in the lead position was growing shorter each time it was my turn. Raimond eventually took over the lead position full time. Then I discovered that I could steer the pram quite successfully just by a steady pull with my right hand, instead of jerking it every now and then. As we continued on doggedly, I became convinced that before long I would fall off my bike from sheer exhaustion.
Describing our ordeal to Mother the next day, Raimond said that there came a time when, in the rear position, I just stopped pedaling and coasted as he continued to pull the whole thing, me coasting, the pram, and the drag of my dynamo, which dimly illuminated the slow progress of this tired cortege. Raimond said he had called out in protest but could elicit no response from me.
How he managed to keep going, I can’t imagine. I must have been steering in a trance; the next day, I had no recollection of the last two kilometers after we had turned off the main road onto the narrower side road leading to Condette. Raimond commented that when we reached home at eight o’clock, I was in a complete daze, as if hypnotized, still clutching onto the perambulator with my right hand and with my bike still upright after we stopped. He had to lift me off the bike and carry me to bed. My eyes were wide open, but he was sure I was asleep; when he had asked me if I wanted
any supper, I just stared blankly.
Raimond swore he would never ride a bike again. Nevertheless, he immediately set to work straightening the pram’s frame. The suspension frame to which the wheels were attached was slightly bent, as if it had been caught between a wall and a car that had backed into it. We hadn’t noticed this detail in the pawnshop and it had probably been the cause of our steering problems on the trip back from Étaples.
Raimond, capable as always, was able to straighten the frame and repair a crack in the woodwork of the main carriage, undoubtedly caused by the same mishap. Raimond attached a light wood pole on each side of the pram, like the shafts of a horse-drawn cart, using screws to fasten them to the wooden body. The towing bike was connected to the two poles, which were bent slightly to meet at the bicycle’s seat post. The result was a vehicle resembling a rickshaw, if one overlooked the fact that rickshaws don’t have four wheels.
I named the pram “La Carrosserie Nationale” (“The National Coachwork”). In French, the name has a certain ring, and I relished the pompous sound of it. In keeping with the spirit of this grand enterprise, Raimond emblazoned its bold name in bright yellow paint and extravagant flourishes on the sides of the carrosserie.
When this magnificent carriage was ready, Raimond hooked it up to Jacques’ bike, and the Tourneaus, Brenda and I set off on the first of many wood gathering expeditions. Our little terrier-cairn, Jock, led the parade, reconnoitering the bushes on either side of the road for dangerous rabbits that might ambush our defenseless five-bike convoy. We felt more like a royal procession setting out on an important mission than the band of humble firewood gleaners that we were.
The Carrosserie Nationale could carry seven or eight small logs and a bundle of kindling, or a couple of burlap sacks full of pinecones. On the return trip, each of our five bikes also carried a single log tied onto its frame with string. Our team often made three or four round trips a day, and we soon had a good stockpile of wood for both households.