by Bryher;
“Toulouse” was heartbroken. Everything depended upon “ces messieurs” but her official had been kind and she knew that she could have got through another kilo of coffee but now, it was evident, it was too late. Coffee would be worth as much as gold where she was going. Ah, there was only one person to blame for the disaster, “c’est le français moyen.” He had always been so credulous, so easy-going, so sure that everything would arrange itself and look what had happened! He, and he only, must take the blame. The young American tried to soothe her and the priest nodded.
We were following the road to the coast where the previous summer there had been a caterpillar of cars following each other almost in one movement towards the Mediterranean. Now there were neither cars nor trucks and what was strange, no people. Occasionally, far off, an old man or woman was still working in a field but even the villages were empty and once when we saw a face at a window, it was blank with misery and despair. There was no food displayed for sale and no hens pecking among the barns.
We drew up in a side street of Grenoble. The driver walked down the coach announcing that we had an hour for lunch just as if we were holidaymakers on an excursion. Several of us started to reach for our rucksacks but he laughed. A passenger helped him to lift a panel at the side, leaving the sealed door intact. We scrambled out and he led us into a restaurant where tables had been prepared for our arrival. This was certainly an escape de luxe.
The place was full of French, they did not look up at us, they argued. Two young women, I judged that they were teachers from the local school, discussed some problem of the moment in vehement whispers. There were many officers but these were silent. The wall was hung with lists. People were asking for information about missing members of their families. I had often imagined a defeated town when I had been reading history. The reality was different. It was the ordinary routine of a meal combined with helplessness that had to be experienced, as if a clock struck “every day...every day...” instead of the hour, and time was meaningless.
They gave us melon, a small piece of tough chicken and grapes. There was no bread. We felt guilty about taking it from the inhabitants but the driver insisted that they wanted the money. He beckoned, we got back into our seats and drove away, hoping that Cromwell was right and that there was virtue in duty. Switzerland seemed not a land but an epoch distant. To cheer us up or herself, “Toulouse” began describing a previous holiday in France. It had consisted, it seemed, of eating. There had been an evening when she had had to take three spécialités one after the other or hurt the innkeeper’s feelings and the lunch when she had only had an omelette, “c’était un rêve,” she declared, “des choses à tomber par terre tellement c’était bon” although she had had to lie in a chair for two hours afterwards before she could continue her journey.
Suddenly everyone jumped, some from curiosity, others from fear. A patrol of German soldiers in helmets dashed past us on motorcycles, “But this is the Unoccupied Zone,” a man behind me declared in a puzzled voice and we all laughed.
“Oh, the victors ride where they like,” another passenger answered. It was not a pleasant experience and my morale felt like a ball of lead. We came to a house and a wrecked bridge that the French had blown up themselves during the final days of the fighting but afterwards we drove for hours through a peaceful but deserted landscape until we pulled up about seven between the wall of a Provençal vineyard and a stretch of wild lavender. “Le pique-nique,” the driver remarked as he unscrewed the side panel once more and we streamed out to stretch our legs and eat our sandwiches, sheltering behind a small hedge from a sharp, autumn wind. Each of us asked the driver in turn what chance we had of crossing the Spanish frontier. On most trips, somebody was turned back. Sometimes they picked out the English, sometimes the choice seemed haphazard, once they had had to leave a diplomatic courier behind. He shrugged his shoulders and told us to hope.
“Why didn’t you go back via Italy?” We stared at the speaker, an American woman with a seagull wing across her hat who had already announced that she had been so absorbed by her studies for a thesis on the Council of Trent that she had neglected warnings to take a steamer in February. We wondered if she were making fun of us. “But we’re at war with Italy,” one of my English companions gasped.
“Oh, Mussolini is such a kind man. If you had written him, he would have sent you a safe-conduct and you could have sailed from Genoa.”
None of us could think of an adequate reply but the driver remarked, he must have felt that his passengers were getting out of hand, that on the previous trip they had had to sleep on the sand, “et le mistral soufflait.” Today we had made good time and we should all sleep in beds.
We brushed the crumbs from our clothes and I wondered whether I should ever smell wild lavender again. It was growing dark, the lights failed on our coach and it was eleven o’clock before we clattered into a city, I had not known where we were to spend the night but caught the name. “Cette? Is it Cette?” I asked and when someone said yes crossly because we were all very tired, I felt suddenly exhilarated. I, of all people, should have been aware of the power of poetry but I should never have believed, if I had not experienced it, how much the name of Valéry and being in his birthplace could mean at such a lonely and uncertain moment.
They called us at five, we left at six and drove to Narbonne where we had a cup of coffee and a slice of bread sitting outside a crowded café. Somebody remembered that the district was famous for its honey but we told him indignantly not to remind us of food. People were more interested here, they talked to some of the Swiss and “Toulouse” left us to take a train to her native town. “A nice girt,” the American student said, waving violently, “she certainly was a nice girl.” It then appeared that we had a problem on our hands, a Jewish girl totally without papers except for a permit to join her parents in Palestine. She was green with fright and unable to speak so we wondered what sort of impression she would make upon the officials. I thought of the human misery that I had seen during the preceding years. Peace is as cruel as war but it is easier to dissemble about it.
“What shall we do if we are sent back to France and have no visas?”
Nobody answered, we had been thinking about such a possibility all morning.
“I think we ought to make a plan.”
“It is much better not to fuss about it till it happens.” It was what I felt myself and I was glad when the driver beckoned us and we started off towards Perpignan. I had never felt at home either in the Riviera or Provence but this stretch of France was new to me and in spite of the ordeal ahead I felt drawn into its atmosphere and its landscape of sandy, aromatic plants. I remembered that Narbonne had been one of the great Roman cities and that the Carthaginians might have passed there on their way from Spain. Suddenly everybody began to stir, we climbed a hill, rounded a curve, and pulled up at Perthuis.
It was eleven when we got out of our friendly Swiss coaches and nine when we left Port Bou on the Spanish side that evening. We spent the intervening hours first in going through the exit formalities in France, then sitting on the curb to eat a rucksack lunch and finally boarding the buses that were really converted trucks to go to the next frontier. We suspected that our vehicles had been used in the Civil War and the American student looked everywhere for bullet holes. It was up this road that the mass of refugees had struggled during the final days.
The formalities were endless. Papers, money, tickets to our destination to prove that we were not staying in Spain, were checked and rechecked. I was lucky. There was a German standing behind each Spanish official but Grace was both a pretty girl and partly Irish, and Ireland and Spain were traditionally friends. They joked with her for a moment and let her pass together with myself as chaperone.
We sat down, again on the pavement. Now that we were “through” we could wonder about the others. The remaining English presently appeared and to our joy, the Jewish girl joined us, her permit trembling in her hands but safe. For the
first time, by some miracle, nobody was stopped although they questioned the American with the seagull hat for almost an hour. They were suspicious of her thesis. “I kept telling them that the Council of Trent had nothing to do with contemporary Spain but they would not believe me,” she grumbled, sucking a raw egg that with biscuits was all that she would eat during the journey. She was so indignant that she smashed one egg over her bunch of keys.
We waited in silence as refugees do, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. The priest and the young American, with much daring, scrambled down to wash in a little stream. Sunset came, a boy with a flock of goats strolled down the hill, it was the essence of the Mediterranean, a ragged herdsman, olives and a little water. Again I wondered if I should ever come back to the South. There were false alarms, orders not to move, and it was dark before we were hustled suddenly into the coaches and driven towards the next village. The drivers got out there for a meal but few of us had any Spanish money and sleep now seemed more important than food. We envied a Swiss who had brought his sleeping bag with him and was curled up on a back seat for “une petite nuit de dix à douze heures.” Mrs. Seagull of the Council of Trent restored herself to favor by uttering our collective thoughts, “Next time I sit in the middle of Europe in a frontier town, I will do the organization myself.” She had had a dream, she continued, of a new passport system, a blanket worn across the back and that could easily be punched with holes at every boundary. We talked to keep ourselves awake and the American girl from the consulate told us that she had tried at first to get away by Petsamo. I could hardly believe that I had seen wild reindeer in its forests during my lifetime as I explained to her that it was not a town but a state.
The moon was full, the houses were dark but at the entrance to every village, electric lights blazed above a police post, and we were stopped while they checked our papers. If only we could sleep and stretch our legs, we muttered, many of us had cramp. It was three in the morning, twenty-one hours after leaving Cette, when we drove into Barcelona.
We had been warned to go out as little as possible so we stayed in the hotel next day except for walking to the agency to check our tickets on to Lisbon. It was in the middle of an immense, deserted avenue. A herd of cows crossed the tram line, as lean as their drivers. We were surprised to see English newspapers only a week old as none had reached us in Switzerland after June. People were sitting crowded against the walls and I wondered at first if it were a feast day. Then we saw to our horror that their faces were literally green, they did not look up as we passed them, they were dying from starvation. I was in some bad raids afterwards but I have seldom seen a more appalling sight. There was nothing that we could do, we had very little money on us, it would have gone nowhere divided among so many, and we felt miserable and helpless.
One of the Swiss who knew the town and spoke some Spanish slipped away and went to see his friends. He would not talk when he returned except to say that conditions were far worse than he had supposed. It seemed strange to be caught up in the results of one war on our way to the middle of another one. I heard two Germans talking in the bedroom next to mine and grabbed my notebook. They were having an ordinary business conversation but it seemed important at that time to write it down. It was stale by the time that I reached England.
We slept a lot, repacked our bags and talked in the courtyard. The staff of the hotel kept trying to do small services for us, we were puzzled at first but then a porter, who spoke a little English, explained. “We are sorry, we know what you are going to.” It was the first time that people had spoken to us about the reality of the situation. “They were bombed here as well,” I reminded Grace. They were not interested in money as tips but accepted gratefully the remnants of the three-days-old food from our rucksacks.
We assembled at the air terminal the following morning. The place was full of German advertisements and a German remarked politely to us that we had got on the wrong bus. We transferred ourselves hastily to one that seemed even more jerky and battle-scarred as we jolted towards the aerodrome. The road was narrow and dusty and we had to make our way against an incoming stream of mule carts with high wheels, full of clover. There were sunburnt boys sleeping on top of the loads and we suspected that their slumber was due more to weakness from lack of food than to the heat or the monotonous pace of their beasts.
The tiny garden round the airport building was full of dark red oleanders. We went through the customs again as if we were holidaymakers except that we had to exchange any Spanish money that we had over for French notes, apart from ten pesetas each that we were told to keep for lunch. Outside a big plane was just taking off for Las Palmas and Germany. I walked up and down the sandy path remembering with fury the English who had laughed at me in 1936 when I had told them that the Civil War was simply a rehearsal for their own destruction. Prophecy, however, even if fulfilled is cold consolation. Nothing can undo the misery nor bring back the dead.
A German officer at my side chattered gaily to his neighbor about the Western Front and the inadequacy of schoolboy French. His civilian suit was too small for him and he carried his sword tied up in a brown paper parcel. It really looked very odd. His companion remarked that it made him ill with laughter to watch the English filing onto the aircraft. We understood why a few moments later. The line was supposed to be Spanish but it was a German plane with an Italian pilot and of the eight passengers four were English and three Canadian. It was a peculiar war and as I remarked to Grace, we must get over our prejudices. It is useless traveling in wartime if one is narrow-minded.
Our Italian pilot was affable and pointed out the landmarks. I could only think of a porcupine as we looked at the country below us, the rocks stood out like spines in a landscape of black and red speckled granite. In front of Madrid, traces of the fighting and many trenches were plainly visible. It brought back Paris and the discussions that we had had at that time and I wondered where my French friends were now. Scattered, in camps or dead?
We sat at the Madrid Airport for a couple of hours and, as always in Spain, I felt trapped and uneasy. Our lunch appeared to have been cooked in kerosene and when we left we actually had a German pilot. “At least we can say that the Germans flew us home,” I whispered but by now we were too absorbed by our own problems to notice much of the countryside. It was sunset and four days after leaving Geneva when we landed at Lisbon Airport. How little did we know that our troubles were not over but about to begin in earnest.
I have never been interested in popular fiction but I have to admit that it is truer to life than philosophical speculation. I myself should not dare to write about the Lisbon I observed in the autumn of 1940, people would say that the incidents were too improbable. Actually they were not, they happened. The first night that we were there our suitcases were searched, I had thought that this might occur so took my papers with me and arranged my things so that I should know if they had been disturbed. The next morning we were told that our reservations to England were canceled. We had only been allowed to bring a limited amount of money out of Switzerland and some had been spent on the journey, we could get no funds from England and so we kicked our heels for days on the Lisbon sands, too poor even to buy a Portuguese newspaper.
If we had been tourists who had disregarded official warnings our fate would have been unpleasant but comprehensible. Most of us had left homes and friends, however, under the mistaken impression that our services might be valuable in England; some were business representatives engaged in the supposedly valuable export trade, others were there at what amounted to a command from the English consuls. We had no help from British sources during the weeks that we were stranded but were treated as if we were criminals. The British Institute had closed for the holidays. This was perfectly normal for an ordinary year but the circumstances in 1940 were somewhat different. We could not even borrow a book to read from its well-stocked shelves. Strangers were put into the same room, dormitory fashion, and then asked three pounds a day at the hot
els. We were not allowed to sleep on the beach. I certainly learned the lesson that patriotism and honesty were crimes and I have had much sympathy with lawbreakers ever since. “There was bound to be disorganization,” the people said. This was no excuse. A couple of officials could have prepared a comprehensive scheme after Munich and sent directives to each consulate for use when needed.
One of our group was flown back at once because of her health. I cabled to relatives in America and thus obtained a few dollars, these I shared with Grace and the other Englishwoman who had come out with us from Geneva. I first deducted enough to oil the wheels so that we could get our exit permits and then at her suggestion we went to Estoril. The season there was over and we found two rooms in a pension for a third of the price that they were asking in Lisbon. There was a heat wave raging, unprecedented even in Portugal, and as we knew the English climate we had packed our thickest winter clothes in our single suitcases and found life decidedly uncomfortable. I enjoyed the spectacle for about two days of the female missionaries (there were so many of them) having to share tables and rooms with voluble members of the underworld. Then the surréalisme of the atmosphere became boring, the reasonably normal are much less fatiguing in a time of crisis. Every other person was an agent of some sort and we soon lost interest as to whether they were spying for Germany, for the Allies or as so often happened, both together. Nobody need ever tell me what a gold-rush town was like. I know and I hope never to have to repeat the experience. Yet against this thriller background Lisbon itself was a city of light, there was a beautiful model of a galleon of the time of Henry the Navigator in the Exhibition that we could only afford to visit once and at sunset the sky was a luminous gold dissolving in puffs of cloud above the roofs.
