All the King's Men (2 page)

Henri never had the slightest intention of labouring for his living. He showed some academic promise in his early years, which led his mother to cherish a dream that her favourite son would eventually become a teacher. But Henri had nothing so bourgeois in mind. Either by accident or design, Henri spent a lot of time in his mother’s company at the Thierry estates, and from behind her apron, so to speak, he glimpsed the world of the local aristocracy. It was a world he liked very much. At ‘Thierry’ he found a sort of second family who seem to have adopted him as a kind of mascot. At any rate he began to absorb something of the culture of that society and to develop a view of himself as someone separate from the ‘little people’ of the world. By ‘little people’ he meant anyone whose life was ruled by others, like his family and their neighbours. This view of himself as an individual divorced from his origins was perhaps the most important early development in what was to become a complicated character. Eventually he would distinguish between two kinds of ‘little people’: those who were vulnerable, who relied on him and somehow deserved his affection – like his mother; and those who had failed to improve themselves, deserved to be where they were and consequently barely figured in his view of the world – like his father.
⁸

Every evening Henri and his mother would return to their very humble house and to a man who was, at least in Henri’s eyes, the very worst type of time-server – a postman, a minor functionary of the state, a failure. Déricourt despised him. For some unknown medical reason, his father developed a bizarre and unfortunate complication after his stroke – he became appallingly obese. Henri, who always took a great pride in his own appearance, found his father’s physical disintegration repulsive.

At the age of 16 he sat his baccalaureat, but his mother’s hopes were dashed. Too indisciplined to cope with the
necessary study, he failed his first exams, threw the rest in and left home for Paris. The only influence his father managed to exert on his youngest son was to ensure him employment by getting him a position with the PTT (Postes Télégraph et Téléphone). Henri started at the very bottom – ‘supernumerare’, literally a supernumerary. From this he progressed to the dizzying heights of ‘clerk’.
⁹

On 26 May 1927, in the company of nearly a hundred thousand of his countrymen, Déricourt went to Le Bourget airfield to cheer the young American, Charles A. Lindbergh, who had just flown non-stop across the Atlantic. It’s difficult today to imagine the kind of prestige that was enjoyed by the pilots of the 1920s. In fact they were not pilots, they were aviators – flyers. They commanded the respect of presidents and kings – and the adulation of millions. The following day, outside the Hotel de Ville, Déricourt again watched as the President of France shook hands with Mr Lindbergh, and the postal clerk hit upon his first avenue of escape.

Déricourt liked to say he’d won a scholarship to a pilots’ school, but in fact it was his mother’s employer who had engineered his admission. Henri was privately sponsored to the Farman Air School at Toussus le Noble near Paris, the training school for the Military air service. On 10 May 1930 Déricourt had his
Baptême de l’Air
.
¹⁰
He flew for six minutes. By the end of the month he had clocked up over four hours’ flying time and had already shown himself an uncommonly good pilot. By 1931 he had progressed to the rank of Corporal second class, then to Chief Corporal.

In 1932 he left the military to take up the life of an aerial showman. With a group of like-minded flying-fools he established the
Aéro Club de Paris
. From their base at Toussus le Noble, they moved about the countryside in a peripatetic fashion, producing impromptu ‘Fêtes Aeriennes’.

In each new town they would land in a nearby field, distribute a few posters, then for six francs entertain the
local country folk to a display of wing-walking, parachuting, dare-devil dives and, of course, the opportunity for a
Baptême de l’Air
. The glamorous twenty-three-year-old flyer developed a reputation as a witty, self-confident and extremely persuasive charmer, particularly with the ladies. It was really his talent on the ground that kept the Aero Club in the air, long after flying circuses had become passé.
¹¹

By 1935 the Depression put an end to their barnstorming. After trying to make a living as a salesman for a company that sold scientific instruments, Déricourt finally settled down to what he would have called a steady job. A new airline was created specifically to transport mail over the vast distances of France, a task previously dealt with by Air France. A fleet of silver-grey Caudron Simouns, the new fast monoplane, and some six or eight pilots and radio operators were gathered at Le Bourget to form Air Bleu. Déricourt was not a person who fitted easily into an organization. He had virtually no respect for authority and little patience with procedure. Air Bleu employees were required to wear a uniform of navy blue trousers, a white shirt and a navy blue tie. Déricourt turned up for inspection on the first day wearing white trousers, a navy blue shirt and a white tie.
¹²

Unfortunately, within just a few months of getting financially off the ground, the airline almost crashed. In May 1936 the Renault family prematurely removed their investment and the pilots and crew were forced to stand down and await possible government help. It was during this hiatus in the airline’s history that Déricourt first demonstrated an art for which he later became quite famous, the art of disappearing. Air Bleu had come to value him as one of their best pilots and were keen to keep in touch, should the company suddenly become solvent again. Throughout August and September, there was a steady stream of Air Bleu correspondence to all of Déricourt’s known addresses, each letter a little more
anxious than the last as the company grew more alarmed by his absence. Air Bleu never received any explanations.
¹³
On this particular occasion, he was secretly down at Chambéry, near the Italian border, doing a bit of aerial photography.

In the spring of 1936 Déricourt had made the acquaintance of André Borrie, an officer in the Deuxième Bureau – the French intelligence service. At that meeting Borrie had approached him with an offer of some easy cash in return for taking some documents to a contact at Déricourt’s destination. The contact would give him a similar sum on receipt. It was the start of an unofficial relationship with the Deuxième Bureau that eventually extended to flying Borrie over sensitive military sites in neighbouring countries. For instance, during his absence from Air Bleu they did some aerial photography over Italian naval docks and were held up by bad weather. On other occasions they flew over German territory to photograph stretches of the famous Siegfried Line.
¹⁴

During the 1930s it was very common for pilots (by then no longer aviators) to perform the occasional clandestine operation. It was virtually considered a perk of the job. The Spanish Civil War in particular was a great opportunity to earn a little bit of extra cash. During the summer of 1936, soon after hostilities had begun, the buccaneering figure of Wing Commander Arthur Lord Granar arrived at Le Bourget airfield with an American Lockheed aircraft. He made a semi-official approach to Air France pilots asking them if they would be prepared to fly this and other aircraft across to the Republicans in Barcelona. It was all highly unofficial and just a tiny bit illegal, but he had no problems getting enough volunteers. Two of those were Léon Doulet and a contemporary of his called Rémy Clement.

They would arrive at Le Bourget before dawn to collect their contraband aircraft, which had enough fuel to get them to Toulouse. They carried no radio operator or
engineers. At Toulouse they refuelled for the stretch across the Pyrenees and down to Barcelona. Having handed over their Lockheeds, they were then flown back across the border to Toulouse, from where they took the sleeper-train back to Paris. At an apartment in Boulevard Pasteur, a colonel in the Spanish Republican Army would hand over an envelope containing some 5000 francs.

Déricourt often told this story as though it was his own. But he was not one of those hard-working Air France pilots.
¹⁵

By 1937 Air Bleu was off the ground again and Déricourt settled down to the routine of flying the mail from Paris to Toulouse, Marseilles and so on. His radio operator, Robert Marotin, recalled what it was like to fly with him.

Once, en route from Rouen to Le Havre, we flew into a cloud. The wings and windshield iced over and Déricourt could only see out of a tiny clear spot in the glass. We dropped down below the cloud and found ourselves flying just above the waves and beneath the tall cliffs just out of Le Havre. Déricourt couldn’t climb back up again because of the weight of the ice and so we followed the line of the cliffs round until we found the gap that led to the runway and got down safely. We dashed into the mess, had two quick brandies and then ran out again to chip the ice off the wings, and were off again within the hour.
¹⁶

Déricourt had developed a taste for danger. He seemed to flourish during moments of stress and Marotin often felt he pushed the system to its limits, just to see when everything would fall apart. There was extra pay for night flying and in those early aircraft there were no sophisticated navigational aids. They used to steer themselves by following the roads and rivers by moonlight.

On one occasion, while on a long overnight flight to
Perpignan, Déricourt’s engine suddenly cut out and the aircraft began to go into a stall. Instead of bailing out Déricourt decided to glide the aircraft in to Perpignan. Somehow he was able to control their descent towards the aerodrome. As the landing lights appeared before them, he ordered Marotin into the back of the aircraft with the mail-sacks – ‘There’s no point in the two of us getting killed.’ He made a perfect touch-down.

Henri began to believe there was actually something special about himself, that he had some gift for surviving where others would have perished.
¹⁷
He didn’t feel protected, it wasn’t a case of divine intervention, but he was sure it was something more substantial than mere luck.

Sometime during 1937 Déricourt met a young British journalist who had spent a little time in Barcelona during the war and was full of tales of intrigue and derring-do. Nicholas Bodington was an extremely bright, extremely entertaining bon viveur with a taste like Déricourt’s for the fast lane. He was born in Paris, was completely fluent in French and was the very embodiment of the Continental Englishman. His father, Oliver Bodington, was an eminent international lawyer based at the British Embassy in Paris. Nicholas, the youngest of three boys, was educated at Cheltenham and Lincoln College, after which he returned to Paris in 1929 to take up the position of chief correspondent with the
Daily Express
. He resigned from the
Express
in 1933 after they threatened to transfer him to London, a city he disliked. He managed to get a similar post with the
Daily Sketch
, but left in 1935 to join Reuters.

In 1936 the Chief Editor of Reuters cabled his Paris office requesting that Bodington be sent to cover the war in Spain. The Paris Bureau Chief advised against it, as Bodington was recovering from an illness and, besides, he was more valuable in Paris.
¹⁸

Nevertheless Bodington, who spoke Spanish nearly as well as he spoke French, went to Barcelona and while there
he got a taste for the world of espionage. Someone had put him in touch with one Otto Punter, a Swiss journalist who operated a network of intelligence agents from Switzerland and who in 1936 became the Republican Government’s link with the international press. Bodington enjoyed the society of spies and would boast of being on terms with many of the ‘clandestine figures’ of the day. He also liked to give people the impression that he too was engaged in espionage, not an uncommon hobby for Reuters agents in the Thirties.
¹⁹

Déricourt and Bodington became good friends. Henri found Nicholas’s urbane and well-informed company a pleasant change from the flyers’ club at Le Bourget. And Bodington was so well informed. He was always full of gossip from the Embassy, intrigue in the diplomatic world, whispers about secret signals, the comings and goings of the law makers and their messengers. In fact Bodington was a secret agent
manqué
and the little he knew about the diplomatic world was what he caught in the form of crumbs at his father’s table.

There was enough political gossip and intrigue in Paris during the late Thirties to satisfy all the secret agents
manqués
. The dramatic political changes that had occurred on three of her borders had rocked the fragile socialist coalition which had governed France for more than fifteen years. Right-wing or fascist groups had begun to flourish and political debate had degenerated into violent demonstrations, mass rallies and at times open gang warfare. The increasingly repugnant Nazi regime in Germany had let loose a wave of refugees from the east, while the Civil War in Spain sent even more refugees from the south. Large concentration camps were constructed to cope with these human tides and a mood of xenophobia crept through French society. Déricourt’s radio operator, Marotin, was a member of the right-wing Action Français and tried on a number of occasions to get Henri to enlist. But Déricourt was utterly unmoved by political arguments. At best he
was remotely aware of the threat of some major conflict, but only very remotely.

During the spring of 1938, Paris prepared itself for a royal visit from the British monarch. King George VI was responding to an invitation the President of France had extended to him back in 1936, to visit the war-graves and generally do whatever Heads of State do to cement good relations. As the date for the visit approached there was a new outbreak of street violence, especially among the communist and fascist groups, that threatened to disrupt the royal occasion. The French authorities were convinced that much of this unrest had been imported by political refugees from Germany. During that spring a senior German police officer arrived in Paris as a guest of the French authorities. Krimminalrat Karl Boemelburg was a founder member of Interpol.