by Amy McAuley
“Wake up, girls,” Madame LaRoche says, with a knock on the door.
Denise pulls the blankets over her head. “I guess she’s never heard of beauty sleep.”
I didn’t get much sleep, beauty or otherwise. I don’t really know Denise well enough to tease her, but I say, “At least I didn’t keep you up half the night by snoring.”
“That’s a load of codswallop. I don’t snore.”
I roll out of bed already dressed in my gray outfit. “Well, it said so on your SOE file.”
Denise’s covers fly to the end of her bed. Her legs swing over the side. “You’re lying. I can tell because your face is twitching.”
I’m too good to let anything twitch. “I’m kidding around. I only looked at my file.”
Denise pops open her suitcase. One item at a time, she removes a comb, a brush, some hairpins, and a tube of lipstick, and lines them up on the wooden stand next to her bed.
“Did you really look at yours?” she asks. “Those files were confidential.”
I take my own comb from my suitcase. From the feel of things, my sweat-drenched hair dried in an unflattering mess, as if I dunked my head in glue and stood in a hurricane. Roughly tugging on the comb to free it from a whirl of hair, I say, “I broke into the safe.”
“Really? All that time they spent teaching us to pick locks and burglarize, and it never occurred to me to put those lessons to good use.” Denise uncaps the lipstick. Partway through one lip, her puckered mouth flattens. “Like what you saw in your file?”
I give up and return the comb to the suitcase. “They said I rebel against authority. Among other things.”
The report also said I show great potential as an agent. I figure they must be right, since I successfully broke into a safe to find that out.
After tightening my watch around my wrist, I notice Denise’s curious glance as I return my bracelet to the confines of my pocket, but I pretend I didn’t.
Early morning sunlight illuminates the house’s deterioration. Peeling wallpaper, yellowed with age, frames a cracked bedroom window, a bare bulb hangs from an ornate ceiling fixture, and the wood stairs and floors are stripped and scratched. Still, the house shows signs that it was beautiful once, before the war.
At the end of the hallway, I stop in front of a nine-paned window that resembles a tic-tac-toe grid. Through the center pane, I watch a barn swallow swoop across the sunlit grass like a tiny bomber plane before soaring away over the wooden rail fence. Thick forests, brilliant green with new leaves, surround the pastures and a small pond. In the yard, a pair of triangular ears pokes up through a patch of weeds next to the water pump. I laugh when a calico kitten springs out, paws ready to pounce.
“I hoped there would be cats here,” Denise says as she squeezes in next to me. “My, what a lovely sight that is.”
When we arrived during the night, the farm was tucked away in the darkness, a shadowy shape in the middle of nowhere, with a single candlelit window showing the path to the door and little else. That dark and gloomy atmosphere was what I expected. After all, we had geared up to face a dangerous and unfamiliar country, where life is so different than what we’re used to. But now, looking at the peaceful scenery outside Madame LaRoche’s home, it seems as if I dreamed last night up.
“I know we need to lie low,” Denise says as we descend the staircase, “but I am positively itching to get going.”
Not me. I’m not in such a hurry to lose the security of the farm house.
We enter the kitchen as Pierre walks in from outside.
“Which one of you is the wireless operator?” he asks without so much as a hello or good morning.
With an offhand wave, Denise says, “I am.”
During the final bit of training, we were assigned specific jobs to perform in the field in addition to whatever side work is thrown at us on the fly. Denise showed a knack for code and transmission, so she received special training to be a wireless radio operator. I taught myself Morse code when I was young, but I don’t have a technical bone in my body. What I do have going for me are “unassuming looks.” Sadly, that means I’m plain enough to fly under the radar. I also have a sharp memory, good gut instincts, and trustworthiness, which makes me a good fit for the courier job. Apparently when large sums of money are involved, the temptation is too great for some people.
Courier work is dangerous, but what could be more thrilling than scooting around the countryside on a bicycle, carrying top-secret messages between cells of the Resistance, right under the noses of oblivious Germans? I know I can do the job, and I don’t care if the occupying forces underestimate me. In fact, I’m counting on it. They can go right ahead and think I’m just a “flimsy little girl” as Pierre put it. I’ll show them.
At the opposite end of the kitchen, Pierre pushes a cabinet away from the wall. From a hidden compartment accessible only from the back, he removes a piece of luggage that came in with our drop. The components of Denise’s wireless set—the transmitter, receiver, power supply, and accessories—fit perfectly snug inside a modest brown suitcase. Of all the SOE’s clever devices, that radio is the one we can’t do without as it’s our only safe way to correspond with headquarters in London. The Nazis listen in on telephone calls. Mail sent through the post is liable to be intercepted. The French are cut off from the rest of the world. And without Denise’s radio, we would be too.
“I wish we had a transmitter receiver like this one,” Pierre tells Denise. “Our radios receive messages from the BBC, but we can’t use them to respond or request supplies.”
Each day, the British Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts the messages personnels, phrases that sound, to eavesdropping Germans, like innocent communication between friends and relatives in France and Britain. Really, they’re coded messages to the Resistance. In preparation for our night drop, the reception committee would have heard two messages, one to put them on standby and another to let them know whether the drop would take place. The messages personnels phrases I learned in training were surprisingly silly. I wonder if Resistance members ever have a good laugh when they hear ones like “The rabbit drank an aperitif” or “Yvette likes big carrots.”
The British government discourages civilians from listening to long-range European service broadcasts since they contain propaganda and coded messages. Of course, the order to not snoop on coded messages zooming across the airwaves only made me want to snoop more. But no matter how hard I tried to find a radio with the long wave band, I never had any luck. My aunt told me they stopped manufacturing them.
Now the coded messages are part of my job. Listening to foreign broadcasts is illegal in France, but that won’t stop me. Those Germans have some nerve, banishing free speech. I can’t imagine facing fines, imprisonment, or even death for something as simple as listening to a radio. I bet most French people feel the way I do, and they listen to the BBC’s radio broadcasts because they’re not supposed to.
“We are grateful for the Sten guns, pistols, and demolition packs the SOE has supplied us with,” Pierre says. “But our situation is about to become dire. Everyone, even Hitler, knows the Allies intend to cross the Channel and invade within months. We don’t know when or where it will happen, but our time to act is now.”
Like the Pied Piper’s entrancing flute music, his heartfelt patriotism has a hypnotic pull. I give my head a slight shake to focus.
“German troops have been occupying and fortifying our country for four years. They will not scatter out of the way and let the Allies roll through France to Germany. They are entrenched. They are waiting, eager to fight. The northern coast may as well be a vast brick wall. It is up to us, the Resistance, to weaken the strength and morale of that wall. The Germans must not have the upper hand when le Jour J arrives.”
Le Jour J: D-day.
Only the Allied planners of the invasion know when and where it will take place. I’m used to hearing about this future “D-day”—the day the invasion will begin—but the way P
ierre speaks of it grabs my attention, like a sharp tug to my arm. He doesn’t take the word lightly. I sense just how strongly he feels about the invasion, how much it will mean to him, and it reinvigorates my excitement to be part of such a monumental day.
“We urgently need heavier weapons,” he says. “Before you leave, can you transmit that request?”
“I’ll pass it along,” Denise says. “I need to radio headquarters today to let them know we’ve arrived safely.”
“Thank you. The last radio operator we used to communicate with London left for Paris. She was never seen or heard from again.”
Pierre makes it sound as if her disappearance were more an inconvenience than anything else. And why mention her in the first place? To purposefully frighten Denise and me right before we embark on our missions?
Denise’s eyes narrow. “Radio operators perform incredibly dangerous work in the field. Hopefully that woman hasn’t been captured or killed.”
He gives her an offhand nod and says, “I’m taking a load of supplies to the men. Bishop said you two can help with that. Since you’re the only agents here, I guess I have no choice. Come with me.”
My mouth drops open after Pierre abruptly walks out the front door with the radio.
“No choice?” I say to Denise. “Doesn’t he realize we had to pass the exact same physical and psychological training as the men in our group to get here? The SOE didn’t pluck girls from the market and drop them into France to look pretty. Where would he and his men be without us?”
Denise crosses her arms. “If he’s expecting us to cook breakfast for them, then he should think again. That is not what I signed up for. And he carted off my radio. Who exactly does he think is going to operate it to pass on that list of requirements he just mentioned?”
Denise has good reason to be in a huff. Anyone, even a child, can easily use a home radio. Denise’s radio requires training and skill. The first time I saw the lid lift open on a suitcase wireless set like hers my mind boggled at all the tubes, switches, meters, plugs, and sockets packed into such a small space. Not to mention the fluency with Morse code necessary to operate such a piece of technology.
Switching back to the required French, she says, “Let’s go.”
We stuff our feet into shoes and follow Pierre along a well-worn path to a stone barn, where a horse-drawn cart waits.
Denise stops to stroke the white blaze between the horse’s huge chestnut-brown eyes. “Look at you, you beauty. You look just like my Gingersnap.”
The horse’s nose twitches up to reveal a toothy smile.
Pierre turns at the waist. “You—” he says. “What’s your name again?”
I glance side to side, supposing he means me, since Denise is still getting acquainted with the horse.
“Adele.”
“Adele, the bags of clean laundry go in the cart,” he says as he enters the barn.
I wander closer. Beyond the doors, two bulging duffel bags sit propped against each other on the cement floor. I struggle to lift one, wondering if it’s filled with rocks. Together, Denise and I carry the bags to the cart and heave them over the backboard.
“I’ll go tell him we’re finished loading the bags,” I say.
Even with the double doors wide open, the interior of the barn dims within my first tentative steps. The containers and supplies we dropped are nowhere to be seen. Everything appears normal, giving no sign of Pierre’s involvement with the Resistance.
He isn’t in the main section of the barn, so I walk farther inside.
“Don’t touch that!”
I spin around with my hand over my pounding heart. Through a trapdoor in the floor, Pierre emerges. At the top of the ladder, he effortlessly hauls himself out of an underground chamber. He fits the door into place and covers it with a hay bale.
“I wasn’t touching a thing,” I say.
He points to a grimy canvas sheet draped over what looks to be, from its lumpy shape, an unusually big bicycle.
“You weren’t touching that?”
“N-no, I wasn’t,” I stammer. “I came to tell you we’ve loaded the laundry.”
“You managed to get the sacks into the cart?”
“Well, yes,” I say warily. “Do you need us to load anything else?”
“No, that’s all. You and the other girl climb into the wagon. You can sit on the hay.”
I trudge back and meet up with Denise at the cart.
Pierre tosses two more burlap sacks into the back and takes his place up front. He steers us down a laneway that runs the length of the property between the barn and the road. I hold tightly to the side rail to keep from bumping around.
“Should you be traveling in broad daylight, Pierre?” Denise asks. “What if you’re caught transporting supplies?”
“This area is very remote,” he says. “That’s why men who escape the compulsory labor service are drawn to these forests. We rarely see Germans pass through anymore, and usually they are on the move to somewhere else. The towns and cities are risky, yes, but not here. That will change when the invasion comes, of course. Then all the major roadways will be clogged with Germans heading north.”
I can’t blame anyone for running away from the compulsory labor draft, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, created in response to Germany’s employment woes. With the majority of their workforce at war, they need replacement workers, and France has plenty of people. Problem solved. Does the injustice of taking men and women against their will not matter to the Germans? Do they even see it as an injustice to begin with?
The horse plods down the country road. I could outpace it on my bicycle.
Denise laughs. “Pierre, your vehicle is literally the one-horsepower model. She’s a beauty, but not very speedy.”
He hunches further in on himself, clutching the reins. “I had a car before the war. A sleek metallic-gray Simca. I held on to it for a while, but at what cost? My mother was going without laundry soap and sugar, and standing in line for hours for a lousy fifth of a pound of butter. With fuel rationed, the pumps drying up, and no petrol coupons to be had, I was left admiring a car I could not even drive. When the war is over, I’ll have another car. I’ll drive it fast and whenever I choose.”
The cart rolls to a stop on a secluded side road. Pierre leaps down and strides to a mass of overgrown brush. On either side of his mud-caked boots, I spot the faint indentations of wheel marks in the grass. The tracks disappear into the woods without circling back, as if the cart usually lifts into the air and flies away.
Pierre wedges his hand through the tangle of leafy branches. A latch clicks. An entire section of the woods swings open on hinges.
“How fun! A camouflaged gate,” I say.
I turn to share a grin with Denise about the secret opening to the forest, but she gives me an odd look. I quickly glance away, wondering what I said to make her react that way. But then again, maybe it wasn’t so much what I said, as how I said it—as a seventeen-year-old tomboy she doesn’t know rather than a professional grown woman named Adele. I’ll have to be more careful about slipping into my old self.
Beyond the gate is a fairy-tale forest, with mossy rocks, yellowed autumn leaves still scattered over the ground like gold coins, and slender sunbeams sneaking through the treetop canopy. Reins in hand, Pierre leads the horse-drawn cart through the gate. After securing it again, he climbs back into the driver’s seat.
Moments later, Denise taps me on the shoulder. “Can you smell that?” She wraps her arms over her stomach. “A cooking fire. And I am so hungry.”
I close my eyes and sniff the air for one of my all-time favorite scents. Every Sunday afternoon during the dreary winter months, my aunt sent her boys to collect whatever small logs and branches they could find. As a special treat, they were allowed to toss them into the coal fire. I loved how wonderful it made the front room smell, like pine or applewood. We sat around together, huddled under blankets, listening to radio shows and singing songs like “R
oll out the Barrel” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
The forest opens into a clearing. At least twenty-five men mill about in a camp of tents and thatched huts. A patchwork of canvas tarps, strung up in the trees like a giant moth-chewed blanket, protects the camp from bad weather and hides it from view of the German scout planes.
Pierre steers the cart around until the supply-laden back end faces the camp.
A stocky man stirring something in a metal bucket atop the fire gets to his feet. Pointing a long-handled spoon at me, he says, “You brought the potatoes, I hope.”
“We brought your clean laundry,” I reply.
“Well, we can’t eat laundry.”
As he hops down from the driver’s seat, Pierre laughs. “Leave her alone, Gus. We brought the potatoes.”
Pierre lowers the back of the cart. Propping his elbow against the wooden slats, he says, “These men are the reason you are here in France.”
I stare in disbelief at the scruffy bunch dressed in a hodgepodge of drab civilian clothes, leather jackets, and bits and pieces of old uniforms. Wooden peasant clogs and dilapidated field boots are the norm. Their hair, at least on the men who haven’t tucked it under a beret, catches my attention the most. Some have slicked it into a long shiny plume from forehead to nape. Others let it hang loose and defiant.
This isn’t what I was expecting. My chest tightens with irritation at being dropped into this place. I’m not sure if any amount of equipment or training can whip this camp of disorganized, amateurish men into a force capable of harassing an elite and powerful army. Even with our help, can they sabotage trains carrying German troops and supplies, or demolish telephone lines so the enemy can’t coordinate attack plans? Do they honestly have what it takes to weaken the Germans in time for the Allied invasion? The man at the fire, Gus, can’t even muster up the energy or discipline to tie his bootlaces and shave. If all Resistance members are like these, France is in big trouble.
Denise scoots to the end of the cart and dangles her legs over the edge. I wrap my skirt around my knees to copy her.
