Where the Clocks Chime Twice

by Alec Waugh

  The position later, with regard to collaboration, was equally involved. It was not a mere question of necessity; of a middle-aged actor, who can only support his wife and children by his histrionic talents, who cannot choose either his parts or audience, who has to act in plays that are not anti-German, to amuse German troops on leave. The underground in France only became active after Russia entered the war. The Maquis were, quite often, not so much good Frenchmen as good communists. They were the very men and women who before the war the French bourgeoisie had most distrusted. The officials, tradesmen, industrialists, and farmers, who were doing their best to maintain, under exceptional circumstances, the industry and economy of France, could scarcely be expected to welcome the very elements they had so long opposed; they resented having their trains derailed, their bridges blown up, their machinery thrown out of gear. The activities of the underground seemed to them the prelude to a complete breakdown of the system, the road to communism. It was natural that the more stable citizens should attempt to restrain the Maquis; and when an enemy is in charge of the forces of law and order it is hard to tell at what point self-protection becomes the betrayal of your fellow-countrymen to an invader. We may account ourselves fortunate, we English and Americans, that we were offered no such choices, no such conflicting loyalties, no such disastrous alternatives. Many men faced the firing squad for no worse crime than backing the wrong horse. I had a feeling that three weeks spent in Villefranche would give me a better insight than many Top Secret documents into what had been happening in France during the Occupation.

  I learnt a lot; though much of what I learnt I might have guessed. For the greater part of the time life had just gone on. There had been no particular incidents : there had been no fighting. The Maquis had not been active. First there had been two years of the unreal quiet of the Vichy régime; a curious twilit world, no yachts, no tourists, various kinds of shortage, then after the North African landings there had been the Occupation, first by the Italians, then the Germans. On the whole, they had preferred the Germans; the Germans had been stricter, but you had known where you were with them. It had been a game outwitting them. They were so stolid and dull and serious. Everyone had his own story of his fooling them, retaining this cache of food, hiding whatever he might have of value, making false declarations, operating a black market.

  Those who had prospered were those I might have foreseen would prosper. There was Artur, the coal merchant. I had known him first when he was twenty-two; stocky, highly coloured, muscular, the best swimmer and one of the best footballers in the village, always gay, always laughing, his teeth very white and even, very much beau garçon. The girls vied for his attention. He had not, however, as much spare time for them as he would have liked. He had an exacting mistress, seventeen years older than himself ; a widow, plump and blonde and affluent. It was the ambition of most of the young Villefranche men to provide themselves with that kind of consort; and most of them when they had acquired one, knocked off work. Artur had too much sense. He profited by his mistress’s concern for him, but he did not neglect his business. On Sundays he would drive a two-seater roadster into the square; his hair agleam with brilliantine, his shoulders constricted within a tight-fitting suit, his throat constrained within a collar; at his side the blonde widow elegant in georgette and platinum. It was one of the chief features of the day’s parade, but on weekdays he would be in his heavy lorry; in a grimy vest, his forehead and his forearms smeared with coal dust; his teeth seeming all the whiter as he laughed and shouted to his friends; still a part of the parade.

  Artur kept his head; he kept his health, his looks, his figure. He took the war in his stride. He roared with laughter as he told me how he had fooled the Germans, selling them bad coal, underweight, and overcharging them; keeping the best coal for his friends. He still drove his lorry in the mornings; in the evenings he wore smart beach clothes. He had given up football, but he was no less athletic. He had a gun for shooting fish under water. He was a little, but only a very little, heavier. His teeth were as white as ever. The young girls eyed him acquisitively; he was still a bachelor: he had now rather more spare time to give to them. He was as much the king of the waterfront as ever. No one thought any the worse of him for not having joined the Maquis. He had done his share, tricking the Germans, helping his own friends and lining his own pockets too, the clever rascal.

  It should have been as easy to predict that Artur would prosper during the war as that for Mimi things would go badly. Mimi was one of my closer friends. He was a regular attendant at the Garden Bar. He was a great bear of a man; a fisherman and a fighter, he walked with a shuffling stride, his shoulders hunched. When I knew him first he was just over twenty. He was silent, almost inarticulate. He spoke French with difficulty. As he sat at the table he would sway his shoulders, his elbows raised as though he were in the ring. His fists would close sometimes, and his teeth would clench, as though he were impatient to be ‘at someone’. Once he said to me, “If you ever want anybody dealt with, you’ve only to tell me, you know.” He went about for the most part with a shrivelled little monkey of a man called Vincennes, thirty years older than himself, who was ordinarily sodden with red wine by nine o’clock, and whom he used, in Elizabethan phraseology, as ‘his creature’, whom he would bawl at, abuse, beat about the head, but defend with the fiercest loyalty against anyone who failed to treat him with respect. Mimi had married in the middle thirties, but he rarely took his wife out with him in the evenings. He lived like a Moslem.

  I hardly recognised him when I saw him on my second evening, shuffling past the old market-place beside a small grey-haired woman and two small children. His shoulders were more hunched; he had lost weight; he looked shrunken. If I had seen him anywhere else I should not have recognised him. But meeting him in Villefranche I knew it could be no one else.

  He blinked when I tapped his arm. He stared at me. “Surely you remember me,” I said. “Monsieur Alec.” “Why, Monsieur Alec!” He raised his left elbow in that familiar gesture, as though he were warding off a blow. His handshake was as firm as ever, but it had a curious, uncanny feel. I glanced at his right hand later, as we sat over a glass of wine. I had guessed correctly. The middle finger was missing.

  I took some time getting his story out him, and then I only got it partially. He had always been inarticulate. With Vincennes and his friends he talked in patois. He could not express himself with any fluency in French. He told me his story in verbs and nouns and gestures; there were few adjectives or adverbs: no prepositions or conjunctions. I got no details, only the bare outlines.

  He had been a prisoner for five years. He had been wounded, badly wounded, in the thigh. But that I gathered had been only a small part of his trouble. He had quarrelled with the guards. He had lost his finger, grabbing at a bayonet. He had been put in a punishment camp. He had been overworked and underfed. He was still in a daze, as though he were not yet sure that the five years’ nightmare was at an end. But though he gave no details, I could guess at the kinds of thing that must have happened. He was independent, sullen. He would not understand what the German interpreters in their correct schoolroom French were saying. They would not understand his Niçois explanations. He was impatient; when he lost his temper he hit out. He was the kind of man who when a war started would be in forward areas, as Artur was the kind of man who if he did find himself in uniform would be conveniently embusqué at a remote H.Q. on the best of terms with the quartermaster. Mimi would resent more than most the restrictions and privations of prison life; he would suffer in a dumb uncomprehending way, like an animal: and like a lost animal he had returned now to his lair, aged and weakened; a stranger among his childhood’s friends. He had a pension; he got work of a casual kind; he had a devoted wife; he would manage well enough, but he was no longer the man who had bullied and defended Vincennes, who had offered to take on my enemies. His real life was over, or at least seemed to be.

  Mimi and Artur were counterparts to one ano
ther : and maybe it was typical of Villefranche that they bore each other no ill will; as children they had tumbled over each other in the gutter; they were still good friends.

  There were many others for whom the war had closed for ever the old way of life. Somerset Maugham, in A Personal Record, refers to a Villefranche boy called Nino of military age who during ‘the phoney war’ smoked an endless chain of cigarettes in the hope of heightening his incipient tuberculosis and thereby rendering himself unfit for service. This may be the Nino whom I knew.

  In 1931 when I knew him best he was a boy of twelve, who hung around the waterfront and the Garden Bar. He was tall and slim and very attractive in a dark Italian way. Villefranche at that period was a magnet for homosexuals, and many of them would eye him hopefully, thinking ‘in three years perhaps’. Anyone who knew Nino was confident that their hopes would not be gratified. Artur was his hero. He had only one ambition, to find some rich Niçoise, preferably a married woman, since her time would be less un-mortgaged, on the proceeds of whose interest in him, he could play a gallant rôle among the girls who sauntered along the water-front. He had no intention of doing any work if he could avoid it.

  Sooner or later inevitably he would get spoilt; but then at twelve, looking as Southerners do five years older than his age, he had great charm. He was friendly, easy, gracious, with the natural good manners of the South. He was never in a hurry. He had all the time in the world to be polite. He would sit in the Garden Bar grinding coffee for Cécile; he would run messages for me, buy newspapers and cigarettes and matches. He would effect great worldly wisdom, great experience. He would talk like a cynical boulevardier then suddenly he would be like a child; I remember an occasion when Cécile scolded him, and he burst into tears like a ten-year-old, his shoulders shaken with great sobs. There was a strangely moving, strangely pathetic quality about him. One was seeing him at his best. Inevitably he would become self-conscious, he would exploit his charm; he would find himself between two worlds, no longer at ease in the waterfront life to which he had been brought up, and not at ease among the night clubs into which his ambition led him. He would have to endure many affronts from those who belonged by birth and by achievement to a world into which he was admitted on sufferance ‘because Lucille insisted’. A hard skin would have to form over tender feelings. Under that hard skin he might well become mean and spiteful, ready to take offence, ready to return a fancied injury. It would be melancholy in the later ’40s to remember what he had been in the early ’30s.

  Well, that was something I was not to see. Whether or not he over-smoked cheap cigarettes to avoid military service—and he may well have done, it would have been in character if he had— his health broke down during the Occupation and he died in the winter of ’43.

  There were other, several other, familiar faces that I found absent on my return. Only two of my friends had been killed in actual fighting, but many had disappeared. The frontier between France and Italy has never had much validity for the local fisher-folk. Garibaldi had been born in Nice. Up till i860 the territory east of the Var had been an Italian province. They all spoke the same Italian patois. Cécile had been born in Italy. Several of the inhabitants of Villefranche had Italian passports. Others, without knowing it, were Italian subjects. More than one family hastily packed up and fled across the frontier to avoid being interned on the eve of Italy’s declaring war; more than one young man after the Occupation found himself to his dismay drafted into the Italian army. There were many concerning whose whereabouts no one had anything to report. There were here as elsewhere those anonymous unrecorded tragedies that always afflict frontier folk who cannot understand why they should be fighting against the village across the valley.

  There were innumerable such incidents along the coast between Nice and Menton, but just as Cécile herself had typified for me all that I cared for most in Villefranche, so did Cécile’s own war story provide the best example of how easy it had been for a Frenchman to take, step by step, the actions that would seem best in keeping with his duty to his country, his family and himself, but that in the long run should turn out most disastrously for all three.

  This is what had happened. Paul, her husband, as a reservist, had been called up in the general mobilisation. As a technician he had been employed at a workshop in back areas. He had seen no fighting, and on the signature of the armistice he was demobilised and returned to work at Cimiez. For a few months his life with Cécile went on placidly, then Laval attempted to raise his troop of technicians to work in Germany. Paul received orders to report. He had no intention of working for the Germans. He ignored the order. A second order came. His friends told him that if he did not take some action, he would be arrested. The best thing, they said, was for him to go to Vichy and get work of some kind for the Government. As a civil servant he would be immune.

  He set off for Vichy, to find that everyone else was inspired with the same idea. Hollywood is not more full of supers than were the corridors of Vichy with potential bureaucrats. No, there was no office job, they told him; what qualifications had he, anyhow? Nor was there any vacancy as a chauffeur. Didn’t he realise there was petrol rationing? There was only one chance; if he was wise he’d take it. A new police force was being organised, the milice the Marshal’s special bodyguard; it was important work; order had to be maintained, hadn’t it? It was well paid, too; there’d be a separation allowance for his wife and daughter. Rather than work for the Germans, he signed on.

  I could not find out, Cécile herself did not know exactly, what had happened during those confused weeks when France had been invaded from the north and south, when the Vichy personnel had scattered northwards into Germany and eastwards into Italy. Those of the milice who stayed behind were shot as traitors by the Maquis. When the fog had cleared, Paul was in Northern Italy on the wrong side of the line.

  For nine months Cécile did not hear from him. Then it was a bare bulletin of facts, that he was well, that he was working in a garage. He did not need to explain, she realised that as well as he did, that for the time being it would be impossible for him to return to France. The hunt was up, the milice were fair prey. And how were persons as obscure as Cécile and Paul to find out what their exact position was? The Lavals could find out where they stood, but how could an unknown mechanic and a barmaid?

  That had been in the summer of 1945. Now, twenty-two months later, the position was unchanged. He was still afraid of coming back. He might be arrested. He could send no money owing to the currency regulations; only an occasional gift. That was what he said. But he had been away three years. As likely as not he had no wish now to return. There was not so much difference between Italy and Southern France. In Italy there would be more friends ready to understand and sympathise with his predicament. Many of them had rowed themselves in that same galley. Why should he come back to be treated as an enemy by those who had been once his friends? It was three years, too, since he had seen Cécile. Three years is a long time when you are under thirty. He was attractive, gay, efficient. Was it not almost inevitable that he had contracted an alliance with some other girl? It was an impossible situation, and the tragic thing about it was that, stage by stage, Paul had appeared to be doing the right and patriotic thing. The story of Cécile and Paul had told me more about the Occupation than all the Top Secret reports that I had browsed through when I worked in Military Intelligence.

  I had always been a little sad when the time came for me to say good-bye to Villefranche, but I was sad in a new way at the end of that ’47 visit. I felt sad for Cécile’s sake. She was now in her middle thirties, and her life was in a groove. She was working as hat-check girl at the Plantation, a night club in Nice to which women might go unescorted. The management had chosen her not only because she was well-mannered and picturesque but because of her exemplary behaviour. She was friendly with the girls but kept apart from them. She received their confidences but held her counsel; in the way that she always had.

  By na
ture she was unadventurous, reserved, withdrawn. When she worked at the Garden Bar she would rarely walk farther than the fifty yards that separated her café from her parents’ house. She never swam. She had the excessive modesty that often comes to those who live in a loose-tongued atmosphere; she did not like being seen in a bathing dress. Once a week she went to the coiffeur on the Corniche Road. Occasionally she went to the patisserie in front of the market-place for a cup of chocolate. But that was all.

  Once, from an upper window of the Welcome, I watched her returning from one of these expeditions. It was in early April and the day was chill. She was wearing a dark coat and skirt. She was walking quickly, her hands thrust into her coat pockets, her face bent forward. She gave the impression of someone hurrying through a hostile city: which in a sense she was. Outside her bar she felt unsure of herself and her surroundings. She did not know how people might be taking her. I had a ciné-Kodak and began to film her. She looked up, startled at the whirr of the machine, like a patrol that has been ambushed. She turned her head and hurried on. That evening she was extremely distant. She was angry at having had her privacy invaded.

  In just that way during the Occupation she moved quickly through the invaded streets, looking straight in front of her, addressing nobody, making her few purchases, attending Mass, then going home. In the same way now, dividing her time between the night club where she was on duty for eight hours and a small one-room flat off the Place Gambetta, she was altogether separate from the life about her. On Sundays she went up to Cimiez to see her daughter. The reserve that had been her strength when she was young was, I felt, undermining her, contracting her range of sympathies and interests, shrivelling her mentally and emotionally. Remembering how she had been then in 1947, and what she had threatened to become, I felt more than a little apprehensive, now three years later, as my aircraft from Damascus circled over the Riviera.