by Thomas Wood
Andrè beamed as she came into the room and I almost expected him to stand up on his chair and start clapping loudly at his niece. He was quite visibly, immensely proud of her, and so he should have been, she was beautiful. Andrè began muttering under his breath, about how wonderful she looked and how much he loved her. For the first time since I had met her, Cécile smiled coyly, a smattering of red flushing across her cheeks as she did so.
Andrè walked to her and kissed her gently on both cheeks, and she waited for him to take his seat before turning to me. Her icy glare was gone, as if somehow, in her Red Cross uniform, her personality was transformed, into something altogether more forgiving, attractive almost. Her eyes were kind this time and she spoke to me softly, as if I was a child who needed a motherly word of encouragement.
“We’re going today. Now, in fact.” Not wanting to risk her wrath if she suddenly morphed back into the fiery, angry woman I had come to know, I began making movements to pack my few belongings donated to me by Andrè; a few clothes, a book and a bottle of wine.
“We’re going to the station. There we will be met by a man, who will guide us to some friends just outside Paris. From there, we’ll plan our next move. The journey shouldn’t be too troublesome as it is only a small village here. It is when we get closer to Paris that will be our main concern.”
She looked at the worry on my face as I realised I was heading to the capital, the very same capital city that the Germans had marched into around a week before.
“They won’t have got their act together just yet,” she said, reassuringly, “but it’s the only place that we can board another train south from at the moment. It is our best chance.”
Andrè was already moving out of his chair, the creaking and cracking of its joins quite easily could have been his joints groaning, especially as he extended an arthritic arm out to me. He embraced me in a more passionate way than he had done when he first met me, before pulling away and staring straight into my eyes.
“Bon chance,” he whispered, as the tears in his eyes slowly started to filter out.
“Merci, Andrè, merci.”
Cécile was right, the station was tiny, almost irrelevant really; there can’t have been more than two trains leaving its one platform per day. But as we met the man who would eventually take us into his home, I found myself incredibly thankful that I was in a small village for now, because, until I acquired some papers, I wouldn’t last five minutes out in the open air.
24
Despite my initial reservations of being in Hardicourt without any papers, I found it relatively easy to walk through the back streets and quiet roads without seeing anyone, let alone a German soldier.
I had slowly become accustomed to not seeing the presence of a German, until one day, while out with Cécile, a soldier approached us, demanding to see our papers. It was one of the most unfortunate situations I had been in, especially as I was only a day away from receiving my very own forged identity papers, courtesy of the man we had met at the station, the very man whose house we now stayed in and who would quite possibly end up dead if I didn’t play this one right.
Cécile had taken to wearing her nurse’s uniform at every given opportunity, as she wasn’t completely assured that her own papers would grant her free passage around the streets.
Nevertheless, her papers were more or less waved straight back in her face as the German soldier began to turn his attention to me, the man who appeared dishevelled and suspicious. As soon as the man held out his hand for my papers, Cécile exploded and poured the full wrath of that icy glare that I had come to fear so much, on this poor teenager, who himself was hundreds of miles away from home, albeit in a totally different manner to me.
She began screaming incandescently, and I was glad that we were down a small side road, more known for its brothels than for its German sentry posts, as I was sure that before too long, if she was to keep it up, a whole garrison would soon be surrounding us, demanding to know what was going on.
“This poor man! Not only have you brutes taken away his home, his family and his livelihood, but you have also taken away his health too! The man is sick! He needs the fresh air!”
Her angry tirade continued for a minute or two more, before she finished with a flourish, “He has nothing! Just the clothes on his back and a spare pair of socks! You lot didn’t give him time to pack up, how was he meant to remember his identity papers as well! Leave him alone!”
“Entschuldigung…erm…Desole…” he panted, almost bowing at us as he retreated away, hoping that none of his mates would ever hear about the raging nurse that he met down a disreputable side road.
I could do only one thing, once the German had disappeared out of sight. Laugh. Cécile, surprisingly did the same, our chuckling and sporadic giggling lasting in part all the way back to the house of Charles, the man who was making our identity papers.
He had taken my photo a day or two before and had soon set about carving a rubberstamp from the sole of one of his wife’s shoes, shaping it and testing it until it looked like the one that was sat at the top of his own, genuine papers.
“My son,” he said, as he handed me my very own papers, one of the proudest moments of my life, “he is fighting somewhere. Was fighting somewhere. I only hope that someone helps him in the same way that we are trying to help you.”
“I will pass on the favour to anyone who comes across my path in need of help,” I replied, gratefully, “whenever that may be.”
“Thank you, Alfie.”
Silently nodding to me, I knew that our time in this new safehouse was slowly drawing to a close, and we only had to wait to the following evening, when Marcel, the local headmaster, visited to instruct us on what to do next.
When he clattered through the door, I was alarmed at his resemblance to Rat Face who I had managed to put away some time ago now and wondered if this had been a distant relative of his in some way. I knew that it was a ridiculous thought and immediately pushed it from my mind, but I couldn’t help being wary of the sideways glances that he gave me, as if he somehow knew that I had killed a man that looked quite like him at some stage.
“There’s been a slight change of plan. The train into Paris has now become flooded with young Germans wanting to get to the capital, so tickets are hard to get but the journey is also risky. We will drive you to just outside the city and you’ll need to walk into Paris.”
He looked around the room and bent himself backwards to look out of the window, as if he’d forgotten to check who was around at the point of running through the plan.
“Once you are in Paris, our friends will help you get to the unoccupied zone in the south, you’ll need to cross the demarcation line somehow, but it should be easy enough. Once you are there, you can head to Spain and from there, you can do as you please.”
He looked up at us from his notes, as if he’d needed any, and tossed them into the fireplace, watching the corners of the pad slowly curl upwards, shying away from the flame before finally succumbing.
He had made it seem so easy, like nothing could go wrong with this plan, almost like the Germans wouldn’t be checking papers, that they would be keeping their heads down to the floor and not taking a second look at me. I hoped sincerely that his careless attitude paid off.
“How do we know who your friends are?” I asked, as he bundled his things together and stood by the door, ready to flee.
“A newspaper. He will have a newspaper. Just follow him.”
*Break*
I wasn’t feeling confident about the next stage of my journey, and the thought frequently visited me that I would have been far better off staying with Monsieur Paquet for a while longer, until these people could have come up with a far more secure network that I would be able to travel through.
I countered myself though with the notion that what these people were doing was beyond heroic, they were putting everything they had, including their lives, on the line for me, a singular soldier who had no
other desire to get home apart from his selfishness to stay alive. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to continue the fight, but I felt like that was what I should give the impression of, to make sure that I maintained their support and assistance in getting away.
There was only one person that I had shared my true feelings with in those few days in Hardicourt, the only person that I felt I could trust, the only one I thought would understand as she was so far away from home herself. Cécile had been kind in the last few days, her hard exterior softened by the unpredictable nature of the life we found ourselves living. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that each hour that we were able to see go by, could quite easily have been the last hour that we spent on earth.
As her eyes warmed to me, I began to warm to her gradually, and we spent many of our hours together waiting for the next person to come along and tell us what to do. We whiled away those hours by talking about everything, our families, how we had ended up where we had and most things in between.
I discovered that she was a runaway, joining the Red Cross to get away from her father, who thought it was unnatural for a girl to have wants and ambitions to be a nurse and instead should stay at home and prepare the next meal. Her greatest fear seemed to have been being caught out and what her father would say if she was sent home in disgrace.
We began to laugh and joke with each other about one another’s mannerisms, her about my bizarre limp that I had employed to reduce some of the pain in my side, and me the way that she seemed to want to spin the pendant of her necklace round at every awkward silence or nervous situation.
In those few days in Hardicourt, we did everything together, especially after we had received our own identity papers, of which I was especially proud of.
I was now Jean Souess, a twenty-two-year-old man from the Pas-De-Calais prefecture, more specifically Nortkerque, and this simple piece of card was all I needed for a seamless journey towards the Unoccupied Zone. It was incredibly detailed, listing my height to my hair colour, whether I had any birthmarks to if I had a moustache or not. I spent hours looking at its every detail, learning it all, but all the time marvelling at how much like it looked like the real deal, even the stamp had been thumped out hundreds of times before being used on my cards, to make it look as though it really had been marking many others before my own.
The picture of me in the top left corner of the card was barely recognisable. I no longer wore the khaki uniform that had seemed stitched to my skin for the few months previously, now I wore a sharp, double breasted, pinstriped jacket, underneath which a beige pullover had been yanked on over the top of a darker coloured tie. My hair was longer than it had ever been before and was slicked back from my forehead, drawing more attention to the gauntness of my face, my cheekbones sticking out as if I had somehow managed to dislocate them.
It all paled into insignificance compared to how much I loved having an element of freedom now. In fact, I couldn’t quite wait to come face to face with a German and try it out on him, even if it did mean that I would be in the hands of the Gestapo quicker than you could say “Bonjour.”
Cécile had admired it too, commenting on how well Charles had done on his handiwork, tossing it back to me saying, “That photo does you no favours.”
I laughed at what she had said but I was distracted by her for a moment, the great laughter lines that were etched on her face for a few seconds were truly beautiful, made even more attractive by the way her eyes had lit up as soon as she had made the comment. We laughed together for a few seconds, before stopping, admiring the looks on one another’s faces for the first time since we had met.
It was then that I realised that I didn’t want to lose her, I didn’t want to do this journey with anyone else. Since we had met, I had been nervous, but she had been the one that had got me through it, without her the chances were I would have been dead already. She was calmer now that I had my own papers, the chances of being caught seeming impossibly small, or maybe that was just our youthful confidence that was taking over us.
“You should come to England some time, meet my family.” I said with a hint of trepidation in my voice, not knowing how she might react to such an outlandish suggestion.
“I’d like that,” she said, smiling sweetly, “I’ve always wanted to visit England properly anyway.”
I smirked again and realised that this was becoming quite dangerous very quickly. She was meant to be looking after me, the on-the-run soldier, while I was meant to be following her lead. But instead I was feeling myself being pulled towards her and that if she was to be in any kind of trouble, I would end up doing something intensely stupid, just for a blip of meagre approval from her.
As we began to pack our minimal belongings together, for the long journey to Paris by road, our hands brushed past one another for half a second, the smoothness of her skin just gently kissing the rough surface of my own hand. It may have been a complete accident on her part, and meant nothing to her but, to me, that brief momentary physical contact with the woman I was rapidly falling in love with, was everything to me.
25
We spent over three hours in the truck that would take us to just outside of Paris and I spent almost every single minute of it thinking about Cécile and the impact that hand brush had had on me and my mind.
I began to torment myself over whether or not it had been intentional, or whether Cécile had even registered it as happening. I thought deeply about whether that was as far as it would go or, maybe one day, we would be free to grasp each other’s hand and publicly display our affection.
My heart began to race at the thought of being able to spend more time with her and, in a way, I was looking forward to making it to Paris, even though it was undoubtedly heaving with German soldiers and Gestapo agents, purely because it meant that Cécile and I would be able to spend some time away together, almost as if it was some sort of a holiday.
For the rest of the bumpy, uncomfortable journey in the back of the truck, I tried to distract myself by running through what our cover story was meant to be. Cécile was still in her nurse’s uniform, still acting as if she was my protector and carer. I had been a farm labourer until recently, when I started to experience fits and seizures while out in the fields one day. My nurse was accompanying me on a trip south, hopefully to the coast, for a mix of sea air but also to find a specialist doctor who dealt with my kind of cases. The story was pretty watertight, it had needed to be, there was always a chance it would be the Gestapo we were telling the story to and we wouldn’t be able to leave any gaps at all with men like them. Cécile knew the whole story too, from the moment she was contacted to be my chaperone, right down to the Doctor’s name that we were hoping to contact. He was a real doctor, and I only hoped that the Germans we found ourselves explaining the story to, wouldn’t have a similar condition that meant that they wanted to tag along on our pilgrimage.
The three-hour long journey soon whizzed by, and the truck was pulled over into an urban side street, littered with bins overflowing with rotten food and other waste I dared not to take too much notice of.
“Keep walking in that direction, you will soon be at the station. Remember, the newspaper.”
As if we would have forgotten that one piece of meagre information that we had been given. I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to head into an enemy occupied capital city, my only piece of information that I was able to act upon was that the man that was to meet us, was holding a newspaper. But they had already done enough for us, I couldn’t complain that I deserved more information than that.
After hurried goodbyes, we departed, the truck’s tyres almost squealing as they sped off and out of the city that could quite easily become their eternal resting place if they weren’t careful.
Cécile and I had a moment of contemplation as we stood in a near silence in the side road where we had been dropped off. Silently, we looked at one another, before making off into the direction in which we had been pointed, to find o
ur invisible man who held a newspaper.
As we walked, our footsteps tapping rather too loudly and bouncing off the walls, I couldn’t help but think that this was a needle and a haystack kind of situation. We were walking towards one of the largest stations in one of the largest cities of this country, and we were going to try and find one man, without breaking our cover by wandering around aimlessly, possibly for hours.
We walked down the main street, Boulevard de la Chapelle, which according to Cécile, would take us right up to the entrance of this grand station. As we neared it, the scale of picking out one man in the crowds that were going to be around us, truly hit home. The main boulevard was streaming with taxis, charging all over the place with little direction or order, dodging and weaving in amongst the large troop trucks that bore the Balkenkreuz, the straight-armed cross that screamed from every Wehrmacht vehicle, ammunition crate and anything else that seemed to have a large enough surface area to have one stuck on.
German troops sauntered up and down the boulevard, the vast majority with their caps tucked into their waistbands and not a single weapon in sight, the young men making the most of every opportunity to do a bit of tourist gawping. A few though, were far more stern looking, and had weapons swinging around at their hips, helmets very firmly on, scanning the crowd with an obligatory scowl scratched into their faces. I made eye contact with a few of them, but held their gaze for a second or two, I didn’t want to break the contact immediately and arouse suspicion, nor did I want to stare at them for thirty seconds straight and give them a reason to check my papers.
I held their gaze long enough, so it appeared that I was the young inquisitive French civilian, taking an interest in their uniforms or weapons.