Philly
All four of us walk up the lane and along the road to the cemetery.
It’s my last day – again! – and a silent veil of sea mist has crept over the island in the night, adding to the feeling that this is an ending, a first suggestion of autumn as summer draws to a close.
It’s a little like being up in a plane again, I think, passing through the clouds before you break through the top into the sunlight above.
The donkeys munch on fallen apples as we pass by, lifting their heads briefly before returning to their feast, and the fence around the orchard is festooned with spiders’ webs, their gossamer filaments rendered visible by the hundreds of diamond droplets that the mist has strung along their lengths.
By the time we reach the graveyard gate, the sun has started to burn through, beginning to dissolve the blanket of white.
Finn pushes open the door in the wall and we file in.
We take our time, slowly walking the length of the cemetery to the far corner where the propeller blades mark the section of war graves.
The remnants of the mist add to the muffled silence contained within the walls, broken only by the quiet crunch of the gravel underfoot.
We have the place to ourselves, apart from the old boy with the rake who seems to spend most of his days there.
Perhaps, like me, he’s reached the age where he feels he has more in common with the dead than the living.
My pot of white heather is still here, just as I left it, slightly sunk into the gravel in front of the headstone for the unknown airman.
I stoop to touch the surface of the soil with my fingertips and am surprised to find it well moistened.
Perhaps the night mist has soaked it. Dan and Kendra step to one side, giving me space, reading the memorial plaques to the commando canoeists and those lost in the sinking of the RMS Lancastria .
And, as usual, Finn wanders off, paper and pencil in hand, in search of more names to add to his collection.
I lean on my walking stick, lost in thoughts of Teddy (the flowers of the white heather bringing him to mind again), and wondering whether Ben ever felt the same sensation of the sun burning away the night’s mist, perhaps while he carved his name into the stones beside the citadel.
But then, all at once, the silence is disturbed by Finn’s call.
‘Philly! Come and look at this.’
He’s over in the other corner, next to one of the ornate family graves.
When I reach him, he points to a small stone alongside it, set low to the ground.
It’s chiselled with a single word: Inconnu .
But what’s odd about it is that someone has tucked a sprig of white heather into the ground in front of it.
A sprig that appears to have been plucked from my own war grave offering.
Finn bends down and picks it up, handing it to me. And as I take it from him, a clattering sound makes me look over towards the wall. The old man has dropped his rake. He’s simply standing there, watching us intently. Time seems to stand still, the mist-shrouded island holding its breath.
And then, slowly and very deliberately, the old man raises his hand and salutes.
His accent is thick and difficult to understand. Kendra’s French is better than mine, so she’s able to translate.
‘He’s asking whether we’re looking for someone. A man who was on the island in 1944.’
Up until that point in the conversation, it could have been anyone. But then he says, ‘A prisoner, who had been a British pilot.’ And so I know. I can hardly take in his words at first, but then a certainty creeps over me, as if the sun is burning away the mists of doubt as well.
Finn is positively fizzing with excitement. ‘We’ve found him, Philly! We’ve found Ben!’
‘Do you think it really could be him?’ asks Kendra.
I try to stay calm. From my time working as a War Detective, I’ve learned to proceed with caution.
It’s vital to examine every piece of evidence, to rule out all other possibilities before you can definitively confirm the identity of remains in an unknown grave.
But I must confess, I feel it more and more strongly as I stand there.
This is where Ben lies, where he’s been through all these years of searching.
I have to rein in that instinct though. Just because hope makes you long for something to be true doesn’t make it so.
I look from Kendra’s face to Finn’s, their eyes filled with the same sense of hope that is making my heart beat faster.
I recognise that feeling – I’ve seen it written on the faces of so many others down the years, all those other families longing for a conclusion to their own investigations.
I’ve also seen hopes dashed. Often, I’ve had to disappoint people with the news that it wasn’t their loved one who’d been found, or that we still didn’t have enough evidence and couldn’t conclusively say it was the one they were looking for.
Those were the worst verdicts I had to deliver – knowing I was sentencing families to more years without a conclusion to their grief, no end to the not-knowing.
So I remind myself again that we need to proceed with caution.
It takes an effort, but I pull myself together and begin to formulate the questions we need to ask, the further evidence we need to gather.
The old man introduces himself as Philippe Bertaud – presumably a descendent of the many Bertauds whose names are inscribed on the graves that surround us in the little cemetery.
When I tell him my name, he takes both my hands in his.
He must be about my age, I think, and his face is deeply lined, weathered by a lifetime in the sun and the wind.
His eyes are kind as he looks into mine.
‘Madame Delaney,’ he says. The words on his lips make my heart rate quicken again as I wonder whether mine is a name he’s heard before.
‘I have been waiting for you for many years. Come to my home and I will explain everything.’
We go there straight away, the five of us.
Finn can hardly contain himself. He keeps running on ahead and then coming back to walk with us, impatient at the slowness of our pace.
We turn in just before the orchard with the donkeys.
They raise their broad heads to look at us again with their big, lustrous eyes, surprised at the return of this unexpected gaggle of people.
Monsieur Bertaud ushers us in through the door of his cottage and motions to us to take a seat at the table in his kitchen. Its surface is covered in a piece of oilcloth, old but well-scrubbed. He pulls up a chair for himself and then looks across directly at me.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘What can you tell me about my husband?’
He rests his hands on the ancient oilcloth. I notice how gnarled they are, leathery with years of exposure to sun and wind, the joints of each finger as lumpy as oak galls. And then he tells us his story, which Kendra translates for Finn’s benefit.
‘I met the man in 1944. He was one of the prisoners of war les Boches had brought to the island, to be held in the citadel.
At the time, I worked with my father in the salt pans, where he was the foreman.
Each day, we went to rake the crystals into piles and skim the finer fleur de sel from the surface of the ponds.
We loaded our baskets and put them on the back of the donkeys to bring them to the town.
We were forced to deliver it all to the Germans, who needed it for their armies, and they paid us a pittance. Those were hard times.
‘One day, two guards brought a contingent of about a dozen prisoners to the marshes. These men were to be made to work there as a punishment. The guards told us the men would help rake the salt and load the baskets, just as we did, but then they would be made to carry their full baskets on their backs, walking the miles back to Saint-Martin alongside the donkeys, used like beasts of burden. My father and I felt sorry for those poor wretches. They were malnourished, their ribs clearly visible through the tears in their shirts, stomachs distended with hunger. They were covered in sores and scratches, too, and the biting flies and mosquitoes soon added to those open wounds. The work was hard enough, without the added obligation to carry those heavy loads for miles at the end of a long day.’ He pauses and shakes his head, remembering.
‘The guards were vigilant at first, overseeing every move the men made. But as the weeks wore on, they grew bored of having to stand there among the marsh flies in the wind and the heat. So they would sometimes leave my father in charge and go off to the shade and shelter of a nearby blockhouse to smoke their cigarettes and play cards. Those times gave us the chance to speak to the men, to try to find out where they were from and how they’d ended up on the ?le de Ré.
We’d give them what food we could spare.
Usually, it was no more than a crust of stale bread or a pear from the orchard, but they devoured those scraps as if they were a great feast.’
He raises his head and looks at me directly, his dark eyes as kindly as those of his donkeys.
‘I remember your husband well, Madame. His head was shaven, as was the case with all the convicts, but I could see his hair must have been dark. And his eyes were clear and blue, comme le ciel . The colour of the sky above our heads and the sea out beyond the dunes.’
Finn can’t contain his excitement at this point. ‘You see, Philly,’ he interjects. ‘It was definitely him!’
I smile and nod at him. ‘So far, so good,’ I say, still forcing myself to stay calm, to try to think clearly and objectively. ‘It still doesn’t prove it’s Ben in that grave though.’ Then I gesture to Philippe to continue.