by Thomas Wood
As the first rumble of falling bombs echoed their way down the halls of the station, I hopped up onto the top bunk of the nearest vacant bed that I could find. I decided there was nothing for it but to wait this one out, and there was no point in doing that wide awake, if there was a bed here that would allow me to do it fast asleep.
Just as I began drifting off, I could make out the quiet tones of a harmonica begin to waft from further down on the platform and a few gentle voices beginning to hum and sing along. What a funny war this was.
2
As I emerged from the underground station, along with everyone else that had taken shelter there overnight, I noticed that there was considerably more dust in the air than there had been the day before, as it clung to my chest and caused me to start wheezing.
I was not the only one affected and numerous people began clutching handkerchiefs to their mouths, to try and filter out the dust, one schoolboy was even hastily pulling his gas mask from his case and preparing to pull it on over his head.
There was a noticeable crunch beneath my feet as I walked my way round to get a bus back to the hotel, bits of brick dust and mortar coating all of the streets around.
Bells rang as firefighters made their way ceaselessly from one fire to the next, still attempting to put out the incendiary devices that were the subject of many posters all around, buckets of sand on most street corners in case one managed to bounce its way down your chimney.
I found myself being diverted away from one street, as police officers and ARP wardens began swarming around the end of one road, shouts of “UXB!” and “It’s still ticking!” just about audible above the crowd who had gathered round to watch.
The bus station had taken a direct hit in the night, the twisted remains of some of the buses, just about visible sticking out of the top of the large crater that had opened up in the middle of the courtyard. The cast iron gates still stood firmly where they had been placed and to the left of the giant crater, was a lone man, an old man judging by the way he moved slowly, sweeping away at the bits of broken glass and contorted metal that ruined his forecourt.
It took me another forty-five minutes to get back to the hotel, taking numerous diversions for unexploded bombs and closed roads. Children screamed past me, elated that their school was closed after a bomb had gone through the roof of their assembly hall, and failed to detonate. I was sure they would be chuffed to bits when the bomb disposal boys got their hands on the ordnance and made it all safe once again.
During my walk back to the Metropole Hotel, I slowed my pace as I passed the Palace of Westminster, the great building where so many decisions had been made that shaped the way that this nation had formed. I wondered if the Prime Minister was in there right now, a new one since I had left for France in 1939, sitting at his desk and pondering whether or not he had made the right decisions. If he was to walk through the streets of London right now, I supposed he would decide that he had made the wrong decision wholeheartedly. That’s certainly how I would feel had I looked at the buildings and monuments that had now been smashed beyond repair.
This great city, that had withstood the plague and city-wide fires, the place that had been our capital for nearly a thousand years, and had seen so many changes of monarch and parliamentarian, was now being obliterated at the word of an evil, silly-moustached man who couldn’t handle the fact that we wouldn’t simply hand Britain over to him.
I suddenly felt very proud, not of myself, but of the country as a whole; not giving in despite only being a small little island that could quite easily find herself surrounded and blockaded, but refusing to give in because of a few little hardships.
I wondered if anyone, namely the United States would ever come to our aid. I knew that people over there wanted to join in, I had read so in the papers and had even met one of their journalists while dining out with Major Tempsford one evening. He had subsequently promised to run a piece about me, as soon as he got the clearance to do so from our government.
As I thought about America and her countrymen, there was one particular citizen that I was concerned about more than any other, an individual who was on my conscience every waking moment, and quite often, my sleeping thoughts.
It had now been over two months since I had seen Cécile and I wondered if I would ever get to see her again. That night we had dined in the restaurant of the Hotel La Romaine had been our last evening together, and I couldn’t bear the thought that it might be the last that I ever saw of her again.
I longed to be beside her once more, I wanted to be able to talk to her whenever I felt like, day or night and to chat about everything that we possibly could. We had got to the point in our relationship that we had spoken about everything we could potentially think of and had been more than comfortable to simply bask in one another’s company. But so much had changed since I had spoken to her last, and not knowing if she was even alive was plaguing my mind with thoughts that I would rather not have.
I missed her, I missed every inch of her, everything that she did and the way that she sounded. I missed the way that she played with the pendant around her neck when she was nervous, and the glorious colours of her Red Cross uniform.
I pined to be able to link arms with her again, or to feel the softness of her palm as she slipped her hand into mine subtly, under the dinner table, so that no one guessed at the way we felt about one another.
Struck with guilt once again, I wondered whether that was why she had been taken away all of a sudden. Ever since I had got back to Britain, I became convinced that it wasn’t the Germans who had compromised her, but me. Her friends had found out about our blossoming romance and wanted to put an end to it immediately. They would want to put Cécile to work later on, help some others out, and they couldn’t afford to have her heart elsewhere when she did, or having her falling in love with every Allied soldier that she gave assistance to.
There was something at the back of my mind though, that knew that they hadn’t been the ones to pull her out of there, not deliberately endangering my life anyway. They would have pulled her out for her own safety, and I had been no threat to her. They must have had a genuine concern for her wellbeing.
Which led me back to the same old question that I found myself asking time and time again, never getting anywhere other than inching round the circle that I would inevitably negotiate and come to the same conclusions repeatedly.
Who had compromised Cécile?
It was a question that I would only be able to get answers for if I was able to talk to Cécile herself, which is what I was hoping to do one day. As long as she managed to keep her head down for the duration of the war, we might be alright.
I was half-hoping that I would be able to begin to dig around in the military intelligence files, to see if anything had come up in their messages from various helpers in France, or subtly in their communications. Major Tempsford had gone one better for me though, something which I delighted in, but also began to wallow in.
“Alf, come in here a second, would you?”
Doing as I was told, I was shown into an office, obviously belonging to Jimmy himself, as it was littered with photographs of the man in his younger days, as well as one meeting the former Prime Minister. This man was obviously very well connected.
Although he had good connections with all the right people, his commission and his subsequent promotions had been almost entirely on his own merit. He had fought in one of the fiercest rear-guard actions during the retreat, at the stronghold at Calais, before he was ordered to withdraw by his own commanding officer, who he had not heard from since.
Three days after the fall of France, Jimmy and a group of others, managed to steal a boat from a harbour in Northern France, right under the German’s noses, and helped to paddle across the entirety of the English Channel, before they had managed to find the British coastline at Deal.
“You obviously know more than anyone about trying to evade and make it back home.” He raised a palm
to my face as I tried once again to deny any expert knowledge on the matter, before continuing on in his monologue regardless.
“No, it’s true. No one else here has been on the run for as long as you have. I know you said that you had a lot of help, but that’s exactly who we are trying to help by working here. I have a job for you, something which you would be more than welcome to turn down if you would like to.”
He looked at me for an answer, even though the proposition hadn’t been made to me yet. I was fairly certain what would follow, but I entertained him regardless.
“What’s that, Jim?” I liked being able to call him by his Christian name, it made the formalities of military life seem so far away and brought me closer to him, so much that I even dared to call him my friend.
“We want you to stop briefing others in what they might find over in France and for you to go back yourself. I know it sounds stupid on the surface of it, but you’d have a lot more support than you did last time. We’d know that you were there for starters.”
He beamed at me, which I returned as we both revelled in his idea of a joke.
“Not straight away of course, we’ll give you a few more weeks to recover and prepare, but there’s a job I’d like you to do. We’re worried about the Frenchie’s attempts at getting our boys out. It seems that for every single successful home run they get, another one is foiled. The fifty-fifty chance of being able to get someone back home is such terrible odds that it’s hardly worth trying to make it back.”
He continued to look at me for any hint of which way that I would decide, but I was making a concerted effort not to move a single muscle in my face, I was enjoying all the information that he was giving me.
“In the next few weeks bomber command will be stepping up their efforts on the Germans, which means more crews being committed which, in turn, means more will be shot down. We can’t afford to only get half our crews back, Alf.
“I need you to get in with them, there’s a local just on the suburbs of Paris that I trust, I knew him before the war. You’ll need to connect with him first, his name is Joseph Baudouin, he runs a local resistance group there. Quite small, but influential.
“You will, of course, be based in and around Paris. You have more knowledge about the goings on there than anyone else. Also, it might be possible for you to make some enquiries there…about that girl of yours, you know.”
I knew exactly and, I knew Jimmy well enough now to know that that would have been one of his main motivating factors behind sending me there. Ever since I had told him, he had shown a great concern for Cécile, but I was yet to know if it was out of a concern for her, or if it was because he thought there was some wider conspiracy that put his whole network at risk.
Either way, I didn’t mind. I was going to be heading back into the only thing that I had known for the last few months; evasion. And, if I was able to find out information on Cécile’s whereabouts in the meantime, then that would be a bonus for me.
“Thanks Jimmy, of course I’ll go.”
“Wonderful. You’ll have to begin training right away I’m afraid.”
He wasn’t lying. I was whisked away by staff car that very afternoon.
3
I was made to sit in the fuselage of the Whitley bomber, on my own, further down from where the navigator sat behind his pilot and co-pilot. If I was to crawl a little further, I would meet the tail gunner, just as isolated as I was, with nothing to keep him company apart from a headset so that he could occasionally talk to the rest of the crew.
It was a narrow fuselage to be sat in and I was able to make my feet touch the far side of it as I sat down on the floor, a wooden board hastily hammered into the spars that enabled me to have a slightly more comfortable journey.
I had listened to their chatter over my very own headset as we had taken off, and experienced what it was like to have your stomach almost ripped from your insides, as this powerful bomber began to increase the revs and speed. The noise back where I was sitting was almost excruciating, taking me several minutes to begin to get used to the sound that was rubbing into my skull. Back here, there was significantly less insulation from the noise of the engines, which wasn’t helped by the fact that I was sitting more or less adjacent to them as we flew.
The whole aircraft shook as we thundered down the runway, being replaced by a more subtle throbbing that pulsated its way up and down the fuselage, occasionally lurching slightly to the left or the right as we hit what I supposed was some sort of turbulence.
My introduction to the crew was a brief one, I had only caught the name of the navigator, Ray, who would be my most important crewmate anyway. It had turned out that they hadn’t known of my hitchhike until they were making their way over to their aircraft, readying themselves for an op into what was now enemy held France.
It was unusual for them to be hitting France, they had all said so as we loaded up, which made me begin to think that Jimmy had pulled a few strings to have this all laid on just for me, so that I would have some sort of cover in which to drop into France.
Ray was more than happy to give me a nudge when the time came, he would be plotting their route anyway and would only need to give me a quick thumbs up to tell me that I was above my target.
I couldn’t help but think of all the people in my life, and how this would be changing everything. For the first time in a long time, it was my parents that I thought of first and what I might be doing to them if they knew where I was going.
They had spent the best part of six months believing that I was dead, the telegram informing them that I was missing presumed dead still sitting in the bottom of my mother’s jewellery box for some reason. They now both believed that I had been given a desk job, safe in the depths of the Whitehall offices, filing paperwork and answering telephone calls. But that, clearly, couldn’t have been further from the truth, and I dreaded the thought of what it would do to them if they received another telegram, completely out of the blue, telling them that their son, the one who was meant to be sat at a desk, had been killed.
I wondered if they’d even believe, or whether they would now simply ignore all the telegrams that they received from the War Office, until some other sort of evidence turned up to suggest otherwise. They would never forgive me if they had found out that I had lied to their faces and had instead headed back into France, even though I was given the option of staying in Britain, had I wanted to.
The fact was though, that I hadn’t wanted to. Ever since I had managed to leave France, I had found myself pining to be back, to fulfil the thrill that I had adored of running, looking over my shoulder every ten minutes and constantly being on a high state of alert.
It felt weird to admit it, but I loved being on the run. It gave me such an overwhelming thrill, which seemed to ignite every part of my being, that led me to desire it more and more, to make the most of it while I still could. I couldn’t be a runaway forever.
The other side of my mind was littered with thoughts for my darling Cécile and how, by returning, I was somehow giving her a chance to make her presence known, to tell me that she was alive. That was all that I needed, just to know that she was still breathing.
It was that breathing that I craved, to feel the tenderness of her warm breath on my cheek and to be totally assured that this war, and the belief of an eternal displacement, wouldn’t go on forever. I needed to be able to smell her again, the smell of her skin enough to calm my every nerve and fear. She didn’t smell of anything in particular, but her skin seemed to have a slightly sweet smell to it, one that would be instantly recognisable to me, and one that I would get in no other place than with Cécile.
The jostling of the Whitley began to intensify to the point where that became the only thing that could encompass my thoughts. I steadied myself, placing my hands on either side of me, just to stay upright and I became convinced that we would be coming down in a hail of bullets and flames within a matter of seconds.
We weren’t
being shot at however. We had merely entered a host of cloud, a choking, suffocating cloud by the feel of it, one that hid dangerous bullies in its midst that flicked and kicked at the wings of the bomber, as if it was nothing more than a matchstick to them.
“Flying on instruments only chaps,” said the pilot, coolly, “Charlie, regular reports from back there.”
“Okay, Skipper,” replied the tail gunner, before sending frequent reports as to the whereabouts of all the other bombers in the formation we were flying in.
“Tough to see anything at all out here Skip, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”
“New boy, we’re on instruments because we can’t see a thing out here and there’s twenty other planes just waiting for us to plough straight into them. You can add that to your notebook.”
I did, not physically, but mentally. I don’t know what these boys had been told, but I had been through an intensive training regime, to make sure I learnt everything that I possibly could about the bomber. From the way it was started up, to how you feathered a prop, I learnt it all until I was dreaming about becoming a pilot myself.
It was only natural that, owing to my knowledge of bearings and map reading, that I assumed the position of pseudo-navigator, the only issue being that, in this aircraft, the navigator was also co-pilot and so was expected to know just as much about flying, as he did navigating.
I needed to know as much as possible, if I was to convince the men on the ground that I was in fact a very experienced Royal Air Force airman, and that I was worthy of their help. It was essential that I was able to reasonably carry off the notion that I had flown many hundreds of hours in the Whitley, otherwise I would never be able to find my local contact, Joseph Baudouin.
The plan was to try and convince his soldiers, his local fighters that I was genuine, as it would lead to almost certain death if I was to simply stroll in and demand to see him. They needed to take me in, it had to be off their own bat, so that I didn’t seem so threatening, before I would be able to request a meeting with Joseph.
