Madame Barbara

by Helen Forrester

  At first, the driver did not quite understand her, so she repeated the question slowly and pointed to some stumps as they passed them.

  ‘Mais non, Madame. The Resistance cut the trees and lay them across the road. They block the roads to make the German retreat more difficult – Germans are caught and killed by invasion instead of safe retreat.’

  He gestured with one hand, and added, ‘No good. Tanks and big lorries go across the fields. Naturellement, this winter we burn the trunks – firewood – a bad winter.’ He sighed at the memory. ‘Very, very bad winter, Madame.’

  Barbara leaned back to rest her head. ‘It was awfully bad in England as well.’ Her voice sounded weary. ‘The very worst winter I ever remember. No coal, no electricity, hardly any gas. Even bread was rationed this winter – and potatoes.’

  ‘Yes, Madame. Also here. Bread ration. Sometimes no bread in bakeries.’

  ‘My stars!’ Barbara exclaimed, shocked by his remark. ‘At least we get our ration.’

  ‘English are lucky. Farms not fought over.’

  ‘They don’t feel very lucky.’

  ‘Very difficult for everybody,’ Michel responded diplomatically.

  They were passing what seemed to have been a village. Only broken walls remained. Already weeds were growing between the stones. The driver gestured towards it and said laconically, ‘Here they fight backwards and forwards. Nothing left.’

  In the rear-view mirror, he saw the slight movement of her head in acknowledgment of his remark. He went on, ‘Our farm like this village. It is within ten kilometres of the coast.’ He slowed the taxi and turned his head towards her, old rage resurfacing as he said bitterly, ‘So much is our farm fought over, and the one next to it, that there is nothing left – nothing. No house, no horse, no hens, no hen coops or brooders, no barn, no pigs, no cow – no people.

  ‘Father die in 1941. Until the invasion, Mama and I work on the farm to keep it somehow until peace come. What peace, Madame?’

  He had really caught Barbara’s attention. This was information about the French side of the war that she had rarely seen reported in England, except for a line or two as back-page news.

  He went on, ‘When the invasion of the Allies begin, Mama and me – we hide in la cave. We are very afraid. House is destroy. La cave is very, very old storehouse – very strong, only little window. When the armies move away, we escape – walk to Bayeux.

  ‘My uncle, Uncle Léon, sail out of Port-en-Bessin not too far away, you understand? We do not know, however, where the ships of the coast is gone. We hope news in Bayeux. Uncle will help us. You understand, Madame, the coast is in great disturbance. Where are our fishermen? Where are our little boats? Good question.’

  She nodded to convey her understanding of the problem.

  ‘As we walk, advancing Allied troops say Bayeux is not damage …’ He took both hands off the wheel, to indicate with gestures a sense of turmoil.

  Barbara held her breath until he hastily gripped the wheel again and continued to drive down the middle of the road.

  ‘In Bayeux, very small damage. Much chaos because many refugee arrive suddenly. Help will be there – but maybe not for many days. I must find work – to eat. Monks give us clean clothes, and I work two weeks in hotel kitchen in Bayeux. I cook and clean – German Army cooks not very clean. Then the British Army requisition it. They not like French cooking.’ He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. ‘They bring their own cooks.

  ‘What I do? Our neighbours caught in the battle – we have not found them. We cannot go on to our land. Too dangerous.’ Yet again with his hands he expressed the enormousness of the damage, of the crowds of panic-stricken refugees swarming into the city.

  Barbara swallowed as the taxi once more began to edge towards the ditch.

  Michel quickly regrasped the wheel and did a theatrical turn towards the centre of the narrow road.

  ‘Le Maire – hôtel de ville – is, how you say, overwhelm? Later, the Government – they promise money, ’elp for Normandy. But ’elp is for cities, Madame, not for poor peasant.’ He sighed. ‘It is always so. Government not care for peasants. They clear some roads OK. But now we wait and we wait.’

  ‘I thought the Americans poured in help?’

  ‘Americans give to Britain, to Germany. At first, they not trust the French or our General de Gaulle – we are forty per cent Communists.’

  Aware of Communism in the back streets of Liverpool, Barbara said in surprise, ‘But we have Communists too. The Americans are giving it to us.’

  ‘Communists in France are – how you say? – a force political. Americans now fear revolution – perhaps a Communist one – may happen in France, if they do not give us help. So now it is that Marshall Aid comes – but first for the railways, the roads, the air fields, all destroyed by Allied bombing; and then for Le Havre, for Rouen, Cherbourg – the cities.’

  ‘It must be very hard for your mother.’

  ‘Hard for all,’ he assured her gloomily.

  Barbara changed the subject. She said slowly in English, ‘It was very kind of the American soldiers – the undertakers at the hotel – to permit you to take me to the cemetery. The hotel says they booked this taxi for four whole months. The reservations clerk said that you usually stay with the Americans at the cemeteries throughout the day while they work.’

  The length of Barbara’s remark made it a little difficult for Michel to understand. He replied cautiously, ‘American Army very good, soldiers most kind, Madame. Lots of petrol! Certainement, they pay taxi four months – not like the Boches – he never pay for anything he can take, les sales Boches.’

  Though he laughed, he sounded cynical, as he remembered how some German soldiers had demanded his best poultry breeding stock and had wrung their pretty necks in front of him. Then they had made his mother clean and pluck them ready for cooking. Cook some of the world’s best breeding stock? It was murder. His poor Chanticleer and his pretty, fertile wives. Hélas! How would he ever find the money to replace them?

  As he mourned his dead hens, Michel edged the vehicle round a pothole filled with water, and then continued, ‘Taxi is the only transport to cemeteries, Madame. Now many people want to visit their dead. This is the only taxi in Bayeux. So I ask Americans, can I take civilians to the cemeteries, while they work? I promise to collect them from their American cemeteries exactly when they order. You understand taxi cannot be left for one moment unattended. Someone steal, dead cert.’ Michel was rapidly extending his vocabulary while working for the Americans.

  ‘They say OK. Take some lady to cemetery. Make a buck. So I drive American ladies, English ladies, one lady from Poland – widow of man who fight with British, je crois.’

  He cleared his throat and spat out of the window. ‘Two German ladies come – they omit to tip me.’ He half turned his head towards her. He sounded mystified, as he added, ‘You know, they cry like everyone else.’

  ‘I am sure they did,’ Barbara agreed.

  She felt fiercely that she did not care whether the Germans flooded the earth with their tears; they could never undo the ruination of her life by the taking of her George’s life.

  Let the German widows cry. Let them suffer. She hoped their cities remained shattered, their factories empty, looted by both Americans and Russians, their farms fought over and desolate. Let them pay.

  After a while, to take her mind off her own troubles, she asked the taxi driver, ‘What are the Americans doing here? Are they really undertakers? Aren’t all the dead buried yet?’

  ‘Ah, simple, Madame. They arrange for dead American soldiers to go home. Bury them in America.’

  ‘What a lovely idea!’

  ‘Very, very expensive, Madame.’ Michel obviously did not believe in such a waste of money, even if it resulted in work for himself.

  They swung round a corner into a narrow lane. At the end of it, an open ironwork gate faced them, and, beyond that, what at first looked like a sea of white and green.
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br />   As they drove through the gateway, the sea resolved into masses and masses of white crosses set in neat rows amid green lawns, stretching, it seemed to Barbara, into infinity.

  She caught her breath. So many! Her mild amusement at the taxi driver’s disapproval of American extravagance was forgotten in the shock of being suddenly surrounded by the evidence of so much death. Surely, it could not be?

  But the evidence lay there, crying out in its silence.

  She was appalled.

  Just inside the gate, the taxi came to a halt. Michel opened Barbara’s door and took her hand to help her alight. Her normal self-confidence left her. She was so shaken by the scene before her that she was grateful for the man’s firm grip; though he smelled at least it was the smell of a man – a man such as she was used to, who worked hard.

  ‘I get the flowers for Madame,’ he said gently.

  She looked at him a little helplessly, and then she pointed to her dropped handbag and asked him if he could reach in and rescue it for her.

  ‘Mais oui, Madame.’

  The cloth bag was covered with dust and not a few hayseeds, blown in when they had passed the hay wain. Michel carefully brushed it as clean as he could, before handing it to her.

  He smiled. ‘Very pretty bag, Madame.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she answered, and then, looking a little rueful, she muttered absently, ‘I made it myself. It’s still difficult to buy things.’

  He made a wry face. He, too, knew about the shortages of everything. He leaned into the taxi to retrieve the flowers for her.

  As he handed the bouquet to her, he saw that despite her casual remarks about her handbag she had gone as white as her lilies. Her dark blue eyes were wide with fright.

  Pauvre petite! So little, so sweet, and, at this moment, looking so helpless. He wanted to take her in his arms to comfort her and tell her that all would be well, that she could be sure that Jules, the gardener, was very kind and that he looked after the graves with great care.

  In the silence of the cemetery, his voice sounded harsh, as, instead, he cleared his throat and enquired hastily, ‘Number of the grave, Madame?’

  She told him.

  He took her arm. ‘I walk with you. Then wait by taxi.’

  She was shaking, and simply nodded acceptance. Fearing she might faint, he held her arm firmly and guided her further along the little lane on which the taxi stood. ‘Germans that side, Allies this side,’ he explained.

  She nodded again. They walked across the grass for a minute or two. From a little fenced enclosure at the back of the cemetery, a figure emerged.

  ‘He is Jules – the gardener,’ Michel told her.

  She was pressing her arm against the driver’s guiding hand, as if she never wanted him to let go, but she showed some sign of animation by saying, ‘Oh, yes. I remember the name. I wrote to the Head Gardener of this cemetery. He replied that the cemetery was, at last, open for visitors. His letter was so kind. So I knitted a pullover – out of wool from old pullovers – and sent it to him as a thank you present for, for …’ Her voice broke for a moment, then she went on more firmly, ‘for looking after George.’

  The taxi driver showed surprise. ‘He like that. Nobody thank gardener before – certainement.’

  As Jules approached, she smiled at him as bravely as she could. The driver repeated the number of the grave to him.

  ‘Come, Madame.’

  She unlinked her arm, and, hugging her flowers, her chin up, her face suddenly old and grim, she walked forward – like St Joan going into the fire, the driver told his brother, Anatole, sometime later.

  Chapter Two

  All the modest hopes of George and Barbara had come to naught. Without George, his young widow considered, life was not worth living. She wished passionately that she had a child to console her, but they had deferred having a family until the end of the war.

  From the day the war began, Barbara and her mother, Phyllis Williams, had fought a stalwart battle to save their home and their means of livelihood until peace should be declared. It had been a hard, very long struggle, and, on top of that, to be bereaved was difficult to bear.

  They owned a small bed-and-breakfast establishment abutting the seashore on the Wirral peninsula. It was about eight miles from Liverpool, on the other side of the River Mersey, and not far from the estuary of the River Dee. They had worked for years to build it up as a nice place for commercial travellers to stay overnight, and for people in search of a family holiday during the summer.

  Their home was an old farmhouse, lovingly restored by its original owner. Barbara and her mother ran the business while her father went to sea. He had been torpedoed in 1941.

  For the sake of her daughter, Phyllis wept for her husband in secret and dealt firmly with the other problems the war had brought her.

  ‘We’ve got to eat, luvvie,’ she had told twenty-two-year-old Barbara, who had been devastated by her father’s death. And with considerable courage, like other Merseyside bereaved women, mother and daughter continued to try to live as normal lives as possible. It was not easy.

  As far as Barbara was concerned, the battle had seemed worth it once she had met George.

  She had actually seen him once or twice in the village, a rather ponderous youth a couple of years older than herself.

  She had met him again when he was on leave, handsome in his Army uniform, at a Red Cross dance held in the church hall. He had, he told her, not been much at home since leaving school; at first he had been learning his trade as an apprentice to a stone mason, working on repairs to Chester Cathedral. Then once he had his journeyman’s papers, he had found a place working on the new Church of England Cathedral in Liverpool. He loved his work; he was devoted to his cathedral. But cathedral building can be put on hold until wars are finished, so George had been called up.

  After Barbara and George’s marriage in 1942, the newlyweds and Phyllis Williams had all three cherished hopes of living together in the bed-and-breakfast after the war was over. The women would continue to run it, and George looked forward to returning to his full-time work as stone mason on the unfinished cathedral.

  Phyllis Williams had been very pleased to acquire such a well-placed, sensible young man as a son-in-law. Suddenly, the need to keep the bed-and-breakfast going had acquired new meaning for her; it would be a great place for grandchildren, and the three of them would be quite comfortable financially.

  Both women had been crushed and bewildered by George’s death. But other people were dependent upon their business, and both women worked mechanically to keep the shabby farmhouse open.

  ‘It’s the small nightmares wot keeps driving you crazy,’ Phyllis would lament. ‘Some of them is the last straw.’ And they would both blow their noses, and do their best.

  Phyllis, however, became very worried about her widowed daughter as she watched her decline into a dull, disinterested woman, who rarely went out socially. It wasn’t that Barbara did not do her share of the work of their little business; she did more than enough, and she knitted and sewed industriously to help eke out their sparse clothes-rationing coupons.

  ‘You know, Ada, there’s no life in her; and she’s too young to give up like she is,’ Phyllis had said anxiously to George’s mother. Ada was herself a widow who did not have much life in her either, except when talking about her garden, when her face would occasionally light up.

  ‘You know and I know, Ada, that you just have to put the war behind you and start again.’

  Ada Bishop sighed deeply. Phyllis Williams was the bravest little soul she knew.

  ‘Perhaps, in the back of her mind, she hopes he’ll turn up again; it’s been known to happen,’ suggested Ada. ‘You don’t always think quite sensible when you’re young, do you? I know he’ll never come home. But she may still hope.’

  ‘You don’t always think sensible even when you’re older,’ replied Phyllis, with a wry smile. It had been hard for her to accept that her own husband had been t
orpedoed in Liverpool Bay in 1941, and would never return. But a lot of seamen never had a grave other than the sea. Then she said, with sudden inspiration at the thought of a grave, ‘Perhaps she’d see different if she could look at George’s grave! She’d really know then.’

  The mothers agreed. They persuaded Barbara that she should take a break and go to Normandy.

  So, after some argument, a listless Barbara had drawn on her wartime savings – it had been easy to save in wartime, because there was very little to buy – and had gone to see Thomas Cook.

  Until catching the ferry at Dover and her subsequent arrival in Bayeux, she had felt fairly calm about the visit; in fact, she had regarded it as an unusual, but welcome break, taken to please Ada and Phyllis.

  Now, thin and workworn, Barbara faced her loss as bravely as she could. She was physically exhausted, despairing in her own loneliness and that of her overworked half-fed mother, bedevilled by the continued strict rationing – and by the cold, the everlasting cold which Britain had endured in that hopeless winter of 1947–48, the lack of gas and electricity – and food. Would there ever be any let-up, she wondered. There seemed to be absolutely nothing to look forward to.

  While travelling to France, she had dwelled on the miserable condition of her home. It had been, in 1939, such a pretty seaside bed-and-breakfast establishment, with an excellent reputation.

  The declaration of war had put an end to that. The house and garden had been ruined a few days before the war actually began.

  Children and their mothers were evacuated from Liverpool and billeted upon them. She and Phyllis, with three extra mothers in the kitchen, had been thrown into chaos. They had accepted, however, that these refugees from the heavy bombing that was daily anticipated had to be housed. They did their best to cope.

  She shuddered when she remembered the day she had discovered that all their beds had bugs in them and the pillows had lice, brought in by evacuees from some of the worst slums in Britain.

  Mercifully, the evacuees had decided they hated living in what they regarded as countryside, where there was not even a decent fish-and-chip shop, and had returned home to Liverpool, as yet unbombed.