by Rachel Hore
And so she’d sink into a restless sleep full of dreams of falling, or trying to run. Sometimes she’d see the face of the young man she’d killed, his face naked with fear before it bloomed red. She often thought of him; tried not to think of his mother, opening the telegram with the news.
And she remembered that snowy Christmas in Sussex, when she’d taken up the silver pistol and pointed it at the mirror. How different she was now from the Beatrice she’d been then. Thank God the future is shielded from us, she thought as she lay in the post-nightmare dark. And now, though her memory focused on the crucifix on the wall of the Limousin farmhouse, she could not pray.
August 1943
One morning there were no executions, and she woke late and listened to the far-off clamour of the city and the clanking of the pipes, then sat up and listened more intently. There was a pattern to the clanking. Someone was spelling out letters and words in Morse. ‘Il y a quelqu’un?’ was the message she strung together. She waited, listening, wondering if it were a trick, or if the message was for another prisoner, but after half a minute the message tapped out again.
She rolled over, loosened a small key from the chain that helped hold the bed together and quickly tapped on the pipes with it. ‘Oui.’
A silence then, ‘Where are you?’ also in French.
‘I think third floor looking west.’
‘Me too but second floor.’
Her downstairs neighbour!
She was ready to tap again, but a message came quick on the heels of the last. ‘Careful, the pigs might be listening.’
‘Yes,’ she replied, eager. What should she say? ‘What shall I call you?’ Real names could be dangerous. On the other hand, if she gave a name recognizable to the Resistance, she might learn of others she knew.
‘Michelle,’ said the pipe.
‘Paulette,’ she replied.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘A fortnight, maybe. And you?’ She was getting faster doing this now, more confident.
‘Three weeks, I think. What have they done to you?’
She didn’t reply for a moment, then tapped, ‘It’s better now.’
‘Me, too,’ came the reply, then the rapid tap, ‘Go now.’ Someone had come.
Beatrice felt strangely elated after this conversation. She had a friend. Someone who had suffered as she was suffering.
In the weeks ahead she had many conversations with Michelle and gradually learned nuggets of information about the progress of the war: the Allies had bombed Hamburg and Rome. Mussolini had been ousted by his own monarch. There was information, too, about others in the gaol. Her own pipe, it seemed, was at some cul de sac of the plumbing system, because she was never able to ‘talk’ to anyone else. Michelle however had contact with the cell next door, and through the woman there to a wider network, including some of the men. There were mostly French here, although she had heard of an Englishman known as Alain who had some sort of spyhole in the wall of his cell from which he had a view of the main staircase and, through which he somehow managed to pass notes. The name Paulette seemed to mean something to Alain, though Beatrice had never heard of him, and occasionally there would come up to her via Michelle news of someone familiar to her from the agent training school, or from that social time in London. Through the metallic grapevine she asked for news of Rafe and of Charles. Charles, she was told, had been seen in the Gestapo lock-up in Limoges, but not after that. There was never anything about Rafe.
One very awful morning she was woken by the sounds of activity in the yard below her window, followed by the cracks of gunfire. She at once tapped a message on the pipe for Michelle but there was no answer. She tried several more times that day, but there was nothing. She never heard from Michelle again. In her honour, she wrote on her wall with the little scrap of grit: In memoriam Michelle, my friend from the cell downstairs. Never to be forgotten. Vive la France. And the date, 2 September 1943.
Two days later, it was her turn to be taken from her cell. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked the guards in panic, but as usual they ignored her. She didn’t know whether or not to be relieved when they escorted her out of the front door of the prison and to where a bus full of prisoners stood waiting. They were being taken to Fresnes, the word eventually got round. They were driven out of Paris, back down the avenue of trees to the great prison. The same cell with the broken window, the same rough wardress, the door was slammed shut . . . and Beatrice was alone with her despair.
She started a new calendar on her wall with a stub of pencil she picked up in a corridor. Months passed. September, October. There were no books for Beatrice to read, no paper to write on, nothing to do but play games in her head. The only contact with others were the sporadic Morse code messages, the occasional outbreak of community singing, usually brutally cut short by the guards, and the longed-for daily exercise in the yard, where the prisoners were not permitted to speak, but sometimes managed to.
None of this was enough. Her wounds had gradually healed, but in November she became ill with depression. She could survive the bad food, the harshness of her captors, got used to the winter nights shivering under a coarse blanket, having stuffed the broken window with cardboard. It was the fear and the loneliness that gradually undid her. In the depths of the night, voices started up in her head, mocking her. No one who valued her knew where she was. She’d been dumped in this prison because the Nazis didn’t know what else to do with her. The Gestapo officer had been right. She’d been forgotten. It was the ultimate betrayal.
Christmas came and went and the prisoners stubbornly sang carols to the chagrin of the guards. She pencilled in the new year, 1944, with a feeling of desperation. At the end of February she sensed the nights becoming milder.
One day in March she was lying on her bed thinking of nothing, lacking the will to move, when a bee began to fly around the room. She raised her head, wondering where it could have come from, and realized the card on the broken window had slipped. The insect circled about a few times then came to rest in a patch of light on the wall above her bed.
She sat up and studied it closely as it cleaned its wings. It was a honey bee, its pouches heavy with nectar, and she wondered where it had come from and so early in the year. On the bus journey to the prison in September they’d passed orchards dotted with late-summer flowers, and the bee brought back the memory. She thought too of the faithful Wincanton heraldic bee, and Mrs Wincanton’s attempts to bind her to the family. Beatrice believed she’d done her best by Angelina. Yes, she’d been that faithful bee. She’d been faithful to others, or tried to be, as far as she could. To Rafe, and when she thought Rafe was lost, to Guy. She thought of her son, of how she’d kept him, not given him away. There might be some who thought she’d betrayed him by leaving him to do war work. ‘We all have to make sacrifices.’ That’s what everyone had said, the government posters, the women in the queues for rations, the men who went away to fight . . . Only her son might not understand that. He might just feel betrayed.
She hadn’t often wept here, fearing they’d see her tears as a weakness, but now the little bee was blurred by them. Suppose she never saw him again, or Rafe, or her family? After that first meeting with the Gestapo interrogator he’d never mentioned her grandmother or her cousin, and she wondered whether he had lied; whether they were still living safely on the Normandy farm.
The bee took off again, looking for a way out. She pushed her chair beneath the window and pulled the card off. After a while the bee found the hole and flew away.
She went over to the wall and drew another line on the calendar. Eight months she’d been in captivity. Yet she knew that the tide of war was inexorably turning. Last September, the news in the exercise yard had been that Italy had declared war on Germany. In November it was rumoured that the Soviets had won Kiev, then, after Christmas, that they’d liberated Leningrad. There was a growing sense of excitement and hope.
Everybody believed that an Allied invasion
of Europe was only a matter of time. And in April 1944, the Occupying forces in France started to move imprisoned British agents east into Germany.
There was no warning. After breakfast one morning in April, the wardress gave Beatrice time only to put on her shoes, and a guard waiting outside escorted her down the metal staircase, through the underground passage and into the reception lobby, where several other women had gathered, all of them dazed and anxious.
‘What’s happening?’ one asked her. She recognized her from the exercise yard, a dark-eyed, gentle-faced woman known to her as Madeleine.
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered back, and the guard pushed them apart with a shout:
‘No speaking!’
Outside, they were herded into a battered bus and driven for miles across the countryside. ‘Well, we’re still alive,’ she managed to murmur to Madeleine. ‘Maybe they’re moving us to another prison.’
‘Maybe,’ came the reply. ‘Perhaps they’re nervous. The invasion will come soon.’
The bus came to a stop outside a rail station in a small town. There was another bus just pulling away and on the platform a group of male prisoners, some wounded, all as shabby and emaciated as themselves, were being corralled onto a waiting train by armed police.
As she watched, trying to see if she recognized anyone, one of the prisoners suddenly broke away from the group and started to sprint along the platform. The police opened fire; he dodged onto the track behind the train. Three or four policemen set off in pursuit, some of the others redoubling their efforts to load the prisoners onto the train.
Beatrice was standing at the back of the group, and now everyone was looking at the escapee, running down the track, the bullets sending up clouds of dust behind him.
Then she realized. No one was looking at her. For a second, time stopped. She moved quietly like the shadow of a bird, back through the doorway of the station, and waited. Nothing happened. She glanced across to the ticket-seller’s window and met the eye of the young man who sat there. Fear shot through her. But then he signalled to her, and disappeared. A second later the door to his office opened and he ushered her inside. He shut the door, and started moving cardboard boxes from under a desk. She crept into the hole he made and lay down on her stomach while he replaced the boxes. Then, through a little chink, she watched him retake his stool at the window.
Outside, the shooting had stopped but the commotion continued, with shouting and running footsteps. Train doors slammed. A whistle, a whooshing sound and the roll of heavy wheels. The train chugged away. A moment later a bus engine started up, then eventually there was silence. She wondered what had happened to the man who’d run away.
The ticket-seller chatted inconsequentially to someone out of sight; a station official came into the office, spoke some instruction about a late train and went out again. Eventually there was peace and the young man came across and moved the boxes so she could crawl out. There was a woman’s coat and scarf hanging on a hook and he helped her put these on. She was shocked to glimpse her reflection in a small square of mirror next to the hook. Grey skin, sunken eye-sockets, frizzy hair. She wound the square of scarf around her head and pulled the coat collar up.
‘Allez chez ma mère,’ he said, pressing a scrap of torn paper into her hand. Then he opened the door, looked about outside, and gestured for her to go. He was a small, wiry man with a merry face covered in acne scars. Quite unremarkable-looking, but she knew she’d always remember him.
As she tried to thank him, he shrugged as though the whole matter was nothing and shut the door behind her.
She tiptoed to the door of the station and peered about. It was lunchtime on a beautiful spring day and the place was deserted. The sun warmed her face. She had no papers, no idea where she was and only one clue, on a scrap of torn paper, of what to do next. But she was alive and she was free.
The ticket-seller’s mother spoke as little as her son, but she did not hesitate to believe Beatrice’s story. Beatrice found herself sitting in a shabby kitchen eating fresh bread and butter for the first time in months, almost crying at how good it tasted. She watched the woman fill a bath by the fire with hot water from a copper urn, then, while Beatrice bathed, lay out some clothes and shoes she said had belonged to her daughter. Something in the way she handled the simple blouse and skirt made Beatrice wonder what had happened to the daughter, but the woman was not the sort to invite questions. The shoes, of stout black leather, fitted her exactly and the woman seemed oddly satisfied by this.
‘I am sorry that you cannot stay here, but it is not safe,’ she told Beatrice when she was dressed.
‘I have family,’ Beatrice told her. ‘Near Le Havre.’ If she went there she could put her worries about them at rest.
‘No,’ the woman said immediately. ‘It is too dangerous that way. Go south. I will tell you the way to Melun. There are people there who can help you.’ She extracted some money from a coffee pot on the dresser.
‘I can’t,’ Beatrice said. ‘You must need it.’
‘Please,’ the woman said, and thrust the money into the pocket of Beatrice’s coat, together with a packet of sandwiches. She had the same sweet face as her son.
‘You are a very good person,’ Beatrice said, taking her hand. ‘After the war. . .’
‘Yes, yes, everything is after the war. It will not be long now.’ She pressed her hand against her chest and Beatrice couldn’t tell whether she meant that the war would be over soon or that she wouldn’t be there to see it. ‘Now, go.’
She followed the woman’s directions, walking, like a cat, in the shadows, so as not to be seen. When night fell she found a barn, as Rafe had once done, and slept under empty sacks, taking care to be up and away at dawn before the farmer was about. All the next day she walked. The only danger she encountered was in a village where she stopped to buy food and ask directions. The baker regarded her with suspicion, and in response to some instinct she varied the route he described to her.
Melun. Finding the address the woman had given her. Knocking nervously at the door of strangers and again finding the miracle of kindness, food and shelter. She stayed with the couple for several days, sleeping mostly and regaining some strength. The wife gave her a bicycle and they sent her south again to a village outside Orléans. There was some argument between them over this. The woman was worried that Orléans was crawling with SS, but the man insisted anyway. There was someone he knew who could get her false papers, and since these could be more crucial to her escape than anything else, she agreed that she should go.
At the country house near Orléans it took over a week for the forger to finish the papers, a long anxious stay, hidden in a wine cellar where there were rats. When they were ready, she went forth again, this time as Jeanne de Varnes, south, always south, for Hitler’s eyes were turning northwards to the coast, to where the Allied invasion was expected daily, and she might just slip away through a chink in his defences while his attention was elsewhere.
She could travel faster now, could use trains with less fear of detection, though the children sitting opposite in the carriage to Angoulême stared curiously at her too-thin face and lustreless skin. She smiled back at them and turned to look out at the passing countryside, awash with longing for the time she’d see her own child back in England.
At Angoulême a doctor examined her scars, an expression of deep compassion on his face. Her toenails were growing again, he assured her, and the ointment he supplied would soothe the scars on her back. Her hosts gave her money and sent her on to Marseille.
The Germans there had bombed the Resistance out of the old city the year before, and the cells had scattered and reformed, but more strongly than before, their efforts utterly focused on destroying the roads and rail that aided the German advance north. Someone was to meet her in a café near the station, that’s all she knew. They’d give her instructions about what to do next, where to go.
What went wrong she never learned. She arrived at M
arseille, found the café and waited for over an hour, but no one came. She tried another café in the street, wondering if she’d got the wrong one, but there, too, she drew a blank. Marseille was as far south as she could go without help, and she was alone. She stood staring out across the Mediterranean, wondering what to do next.
In the end she took a room in a run-down boarding house near the docks. It was a rough area and she didn’t like being out in it after dark. The proprietor regarded her with prurience as she filled out the forms. When she came downstairs the next morning, there was an SS officer lounging against the desk in the narrow hallway, chatting to the man. She tried to slip past, with eyes cast down, but he seized her arm and swung her round with a jeering, ‘Well, what have we here?’ Nine in the morning and there was wine on his breath. Anger blazed through her and she pulled away, with a ‘Laissez-moi!’
He came at her, his fist swinging, but her body remembered what to do. She heard the trainer’s voice in her head. Grab the hand before it hits, twist it behind his back, trip him so he falls backwards. Then run like hell. She did all this and ran.
Flung open the door, into the street. A shout behind her. She dodged sideways down an alley as the bullet hit the window she’d just passed. Then left down behind the line of houses, over a wall into a back yard, through a back door into a kitchen. Through the house and out of the front, down a bigger street. Behind her the sounds of pursuit. She looked about wildly.
Coming towards her was a very old man leading a donkey that was pulling a little cart covered with a tarpaulin. He stopped, called softly, ‘Ici, mademoiselle,’ and lifted a corner of the tarpaulin.
‘Merci,’ she gasped, and climbed inside the cart. It was empty, but smelt of sweet manure. The man straightened the tarpaulin then the cart jerked forward as the donkey moved on. The cart trundled over cobbles for some time at a slow but steady pace, turned this way and that. She lay rigid, smelling that familiar smell of horse. Finally, the cart stopped.
