Philly
I must admit, I’m quite enjoying my extra time on the island.
Finn is an easy enough charge, even if he does ask a lot of questions.
All that cycling too – who’d ever have imagined I’d be riding a bike again after all these years!
Thank goodness the ?le de Ré is as flat as a pancake.
We make a very odd couple, I know, and we attract smiles and waves wherever we go, as well as shouts of encouragement from other cyclists as they go zipping past us on their much more serious bikes, clad in their Lycra shorts and their aerodynamic helmets.
The sea air and sunshine must be doing us both good.
There’s a bit more colour in Finn’s cheeks and he seems to be sleeping a little better – at least, I haven’t heard much midnight trampolining.
I’m sleeping well enough too, although the questions he asks have stirred up ancient memories.
Spending so much time in graveyards probably isn’t helping either.
It’s brought the dead closer. I keep having vivid dreams of Ben and Amy, Gwido and Antoni, Noor and Violette.
Full-moon dreams. They say it has an effect.
Almost eight decades have gone by since I last saw any of them and yet they appear in my dreams as if it were yesterday.
Every one of them so full of life. I have aged, where they have not.
They wouldn’t recognise me if they were to see me as I am today.
An old woman, my body ravaged by the years.
Better that than the alternative, though, as the saying goes.
I wonder whether that hobby of Finn’s, making those rubbings of the epitaphs on people’s headstones, is entirely healthy.
But it serves my purposes well, the excuse to go looking in cemeteries.
It’s rather nice having someone to help me with my search.
A lifetime of searching. A fool’s errand, probably.
Most people would have given up long ago.
I’ve helped find so many others along the way, yet never found the one I’ve really been searching for down the years.
Finn seems genuinely interested in hearing about my life as well though.
He takes his task of recording my memories very seriously.
‘I’m helping Mum write her book,’ he told me as he set things up to record the next instalment. ‘Then we can make some more money and Dad won’t have to be so worried that we’re spending too much, without him doing a proper job anymore because of looking after me.’
The expression on his pinched face makes my heart ache at times. What a funny combination he is of naivety and wisdom beyond his years. It must be hard for him making friends of his own age when he’s simultaneously older and younger than them.
‘Right then, are you ready? Chocks away, all systems go?’ I asked. And that made him smile as he gave me the thumbs up and hit record .
In the wake of Ben’s disappearance, I sleepwalked my way through the next few months in a state of shock.
All I wanted to do was to crawl away into some dark cave and be alone with my grief.
But I had to keep going, the twins gave me no choice.
The Bertrams took me under their wing, both Tony and Barbara, and I spent every day I could at their farmhouse with my babies, where there were lots of extra pairs of hands only too willing to cuddle them and help with the endless routine of feeding them and changing their nappies.
I suppose it was a welcome distraction for the French agents who’d been brought over, playing with the children in between their training sessions.
Maybe for some of them it was a reminder of happier times with their own children back home.
I hated not knowing where Ben was. How he was.
His German captors knew he was a pilot. Would they treat him with respect, or would they torture him?
Would he be sent to a proper prisoner-of-war camp, or to one of those grim-sounding work camps somewhere in Germany or Poland?
I couldn’t get the thought of Noor out of my head and what we knew of what had happened to her.
The passengers in Ben’s plane had been three French agents being returned to work in one of the Resistance networks.
Would they have been able to withstand interrogation and torture?
Would the whole circuit have been compromised?
It was a bright April morning and I’d gone over to the farmhouse to help Barbara with the cooking.
I’d had a sleepless night with both twins.
They were fractious and unsettled, perhaps beginning to teethe or maybe just picking up on their mother’s mood.
I was relieved to be able to hand them over to Barbara’s boys, who loved being given the responsibility of pushing the babies up and down the road in front of the house in a big pram.
Tony’s car pulled into the driveway. Barbara glanced up from the pastry she was rolling out and frowned.
‘I though he was going to be busy over at the airfield all day today,’ she said.
Through the window I saw him ruffle his sons’ hair and bend down to smile at the twins, then he came into the house, calling my name. I hurried to meet him in the hall.
‘Philly, there’s some news. I wanted to come straight over and tell you. Here, let’s go into the drawing room.’
I perched on the edge of the sofa, nervously wiping my hands on the hem of my apron. ‘Ben ...?’ I said, scarcely daring to hope.
‘We brought back one of our agents this morning. In fact, you might remember her – her cover name is Louise.’
I nodded, recalling a pretty, dark-haired girl who spoke with a cockney accent.
Her real name was Violette, she’d told me.
Like me, she’d been given a poem to learn, which would be the basis for the codes she’d need to use to transmit messages from France.
She’d needed a bit of extra help with her Morse code to get up to speed before her first deployment.
We’d practised, using lines from her poem, which bore a striking similarity to mine.
I wondered whether the original author had been the same for both.
Tony continued, ‘Well, she was dropped in a few weeks ago but was caught by Vichy police and interrogated. She was released, though, and found her way to a local Resistance cell, who managed to get a message out. One of the Special Duties boys picked her up last night.’
He cleared his throat before going on. ‘One of her contacts over there spoke of a British pilot who’d been captured by the Germans in the western area of the Loire, near Tours.
It has to have been Ben. He was taken to Poitiers to be interrogated by the Gestapo but gave nothing away.
He’d attempted to escape from the prison there, but was recaptured.
When he was last seen, though, he was in good health. ’
He stopped. My heart lurched with a jolt of simultaneous hope and despair.
‘That’s it?’ I said, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I’d hoped for more. I was always hoping for more.
‘Yes. I appreciate it’s not much, but at least we know for certain that he’s still alive. And we’ve moved the focus of our search to the Poitiers area. There’s a circuit operating there. We’re asking them to try to get us more information. He’s most probably being held in a prison in the area.’
I knew I should have been grateful that they were going to so much effort.
Ben was just one of many who’d gone missing.
Once I’d been able to swallow my disappointment that they hadn’t found him yet, that he still wasn’t coming home, I did give thanks for the news he was still alive.
But if he was in the hands of the Gestapo, his future was uncertain.
He was incarcerated somewhere. He could still be executed on a whim, or sent to the camps at any moment.
The news had punctuated the not-knowing with a glimmer of hope, but the clouds of doubt and grief soon obscured it once again.
Like so many others, I clung on to the thinnest of hopes as the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months.
I asked every French agent I met to listen out for any word of a British pilot with dark hair and blue eyes.
They promised me they would, and I prayed that someday one of the coded messages trickling back to us through the ether might contain the news I’d been waiting for. But that message never came.
We became aware that something big was coming as spring turned to summer.
The ground crews at the airfield were kept busy painting distinctive white stripes on to the wings and fuselages of Spitfires and Typhoons, as squadron after squadron passed through.
They were called invasion stripes, designed to make Allied aircraft stand out during D-Day in the chaos of the onslaught from the air that would support the landings in Normandy.