by Thomas Wood
But, until those methods were devised I, and my fellow soldiers in the pub, would have to settle for the sort of plan that men like Henri and Frankie had dreamed up, presumably in the evenings spent sitting in this very same pub.
I wasn’t hopeful.
32
It didn’t take long for the monotony of the horse’s hooves clattering into the cobbled stone path to begin to irritate me. Most of my major muscles had already started to seize up and cramping was just around the corner, I knew that when the time came, it was going to be one sizeable effort to not fall over once I clambered from the horse cart.
With every hoof clap though, I was one step closer to freedom, one inch closer to getting home, so I tried to distract myself from the noise with other thoughts and meditations. I thought about what was going to happen next, I wondered how long it would take me to get to my next waypoint, I even allowed myself to dream of what I would do if I made it home. But there was one train of thought that kept niggling away at me, it kept threatening me from the periphery and eventually, I had no other option but to let it encompass all my attention, drawing me further and further away from the horse’s hooves.
I couldn’t stop thinking about all the people that had died simply to get me to where I was, in this horse cart. Some of them had done it knowingly and willingly, Monsieur Paquet and Clarke had both sacrificed their lives to further my escape attempt, while others had done it totally unbeknown to them, like Major Perkins. If it hadn’t been for him and his quick-thinking orders to get out of there, I would have certainly met a similar fate to him. It all seemed so long ago now that I began to wonder whether I was making certain parts of my story up, a fabrication of an eternally exhausted mind.
Cécile had given her life for me, or at the very least, her freedom, Red had died waiting for me in a shell hole, Sergeant Lambert had died by taking a bullet that would have hit me had it not been for his body thrown in front of it. Countless others would have suffered because of me; Andrè had been at risk simply for having me in his home, the same with all the other houses I had made use of, all of those involved in producing my identity card were at risk from the very second they handed them over to me and so even was the young German who had pointed me in the direction of the train station.
It was entirely possible that they were all dead now, the Gestapo making a bold example of every single one of them, to deter others from doing the same. They were all a sacrifice for my freedom. A freedom which I did not yet have, but I was close.
As the cart shook gently from side to side, I wondered and prayed that each and every one of them, all of those who were somehow still alive and especially those who were no longer part of this earth, had some sort of peace in their lives, and that they were okay with me still being alive, and making such an audacious attempt to burst into freedom.
They would, no doubt, have been incredibly disappointed with the way in which I was trying to make it into the unoccupied zone of France. It was an almost childlike suggestion at first, but it soon dawned on me that Henri and German Frankie, had already done this before and they were confident that I would at least make it past the Germans in this way.
German Frankie turned out to have been one of the more privileged locals; he had a horse and a cart. The Germans didn’t seem to have too much transport in the area, as they had asked Frankie, and a few others like him, to be the ones to bring supplies out of the unoccupied zone, and into the German held territory, before dropping the supplies at the local garrison. The garrison where hundreds of Germans were sited to occupy, patrol and administer this region of France.
As part of his master plan, I had met him as he left the German garrison, picking up the necessary papers for that day’s trip, and hopped in to the back of his cart at the side of the road. The day before, he had shown me how he had cleverly laid a false floor in his cart, accessed by pulling up a few of the deck boards in the back, and lying, very flat against the real floor. The boards were then hastily pulled back over the top, and I had just an inch between the end of my nose and the wooden plank that Frankie had been so proud of. My journey was made far more cramped and uncomfortable by the swathes of letters and a parcel or two that Frankie had already stowed beneath the floorboards; communications between families who were desperate to contact one another in any way that they could.
I was quite fortunate in a way, I was taking this journey at no cost to myself, whereas the owners of the letters and the parcels had been charged a tidy premium to smuggle them to the other side. Some people were doing well out of this war; Frankie was most certainly one of them.
Once we had made it to the other side, the next face that I would see would be one of Frankie’s associates in the free zone, who would pull up the floorboards, take the letters and parcels, and point me in the general direction of freedom and from then on, it was down to me. As I lay there, listening to the faint humming of Frankie as we trundled along, I desperately prayed that the next face I saw was Frankie’s friend, and not some rosy cheeked German who was still recovering from the drinking session the night before.
Fortunately, the journey wasn’t overly long, and I soon began to feel the dramatic loss in pace as we neared the checkpoint that would decide my fate. As we slowed, Frankie began to grind on me a little, his overconfidence as he began to whistle ‘God save the King’ shining through so much that I was convinced that I was about to be turned over to the Germans. Despite this, I decided to take some delight in it, if I made it through it would be almost comical, but if I was captured, then at least I was captured to the rather haunting version of the national anthem.
As we slowed to a halt, Frankie began to utter slow, soothing words to his horse, which had an opposite effect on me, my heart rate immediately soaring through the roof, and its beating threatening to push through my own chest. I began praying more than I ever had done before, for Frankie, for the Germans, for my heart to slow down and not beat so loud as to give me away. Everything I did, my breathing, my praying, was all done consciously, deliberately making sure that it wasn’t me who was the one that messed this all up.
I soon realised why German Frankie was called German Frankie, almost immediately after we came to a stop. Shouts were exchanged between Frankie and what must have been the Germans manning the checkpoint, a mixture of both French and German.
The shouts died down as Frankie hopped from the cart, and began making his way over to the soldiers, his low booming voice quite clearly audible and distinguishable from all the other voices that I could hear. Laughter became the constant soundtrack as I waited, and I grew frustrated as I heard the clinking of bottles as drink was passed around. Frankie seemed to be having some sort of party out there.
I calmed myself by trying to utter the reassurance that he had to do this, this was what he did on a daily basis and so today couldn’t have been any different. But something was eating away at me, something was troubling my mind as I lay there. What if he was telling them that there was a British soldier in the cart? What if today was the day that they decided they didn’t trust him anymore and searched his transport?
I resisted the urge to bounce my leg up and down like I would have normally done if I was nervous, more because the cramp would really begin to take hold if I did, but also because the noise would make it obvious that someone was in the cart.
I almost broke down in tears when I felt the cart begin to pull away again, and we carried on in the direction we were facing; we hadn’t been turned around or summoned into a holding area. I was almost a free man.
I was surely in free territory by now, the shouts and jeers of the soldiers slowly fading away into nothing. I had done it, well, we had done it. All those people who had made and squirrelled things away for me, had helped me get away. It would now be a relatively simple journey down to the south and from there, home. I couldn’t quite get over the feeling that I no longer had to hide, no longer had to feel precarious every time a soldier or a police officer approached
me, no more feelings of apprehension when a group of soldiers burst into a hotel or dragged someone off into the night. I couldn’t believe it. I had been on the run for months and it had just finished. Just like that.
But then the cynic in me crept in, the trepidation that told me not to switch off entirely. There was still so much that could go wrong. I had been so trusting of the men who had kidnapped me at the station, the very men who went on to give me a jolly good hiding and convinced me that I was in the grips of the German secret police. I had been compromised before, without seeing it coming, and now, it was quite possible, that I had been handed over to the Germans and I was just in a waiting game for them to come and dig me out.
Someone had given me up once before, I didn’t even know who yet, but it would have been so easy for Henri or Frankie to have taken a salary from the Germans, the deal being that they pretended to help, but took them to the pub on a certain night to be marked by the sentries of the next day.
I thought about the other Brits that were in the pub and how well they were faring. Maybe it was legitimate and above board and they were already well on their way back to Britain, but my cynical side told me that they were already captured, or dead.
These thoughts tormented me for what must have been another twenty minutes, before I heard what I had been straining to hear for so long.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Four, clear, eminent booms as Frankie pushed his boot into the wooden floorboards that surrounded his feet. It was time to go. The next face I would see, would determine my entire future. The boards were about to be lifted and it would either be a grin, or a gun; there would be no in between.
I heard scrabbling around as the cart began to slow, boxes being moved around on top of me before the boards were slowly prised open. The sunlight that savaged my eyes sent streams of water flowing down my cheeks, which I quickly rubbed away to try and determine my fate.
There were no shouts yet, no gunshots or pain to speak of and, as I rubbed the final bits of water from my eyes, I realised that a young boy was staring at me, smiling. He couldn’t have been any older than fourteen years old, and I began to grow very irritated that this boy was being put in harm’s way like this, when he should be at home with his mother.
But I couldn’t be angry, I was free.
Gripping his hand, he helped me to my feet and he almost immediately began throwing the bags of letters and parcels over the side of the cart, which I noticed was still moving at a rather leisurely pace. I looked up at him as he began pointing, with a long, wiry finger, towards the trees that ran along the right-hand side of the road. Just what I liked, some cover.
I slapped Frankie on the back, thanking him, before pressing a small piece of paper into his hand.
“Will you sort this for me, Frankie?”
“I will try, my friend, I will try…”
Giving the young lad a nod, I slipped off the back of the cart, and immediately began running towards my treeline, the cramp really beginning to take effect and menacingly teasing me as I tried to stay on my two feet.
I made it to the treeline and carried on running, until it felt like my legs were simply about to give up completely. Resting against the trunk of the largest tree I could see, I began to collect my thoughts.
Frankie and Henri had been concerned for me, that somehow, something was going on that meant that my escape attempt meant just as much to them as it did to me. Henri was convinced that Cécile was still alive, in hiding somewhere and that he would be able to find her if she wasn’t in German hands. I was so desperate to find out, so longing to be able to speak to her, that I had given Frankie a note.
Cécile.
If you are reading this, I am a free man.
I would still so love it if you were able to come to England. It is not far.
All my love,
Alf.
33
German Frankie had managed to get me around twenty miles into the unoccupied zone of France, coupled with the twenty or so that I had managed until night fell, I was feeling increasingly confident about my time in the free part of France.
Henri had warned me though, that to stay near the border with the occupied zone, would mean that the local authorities would be willing to hand me back over to the Germans. Almost in the same breath, he had told me to make my way to Vichy, which is where many of the consulate officials had set up, in the aftermath of the German occupation of France. From here, he said, I would be able to obtain a pass from the American consulate, which would give me some assistance in travelling freely down to the south of France, from where I would be able to plan the next phase of my escape attempt.
I knew that I had more than enough money to make my journey south, my pockets still weighted down nicely with the money that Henri had managed to source me, but I still wanted to save as much of it as possible, I didn’t know who I might need to bribe along my journey, and so opted to sleep rough that first night of freedom, under the warm sky, twinkling gently as the stars began to find their strength.
Waking up early, along with the birds, I walked into the nearby village, in search of some food. However, as I entered, I realised that there was something right in front of me that would prove far more important than food would have done at that moment in time. As I hopped on the bicycle that had simply been leaning outside the front door of one of the houses, I was flooded with guilt as I thought about the ways in which this bike could have been used to provide for a family, or a young child who had saved up for months to buy it. But equally, I told myself, it could have been used to round up mysterious men who had been found sleeping in the nearby woodland, and escorted them back to the Germans, so I felt no real qualms as I peddled as hard as I could to get out of that village.
I cycled all day after that, too scared to look round and face the mob from the small village that would have formed at the first news of a stolen bicycle. The hunger and thirst that had dominated the first few miles of my journey, slowly began to subside as I gradually became more accustomed to the feeling once more.
The further I cycled, the more confident I became, eventually plucking up the bravery from somewhere to begin waving at the locals as they passed me by in a blur and even stopping for directions in one overly helpful French village.
As dusk fell, I began to look for somewhere to sleep. I couldn’t have been too far from Vichy by now and wanted to present the best version of myself as I could when I arrived at the consulate, if it was still operating. I settled in a nearby farm, in the barn to be precise, where I was fortunate enough to discover that a small milking bucket, full of slightly fetid water, was perched in the corner. Piling together a comfortable bed of hay and straw, I gave myself a quick wash in the water, succeeding only in making myself smell much worse than when I had walked into the barn. Nevertheless, I got a decent night’s rest and was woken only by the streams of sunlight that forced their way through the rafters.
I buried the bicycle under a layer or two of straw, leaving a nice surprise for the farmer and his family when they next cleared the building out. I figured that walking into Vichy would give me more time to take a look around, and to work out an escape route if everything began to go belly up.
Crossing a river by bridge, I noticed that the greenery of the fields that I had become accustomed to, slowly became far more built up, signifying that I was now in the heart of the unoccupied zone of France.
Life here seemed to be carrying on as usual, the tricolour was flying proudly from almost every building and there wasn’t a single soldier in sight. I hoped that they were all at the border with the Germans because, with an attitude like theirs, it wouldn’t be long before the Third Reich had extended its territory a little bit more.
I walked around the streets of Vichy, determining where things were such as the local hotels and other places of interest. It was possible, Henri had told me, that the consular officials would need to be requested, and so I would have to put myself up in their h
otels for a night or two. It was good for me anyway to get a feel for the place, it made me feel like I was in much more control over the situation and that if, for any reason, it was to kick off, I would know where to go and hide, just as much as the local police did.
I walked past the American consulate on my left, and barely gave it a second glance as I walked by, I certainly didn’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to myself now, by ogling at the building with its stars and stripes fluttering gracefully in the wind.
As I stumbled past, I noticed two men, one with his head buried in a newspaper, the other glaring at me scrupulously from a bench about one hundred yards from the consulate. They looked business like, but almost completely disinterested in me, and the newspaper.
The consulate itself was an unremarkable building; a large doorway that hung open, a few windows and a balcony upstairs from which the flagpole extended was all that seemed to constitute this building that could eventually mean so much to me.
I walked straight past and rounded the corner at the end of the road, beginning to circle back on myself. I had wanted to check that I was able to walk straight into the embassy, I didn’t want to draw unwanted eyeballs in my direction by being the only person not to know the opening and closing times of one of the most important buildings in the city right now.
Fortunately for me, the door had been open, and I would be able to at least make it inside the building before finding that it was stuffed to the rafters with waiting German soldiers.
Rounding the final corner, now only a matter of feet from the front door of the embassy, I noticed that the two men on the bench were still there, but they had swapped their interests, the newspaper now in the hands of the man who had been staring up and down the street around fifteen minutes before.
