´óÏó´«Ã½

• Continued from chapter five

Where to hide Jack next? The Casellis’ contact network spread far and wide. Within a very short space of time, Jack found himself at the château at Cudot. This was the ancestral seat of the St Phalle family. At the time, Alexandre de St-Phalle was the proprietor of an immense domain and also of an important bank in Paris — La Banque St Phalle. His wife was an American called Helen Harper and they had nine children. Only the three youngest — all daughters - Clotilde, aged twenty-one, Thérèse, eighteen, and Marie Alpais aged six were at home in the château with their mother.
Jack was hidden in a small room in the château called the chapel. There he lived in relative comfort, out of the view of the staff and yet able to enjoy the warmth of a family home.

It was the Caselli brothers again who decided that Jack’s time at the château had come to an end and arrangements were secretly made for his next move.
On or about Saturday 30th July, in the early hours of the morning, Clotilde de St-Phalle and a local farmer accompanied Jack on a 13 km bicycle ride to an agreed rendez-vous point. Situated on the top of a hill overlooking the town of St Julien-du-Sault, the agreed meeting point was the romantic ruin of the chapel of Vauguillan.

Finally, their wait at the rendez-vous point was over. A car arrived, driven by a man called M Louis Condemine. An industrialist from the neighbouring town of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne he had a factory manufacturing agricultural canvases and tarpaulins in the town. Jack took his leave of Clotilde and the farmer and once more entrusted his life to a stranger.
M Condemine then took Jack by car almost back to the château at Cudot. His destination was an isolated farmhouse called ‘Machefer’ which was located in woodland just less than 2 kilometres to the north-west of the château. It was back to living rough in the forest with a maquis group once more.

But this was a stay which didn’t last long. On or around 1st August, the Casellis arranged another move for Jack. His destination lay some kilometres to the north in the village of Chaumot.
Since his forced parachute landing in France almost three months before, Jack had spent no more than five consecutive nights in the same bed, with the exception of his five week stay in Sens Hospital. He’d known the hardships of the maquis camps with their lack of sanitation, rough living conditions and meagre food rations, as well as sharing the privations of ordinary citizens living in wartime France.

Now at last he could live more of a ‘normal’ family life, in a loving household, despite the limitations placed on him by his clandestine existence. His hosts this time were M and Mme Merlette and their daughter Mimi. M Merlette was not only the blacksmith and mayor of the village, but he was also secretly involved in resistance work. He and his wife were already risking their lives by sheltering a Jewess, whose daughter and grand-daughter had been gassed in a Nazi concentration camp. Presumably, they felt that the addition of a British airman to the household didn’t present that much more of an additional risk!
August ‘44 had started hot, sunny and full of promise. The Allies had landed two months before and were making progress south.

Finally, on August 21st news came through that Sens, fifteen kilometres to the north-east of Chaumot, the town where Jack had been treated in hospital, had been liberated by the Americans!

The day after, and it was the turn of Chaumot when American tanks rumbled into the village.

Freedom must have tasted sweet for the villagers of Chaumot after four years of occupation, but liberation in the Merlette household had brought about a dilemma — what exactly should be done with Jack to ensure his safe and speedy repatriation?

After speaking with the Americans in the village, it was decided that Jack should return with a group of soldiers who were going back to Sens. He always remembered thinking that Chaumot was quite a long way from Sens, because it took the best part of the day to get to the city. However, that was because the mini-convoy he was travelling in meandered around the countryside, first to the west and then to the east of Chaumot, picking up German prisoners on the way, before finally arriving in Sens.

It’s difficult to imagine how strange that journey must have felt. On the one hand, Jack was probably speculating about how long it would take to get back to England, and exactly what was in store for him there, in terms of the medical care he would need and how soon he would regain his speech and get full movement back to his right side. On the other hand, he couldn’t exactly share his fears and expectations, nor query exactly what was going to happen to him at journey’s end, as his speech was still quite limited — restricted to a few well-practised phrases — and he had no way of explaining the trials and tribulations he’d been through in the last three months. Moreover, most of his travelling companions were German soldiers, subdued and depressed in defeat and the American soldiers in charge of them, one imagines, would have been in high spirits and therefore not in a mood to coax information painstakingly out of Jack.

What did happen to Jack when he finally arrived in Sens had probably never entered into his head as being within the realms of possibility. Taken before the American command to explain himself, Jack was completely at a loss. He had no identity tags — both of them were long gone — confiscated by the Germans on 15th May when he’d been shot, and he was totally unable to explain the long and complicated story of what he’d been through.

The Americans therefore came to the conclusion that he was a German imposter! He had, after all, arrived with a contingent of German prisoners, so it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable conclusion. Jack was therefore doomed to spend his first night of freedom imprisoned in the gloomy and cavernous ‘sous-sol’ of the Palais Synodial adjoining Sens Cathedral in the company of German prisoners and suspected French collaborators.

Luck was, however, on Jack’s side. Being tall, he was recognised amongst the group of prisoners by a French résistant who had previously made Jack’s acquaintance. He immediately drew the commanding officer’s attention to the mistake that had been made, telling him in no uncertain terms that a British airman had somehow ended up amongst the German prisoners. At Jack’s request, he was taken to Sens Hospital where the Americans would be able to find some of the medical staff who had treated him, thus confirming his identity and proving the nature of his injuries by reference to his medical records. At the same time, the military authorities were consulting with Gilbert Praz, the man who had organised his escape from Sens Hospital some 9 weeks before. He categorically confirmed that a terrible mistake had been made and that Jack was a British airman and not a German imposter.

• Continued in chapter seven

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Allan Price of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Janet Marsden and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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