by Thomas Wood
We reached the end of the alleyway and, bursting out of the tight confines of the eight-foot walls, I drank in the comparative silence.
But, as I composed myself, I became aware that there were far more gunshots now that we were out of the alley, than there had been when we were in.
I chanced a look backwards. Just in time to see a lone figure, a man, dressed in black with a workman’s cap on, peer out from one of the backyards. He had a rifle. The same rifle that Suzanne had had with her on the first night that we had met her.
He was taking pot-shots at the Germans, not really succeeding in hitting any of them, but doing a sterling job of keeping them off our toes.
I wondered for a second who had sent the man, or whether he had lived there by chance, but, as Mike tugged at my sleeve, I realised that it did not matter.
The fact was that he was there and, for now at least, we had been granted another opportunity to do what we had been sent for.
“That man!” I cried, “He needs our help!”
“What help can we give him, Jean?” Mike bellowed, already beginning to make his way to the river. “The best help we can give him is by staying alive!”
I went to argue with him but restrained myself. We would not be able to help the man, whether we stayed with him or left. But by keeping ourselves alive, there was at least a chance that we could help his fellow countrymen, his family possibly, to rid themselves of the Germans that were now descending on the poor man.
I turned, giving one final thought to our rescuer, just as I watched a round just clip him in his upper arm.
15
“I don’t really fancy it all that much now, old fruit. How about you?”
“It’s a lot further than I thought. Besides, how can we get this across without it being damaged?”
He thought for a moment, “I rather thought that we would have to escape without that thing, if truth be told.”
We stood staring at the body of water, that seemed so flat that you could roll a marble over the top of it, wondering what we would do next.
The tranquillity of the water, the almost sedentary position that it adopted, was far from what was going on in my insides. My heart was still thumping out of my chest, my throat feeling as if it was trying to close up and starve my lungs of any oxygen. Sweat was rolling down my sides as it trickled from my underarms, and the perspiration on my forehead was enough to fill the river before us, several times over.
Our plan, to swim across the water, to the relative isolation of the island, was neither well thought out nor executed. Our failure to consider the one most important bit of equipment, other than ourselves, was enough to bring our egos crashing around our ankles.
“Now what?” I asked, as the sounds of rolling truck engines and general pandemonium continued to clamour around Monsieur Plantier’s abode. “They’ll be spreading their search soon enough. If they haven’t done so already.”
Mike looked around, erratically
“Come on, over here. I’ve got an idea.”
Reluctantly, like a younger brother following his elder sibling, I trotted off behind him. Invariably, Mike’s ideas ended with me either passing out blind drunk or standing in front of the CO’s desk. On one occasion, I had found myself doing both. The CO was most unimpressed, it took him all of five minutes to reorganise his pen pot.
“Oh, and one other thing, Jean,” he quipped, spinning around on his impossibly squeaky heel. “If we’re ever in hot water like that again, we get out. No faffing around with that wireless set. We go. I don’t know how many more of them I can take. Your problem is you’re too straight. Always playing by the rules.”
He muttered something else as he turned away from me, imaginably uncomplimentary, but at the same time filled with love and respect, as always.
He was right. I had nearly got the two of us killed. The chances were, Monsieur Plantier would be killed anyway, regardless of if they had found a transmitter coil under the bed or not. He was replaceable. We were not.
But the wireless was a vital piece of equipment. If we had lost that, as well as our contacts, then we were less useful to the war effort than a wooden frying pan. In my mind at least, playing by the rules would pay off dividends further down the line. It was just such a shame that Mike’s foresight went about as far as his charm did on the young woman tying up her boat.
“S'il vous plait, Madame,” he begged, to the point where I thought he might cry. “My brother and I wish to scatter the ashes of our dear mère. She died in the most tragic of circumstances, she…”
I tried my utmost to maintain the smirk that was slowly threatening to give the game away. Mike went into such detail about how our beloved mother had passed away, that I thought even he had begun to believe it.
The girl, whose grand sum of worldly possessions lay in the boat, was stubborn, refusing to let Mike take control of the small vessel, even after he had fluttered a bunch of banknotes under her nose.
I couldn’t help but let my mouth wriggle around for a second, as I tried desperately not to burst out into laughter. He had always fancied himself as a bit of a ladies’ man but, here he was, failing miserably to even buy the young girl’s affections.
Momentarily, the girl locked eyes with me, sending a bolt of lightning straight through my chest. There was a second or two where I did not know how to react, the phenomena was one so strange to me that I had forgotten how one should behave around such girls.
She smiled at me mischievously, which settled my palpitations and perspiration no end. I was powerless to do anything except smirk back in her direction.
Without looking back at Mike, instead looking only to me, the girl snatched the wad of notes from his hand and tossed the rope in my direction.
“But…How? I mean, why? Why you?”
“It would appear, my friend, that sometimes a young lady appreciates a bit of honesty.”
“But you didn’t say anything.”
“I didn’t need to, Michel.”
Mike spent the next ten minutes reeling from the fact that I had benefitted from a bond with the fairer sex that he simply found impossible to establish. I said nothing, apart from keeping the wry smile on my face, which seemed to infuriate him all the more.
It was a moment of contemplation for me, as we rowed ferociously towards the small island that inexplicably refused to move despite the metropolis around it. I hadn’t experienced those kinds of emotions, the shockwave through the chest and the quivers of the heart for a very long time.
It was that calibre of reaction, the ones of the body, the ones that I could not control, that scared me the most. They were the ones that would give me away, but, more than that, they would be the ones that reminded me.
“Hey,” Mike’s voice suddenly resonated, as he slapped me on the leg. “Don’t dwell on it. Not now.”
I didn’t even need to ask him.
“Your face. It goes grey. It gives you away. It scares me.”
“Sorry, Mike.”
“Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault. But don’t let it distract you. Alright, old fruit?”
I nodded, as the bottom of the boat began to scrape and slide over the shingle that told my tired arms it was time to stop.
In silence, we began to heave the boat further onto the island, so that we could be safe in the knowledge that the boat wouldn’t suddenly begin to float off on its own accord.
We had barely said a word about what had just happened, instead opting to ensure that we were as far away from the chaos as was possible. In the event, it wasn’t necessarily the distance that made us feel safe, but the opportunity of concealment.
It would take a German with a good pair of binoculars and an unusual hunch to take a look over at the island and, with any luck, he wouldn’t be able to see the two of us hunched behind the undergrowth.
The commotion had died down slightly, but it was more down to the fact that we were a decent distance away from the epicentre that we had the luxury of
peace.
As the wind continued to breathe around us, letting up for nobody, I could have sworn that I caught the occasional German word, the odd command, as rooms and houses were upended, in search of the two men.
“What do you think we should do now?” I asked, hoping that Mike’s own thoughts had been more fruitful than my own.
“Not really sure, to be truthful. We could radio London. They might have an idea.”
“I reckon they’d have several. None of them any use to us right now, I’d say.”
He hung his head as if he was in complete shame.
“Oh, come on, old chum,” I said, trying to feign optimism and hopefulness. “It’s not all bad.”
“How so?”
“At least we don’t have to stomach any more of Monsieur Plantier’s coffee.”
He chuckled gently, plonking his backside down on a tuft of grass.
“That’s true,” he said, finding the energy to look up at me. “It really was awful stuff, wasn’t it? Reminded me of the stuff that Teddy Higgins used to drink.”
His head bowed again, as he inevitably recalled the fateful day where Higgins had baled out of his Hurricane, his parachute failing to open. I couldn’t imagine what Mike had seen on that day, no matter how many times I dreamt about it.
The more I looked at him, the more I realised that we were both damaged. We had been damaged by different things, but the same awful war.
“Come on, old fruit,” I said, putting my frankly terribly impersonation of him on. “It wasn’t your fault,” I mumbled, returning to my own tones at the sound of myself.
“I’ll tell you one thing about all this,” he said, dusting off his clothes but still keeping himself firmly planted on the floor.
“What’s that?” I breathed as I squatted down to join him.
“I will never trust that blasted woman ever again. I knew there was something about her. But I didn’t think she’d try and hand us over that quickly.”
“We don’t know that it was her,” I jumped in, defensively. “It could have been a random search.”
Mike scoffed, “I know that I can be an unlucky so-and-so, Johnny. But that simply takes the biscuit. How many houses are there in Tours? You are trying to tell me that out of all of them, the Germans pick the one house that happened to have two British agents in?”
Instinctively, I looked around me, seeing nothing but undergrowth and insects to hear Mike’s revelation. I just had to hope that they weren’t German insects.
I let his blood cool for a few seconds before I joined in the debate, trying to add a rationality to our thinking that even I was struggling to comprehend.
“Mike, there could have been a hundred other reasons why they chose Monsieur Plantier’s house.”
“Pray tell, Johnny,” he said sarcastically, an arm waving out in front of him in submission.
“Monsieur Plantier for example. How do we know what he’s been up to? He could have been out every night the last few months, laying mines and blowing things up. He could have been on the Germans’ watchlist for months.
“It could have been something as trivial as not adhering to the blackout. Or refusing to give up his seat on the bus for a German.
“They might not have been looking for us at all.”
He perused my weak and ill-thought-out suggestions which, surprisingly, he seemed to take more seriously than I had done.
“I suppose that you could be right, old fruit. I am rather glad I’m here with you, you know. You always were the cool one. If I was here on my own I rather suspect that I’d be dead already.”
“Don’t be stupid, Mike.”
“No, really. I mean it.”
I felt like blushing, but all I could really bring myself to do was to close my eyes, just for a brief moment. For a fleeting second, I was back in Cornwall, at Telwyn Farm, lying in the stream appreciating every bird and creature that sung above my head.
It felt like a lifetime ago, one where the memories had already begun to soften at the edges and recollections had faded. But just as easily as some memories had paled, others had sharpened, developed over time.
Just as Mike was fighting off the demons that beckoned him, complete with nightmares of a tumbling Teddy Higgins, so too were mine coming to fruition.
“It is strange though,” he started again, hours after we had finished our initial discussions.
“What is?”
“The whole thing. Suzanne met us on her own. Why didn’t she have anyone else with her?”
“Maybe she wanted to go on her own?”
“Or maybe she didn’t particularly want anyone knowing we were coming? That way she could shop us to the Germans that little bit easier.”
“But people do know that we’re here. Alfred and Plantier know.”
“Convenient for her though. Choosing the two men that seem utterly petrified of the woman.”
I mulled the idea over some more. He was right. There were things that did not quite add up.
The way that she had left us for such long periods, the not informing us that we were due to move, the way in which that no one seemed to know all that much about her and were reluctant to tell us if they did. And, perhaps most curiously of all; she had been seen fraternising with the Germans.
“You’re not going to try and convince me that all is well again, are you, old fruit?”
“No, you’re right. There is something worryingly irregular with Suzanne Seguin. But I do have one thing that you’re not going to want to hear.”
“Oh?”
“We need her now. More than before.”
16
“How are we going to find her?” Mike asked tentatively, as he strained under the effort he was exerting.
“I don’t know yet. I’m sure she’ll find her way back to us, one way or another. She seems like that sort.”
He thought for a moment, as he carried on working away like a persistent rodent, trying to make his way into the pantry for a midnight feast.
“I’m not quite as certain as you on that front, old fruit.”
“Why not?”
“She seemed pretty aloof to me. Secretive. And now that she tried to get rid of us, I’m convinced that she’ll be lying low somewhere. Out of our way. She’ll know that we want to have a stern word with her.”
“We still don’t know that it was her who told the Germans.”
Frequently, I found myself getting defensive of Suzanne, despite the fact that I did not trust her in the slightest. In fact, I would have wagered that I trusted her less than Mike did. But there was something about the whole situation, and Mike’s frame of mind, that convinced me that I would have to persuade the both of us that she wasn’t as bad as we had been making out.
“And you have no evidence to prove otherwise.”
I looked at him triumphantly, as if I had backed the prosecution barrister into a corner that no one could escape from.
“But you, similarly, have no evidence to redeem her.”
The prosecution counsel was back on top.
I rubbed away at my forearm, the itching that I had experienced before reaching a crescendo in the last few days, as I inevitably ran out of the ointment that I required to soothe it.
“It’s bad?” Mike asked, nodding at my scratching. “I’ve noticed you doing it a lot more recently.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s getting worse. I need to find some sort of ointment that will help sort it out soon. Otherwise I’m scared I’ll wake all the Germans in France up with my scratching.”
He chuckled, softly.
“Want to talk about it all yet?”
“I can take a turn carrying that, if you want.”
He stayed silent, frustrated at my lack of a real acknowledgement of his question. But through my own refusal to answer, he had received the most complete answer that he could have expected from me.
As we continued to walk through the wooded area, I knew that he was thinking of exactly the same
thing. He had been with me the entire time that the event had unfolded.
I pondered how he had seen things, if he had different memories of that night compared to me, as it had not affected him in the same way that it had done in my life.
He must have been saddened by what he had seen, I don’t think anyone could have been hardened to the goings-on back then, but he had somehow managed to carry on.
Just days after it had all happened, he was back with 249 Squadron, flying sorties over the skies of Kent, as the Germans refused to back down on their plan to eradicate us all.
Meanwhile, I had run away. I had run away from everything that I could have taken comfort in, run away from all my responsibilities, but perhaps most importantly, I had run away from the war.
I had wanted the end of it all. I did not want to see another rifle or bomb blast ever again in my life. I craved the silence that only a peaceful nation could offer, the solace of the birds flying through the trees and insects going about their days uninterrupted.
You never seemed to get any of that in a war-torn city.
I knew, of course, that you did, but it was never the same, it never had the purity of true peacefulness.
Everyone knew that I had gone AWOL. Everyone on the Squadron knew that I had left them, without so much as a farewell or an explanation. But, for some reason, they had all understood. Even the CO, which was unusual for a man like him, so often a stickler for all the rules.
It was why I had been allowed to stay at Telwyn Farm, almost completely uninfringed, as I began to become accustomed to the way of life down there; one where there was no war on.
I was ashamed that I was there, more because of who I subsequently became associated with than anything else. There were men there, men of fighting age, who too had run away from their responsibilities. Their responsibilities to join up and fight.
It frustrated me, to hold the knowledge of what other brave men were doing, while there were some who buried their heads in the sand and lived a life of luxury out in the country. It angered me all the more to know that it was only the wealthy, only the ones who had a full pocket of notes, that could afford to do so.
