A Possible Life Page 4

  All of them, even the youths now living outside the law, were content to wait for some unspecified moment, some glorious day of action, and Geoffrey was frustrated by the delay. At one point he was tempted to rejoin the Musketeers, who had at least seen action in North Africa. In France, nothing happened. The British Secret Intelligence Service, covertly competitive with Geoffrey’s organisation, was keen to build ever-larger networks of people who, so far as Geoffrey could see, then sat around and drank coffee with one another in risky public places.

  So when in May he met a dark-haired twenty-five-year-old called Giselle (not her real name any more than his was Pierre Lambert) he was enchanted by the fire of her impatience. She had worked as a courier for the Barrister circuit where she had encountered a fellow agent she described to Geoffrey. He had made an impression on her, this rosbif. He was very large – she gestured with her hands – and insisted on doing everything according to the ‘book’ (though could not say which book, or who had written it); he exercised vigorously each morning, was baffled by the lack of golf courses in the Landes and spoke French with a deplorable accent.

  ‘Mon dieu,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Je le connais. C’est “Tiny”.’

  ‘Comment?’

  ‘“Minuscule”. Il s’appelle “Minuscule”. Tiny.’

  Giselle looked doubtful, but Geoffrey explained that in English the alliteration with his surname gave it a certain lilt. They moved on quickly to discuss a plan Giselle was developing. A goods train left from the yards of Montauban early on a Wednesday morning to carry supplies up to the Massif Central. Its terminus was no less a place than Vichy itself, where the French puppet government strutted among the parks and boulevards of the old spa town.

  With humour lighting up her dark eyes, Giselle outlined the plan for Geoffrey, herself and two good men she had recruited to their circuit, to dynamite the track and send a symbolic message to the people of France that the Resistance would no longer tolerate the flower of French agricultural produce being transported to the Hôtel du Parc and other troughs of official collaboration. Giselle was the woman Geoffrey had longed to meet – in almost every way. As over the succeeding weeks they sat long into the night, poring over railway maps, he grew light-headed on the spirit of her ingenuity and her sense of the absurd. In a moment of exhilaration, when she briefly drew breath from plotting, he kissed her full and silent lips and found himself enthusiastically kissed back. They regained their seriousness, agreed what they had done was ‘pas professionel’, but did not rule out doing it again, perhaps after they had derailed the train.

  They chose a section of track that was far from any town or village, in the hope that this would make it harder for the Germans to organise reprisals, and travelled there by bicycle two days before the planned attack. A resourceful schoolboy called Hugues found a way through the hedgerows and ditches, then led them through a damp culvert to an embankment. They slithered down to the track, where Geoffrey quietly insisted that his training, still remembered from his week at the country house near Brockenhurst, meant that he alone must supervise the laying of the charges, though at Giselle’s insistence he allowed her also to clamp some of the plastic explosive against the rails. He told her that a lonely courier with the Dentist circuit had once been so hungry that he had eaten some of the explosive and had pronounced it quite satisfying, like a mild Swiss cheese. Giselle, her eyes alight with competitive fire, told him her father had drunk half a litre of engine oil and vowed that even after the war he would never go back to the thin olive variety.

  They climbed back up the embankment, trailing fuse wire, and settled down to wait. The train went up with a satisfying explosion, though they were distressed that it seemed to contain some live animals as well as their products in the form of ham and cheese. If there were any armed guards or German soldiers, they seemed to have died in the blast, and the saboteurs were able to help themselves to some edible souvenirs; the driver of the train, who was unharmed, was a resistance sympathiser who congratulated them on their work and pointed them to the wagons with the best food. They were long clear of the area before the lights of armoured vehicles and motorcycles came across the fields.

  When he next returned to France after a spell in London, Geoffrey was put in charge of a circuit in the Lot called ‘Haberdasher’, living in a deserted barn with a view of the river Dordogne in the valley. With a supply of walnuts and fruit in the orchards and with cheese from the sheep on the hill it was sometimes difficult to remind himself that he had work to do. When the weather began to turn cold, however, he told his wireless operator and courier that he had important business near Mont-de-Marsan and set off to find what he could of the Barrister circuit. It did not take many enquiries to unearth a large man passing himself off as a Belgian handyman.

  ‘Why on earth are you Belgian?’ he said.

  ‘To account for my accent, I think,’ said Trembath. ‘It means everyone looks down their nose at me. It’s quite convenient.’

  Trembath had a room over a café in a small town; he took a bottle of thin wine from a cupboard and filled two glasses.

  ‘I’m bored,’ said Trembath. ‘Nothing ever happens. We just wait and wait. It’s lonely. I sometimes see the wireless chap, but he lives miles away in a deserted manor house. He spends all day playing the piano in an empty drawing room.’

  ‘Come and spend some time with Haberdasher,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We’re planning great things. We expect the Allies to invade France from the south in the spring and we’re looking at how we can stop German reinforcements getting down to the coast.’

  Trembath pushed his big hand back through his hair; a smile spread across his placid features. ‘All right, Talbot. I’m game.’

  ‘We’ll have to travel separately. I can’t afford to be seen with a Belgian handyman. You know the name of the village? I’ll see you at the crossroads at midnight the day after tomorrow. Have you got money? I’ve got plenty from London.’

  Two nights later at the barn, they lit a small fire and sat either side of it eating bread with ewe’s cheese and drinking red wine Geoffrey had bought from a man in Gramat. There was a message from Hugues, the keen schoolboy, telling him that Giselle wanted to see him urgently at a location between Brive and Ussel.

  ‘Giselle!’ said Geoffrey. ‘What a firebrand.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Better than your solitary pianist. This is the war you wanted. This is resistance with a capital “R”.’

  The next day they set off by bicycle, Trembath following an hour behind. Their rendezvous was a remote farmhouse chosen by Giselle as the headquarters for her next operation, at the end of a long narrow track with a commanding view of the countryside.

  It was evening as Geoffrey approached, standing on the pedals as the bicycle juddered over the potholes. He was invigorated.

  He felt that his life was about to take a decisive turn. Why should it be here of all places, he wondered – this old farm that had seen the generations come and go and would see him in the grave as well? But then again, why not? What are places for – but to keep watch silently?

  Dismounting, he wheeled his bicycle across the farmyard with its stinking midden. A chained dog barked as he approached the door. No one answered his knock, so he let himself in and walked down a gloomy passageway; he heard what sounded like a horse, or perhaps a cow, shifting on its hooves in a side room. Eventually the passage opened into a parlour where a log fire was burning. There were lit candles in wrought-iron sconces on the walls.

  ‘Giselle?’

  There was a scuffling sound from an old couch in front of the fire, and Giselle was suddenly standing in front of him. He had only ever seen her in her trousers or overalls, but she was wearing a dress with stockings and there was a ribbon in her hair.

  She crossed the room and embraced Geoffrey, squeezing him to her. ‘Ah bonsoir, mon brave, mon anglais. Que je suis heureuse de te revoir!’

  ‘Moi aussi.’

  ‘J’ai préparé un
dîner un petit peu spécial.’

  ‘Il y a un autre qui arrive dans quelques instants. Un ami. “Minuscule”.’

  A commotion in the yard told them Trembath had found his way, and shortly afterwards he was sitting with them at the rough table drinking a local spirit made from apples while Giselle sliced a dry saucisson. She had prepared a slow-cooked dish of beef in wine and there were fried potatoes to go with it. After dinner, she began to describe her next plan. Pushing the plates to one side, she laid out a map on the table and pointed to where the German tank divisions were likely to be sent. She then outlined the best places on the main roads to attack them, though this would involve more than booby traps, she said; this would entail the full manpower of all the young Frenchmen who had fled to the hills to avoid working in Germany. They needed more weapons. She looked enquiringly at Geoffrey, who nodded his agreement and told her he would see what he could do.

  While he was quietly thrilled by Giselle’s plan, he was a little worried by her manner. She was as fiery as ever, as contemptuous of the Germans and careless of her own safety, but there was something detached about the way she spoke – as though in her heart she did not expect to see the events she was describing.

  He looked across at Trembath in the candlelight. He was studying the map while clearly struggling to understand all that Giselle was saying. It was strange, but Trembath seemed not to respond to her as a woman, Geoffrey thought; his attention was fixed only on the briefing.

  For a moment, his own attention wandered as he took in the details of the parlour, the row of copper pans above the range, the stone sink, the home-made wooden shelves with pots and jars. What must it be like in peacetime, and who really lived here? How strange was the dislocation of war, like a ghost universe. Then he looked at Giselle’s slim, earnest figure as she leaned across the map, the light catching the red ribbon in her hair.

  She smiled and said in English: ‘So you are prepared to fight?’

  ‘We are,’ said Trembath.

  A door that led further into the house swung open quietly. Two German soldiers stood with rifles raised, pointing them at the Englishmen, one at each.

  Giselle sat down heavily and lowered her face into her hands.

  ‘Je suis désolée,’ she said. ‘J’étais prise. Le mois de juillet. Ils m’ont torturée.’

  Geoffrey could not speak. He wanted to translate for Trembath in case he hadn’t understood, but the outcome of it all was clear enough.

  The two of them stood with their hands above their heads and were pushed at gunpoint down a passageway towards the middle of the house. Though he could hear Giselle sobbing, Geoffrey did not look back.

  For a day they were held in a police cell in the local town; then, with other undesirables, they were put on a transport to Bavaria, where they spent a week in a makeshift prisoner-of-war camp. The conditions were tolerable, they agreed, and Geoffrey persuaded Trembath to do nothing rash in his desire to escape. Then one night the pair of them were taken out of the camp in a lorry and driven to the local railway station, where they were put into a cattle truck. There were about thirty others in the wagon, most of them Russians. The train moved slowly eastwards, though no one knew where they were going. There was no water or food, though every few hours the doors were drawn back and they were allowed out to relieve themselves while armed guards looked on.

  It was about three in the morning when they were finally told to disembark. They were at a railhead with a long platform and what looked like a normal waiting room with flowers in wooden tubs outside. A German soldier pulled along by a dog on a chain told them to strip naked; he was not the lazy infantryman one might have expected to volunteer for prison guard, but, Geoffrey recognised from his enemy identification course in Brockenhurst, an SS officer. Other guards emerged from the darkness and shouted at them to hurry. Some of the men, exhausted and bewildered by the journey, were slow to remove their clothes, and Geoffrey saw one beaten with a rifle butt and another with a whip. The SS men drove them into a building at the end of the platform where they had their heads shaved by unspeaking men in striped uniforms. Still naked, they were told to dip their heads in a bucket of green liquid. Only the guards spoke, keeping up a continual hectoring: ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ Hurry, faster, quicker. It was not the usual fear of rank that made the Germans so frantic, Geoffrey thought; there was no hidden superior they were trying to impress. It was something else. He caught Trembath’s eye, but neither spoke.

  They gave their names and nationality to a clerk who sat by the door. Geoffrey hesitated for a moment before deciding on his own name rather than that of Pierre Lambert; it would help the Red Cross to trace him. In the next building they were given striped uniforms and wooden clogs of their own, then herded at gunpoint down a path and into a brick block with the letter D chiselled into the stone lintel. Inside were rows of wooden bunks from floor to ceiling, designed perhaps for one person but holding two, three or even four men. There was a drainage channel down the centre and an ablutions room at the far end. A prisoner who appeared to be in charge pushed them to the end of the block, shouting orders at them in Polish. They climbed into a wooden bunk near the door, Trembath’s bulk causing the man already in it to lie tight against the side. It was too dark to see this man’s face, though they were aware of him scratching himself through the cold, uncomfortable night. None of the others showed any interest in the new arrivals; they had clearly seen many people come and go.

  Geoffrey closed his eyes, his body against Trembath’s. They would find the British officer in charge the next day, no doubt, and make contact through him with the Red Cross; he would want to get word to his parents in Hampshire and arrange for some parcels.

  They awoke to shouted orders in Polish from a man who appeared to be a kind of dormitory prefect. Another Polish prisoner, this one more of a head boy, then inspected the block before ushering in two SS officers; it was a little like occupied France in the way the Germans had persuaded the vanquished to do the dirty work for them. Hundreds of shaven-headed men stood shivering beside their bunks; one or two appeared too ill to move and, on the orders of the SS, were pulled out by the others. Two were already dead and were dragged from the block by their hands. An older man who could no longer stand unaided fell to the ground by the drainage channel, where a German shot him through the head. Trembath leapt forward to remonstrate, but Geoffrey grabbed his arm.

  A cauldron of soup was brought in on a wheeled wagon to the end of the room and the men went forward in silence to receive their ration. With no plate or bowl, Geoffrey could take only the bread, though to judge by the emaciated state of the prisoners he was not missing much in the soup. There followed a roll call that took almost two hours, the men standing in rows while SS men counted them off in an alley between two of the brick blocks. Then they were marched towards the camp gate, and Geoffrey for the first time could see what kind of place he had come to.

  They were in marshy land with pine forests all round them; in the distance he could make out mountains, or their foothills. The camp itself had obviously been built for some other purpose before the war. The watchtowers were set into the perimeter fence at intervals of about a hundred yards and did not look particularly tall or robust; there was a second barrier of rolled barbed wire, while the main fence, to judge from the regularly spaced junction boxes, was electrified. Geoffrey walked next to Trembath through the gate of the camp and down a metalled road for about twenty minutes before the SS guards ordered them to stop at a building site. They were given shovels and told to start working; their job was to dig a drainage channel along the edge of the field.

  Geoffrey could understand nothing of what the other prisoners, who were either Russian or Polish, were saying to one another. He felt as though he had become lost in someone else’s war – some Transylvanian or Slavic nightmare that had nothing to do with Mr Green or the Musketeers. Who were all these East Europeans with their terrible histories, pine forests and slaughters? What had they to do
with democracy and the RAF?

  ‘These men look broken,’ Trembath said from the corner of his mouth, working next to Geoffrey, glancing at his starved fellow prisoners. ‘I think we need to set an example.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We need to know more before we start planning an escape, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘It’s our duty,’ said Trembath.

  Geoffrey stood up to stretch his back from an hour of digging and felt a sudden, excruciating pain in his side. An SS man with a whip stood behind him. The Pole to Geoffrey’s right made a downward gesture with his arm: stay bent over, don’t stand up. Along the line, Geoffrey saw an old Slav do what he had done – stand and stretch. An SS man drove a rifle butt into his face; when the man next to him went to help, they shot him through the knee. Another German officer, drawn by the sound, walked over to see what had happened. He took out his pistol and, to the amusement of his fellow guards, shot the man through the other knee as well. The prisoners bent down to the ditch and did not raise their heads.

  They worked for twelve hours digging with a half-hour break in the middle of the day, when a motor lorry brought water, a piece of bread and more soup. The site itself, perhaps twenty acres in extent, had many completed buildings, paths and roadways; it was surrounded by further wire through which Geoffrey could see what looked like bonfires in clearings among the trees, attended by further prisoners in striped uniform and overseen by SS men with guns and dogs. Columns of smoke with an unfamiliar smell emanated from the pyres.

  Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted, Geoffrey remembered from his course at Colchester. He would lie low and observe; and in planning his escape, there was no immediate hurry: the only sense of urgency seemed to come from the chance of malnutrition. It seemed that most of the prisoners in the camp were starving; they were being worked to death. He and Trembath needed to be on a train to the West to rejoin the war effort before they were reduced to the skeletal condition of the others.