“You never told me any of this,” I say. Dad and I are close and I thought I knew his life well. It stings a little that this is a part of his past he’s never shared with me.
“There’s a lot I never told you, love,” he says gently.
“Well? What else?”
“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—”
He pauses for a moment, and when he speaks again, his tone has changed. It’s darker now—heavier, somehow. He stares out at the ocean, his shoulders slumped forward as he speaks.
“The Special Operations Executive approached me and invited me to try out to train as an agent to return to France. I owed my life to the French, and I wanted to do more to help the war effort after what had happened to my family. That invitation to join the SOE felt like an answer to my prayers.”
I’m aware of the work of the SOE. I’ve seen those old films about beautiful women acting as spies behind enemy lines, courageous and dashing British men working alongside them too. My father is nothing like those characters. He’s not physically imposing or courageous or especially handsome, or brilliant and charismatic like the actors in those films. Or maybe he is, and I’ve just never seen it, because to me, he’s always just been Dad—a dreadfully uncool, slightly shy man with a heart as big as the world itself.
He’s staring out at the water now, the wind tousling his faded brown hair, his gaze distant and somber. And for the very first time in my life, I wonder if I know my father at all.
“I just don’t understand why you would keep any of this a secret from us,” I say. Has Dad lied to us? Maybe not openly, maybe not directly, but even so, there’s a deception here. I try to ease the pain of that by staring into his kind eyes as he turns to me, but I can’t shake the sense of hurt.
“I never intended to lie to you and Archie. Your mother and I married right after the war ended and you were born ten months later. It all happened very quickly, Charlotte, so I wasn’t close to ready to explain when you were little, but even as you grew older…” He exhales, his eyes growing cloudy. “The truth is that my SOE days were very complicated, love. Not easy to reflect upon, even now. To be completely frank, I’ve spent a lot of my life trying not to think about those times. Speaking about it like this was out of the question for most of my life.”