The Arrow's Arc
Page 30
“Of course. I well understand. You cannot miss the church. It is near the Museum and the graveyard is behind it. Will is just to the right of the entrance. You will see the headstone.”
Shyly, she reached out her arms to the young woman and they embraced warmly. Kate kissed her. “Thank you so much for telling me the story. I shall not have time to see you before I go. But I promise I will return next summer to see you.”
“That would be nice, my dear, but I fear I will not be here.”
“Of course you will. Goodbye. I shall write to you.”
The next morning, Kate rose early and found the churchyard. Her father’s grave seemed almost freshly dug, so well-tended was it, with summer flowers giving a warm glow of colour at the base of the headstone. The inscription on it in English read: “Will Gladwin. Archer. Gunner. Beloved.”
She stood by it for perhaps twenty minutes, her thoughts tumbling around in her head like clothes in a washing machine. Eventually it began to rain, and she realised that the bus for the school children had arrived ten minutes ago, so she inclined her head, planted a kiss on top of the stone and left.
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Kate’s leaving party at the school two months later was memorable. The children clubbed together to buy her flowers, and they sang to her in French after she had made her leaving speech in the school hall. She had surprised everyone by requesting for her leaving present from the staff “any books on reincarnation and the Lancaster bomber” and, with much ribaldry, three volumes were presented to her on stage. Later, she further surprised the staff by drinking whisky.
Back home in her cottage, she opened mail which she had not had time to read in the morning. Among the letters of goodwill on her retirement was a small parcel from France. It contained a little box and a letter from Josephine, Marie’s maid and housekeeper. In it, Josephine wrote that Marie had died and was to be buried on the exact day of Kate’s retirement. The young girl explained that Madame de Vitrac had requested that, on her death, the enclosed object – she did not know what it was – should be sent to Kate with her love. Kate removed the tissue paper and held it in her hand. She recognised it immediately. It was, of course, her father’s archer’s nock.
Two weeks later, Kate climbed into her aged Mini and drove via the Channel Tunnel to Azincourt. There, she took overnight lodging at the hotel again – she decided not to visit Tramecourt – and, the next morning, visited the churchyard. Next to her father’s grave a freshly dug mound showed where Marie had been buried. Kate placed flowers on both of the graves and then took the nock from her handbag. She rubbed it with her thumb and forefinger, as she had done so many times since receiving it and, once again, despite the nearness this time of Marie and Will, felt absolutely nothing.
She gave a wry smile and bent down. “Ah well, Dad,” she said, thrusting the nock deep into the soft earth of his grave, “I think this belongs to you rather than me. Goodbye. God bless you both.”
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Arrow’s Arc is a fictional tale, of course, but there are strong strands of fact running through it. I have based Gladwin and Proctor’s journey through occupied France on the experiences of several intrepid escapers and evaders (escapers: those who got out of prison; evaders: those who, like Gladwin and Proctor, were never initially captured) who dodged Gestapo, gendarmes and the Wehrmacht on the way to the Spanish border and, indeed, the coast of Brittany. For instance, what may appear to the reader to be Gladwin’s too-easy-to-be-true ruse of escaping the Gestapo checks at a railway station by simply walking through the station buffet, happened to George Millar on his long journey home. The escape lines did operate as I have described them, more or less, with brave couriers handing on their ‘parcels’ down links in the chain, under constant threat of betrayal, capture, torture and either immediate execution or the slower death of the concentration camps.
Airey Neave, later to become a Cabinet Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government and to be assassinated by the IRA, was a rare escaper from Colditz Castle who reached home to help set up, and later head, MI9, the War Office branch which existed to help the escape lines. At the war’s end, he estimated that a total of some 12,000 civilians had operated the lines but that about 500 had been arrested and executed. They had, however, helped 4,000 Allied (mainly British and American) servicemen to escape from occupied Europe by D-Day in 1944, after which, of course, the invading troops were able to liberate more prisoners.
The Comet Line, down which Gladwin and Proctor passed, was one of the most successful ‘rat runs’, and operated from 1941 to the liberation although, by the winter of 1944, only a trickle of ‘parcels’ were able to reach and cross the northern Spanish border. The naval evacuation from the beaches of Brittany, code-named ‘Shelburne’, although shorter-lived – it operated for about one year, up to the spring of 1944 – was also considered to be successful, although there were vicissitudes as fictionalised by me in this novel.
Readers interested in the Hundred Years’ War are urged to visit the splendid museum in the village of Azincourt although, alas, they won’t find Marie de Vitrac there, and the battlefield itself is nowadays rather uninspiring. But there was a Will Gladewyne who fought there for King Hal on Saint Crispin’s Day. He was an archer who almost certainly came from the Welsh borders. The physical characteristics imposed by his trade, and attributed by me to Bill Gladwin in the novel, are based on the analyses of the archers’ skeletons found in the wreck of the Tudor warship, The Mary Rose. The ‘Black Archers of Llantrisant’, of whom Kathleen’s Uncle Tony was a member, still exist and their provenance is as described in the novel.
There are other real characters whom I have used to give verisimilitude to my tale – although, of course, the main protagonists and most of the supporting cast are fictional creations. The French Canadian Sergeant Major Lucien Dumais was Chef de Mission of ‘Shelburne’, and he survived the war to become a Capitaine and be awarded the Military Cross. Airey Neave describes him as “short, articulate and very tough” – he once used an iron bar to ward off intruders on an earlier evacuation of evaders in the south of France. I have extrapolated from that description somewhat to formulate his character for my book. What is certain is that he was a true hero of the war.
So, too, was the Abbe Carpentier, although I have placed him in Bayonne and not his real home at Abbeville, where he forged passes and ID cards for escapers and evaders until he was betrayed to the Gestapo in 1941, and summarily executed. I have given my Abbe opinions about pacifism, and a gentle open mind about reincarnation, which I have no evidence to attribute to the real Abbe. That the latter was a credit to his race and his religion, however, there is no doubt.
The French sailor Giquel and his young family did live in that small clifftop cottage above the beach in Brittany. Many fugitives passed through their tiny house, code-named the “Maison d’Alphonse”, until the Germans eventually caught on and burned it down.
Dedee, too, existed. This pretty young Belgian girl (real name Andrée de Jongh) set up the Comet Escape Line in 1941 and led it, personally taking evaders and escapers down the line, until she also was betrayed and arrested on the Spanish border in 1943. She narrowly survived her days in Ravensbruck concentration camp to be awarded the George Medal by King George VI, and become among the most loved and honoured of all of the many heroes and heroines of the Resistance.
There was no space in the novel to make other than the most fleeting reference to the Basque giant, Florentino Goicoechea, the most famous of the passeurs at the frontier. Recruited originally by Dedee in the autumn of 1941, he continued operating until the early part of
1944. He too survived the war and was awarded the George Medal.
As for reincarnation, I have no strongly held belief in it, and it is for the reader to conclude whether or not Marie’s story of other lives is true. This element of the book represents only a timid dip of the toe into what are deep waters. However enough strong, even if circumstantial, evidence of such experiences has now been documented by respected psychoanalysts and other experts for the subject to be treated with respect – and, I submit, for it to be accepted as an integral part of a novel of this nature. I have used some of those documented regressions as inspiration for Marie’s account of previous lives.
Before writing the novel I trawled through many fictional and documentary accounts of escapes from occupied Europe during the Second World War, and of reincarnation. Those I found most helpful, I list below:
Escape: Saturday at M.I.9 by Airey Neave (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1969);
Horned Pigeon by George Millar (William Heinemann, London, 1947);
Fight Another Day by Lt Colonel J.M. Langley (Collins, London, 1974);
Safe Houses are Dangerous by Helen Long (William Kimber, London, 1985);
Escape and Evasion by Ian Dear (Arms and Armour, London, 1997);
Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks (Vintage, London, 1999);
The Lancaster Bomber: Lancaster at War 2 by Mike Garbett and Brian Goulding (Ian Allan Ltd., Shepperton, Surrey, 1979);
Reincarnation: Other Lives, Other Selves by Roger J. Woolgar (Doubleday, New York, 1987);
Mind Out of Time by Ian Wilson (Victor Gollancz, London, 1981);
An Old Magic by Barbara Cleverly (Suffolk Press, Mildenhall, 2003);
Ferney by James Long (Harper Collins, London, 1998).
The Hundred Years’ War and Agincourt have inspired rafts of books over the years. Readers who wish to know more about the British archers’ role in this long series of battles, and at Agincourt in particular, may care to dip into the splendid Longbow, by Robert Hardy, republished in paperback by the Mary Rose Trust, Portsmouth, in 1986, or my own Masters of Battle (Arms and Armour, London, 1996). Some of these books may well be out of print now. My source for most of them was the London Library.
- J.W. Chilmark, 2016
About the Author
According to author John Wilcox , an inability to do sums and a nascent talent to string words together steered him towards journalism – that and a desire to wear a trench coat, belted with a knot, just like Bogart.
After a number of years working as a journalist, he was lured into industry. In the mid-nineties he sold his company in order to devote himself to his first love, writing. He has now published, to high acclaim, twelve Simon Fonthill books, one Fonthill short story, two other novels and two works of non-fiction, including an autobiography.
http://www.johnwilcoxauthor.co.uk/
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