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50b - War around the Austin (concluded)

"There was one small story I was going to tell you concerning my brother, he died as I say in 2004, he had gone all through the war and settled down in Somerset to take care of my parents but when he went to France in 1939, he and some others were billeted at a small town not too far from Lille I believe and he met a young girl there, and the family liked him and everything else, he used to go to the house, her name was Giselle, always carried a photograph and everything like that, she was quite a bit younger, and then after the war, I was on leave, he was on leave and I said shall we go and see if we can find her, he said oh no, no, he said, closed book and he never mentioned it again. I now find that some, probably about ten years ago, they got in contact with him via …, the lady Giselle married during the war, had a daughter of her own, and her grand-daughter I believe was a bit of a whiz on computers and also learning English, went through the thing, found the Cooter name and everything else, and they got in contact by letter.

But the other remarkable thing that I found, I found a very flimsy piece of paper which was the British Red Cross, and Giselle, during the war, had written down this thing trying to locate Norman Leonard Cooter, not solder, sapper, whatever, a private individual via the Red Cross, and it had actually got a German stamp on it to say that they had approved this and via, somewhere, it came to England and the British Red Cross couldn’t trace him, but of course he was in the army, this is why they couldn’t.
Anyway I have now got these letters, and I am sort of slowly going through them but it would turn out that Giselle and her husband were both members of the resistance, and there’s a wonderful photograph of them standing there with their medals on. They have now moved down to the south of France for health reasons, but I thought what a wonderful story; my brother never married! No. You know after that, he …
Knowing my brother, a very, very shy guy, I imagine that he never told her how he felt anyway, consequently she thought well, you know, we have been good friends and everything else like that, that’s it. But I have got all these letters and stuff, I must get them into some sort of order."

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