My Father's War, page 7
‘What about us?’
‘We stay put. For the time being. Stay indoors.’
I suddenly remember our plans. ‘But—we were going to see that man, Mr Sureau—about Mum.’
‘No, Annie,’ she said firmly. ‘It would be sheer madness. We are safe here for the moment. And here we stay, for the moment.’
Fury filled me. ‘I hate the Germans! I hate them so much!’
The other three laughed. Julie spluttered, ‘You’re not alone in that, child.’
They’re so calm. I can’t be, though I try to master my fear. How can you get used to this? How can you? It’s one thing to know we’re at war, but it’s quite another thing to be where the shells are actually falling. Every time, I think, what if it comes closer? What if there is a direct hit? Or what if the Germans pound and pound and pound till nothing is left of Amiens? I hate them, I hate them, I hate them, I wish they were all dead, I wish they would all go home and leave us alone.
And—oh my God, Mum is out there somewhere. What if she has gone in that direction? What if she is close to where the Germans are? I’m scared for her, so scared, but there’s nothing I can do.
Later
It’s night time and the shelling has stopped at last. My ears are ringing again, with silence this time. Madame Baudin says the gunners can’t aim properly at night. Out in the night somewhere though there will be battles raging. There are French and British divisions between here and the advancing Germans—maybe not enough to face the onslaught, but Madame Baudin says they’ll be doing the best they can until reinforcements can be rushed through from Flanders or England or wherever they have to come from. We pray together for those poor men who have to face the advance full on. Imagine—what must the shelling be like up close? What must it do to you to have that constantly pounding? Paul says that shells are lethal if they land on top of you, but machine-gun fire is more frightening because it can be targeted more accurately and much closer. Out in the night somewhere are men facing shells and machine guns and rifles and bayonets, and for the first time ever I can really imagine what it might be like—what it must be like …
And Mum is probably out there, on a frontline road haunted by machine-gunners and strafing aeroplanes and massive shells falling. I try to imagine her hiding in a ditch, crawling into shelter, safely ensconced somewhere on an abandoned farm—anything to stop me from seeing a still form on the road …
Enough. I’m torturing myself for no good reason. We don’t know where she is. We have not been able to go and see Sureau, because of the shelling, and now it’s too dark. So says Madame Baudin. ‘And even if shells aren’t falling, there is no telling what else may be abroad on such a night. Tomorrow,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go, if we can.’
But what if the Germans shell us again tomorrow? Then it will be just the same: trapped in Little Venice, unable to even poke your nose out of doors, flinching every time one of those blanky shells lands, imagining all kinds of horrors and helpless to do anything about it.
Madame Baudin said if things got any worse we would have to go down to the cellar. The thought of being in the dark with the smell of potatoes and cabbage and sour wine in your nostrils and the shells falling overhead is almost too much to bear. I can’t help feeling I would be better off if I—
March 22
Got into very bad trouble today—in fact, a real bawling-out from Madame Baudin. I have never heard her like that before, and it scared me a little. But it was worth it because at least now I know more than I did, even if it still doesn’t make sense. It wasn’t just me that got into trouble, but Paul as well. This is how it happened.
I did not finish my entry last night, because just at that moment Paul knocked on my door, very quietly. I hid my book under my pillow as usual and got up to let him in, and the first thing he said was, ‘You want to go and see that hortillon, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘But how?’
‘Five o’clock tomorrow morning,’ he said. He took something from under his dressing-gown. A small travelling-clock that usually sat on the mantelpiece in the drawing room. ‘It will be before dawn, before they start shelling again. Be ready.’
‘What do we …’ I began, but I was speaking to nobody because he had already gone. I went back to bed and lay down and tried to sleep, but I was too excited and the clock was ticking in my ear. I kept falling asleep and then waking up with a jump, thinking it must be five o’clock already. By four-fifteen I couldn’t stand it any longer and I got up and splashed water over my face and got dressed, putting on my coat and hat and gloves as well. And then I settled down to wait, turning things over and over in my mind. It seemed like ages before there was that light knock on the door, and I jumped up and went out with Paul.
Outside it was still dark, with just a faint trace of grey light on the horizon. It was drizzling a bit too, and pretty cold and very quiet—not a nice sort of quiet, rather the holding-breath sort that’s just waiting for something to happen. No red flashes. No bangs. No thuds. Everything was dead quiet. All muffled up and creeping along as we were, we could have been taken for people up to no good, and I hoped fervently that we would not meet a gendarme on his beat or anyone else who might catch us and send us home.
Paul hurried along without speaking, and I followed hard on his heels, down to the river and then along it till we reached a place where some boats were tied up. Long black flattish boats, with a prow on them like a sort of gondola. Paul scrambled onto one of them. ‘Come on,’ he said, speaking for the first time and holding out a hand. I stepped in, and he untied the boat and poled it away from the bank. In less time than it takes to write it, we were heading away from the river into a channel and then into the system of canals where the hortillonages are scattered.
‘You can’t get to Sureau’s plot by road, only by boat,’ said Paul. ‘A lot of them are like that. And the hortillons like it like that. It’s their secret world.’
It did indeed feel like a secret world as, in the misty grey light, we glided noiselessly through the reeds, deeper and deeper into the hortillonages. Here and there you could catch a glimpse of a wooden hut or bare fruit trees or tall poles for beans, weathered and worn. Most of the plots looked overgrown, and I remembered Madame Baudin saying that they’d been abandoned.
Paul said quietly, ‘The vegetables will all be long gone—but when the fruit comes on the trees, everyone will come to help themselves.’
‘Have you done it before, yourself?’
He nodded, and gave me a sideways look. ‘But don’t tell Grandmother. She doesn’t approve.’
I gave a gasp. Not about what he said, but because I’d suddenly caught a glimpse of something frightening. A German soldier in a pointy helmet aiming a gun at us! The next instant, I realised it was only a scarecrow, a man of straw with stick arms, its straw head capped with a German helmet, one of those pointy Prussian ones they used to wear at the beginning of the war.
‘Souvenir of battle,’ said Paul dryly. ‘It must be Sureau’s plot.’ And he poled us to the bank.
We tied the boat up and slipped up the path towards the wooden shack we could see behind a thicket of blackberry bushes. We had hardly even reached the door when it opened and a man came out. And he was holding a gun.
‘Stop, thieves, or I’ll fire.’
We stopped. Though he wasn’t very big (hardly taller than Paul), and though he had a wooden leg, he still looked dangerous, and it wasn’t just the gun.
Paul said hurriedly, ‘Monsieur Sureau, we’re not thieves. I’m Paul Baudin. My grandmother—she owns a boarding-house. Little Venice.’
Sureau stared at Paul. He said, ‘You’re Elise Baudin’s grandson?’
Paul nodded.
Sureau lowered the gun. He put it down behind him. He said, ‘What is your grandmother doing, letting you gallivant around at such a time?’
Paul said, ‘She—she doesn’t know.’
Sureau raised his eyebrows. But before he could say anything, Paul hurried on, ‘Please, Monsieur Sureau, we had to see you. My friend here, she—’
‘Please, monsieur,’ I said, breaking in, ‘I just need to ask you some questions.’
He swung his head round to look at me. ‘You aren’t French,’ he observed. ‘Your accent—it is English.’
‘No. Australian.’
‘Australian!’ He grinned, showing broken teeth. ‘I like your people. Mostly. When they aren’t trying to make off with my vegetables, that is. So what is it you want, little kangaroo?’
‘It’s my mother,’ I gabbled. ‘Did she come to see you? About my father. He’s missing. And she’s disappeared. I think she’s looking for him.’ I described Mum, as quickly as I could.
He stood looking at us, scratching his head. For a moment I thought he was going to say no, and it would all be wasted and we would be no further along. But after what seemed like ages, he nodded and said, ‘Oh, she came here all right. But I have to say she didn’t look old enough to be your mother.’
‘Well, she is! She had me when she was eighteen.’
‘Quite the baby herself then. But she didn’t come two days ago, like you say. It was the day before that.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I don’t think I’m so decrepit yet that I can’t make out the days,’ he said.
‘Did she come on her own, or with someone—another lady? A nurse?’ I asked, thinking of May Pryce.
He shot me a glance. ‘No. On her own.’
‘Please, monsieur. Tell us—what happened?’
‘She said she’d been told I had contacts in the Australian forces. Told her she’d heard right. She wanted to know if I knew a Private Harry Cliff. Told her I’d never heard of him. She showed me a photo, then, and said maybe he’d been going under another name.’
‘Another name?’
‘That’s what she said. Told her I’d never seen the man before. She said that her information was that he had been given my name and planned to see me. “Well then he must have changed his mind,” I said, “because I’ve never set eyes on the fellow. And what was he supposed to come and see me about?” She said that she didn’t know, but she hoped I might tell her. “Well, I can’t,” I said, “as he never came, whatever he wanted. What’s he done, left you in the lurch?” She looked snippy at that and I thought she wouldn’t answer. Then she looked sad and said, “No, not at all, but he’s missing, and no-one will tell me anything, and I am out of my mind with worry.” I said that if he had been reported missing then it meant no-one did know anything of his fate, but she shook her head and said he’d not been reported as missing, but he was, and she couldn’t get straight answers out of anyone. And she had hoped that maybe I had heard something. I said I was sorry, but I had heard nothing. She sighed and said she was so afraid that something terrible or shameful had happened and no-one would tell her. I said if that was so, why would she want to know? Surely it was best to stay in blissful ignorance. She said there was no bliss, it was a hell of fear, and if at least she could start to understand, then things would be better, even if she had to face the worst. “I am sorry to have troubled you, Monsieur Sureau, but I had hoped that maybe you could shed some light on the question.” I said I was sorry too, and wished I could help her, but alas I could not.’
‘Oh,’ I said, crestfallen.
‘She looked just like you, little mademoiselle,’ he said gently. ‘As if her last hope had vanished, so I took pity on her and told her that if she wanted my opinion, honed by my knowledge of the military, it was this: if a man is missing but has not been reported as such, then it is precisely what she suspects—that the army knows the reason for his disappearance but will not tell her. And that can only be for one of two reasons: that it could bring shame on the army and affect the morale of his comrades; or that it would compromise a secret operation.’
‘What do you mean, Monsieur Sureau?’
He did not answer, but went on. ‘I told her that if she knew her man, she’d know the reason that was most likely, and act accordingly. She nodded, and looked much brighter, and said she’d suspected it for some time, but I had made it so much clearer. “Of course that must be the reason, of course it must. But monsieur,” she went on, “do you know what happens if it all goes wrong?”‘
‘If what goes wrong?’ I asked, desperately trying to follow what he meant through the whirling thoughts in my head.
Then Paul said slowly, ‘If he gets caught by the Germans.’
‘The Germans?’ Then I saw, suddenly. Oh, I felt like such a fool. The revelation had been staring me in the face for days and I’d been blind, blind! Dad was working for Intelligence. And he had gone behind enemy lines, on a secret mission. I’d read articles about people who’d done that—soldiers and civilians who had risked their lives to get important information on troop movements, on military plans, on a host of things, for our forces. I remembered one article which had called them ‘The Bravest of the Brave—Our Secret Army,’ and a thrill of pride and excitement went over me as I thought of my father being amongst them. But that soon changed into a thrill of fear as I remembered something else—the fact that many of these heroes were either killed or disappeared without a trace behind enemy lines, never to be seen again.
Sureau said blandly, ‘I told her that she knew as much as I did. If a man gets killed on such an operation, then you usually find out. Eventually. If he’s captured—well, you wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. That’s the risk of the game, for spies, whether for us or them. If there’s no word, then she’d do best to leave well alone. Not ask too many questions. Or people might start thinking she was a spy herself.’ He grinned wolfishly. ‘For the other side.’
‘How dare you!’ I said hotly. ‘How can you say such a—’
Paul interrupted hastily. ‘What did she do then?’
‘She looked just like mademoiselle now—as if she wanted to tear me limb from limb, her eyes shooting sparks! She thanked me in a way that didn’t sound very grateful, and was about to go when suddenly her eye fell on that—’ he pointed to a rickety old wheelbarrow propped against a post— ‘and asked me to sell it to her.’
We both stared at him, astounded. ‘What?’
He gave a crooked smile. ‘I know, I felt exactly the same. I asked her did she think she was going to charge the German tanks with it? She said it was none if my business what she was going to do, and did I want to sell it or not? Well of course her high-and-mighty tone annoyed me and I said, no, it was not for sale. And that was it. She left. I didn’t see her again.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sorry, now, for my ill-temper.’
‘I wish—’ I began, but I didn’t finish what I was about to say because at that moment there was a red flash and a distant roar, and Sureau shouted, ‘Get down!’
I can’t even remember doing it, but for the next few minutes I was on my face in the dirt breathing in plant smells and wet grass, my ears ringing with the sound of the shelling, my heart beating so fast I thought it would jump out of my chest. Flash! Bang! Thud! I could feel the faint vibrations of it through the earth, and my throat roiled with nausea, from a smell that wasn’t earth or plant but a horrible acrid stink. Then as I lifted my head up between bombardments, I saw, on the lightening horizon, a huge sinister cloud of heavy grey smoke.
Sureau said, ‘Get into the house,’ in a tone that brooked no argument, and we crawled across the ground and into his dimly lit, smelly place. His old mother was in her rocking chair by the fire, a shawl over her head (she’s deaf, which is why she wasn’t worried). She didn’t say anything to us and we were too shy to say much to her beyond bonjour. Sureau too had fallen silent, smoking his pipe and gazing into the distance. So we just sat there while the shells fell and the daylight grew brighter at the windows.
The noise—the noise was terrible. In Madame Baudin’s solid house it had been bad enough. In this flimsy wooden house the vibrations from it felt as though it would shake the place to pieces.
And yet—the strange thing is that Paul had been right, you do get used to it. I still flinched, but not nearly as much as I did yesterday. My head was ringing with the noise, and my heart was racing, but not only with what was going on outside, but with what we’d learned this morning. Dad as a secret agent! It was a big idea to take in. Big and exciting. And it fitted. It fitted so well with what I knew of my brave, clever, resourceful father.
But it was a terrifying idea, too. Monsieur Sureau had said that if you got shot, they told your side. So he wasn’t dead. But he was still there. Behind German lines. Somewhere. In prison? At large still, and every day in greater danger? I didn’t know. I had no way of knowing.
Fear licked at me. But Mum had found out something more. She’d said in the letter she left that she was following a lead. Not Monsieur Sureau’s, because he had none, really, did he? He had never met Dad. So it had to be the person she saw the day before she left, whoever that was. It definitely wasn’t May Pryce, though, because Monsieur Clermont had asked at Bertangles, and she’d already left to rejoin her unit before that day.
But May had presumably put her on to Monsieur Sureau in the first place. Or somebody she knew had. Somebody whose identity I had no way of finding out, now May was gone. Or could it be Monsieur Clermont who had suggested the hortillon? But no, that couldn’t be, because then he’d have known about her visit to Sureau, and he’d had no idea. He’d said nothing about it at all. My thoughts went round and round like rats in a trap, getting nowhere at all.
Eventually there was a lull in the shelling and Sureau said, ‘You’re going home.’ He escorted us to the bank but did not leave us there, instead getting in the boat with us and poling us swiftly through the canals, telling us to keep down all the while. But—oh my God—before we were back the shelling started again, and though I told myself I wasn’t scared, that it was all far away, that we wouldn’t be hit, I can hardly describe what it was like being out there in the flimsy shelter of the canals while the sky crackled and glowed with the flashes and the dull thuds and crash of falling masonry and the clouds of acrid smoke filled the horizon. It was as if I was not living in my body but apart from it, feeling so light-headed and that I didn’t even feel scared at all, just numb and strange.
