Perfectly Ordinary People(44)

Dad loaded all his tools in the back, piles and piles of them, and winched his old tractor engine on there as well – to give the Germans something to look through, he said – and then piled some more ropes and things on top of Pierre behind me, and then we drove out of town.

No one tried to stop you?

Oh, there were checkpoints. But it was early days still, and the checkpoint troops were still trying to be relatively polite. Dad was a mechanic in his garagist’s truck returning a tractor engine to La Vieille-Loye. The soldiers checked our papers and rifled through the tools in the back every time, and when they showed too much interest in the baby I pinched his thighs to make him cry, the poor thing, and told the Germans off for having woken him up. That always worked – they waved us on every time.

And they didn’t find Pierre?

No. I had lots of blankets on my lap beneath the baby, and they sort of merged into the one behind us that was covering Pierre. There was so little space behind me that I don’t think the Germans thought to look, and he was so slight . . .

You know, he slept during most of the journey. I remember – and this is quite funny – that as we pulled up at one of the checkpoints, I realised he was snoring and had to kick him and tell him to be quiet!

I suppose he was exhausted after his ordeal . . .

Exactly. Though he was more than exhausted. He was suffering from a sort of anaemia from all the blood he’d lost, but we didn’t know that yet.

Did you get emotional about not being able to say goodbye to your mothers?

I did. Pierre not so much. They didn’t get on so well, plus I think he was still in shock from what they’d done to him at the police station. He seemed a bit . . . I don’t know how to put it really . . . a bit robotic, I suppose you could say. It was like he’d gone into a sort of survival mode, and everything else was just switched off. But I did – I got really weepy during the drive and Dad kept having to reassure me that it was better this way, because Mum would only have got upset, and we were all going to see each other again soon anyway, weren’t we?

Did you still believe that?

Yes, I think I did. I couldn’t project anything specific in the future. I had no idea how things were going to pan out, but I didn’t imagine for an instant that was it, that I would never see them again.

Are you OK? Do you need a tissue?

Thanks, yes. I’m fine. Sorry. It’s just . . . it’s still hard. Even after all these years. The fact that I never got to say goodbye properly. I tried to ask Dad to tell Mum that I loved her, but I couldn’t even say the words to him. My throat kept closing up. But I remember he said it was OK because she knew. He squeezed my leg and said, ‘It’s OK, sweetheart, she knows. We both do. That’s one thing we got right in this family. We all know how much we love each other.’

It took all day to get to La Vieille-Loye. I hadn’t thought to even question how far it was, so I was shocked about that. Normally it would only have taken about three hours, but because we got stopped and questioned a few times, and because Dad took lots of detours down country lanes to avoid as many checkpoints as possible, it ended up taking us twice as long.

He drove without a map and I didn’t realise how strange it was that he knew exactly where to go until the afternoon when he turned off the road and started heading down a bumpy dirt track. That was when I realised that neither of us had told him the carpenter was in La Vieille-Loye. Neither of us had a specific address – we’d been too upset and too busy being scared to even think about the details of it all. So it was only then it dawned on me that something strange was going on. I asked him if he was sure it was down that particular track and how he knew and he replied that he’d ‘spoken to some people’ and that I didn’t think he’d put his only daughter in the care of some random person he knew nothing about, did I?

The track was long – perhaps three or four kilometres, and incredibly uneven – so the baby woke up and started crying and then, whenever we went over a really big bump, Pierre groaned as well. My father kept apologising about the bumps.

Eventually we came to a dilapidated stone farmhouse in a clearing, and Dad parked and told us to stay put. He specifically told Pierre to stay silent.

He was gone for ages, maybe half an hour. When he returned and started the engine without a word, I thought he’d decided against leaving us there for some reason – I thought something about the set-up had made him suspicious. But then he drove the pickup across the courtyard and into a huge wooden barn. There were big carpentry tools dotted around the place – you know, drills and saws and one of those big machines for turning table legs and stuff.

A lathe?

Yes, that’s it, a lathe. Once we were in, Dad climbed out and dragged the big wooden doors closed behind us.

We pulled Pierre from his niche and unwrapped him and then an old man, a very tall, wiry man with lots of grey hair, appeared through a side door. He was a gruff, rustic sort of person with a huge grey moustache and a very strong accent – but he turned out to be kind, and as soon as he saw Pierre, he offered to hide us until he’d got his strength back.

My father pulled a roll of banknotes from his pocket and peeled off a wad to give to the man. I think it was only a few hundred francs, and they were old francs of course, so it wasn’t a huge amount. He divided the remainder into two rolls and put rubber bands around them, telling me to give one of them, the smaller one, to the man once he’d got us over the border, and the rest he said was to help us on our travels.