‘I’m – er – holiday by bicycle.’
With his big boots, he looks like a Spanish onion man, considered the constable, except for his trilby hat and old mackintosh. And this man doesn’t have any onions. The Basque purveyors of onions came over from Spain regularly to sell their produce to English housewives, but they wore berets.
There was an uneasy moment, when the constable asked, ‘How far are you thinking of going?’
Michel looked at the large red face before him. The expression seemed reasonable. ‘I go to West Kirby near Liverpool, visit a friend’s house.’
The constable did not reply as he weighed him up. Instead, he waved on some panting lorries bound for the dock road. Then he turned back to Michel. ‘A friend?’
Very nervous, Michel played his best card. He said, ‘I am from Bayeux. I work with Resistance. I save an RAF pilot from the Germans. Now he invite me to visit him. Very nice man.’
It was an acceptable explanation for a small, neat foreigner’s presence, thought Michel defensively; and he had, praise God, in his inner pocket a letter which, if the constable required proof, said exactly that.
The constable considered it very acceptable too, and grinned amiably, as he impatiently held his hand up to stop an elderly lady in an equally old car, edging past him into turning traffic. ‘It’s a long ride,’ he warned. Then he repeated the directions to Winchester.
‘Merci bien,’ responded Michel, as he mounted his bike and rode out of the intersection.
Thankful to have survived his first encounter with British police, he plucked up courage sometime later to ask the way to Wickham, the first place on his route, of a woman carrying a shopping basket, while she waited to cross a road.
The woman actually smiled at him as she described the route to him.
As he progressed from village to village, he found two big problems. One was that Britain did not seem to have any straight roads such as France was blessed with; between high hedges they wound their way through tiny, anonymous settlements. And, secondly, there were, inexplicably, absolutely no directional signs of any kind. He did not know that all signposts had been carefully removed at the beginning of the war so that a German invasion force would, it had been anticipated, get hopelessly lost.
As he progressed further and further into the countryside, however, the natives appeared friendly, though, when he paused to ask directions, they almost invariably asked what he was doing in England.
Britain was awash with ne’er-do-wells, many of them home-grown. But an uncomfortable number were deserters from various armies, refugees from overrun countries, riffraff of every kind, even German ex-prisoners of war who had, by one means or another, escaped being sent home to their devastated country. The stories of this floating population’s running of the black market, dealing in drugs, smuggling anything they could sell, could be found in the back pages of most newspapers; and these reports made the long-suffering, tired-out British very nervous and resentful. Though people were polite to him, Michel sensed this underlying fear. It worried him. The road to Liverpool began to seem impossibly long.
He had brought with him, in the shabby suitcase tied to the back of his bike, two bottles of water. He had not considered that it might be difficult to get the bottles refilled. To save money, he intended to sleep rough while on his way north; a haystack or a barn would provide a warm and dry sleeping place, but it would not supply him with water; for that he would have to ask.
Thirst became a major preoccupation. He was nervous of knocking on a door to beg for something as ordinary as water; he could easily visualise what kind of belligerent hater of the French might answer – and plunge him into unimaginable trouble. Yet in the warm, dry harvest weather, riding steadily, he needed to drink as much water as he could.
Sometime after leaving Wickham, he came to a small humped-back bridge over a stream. He parked the bike at the beginning of the bridge. Old wine bottles in hand, he eased through a thin hedge into an apparently empty, uncultivated field and slid down to the stream. The water appeared clear, so he topped up both bottles and recorked them. Then he took off his hat and splashed his face, thankful for the coolness of the water.
He had just wiped the water out of his eyes and smoothed back his splashed hair, when a voice roared from the bridge, ‘What’re you doing down there? You’re trespassing.’
Startled, Michel looked up.
By his bicycle, stood a heavily built elderly man. He was roughly clad in a faded tweed jacket, breeches and leather gaiters. Pulled down over his forehead was a battered tweed hat and tucked into the band of it were several fishing flies. As he shook a walking stick at Michel, he shouted again, ‘You’re trespassing!’ A huge white moustache moved menacingly up and down as the man angrily sought for words.
‘Monsieur?’
‘Don’t you Monsoor me! Come out of there.’
Scared because he could not remember precisely what the word ‘trespass’ meant, Michel hastily picked up his trilby and clapped it back onto his head. Then he picked up his bottles, and, tucking one under his arm, scrambled up the slippery slope and emerged to face the stranger.
The man was tapping the ground angrily with his stick, and, as Michel straightened up, the man lifted the walking stick and, none too gently, poked the Frenchman in the stomach.
‘Can’t you read?’ he shouted, as if Michel were deaf. He again swung his stick upwards, this time to point to a notice board, almost obscured by heavy foliage. ‘No trespassing!’
Michel instinctively ducked as the man swung the heavy stick back to point to the stream. ‘That river and the fish in it belong to me – not to European trash. I’m sick and tired of tramps on my land – particularly foreigners. They shouldn’t even be here.’
He paused for breath and glared at the intruder, and Michel hastened to interject, ‘I am most sorry, Monsieur. I wish only water to drink.’ He lifted up a bottle in each hand.
‘Water? You dirty French wino. You were tickling trout, I’ll be bound.’
‘Mais non, Monsieur. I visit England for holiday.’
‘Ha!’ He scanned scornfully Michel’s loose black trousers, his woollen sweater and his big farm boots; and Michel wished he had not, because of the heat, taken off his raincoat and strapped it on the top of his suitcase on the carrier. He believed that the raincoat gave him an air of middle-class respectability. He had a new suit folded carefully into his suitcase, but he wanted to maintain its pristine look until he reached West Kirby. He was, however, acutely aware of how shabby he must look to the beefy, furious man before him.
‘Holiday? That’s a likely tale. You’re here to steal what you can get.’ The man was rapidly going purple in his rage. ‘There’re too many like you here. I know your kind.’
Michel had had enough. He edged towards his bike. Tight-lipped, he leaned in front of the furious landowner and put the bottles carefully in a small shopping basket strapped to the handlebars.
‘Monsieur is much mistaken,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Now, if Monsieur kindly move himself, I continue my journey.’
The older man was a trifle nonplussed by the clarity of Michel’s English. He blustered on, however, ‘Get back to France, you scum.’ He lifted his stick again and shook it at the hapless Frenchman. ‘If I ever set eyes on you again, I’ll call the police!’
Very angry, Michel moved swiftly round the back of the old man, then leaned in front of him and seized his bike by its handlebars. He pulled it forward sharply into the road; the pedals scraped the gaiters of his abuser.
He jumped into the saddle, sailed down the sharp slope of the bridge and rode off, followed by a stream of curses.
Though very shaken by the encounter, Michel made the best speed he could through a tiny hamlet, and then slowed as he began to move into hilly country. He did not stop, however, until he had put a number of miles between himself and the irascible landowner.
A couple of hours later, at a silent juncture of two lanes, wh
ere an elm tree offered shade, he dismounted and sat down on the rough ground. He put his head on his knees. He was breathless, offended, hurt – judged by his clothes, by his foreign accent. It seemed that Uncle Léon had been right: the British boors still hated the French as much as the French despised them.
Was it going to be like this all the way? Then, puzzled, he asked himself how chère Barbara could be so different?
He sat there until he steadied. Then he told himself philosophically that one man did not necessarily represent a nation. He must be calm, and get himself to his dearest Barbara.
He got up, opened one of his bottles, took a big slurp of warmish water and then unstrapped his suitcase. He took out a two-pound loaf of bread, one of two he was carrying, baked by the seaman who acted as cook on his uncle’s ship. He tore off about a quarter of the loaf. As he slowly ate the already rather dry bread, he walked up and down in front of his bike lying on the ground in order to loosen his muscles.
When a young boy, dressed in working overalls, came whistling down the road, he asked him for the route to Winchester. The boy looked at him with interest. He was, however, civil and put him on his way, with the advice to ask again when he reached a certain point.
As Michel thanked him and mounted his bicycle, he called after him, ‘You’ll know Winchester when you see it – it’s got a big cathedral and a real statue of King Alfred!’
Feeling reassured after this encounter, he sailed onwards through meandering country lanes. Occasionally, he would stop and consult his compass – he knew he must, generally, keep going north-west. Once or twice, he spread his map on grass at the side of the narrow roads he was traversing to try to check his whereabouts. As he examined the detail of the map, he tutted to himself. When compared with France, Britain really had a rotten road system.
He unexpectedly found a surviving signpost, which helped him on his way to Winchester, and he crossed the River Itchen, while the sun was still high, and rode up the hill of what appeared to be the city’s main street, and out into the country again.
He wanted to reach Andover before looking for a place to eat an evening meal. Though hungry, he pressed on through low hills, only to realise that he was lost. He slowed down.
The only living things Michel could see were sheep, until he was suddenly faced by an army Jeep carrying four soldiers.
The lane was narrow, so he drew into the side to let them pass. They slowed to pass him, and he was suddenly terrified. The driver, however, grinned cheerfully and, as he went by, gestured thumbs up in appreciation of the space made for him.
This encouraged him, so that when he met two infantrymen strolling towards him, cigarettes in hand, as if off duty, he stopped to ask if he were on the right road to Andover.
They looked him over cautiously. Instead of answering him, one asked, ‘You’re French?’
‘Oui, Monsieur.’
‘What are you doing here?’
It was a question he was getting used to, and he replied, as he had to others, ‘I have holiday. I bicycle through your beautiful country to see it.’
‘Lucky for you,’ sneered the talkative one, as he took a cigarette out of his mouth. ‘I was in the invasion and I saw men like you sitting on your arses, while we fought the Jerries. Cowardly swine.’
Michel took a big breath to control his outrage; they were far too big and fit for him to tackle alone. One man dropped his cigarette and ground it under his army boot; then he grinned knowingly at his companion.
Michel had seen that look on the faces of Germans. He was sitting astride his bike, legs straddled on either side, and he now nonchalantly eased his right foot onto the pedal, as if to steady himself.
He glanced quickly down the lane behind them, and then grinned, and shouted, as if to greet an old friend, ‘Hello, Joe!’
They turned to see who was there, and he shot away from them with all the force he could muster, and kept on pedalling.
There must be a military camp somewhere near, he considered, as soon as he could make himself concentrate again after such an insult; and he doggedly pedalled downhill for several miles of curving lanes, in the hope of escaping any other soldiery who might be lurking in the undergrowth.
In a desperate need to know where he was, he finally stopped outside an isolated little Norman church, similar to his own parish church, except that a notice board said that it was Church of England.
Next to it, was an equally small house. A presbytery? A priest would surely be civil to him, Michel decided.
He opened a wrought-iron gate and wheeled his bicycle up to the front doorstep. Tentatively, he pressed a bell. A dog yapped on the other side of the door.
To his relief, a woman’s voice called, ‘Down, Scampy, down!’
He heard a bolt being shot back, and a thin, middle-aged woman, holding a small terrier firmly by its collar, opened the door.
‘Yes?’ she enquired.
‘Madame, I cycle to Andover, and I have lost my way.’ Tired, black-rimmed brown eyes looked expectantly at her.
She smiled and opened the door a little wider. ‘You’re within a mile of it.’ She picked up the straining dog, and stepped out to point the way. ‘If you continue down this road, you’ll see it in the distance. Just turn half left at the pub. That road will take you straight in.’
He thanked her in English.
Remembering her tattered back garden, which her priestly husband had rather neglected that year, she asked hopefully, ‘Are you looking for work?’
‘No, Madame. I have holiday on bicycle.’
Her face fell. ‘Oh. I see. Never mind.’ Then she laughed self-consciously. ‘I was going to offer you a meal, if you would dig up our potatoes. I think they’re ready.’
He jumped at the idea of a free meal. ‘I do it,’ he said promptly. ‘No trouble.’
Two sacks of potatoes later, he was presented with a big plate of assorted boiled vegetables and a minuscule amount of stewed meat, followed by a large slice of tasteless steamed pudding with, to him, an unidentifiable, weird yellow sauce over it.
As he sat on a discarded kitchen chair in the garden, and thankfully ate the food, the vicar himself emerged to take a look at him. The minister was tall, bent and greying, his black suit shiny with wear.
Gazing gently at Michel over glasses on the tip of his nose, the vicar addressed him. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I hear you are taking a holiday amongst us.’
As Michel rose politely, empty pudding dish and spoon in one hand, he summoned up his best English, and replied that he was.
‘Thank you for getting in the potatoes. It’s difficult at present to get a jobbing gardener.’ He cleared his throat, ‘You are French, I take it?’
‘Yes, sir. From Calvados.’
‘You have friends here?’
‘Yes, sir. I go first to a place call West Kirby – near Liverpool, and then to another friend in Manchester.’
The vicar was puzzled. The man looked like a tramp; yet he spoke credible English with a good accent.
‘I believe my wife is making a pot of tea,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come into the kitchen and drink it there?’ He smiled. ‘We usually have a cup after dinner.’
Poor Michel could have wept on his shoulder with sheer relief at his graciousness. ‘Thank you, sir. Where shall I put the potatoes?’
When the modest harvest had been safely stored in an outhouse, Michel was ushered into an untidy kitchen and seated at a table strewn with the remains of a meal.
It took the vicar about five minutes to get out of Michel the story of the RAF men his family had succoured and that he was also to visit an English lady he had met in Normandy.
Tea was not Michel’s favourite drink, but the three of them emptied two extremely weak pots of it, and the sun was sinking before Michel reluctantly rose to leave his kindly hosts. They accepted his remark that he would find somewhere in Andover to stay the night.
Much comforted, Michel rode through Andover, after
first asking the way to Swindon of a patrolling constable. The constable first directed him, and then warned him that it was about sixty miles away.
‘I start now. Find bed-and-breakfast to sleep en route. Arrive in Swingdong tomorrow,’ replied Michel.
‘OK, mate.’ The constable was amused at his pronunciation, but he made a wry face. ‘Better get a lamp for your bike if you’re going to cycle late,’ he advised. ‘I could give you a ticket for not having one.’
‘Very hard to buy,’ guessed Michel.
‘For sure. That’s why I’m not ticketing you now.’
With the well-meant advice of the constable still ringing in his ears, Michel faced a few more miles of hilly country, some of it well-treed, before he gave up and began to look out for a place to sleep.
He was dreadfully tired, and nervous too. Until he had met the vicar and his wife, he had begun to think that he was mad to continue his journey through such an alien country.
Better, perhaps, to turn back and forget his insane idea of marrying an English woman – and yet his longing for her was there and not to be denied, and it kept him pedalling until his legs ached.
He continued doggedly on until darkness began to close in; then the multitude of curves in the narrow road, which tended to bifurcate unexpectedly, confused him again. He passed through several dimly lit villages, however, until the strong smell of manure suggested a farm close behind the hedges which lined the road.
He dismounted, and furtively walked to a gate. A hump outlined against the darkening sky indicated a house. It showed no light. He hesitated and then decided that to open the gate would make too much noise. He pushed the bike further down the lane. Another gate led directly into a field.
He eased the gate open and slipped his bicycle through. He looked up at a starlit sky. Rain seemed unlikely. The field had a crop in it of some kind; he could smell its dusty, nearly ready-for-harvest odour.
It would do. Beneath the hedge he caught a gleam of water, probably a drainage ditch, he thought. So he laid his bike, unlocked, on the rough grass between it and the gently waving wheat. Then he unpacked, ate some more stale bread and drank the last of his water.
Madame Barbara Page 34