Rosie's War (8 page)

‘Pat! My God! Pat Say! What are you doing here?’ He let out a laugh. ‘It’s me. Ben Everton-Jones.’

I gave a gasp of amazement. Ben was an old boyfriend of my sister’s from London. The last time I had seen him had been at a farewell party in Hampstead a couple of nights before I had left London.

He explained what had happened to him and the other men. He was an RAF officer who had been shot down a few days previously. Although his head injuries were horrific, he assured me that they weren’t life threatening. The others had been less lucky. One, Major Toby Tailyour, was close to death. The other, Lieutenant Mike Ansell, the British Army’s youngest commanding officer, lay blinded. His unit had been cut off in northern France and had taken refuge in the loft of a farm building. Some retreating British soldiers had mistaken them for Germans and had fired on them, hitting Ansell in the face at point-blank range. An American ambulance crew working for the Red Cross had transported the three of them to the hospital disguised as French soldiers.

As I looked at Ben in his bloody bandages I suddenly became overwhelmed. Life was becoming a nightmare. All I had wanted to do was get home to England but it looked like I had got it all so wrong. I was trapped in Paris and would never see my family again. My pent-up fears came to the surface and I began to cry violently. Ben was terribly embarrassed by my outburst but very kind.

‘Don’t worry, Pat,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Look, we’re both in the system now. They’ll send us home as soon as they can.’

He probably thought of me as a burdensome kid sister. I didn’t mind. Ben was a link with the normal world back home. After that I saw him whenever I could.

I was to spend just a few weeks at the hospital. They passed quickly. The hours were long: I woke up at 5 a.m. and started swabbing down the corridors half an hour later, with a break in the afternoon while I slept flat out. In the evening I waited on the doctors in their dining room. They were confident and detached Americans and appeared to find the arrival of the German army merely an interesting phenomenon. They were supposed to finish their meal by eleven but would often stay chatting until much later while I worked around them and tried to hurry them up. All the breakfast things would have to be laid before I could run out into the night to my couch. The one compensation was that I could finish any left-over wine or champagne.

I kept a low profile and hardly spoke to anyone during my stay, apart from Ben. There seemed to be no English staff around. The doctors were friendly enough but distant and my French co-workers largely ignored me. Perhaps they were afraid.

I certainly had no feelings of fear, especially as the US Ambassador arrived in the maids’ dressing room one day to assure us that we would all be protected, whatever our nationality. I was completely cut off from the outside world and was shielded from the German occupation of the city, cocooned as I was in that big hospital and exhausted by the long hours of work. I was just one of many. As at boarding school, I clung to the comfort of a routine life in an institution. My one outside sortie to watch the Germans entering Paris had been at the beginning of my stay. I had a special permission pass to be out after curfew so I could go the short distance to my flat after work but I hadn’t used it to go further afield. Midnight was no time for an English person to be scuttling around the outskirts of occupied Paris.

This rather sheltered life lasted precisely three weeks. One morning early in July I was summoned once again to Mr Close’s office. He beckoned me to a chair. There was an uncomfortable silence while he fiddled with his tie and avoided eye contact. His jovial manner of our previous meeting had gone.

‘Miss Say,’ he said at last. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to leave immediately. The German authorities have asked us if there are any English people here. We shall have to tell them the truth. It would be awkward for all concerned if you were caught here. Not least for you, of course.’

‘But you told me I’d be looked after!’ I spluttered in fear and anger. ‘So did your ambassador.’

‘The British Interests Section at our embassy should be able to do something for you,’ he said by way of reply. ‘It’s a Mr Sutton in charge, I believe. Could you please see Matron immediately to make your arrangements for leaving.’

He looked away as if to end the meeting. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Say,’ he muttered quietly.

I had never believed his expressions of concern for me. So that was that and thank you, Mr Close.

I left his office and wandered down the long corridor. For the first time since I had left the Manguins at the station in Avignon I was really frightened. I went to the flat and packed my things. The martinet of a matron took my uniform and wished me well with some doubt in her voice. She allowed me to telephone the US Embassy from her office. I was out of luck. Mr Sutton was away until the day after next.

I went to the staff canteen and sat glumly over a cup of coffee. I did not even have anywhere to sleep that night. Whom could I turn to? I had the address of Claude Manguin’s sister, Lucile, who ran one of the most notable dress houses in Paris on the rue Gambon but I didn’t think I could call on her. I was beginning to realize that I was actually dangerous to people. I was an enemy alien and if a huge organization like the American Hospital felt threatened then I could hardly ask a French businesswoman to help. She might be jeopardizing her livelihood (and perhaps even her personal safety) if she sheltered me. I was completely alone.

I thought of my parents. They must be sick from worrying about me. I had sent them a couple of letters from Paris but I doubted whether they had reached them in the confusion of these past weeks. Hopefully they had received my last letter from Avignon, posted nearly a month before in early June. But even that would scarcely have been of comfort to them: I had written that I was going home via Paris of all places! I sat at the table for what seemed like hours. There were tears in my eyes. The doctor who had taken me to the victory parade came over and asked me what was wrong. I explained my predicament. He listened carefully then squeezed my hand.

‘Look, Pat, I’ll see what I can do. You hang on here.’

He hurried off. I sat for a long while. The silence was finally broken by a loud, American voice from across the canteen.

‘Where is she?’

I looked up to see a formidable sight striding towards me. Here was a thick-set woman of late middle age; raddled, I suppose you might say. A cigar drooped from her lips. She was dressed in an immaculate American Ambulance Corps uniform. She beamed at me and took off her cap to reveal a large head of closely cropped hair. On her wrist she was wearing a bulky, man’s watch.

‘I’m Hoytie Wiborg. Dr Murray told me all about you. Don’t worry, kid, we’ll get you out of here.’

She gave me a firm handshake and sat down heavily at my table. She explained rapidly that she was one of a team of drivers allowed by the Germans to bring seriously wounded French prisoners to the American Hospital for treatment. She was full of enthusiasm for my case.

‘Why don’t we bandage you from head to toe and take you in the ambulance away from Paris? Or you could pretend to be an American and join the unit! Or pose as my daughter.’

I shook my head. I was quite overwhelmed by this barrage of ideas. Even the most ridiculous seemed plausible in that mood of despair.

‘I asked the ambulance drivers a few days ago if they could take me. But it’s too risky for them.’

‘There are loads of things that we can do for you,’ she said as she got up. ‘Let’s go.’

I had no choice but to trust this woman. I followed her in a daze. We drove off in her white ambulance into the centre of Paris. She left me at a cafe and came back a couple of hours later with a wide grin on her face. She had found me work in a police canteen near by. We walked over to see it. She introduced me to the supervisor, bade me a quick farewell and hurried off.

That was the one and only time I was to see Hoytie in Paris. I had been too bewildered by the force of her personality and by the sheer misery of my situation to show any curiosity about her. She had arrived out of the blue to organize my life and then simply disappeared.

It wasn’t until I met her again very briefly in Marseille at the beginning of 1942 that I discovered that Mary Hoyt Wiborg was an heiress whose money came from the long-established and distinguished American firm of Wiborg and Ault, ‘Makers of Fine Printing and Lithographic Inks’. It was an enlightened firm that had commissioned posters by Toulouse-Lautrec and other painters. Hoytie had lived in France for many years and had been a well-known lesbian in pre-war Parisian artistic circles, socializing with the likes of Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Picasso and Cocteau. She had fallen in love with the formidable arts patron, Polish-born Misia Sert. Hoytie tried unsuccessfully to seduce her in the sleeping compartment of a train to Venice and was content after that to be one of the gang as long as she had a place in Misia’s life. She was accepted as a good-hearted joke by her friends when not too irritating for words. She was a real character who had never fulfilled her ambition of achieving a place in Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
. In the autumn of 1939 she had opted for war work, doing her bit for the country that had looked after her for so long.

I didn’t know any of this at the time, of course. Looking back on her now, she seems like a caricature lesbian, masculine and hard-drinking. But at the time I simply thought that she was a rather fearsome old lady and quite reminiscent of one of my great aunts. She fulfilled her mission to help me that afternoon in July without behaving in any more personal a way to me than that of a caring aunt. I suspect now that she had to give the police canteen a good subsidy to take me. I always remember her with gratitude and affection.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Police Canteen

T
he police canteen operated from a closed-down primary school on the rue du Bac, a long, winding street in the elegant
Fème arrondissement
just behind the Chamber of Deputies. Such canteens had been installed all over Paris to feed the policemen whose families had left for the countryside to escape the German occupation of the city.

Once again I was swept into a strict routine of work that started early and went on into the night. I lived with the concierge and worked like a slave. I expected no wages but money was not a problem, given that the British Interests Section at the US Embassy allotted me 300 francs a month (about £70 in today’s money). I worked a fifteen-hour day, spending long hours at a smelly sink washing up greasy plates. I had two afternoons off per week. The local
commissaire
made sure that the Germans were duly informed of my existence and I signed my name as an enemy alien every day at the
Kommandantur
.

For much of my time at the canteen my main worry was the chef. He was a tall, muscular and fearsome character straight out of a Zola novel who would usually be drunk by noon. He would curse
la sale petite anglaise
who had once again refused to gouge out the eyes and tongues in the calves’ heads before they were cooked. He tried to attack me one afternoon when he was particularly drunk. It took two policemen to drag him off, leaving him with a couple of teeth missing and a determined grudge against me.

The real compensation for all this hard work and aggravation was that there was plenty to eat and drink. After all, no one was going to let the police starve. We also received extra supplies of country food sent by the police families who had fled to regions such as Normandy and Brittany. Usually, by seven in the morning I would already have eaten sausage and bread, swilled down with red wine. I would sit down to meat and vegetables piled high on my plate at three in the afternoon (when the last of the police were back on duty) and again at about midnight.

The canteen quickly divided into pro-German and pro-English groups. The latter were certainly more numerous, perhaps reflecting the fact that the police were treated by their new German masters as a necessary labour force of degenerates and were under strict military discipline. Many bridled with resentment at this state of affairs and every day someone would have a new story of German insolence.

There were fierce arguments and even fights. The pro-German police would curse the English as I served them at the table, repeating propaganda stories from Dunkirk: how the English had refused to let the French get into the boats and had bayoneted them in the water. Everyone was predicting victory for their own side. One particularly obnoxious policeman goaded me relentlessly for a few days with the ‘news’ of a successful German landing at Dover and the taking of hostages.