We fall into silence after that—a space held by my father for me to probe and question, and yet, I don’t.
It’s not that I’m not curious. I am, desperately so.
It’s simply that I can hear the tension in his voice even as he offers to share his past with me. My father has been through more than enough in this past year without me digging around in what’s left of his darkest memories. Perhaps Aunt Kathleen is right and there are a few skeletons buried in the closet of my father’s past, but surely that only makes it more difficult for him to embark upon this project.
For the very first time, I wonder if the gaps in his memory aren’t just from his injury…but maybe from trauma too. And maybe that’s why my mother was so determined that Dad should just look forward, never back.
C H A P T E R 5
ELOISE
Rouen, France
February, 1944
By lunchtime, the train had reached the outskirts of Rouen. I stared out the window as we passed through the southwest of the town, the industrial district, or what was left of it after the sustained Allied bombing raids in recent months.
“Such savage bombing, no?” the colonel beside me said sadly, leaning forward as he followed my gaze to the rubble. I bit my tongue—suppressing an irrational urge to point out that the Allies were hardly unprovoked in trying to ensure the town’s infrastructure remained useless to her occupiers. “I do hope your uncle is found safe and well. Please be in touch if I can help.”
Soon enough the train had stopped at Gare Saint-Sever. The soldiers around me said goodbye as they passed me my bags, but when one saw me struggling to make my way out of the seat, he insisted on carrying the two suitcases that had been stored above his seat. When he lowered them to the ground outside of the station, I heard the colonel calling me.
“Miss Leroy?” I had been about to walk away—so close to escaping unscathed! Now, my spine stiffened despite my best efforts to hide my frustration, and I turned back to him, trying to force a calm but questioning smile on my face. “I have a car waiting. Could I offer you a lift to your hotel?”
I would be staying the night in a lodging house, but I was never going to reveal the details of that to the colonel. Still, this was an offer I did not want to refuse—I didn’t want to offend him, or even to have to explain why I didn’t want to get into his car. Besides, a chauffeur-driven car ride across a bridge to the right bank of the Seine would likely mean avoiding the military checkpoint on the bridge, and although this would only be a temporary reprieve from that test, it was a welcome one. Basile had warned me the city was filled with Gestapo and the French Milice and I’d be showing my papers to various guards constantly.
Only local residents were allowed to be within the forbidden zone, which was why my cover story and papers listed an address in Le Havre as my home and I would need to register my visit to secure a permis de sejour, a visitor’s permit.
The SOE had arranged the finest forger to create my papers so they should pass review, but I was not at all disappointed about orienting myself in the town before I tested that theory.
“Thank you,” I said, feigning surprise and relief. “But I do hate to be a burden to you.”
“It’s no trouble. Where are you staying?”
“Well, first I’ll store my luggage with the consigne at the Gare Rive Droite. My uncle has friends in business I can check in with nearby, you see.”
“Of course. I’ll have the driver drop me to the Hotel De Ville first and he can take you wherever you like after that.”
As we traveled into the town, I felt a pang of grief at the endless rubble. It was clear that the Allies targeted the blocks around the Seine again and again, destroying the historical bridges, then the temporary pontoons the Germans constructed in their place, and so on. And in Rouen, like Paris, German soldiers and the Milicens held a very visible presence on the street.
My gut was a churning mix of emotions I didn’t want to acknowledge and couldn’t afford to name. To focus on them would be to show them on my face.
“All the best, Miss Leroy,” the colonel said as he left the car to go into his hotel. I thanked him profusely and wished him well too, and several minutes later, his driver deposited me at the Gare Rive Droite. I went into the station, waited a few moments, then came back out onto the street to find the car gone, so I continued on foot to my lodgings.
By lunchtime, I was alone in my newly rented room, ready for the first test of my mission. I would move around constantly while in Rouen, but selected that first night’s accommodation based on the directions of my commanding officer, Basile, during our final briefing before I left Paris. His agents had long used a void behind a loose brick in the laneway opposite my room as a “drop box”—a place where the members of the circuit could pass information to one another.
“The first task of your mission is simple: just hide behind the drapes in your room and watch that laneway,” Basile told me.
He had been evacuated to London for a debrief two months earlier, leaving the SOE’s proud Normandy region network, the Janitor network, in the hands of his trusted w/t operator, Jérémie.
Jérémie was a loyal, dedicated agent, but he tended to prioritize speed over accuracy when it came to signaling. A team of highly trained secretaries at Baker Street did most of the decoding for the rest of the SOE, but Jérémie’s signals tended to be so muddled they required Freddie Booth, architect of the SOE’s cryptography procedure, to detangle each message.
Then, a few weeks after Basile’s evacuation, Jérémie’s accuracy abruptly improved. No longer was each message littered with mistakes—now every letter of every word was perfectly accurate, raising suspicions. Then when an agent returned from a mission to the south of France to report vague but troubling rumors of resistance arrests near Rouen, SOE officials became anxious about sending Basile back into the region.
The stakes could not be higher when it came to the Janitor circuit. Although only those closest to Churchill himself knew the precise details of the D-Day operation, we all knew the Allies were planning a landing on the continent and we all suspected the Normandy region would play a vital role. Basile built the Janitor network so his knowledge of the SOE’s operations in the region was simply too great to risk his exposure.
It was decided that he would return to France but would remain in hiding in Paris until conditions in Rouen could be confirmed. That’s where I came in. Baker Street had signaled Jérémie, instructing him to check the drop box between 13:00 and 13:30 hours. My first task was to watch to see who turned up. If Jérémie arrived, I’d make contact with him to request a comprehensive briefing on the circuit’s status. If all went well from there, I would go back to Paris to tell Basile that his return to Rouen would be a relatively safe prospect.
By 12:50, I had positioned myself behind the drapes in my room so that I could watch the laneway. I’d done my best to memorize Jérémie’s features from the photograph in his personnel file back in London. He was baby-faced and eager, grinning into the camera as if he was on his way somewhere exciting, not headed to a risky mission in occupied territory.