Winter of the World (55 page)

On a warm Mediterranean afternoon in October, Lloyd Williams arrived in the sunlit French town of Perpignan, only twenty miles from the border with Spain.

He had spent the month of September in the Bordeaux area, picking grapes for the wine harvest, just as he had in the terrible year of 1937. Now he had money in his pockets for buses and trams,
and could eat in cheap restaurants instead of living on unripe vegetables he dug up in people’s gardens or raw eggs stolen from hen-coops. He was going back along the route he had taken when
he left Spain three years ago. He had come south from Bordeaux through Toulouse and Béziers, occasionally riding freight trains, mostly begging lifts from truck drivers.

Now he was at a roadside café on the main highway running southeast from Perpignan towards the Spanish border. Still dressed in Maurice’s blue overalls and beret, he carried a small
canvas bag containing a rusty trowel and a mortar-spattered spirit level, evidence that he was a Spanish bricklayer making his way home. God forbid that anyone should offer him work: he had no idea
how to build a wall.

He was worried about finding his way across the mountains. Three months ago, back in Picardy, he had told himself glibly that he could find the route over the Pyrenees along which his guides had
led him into Spain in 1936, parts of which he had retraced in the opposite direction when he left a year later. But as the purple peaks and green passes came into distant view on the horizon, the
prospect seemed more daunting. He had thought that every step of the journey must be engraved on his memory, but when he tried to recall specific paths and bridges and turning points he found that
the pictures were blurred, and the exact details slipped infuriatingly from his mind’s grasp.

He finished his lunch – a peppery fish stew – then spoke quietly to a group of drivers at the next table. ‘I need a lift to Cerbère.’ It was the last village
before the Spanish border. ‘Anyone going that way?’

They were probably all going that way: it was the only reason for being here on this southeast route. All the same, they hesitated. This was Vichy France, technically an independent zone, in
practice under the thumb of the Germans occupying the other half of the country. No one was in a hurry to help a travelling stranger with a foreign accent.

‘I’m a mason,’ he said, hefting his canvas bag. ‘Going home to Spain. Leandro is my name.’

A fat man in an undershirt said: ‘I can take you halfway.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Are you ready now?’

‘Of course.’

They went outside and got into a grimy Renault van with the name of an electrical goods store on the side. As they pulled away, the driver asked Lloyd if he was married. A series of unpleasantly
personal inquiries followed, and Lloyd realized the man had a fascination with other people’s sex lives. No doubt that was why he had agreed to take Lloyd: it gave him the chance to ask
intrusive questions. Several of the men who had given Lloyd lifts had had some such creepy motive.

‘I’m a virgin,’ Lloyd told him, which was true; but that only led to an interrogation about heavy petting with schoolgirls. Lloyd did have considerable experience of that, but
he was not going to share it. He refused to give details while trying not to be rude, and eventually the driver despaired. ‘I have to turn off here,’ he said, and pulled up.

Lloyd thanked him for the ride and walked on.

He had learned not to march like a soldier, and had developed what he thought was a fairly realistic peasant slouch. He never carried a newspaper or a book. His hair had last been cut by a
brutally incompetent barber in the poorest quarter of Toulouse. He shaved about once a week, so that he normally had a growth of stubble, which was surprisingly effective in making him look like a
nobody. He had stopped washing, and acquired a ripe odour that discouraged people from talking to him.

Few working-class people had watches, in France or Spain, so the steel wristwatch with the square face that Bernie had given him as a graduation present had to go. He could not give it to one of
the many French people who had helped him, for a British watch could have incriminated them, too. In the end, with great sadness, he had thrown it into a pond.

His greatest weakness was that he had no identity papers.

He had tried to buy papers from a man who looked vaguely like him, and schemed to steal them from two others, but not surprisingly, people were cautious about such things these days. His
strategy was therefore to steer clear of situations in which he might be asked to identify himself. He made himself inconspicuous, he walked across fields rather than take roads when he had the
choice, and he never travelled by passenger train because there were often checkpoints at stations. So far he had been lucky. One village gendarme had demanded his papers, and when he explained
that they had been stolen from him after he got drunk and passed out in a bar in Marseilles, the policeman had believed him and sent him on his way.

Now, however, his luck ran out.

He was passing through poor agricultural terrain. He was in the foothills of the Pyrenees, close to the Mediterranean, and the soil was sandy. The dusty road ran through struggling smallholdings
and poor villages. The landscape was sparsely populated. To his left, through the hills, he got blue glimpses of the distant sea.

The last thing he expected was the green Citroën that pulled up alongside him with three gendarmes inside.

It happened very suddenly. He heard the car approaching – the only car he had heard since the fat man had dropped him off. He carried on shuffling like a tired worker going home. Either
side of the road were dry fields with sparse vegetation and stunted trees. When the car stopped, he thought for a second of making a run for it across the fields. He dropped the idea when he saw
the holstered pistols of the two gendarmes who jumped out of the car. They were probably not very good shots, but they might get lucky. His chances of talking his way out of this were better. These
were country constables, more amiable than the hard-nosed French city police.

‘Papers?’ said the nearest gendarme in French.

Lloyd spread his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘Monsieur, I am so unfortunate, my papers were stolen in Marseilles. I am Leandro, Spanish mason, going—’

‘Get in the car.’

Lloyd hesitated, but it was hopeless. The odds against his getting away were now worse than before.

A gendarme took him firmly by the arm, hustled him into the back seat, and got in beside him.

His spirits sank as the car pulled away.

The gendarme next to him said: ‘Are you English, or what?’

‘I am Spanish mason. My name—’

The gendarme made a waving-away gesture and said: ‘Don’t bother.’

Lloyd saw that he had been wildly optimistic. He was a foreigner without papers heading for the Spanish border: they simply assumed he was an escaping British soldier. If they had any doubt,
they would find proof when they ordered him to strip, for they would see the identity tag around his neck. He had not thrown it away, for without it he would automatically be shot as a spy.

And now he was stuck in a car with three armed men, and the likelihood that he would find a way to escape was zero.

They drove on, in the direction in which he had been heading, as the sun went down over the mountains on their right-hand side. There were no big towns between here and the border, so he assumed
they intended to put him in a village jail for the night. Perhaps he could escape from there. Failing that, they would undoubtedly take him back to Perpignan tomorrow and hand him over to the city
police. What then? Would he be interrogated? The prospect made him cold with fear. The French police would beat him up, the Germans would torture him. If he survived, he would end up in a prisoner
of war camp, where he would remain until the end of the war, or until he died of malnutrition. And yet he was only a few miles from the border!

They drove into a small town. Could he escape between the car and the jail? He could make no plan: he did not know the terrain. There was nothing he could do but remain alert and seize any
opportunity.

The car turned off the main street and into an alley behind a row of shops. Were they going to shoot him here and dump his body?

The car stopped at the back of a restaurant. The yard was littered with boxes and giant cans. Through a small window Lloyd could see a brightly lit kitchen.

The gendarme in the front passenger seat got out, then opened Lloyd’s door, on the side of the car nearest the building. Was this his chance? He would have to run around the car and along
the alley. It was dusk: after the first few yards he would not be an easy target.

The gendarme reached into the car and grasped Lloyd’s arm, holding him as he got out and stood up. The second one got out immediately behind Lloyd. The opportunity was not good enough.

But why had they brought him here?

They walked him into the kitchen. A chef was beating eggs in a bowl and an adolescent boy was washing up in a big sink. One of the gendarmes said: ‘Here’s an Englishman. He calls
himself Leandro.’

Without pausing in his work, the chef lifted his head and bawled: ‘Teresa! Come here!’

Lloyd remembered another Teresa, a beautiful Spanish anarchist who had taught soldiers to read and write.

The kitchen door swung wide and she walked in.

Lloyd stared at her in astonishment. There was no possibility of mistake: he would never forget those big eyes and that mass of black hair, even though she wore the white cotton cap and apron of
a waitress.

At first she did not look at him. She put a pile of plates on the counter next to the young washer-up, then turned to the gendarmes with a smile and kissed each on both cheeks, saying:
‘Pierre! Michel! How are you?’ Then she turned to Lloyd, stared at him, and said in Spanish: ‘No – it’s not possible. Lloyd, is it really you?’

He could only nod dumbly.

She put her arms around him, embraced him, and kissed him on both cheeks.

One of the gendarmes said: ‘There we are. All is well. We have to go. Good luck!’ He handed Lloyd his canvas bag, then they left.

Lloyd found his tongue. ‘What’s going on?’ he said to Teresa in Spanish. ‘I thought I was being taken to jail!’

‘They hate the Nazis, so they help us,’ she said.

‘Who is
us
?’

‘I’ll explain later. Come with me.’ She opened a door that gave on to a staircase and led him to an upper storey, where there was a sparsely furnished bedroom. ‘Wait
here. I’ll bring you something to eat.’

Lloyd lay down on the bed and contemplated his extraordinary fortune. Five minutes ago he had been expecting torture and death. Now he was waiting for a beautiful woman to bring him supper.

It could change again just as quickly, he reflected.

She returned half an hour later with an omelette and fried potatoes on a thick plate. ‘We’ve been busy, but we close soon,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a few
minutes.’

He ate the food quickly.

Night fell. He listened to the chatter of customers leaving and the clang of pots being put away, then Teresa reappeared with a bottle of red wine and two glasses.

Lloyd asked her why she had left Spain.

‘Our people are being murdered by the thousand,’ she said. ‘For those they don’t kill, they have passed the Law of Political Responsibilities, making criminals of
everyone who supported the government. You can lose all your assets if you opposed Franco even by “grave passivity”. You are innocent only if you can prove you supported him.’

Lloyd thought bitterly of Chamberlain’s reassurance to the House of Commons, back in March, that Franco had renounced political reprisals. What an evil liar Chamberlain had been.

Teresa went on: ‘Many of our comrades are in filthy prison camps.’

‘I don’t suppose you have any idea what happened to Sergeant Lenny Griffiths, my friend?’

Teresa shook her head. ‘I never saw him again after Belchite.’

‘And you . . . ?’

‘I escaped from Franco’s men, came here, got a job as a waitress . . . and found there was other work for me to do.’

‘What work?’

‘I take escaping soldiers across the mountains. That’s why the gendarmes brought you to me.’

Lloyd was heartened. He had been planning to do it alone, and he had been worried about finding the way. Now perhaps he would have a guide.

‘I have two others waiting,’ she said. ‘A British gunner and a Canadian pilot. They are in a farmhouse in the hills.’

‘When are you planning to go across?’

‘Tonight,’ she said. ‘Don’t drink too much wine.’

She went away again and returned half an hour later carrying an old, ripped brown overcoat for him. ‘It’s cold where we’re going,’ she explained.

They slipped out of the kitchen door and threaded their way through the small town by starlight. Leaving the houses behind, they followed a dirt track steadily uphill. After an hour they came to
a small group of stone buildings. Teresa whistled then opened the door to a barn, and two men came out.

‘We always use false names,’ she said in English. ‘I am Maria and these two are Fred and Tom. Our new friend is Leandro.’ The men shook hands. She went on: ‘No
talking, no smoking, and anyone who falls behind will be left. Are we ready?’

From here the path was steeper. Lloyd found himself slipping on stones. Now and again he clutched at stunted bushes of heather beside the path and pulled himself upwards with their aid. The
petite Teresa set a pace that soon had the three men puffing and blowing. She was carrying a flashlight, but she refused to use it while the stars were bright, saying she had to conserve the
battery.

The air got colder. They waded across an icy stream, and Lloyd’s feet did not get warm again afterwards.

An hour later, Teresa said: ‘Take care to stay in the middle of the path here.’ Lloyd looked down and realized he was on a ridge between steep slopes. When he saw how far he could
fall, he felt a little giddy, and quickly looked up and ahead at Teresa’s swiftly moving silhouette. In normal circumstances he would have enjoyed every minute of walking behind a figure like
that, but now he was so tired and cold he did not have the energy even to ogle.