The Paris Agent(5)

“When the war started, I had a promotion of sorts, and I ended up working as a flight engineer. It was marvelous fun at first, soaring into the sky with a crew that soon enough felt like brothers to me. But…everything changed in 1940 with the Battle of France. Me and the boys were so proud to be defending our neighbor—we knew England was at risk too and we wanted to do for France what we hoped the world would do for us if the Germans came to our shores. But one day, on a mission over Northern France, my plane took a brutal hit.” I gasp in shock, and Dad nods slowly, still staring out at the water, but his gaze is distant now and his voice drops. “We had no choice but to bail out and it was terrifying. Ian Owens’ chute didn’t open. No chance he could have survived a fall like that. The rest of the crew were captured pretty much right away.”

“And you?” I ask, stunned.

“Ah, I was the lucky one that day,” Dad says softly. “By some miracle a gust of wind caught my chute, and I was blown away from the others, right into the backyard of a sympathetic French farmer. He hid me for months while the area was lousy with Germans. He put me to work with his sons—fixing their cars, working on the fields—hiding in plain sight as it were. Not an uncommon thing for helpful Frenchmen to do for downed airmen at the time. Once that initial phase of the occupation had settled into something calmer—still awful, mind, but not quite as chaotic—the farmer sought out a local resistance group and in time, they took me into their network of safe houses. Your mum and I weren’t married yet, but we were dating, and she had no idea if I was alive or dead for over a year.” He shakes his head as he exhales. “I suspect that just about drove her crazy.”

“But…what?” The slight sting that Dad had been keeping secrets from me is now a soul-deep ache and confusion. “Dad.” He doesn’t react, so I say again, this time more urgently, “That’s how you learned French, isn’t it? You told me you learned at school…”

“Like I said, love,” he says quietly, “I didn’t want to lie to you and your brother, but it was easiest to give you both simpler explanations for these things at first. Then time got away from me. Some things are easier to forget than to confront.”

“Wow,” I breathe, shaking my head. “Dad! This is incredible.”

“They were wild times. Everyone my age has a story to tell about the war years.”

“But…but you?” I suppose any daughter would be shocked to hear a parent had lived through such an ordeal, but my father is so quiet—at times, bordering on shy. I don’t think of Dad as weak but even so, I just can’t picture him living under such danger.

“And then, after I escaped France—”

“How did you ‘escape France’？”

“There was really only one way out and that was the escape lines operated by resistance volunteers. They made up false papers for me, then smuggled me through a series of safe houses, from Lille to Paris, where they paired me up with a girl…a resistance operative, of sorts. She also needed to get out, so we escaped via the Pyrenees.”

“But—the French-Spanish border is…what…500 miles from Paris?”

He gives a little shrug.

“Thereabouts.”

“So, you and some British girl just…what? Drove from Paris to Spain?”

Dad shakes his head.

“Oh no. We caught a train together to St. Jean de Luz, then a guide took us onward from there by foot through the mountains. I mean, it wasn’t as simple as a leisurely hike. Those mountains were riddled with people who wanted to stop evaders like me. First there was the German Gestapo, and the Milice Française, and of course, even the Spanish in the Guardia Civil wanted to stop us. It was an impossibly difficult twenty-four hours.” He glances down at his feet and mutters, “My God, by the time we reached the safe house in Oiarzun, even my blisters had blisters. Every step was agony.”

“You walked out of occupied France. You just walked out through the mountains into Spain,” I whisper incredulously.

“I needed to get home and that was the only way to do so.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose and squeeze my eyes closed for a moment, trying to piece it all together. “When were you shot down?”

“June 19, 1940.”

“But…when did your family die?”

“August 29, 1940.”

“Oh, Dad…” I croak, eyes filling with tears. “When did you find out they were…gone…？”

“The day I arrived back here to Liverpool. July 27, 1941,” he whispers unevenly. “When I left, my parents and brothers were alive and well in our beautiful home. When I came back, our house had been leveled. The bomb caused a fire, so everything we owned had been burnt so even the rubble was cleared. The only thing I had left of my family was their graves and my memories. That was it.”

“My God, Dad. I’m sorry.”

“It was tough,” he says, but I catch a glimpse of the stoic father I’m used to as he clears his throat and straightens his spine. “Plenty of people had difficult stories through those years. Mine isn’t special. My family was gone, and your mother was right—I couldn’t bring them back by sitting in my misery. So I guess that’s where the story really gets interesting, because—”