Nell and the Girls
Page 15
We had an appointment with Monsieur Moussi, the mayor of Rieux-en-Cambresis, and his deputy at the Town Hall. We had asked if we could meet anyone who had been in the village on the day of the massacre. We met Jean Devaux, who had been working in his father’s fields that day and had witnessed the whole thing. He described how he had laid flat in the field and hidden, terrified, when he’d seen the German armoured vehicle approaching and stopping. He’d watched in frozen horror as, one by one, his friends, mostly his school friends, had been mown down. That evening, he had gone with the family ox and cart and brought some of the bodies back to the village. We talked and it brought back the whole, awful episode. Monsieur Moussi presented us with an ashtray embossed with the Rieux-en-Cambresis coat of arms and a book published by Lille University, which is a study of the Rieux dialect – fast disappearing no doubt. We took more photos and left.
My friend Claudette and her husband Daniel are still in Rieux-en-Cambresis. We have kept in touch over the years. We had a long-standing invitation and stayed with them for a few days last year. They live in a large doublefronted house right in the village centre. Daniel explained how their present sitting room had once been a shop and workshop owned by his parents selling overalls and work clothes, including the bleu-de-travail, the blue overalls traditionally worn by French labourers and workmen. The clothes were made by several seamstresses in a workshop in the garden. The workshop has now been dismantled, and Daniel, a retired dentist, is enjoying growing his vegetables on the patch where the workshop used to be.
Looking out of the window onto the street, Claudette pointed out the wall opposite, pockmarked with hundred-year-old shell holes. She said her grandfather had been the village policeman during World War One. Rieux-en-Cambresis was occupied, but right on the front line. Her grandfather and another man had been sending messages by carrier pigeon denoting troop movements when they had been caught and shot by the Germans.
This whole area of northern France was given over to producing textiles until the sixties. There was a textile factory in the village producing particularly fine products. Claudette used to buy seconds from the factory, and she showed me a sheet she had bought, part of Catherine Deneuve, the film actress’s wedding trousseau. It was made of the finest of fine cottons with small pink hearts on it. She said the same firm had also made a long ceremonial tablecloth for the Shah of Iran, covered in embroidery and interwoven with gold thread. All that is gone now, and it seems on the whole that there is no local employment for the people of Rieux-en-Cambresis and they have to find work in Cambrai.
After a few days with our friends we left, promising to return. The constant pull to return to the country of my birth never fades.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my husband Tony and my own three daughters, Julie, Sophie and especially Marina; to my sister Irene and my sister Marie’s memory; to First Paragraph creative writing group in Bristol for showing me how to get started and to Myrmidon for seeing the potential in my writing.
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