Perfectly Ordinary People(81)

And while we were at it, Pierre, who said he’d always hated his first name, used his second name instead. So that’s how Pierre became Christophe Solomas. The mayor put Monsieur Solomas on the payroll, and then set out about getting the required papers for all of us. I became Genevieve Solomas, and our baby Guillaume Solomas. So we were finally, officially, a family.

That’s amazing. And were these fake documents? Forgeries? Or were they official?

Do you know, we weren’t really sure for years? There was always this terrifying doubt that if we had to produce them, they’d be compared to some official register and a problem would be flagged up, but it simply never happened. For months, I kept slipping up and calling Pierre . . . well, Pierre, rather than Christophe, too.

After the war we had to get fresh copies so we could request passports, and we honestly didn’t know what would happen. But we asked for them through the normal channels and they handed them over as if nothing untoward had ever taken place, as if those were the people we had always been. It was only then that we knew we were officially in the system.

Do you have a marriage certificate too?

I do. Look, it’s here in my livret de famille. I dug it out so that I could show you! You see? Genevieve Lecomte married Christophe Solomas on the fourth of May 1939 in Le Mas. That was the name of the village where Pierre, or rather Christophe, was employed.

May 1939? I didn’t think you got there until 1940.

Yes, but they backdated the certificate so we were married before the baby was conceived.

That really does look official. What about Lecomte? Where does that name come from?

Oh, we pulled that one out of a hat, too. It seemed like using my real maiden name – Schmitt – might be dangerous. So I went for Lecomte.

Gosh, all these name changes. It’s quite confusing.

Yes, I’m sorry about that! It was confusing for us, too, if that’s any help! <Laughs> Actually, I’m sure that I must be still listed somewhere as being born as Schmitt in Mulhouse as well, but it has never caused a problem. That’s the town hall stamp at the bottom, see? Ethel’s the only person who never changed her name. She’s still Lambert.

Of course. And did you stay in that same house then – in the hut, I mean – the whole time?

In the end we did, though it wasn’t our intention.

The mayor had said that once our papers came through it would be safe for us to move to the village. He even had a place we could use. It was still pretty basic, but it at least had a proper front door and a stove.

But before we were able to move, word came that the government – Pétain’s Vichy government – had been forced by the Germans to reintroduce a sort of obligatory scout movement to replace the French national service. It was called Les Chantiers de la Jeunesse, and all young men had to spend six months training, getting fit, hunting and gathering and competing in sports events . . . Often they had to camp in the forest for months on end. It was all terribly virile and Christophe would have hated it.

It sounds a bit like the Hitler Youth.

Well, you know, certain chapters were a lot like that, depending on where you lived. It was very much the luck of the draw. In some regions they enthusiastically shipped their young men off to Germany to help with the war effort. But others were associated with the resistance and saw their role more as one of preparing men to fight when the day finally came to kick the Germans out. So it was a very mixed bag.

Anyway, the mayor of Le Mas seemed to think it was much safer for Pierre – sorry, I suppose I can call him Christophe now, can’t I? – to vanish from view before he got enrolled in Les Chantiers and got his name added to all sorts of lists. Especially because he hadn’t received the paperwork with his new identity yet.

So he told us to continue living in our forest hideaway for the time being. He found us a mattress and a wood-burning stove – he always had a contact for everything – and eventually Christophe even put in an outdoor sink. But it was always incredibly basic, and in winter quite stunningly cold.

So even once your papers came through, you still weren’t able to move?

No. Unfortunately, things never did get any safer. They only ever became progressively more dangerous. Pétain passed anti-gay laws, the first since the Revolution, and started shipping trainloads of so called ‘undesirables’ – mainly Jews – to the camps. Then in ’42 the Germans simply took over the whole of France, so there was no free zone anymore. They began conscripting French men then, and sending them to work in German factories. They didn’t often bother coming as far into the mountains as Le Mas – there weren’t really enough people there for them to be that interested – but when they did occasionally visit, Christophe would take a day or two off, and we’d hide out in our little house in the forest. Unless someone tipped them off, there really wasn’t much chance anyone would stumble upon us living out there. And thankfully no one ever did.

Can you tell me a bit about what life was like up there? It must have been very different to the lives you’d been living in Mulhouse.

Yes, of course. Well, in summer, and in spring and autumn, Christophe worked most days. There was always something to be done around the village, fixing the water supply, or helping someone who was planting or harvesting . . . Some days he’d be fixing roofs, or electricity or . . . I don’t even remember really . . . he was a general sort of dogsbody and the tasks he had to do were very varied. In summer he’d work quite literally from dawn to dusk and fish for trout on his day off. We ate so much trout that, even now, I can’t stand it. Just the thought of trout makes me feel queasy. And then in winter, he often couldn’t work at all because of the snow.