by Shirley Mann
Bobby stared after him and then realised she was wasting precious time, so she sat down on a concrete bench behind her.
The note was brief. She was flying over enemy territory and apart from sitting in the co-pilot’s seat to operate the landing gear, her sole task was to get Michel to board the aircraft, keep him calm and endorse his new position as head of a local resistance network. She heaved a sigh of relief that she was not going to be expected to fly but she felt a shiver of alarm that Michel was going to have to take on such an important role. It sounded as if there might be opposition from the local network as well as from Michel, but it was going to be her job to reiterate to all that the highest authorities, both in the French Resistance and the British Government, were insisting that he had to be the person to take on the job. He had to believe in his own capabilities, and she was to use her influence to convince him.
She shook her head in disbelief. This was a huge responsibility and she felt that Edward Turner and the rest of the bigwigs were overestimating her influence on the young Frenchman. She touched her hair; it was getting her into more trouble than she had ever bargained for. The next words on the instructions chilled her heart.
In the event of an unforeseen landing, she was not to meet any other resistance fighters, she was not to go out and she was to remain hidden at all times until she was returned to the rendezvous point at 02:00 hours one week after arrival, when an aeroplane would pick her up. There would be no radio messages transmitted to the ground and no one would know anything about her. The cyanide pill could be used ‘if necessary’ to avoid giving the enemy any information, she read with an icy chill spreading over her body.
Bobby slowly chewed the rice paper, feeling she was having her last meal.
There was a sound from the far end of the barn. She got up from the cold concrete plinth and peered into the darkness, her pulse racing. In one corner, sitting with his head in his hands, was Michel.
‘Michel,’ she whispered. He jumped and shot to his feet. He stood with his hands by his sides and she immediately went over to him and put her arms around him, feeling him shiver. For a second, he clung to her, their two faces masked by a mass of auburn hair.
‘Je ne peux pas, I cannot . . .’
Bobby looked at the figure in front of her. He was relying on her to have the answers. Bobby had never had anyone to worry about but herself and she was shocked to realise she was about to risk her life for this young man and that there was no doubt in her mind that that was exactly what she was willing to do.
‘Come on, Michel, we both have to do this. We will be fine. J’en suis sûre.’ She felt anything but sure but somehow her appearance of confidence did the trick and Michel reached back to grab his parachute.
Something really important was happening in France; things were hotting up, she knew that from the number of aircraft deliveries she was having to make, and it had not taken her long to work out there was a treacherous leak in the Normandy network. She went on.
‘Ne t’inquiète pas. I’ve lost one brother, it isn’t possible I should lose two. You’ve been brought into my life for a reason. We both have a job to do. I will help to get you safely into France. You will take over the network there and you will do a brilliant job. Everyone is counting on you. And then, when all this is over, we will meet up again as family.’
For a brief moment, their eyes locked and each took comfort from the familiar reflection that stared back at them. She took his hand like a mother with a small child and headed towards the Anson. They climbed in and Michel sat down pathetically on one of the seats at the back, clutching his parachute like a man holding onto a lifeline. Bobby climbed into the co-pilot’s seat.
‘Hello First Officer Hollis.’
‘Gus! It is you. I thought it might be. I’m so glad to see a friendly face.’
‘Looks like it. Everyone ready? OK, let’s get these checks done and then get going. To be honest, you’re more used to an Anson than I am, we rarely use them, so I’ll be relying on you in case of problems.’
What he means, Bobby thought to herself, is that if he gets killed by enemy fire, I will have to take over.
Bobby realised the authorities were not taking any chances with this mission.
This aircraft had to get Michel to Normandy.
Chapter 15
‘Straps on,’ Gus called back to Michel. Bobby hated being in the co-pilot’s seat. Her hands were itching to touch the controls and she had to concentrate on the wheels to stop them twitching but she peered across at him noting his take off procedure to check it coincided with her knowledge of the plane. Gus may not have been used to an Anson, but his take off was smooth.
‘This is low. We’re only at 500 feet?’ she said to him.
‘I need to be able to navigate and it helps to avoid problems, you’ll understand that,’ he replied. ‘Once we get over the Channel, I’ll need you to find a river and a railway line that go southwest in a parallel line. Here’s the map, I was told not to show any markings on it, so we’re relying on my memory and our visual abilities but it’s near Louvigny, a small town on the Rivière l’Orange or something. A message has been sent to say we’re coming but they know no more than that. Once we get within sight of the landing field, we can use the ‘S’ radio but that’s where we’ll need your French. Mine is less than rudimentary and I won’t understand a word these French chaps are saying.’
Another reason for me to be here, Bobby thought.
‘OK,’ she said, glad to have something to do. ‘It looks almost a full moon, do you always fly when it’s so bright?’
‘Yes or a few days before or after a full moon, you’ll find that helps with navigat—Dammit,’ Gus suddenly called as they flew towards the south coast. ‘Balloons.’
Bobby’s heart leapt. Not again, she thought, they were becoming the bane of her life. They were being used more and more whenever there was a threat of a raid and she, like all ATA pilots, usually found another route to avoid them, but this aircraft had no choice but to go the most direct route to get there on schedule.
Gus skilfully dodged the cables, and she kept a constant look out for any signs of the enemy. She had to acknowledge Gus was an excellent pilot and was obviously very used to flying fast and low. Also, like her, he was used to flying without a gunner, which made pilots more inventive and very quick at manoeuvring, even in an Anson.
After about half an hour, Gus kept glancing upwards, scanning the skies. His face was looking strained as messages about enemy aircraft came in on the radio to be transmitted through Gus’s headphones. Bobby, who never had a radio, began to think dire warnings over the airways were a mixed blessing as she watched Gus become more and more anxious.
‘I think we might be OK,’ he finally said to her, looking at the clear skies on each side of them.
Bobby gave a sigh of relief. They did not need an attack.
Just then, Gus swore and swerved to the left. Michel moaned as he lurched against the side of the aircraft and Bobby banged her elbow. She knew better than to interrupt a pilot’s concentration but held her breath waiting to see what had happened to cause him to move so quickly.
Once he had righted them again, Gus said to her, ‘A rogue bandit, coming our way.’
Bobby leaned forward – not being able to see the enemy was making her feel impotent. Just at that moment, a German Messerschmitt flew within feet of their cockpit. She could see the pilot. A young man with the whites of his eyes showing. She could not help herself, she waved at him, her auburn curls blocking Gus’s head.
The enemy aircraft suddenly lurched upwards and then disappeared.
Gus burst out laughing. ‘My God, I wonder why we got away with that. Maybe he was short on fuel or maybe he just wants to get home in one piece. Or,’ he paused and then chuckled, ‘maybe he was just too surprised to see a woman in the cockpit and thought you were an angel come to foretell his impending doom!’
She sat back in shock. She had never seen a
German so close.
‘Are we alive?’ a weak voice came from behind her.
‘Oui, Michel, oui, I rather think we are,’ Bobby replied slowly. ‘I told you, we will both die in our beds surrounded by our grandchildren.’ She looked round to see him give a wan smile.
The rest of the journey passed quickly as she concentrated on navigating and Gus gave his full attention to looking out for the enemy and flying the aircraft. Then she spotted what they were looking for.
‘There, down there,’ she told Gus. The river sparkled in the moonlight and the tracks of the railway followed its banks. For a second, she felt a buzz of excitement; she was over France. She had never been abroad and had always longed to travel and see the world. But down below her were people who had been invaded, whose everyday lives had been turned upside down and, if the newsreels were to be believed, were constantly living under the threat of execution, prisoner of war camps and starvation.
Gus checked his watch and his compass. ‘In eight minutes you need to look out for three flares on the starboard side. They will only be fleetingly lit, so we need to be quick.
She carefully checked her watch. After six minutes, she scanned the ground. ‘They’re there, they’re there,’ she called, pointing to a field to their right where there were three torches being flashed intermittently.
‘What letter are they flashing?’
Bobby searched her memory for the Morse alphabet. She had learned it in training but rarely used it. ‘M’ she said finally.
‘OK, talk to them on this radio.’ He passed over a different transceiver to her. ‘Here, they have a second receiver on the ground to this one. Tell them we have a special package for them that we had to pick up last month unexpectedly and ask if it’s OK to land.’
‘Bonsoir,’ she uttered into the mouthpiece. ‘Nous avons une livraison spéciale pour vous que nous avions dû récupérer le mois dernier de façon inattendue. Est-ce-que bon pour atterrir?
She listened and then told Gus, ‘We’ve got the OK to land.’
‘Right, I only have minutes to land and less than 600 yards to do it in. I need to head towards the bottom of that ‘L’ shape. Michel needs to get out as soon as I get those wheels down and then I can make a U turn while he’s getting out. There’s no time to lose. Tell him to jump at the last minute. Someone will be there to meet him. We have very little time to take off again,’ he paused. ‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have by my side.’
Bobby stole a sideways glance at his profile. Oh dear, she thought, I wish he didn’t make my stomach turn over.
Bobby relayed all the information but Michel stood hovering by the door, his hands clinging onto the cold metal. He seemed incapable of opening it.
‘You’ll have to go and do it for him, we can’t waste time,’ Gus told Bobby. She unstrapped herself and went to the back to help. The door was stuck and she struggled to wrench it open.
Gus shouted back to her, ‘Hurry up, there are some more lights coming out of the woods, I don’t know if they’re French or German.’
Bobby threw her whole weight against the door, but Michel just stood there, glumly staring into space. Gus was yelling something from the front, but she could not hear him. She stepped backwards and pitched herself at the door. It suddenly flew open and she fell out onto the ground beneath, with Michel tumbling out on top of her. Gus was already revving the engine, apparently unaware that she was no longer on board and then, to her horror, the aeroplane taxied off down the field, the wheels bumping along the clumps of grass. She stared after it, lying prostrate on the wet, muddy ground, too terrified to move. She spat out some bits of grass she had almost swallowed as she fell and stumbled back to her feet. It was a large field, surrounded by dark, foreboding trees. There were some dark shapes running from the woods towards them. She hoped they were French.
‘Bienvenue en France,’ a French voice hissed at her as Gus swept the Anson back up into the sky, talking to an empty space behind him.
Chapter 16
There was immediate consternation amongst the group of about five men around Bobby and Michel. While two of them hugged a static Michel in a Gallic embrace, chattering on in French, the other three looked aghast at Bobby. They were only expecting one ‘package’. What were they supposed to do with two?
The men were dressed in dirty gabardines with belts pulled tightly around their waists. Three of them wore black berets and they all carried shotguns, slung carelessly over their shoulders. Their boots were covered in mud and every one of them had used that mud to darken their faces so they would not be seen in the moonlight. Bobby, with her shiny, pink cheeks felt that she shone out like a sunbeam in the darkness.
Bobby experienced a deep panic arising from her stomach; somehow, she had actually landed in France. She was furious with Gus. How could he have left her here? But even as that thought passed through her racing mind, she knew he was unaware that she, as well as Michel, had fallen out of the plane. Now the words on the briefing note that she had dismissed as being out of a theatrical melodrama suddenly seemed like a terrifying portent. These were real Frenchmen, talking rapidly and in a dialect she could not understand; she had no idea where exactly she was and even less idea what to do – and she was behind enemy lines. She looked round at Michel for help but he seemed incapable of speaking so Bobby started to speak, explaining as best she could, what had happened. There was a momentary pause and then she saw the famous French shrug from the tallest man amongst them as he moved to quickly propel her and Michel forward. There were no lights anywhere and Bobby was torn between being grateful to the moon above and being terrified that they were so clearly illuminated in its light.
She watched Michel lean down and automatically rub some mud on his face and bent down to do the same before stumbling after the men towards the woods in front of them. Glancing behind her, imagining German boots thundering towards them, she could just see the outline of a large house that seemed to be watching them through its closed shutters. It loomed, full of shadows and menace, and Bobby shivered.
A low whistle revealed two men hiding in the bushes about twenty feet away from them. They emerged, running, half-crouched to have a quick conversation with the tall man and her guides abruptly changed direction, turning away from the woods towards the gable end of the house. As they crept in front of it, Bobby warily glanced up at its faded grandeur and peeling pink-icing paintwork. Desperate to think of anything other than the situation she was now in, she tried to imagine its history. It looked ornate enough to be from a golden era full of crinolines and feathers and it occurred to Bobby that theirs was not the first clandestine group it had witnessed moving silently through its grounds during France’s turbulent history. She hardly dared look up to notice its massive hipped roofs and decorative quoins but tried to crouch down as far as she could in an effort to make herself as invisible as possible. There were no torches, but these men obviously knew their way. Bobby mentally raced through every possible scenario she was about to face and then decided it was just all too terrifying so concentrated on the more immediate threat of not falling over instead. At the far end of the overgrown terraced lawn, the group entered some more woods and while Michel followed noiselessly with the practised manner of one used to creeping silently around the French countryside at night, Bobby’s boots kept catching on leaves and roots.
‘Silence!’ a man behind her whispered in a French accent.
For the first time, Bobby knew what it was like to be in enemy territory. Her heart was racing and every tree shape looked like a German soldier. She had never been so terrified. Not even, she realised, when engine failure in a Swordfish had caused the aircraft to drop like a stone for a few heart-stopping seconds before she was able to restart it. But now, all the fears she had experienced as an ATA pilot seemed like tiny slivers of glass rather than the huge shattered mirror she was facing here.
After what seemed an age, but in reality was probably only ten minutes, they arrived at a s
mall row of about seven houses lined up on one side of the road, as if clinging onto each other in solidarity. On the other side, there was a small school building with a broken gate and a noticeboard covered in threatening posters with the familiar black spider-like swastika. Bobby felt a chill go down the back of her neck. The street was empty and all the houses were blacked out, like those in England, so all she could make out was a long line of shadows rather than cosy homes. The houses all looked the same, Bobby noticed as they got nearer. They all had rendered fronts with shuttered windows, now closed tight against the cold, the war and prying eyes. Every house in England had vegetables growing in every possible corner but here, the houses butted onto the street, with no pavement between and there was little sign of any gardens. A few window boxes remained but only the straggly residue of an occasional dead geranium tippled over their wooden frames. It was if the inhabitants of the houses had given up any hope of revival for their plants or themselves. Many of the houses had bullet holes in them, a chilling testament to struggles that Bobby did not even want to think about. The men pushed Bobby down into a crouch and led her along the side of the street, indicating to her to keep pressed in against the walls until they approached the house at the end when one man gave an owl hoot and a tiny crack appeared in the doorframe. It opened an inch at a time as they approached and after three low whistles from the man at the front of the group, it opened a few more inches. A woman in a checked pinny was holding the door ajar, rapidly scanning the horizon from side to side. They all sidled through.
A hurried conversation followed in which Bobby realised this was only a stopping-off place and that they would be on their way again. The woman led them to a cellar, first moving a worn rug and then lifting up a large wooden hatch to reveal some roughly hewn steps. The little group trooped down and then two of them started to move some vats of wine. Behind the vats was a doorway, hidden in the gloom. They opened it and signalled for Bobby and Michel to go through it. As they bent down, Michel looked her in the eyes. ‘I am so sorry, Bobby, I had the panic and now, I put you in so much danger.’ He gave her a quick hug and added, ‘But I am not sorry that you are here with me.’
