Bobby's War Read online

  He had played rugby against Malvern School where Patrick Markham was a pupil many times and they had since met at functions at Whitehall. The two men got on well and he had been invited to luncheon at the Markham’s home on several occasions following the setting up of 161 Squadron, which was such a top secret exercise that many of his colleagues in the War Office did not even know of its existence. He knew that Markham had appreciated his input on the logistics and secrecy of the operation and there was a mutual respect that had grown between them to such an extent that when Markham had had a personal dilemma several years ago, he had called on Edward for some impartial advice. They now considered each other to be friends and Edward decided if anyone could facilitate him to help Bobby, it would be Markham. Edward was justifying his interest in the flight that took Bobby to France because of his job but he was disturbed to discover that his interest in her welfare was becoming anything but professional.

  The troubled civil servant marched each evening along the London streets, thumping his highly-polished shoes on the tarmac. He was in a bad mood, unable to understand why he suddenly felt responsible for this woman. He had avoided all romantic entanglement into his early thirties, but for some reason, the sight of Bobby with head held high and a determination do her duty, walking slowly down that corridor in Hamble had unleashed an urgent desire to enfold her in his arms and hold her safe. There had to be a way he could call in a favour from Markham.

  *

  Three hours away by road in Bedfordshire, another young man was having equally troubling thoughts. Gus Prince was waiting for his orders for the next drop off and was having a cigarette outside the main building at Tempsford. He was increasingly busy delivering and picking up SOE agents, invariably known as ‘Janes’ and ‘Joes’ regardless of their code names. Many of them were young women and he felt sorry for them, knowing the clandestine life they were about to take up. One looked remarkably like that difficult girl from primary school, Marie, he thought, but he asked no questions and she offered no information. Some had family in France and they were all expected to speak the language fluently so they could uncover vital information and send it back to Britain. Every time he took one over, he looked at their pale, young faces and wondered whether they would ever set foot on British soil again.

  The adrenalin kept him focused while he was flying but as soon as the concentration was no longer needed, he felt a knot in his stomach that would take him a moment to identify as worry. As a pilot, he had learned to be calm under pressure and he approached his job with professionalism, but that professionalism seemed to fly out of the window at three o’clock in the morning when he woke in a cold sweat envisioning a young woman with auburn hair facing an execution squad in a narrow French street. He had returned from the mission feeling a complete failure, knowing he had let Bobby down, but his superiors applauded his actions, more concerned about getting a pilot – and his aircraft – back in one piece rather than worrying about an ATA girl who, if she kept her head, would be picked up again in a week.

  Unable to mention the incident to anyone, Gus reasoned that as he would be going back in a week – well, five days, four hours and ten minutes to be exact, he sadly realised he knew the precise time – there was no need to worry; she would be safe back in Blighty before anyone knew she had gone. Secrecy was so much part of the war that it had become second nature but that did not help his sleep patterns when all sorts of dire situations presented themselves to him in nightmares.

  ‘Hello Prince,’ Group Captain Patrick Markham came out of his office and was about to pass Gus when he halted. ‘Got a light?’

  ‘Yes, of course, sir,’ Gus saluted and then leaned over with a match to light his commander’s cigarette.

  ‘You did the Normandy mission, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘I know we’ve done the debrief with you, but . . .’ Markham paused and looked round to check no one was listening.

  ‘The girl you lost there, think she’s capable of keeping her head?’

  Gus winced at the word ‘lost’ and felt a huge guilt engulf him.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean lost,’ Markham said with a sudden wave of sympathy. He knew the circumstances had left Gus no choice. ‘I just wondered whether you think she’s got the balls to survive over there and not do anything stupid.’

  It was a question Gus had turned over and over in his head but now, facing his commanding officer, he felt a huge pride for the girl he had known since childhood, the one who had dealt with the school bullies, saved Harriet from endless scrapes and had flown upwards of fifty different aircraft.

  ‘Yes, I do, sir. If anyone can survive, it’s Roberta Hollis, and she won’t give anything away, either. She’s the strongest woman I know.’

  Markham looked sideways at the young pilot and smiled to himself. He had not been fooled for one minute by Edward Turner’s sudden interest in an unplanned drop-off in Normandy. Now here was another one. She must be quite a girl if she had ensnared Prince and, if his suspicions were correct, his old friend Turner, he thought.

  He stubbed out his cigarette under his heel. ‘Well, let’s hope you’re right and she doesn’t get in harm’s way.’

  Chapter 20

  Bobby was getting increasingly worried about Elizé. The little girl sat for hours on the corner of the mattress, her knees tucked up and her arms huddled around them. She hardly spoke, ate the turnip soup without seeming to taste – which Bobby conceded, could be a blessing – and just swayed gently backwards and forwards.

  The hours passed slowly. Bobby tried to interest the girl in every game she had ever played in her isolated childhood, but Elizé’s eyes just looked through her. Eventually, after three days, Bobby gave up and went back to trying to make notes on British planes for her next test. She had asked for paper and a pencil, but she also kept the matches close to hand so she could burn her notes if there was any sense of a threat from upstairs. The last thing she wanted to do was to give the Germans information about British aircraft.

  She was absorbed in her task, lying on the mattress, when she felt a shadow above her.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She looked up in surprise to see Elizé staring at the diagram of a Wellington she had drawn on the paper.

  ‘It’s an aeroplane,’ she said gently.

  ‘It’s big,’ Elizé said.

  ‘Yes, it’s enormous. Let me show you.’

  Bobby sat up and made a space next to her and the girl warily sat down.

  ‘You see, it has wings that are bigger than this house and it takes six people to fly it. But because I deliver aircraft, I would fly it on my own.’

  Bobby could not keep the pride out of her voice.

  ‘It’s called a Wellington, has huge twin engines and when they start up, you can’t hear yourself think, it’s so loud,’ she went on, warming to her favourite subject. ‘It’s one of the huge bomber planes that are making such a difference to this war. Did you hear about the Lancasters that bombed the dams in the Ruhr Valley? It was when the bombs were made to bounce along the water and then into the dams.’

  Elizé shook her head. Newspapers were controlled by the Germans and radios were banned in France.

  ‘How?’ she asked.

  Bobby picked up her pencil and started to draw a diagram, explaining how the Mohne and Edersee Dams were breached, causing catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr Valley and of villages in the Eder Valley but the child had stopped listening. She was just looking enviously at the pencil in Bobby’s hand.

  Bobby looked at the child’s intent face, then she turned the paper over and passed it to her. ‘Would you like to draw?’ The girl took the pencil and Bobby watched closely. Elizé bent her head and bit her lip in concentration. She drew a head and then put some hair round it, then gradually a woman’s face emerged. Bobby took a sharp intake of breath; this child was seriously talented. She moved away to give her some space, curling up on the other side of the room on an
old blanket to watch from afar.

  She knew that Elizé had been born in about 1936 so most of her life had been spent as an unwilling witness to the second world war of the century. It seemed so unfair that her childhood was being devastated, particularly that her religion was putting her at such huge risk, marking her out as alien. The situation with the Jewish people had consisted mainly of just rumours in Britain, but there was a growing unease about what was happening to them. And now, in front of her, was an innocent victim whose life had been blasted by an intolerance that was so strange to Bobby. She had been brought up in the Church of England but on the farm, some of the farmhands were Catholic and Rachel, the maid, was Jewish. There had never been any problem as to which God everyone worshipped and for all her family’s faults, Bobby thought, intolerance of other religions was not one of them and, as a result, this hatred of other people’s beliefs was something she did not understand.

  There had been few clues about the traumatic childhood Elizé had suffered so far but Bobby knew that she was witnessing a moment of a vital bond being recreated on paper between a daughter and her mother. She wanted to reach out to Elizé, feeling her isolation and loneliness and identifying with it but even she could not imagine the horrors that would haunt Elizé’s sleep for the rest of her life. To see your own father killed and your mother dragged off onto a cattle train was so far removed from anything Bobby had ever experienced, all she could do was send waves of compassion across the dank cellar and hope that some of them reached the child.

  Bobby had never been one to feel sorry for herself, even though she often caught Aunt Agnes, Archie and sometimes Mrs Hill and Rachel looking at her with pity, but she had always managed to exist as an entity, content with her own company and not needing anyone else. But the longing to help this little girl gave her such a strong feeling of empathy, it brought her up with a jolt.

  It reminded her a little of her affection for Harriet, whose need for love had eventually broken through the barrier she had erected around herself, but this child was smashing that barrier into tiny little pieces and it left her breathless. She longed to envelop the child in her arms and protect her from all harm, which, she reasoned, considering they were both fugitives hiding in a French Resistance house behind enemy lines, was not going to be an easy task.

  They emerged from the cellar once it was dark, the curtains were closed and the windows shuttered. Michel kept watch on the street outside while they had their meal. His private concerns about Paul Cloret had intensified and he was having him watched. To have an informer living next door was a risk the Bisset family could not afford to take. Michel peered up and down the road, but all was quiet except for the sound of Claudette’s wooden shoes on the kitchen floor as she prepared the meagre evening meal. With a shortage of rubber, the French people had started to nail wood to the bottom of their shoes and Bobby had soon learned to recognise the clomp, clomp of the young woman’s feet on the floor above her cellar bedroom and had even started to find it comforting. Everyone was limited to 1,200 calories a day but for once, there was some fatty meat on the table and it was a rare treat for them all. Claudette was struggling to find food with any nutrition in it so she had been growing rhubarb in a tub in the back yard but last week, the government had warned that it contained oxalic acid and should not be eaten, so she had been at her wits’ end about what to give everyone, particularly with two extra, unexplainable mouths to feed. She would trail around the little shops in the village, queueing for hours, often in vain, but this morning, her patience had enabled her to buy some meat and black bread and she had even managed to cajole some pears out of an elderly neighbour with a depleted orchard. Claudette had returned triumphant and had been proudly slow-stewing the meat all afternoon to try to soften its sinewy flesh.

  ‘We normally find some food on le marché noir,’ Raoul explained, doling out the meat with pride, ‘but while we have des invitées’ – he grinned at his two guests – ‘maybe not at the moment, huh?’

  Bobby was being torn apart by guilt at the inconvenience and risks this family were taking on her behalf and looked across at him with a frown. She opened her mouth to speak.

  ‘Mais, now I have my big family, and it is good,’ he carried on, cutting across her.

  ‘He’s actually enjoying this,’ she thought, suddenly taking in his beaming face as he looked from Elizé to Bobby, over to Michel and then at Claudette, who was proudly bringing in a large platter of rare potatoes she had been saving for just such a treat.

  It occurred to Bobby that having all his charges to worry about had given Raoul a way to cope with the grief of losing his wife and that he welcomed his extra ‘guests’ after Michel’s unexpected stay in England had left him and Claudette alone rattling around in this large, old-fashioned terraced house.

  Raoul grinned around at the full table with satisfaction and reached for the salt dish before remembering it was not there. Salt was just one more treat they had to manage without. He shrugged.

  Chapter 21

  Edward had thought about asking for the War Office car to take him to Tempsford but he decided in the end to take the train and not to use a travel warrant but to pay for it himself. This was a trip that did not need to be traced in any documentation.

  He told a puzzled Miss Arbuckle that he would be out for the day, tucked The Times under his arm, picked up his bowler hat from the hat stand and headed off to the station. He was not allowed to work on the train, that was too risky, but he was so looking forward to being out of London and maybe forgetting for a moment that there was a war on. It was late March 1944 and things were on a knife-edge in the battle against Hitler. Only yesterday, Edward had received details of an attack on Monte Cassino and the Allies had landed at Anzio but the death tolls everywhere were high, both in Europe and the rest of the world. The Allies were growing more determined than ever and there were plans for an invasion in June but Operation Overlord, as it was called, was giving him and all his colleagues nightmares, as they tried to work through probability factors more than three months in advance. Edward suspected it would all ultimately depend on the weather, but he had been putting all his concentration into making sure the logistics would work to get enough troops to land without the Germans realising they were there.

  Edward rushed along the pavement, brushing his floppy fringe out of his eyes. He was completely discombobulated. It was a great word, he decided, and described exactly how he felt. Throughout Eton and Cambridge, he had been in complete control, focusing his sights on a future where he could make a difference. A tall, good-looking man, he was pursued by a succession of hopeful socialites. He dated some of them but never lost his heart. He joined the best societies and clubs and made important contacts. He toyed with the idea of politics but when he was approached by a man in a bowler hat at the entrance to the University Library, he knew he was being targeted for a career that would be fascinating but would mean he could never be completely honest with anyone again. He got an excellent degree, became a competent tennis player, a good sailor and could balance a crystal sherry glass on a small, hors d’oeuvres plate – all necessary attributes of a member of the Secret Intelligence Service who wanted to fit in with people of influence.

  He had been sent out into the field as a ‘special operative’ and had spent some fraught pre-war years in Germany and the Netherlands. He had survived many serious situations, barely escaping with his life on occasions, but the adrenalin and the thrill was something he could not recreate in the endless strategy meetings he was forced to suffer back in London. His quick mind had allowed him a chance to rocket up the ranks in the War Office and he had found it quite easy to compartmentalise his thoughts and develop a slightly awkward persona so that people did not suspect how intricate his work really was. It did not concern Edward that people thought he was a slow, ponderous type in a pin-striped suit, it was a small price to pay for keeping his work secret.

  But today was a day just for him. He was thirty-two years
of age and his parents had despaired of him ever finding a wife, which is why his father and Andrew Hollis had dreamed up the ridiculous idea that he and some girl should get hitched. That, however, he acknowledged, was before Roberta Hollis, with her mane of glorious auburn hair, burst into his life. Not long after he had met her, he found himself completely blown off course and foundering on the rocks. The sailing analogies suited his situation, he thought, putting his head down against the bitter wind. He felt as if he was being buffeted through waves and tossed and turned in a maelstrom.

  ‘I was doing fine in this war,’ he muttered to himself, heading down to the Underground, ‘and then she goes and gets herself dropped in the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, for heaven’s sake . . .’

  A woman looked up at him in surprise.

  ‘Sorry, just thinking out loud.’

  She pointed to a poster that warned ‘Careless talk costs lives’ with a sanctimonious nod of her head at him.

  ‘I know,’ he said, smiling initially at the irony of the telling off – to him, of all people – but the moment shook him. He had always been so good at disguise and subterfuge, but this smouldering passion was shaking him out of his comfort zone. He was letting down his guard.