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Living in France when war started

In 1940 I was living in France with my parents. My father was a traveller over the Northern part of France for Huntley and Palmers who were based in Reading but had a factory just outside of Paris. I was born in 1926 and we lived in Vincennes, a suburb of Paris and we (my brother and I), went to school there.

Just before the war we went on holiday to a little village called Saint Saens near to Dieppe and we liked it so much we went back the following year.

That was the year war broke out in September so my father decided to stay in Saint Saens and go to the local village school and mix with the local children. We didn’t want to go back to Paris where we might be bombed and he felt it would be safer there in the country. It was a marvellous time for us children it was a nice summer - apple orchards and vineyards and we made friends with the farmer. The English came with an expeditionary force and some of them settled in the village while others went to the front in the Cold War, so to speak, in the winter of 1939-40. The hotels were taken over by the officers. It was an extremely bad winter with snowdrifts etc and I caught pneumonia. There were no doctors around but my father managed to find an army doctor who came, the worse for drink from the mess,said I had to stay home but there was no medicine. An old lady who used to help my mother with the cooking looked after me. Was extremely ill and nearly died.

In the early part of the summer — April or May we could hear the guns booming in the distance. The front was little North of Neufchatel which was about fifteen or twenty miles away. As things got a bit stickier, the troops started pulling back and you could see the retreat. Some of the British officers were still in the village until we got up one morning and they were all gone. We felt abandoned in a way because no-one had warned us about or advised us what to do.

Refugees

The refugees were coming through from Belgium and Holland through the village, most of them with handcarts and horse and carts or just walking, carrying what they could. There was a hall attached to the school which was used as a dormitory by the refugees. Upstairs was what had been the Naafi and everything had just been left when the English went. The refugees looted the whole place and took all the food and moved on. They were a stream of people who just moved away from the front; they didn’t know where they were going. Shops were just emptied as they went along. They begged and I suppose, stole. The refugees did not take to us kindly as we had a car. We were an obstruction and some refused to move out of the way. Some old dears lay there by the side of the road, ill or exhausted.

My father decided we would be better off in Paris fortunately, as my father knew the roads, we were able to avoid a lot of the refugees who blocked some roads. We were dodging between streams of refugees when we came to a bridge where there were some English soldiers, it was a rearguard action and they said ‘We are going to blow this bridge up’. I think they were a guards regiment — Coldstream or Grenadiers. English, they told us to go back as the enemy is only so far away. My father said he knew how to get out of the situation and asked ‘Do you have any petrol ?’. The soldiers left us have a jerry can of petrol which was very kind then no sooner did we cross the bridge, then up went the bridge. It rattled the windows. It must have been wired up ready to go.

We had a Citroen with an English flag that he fitted on the front and we found our way back to Paris where our flat was as we had left it. I was till recovering from my pneumonia and my parents decided to send us to the South of France. It was a centre called a Station Climatique run by nuns at Moutchic near Bordeaux. It was by a lake I travelled on my own by train but there were lots of kids on the trains. I was in quarantine when I got to the centre for two weeks and even after that we didn’t get any news from my parents. I realised afterwards that they were on they were on the move on their way to pick me up. If they had been caught they would have been caught and interned near Paris and possibly used as hostages.

A dangerous escape through occupied France

Eventually my parents turned up; they had been strafed on the way. They had left everything behind except what they could carry away although it was surprising what they could carry- even photographs. They collected me and my father had found out that there was a boat from Bordeaux but the consul told him that it had already gone and there was possibly one from Bayonne. A laissez passe document to allow us to move about was given to us. Traffic was stopped so there was no traffic on the road. We felt isolated and apprehensive — anything could have happened. There was a terrible storm which set fire to the forests we were travelling through. One tree fell behind us, very close. It was like burning our bridges; nothing but moving forward then. There was a demarcation zone at that time between German occupied France in the North and the Vichy government to the South. We were North of that.

We went to the consul’s office to get the papers to allow us to travel. The Queen Emma was the name of the boat which I think usually went between Dover and Calais. We travelled through the night. It was packed tight with people so you can imagine what the toilets were like and there was no food.

Then half way through the journey the next morning, we saw four destroyers tooting and coming full speed towards us. There was no sight nicer. Apparently there were submarines about and they were there to escort us. A little later we came across a ship that had been sunk and the end was sticking up in the air; it must have had air in it. We ended up in Plymouth but we were there for two days on the boat as they questioned us, even the children, looking for 5th columnists.

The consuls would have sent a message to say that people were waiting to leave France but I don’t know how the messages to get across. The Germans hadn’t got a hold on the place by then; they hadn’t consolidated and their front line was still coming down. My father knew who to go to. The consul in the North of France said ‘ I am catching the same boat. I am making my way down.’ So I don’t know how the messages got to England that there were people waiting to escape. But it was manned by English merchantmen.
Another thing that was a terrible shame was that many who stayed were incarcerated in prison.

After the war our Paris flat was left untouched as we left it. Can you understand that? I would have though that the Germans would have gone from house to house and taken everything, but they never found out, they never touched the flat and the landlord did a good job. He kept it for us in case we wanted it when we came back.

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