大象传媒

Louis Fernande Clark 1913-1992

My mother was born in Paris and brought up in Boulogne Sur Mer, Pas de Calais, by her mother and English stepfather. She married my father, Fernand Louis Charles Dudart (born 1910) in 1932. She moved to Orange in the Vaucluse, Southern France which became self-governing Vichy. Food - or the lack of it - became a major problem.

By 1943, my parents had four boys and decided to move to Dreux in German occupied France, where they understood the food situation to be more regulated.

Father was rejected by the French Military Board on at least two occasions, owing to a very severe would in his leg. He died of gangrene in 1945.

My father had been appointed Deputy Head at the College Retrou and we were housed adjacent to the college which had been taken over by the Germans as a barracks.

As the war escalated, the nightly bombing was very frightening; the target being the large railway network around the town. During the day, convoys of allied prisoners came through the town. The lorries were open; packed with standing men, some wounded. My mother would ask the commanding officer's permission to approach the men, who were not allowed to disembark. She would talk to the men, take messages, pass them drinks and supply cigarettes.

Then came the German retreat. All sorts of comandeered vehicles: horses and carts, private cars and lorries all filled with wounded and dying.

One morning after the curfew, we found that the garrison had left in great panic leaving all their equipment. Within hours, my mother had volunteered to work for the Americans as an interpreter between the French Railway authorities and the 723 American Railway Battalion, who were urgently trying to reopen the region's lines to move both goods and personnel.

Appalled by the general attitude of the French political factions and the treatment of the collaborators - particularly the women - she soon decided to leave France for England where her parents were living. She arranged with the Railway Battalion to transport her two eldest sons across France to Dieppe on 11th March 1945 then to Newhaven, where they were collected by their aunt.

She finally followed with the younger children, some months later. England was, to them, a haven.

Towards the end of her life, she suffered a stroke. For many days, she relived those dreadful times. She thought herself to be in the hands of the Gestapo.

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