“You take too much on yourselves,” he said, “You couldn’t control your crooked politicians, any more than we could galvanise our wishful-thinking bunch into positive action, in 1938! The fact is, the whole damned lot of us had a horror of starting up another war, and we kept telling ourselves that it wouldn’t happen! I was as bad as anyone else and I don’t mind admitting it now! There was only one chap in our Avenue who saw what was happening, that chap I told you about, Jim Carver. The rest of us backed Chamberlain and his piece of paper, and don’t let any Britisher tell you differently!”
“That may be so,” replied Claude, “but when it did happen you preferred to die rather than give up. Each of you, the highest and the lowest! That is something of which you should always be proud, my friend!”
Esme wondered whether this was an exaggeration on the part of the Frenchman and decided that perhaps, after all, it was not. He had seen the suburb under non-stop bombardment and had sensed the spirit of defiance in people like Edith Clegg, and little Miss Baker across the road. Supposing England, or any other country, had been isolated and pounded in this ruthless manner? Suppose its fighting men had been thrown back on a defenceless base, and its food supplies menaced by U-boat blockade. Would that country have continued to resist or would it, like France, have glumly sued for peace and accepted German domination?
He decided at once that this was one of those silly ‘if’ questions that had no real answer.… ‘If there had been tanks at the Battle of Hastings’. ‘If Napoleon had actually landed the Grande Armée on the shores of Kent.…’ Who could tell? One could only judge these matters by what did occur, not by what might have occurred.
He made up his mind, however, to spare the Frenchman’s pride and said: “We were saved by the Ditch, Claude and without it we’d have been no tougher than you people! Apart from that, I can’t see a cagey old Devonshire farmer risking his neck to get a French aviator back into the fight, as you’re doing right now!”
“You are kind but not quite honest,” smiled Claude, and the topic was dropped.
About two months after his first interview with Claude in the farmhouse, Esme had a very pleasant surprise.
One afternoon, Claude came to his hide-out over a butcher’s shop in a little village, near Lille, and told him that he was about to meet an old friend. A few minutes later Snowball, the West Indian wireless operator, was shown into the room, displaying perfect teeth in a delighted grin but no surprise at all at their reunion, having heard some time ago that Esme was still free, and in hiding.
They spent an animated hour in one another’s company before Claude said they must part, for Snowball’s journey to Paris had been arranged, and he was leaving that night, disguised as a French Colonial N.C.O.
“For him it was easy,” Claude said, when Esme protested bitterly at Snowball’s priority. “For you, perhaps, there is something important that has to be done first!”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Esme, noticing that Claude avoided his eye.
“There is some information that your people would like to have, and it is possible that you might be the right man to convey it to them!” said Claude, quietly.
He went on to discuss a mysterious activity of the Germans in parts of the Pas de Calais coast. Nobody he said, knew the precise purpose of these activities, for as yet they were limited to large-scale diggings, tunnellings, and the laying down of wide-gauge railway tracks.
“Maybe it’s a new series of radar stations,” said Esme.
“It is more than that my friend,” said Claude, “it is some kind of long-range weapon…rockets perhaps, or something like rockets. We have reports from at least a dozen centres. At Siracourt and Mimoyecques, for instance, thousands of Russian slave labourers are employed. At Nieppe, near Armentieres, a small forest has been closed in with camouflage netting.”
“You mean that you want me to memorise details and report back to A.M.?” asked Esme, anxiously.
“That must depend upon you,” Claude told him, “for you are an airman, and it is not for me to ask you to become a spy! As I have told you before, if you are caught now you have an identity disc and would go, after some questioning no doubt, into a prisoner of war camp. If we were caught it would be the firing squad or, at best, deportation to Germany, and slow death when we got there!”
“What exactly do you want me to do?” asked Esme, his stomach sinking.
For answer Claude rose and went across to his valise, which he unstrapped, taking out a small, leather-bound volume. Esme saw that it was an anthology of French verse but when Claude opened it he saw a hollowed-out section in the leaves. From the hollow the Frenchman extracted a small sheaf of tissue papers, each sheet being covered with drawings.
“It is of great importance that these sketches should reach your Intelligence without delay,” he said, bluntly.
“May I look at them?”
“Of course.”
Esme smoothed the sheets and examined them carefully. Each was covered with fine tracing in indelible ink, and the spaces beneath the drawings were filled with rows of tiny figures that looked like a text illustrating the sketches.
“Are these drawings of the places you mentioned?” he asked.
“There are three more to come,” said Claude. “Our people are getting them for you now.”
“So that’s why I’ve been kept hanging about for so long?” said Esme.
Claude shrugged. “You are at liberty to refuse to have anything to do with them,” said Claude. “If you were caught with them you would of course, be treated as a spy!”
“Don’t you have special couriers to transmit this kind of information?”
“We do have couriers,” said Claude, “but two have been caught this month, and a third is in hospital with pneumonia. Well, my Avenue friend, what is it to be? A simple evader or a special agent?”
“You don’t leave me much choice do you?” said Esme, unhappily.
The Frenchman patted his shoulder. “I will arrange a rendezvous with Martin, in order that he should explain them to you. What little we know your people shall know,” he said.
“I’m not much good at anything as involved as this,” mumbled Esme.
“We shall see,” promised Claude and left him to his thoughts.
The meeting with Martin took place about a fortnight later. Martin, in the role of a French policeman, had reconnoitred two of the sites, and had detailed information on those at Siracourt, Watten, and Wizernes, all in the Channel coast area.
As far as Esme could gather the diggings were of two distinct types, the one a huge, sunken mushroom, made of reinforced concrete, and the other a more open site, usually situated on the edge of a wood, with a large timber platform fed by a railway track. The greater part of the track was concealed in a tunnel.
Martin was convinced that they were designed for some kind of long-range gun, but he told Esme that one of his party, an engineer by profession, was of the opinion that they were connected with long-range secret weapons, possibly pilotless missiles. Whatever they were, the sites were all near the coast, and it therefore followed that any projectile leaving them would be aimed at south-east England.
A few days after Martin’s visit Esme was moved again, this time to a watchmaker’s house in a village a few miles outside Paris.
The watchmaker, an elderly man, was a collector of antique clocks, and his house was full of clocks, some of them dating back to the early eighteenth century.
All day long his clocks were chiming and the old man would sometimes conduct Esme on a tour of the collection, here touching a clock lovingly on its base of decorated porcelain, or there making a minute adjustment to a timepiece representing a tournament, in which tiny armoured knights charged one another each time the hour struck.
At a certain time each evening the watchmender would put a finger on his lips and take Esme into the workroom, where he would lift a loose floorboard behind his counter. He would emerge holding a tiny radio set,
so small and gimcrack that it reminded Esme of the crystal sets that had been so popular in the Avenue when he was a child.
On this tiny instrument they would listen to the B.B.C. news and when the bulletin was over the old man would wink and say: “It is a useful contrivance, but not as beautiful as the least of my clocks, Sergeant!”
Esme was here when Claude arrived one night with the last of the drawings and news that he was to be ready to leave France the following night.
“You will not be going overland, my friend,” he said. “We have decided to send you home by Anson aircraft.”
“By Anson…? You mean, I’ll fly out from a secret landing field?”
“Of a kind, yes,” smiled Claude, “but the runway is not so perfect! With luck, you will survive to be in London this time tomorrow. After that they will give you leave, perhaps, and you will be able to surprise your fiancée, Judith. You will kiss her twice, tenderly, once for yourself, and once in memory of the Shirley policeman’s daughter, who was so cold, and so frightened of falling in love with a foreigner!”
Esme was so excited by the prospect of being in England again in less than twenty-four hours that he was obliged to leave his preparations to Claude. Under the Frenchman’s instructions he used adhesive tape to fasten the drawings to the inside of his thigh, and then covered the bulge with a circle of adhesive plaster.
“It would not fool the most stupid of the Gestapo but at least you could shed your clothes and still retain them!” he said. “If we are challenged at any stage of our journey I advise you to rely more upon this and upon your powers of flight,” and he gave Esme the loaded Sten gun.
Esme was too nervous and excited to take Claude’s advice and go to sleep, pending Martin’s arrival with the lorry. He lay on his mattress in the watchmender’s attic listening to the sleet slashing against the small window pane, and wondering if this weather would mean a postponement of the flight. They still had to cover several hundred kilometres to the pick-up point, which was located south-west of Paris, and Claude had told him that they would be making the middle step of the journey by rail and using a slow train as the safest means of early morning travel. He was to make this journey as a Belgian gas-fitter, and his identity card had been made out in the name of Adolphe Picart, with his own photograph attached.
Carefully he went over the story that he was to use if challenged. He was a native of Dakar and had spent most of his life in the colony, which accounted for his accent. He was employed by the firm of Lamartine et fils, heat-engineers, of Brussels, and was going to Bordeaux to help in the installation of a new gasometer.
It all sounded so pat and Esme, who had always spoken reasonably good French, was confident that he could pass for a Frenchman with the majority of Germans. At all events, Claude said that this was so, and Claude knew his business. If they encountered collaborators, however, it would probably mean using the gun, which was to be carried in Esme’s tool-bag.
At first light, Claude said, a lorry would call for them and convey them both to a small railway station about five kilometres away. From here, they would travel second-class to Orleans, where a car would pick them up and take them south-west across the old Vichy demarcation line to the air strip.
Esme had been awaiting the day of departure with extreme impatience but now that it had arrived he felt far more nervous than at any time during his period on the run. So many things could go wrong at the last moment and if something did go wrong, and he was caught and searched, the probable results did not bear thinking about.
He tried, as he lay on his rustling mattress staring up at the vague outline of the high window, to comfort himself with the thought that here, at last, was a situation that he had been rehearsing since childhood. Here was high adventure and romance, the chance he had always longed for in order to prove to himself that he was capable of transforming day-dreams into reality. ‘Down, Judy, down! The cavalry patrols are searching for us!’ ‘Quiet, Judy, quiet! The snap of a twig will betray us!’
Well, here were Gestapo squads, more to be dreaded than any cavalry patrol, and all keeping a sharp look-out for him; and here was a situation where the snap of a twig might well lead straight to Fresnes Gaol, or Vincennes, where an account of his activities over the past few months would be gouged or beaten from him, involving not only his own death, but the betrayal of every Frenchman who had housed and fed him since the previous September!
The reflection brought no glow of pride and certainly no surge of excitement, only a dry, parched feeling in the throat, and a persistent waiting-to-see-the-headmaster sensation in the pit of his stomach. He decided, without shame, that he was not, after all, an adventurer, and that in future the exploits of fictitious heroes would provide him with all the excitement he demanded of life. No longer did he see himself as Jim Hawkins, or Brigadier Gerard. The mantle of the elect had fallen from him and he envied only people like Mr. Baskerville, or old Harold, both, no doubt, tucked up in their warm beds in the Avenue, awaiting the dawn of another day that would begin with the arrival of the 8.40 at the Woodside ‘up’ platform.
He leaped from his mattress at the sound of a car braking in the street below.
His instincts, sharpened by the weeks he had spent in hiding, were as keen as an animal’s, and he slipped noiselessly across the room and opened the door an inch, standing quite still, and listening intently for the sound of Claude’s movements below.
It was still dark, but his luminous watch showed him that it was not yet the hour that the lorry was expected. He was about to cross to the window again, and look down into the street, when he heard the terrifying crash of splintering woodwork, then a confused uproar from the landing below.
He had no time to experience terror, or even to tell himself that this was the evader’s nightmare, a raid in the middle of the night! Everything, from the first crack of the street door, seemed to happen with the speed of light, and everything he did from then on was dictated by blind instinct.
He heard someone shout: “No, m’sieur, no! Go, see for yourself!” and then the crash of boots on the lower flight of stairs.
Almost at once there was a volley of shots and a sudden glow of subdued light spreading up from the narrow staircase well, and faintly illuminating the small landing outside his attic.
Into this rectangle of light ran a uniformed man, brandishing a revolver, and as Esme flung open the door something whipped sharply at his right arm.
From below Claude shouted a warning and without being able to distinguish the actual words Esme interpreted his yell as a command to fight his way downstairs.
He did not even remember having picked up the Sten gun but it was here, held in his left hand, with the metal butt pressed hard against his hip.
At the moment the man on the stair fired Esme’s finger closed on the trigger, and he fired a full burst without the least attempt to aim. Then, still holding the gun, he ran across the landing and down the stairs into the pool of light, where Claude was standing astride the bodies of two men in black uniforms.
Two yards away, close to the living-room door, was the watchmender. He was sitting with his back to the door frame, his bare feet thrust out at a wide angle.
At the moment of reaching Claude, and before he had fully absorbed the scene on the landing, Esme heard a strange, bumping sound immediately behind him, and he turned to see the body of the man he had killed roll down the short flight of stairs and come to rest at his feet.
He stared at it in amazement, noting its slow, almost graceful progress and he was still staring when Claude caught him by the arm and dragged him down the remaining stairs, into the hall and through the swing doors to the old man’s workshop.
The moment they entered the room there was more shouting from the street, and somebody fired a volley through the shop window. The bullets must have smashed into the row of clocks on the shelves behind the counter, for Esme heard a confused metallic clang, but Claude made no comment, maintaining his grip on Esme’s sl
eeve and dragging him on through the door leading to the kitchen, and down a narrow passage into the yard. As they crossed the enclosure he spoke for the first time.
“Reload under the wall and follow me out!”
Esme did as he was told, holding the gun between his knees while he fumbled for the ammunition that was loose in his jacket pocket. He heard Claude unbolt the back gate that led, he remembered, into a covered archway and from thence to a network of alleys, serving the huddle of houses at the back.
“Give me the Sten! Give it to me!” snapped Claude, and tore the gun from Esme, dropping his own automatic to the stones.
Side by side they ran out of the archway and down the first alley to the right, but as they emerged someone came pounding over the cobbles from the direction of the shop-front and Claude suddenly stopped, faced about, and called over his shoulder to Esme.
“The lorry is at the end of the lane…Martin…get to him!
Then followed another burst of firing, the flash of the gun lighting up the dripping walls of the alley, and Esme saw nothing more than that of the fight but dashed on into the darkness ahead, emerging, in less than thirty seconds, on the main road, where he ran full tilt into a vehicle parked right across the mouth of the lane.
The force of the collision winded him and he felt an agonising pain in his shins where they had met the running board. He recoiled from the stationary vehicle but somebody reached out and pulled him into the driving cabin. Instantly, with the door swinging loose, the lorry shot away, twisting this way and that as it took corners at breakneck speed, and headed for the open country.
Slowly, as he recovered from the shock of the impact, Esme was conscious of two other things apart from the painful smart of his bashed shins. One was the ceaseless thresh-thresh of the windscreen wipers, fighting the steady slash of rain, the other a strange, spreading numbness in the upper part of his right arm. Then followed a heavy drowsiness, that seemed to pluck at his senses, preventing him from thinking of anything but sleep.
Everything, he felt, as the lorry rushed forward, was driving him towards sleep, the airlessness of the cabin, the almost hypnotic swish-swish of the windscreen wipers, and the numbness of his arm, that now seemed to be spreading upwards to his brain. He found that he could not even count how many other men were with him in the front of the lorry, and which of them was actually at the wheel.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 47