Perfectly Ordinary People(45)

I hadn’t really thought much about the future, about where we were supposed to go, so I asked Dad where we should aim for, and he said he’d heard that the Atlantic coast was supposed to be safe. I was shocked because that was thousands of kilometres away and I had no idea how we were supposed to get there. We didn’t know anyone over that way, either. The carpenter – he never told us his name, so Pierre and I started referring to him as Moustache – said he’d heard that too, that the south-west was safest – to the west of Perpignan, but we should avoid anywhere north of Lyon. Even Lyon he’d heard bad things about, he said. He told us not to go near the Italian border either. But then he interrupted himself and said we’d have plenty of time to think about all that, and my father should leave. It was dangerous for us all the longer he stayed.

Dad hugged me and made me promise to write whenever I could. He said never to put my address or my name. He told me to just tell him if we were OK and then sign the letters Nours or something.

Nours?

It was the name we’d given my teddy bear when I was little. So after that I always signed my letters home Nours.

The carpenter insisted that Dad should get a move on, and so we hugged and in a flurry of tears said our goodbyes. Dad told Pierre to look after me, and Pierre joked and said I was going to look after him. And then they opened the barn doors and Dad got in his pickup and drove away.

That must have been pretty traumatic, wasn’t it?

Oh, totally. It was awful. The whole thing was. Of course, I didn’t know then that I’d never see him again. But all the same, yes, it was terrible. I couldn’t stop crying and shaking. As you can see, I’m crying now, just thinking about it.

Take a minute, if you need to.

No. I’m OK. It’s just that . . . you know . . . when people are dead, once they’re gone . . . Well, you always wish you’d said more, don’t you? But I didn’t know. It took me a very long time – years and years and years. But in the end I managed to forgive myself for that – for not having said more. Because I’ve accepted that there’s no way I could have known.

Of course there wasn’t.

Once he’d driven away, God . . .

Take a minute. Take some breaths.

Yes. Gosh, the memories still feel so fresh. Dad driving away, the dust swirling behind his truck . . . Anyway, Moustache led us into the woods, and we walked for half an hour through the trees – I think it must have been a couple of kilometres. Pierre was whimpering from the pain of having to walk and I was in tears because I was so scared. It was very remote, and I wondered if he wasn’t just going to kill us or something – but then we came to a small wooden hut. It was made of tree trunks and the forest was so thick around it that you couldn’t see it until you were upon it. He told us he’d built it himself from the trees he’d cut and that we’d be safe there. He was very proud of it, I seem to remember.

It was incredibly basic, just a single room with a rough bed made out of planks, and two chairs that he’d hacked out of other bits of tree. There was a wood burner he told us not to light because of the smoke – not that we needed to anyway, it was summer, after all. The shutters were all closed and he said we couldn’t open them and we’d have to stay indoors and not go out, ‘not even to shit’. I remember he said that. As I say, he was a pretty rustic kind of a guy. There was a bucket in the corner ‘to shit in’, he said, and there was a jug of water on the shelf. He promised someone would be back with food later on and then started to leave.

Pierre asked him how long we needed to stay there, I recall, and he said rather abruptly that we’d be there until Pierre could walk properly. And then he left.

When we realised he had re-chained and padlocked the door we got quite panicky. Actually, we got very panicky.

You mean, he’d locked you in?

Yes. We went around checking the shutters and realised they’d all been nailed shut. So unless we smashed our way through the door or something – and there was nothing to smash it with anyway – we were stuck there.

We worked ourselves into a frenzy then. We sat on those two chairs whispering about what if he never came back and left us there to starve, or came back with a shotgun to kill us and steal all the money he’d seen my father give me. Pierre thought he was probably off to fetch some Germans and would hand us over in exchange for food or money or something.

Eventually we ran out of theories and even energy to come up with new ones and fell asleep, the three of us, on the bed. It was only a single, and a narrow single at that. It had one of those old-fashioned straw mattresses too, and the straw stuck through the holes and needled you when you moved. But we’d worn ourselves out worrying, I think, so the three of us slept for a while.

Later on, after dark, we were woken by the sound of the chain being pulled off and got scared all over again. There was nowhere to hide, and we had no weapons, so we just sat up to await our fate. We talked about it afterwards and Pierre said he’d been convinced that Moustache had come back to kill us, while I was certain it was going to be Germans. But when the door opened, it revealed this pale, grubby little girl – she must have only been about eight. She had a lantern in one hand and a bag in the other which contained a baguette, a jug of milk – you know, country milk, straight from the cow – and a bar of chocolate.

God, that chocolate. I shed a few tears when I saw the chocolate.