Daughter of Catalonia (10 page)

Elise, her Catalan still weak, made herself understood with gestures and wrote down what she didn’t understand for Luis to translate later. Her second pregnancy was a little complicated, Philippe knew, but she refused to complain.

‘Look at the faces of the people who find their way here,’ she would say to him. ‘How weary, how physically beaten! We’re so lucky, Philippe, and the baby is fine.’

She smiled again and Philippe was lost. He could never
withstand that smile of hers, and the light in her sky-blue eyes. The apartment was peaceful this morning, and Elise was alone, except for Madeleine, who was washing a doll in a bucket in the corner of the kitchen.

‘At least there’s no one here this morning, for once. Where is that husband of yours?’ he said.

‘Away with Henri to the camp.’

‘You know there’s dysentery in the camp now?’

‘Yes, we heard. And with this cold spell people are dying – they’ve got no rations, and they’re just so weak. How can we do this to people, Philippe?’

‘We? You mean the authorities?’

‘No, I mean the French. We’re all doing it. If ordinary French people were all at the gates demanding entry, the camps would open up.’

‘I know. It’s all political appeasement on the government’s part, and the worst kind of fear here in the village. And now that the word is out that there’s disease in the camp, people will close their minds and their doors even more.’

‘Not ours, it seems.’ Elise smiled as the door of the apartment burst open and banged shut behind Luis, stalking in like a fury.

‘Miguel’s wife has fallen ill in the camp, and they won’t let me bring her out! They say she’s infectious and a danger to the community. Hah! I’ll give them danger to the community! Anyway, I got their two children out, by telling the guard their grandmother was waiting for them in Collioure, and tomorrow I’ll get the mother out as well. The guard Pierre’s on duty tomorrow, and he’ll help me.’

He flung himself onto the sofa by the kitchen, his legs dangling over the arm at one end, chafing his fingers together.

‘By God, it’s cold out there!’ He reached a hand out to Elise.

She took it and rubbed it between hers. ‘You need some soup. I know it’s not lunchtime yet but some soup would do you good. Or would you prefer coffee?’

‘Soup sounds wonderful, and it smells wonderful too. Philippe, my friend, how are you, and what have you been doing with my wife while my back was turned?’

‘Planning her escape from your desertion, of course.’

‘You can’t escape from someone who has already deserted you, idiot. It’s an oxymoron. And you a teacher! Come down and teach those guards something at the camp, will you? They’re the most ignorant bunch of gorillas you ever set eyes on.’

‘Tell me about Miguel’s family,’ Elise asked. ‘Where did you leave the children? Do they need us? Is their grandmother really here?’

‘Not the grandmother, but a cousin or something like who lives near Collioure. That’s what makes the situation so stupid. Amongst all the people in the camps, Miguel and his family have no need to be there. They have a place to stay if they can get out. It’s all because they suspect Miguel of having fought in the war. Well, what if he did? What’s he going to do here now? The French have gone mad with suspicion.’

Madeleine appeared at his knee, holding out a wet doll which dripped on his trousers. He lifted her onto his lap,
and helped her to dry the doll with a kitchen cloth.

‘We need practice at this, angel. When our baby comes out of Mummy’s tummy you’ll have to help us bath her too.’

‘It’s not a girl, it’s a boy,’ Madeleine declared. ‘Maman said he was kicking her this morning.’

‘Is that what boys do?’ Luis smiled into her eyes, stroking her hair back from her face.

Madeleine nodded vigorously. ‘Daniel kicked me once. But then I hit him with Julie.’ She waved her doll triumphantly.

‘Amazon!’ crowed her father, and kissed the top of her head.

‘Soup, my love? Come to the table. Philippe? You’re sure? But you’ll stay to lunch! I got fresh fish from the market today.’

Luis rose from the sofa, carrying Madeleine, and kissed Elise as he passed her.

‘Have we enough food for Philippe? He eats so much! Can we afford to feed him?’

Elise laughed. ‘Since for once we don’t seem to have anybody else, I think we can just about manage.’

‘You hear that, Madalena?
Tonton
Philippe is staying for lunch. In that case we definitely need to eat soup first for there won’t be much else for us!’

Listening to Philippe, Madeleine could almost see her parents in this room, and feel the heat of the little stove warming her father’s hands. She watched him closely and waited for him to continue. He seemed to drift in and out of his private reverie, and then would emerge to take up his tale.

‘The work became very serious for your parents,’ he continued. ‘They became part of an unofficial campaign group, and your mother learnt how to forge documents, identity papers to get people out of the camps, and they provided money, organised travel, and Luis wrote tracts and newspaper articles. When you came up the stairs to this apartment, if you didn’t hear Spanish voices, you would be sure to hear Luis’s typewriter rattling away.

‘It all meant that in 1940, when France fell to Germany, your parents were already politically involved. You will
hear a lot of rubbish about the war years, my dear, or maybe not, since nobody talks about it now if they can avoid it. But the truth was really quite simple. People were stunned and humiliated at the way France was just overrun by Germany. We’d all been led to believe our defences were impregnable. Well they weren’t, and our “war” with Germany only lasted a few weeks, and then we were completely defeated, and humiliated, and scared, and at the mercy of the Germans. Then Maréchal Pétain stepped in as our leader and promised us a new France, new dignity, independence under Germany.

‘Have you heard of Pétain? Yes, of course you have. Well, most people thought he was a saviour. No one knew what to do and he seemed to have the answers, and everyone assumed that Germany was going to defeat England in months as well, and just thanked their stars that our part of France had escaped occupation, thanks to Pétain. And of course all our news was censored and controlled. I must have heard a hundred people in this village saying well now at least the war was over, and this part of France was still free, and now we could start trying to rebuild France. All rubbish, of course, but no one had the heart, the faith or the information to believe anything else. That’s what that sense of utter defeat and despair does to you.

‘Only those who were already politicised had any notion of resisting. There wasn’t any organised resistance, of course, not in the beginning, but people like your father were in action in any way they could be. Luis and Elise just seemed to carry on the same activities,
with no change except that as well as helping Spaniards, they gradually began producing documents for people fleeing the Germans, trying to get over the border to Spain, where ironically they would be safe. Elise became a real expert.’

He paused. ‘Would you like to see some of their old tools?’

Madeleine had been lost in his story, and the sudden question startled her.

‘Tools for forging documents?’

‘Yes indeed. Look!’

He manoeuvred himself out from the table and pulled down a tin from the top shelf in the corner of the room. Dust covered the lid of the tin, and he sneezed, then blew the dust on to the floor. It was an old, faded biscuit tin, and he brought it over to Madeleine.

‘Take a look,’ he invited.

Madeleine stared at the box. Then she gently lifted off the lid, which was only lightly pushed down. Inside were four wooden ink stamps, two round and the others rectangular. She picked them up and handled them reverently, and saw they were official police stamps, two marked
Ville de Montpellier
and two marked
Ville de Marseille
.

‘Are these real?’ she asked in an awed voice.

‘Copies,’ replied Philippe. ‘But good ones. If you smudged the ink a little when making the stamp it would pass for the real thing. They used towns some distance from here because the local police would be less familiar with the style of documents they produced. They would
type letters authorising travel, and stamp them, and of course, most important were the identity cards. See, there are some cards below.’

Madeleine lifted out the stamps, and below were some blank cards with
Carte d’Identité
printed on the top, the identity cards which had never existed in France before 1940, but which the Germans had imposed. There were sections for writing in all the relevant personal information, such as height and hair colour, and, despite the obligatory photo, more detailed information like shape of nose and face.

‘These are real, I think,’ said Philippe. ‘I wasn’t party to what they were doing, but by 1942 the Resistance had a good system going for “acquiring” – stealing – what they needed. The cards needed to be genuine, because by then the controls were getting tighter and tighter. But the Resistance had cooperation by then. The people had learnt to hate the Vichy regime, and all that old love of Pétain was dead.’

Madeleine placed the tools of her mother’s resistance work carefully back in the box.

‘You found these still in the flat after the war? Nobody lived here meantime?’

‘As it happened, no. But the only reason they got left behind was because the stamps had changed, and these were old ones. There was a lot of other stuff, special inks and all sorts, but everything that could be important in creating more documents was passed on to another cell.’

Madeleine sat for a moment, visualising her mother sitting at this table, reproducing documents with
painstaking delicacy, perhaps while she was at school. Presumably she had gone to school? She asked Philippe.

‘Oh yes, you were in my school, one of my pupils! I taught you to read and write, although your mother had already taught you a great deal before you came, so you were the star of my class. You used to tell all the other children what you heard on Radio London. I used to come here to listen to the BBC broadcasts with your parents, because I didn’t have a radio set, and you were often allowed to stay up to listen as well. I used to wonder whether you should really be telling the other children what you heard, but Luis used to say most of the village was listening in secret anyway, so what did it matter. By then the tide had changed – people were mostly only paying lip service to the Vichy regime, and waiting, hoping for things to change. The proudest man in the village was an old fisherman whose son was fighting with the Free French under de Gaulle in North Africa. The boy was actually a merchant seaman who had landed up in Morocco, and no one was actually sure he was really fighting, but we’d got to the stage where people wanted to believe it, at least!

‘So there we were just surviving, but your father was coming increasingly under suspicion by the authorities. He protected himself by continuing to do work for the same newspaper he’d worked for before the war in Perpignan, which was now a Vichy mouthpiece. Then came the news in November 1942 that the Germans were moving in to take over from the Vichy government. They were scared by now of the possibility of an invasion from
North Africa, and wanted to secure this coast. We all knew things were going to get much tougher, and that’s when things really did get much tougher between your parents.’

‘I won’t go, Luis! I won’t go!’

‘Elise, my love, you know you have to! This village is going to be overrun by German militia, and our work is too well known. And you’re English!’

‘Half English!’

‘Semantics! Everyone here knows you were brought up in England. It’s bad enough being Spanish, but there are so many of us here now that I can probably pass. But you – you would be arrested straight away. We have to think of the children, Elise. If we get you over the border then you can go to the British Embassy in Barcelona. God knows, we’ve helped enough other people to do it! And they’ll get you home.’

‘And you? What are you going to do?’

‘Well I can’t go into Spain, that’s for sure!’ Luis’s smile was grim. ‘I’ll stay here, and keep on working. Enric or one of the others will find me a safe house, I know.’

‘Luis, no! You never fought Franco! I know you’ve felt you can’t go back into Spain, but they’re not actually looking for you. Your battles in Spain happened so long ago, two years before the Civil War even started. Why should they be looking for you now? Surely you could come with us to Barcelona!’

‘No, Elise. It’s the same people running Catalonia now who were running it in 1935. Then they had been elected,
and we could get rid of them the same way, but now Franco has given them all positions of power, and they’ve been told to keep us damned Catalonians under control. I can’t run the risk of going into Barcelona. There are too many of them who would recognise me, and my name is on file.’ He paused, and reached out to touch Elise’s cheek.

‘And,
carinyo,
I think you know that even if I could get away with it, I can’t leave with you. God knows I love you, and I don’t know how I’m going to manage without you, but I already ran away from one fight. I can’t run away from this one.’

Elise gazed at him in despair. It was because of her and the children that he had never joined the Republican army in the fight against Franco. She had kept him away from the cause closest to his heart. There was no way she could take him away from France now, and nor could she stay, not with the children. The logic was inescapable and more grievous than she could bear.

She nodded mutely and held his hand close against her cheek. Tears drenched it, and Luis pulled her into his arms, drying her tears with his lips.

‘It won’t be for long, Elise. The tide has turned in this war, and the only reason the Germans are moving in here is because they’re sure the Allies are going to invade. It’ll come soon, from one direction or another. And my love, as soon as that happens I will come for you.’

Day after day the plans were made, and Elise kept her fears hidden – fear for Luis, fear of the separation, and the horror of returning to her parents’ home in England. The
time stretched before her as an endless ordeal, and she felt she could have endured all the dangers of Luis’s future life far more easily.

As for Luis, he went about forming his plans for them with a determined positiveness which would almost have fooled her, had she not occasionally caught him looking at her off guard, when she recognised her bleakness reflected. That look made Elise even more determined to hide her fears. And so together they smiled and made their plans quietly, in secret from the world.

They would have to walk across the mountains. The sea route was now impossible – the fishing boats were watched and the beaches guarded, and no one had dared use the boats for escapees for some time. But how to take two small children on a walk of many kilometres across a rough mountain pass in the cold of a November night? The pass being suggested was over fifteen kilometres long, and involved a climb of nearly a thousand metres. And to get to it there were a further fifteen kilometres of heavily patrolled country lanes to be covered. To avoid risk of discovery, most escape parties went on foot to the pass, across the fields. To take a car along the border roads at night was to court arrest. Elise kept a smile on her face because she had to, but was secretly aghast.

‘Are we really going to try to cover thirty kilometres with the children?’

‘No, don’t worry. Enric says there are evenings when the militia are less likely to be out on patrol – he can watch and tell us. We’ll go as far as the pass by car, without lights. We’ll be OK. We have the benefit of inside knowledge, you see.’

‘But there’s still the pass to walk. Can we really do it with the children, Luis?’

‘We’ll be fine, don’t you worry. It’s already been done by other groups with children, and Enric has taken two families over before. He wants to help me carry the children – at least Robert – in a kind of makeshift backpack, and if he does so I can carry Madeleine for a good bit of the way. She’ll have to walk some, but my Amazon will cope with that.’

‘I just hope she’ll cope with my parents as easily! Can you imagine my father’s reaction when I turn up unannounced with two brown Catalan children with a war history to make their hair stand on end? It’s almost worth going just to see his face!’

Luis grinned and kissed her. ‘Attagirl! See it as a mission to enlighten the natives.’

‘Yes, but let’s hope it doesn’t last too long, this war, or I may be murdered before I can make it back here.’

‘Tell them you have a dangerous resistance worker for a husband, and I’ll be coming to get them after the war! Tell me, dear wife, how does it happen that we have no children in this apartment this afternoon?’

‘Serge told Philippe he has some apples, goodness knows where from, and so Philippe decided to take the children to buy some. He says this fine weather we are having can’t last – well we know it can’t, we’re nearly in November – so he wanted to treat them both before we leave. Oh God, Luis, we’re really going to leave aren’t we?’

She reached for him, and he breathed into her neck.

‘My love, you may leave, but we will always be together. It doesn’t matter where we are.’

His voice deepened. ‘How long will Philippe be gone?’

‘He said he would take the children down to the shore afterwards. They won’t come back for a while.’ She gave him a smile of pure seduction.

‘Show me how you will miss me, Luis.’

Philippe looked at Madeleine. ‘Do you remember leaving? You probably know more about your journey than me. Luis went with you into Spain, and then left you, and we heard you got to the British Consulate in Barcelona, and from there to Gibraltar and then to England by boat.’

Visions came to Madeleine of a frightened six-year-old walking in the dark, wet and cold in the November rain, her parents and another man by her side. She remembered being squashed in the back of a cart, then a train, and what must have been a hotel room, and being even more frightened because she didn’t understand anyone around her, or know where she was. She remembered her mother explaining to her that they were going on a boat, and that they were going to England, which she had heard of, but didn’t want to go to. She had cried for her father, missing the man who had never been away from home, but she had no memory of her mother crying, only of her negotiating, arranging, discussing, always in the same quiet, patient voice, in English, French, bits of what must have been Spanish. The journey for her was a memory of confusion and fear and boredom, and always holding hard to her mother’s hand.