Rosie's War

by Rosemary Say

  Through Mr Randall’s office I was able to send a letter to my parents a few days later. It was remarkably clichéd. Perhaps I was just too anxious to reassure my family that I would get home and that I was well cared for and safe. I wrote: ‘So I shall soon be home – a prodigal daughter who has gone through the most extraordinary experiences. I am having a real holiday here and the weather is gorgeous.’ I realized just how much I wanted and needed to hear from my family when Frida received a reply to her telegram a week before I did. I was very jealous and told my parents so in no uncertain terms in my next letter.

  Mr Randall’s offer of Madame Morbelli’s hotel sounded fine to us. It was in a quiet side street in the centre of town, next to a beautiful church. And this ample lady was indeed fine, with her red-tinted hair and make-up of purple, blue, green and cerise. She reminded me of the madam from Boulogne in the Besançon camp. She put us in a large, bright and sparsely furnished room overlooking the street. There was only one drawback.

  ‘One of my gentlemen is a commercial traveller,’ she explained as she adjusted her corsage. ‘He sometimes comes back for one thing or another and always uses this room. So I am afraid, my dears, that when he does you will have to stay with my friend Marie-Ange. But don’t worry,’ she continued as she saw the looks of dismay on our faces, ‘It’s better than sleeping on the Vieux Port. And she is always most careful to change the sheets.’

  Madame Morbelli obviously had a beady eye for business but she was as good as her word. She ran a truly bourgeois establishment. Our impeccably starched sheets were kept neatly folded in a box at the foot of the bed when we had to vacate the room. During the few months that we stayed there we hardly ever saw anybody in the building and certainly never heard any movement. It was very unlike my idea of a brothel. I found, to my great delight, a leather-bound collection of French classics in a glass cabinet downstairs and would contentedly spend hours reading. Our few visits to Marie-Ange were slightly less comfortable, as we were expected to stay away from our room for long periods of the day and evening.

  Madame Morbelli was anxious that we go to the prefecture of police as soon as possible to establish our legal identity. She warned us that although this might be the Unoccupied Zone there were still constant police round-ups and random checks at hotels and cafes. Accordingly, we joined a huge queue of anxious refugees on our second day with her. It was shocking to see just how many people had been displaced by the war. We were all waiting our turn to be accepted as temporary residents in this already overflowing city. Desperate and frightened people clamoured and pushed to get through and obtain their precious papers. Scuffles broke out as the day wore on. Occasionally people would emerge from the building shouting and protesting at their treatment inside. A man behind us in the queue kept up a constant, depressing conversation.

  ‘Nobody can influence the decisions of Monsieur le Préfet, of course, but then he wants no trouble with his masters,’ was his constant theme. ‘He can send us all back where we came from.’

  He told us his life story a number of times, always ending with the question, ‘And where do you come from?’

  We let him continue with his depressing talk but told him nothing about ourselves. I was getting worried that we might be sent straight back to Vittel. Just as dusk came we were taken in to see a young official. We had decided the previous night that we would tell the authorities everything and hope for the best. He silently took a few notes then asked for our passports. To our great surprise he quickly signed and stamped some pieces of paper with a great flourish.

  ‘I have no wish to make things difficult for our English mesdemoiselles,’ he said as he handed them to us with our passports. He gave a broad smile. ‘May I wish you a pleasant stay in our beautiful city,’ he continued, seemingly without a hint of irony.

  The evening was wet and raw as we made our way back to Madame Morbelli’s. We were feeling on top of the world. Our luck had held. We had somewhere to stay, food cards and even the blessing of a Vichy official who liked England! Our worried parents had been informed of our whereabouts. We had officially joined the recognized army of people hoping to start their lives elsewhere. We were not leaving home, however, but going back to it. All we had to do now was wait.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Wait

  For the first few days in Marseille we could hardly bear to leave our room. We had been so frightened and physically exhausted that it was enough just to sit quietly on the bed reading. Life gradually settled into a routine. Every week we went along to see Mr Randall who gave us an allowance to pay our way (this money was to be added to our debt to the British Government when we returned to England). Once we recovered our confidence, Frida and I began to go our separate ways. Perhaps this was no bad thing. Our dependence on each other and our common trust had kept us going through some pretty difficult times. Our friendship held fast, but in everyday life we often found quite different diversions and interests.

  Frida, of course, was of a serious political mind: she wanted to know what the local people were thinking and doing. As always, she seemed to talk to everyone. She found that many listened illegally to the BBC rather than to the Vichy-controlled radio stations and that they bought Swiss or underground newspapers when they could. She came back one afternoon with a wonderfully acid comment from a schoolteacher on Vichy newspapers: ‘I don’t use them even to wrap my boots in. They’re not strong enough.’ Clandestine papers such as La Marseillaise had circulations far larger than the number of copies actually printed, since each edition was read by numerous people. In this way it seemed that in spite of the strict censorship, everyone knew about the strikes and sabotage acts that were going on in railway yards and factories in the Unoccupied Zone. Details of reprisal shootings by the authorities also seemed to be common knowledge.

  Frida encountered much grumbling about the amount of local products that disappeared to Germany, including the famous savon de Marseille. But it was the lack of petrol that seemed to cause the most resentment, as this hit the fishing trade which was the city’s main industry. Perhaps surprisingly, she didn’t find much evidence that the British blockade on food entering the port was producing anti-British feeling. According to what she told me, the people understood the need to stop imported food being diverted to Germany and the German army. ‘C’est naturel’ was the way they justified it over and over again.

  In fact, the food shortages here were far worse than the rationing we were to experience when we got home to England. Conditions in Marseille were so appalling that they made even our diet in the camps seem generous. The lack of food dominated our lives. Bread was severely rationed and often not available. You could queue for hours outside a shop, often on a mere rumour, only to find that there was nothing left. Tuberculosis was rife. It was shocking to see emaciated children with bloated stomachs wandering the streets of the city. The staple food seemed to consist principally of carrots disguised in different ways. Some years later, Frida described a typical restaurant menu:

  Potage Paysanne (carrots and water)

  Filet de Boeuf Garni (carrots plus a small scrap of meat)

  Macedoine de Legumes (mainly carrots)

  Carrottes Vichy

  The city was a fascinating mixture of people, intrigues and aspirations. I quickly established my favourite cafe on the Vieux Port. I would bring a book and sit there contentedly from mid-morning onwards drinking worse coffee than I thought could be possible in France (usually burnt acorns and barley) and smoking cigarettes made from dried tea leaves. Frida would arrive at some point in the day but quickly dash off elsewhere. Towards noon the same groups of people would start to stroll in as if they were walking into their front parlours. For the first few days no one took any notice of me. I didn’t care. I was in a cocoon of my own world.

  One afternoon a short, slight man approached my table. He bowed slightly, stood very correctly before me and spoke in halting French.

  ‘May I introduce myself, Mademoiselle?
I am Alfred Ziege, from Frankfurt. We have heard you are English. Would you care to join us?’ He pointed to a small group at the far side of the cafe.

  ‘Thank you, I’d love to.’ I walked over to their table. ‘My name is Rosemary Say. But everyone calls me Pat.’

  ‘Pat, this is Fritz who lives in the same building as me. He’s also German. And this is Jean and Marek.’

  A languid arm stretched across to give me a handshake and a strong Belgian accent welcomed me into the group. I smiled. Then suddenly my hand was seized and a wonderfully overblown, romantic kiss was placed neatly in the middle of my palm by the other man.

  ‘Welcome. I am Marek.’ He pointed at me. ‘We did not know what to make of you and your friend. Two nice English girls sitting in a cafe. You seemed the most unlikely spies.’

  He was looking at me and laughing as I began to stammer out explanations and credentials. He was a very good-looking man with sharp features, a precise moustache and a thick mop of reddish, wavy hair which sat high on his head. His eyes were intelligent yet dreamy. He knew exactly what effect he was having on me.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ve been well spoken of,’ he teased.

  They accepted me into their group. We spent the next couple of hours sitting there and telling our life stories. They were all penniless refugees who used the cafe as a club, as they waited (like me) for visas to get away from Marseille.

  By the end of the day I was deeply in love with Marek. He was a Polish Jew who had spent a number of years in France where he seemed to have made a good living as a writer, poet and literary critic. He had family in the USA and was waiting for a boat to join them. Up to that point my late-adolescent romances had been given a sadly disappointing run. At seventeen I had defiantly lost my virginity in a Folkestone hotel to the captain of a French cross-Channel steamer. There had been the brief and rather anonymous moments with the young soldier on the train from Avignon and the Toulouse police officer in Paris who had promised to send a letter to my parents. My other romances had been rather chaste affairs. But now I knew better.

  In the following few weeks Marek and I would spend hours discussing the state of mankind. He would make me sit absolutely still while he read Stendhal out loud. He could have read the Bible to me in Hebrew and I would have been just as enchanted. I was amused by his serious concern that he might not like the American way of life. He had seen just one Hollywood film and had hated it.

  ‘What poetry and culture is going to come out of cowboys and Indians?’ he demanded one afternoon.

  We were sitting in opposite chairs at the cafe. With his love of drama he had taken my hands and sunk his chin in them, staring into my eyes. I was delighted by the attention and the theatricality of the gesture.

  ‘You don’t need to be too concerned,’ I teased in return. ‘I think America’s a big enough place for you to fit in somewhere.’

  I learnt years later how common this fear of the unknown was among many would-be refugees. The Jewish artist Marc Chagall, for example, was very reluctant to accept that his French citizenship might not save him from imprisonment by the Germans. He left the country in 1941, only after he had been reassured that there were, in fact, cows in America!

  Marek accepted my adoration with good grace. He would take me to bed when Frida had gone out for the day. Madame Morbelli looked after us indulgently. Perhaps she was more accustomed to commercial love and found that my starry-eyed happiness made a nice change. It is only in retrospect that I can see how ours was a typical wartime romance. At no point was it suggested that I try to get to the USA or he to England. And as time went on my main worry (seemingly without any guilt) was that he would find his boat before I left. So much for the largesse of love.

  Alfred also became a firm friend after our first meeting. He was a dedicated Communist who had fled Germany in the mid-1930s. He was a tailor by profession and lived in a tiny room, most of which was taken up by a sewing machine. He seemed to make a living of sorts, even though we could never work out how.

  He became my constant companion at the cinema, which was another cheap way of passing the time. While some films were enjoyable, the shorts that accompanied them were hard to bear. They were sickly stuff, even by Vichy standards, based on Marshal Pétain’s pathetic tag of Travail, Famille, Patrie (Work, Family, Country). One I remember was about a young man learning the folly of his ways in the big city, only to return to the loving bosom of his family who forgave him everything. The one consolation for having to sit through such drivel was to see the ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ slogans that had been daubed on the cinema walls under the cover of darkness.

  ‘Pat, you must teach me English,’ Alfred said one day as he sat at his machine mending my battered coat. ‘I have decided I want to go and live in Canada.’

  And so began his abortive attempt to learn the language. We started with really simple things, given that he had hardly a word of English. He would sit at his machine in the evening concentrating on his pronunciation and sewing while I perched on his small bed listing elementary phrases and correcting him. Most evenings our lesson would be interrupted by Fritz who was standing and listening at the open door. He would at some point take exception to a word that Alfred was trying to learn and say something to him in German. This would then start a fierce argument between them. Fritz had been a member of the Social Democratic Party. As such he was prepared to blame the Communist Party, in the guise of Alfred, almost single-handedly for the rise of the Nazis. Alfred would reply in kind.

  Sometimes they would be joined in argument by other German friends, one noisy anarchist in particular. Almost always the discussion was about the past. This was old-time European politics, ready to defend lost causes that had little to do with today’s problems. As with many others we met, discussion was all. There was the past and (sometimes) the future, but the present did not seem to be important. They were indomitable.

  Like all the other refugee groups, we marked out our tables every day at the Vieux Port cafe. The proprietor resignedly accepted the fact that all he could expect by way of custom from us was perhaps a couple of cups of coffee among eight to ten people, most of whom appropriated his chess sets.

  Looking back at my friends during those months in Marseille, it is impossible to say that we were in any way a really close group. There was a lot of suspicion and hopelessness amongst all of us. Feelings ran high and quarrels were loud and violent. We all shared the worry of uncertainty: exactly when would we get away? And just about everyone apart from Frida and myself faced the question of where they would go and what they would do when they got there. We all took comfort, however, from the sheer numbers of people who wanted to leave. We certainly weren’t alone in our predicament.

  It was sad to see the waste of intellect and ability as the delays lengthened and the future for many continued to look bleak. Sometimes a friend would not appear at the cafe. Had he got his visa at last, had he been arrested or had he just scarpered into the countryside to try his luck away from the pressures of the city? We waited and wondered. But if the person didn’t come back he was soon forgotten. We were only really held together by a common wish to be off and away and to begin our lives again.

  As we got into December I began to worry more and more about my two beautiful pigskin suitcases. I had left them at the Izards’ in Paris on my arrest. If we were going to be leaving France quite soon, as I desperately hoped, then I wanted to take them with me. They were the smartest possessions I had ever had, excluding the ski suit left behind in the camp. Frida was amused at this concern for my luggage, which had begun to border on the obsessive.

  An elderly German man at our table came up with a surprising remark one afternoon, as we were sitting in the cafe and I was again bemoaning the loss of my suitcases.

  ‘Why don’t you go to the Thomas Cook office, young lady?’ he said in a pinched tone. ‘There’s one near by. Aren’t they supposed to be able to arrange all travel requirements?’

  I detected a hin
t of sarcasm but ignored it. The following day I dragged Frida along to their offices. I briefly explained the situation to a rather effete young clerk who sat behind the desk.

  ‘I’ll leave well alone if it means that my friends in Paris are compromised in any way,’ I added quickly. ‘But I would like to take my luggage on to England. Could you please advise me?’

  ‘That should be no problem, Mademoiselle,’ replied the man in a rather bored voice. ‘Please fill out these forms. There is a fee of fifty francs. Your luggage should be here within a week and it will be delivered to your address.’

  Rather dazed, I completed the formalities and signed the forms. Sitting in a bar later with Frida and having a celebratory drink of coffee, I thought through the whole extraordinary episode.

  ‘The clerk didn’t seem particularly surprised at my request, did he?’

  ‘No.’ Frida considered the matter. ‘I suppose there are lots of people like you who had to leave in a hurry and now want to get their possessions back.’

  ‘Maybe. But there can’t be many like me who have been imprisoned and then want to get their luggage back from their place of arrest!’

  We both smiled at this. Surprising though it might seem in retrospect, at no time did either of us consider that the whole transaction might be foolhardy. Indeed, it was only after the war that I learnt from Madame Izard how disconcerted she had been to find a messenger at her door one morning with a signed note from me requesting that my luggage be released. She had not heard from me for weeks and had been terribly worried. Now what had happened? Was I not still behind barbed wire at Vittel? She hadn’t liked this unexpected demand but had concurred. There was nothing else for her to do.