Henderson’s Boys – The Escape
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Part One
June 5th 1940 -June 6th 1940
Nazi Germany launched its invasion of France on May 10th
1940. On paper the forces of France and her British allies were equal or
superior to the Germans’. Most commentators predicted a long and bloody war.
But whilst the allied armies spread out in defensive formations the Germans
used the radical new tactic of blitzkrieg, massing tanks and armour into huge
battle groups and punching through enemy lines.
By May 21st
the Germans had successfully occupied a huge section of northern France. The
British were forced into a humiliating sea evacuation at Dunkirk and the French
army was in tatters. German generals wanted to push on towards Paris, but
Hitler ordered them to pause, regroup and secure their supply lines.
On the night of June 3rd, he finally gave orders to
resume the attack.
CHAPTER ONE
As a baby Marc
Kilgour had been abandoned between two stone flower pots on the platform at Beauvais
station, sixty kilometers north of Paris. A porter found him lying inside a wooden
fruit pallet and rushed him into the warmth of the stationmaster’s office. There
he discovered the only clue to the boy’s identity, a scrap of notepaper with
four handwritten words: Allergic to cows
milk.
Now twelve
years old, Marc had imagined his abandonment so often that his memory of it
seemed real: the frosty platform, his anxious mother kissing his cheek before boarding
a train and disappearing forever; her eyes moist and her head crammed with secrets
as the carriages steamed into the night. In his fantasies Marc saw a statue
being erected on the platform some day. Marc Kilgour: fighter ace, Le Mans race
winner, hero of France…
But his life could hardly have been
less exciting. He’d grown up in a decrepit farmhouse a few kilometers north of Beauvais.
Its cracked walls and shrivelled beams were constantly threatened by the
destructive power of a hundred orphan boys.
The
region’s farms, chateaux and forests were attractive to Parisians who came out
for a Sunday drive; but it was hell to Marc and the windows into more exciting lives
he got through the radio and magazines tormented him.
His
days were all the same: the squirming mass of orphans rising to the crack of a walking
stick on a metal radiator, school until lunchtime, then an afternoon toiling on
a nearby farm. It was brutal work, but the men who were supposed to do it had
been called up to fight the Germans.
Morel’s
farm was the largest in the area and Marc was the youngest of four boys who
worked there. Mr Tomas, the orphanage director, knew there was a shortage of labour
and received a good price for the boys’ work; but the lads saw none of the
money and any suggestion that they should was met with a stern expression and a
lecture on how much each of them had already cost in food and clothing.
A
long history of run-ins with director Tomas had earned Marc the least pleasant
job on the farm. Most of Morel’s land produced wheat and vegetables, but the
farmer kept a dozen dairy cows in a shed, whilst their calves were raised for
veal under an adjacent canopy. Morel had no land for pasture, so his cattle lived
on fodder and only glimpsed daylight when they were led to a neighbouring farm for
a romp with Henri the bull.
While
his fellow orphans tended fields, Marc clambered amidst the tightly packed stalls,
scrubbing out the milking shed. An adult cow produces a hundred twenty litres of
faeces and urine each day and takes no account of holidays or weekends.
Seven
days a week, Marc found himself in the vile smelling shed scraping manure down
a sloped floor into the slurry pit. When the trampled straw and muck was
cleared, he had to hose the concrete and replenish each stall with bails of hay
and vegetable waste. Twice a week came the worst job of all: shovelling out the
slurry pit and wheeling the stinking barrels to a barn, where they would rot
down before being used as fertiliser.
…
Jae Morel was
also twelve and had known Marc since their first day at school. Marc was a
handsome boy, with tangled blond hair and Jae had always liked him. But as the
daughter of the area’s wealthiest farmer she wasn’t expected to mix with boys who
came to school with bare feet. At age nine she’d moved from the village school
to an all girls' academy in Beauvais and had almost forgotten Marc until he’d begun
working on her father’s farm a few months earlier.
At
first the pair only nodded and smiled, but since the weather turned fine they’d
managed a few conversations while sitting together in the grass and
occasionally Jae would share a bar of chocolate. They both sought a deeper
connection, but their talk centred on local gossip and reminiscences from the
days when they’d shared a classroom.
Jae
always approached the cow shed as if she was taking a stroll and couldn’t care
less, but she often doubled back or hid in the long grass, before standing up
and pretending to bump into Marc by accident as he came outside. The process
was strangely exciting, even though they’d never exchanged more than words and
chocolate.
On
this particular Wednesday, Jae was surprised to see Marc emerge from the side
door of the cow shed, bare chested and in a vile temper. He lashed out with his
rubber boot, sending a metal bucket clattering across the farmyard before he
grabbed another and put it under the tap mounted on the shed’s exterior.
Intrigued by Marc’s fury, Jae
hunkered down and leaned against the trunk of an elm. She watched as Marc wriggled
out of his filthy boots, then glanced around furtively before removing his under
shorts, trousers and the socks into which they were tucked. Jae had never seen
a boy naked and clapped a hand over her mouth as Marc stepped up on to a large
paving slab and grabbed a block of soap.
Marc cupped his hands and dipped
them into the bucket, splashing water on himself before working the soap. The
water was cold and even though the sun was hot he moved hurriedly. When he was
lathered all over, he raised the bucket high into the air and drained the water
over his head.
Soap burned his eyes as he reached
out for a grotty towel wrapped over a wooden post.
‘You’ve got a big arse!’ Jae shouted,
as she sprang out of the grass.
Marc urgently flicked the damp hair off
his face and was stunned to see Jae’s brown eyes and sweet smile. He dropped
the towel and lunged towards a pair of corduroy trousers.
‘Jesus,’ he choked, as the usually
simple task of stepping into trousers became a frantic bout of hopping. ‘How
long have you been there?’
‘Long enough,’ Jae grinned, pointing
at a wooden screen lying flat on the pathway.
‘I don’t usually bother pulling it
up… You’re never around until later…’
‘No school,’ Jae explained. ‘Some of
the teachers have left. The Boche[1]
are on the march…’
Marc nodded as he buttoned his
trousers and lobbed his work boots into the shed. ‘Did you hear the artillery
shells earlier?’
‘Made me jump,’ Jae nodded. ‘And the
German planes. One of our maids said there were fires in town, near the
marketplace.’
‘You can smell burning when the wind
changes. Your dad’s got that swanky Renault. You should head south.’
Jae shook her head. ‘My mother wants
to leave, but Daddy reckons the Germans won’t bother us if we don’t bother
them. He says they’ll still need farmers whether it’s French or German crooks running
the country.’
‘The director let us listen to the
radio for a while last night,’ Marc said. ‘They said we’re planning a
counterattack, we could drive the Boche out.’
‘Maybe,’ Jae said uncertainly. ‘But
it doesn’t…’
Marc didn’t need Jae to explain
further. The government radio stations bristled with optimistic talk about fighting
back and broadcast stirring speeches on turning
points and the French fighting spirit.
But no amount of propaganda could disguise truckloads of injured troops
retreating from the front.
‘It’s
too depressing,’ Marc said, buttoning his shirt as he smiled at Jae. ‘I wish I
was old enough to fight. Have you heard anything from your brothers?’
‘Nothing…
But nobody knows about anyone. The post has gone to hell. They’re probably
being held prisoner. Or they might have escaped at Dunkirk.’
Marc
nodded optimistically. ‘BBC France said over a hundred thousand of our troops
made it across the channel with the Brits.’
‘So
why were you in such a mood?’ Jae asked.
‘When?’
‘Just
now,’ she smirked. ‘When you steamed out of the shed and kicked the bucket.’
‘Oh
that - I was all set to finish when I
realised I’d left my shovel in one of the pens. So I reached in to grab it, the
cow’s tail shoots up and VOOM. It shits right in my face, mouth was open too…’
‘EWW!’
Jae shrieked, stepping back in horror. ‘I don’t know how you work in there.
Just the smell makes me gag and if that
went in my mouth I’d die.’
‘Get
used to anything, I guess. And your dad’s alright in some ways. He knows it’s a
filthy job, so I only have to work half as long as the boys in the fields and
he gave me boots and some of your brother’s old clothes. They’re too big, but
at least I don’t have to go around stinking of slurry.’
After
the initial shock Jae had seen the funny side and she re-enacted the scene,
flicking her arm up like the cow’s tail and making a noise. ‘VOOM – SPLAT!’
Marc
was irked, ‘It’s not funny. I’ve still got the taste in my mouth.’
But
this only made Jae laugh harder and Marc got annoyed.
‘Little
rich girl,’ he sniped. ‘You wouldn’t
like it. You’d be crying your eyes out.’
‘VOOM
– SPLAT!’ Jae repeated. She’d made herself laugh so hard that her legs were buckling.
‘I’ll
show you what it’s like,’ Marc said, as he lunged forwards and wrapped his arms
around her back.
‘No,’ Jae protested, kicking out as he
hitched her off the ground. She was impressed by his strength, but she pounded bony
fists against Marc’s back as he marched towards the open slurry pit at the end
of the barn.
‘I’ll
tell my dad!’ she squealed. ‘You’ll be in so much trouble.’
‘VOOM
– SPLAT!’ Marc replied, as he swung Jae forwards so that her long hair dangled
precariously over the foul smelling pit. The smell had the physical presence of
a slap. ‘Do you fancy a swim?’
‘Put
me down,’ Jae demanded, her stomach churning as she looked at the flies on the bubbling
crust of manure. ‘You oaf. If I get one speck of that on me you’ll be so dead.’
Jae
was starting to wriggle and Marc realised he didn’t have the strength to hold
her for much longer, so he swung her around and planted her back on the ground.
‘Idiot,’
she hissed, holding her stomach and retching.
‘But
it seemed so funny when it happened to me,’
Marc said.
‘Pig
head,’ Jae growled, as she swept her hair back into place.
‘Maybe
the princess should go back to her big house and practice her Mozart.’ Marc teased,
before making a screeching noise like a badly played violin.
Jae
was spitting mad, not so much because of what Marc had done, but because she’d
let herself get so fond of him.
‘Mother
always told me to stay away from your type,’ Jae said, squinting fiercely into
the sunlight. ‘Orphans! Look at you, you’ve just washed but even your clean
clothes are filthy rags.’
‘Temper, temper,’ Marc grinned.
‘Marc
Kilgour, you should work with manure.
You are manure.’
Marc
was anxious that Jae calm down. She was making a ton of noise and farmer Morel
prized his only daughter.
‘Take
it easy,’ Marc begged. ‘Us lads muck around, you know? I’m sorry. I’m not used
to girls.’
Jae
charged forwards and tried to slap Marc across the face, but he dodged out of
the way. She swung around to catch him across the back of the head, but her
canvas plimsoll skidded on the dry earth and she found herself doing the splits.
Marc
reached around to save Jae as her front foot slid forwards, but her smock
slipped through his fingers and he could only watch as she toppled into the pit.
CHAPTER TWO
The first bombs
fell on Paris on the night of June 3rd. It was the first sign of the
German advance and the explosions were a starting pistol for an evacuation of
the city.
The
Nazi regime had terrorised Warsaw following the invasion of Poland the year
before and Parisians were expecting the same treatment: Jews and government
officials shot in the streets, girls raped, homes looted and all men of
fighting age taken to labour camps. While many Parisians fled, by train, car or
even on foot, others carried on with their lives and were widely regarded as
fools.
Paul Clarke was a slightly built
eleven year old and one of the dwindling number of pupils who still attended
Paris’ largest English language school. The school served British children whose
parents worked in the city but weren’t rich enough to send their offspring to a
boarding school back home. They were the children of embassy clerks, low
ranking military attachés, drivers and others of similar status in private
companies.
Since the beginning of May the pupil
roll had fallen from three hundred to less than fifty. Most teachers had also
gone south or returned to Britain and the remaining kids – who ranged from five
up to sixteen – were now taught a shambolic curriculum in the school’s wood
panelled hall, overlooked by King George and a map of the British Empire.
The
only teacher left was the school’s founder and headmistress, Mrs Divine. Her typist
had been drafted in as a classroom assistant.
Paul was a daydreamer and he much
preferred this emergency arrangement to the years he’d spent seated rigidly
amongst boys his own age, getting rapped on the knuckles with a wooden ruler whenever
his mind wandered.
The
work set by the elderly headmistress wasn’t up to Paul’s intelligence and this
left him with time to doodle. There was hardly an exercise book or scrap of
paper in Paul’s desk that wasn’t covered with delicately inked drawings. His
preference was for armoured knights and fire breathing dragons, but he could also
make accurate drawings of sports cars and aeroplanes.
Presently,
Paul’s ink blotched, fingers were pencilling the outline of a French biplane
diving heroically towards a line of German tanks. The drawing had been
requested by one of the younger boys, at the price of one Toblerone bar.
‘Hey skinny,’ a girl said, as she
flicked Paul’s ear and made him smudge the tip of a propeller.
‘For god’s sake,’ he said furiously,
as he looked around and scowled at his older sister.
Rosie Clarke had just turned
thirteen and was as different from Paul as siblings can be. There was some likeness
in the eyes and they shared dark hair and a freckled complexion, but where Paul’s
clothes drooped as if they were ashamed to hang from his thin body, Rosie had a
buffalo’s shoulders, a precocious set of breasts and long nails that regularly
drew her younger brother’s blood.
‘Rosemarie Clarke,’ Mrs Divine said,
in a posh English accent. ‘How many times must I tell you to leave your brother
alone?’
Paul appreciated having the teacher on
side, but it also reminded the entire class that he got bullied by his sister
and the mirth that rippled across the room was all at his expense.
‘Madam, our father’s outside,’ Rosie
explained.
Paul snapped his head towards the
window. He’d been engrossed in drawing and hadn’t seen the dark blue Citroen
roll into the school courtyard. A glance at the clock over the blackboard confirmed
that it was a good hour before home time.
‘Mrs Divine!’ Mr Clarke swooned, as
he entered the hall. ‘I’m so sorry to
disturb your lesson.’
The headmistress showed obvious
distaste as Paul and Rosie’s dad kissed her on both cheeks. Clarke was the
French sales representative for the Imperial Wireless Company. He dressed
flamboyantly, in a dark suit, mirror finished shoes and a polka dot cravat that
Mrs Divine found vulgar; but her
expression warmed when Mr Clarke handed her a cheque.
‘We’ve got to collect some things
from our apartment and then we’re heading south,’ he explained. ‘I’ve paid up
until the end of term. I want the school to be here when things get back to
normal.’
‘That’s most kind,’ Mrs Divine said.
She’d spent thirty years building the school from nothing and seemed genuinely
touched as she produced a handkerchief from the sleeve of her cardigan and dabbed
her eye.
Paul and Rosie’s played out a scene
they’d seen many times over the past month. Boys shook hands like gentlemen,
while departing girls tended to cry, hug and promise to write letters.
Paul found the stiff upper lip easy
because he’d never been popular and his favourite art teacher and two closest
friends had already gone. Feeling rather awkward, he stepped towards the
younger boys at the front of the room and returned the exercise book to its eight-year-old
owner.
‘Guess I won’t get it done now,’ he
said apologetically. ‘It’s outlined in pencil, so you could finish it
yourself.’
‘You’re so good,’ the boy said, admiring the explosion around a half drawn
tank as he opened his desk. ‘I’ll leave it. I’d only ruin it.’
Paul was going to refuse payment
until he saw that the boy’s desk contained more than a dozen triangular bars. Toblerone
in hand, Paul stepped back to his desk and gathered his belongings into a
leather satchel: pens and ink, a stack of battered comic books and the two artist’s
pads with all of his best drawings in them. Meanwhile Rosie had erupted like a
volcano.
‘We’ll all be back some day,’ she
bawled theatrically, as she crushed the wind out of her best friend, Grace.
Upon seeing this, two of Rosie’s
other friends backed away.
‘Don’t worry, dad,’ Paul said, as he
approached the doorway and saw the bewilderment on his father’s face. ‘It’s
just the girls; they’re all a bit nuts.’
Paul realised that Mrs Divine was holding
out her hand and he shook it. She was a cold fish and he’d never really liked
her, but he’d been a pupil for five years and the gnarled fingers seemed sad.
‘Thank
you for everything,’ he said. ‘I hope the Germans don’t do anything horrible
when they get here.’
‘Paul,’ Mr Clarke snapped, gently
cuffing his son around the head. ‘Don’t say things like that.’
By
this time Rosie had finished crushing her friends and tears streaked as she
shook both Mrs Divine and her typist by the hand. Paul waved to nobody in
particular as he followed his father down the school’s main corridor and outside
on to a short flight of steps.
The sun shone brightly on the paved
courtyard as Paul followed his father towards the rather impressive Citroen.
The sky was cloudless, but the school was on a hill overlooking the city and
smoke poured from several buildings in the centre.
‘I didn’t hear any bombs,’ Rosie
noted.
‘The government’s moving south,’ Mr
Clarke explained. ‘They’re burning everything they can’t carry. The defence
ministry has even set some of its own buildings on fire.’
‘Why are they leaving?’ Paul asked.
‘I thought there was supposed to be a counter attack?’
‘Don’t be naive, you baby,’ Rosie sneered.
‘We might not be in this mess if our
side had decent radios,’ Mr Clarke said bitterly. ‘The German forces are
communicating instantly. The French use messengers on horseback. I tried to
sell a radio system to the French army, but their generals are living in the
dark ages.’
Paul was shocked to see a cascade of
papers come at him as he opened the back door of his father’s car.
‘Don’t let the wind get them,’ Mr
Clarke gasped, as he dived forwards and scooped manila folders off the pavement.
Paul shut the door before anything else
escaped, then he peered through the glass and saw that the entire back seat was
covered in folders and loose papers.
‘Imperial Wireless Company records,’
Mr Clarke explained. ‘I had to leave the office in a hurry.’
‘Why?’ Rosie asked.
But her father ignored the question
as he opened the front passenger door. ‘Paul, I think it’s best if you clamber
in between the front seats. I want you to stack those papers as we drive.
Rosie, you get in the front.’
Paul thought his father sounded
tense. ‘Is everything OK, dad?’
‘Of course,’ Mr Clarke nodded,
giving Paul his best salesman’s smile as the boy squeezed between the front
seats. ‘I’ve just had a hell of a morning. I tried four garages to get petrol
and ended up having to beg at the British embassy.’
‘The embassy?’ Rosie said curiously,
as she slammed the passenger door.
‘They’ve got a reserve supply for
getting staff out in an emergency,’ Mr Clarke explained. ‘Luckily I know a few
faces there, but it cost me a few bob.’
Mr Clarke wasn’t rich, but his
six-cylinder Citroen was a grand affair that belonged to the Imperial Wireless
Company. Paul always enjoyed being in the luxurious rear compartment, with its
crushed velvet seats, mahogany trim and tasselled blinds over the windows.
‘Do these papers go in any order?’ he
asked, clearing a space for his bum as his father drove out of the courtyard.
‘Just stack them up,’ Mr Clarke
said, as Rosie looked back and waved at her friend Grace who stood on the
courtyard steps. ‘I’ll get a suitcase from the apartment.’
‘So where are we going?’ Paul asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ Mr Clarke said. ‘South,
obviously. The last I heard there were still passenger ferries heading to
Britain from Bordeaux. If not, we should be able to cross into Spain and get a
boat from Bilbao.’
‘And if we can’t cross into Spain?’
Rosie asked nervously, as Paul straightened an armful of papers by tapping them
against the leather armrest.
‘Well…’ Mr Clarke said uncertainly.
‘We won’t know for sure until we get down south, but don’t worry. Britain has
the biggest merchant fleet and the most powerful navy in the world. There’ll be
a boat heading somewhere.’
By this time the Citroen was cruising
briskly downhill, past rows of apartment blocks, with the occasional shop or
café at ground level. Around half of the businesses were closed or boarded up,
while others continued to trade despite frequent signs indicating shortages such
as no butter on food stores, or tobacco
only available with a meal on the outside of cafés.
‘Shouldn’t we stop at the florist?’
Rosie asked.
Mr Clarke glanced solemnly at his
daughter. ‘I know I promised, sweetheart, but the cemetery’s fifteen kilometers
in the wrong direction. We need to pack quickly and get as far out of Paris as
we can.’
‘But…’ Rosie said sadly. ‘What if we
can’t come back? We might never see mum’s grave again.’
This thought made Paul freeze as he
stacked the last of the papers. The cemetery always made Paul cry. Then his dad
would cry and stand around the grave for ages, even when it was freezing cold. It
was always horrible and he rather liked the idea of never going back.
‘Rosie, we’re not leaving your
mother behind’ Mr Clarke said. ‘With luck she’ll be up there watching over us
the whole way.’
The Escape will be released in the UK on February 5th
2009 (March in Australia & New Zealand)
Text copyright ©Robert Muchamore 2008. Henderson’s Boys
logo copyright © Robert Muchamore and Hachette Children’s Books.