Madame Barbara. Helen Forrester

learning from him without realising it.

      She found herself with more pocket money than many of her own age in the village; it wasn’t a wage, but it was generous spending money.

      Grandpa counselled saving. ‘No matter what you earn, put ten per cent by, luv. When you want somethin’ big, you’ll have the money.’

      Barbara wanted a bicycle, but Phyllis said it was an unnecessary expense; she must save up and buy it herself. Barbara wept in frustration. But she learned and eventually Grandpa gave her a whole ten shillings for her birthday to make up the sum required.

      He had long been dead before Barbara realised how wise he had been – and how kind.

      In the depression of the 1930s, young people were having real problems finding work, and when she saw the pittances which her girl friends in the village earned, and how they envied her, Barbara had enough sense to take a serious interest in a business which could, in time, be hers.

      And, who knows, she thought as she dealt daily with very decent men, one day I might marry one of them.

      

      As she lay, unable to sleep, on a decidedly old bed in a foreign country, Barbara remembered her parents, all her mother’s hard work, and the happy days before the war. And now, all that work – her whole life, indeed – seemed to her to have come to naught.

      Their clientele had been, on the whole, so pleasant. But then the war had come. Though it had not been bombed directly, her home had been in the path of German bombers on their way to Liverpool; a pile of earth like an outsized mole hill, at the back of the house, still bore witness to the explosion of a bomb jettisoned by a frightened pilot. Their home had, however, been very nearly destroyed by misuse.

      The sales representatives had vanished into the Forces. The evacuees and their mothers billeted on them had been a disastrous intrusion.

      After the evacuees decided to return to Liverpool, as yet unbombed, Barbara and Phyllis had recovered from the worst of that invasion; but, even, subsequently, as a refuge for the elderly from the bombing of London and the South of England, they had been unable to keep the house up. Civilians had to make do with what they had for the duration: no paint, no new bed linen or china dishes, no plumbing repairs, no flower garden – just a vegetable patch. And never enough coal for heating.

      When peace came, practically everything they owned was worn out. There was not an unpatched sheet in the house, not a curtain left other than blackout ones.

      The problems of repair and renovation, even now in 1948, seemed almost insurmountable, though damage to their property had been almost nothing in comparison with the havoc wreaked on Liverpool and its environs, or the almost total destruction of parts of Normandy. It had, however, the same overwhelming look of shabbiness and neglect which most of England had. And the faces of the people in the village shared with their French counterparts the same look of intense fatigue and of bad health.

      Barbara spared a compassionate thought for the French people round her. Betrayed by their Governments, despised for their surrender to the Germans, their young men still being killed in the war in French Indo-China, and in Algeria, living in a province which was a heap of ruins, how must they feel each time they were called cowardly? Ready to collapse?

      As she finally got up to wash and dress in preparation for going with Michel to Caen, she wondered if, in similar circumstances, without the Channel to protect them, the British would have done any better than the French had.

       Chapter Nine

      Michel found Barbara sitting waiting for him in the foyer of the hotel. She wore a pink woollen dress with the same jacket that she had worn the day before. Despite makeup, carefully applied, her eyes were black-rimmed from lack of sleep; her tears and ruminations of the night had not been conducive to sleep.

      She was not particularly looking forward to the promised expedition; she had been stupid to have even mentioned Caen to the driver. She told herself crossly that she was bound to feel even more depressed after looking at such a place. Still less, however, did she wish to spend the day by herself, wandering round Bayeux. And George’s mam had said, when kissing her goodbye, that she wanted all the information that Barbara could collect about what had happened to her son.

      She felt numb, unable to think clearly. It was as if she were floating in space, afraid to put a foot down on the earth, lest she be roused and burst into tears again, in mourning not only for all that she personally had lost, but also for a sad, sad world.

      As on the day before, she was hatless. Hats were another small thing that had vanished during the war – unless one was in the Services, where a hat was still part of a uniform. Her hair was elaborately swept up on either side of her face, to become curls on the top of her head. Similar curls were, as usual with her, confined at the nape of her neck by a precious tortoiseshell hair slide. This style tended to make her look taller than she was.

      As Michel walked into the foyer, he noted her makeup, and found himself wondering exactly where she had obtained such powder and paint.

      The paint reminded him how foolish he was to get involved with a foreign woman who had access to such luxuries as makeup. What chance had a poor French peasant against the irritatingly rich American soldiers still scattered around Europe – particularly the three who were staying in the same hotel? Then he pulled himself up. ‘I’m not in competition with anybody,’ he told himself firmly; ‘I’m simply taking a woman, for whom I feel sorry, to Caen because her husband died there.’

      In spite of her swollen eyelids and the shabbiness of her dress, however, she looked to him as exotic and interesting as if she had come from some faraway oriental country, instead of from just across the English Channel. It seemed to him a pity that all he could offer her was a taxi ride – no nylons, no chocolates, no makeup, no handsome uniform by her side.

      When he had told his mother and Anatole that he would be busy this Saturday, neither of them had queried it. If Barbara was seen in his taxi, it would be assumed that he was carrying yet another war widow to yet another grave. The most important point, he felt, was that old Duval should not notice a lady in his taxi on a day when the Americans were out of town, and, therefore, not easily available to say that he had their permission to help war widows.

      The old taxi had only one seat in front, for the driver. At his side was a platform on which heavy luggage could be carried. Today, of course, it was empty. Barbara managed to smile quite cheerfully at him as he opened the door for her and saw her comfortably ensconced in the back seat.

      He drove her along a main road which, he said, was newly repaired. There was not much traffic, and, occasionally, he would slow down to show her damage done to villages and farms in the great battle. It amazed her that the famous, huge bocages, dense thickets of bushes and young trees, had, in many places, withstood the onslaught of tanks, artillery and bombing, whereas walls and stone cottages had been pushed down and crushed.

      They passed a quaint, moated farmhouse. With pride, he told her that it had, occasionally, been a meeting place for the Partisans.

      He laughed, and then went on, ‘The owner pull up the drawbridge – difficult for the Boches to get in without noise.’

      From that house, he told her he had, one night, taken a downed British airman and hidden him in one of his chicken coops. He laughed again, as he added, ‘How he complain of the smell! He nice guy. Very grateful to us. His papa big guy in England. I learn much English from him. I write to him sometimes – old friend now.’

      He eased the taxi a little to the side, to allow a van to pass him. He waved to the driver.

      ‘Another old friend,’ he told his passenger. ‘He teach me to drive. He is engineer electrical – very clever fellow.’ Then he went on with his story, ‘Later, we keep the airman in the roof of our cottage for six weeks until my father take him to Port-en-Bessin.’

      ‘What happened when he