Rosie's War (5 page)

I understand that you must be wanting to see me safely installed – and if one can look into the future with any certainty – Hitler and God permitting – I’ll arrive somewhere in the end even if by a slower and more irregular route than Joan and in a different line.

CHAPTER THREE

France at War

I
t was only when France was merely days away from war that the seriousness of my situation finally dawned on me.

The family spent what was in many ways a very normal holiday in August 1939 at Père Manguin’s. I was looking forward to seeing my brother David, who was planning a visit at the very end of the month. One evening before dinner I wandered down to the beach and saw warships in the bay. An old man stood there watching them.

‘La guerre arrive,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘La guerre arrive.’

I watched him staring fixedly out to sea. The sight of the warships in that beautiful bay – their sheer size and dull colour menacing the bright little sailing yachts and fishing boats – made the prospect of war very real and immediate. I looked at the old man and thought of my father. His generation had already survived the Great War. It must have seemed unbelievable to them that war was about to engulf Europe again.

Monsieur Claude called me aside a couple of days later. He looked ashen-faced. It had just been announced on the radio that Germany and the Soviet Union were about to sign a non-aggression pact. I slowly began to understand that this meant war for France and Britain. As he explained, Hitler could now turn his attention to attacking the West without having to look over his shoulder at the Soviet Union.

Certainly the pact seemed to shake everyone in the Midi out of their lethargy. Two days later I wrote to my parents: ‘The situation internationally is now the first subject of everyone’s conversation.’ I began to hear that lots of foreigners in St-Tropez were making hasty plans for departure.

Monsieur Claude, who was a captain in a reserve regiment, received a telegram ordering him to report to his unit the following week. He sped back home to Avignon that very afternoon, returning to St-Tropez a few days later at 3 a.m. (he didn’t have permission to leave his barracks) to pick us all up. The children grumbled sleepily in the back of the car about this abrupt change in plans. Their father explained to them that he had work to do. The parents tried to appear cheerful but I could detect real concern under the surface.

We arrived back to a very different Avignon from the one we had left less than a month before. The town was already teeming with soldiers on the move. We saw off Monsieur Claude the next evening at the station; his unit was being dispatched north. The scene was like the photographs of Victoria Station in 1914, with every carriage of the train packed with troops and military equipment.

What was I to do now? I wrote to my parents of the need to be realistic: ‘To gaze at the proverbial blue Mediterranean only means watching perpetual manoeuvres in the bay with bombers roaring overhead.’ But what was realistic or advisable at this point? I didn’t know where I would be safer if the German bombers started their campaign – London or Avignon. Or even if I could reach England if I decided to go home.

I discussed what to do with Madame Manguin but before we could reach any firm conclusions the decision was taken out of my hands by the fast-moving events of the following days. By Sunday, 3 September 1939, Britain and France were at war with Germany.

There was a real sense of panic during those days. There were rumours of mass evacuation away from the dangers of the nearby armaments factory. Housewives were already beginning to hoard food, as whispers of rationing spread. Just two days before the war started, I dropped a quick note to my parents, written hastily at the post office:

Working hard as house in dreadful state – all Avignon to be evacuated because of nearness of powder factory …The telephone for private calls is cut and a telegram takes three days unless official! …Trying to buy sugar –
impossible
to find anywhere.

I could not have returned to England in September 1939 even if I had wanted to. With the armed forces being mobilized, the travel situation in France during those first few weeks of war was chaotic. I explained in a letter home to my distraught parents:

There are no seats on the trains now, and no regular times, nothing but troops moving all the time … travelling conditions are not really possible for me alone, whatever the English authorities say.

The German invasion of Poland lasted only a matter of weeks. This surprisingly swift victory added to my confusion over whether I should stay or go. Everyone I talked to in Avignon fully expected England to be invaded at any moment. This was surely no time to return? My letters home were now more concerned with my family’s safety back in England than with my own in France: ‘You should get out before the inevitable aerial onslaught,’ I pleaded.

My parents thought otherwise. Once the war had started they wanted me home and they continued to worry about me throughout the period of the Phoney War. In October my concerned father enlisted the support of the British Consul in nearby Marseille, a Mr Norman King.

This gentleman wrote me a rather pompous letter, stating that he was in full agreement with my father that I should return forthwith to England, especially given that train services were now running again quite regularly. His Majesty’s Government would offer me any financial assistance needed, he added. Like a rather stubborn and naughty child, I wrote back saying that for the present I was not leaving but would (of course) obtain the necessary visas if and when I decided to go.

I was secretly rather impressed by the fact that the letter and envelope were stamped with the royal cipher. It certainly had the effect of making me begin the lengthy process of ensuring that my papers were in order – endless forms, stamps and payments – so that I could leave the country when necessary. I understood my parents’ concerns. I made a promise to write a postcard to a member of the family every other day on the even date. Needless to say, this commitment was never kept.

Just how differently my parents and I viewed events, living on either side of the English Channel, was summed up by my polite thanks to them for having filled in my ration forms. There was ‘nothing like that here yet’. I continued: ‘Your taxes and rationing are necessarily stiffer than out here, where life is not so dear, but each day there seems to be another restriction or expense for you – still our time is coming!’

As it turned out, of course, hostilities weren’t to start in Western Europe in earnest until the following year. Life in Avignon returned to a sort of normality after the first few weeks of panic and confusion. It seemed that large-scale war might be avoided after all. ‘The Anglo-French firm outlook is a ray of hope,’ I wrote to my father. I settled in France ever more comfortably during that winter. Monsieur Manguin’s absence in the army brought some financial problems for the family and they could no longer pay me. But this was a blessing in disguise, as it forced me to take on private English classes. I was soon saving money for the first time in my life. I had mastered the French language by now and even had vague plans to move to Paris the following autumn to start studies at the Sorbonne. And, most importantly, by early 1940 I was in love with Patrice.

Why go home under these circumstances? As I put it in a letter to my parents:

I am busy and individual here, which suits me better than to be thrown into the melting pot of National Service – perhaps I am wrong – anyway I am happy. With the help of the consulate and authorities who are friends I shall manage perfectly all right when I want to leave.

I did, however, rather hesitantly explain that I would need some money to tide me over. As advised by Mr King, I had applied for and obtained a
carte d’identité
, costing 300 francs. I promised my father that from now on I would go easy on spending any more money.

My life in Avignon was one of complacency and calm during that first winter of war. I even went over to London in March 1940 for my twenty-first birthday celebrations. In hindsight it seems extraordinary that I was allowed to travel back to France in mid-April and that my family and I considered it appropriate. After all, the Germans attacked Denmark just a few days before I was due to leave London; the war had now started for real in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the trains were all running normally and for me the only slight strangeness was the fact that I now needed a visa to travel to the Continent. There was certainly no sense of panic or urgency either in England or France. None of us could foresee that France would collapse so completely and spectacularly within a few weeks.

I think too that I so desperately wanted everything to be all right that I refused to see any dangers. All my letters home over those months, whatever the content, sound so happy. I was constantly reassuring everyone that I was fit and healthy, enjoying for the first time a way of life that totally suited and fulfilled me. It is difficult now to think of any other explanation for my travelling back to France on 17 April, less than a month before the Germans invaded the Low Countries.

The events of the few weeks following my return to Avignon soon shook me out of my stubborn complacency. The war began in earnest for France in the second week of May. The rapid advance of the German army through the Low Countries and Northern France stunned us all. Horror stories about German atrocities began to circulate. As I cycled back from school with Biquet one warm afternoon at the end of May, I saw a car arrive with a mattress on its roof, holed with machine-gun fire. The boy thought this an amusing sight but I was horrified. Reality had pushed its way into my little dreamy world and I was frightened.

That evening, when the children had gone to bed, I discussed with Madame Odette what I had seen.

‘It’s the first of the refugees from the north. They’re fleeing from the fighting. We’ll soon be awash with them.’ She paused and looked at me directly. ‘Patoun, have you given any more thought as to what you should do?’

‘Well, yes. I don’t think I can go on like this. I’m being such a worry to my parents and to you. Everything’s moving so quickly and I don’t think they can cope with much more.’

She nodded in agreement. ‘You can’t put off your decision for long. It might soon be impossible to get home.’

‘I know I have to decide on something quickly but I don’t want to get it wrong. What if I go and it turns out to be safer here?’

‘We’ll miss you, Patoun,’ she said, getting up from her chair and coming over to kiss me on the forehead. ‘No one really knows what’s for the best but you must just do what you think is right.’

I hardly slept that night, worrying about my future plans. I knew that the Manguins were planning to move to a large house outside Avignon with another family. I also knew that my parents would be relieved if I went home. And at the back of my mind was the daunting prospect of looking after eight young children in the new house, instead of the usual three. On the other hand, I felt that people shouldn’t be going to London but leaving it. I was really concerned about my parents staying on there. I wanted them out. ‘My concern for you is a sincere sentiment quite detached from anything else,’ I wrote.

By the following morning I had made up my mind. I decided to send a telegram home telling them that I was returning to England.

And so I began the cumbersome business of organizing my travel and visa, with endless telephone calls to the nearest British Consulate in Marseille and to Southern Railways in Paris. On top of all this, my private pupils had to be informed that I was leaving. All the while Madame Odette still wanted help with the children and with the sorting out of the clothes, furniture and various personal possessions which went with the closing down of the house. She had no idea when they would be returning nor under what circumstances.

In the midst of all this I received another letter from Mr King, the British Consul in Marseille. He was giving what he said was his ‘final’ advice. He now believed that travelling at the moment was too difficult and uncertain. The only port left open was St-Malo, which was hundreds of miles away in the north-west of the country. Even if I managed to reach it, he added, I might be stuck there indefinitely, praying that a boat would soon be leaving for England. If I really wanted to leave France, the best way would be for me to take a plane from Marseille. But the whole situation was very uncertain and no one could give me any guarantees.