Madame Barbara

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‘Oh, Mam!’ she wailed in protest.

‘It won’t hurt you, luv. It’ll take you out in the fresh air,’ replied Phyllis firmly. The girl must help if they were to make a success of the place.

Not too sure where to start, Barbara weeded the cracked asphalt path between the gate and the front door. This attracted an elderly man pottering in the front garden of one of the houses across the road. He wandered across and admired her efforts to tidy up.

‘It’s a proper mess, miss, isn’t it?’

She agreed mournfully that it was, and that she had no idea how to make it look nice.

He suggested she use a sickle to cut down the very long grass, and offered to lend her one. He brought it to her and showed her how to use it.

Much to Phyllis’s amusement, he became her daughter’s friend and mentor. She worked under his instruction much more cheerfully than if her mother had told her what to do, and it was he who suggested that she attend the upcoming church fête, where people would offer for sale, quite cheaply, surplus plants from their gardens.

Armed with a shilling, she bought peonies from a middle-aged lady, who said she was Mrs Ada Bishop and that she lived over by the Ring o’ Bells, a pretty pub on the other side of the village. So she became acquainted with George’s mother long before she met her son. Mrs Bishop was a keen gardener, and suggested some pansies and lilies of the valley.

Barbara and Phyllis had had no garden when they lived in a terraced house in Liverpool, so this world of gardening enthusiasts was quite new to the young girl.

‘That place was beginning to be an eyesore,’ Ada confided to Barbara, as she filled an old seeding box with plants at a ridiculously low price. ‘I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing the garden for your mam. You’ll find you’ll love doing it after a bit. Just wait till them peonies come out. Now, all you have to do is make a little hole, put some water in it and cover the plants’ roots. Pat ’em down gently – and don’t forget to leave plenty of room for the peonies; they’ll grow really big.’

As Barbara told George, years later, ‘I never realised what would come out of it, I never did. She made me interested in flowers, and now I love the garden. I didn’t even know she had a son, ’cos you was away so early to get to work, and you was in Chester for ages. It was real funny when I met you at the Red Cross dance and found I knew your mam.’

Since the end of the war, Barbara had done her best to rebuild the garden. Again, it was Ada who brought her plants to set it up, Ada who had her own grief to contend with. She never said much, but she had tried to help Barbara, and, in return, Barbara hoped she was a bit of a comfort to her mother-in-law.

A week after they had moved out to the new house, Phyllis’s husband, Hugh Williams, had been informed of his change of address. In a letter posted from Sydney, he had approved Phyllis and Barbara’s idea of living by the sea. The front garden was looking quite decent by the time he returned from a six months’ voyage round the ports of Australia.

He nearly had a fit. He found he had a house far better than anything he could ever have hoped to live in, where strange men, whom he regarded with deep suspicion, came and went like some weird, briefcased merry-go-round. And his wife owed nearly thirty pounds to the Times Furnishing Company – just for single beds!

‘How did you get credit?’ he asked disbelievingly. ‘You’re only a woman.’

‘Charm,’ she replied, neglecting to tell him that her own father had chanced his savings and had co-signed with her for the purchase.

His little daughter, who suddenly seemed to have become a young woman, had produced a penny notebook, in which she had kept an account, something she said she had learned how to do in night school.

‘See, Dad. It’s not paying much yet, because we’re still buying stuff for it and paying the Times, but it’s broken even for the last three months.’ She grinned at him happily. ‘The word’s going round about it. And whoopee! You know, we can now charge ten shillings and sixpence a night for the high-class chaps from the big firms!’

Hugh expostulated, raged, to no avail, said his prayers and went back to sea. He did, however, give them one good idea: he suggested that, to increase their income, they rent part of the land round the house to a farmer, either for grazing or haymaking – which they did.

Either because of his prayers or the unremitted hard work and business acumen of the two women, the enterprise began to pay off.

None of them gave credit to Phyllis’s grocer father for the coaching he gave them. He made numerous helpful suggestions to limit theft, produce meals quickly, buy wholesale.

‘Grandpa talks ’is head off,’ Barbara remarked to her mother; nevertheless, she was learning from him without realising it.

She found herself with more pocket money than many of her own age in the village; it wasn’t a wage, but it was generous spending money.

Grandpa counselled saving. ‘No matter what you earn, put ten per cent by, luv. When you want somethin’ big, you’ll have the money.’

Barbara wanted a bicycle, but Phyllis said it was an unnecessary expense; she must save up and buy it herself. Barbara wept in frustration. But she learned and eventually Grandpa gave her a whole ten shillings for her birthday to make up the sum required.

He had long been dead before Barbara realised how wise he had been – and how kind.

In the depression of the 1930s, young people were having real problems finding work, and when she saw the pittances which her girl friends in the village earned, and how they envied her, Barbara had enough sense to take a serious interest in a business which could, in time, be hers.

And, who knows, she thought as she dealt daily with very decent men, one day I might marry one of them.

As she lay, unable to sleep, on a decidedly old bed in a foreign country, Barbara remembered her parents, all her mother’s hard work, and the happy days before the war. And now, all that work – her whole life, indeed – seemed to her to have come to naught.

Their clientele had been, on the whole, so pleasant. But then the war had come. Though it had not been bombed directly, her home had been in the path of German bombers on their way to Liverpool; a pile of earth like an outsized mole hill, at the back of the house, still bore witness to the explosion of a bomb jettisoned by a frightened pilot. Their home had, however, been very nearly destroyed by misuse.

The sales representatives had vanished into the Forces. The evacuees and their mothers billeted on them had been a disastrous intrusion.

After the evacuees decided to return to Liverpool, as yet unbombed, Barbara and Phyllis had recovered from the worst of that invasion; but, even, subsequently, as a refuge for the elderly from the bombing of London and the South of England, they had been unable to keep the house up. Civilians had to make do with what they had for the duration: no paint, no new bed linen or china dishes, no plumbing repairs, no flower garden – just a vegetable patch. And never enough coal for heating.

When peace came, practically everything they owned was worn out. There was not an unpatched sheet in the house, not a curtain left other than blackout ones.

The problems of repair and renovation, even now in 1948, seemed almost insurmountable, though damage to their property had been almost nothing in comparison with the havoc wreaked on Liverpool and its environs, or the almost total destruction of parts of Normandy. It had, however, the same overwhelming look of shabbiness and neglect which most of England had. And the faces of the people in the village shared with their French counterparts the same look of intense fatigue and of bad health.

Barbara spared a compassionate thought for the French people round her. Betrayed by their Governments, despised for their surrender to the Germans, their young men still being killed in the war in French Indo-China, and in Algeria, living in a province which was a heap of ruins, how must they feel each time they were called cowardly? Ready to collapse?

As she finally got up to wash and dress in preparation for going with Michel to Caen, she wondered if, in similar circumstances, without the Channel to protect them, the British would have done any better than the French had.

Chapter Nine (#ulink_22d760cc-7fec-5fd7-841d-2cb3025c3d90)

Michel found Barbara sitting waiting for him in the foyer of the hotel. She wore a pink woollen dress with the same jacket that she had worn the day before. Despite makeup, carefully applied, her eyes were black-rimmed from lack of sleep; her tears and ruminations of the night had not been conducive to sleep.

She was not particularly looking forward to the promised expedition; she had been stupid to have even mentioned Caen to the driver. She told herself crossly that she was bound to feel even more depressed after looking at such a place. Still less, however, did she wish to spend the day by herself, wandering round Bayeux. And George’s mam had said, when kissing her goodbye, that she wanted all the information that Barbara could collect about what had happened to her son.

She felt numb, unable to think clearly. It was as if she were floating in space, afraid to put a foot down on the earth, lest she be roused and burst into tears again, in mourning not only for all that she personally had lost, but also for a sad, sad world.

As on the day before, she was hatless. Hats were another small thing that had vanished during the war – unless one was in the Services, where a hat was still part of a uniform. Her hair was elaborately swept up on either side of her face, to become curls on the top of her head. Similar curls were, as usual with her, confined at the nape of her neck by a precious tortoiseshell hair slide. This style tended to make her look taller than she was.

As Michel walked into the foyer, he noted her makeup, and found himself wondering exactly where she had obtained such powder and paint.

The paint reminded him how foolish he was to get involved with a foreign woman who had access to such luxuries as makeup. What chance had a poor French peasant against the irritatingly rich American soldiers still scattered around Europe – particularly the three who were staying in the same hotel? Then he pulled himself up. ‘I’m not in competition with anybody,’ he told himself firmly; ‘I’m simply taking a woman, for whom I feel sorry, to Caen because her husband died there.’

In spite of her swollen eyelids and the shabbiness of her dress, however, she looked to him as exotic and interesting as if she had come from some faraway oriental country, instead of from just across the English Channel. It seemed to him a pity that all he could offer her was a taxi ride – no nylons, no chocolates, no makeup, no handsome uniform by her side.

When he had told his mother and Anatole that he would be busy this Saturday, neither of them had queried it. If Barbara was seen in his taxi, it would be assumed that he was carrying yet another war widow to yet another grave. The most important point, he felt, was that old Duval should not notice a lady in his taxi on a day when the Americans were out of town, and, therefore, not easily available to say that he had their permission to help war widows.

The old taxi had only one seat in front, for the driver. At his side was a platform on which heavy luggage could be carried. Today, of course, it was empty. Barbara managed to smile quite cheerfully at him as he opened the door for her and saw her comfortably ensconced in the back seat.

He drove her along a main road which, he said, was newly repaired. There was not much traffic, and, occasionally, he would slow down to show her damage done to villages and farms in the great battle. It amazed her that the famous, huge bocages, dense thickets of bushes and young trees, had, in many places, withstood the onslaught of tanks, artillery and bombing, whereas walls and stone cottages had been pushed down and crushed.

They passed a quaint, moated farmhouse. With pride, he told her that it had, occasionally, been a meeting place for the Partisans.

He laughed, and then went on, ‘The owner pull up the drawbridge – difficult for the Boches to get in without noise.’

From that house, he told her he had, one night, taken a downed British airman and hidden him in one of his chicken coops. He laughed again, as he added, ‘How he complain of the smell! He nice guy. Very grateful to us. His papa big guy in England. I learn much English from him. I write to him sometimes – old friend now.’

He eased the taxi a little to the side, to allow a van to pass him. He waved to the driver.

‘Another old friend,’ he told his passenger. ‘He teach me to drive. He is engineer electrical – very clever fellow.’ Then he went on with his story, ‘Later, we keep the airman in the roof of our cottage for six weeks until my father take him to Port-en-Bessin.’

‘What happened when he arrived there?’ Barbara asked.

‘Uncle Léon put him in his boat – he is Master of a tramp coastal, you understand. Les Boches watch the fishing fleet very closely – difficult to do anything but fish. It is difficult to put someone on a fishing boat. Tramps not quite so much – Uncle Léon have regular route to Cherbourg and often carry cargo for the Germans. None of his cargo ever lost or stolen. He is very careful – so they trust him a little. However, he wait for the dark of the moon. Airman dress like me and use my seaman’s book, looks like crew. In Cherbourg, he land like the rest of crew going ashore. There he go to safe house. From there the British have system to get him to Britain.’

‘Did the British really work from Cherbourg?’

‘They come and go in Normandy, sometimes, je crois, by air – parachute. Spies. Information. Guns for the civilian Partisans and for the maquis. Regular service!’ His laugh was grim this time.

‘Who were the maquis?’

‘Many of them were very brave soldiers of our Army, Madame. They fight on throughout the war – civilians feed them; Germans kill many.’

‘Humph. I never heard about them.’ She reverted to his story of the airman. ‘It must have been very dangerous for your uncle – and for you, if it was your seaman’s book which he carried?’

‘Certain. Big, big danger that someone betray us. Germans have spies, French ones.’

She felt it would be indiscreet to comment on his being betrayed by his own people. She had read in British newspapers of the deadly revenge taken on such people, the minute the war was over – and even during the war, where the opportunity arose. ‘I was told the Partisans were in touch with Britain,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘When Germans first come to Normandy, they demand we give them our radios.’ He half turned and grinned at her. ‘Some families have more than one radio. We say we are very poor, say we have no radio. We keep ours. Lots of hiding places for small radio on a chicken farm. We have electric – keep chicks warm. We plug in the radio.

‘We listen to the BBC and tell news to our friends. Some Partisans very clever – build good radios themselves. Sometimes, Germans jam British broadcasts.’ He was silent as he negotiated a woman pushing an ancient wheelbarrow full of logs down the road. Then he said very soberly, ‘Sometimes the radio of the Freedom Fighter is traced – not all Germans are fools. Then the SS come – and always some are taken and tortured to say who help them. This cause – how you say? – a run of arrests and executions by the cursed SS. We not always know names of men helping us – difficult for Germans to squeeze names out of us. We are all very afraid – nearly all the time.’

Barbara shuddered. Hitler’s SS had been dreaded throughout Europe. The very thought of their ever getting into England had, on more than one occasion, made her flesh crawl.

The taxi was entering Caen, and she was immediately staggered by the vast amount of damage. Like the cemetery, it was overwhelming.

The road on which they were travelling was clear, but their route was lined on either side by huge piles of rubble, or what had once been basements, now filled with rainwater. In one great pile of debris, three young boys were dodging, slipping and sliding amid the wreckage, shouting ‘Bang-bang’ at each other as if they were fighting an imaginary battle.

Barbara saw here again a picture she had already seen in Liverpool – a duck swam placidly across one of the pools of water, and, from hollows between the broken stones and concrete, long sprays of pink willow, yellow ragwort and coarse grass waved in the breeze.

At the side of one of the roads there was a series of little stalls. One, she could see, was selling children’s clothing, another small trinkets, whether new or second-hand she could not judge. Two women pedestrians had stopped to examine the goods, and were being attended to by a woman in a black blouse and long black skirt. Other than this little group and the boys playing, the place looked deserted.

Michel turned the taxi into a side road and went up a slight slope, towards a series of buildings, either churches or monasteries, which appeared to have survived with little or no damage. For a moment, it was as if they had left the war behind them. However, the same uncanny stillness, the sense of lack of human occupation, pervaded the area as it had the ruins. Barbara wondered if these ancient monuments had been abandoned.