by Ken Follett
She did not get far.
Two streets away, a bomb landed on a house directly in her line of vision, and she braked suddenly. She saw the hole in the roof, felt the thump of the explosion, and a few seconds later saw flames inside, as if kerosene from a heater had spilled and caught fire. A moment later, a girl of about twelve came out, screaming, with her hair on fire, and ran straight at Daisy.
Daisy jumped off the bike, pulled off her leather jacket, and used it to cover the girl’s head, wrapping it tightly over the hair, denying oxygen to the flames.
The screaming stopped. Daisy removed the jacket. The girl was sobbing. She was no longer in agony, but she was bald.
Daisy looked up and down the street. A man wearing a steel helmet and an ARP armband came running up carrying a tin case with a white First Aid cross painted on its side.
The girl looked at Daisy, opened her mouth, and screamed: ‘My mother’s in there!’
The ARP warden said: ‘Calm down, love, let’s have a look at you.’
Daisy left the girl with him and ran to the front door of the building. It seemed to be an old house subdivided into cheap apartments. The upper floors were burning but she was able to enter the hall. Taking a guess, she ran to the back and found herself in a kitchen. There she saw a woman unconscious on the floor and a toddler in a cot. She picked up the child and ran out again.
The girl with the burned hair yelled: ‘That’s my sister!’
Daisy thrust the toddler into the girl’s arms and ran back inside.
The unconscious woman was too heavy for her to lift. Daisy got behind her, raised her to a sitting position, took hold of her under the arms, and dragged her across the kitchen floor and through the hallway into the street.
An ambulance had arrived, a converted saloon car, its rear bodywork replaced by a canvas roof with a back opening. The ARP warden was helping the burned girl into the vehicle. The driver came running over to Daisy. Between them, they lifted the mother into the ambulance.
The driver said to Daisy: ‘Is there anyone else inside?’
‘I don’t know!’
He ran into the hall. At that moment the entire building sagged. The burning upper storeys crashed through to the ground floor. The ambulance driver disappeared into an inferno.
Daisy heard herself scream.
She covered her mouth with her hand and stared into the flames, searching for him, even though she could not have helped him, and it would have been suicide to try.
The ARP warden said: ‘Oh, my God, Alf’s been killed.’
There was another explosion as a bomb landed a hundred yards along the street.
The warden said: ‘Now I’ve got no driver, and I can’t leave the scene.’ He looked up and down the street. There were little knots of people standing outside some of the houses, but most were probably in shelters.
Daisy said: ‘I’ll drive it. Where should I go?’
‘Can you drive?’
Most British women could not drive: it was still a man’s job here. ‘Don’t ask stupid questions,’ Daisy said. ‘Where am I taking the ambulance?’
‘St Bart’s. Do you know where it is?’
‘Of course.’ St Bartholomew’s was one of the biggest hospitals in London, and Daisy had been living here for four years. ‘West Smithfield,’ she added, to make sure he believed her.
‘Emergency ward is around the back.’
‘I’ll find it.’ She jumped in. The engine was still running.
The warden shouted: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Daisy Fitzherbert. What’s yours?’
‘Nobby Clarke. Take care of my ambulance.’
The car had a standard gearshift with a clutch. Daisy put it into first and drove off.
The planes continued to roar overhead, and the bombs fell relentlessly. Daisy was desperate to get the injured people to hospital, and St Bart’s was not much more than a mile away, but the journey was maddeningly difficult. She drove along Leadenhall Street, Poultry, and Cheapside, but several times she found the road blocked, and had to reverse away and find another route. There seemed to be at least one destroyed house in every street. Everywhere was smoke and rubble, people bleeding and crying.
With huge relief she reached the hospital and followed another ambulance to the emergency entrance. The place was frantically busy, with a dozen vehicles discharging maimed and burned patients into the care of hurrying porters with bloodstained aprons. Perhaps I’ve saved the mother of these children, Daisy thought. I’m not completely worthless, even if my husband doesn’t want me.
The girl with no hair was still carrying her baby sister. Daisy helped them both out of the back of her ambulance.
A nurse helped Daisy lift the unconscious mother and carry her in.
But Daisy could see that the woman had stopped breathing.
She said to the nurse: ‘These two are her children!’ She heard the edge of hysteria in her own voice. ‘What will happen now?’
‘I’ll deal with it,’ the nurse said briskly. ‘You have to go back.’
‘Must I?’ said Daisy.
‘Pull yourself together,’ said the nurse. ‘There will be a lot more dead and injured before this night is over.’
‘All right,’ said Daisy; and she got back behind the wheel and drove off.
(iv)
On a warm Mediterranean afternoon in October, Lloyd Williams arrived in the sunlit French town of Perpignan, only twenty miles from the border with Spain.
He had spent the month of September in the Bordeaux area, picking grapes for the wine harvest, just as he had in the terrible year of 1937. Now he had money in his pockets for buses and trams, and could eat in cheap restaurants instead of living on unripe vegetables he dug up in people’s gardens or raw eggs stolen from hen-coops. He was going back along the route he had taken when he left Spain three years ago. He had come south from Bordeaux through Toulouse and Béziers, occasionally riding freight trains, mostly begging lifts from truck drivers.
Now he was at a roadside café on the main highway running southeast from Perpignan towards the Spanish border. Still dressed in Maurice’s blue overalls and beret, he carried a small canvas bag containing a rusty trowel and a mortar-spattered spirit level, evidence that he was a Spanish bricklayer making his way home. God forbid that anyone should offer him work: he had no idea how to build a wall.
He was worried about finding his way across the mountains. Three months ago, back in Picardy, he had told himself glibly that he could find the route over the Pyrenees along which his guides had led him into Spain in 1936, parts of which he had retraced in the opposite direction when he left a year later. But as the purple peaks and green passes came into distant view on the horizon, the prospect seemed more daunting. He had thought that every step of the journey must be engraved on his memory, but when he tried to recall specific paths and bridges and turning points he found that the pictures were blurred, and the exact details slipped infuriatingly from his mind’s grasp.
He finished his lunch – a peppery fish stew – then spoke quietly to a group of drivers at the next table. ‘I need a lift to Cerbère.’ It was the last village before the Spanish border. ‘Anyone going that way?’
They were probably all going that way: it was the only reason for being here on this southeast route. All the same, they hesitated. This was Vichy France, technically an independent zone, in practice under the thumb of the Germans occupying the other half of the country. No one was in a hurry to help a travelling stranger with a foreign accent.
‘I’m a mason,’ he said, hefting his canvas bag. ‘Going home to Spain. Leandro is my name.’
A fat man in an undershirt said: ‘I can take you halfway.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you ready now?’
‘Of course.’
They went outside and got into a grimy Renault van with the name of an electrical goods store on the side. As they pulled away, the driver asked Lloyd if he was married. A serie
s of unpleasantly personal inquiries followed, and Lloyd realized the man had a fascination with other people’s sex lives. No doubt that was why he had agreed to take Lloyd: it gave him the chance to ask intrusive questions. Several of the men who had given Lloyd lifts had had some such creepy motive.
‘I’m a virgin,’ Lloyd told him, which was true; but that only led to an interrogation about heavy petting with schoolgirls. Lloyd did have considerable experience of that, but he was not going to share it. He refused to give details while trying not to be rude, and eventually the driver despaired. ‘I have to turn off here,’ he said, and pulled up.
Lloyd thanked him for the ride and walked on.
He had learned not to march like a soldier, and had developed what he thought was a fairly realistic peasant slouch. He never carried a newspaper or a book. His hair had last been cut by a brutally incompetent barber in the poorest quarter of Toulouse. He shaved about once a week, so that he normally had a growth of stubble, which was surprisingly effective in making him look like a nobody. He had stopped washing, and acquired a ripe odour that discouraged people from talking to him.
Few working-class people had watches, in France or Spain, so the steel wristwatch with the square face that Bernie had given him as a graduation present had to go. He could not give it to one of the many French people who had helped him, for a British watch could have incriminated them, too. In the end, with great sadness, he had thrown it into a pond.
His greatest weakness was that he had no identity papers.
He had tried to buy papers from a man who looked vaguely like him, and schemed to steal them from two others, but not surprisingly, people were cautious about such things these days. His strategy was therefore to steer clear of situations in which he might be asked to identify himself. He made himself inconspicuous, he walked across fields rather than take roads when he had the choice, and he never travelled by passenger train because there were often checkpoints at stations. So far he had been lucky. One village gendarme had demanded his papers, and when he explained that they had been stolen from him after he got drunk and passed out in a bar in Marseilles, the policeman had believed him and sent him on his way.
Now, however, his luck ran out.
He was passing through poor agricultural terrain. He was in the foothills of the Pyrenees, close to the Mediterranean, and the soil was sandy. The dusty road ran through struggling smallholdings and poor villages. The landscape was sparsely populated. To his left, through the hills, he got blue glimpses of the distant sea.
The last thing he expected was the green Citroën that pulled up alongside him with three gendarmes inside.
It happened very suddenly. He heard the car approaching – the only car he had heard since the fat man had dropped him off. He carried on shuffling like a tired worker going home. Either side of the road were dry fields with sparse vegetation and stunted trees. When the car stopped, he thought for a second of making a run for it across the fields. He dropped the idea when he saw the holstered pistols of the two gendarmes who jumped out of the car. They were probably not very good shots, but they might get lucky. His chances of talking his way out of this were better. These were country constables, more amiable than the hard-nosed French city police.
‘Papers?’ said the nearest gendarme in French.
Lloyd spread his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘Monsieur, I am so unfortunate, my papers were stolen in Marseilles. I am Leandro, Spanish mason, going—’
‘Get in the car.’
Lloyd hesitated, but it was hopeless. The odds against his getting away were now worse than before.
A gendarme took him firmly by the arm, hustled him into the back seat, and got in beside him.
His spirits sank as the car pulled away.
The gendarme next to him said: ‘Are you English, or what?’
‘I am Spanish mason. My name—’
The gendarme made a waving-away gesture and said: ‘Don’t bother.’
Lloyd saw that he had been wildly optimistic. He was a foreigner without papers heading for the Spanish border: they simply assumed he was an escaping British soldier. If they had any doubt, they would find proof when they ordered him to strip, for they would see the identity tag around his neck. He had not thrown it away, for without it he would automatically be shot as a spy.
And now he was stuck in a car with three armed men, and the likelihood that he would find a way to escape was zero.
They drove on, in the direction in which he had been heading, as the sun went down over the mountains on their right-hand side. There were no big towns between here and the border, so he assumed they intended to put him in a village jail for the night. Perhaps he could escape from there. Failing that, they would undoubtedly take him back to Perpignan tomorrow and hand him over to the city police. What then? Would he be interrogated? The prospect made him cold with fear. The French police would beat him up, the Germans would torture him. If he survived, he would end up in a prisoner of war camp, where he would remain until the end of the war, or until he died of malnutrition. And yet he was only a few miles from the border!
They drove into a small town. Could he escape between the car and the jail? He could make no plan: he did not know the terrain. There was nothing he could do but remain alert and seize any opportunity.
The car turned off the main street and into an alley behind a row of shops. Were they going to shoot him here and dump his body?
The car stopped at the back of a restaurant. The yard was littered with boxes and giant cans. Through a small window Lloyd could see a brightly lit kitchen.
The gendarme in the front passenger seat got out, then opened Lloyd’s door, on the side of the car nearest the building. Was this his chance? He would have to run around the car and along the alley. It was dusk: after the first few yards he would not be an easy target.
The gendarme reached into the car and grasped Lloyd’s arm, holding him as he got out and stood up. The second one got out immediately behind Lloyd. The opportunity was not good enough.
But why had they brought him here?
They walked him into the kitchen. A chef was beating eggs in a bowl and an adolescent boy was washing up in a big sink. One of the gendarmes said: ‘Here’s an Englishman. He calls himself Leandro.’
Without pausing in his work, the chef lifted his head and bawled: ‘Teresa! Come here!’
Lloyd remembered another Teresa, a beautiful Spanish anarchist who had taught soldiers to read and write.
The kitchen door swung wide and she walked in.
Lloyd stared at her in astonishment. There was no possibility of mistake: he would never forget those big eyes and that mass of black hair, even though she wore the white cotton cap and apron of a waitress.
At first she did not look at him. She put a pile of plates on the counter next to the young washer-up, then turned to the gendarmes with a smile and kissed each on both cheeks, saying: ‘Pierre! Michel! How are you?’ Then she turned to Lloyd, stared at him, and said in Spanish: ‘No – it’s not possible. Lloyd, is it really you?’
He could only nod dumbly.
She put her arms around him, embraced him, and kissed him on both cheeks.
One of the gendarmes said: ‘There we are. All is well. We have to go. Good luck!’ He handed Lloyd his canvas bag, then they left.
Lloyd found his tongue. ‘What’s going on?’ he said to Teresa in Spanish. ‘I thought I was being taken to jail!’
‘They hate the Nazis, so they help us,’ she said.
‘Who is us?’
‘I’ll explain later. Come with me.’ She opened a door that gave on to a staircase and led him to an upper storey, where there was a sparsely furnished bedroom. ‘Wait here. I’ll bring you something to eat.’
Lloyd lay down on the bed and contemplated his extraordinary fortune. Five minutes ago he had been expecting torture and death. Now he was waiting for a beautiful woman to bring him supper.
It could change again just as quickly, he
reflected.
She returned half an hour later with an omelette and fried potatoes on a thick plate. ‘We’ve been busy, but we close soon,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
He ate the food quickly.
Night fell. He listened to the chatter of customers leaving and the clang of pots being put away, then Teresa reappeared with a bottle of red wine and two glasses.
Lloyd asked her why she had left Spain.
‘Our people are being murdered by the thousand,’ she said. ‘For those they don’t kill, they have passed the Law of Political Responsibilities, making criminals of everyone who supported the government. You can lose all your assets if you opposed Franco even by “grave passivity”. You are innocent only if you can prove you supported him.’
Lloyd thought bitterly of Chamberlain’s reassurance to the House of Commons, back in March, that Franco had renounced political reprisals. What an evil liar Chamberlain had been.
Teresa went on: ‘Many of our comrades are in filthy prison camps.’
‘I don’t suppose you have any idea what happened to Sergeant Lenny Griffiths, my friend?’
Teresa shook her head. ‘I never saw him again after Belchite.’
‘And you . . . ?’
‘I escaped from Franco’s men, came here, got a job as a waitress . . . and found there was other work for me to do.’
‘What work?’
‘I take escaping soldiers across the mountains. That’s why the gendarmes brought you to me.’
Lloyd was heartened. He had been planning to do it alone, and he had been worried about finding the way. Now perhaps he would have a guide.
‘I have two others waiting,’ she said. ‘A British gunner and a Canadian pilot. They are in a farmhouse in the hills.’
‘When are you planning to go across?’
‘Tonight,’ she said. ‘Don’t drink too much wine.’
She went away again and returned half an hour later carrying an old, ripped brown overcoat for him. ‘It’s cold where we’re going,’ she explained.
