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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Holly Fuller of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Jack Haywood and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the terms and conditions.

I was 10 years old, my father was English working for an Anglo- French manufacturing company in Mantes, La-Jolie in the department of Seine-et-Oise, 30 miles (40kms) North West of Paris on the River Seine.

My Mother was French and my brother was 4 years old. People were very apprehensive of the future after the Dunkirk evacuation especially as we saw bedraggled undisciplined French soldiers passing through the town.

In the first week of June the Germans started bombing raids, the mother of one of my school friends was killed.

On the morning of June 7th our neighbour who was a sergeant in the French Army had come home in a poor state, very tired, his boots worn out, said to my Father: ‘GO, the Germans are coming!’

I was picked up from school at Lunchtime; meanwhile my father made arrangements with one of his colleagues also an Englishman to meet in Saint-Jean-de-Monts in Vendee on the West Coast. That night we slept, or tried to in the cellar of our house. In the morning my parents hastily packed the car (a 1937 Peugeot 302) with clothing, bedding, pots and pan, tied up in sheets, not in suitcases so as to save room, also a portable commode and a washing tub. A mattress was tied to the roof, it was hoped that this would stop bullets. In the morning of June 8th the bombing stopped but the rumble of distant gunfire could be heard so we left in a hurry.

There were 5 of us in the car, my parents, my younger brother, our Great Grandmother, aged 84 and myself. We left my Grandmother behind as she was employed as a local civil servant and she felt she had to remain at her job.

We headed south-west. There were traffic jams at Dreux, the bombing started again and there were masses of people in cars, carts, bicycles and on foot with laden prams leaving the town, the French airforce planes at the aerodrome were destroyed as was most of the town a few hours after we passed through.

At Mogent-le-Retrou more bombing and machine gunning this time by the Stuka dive-bombers with their screaming sirens, which was very frightening. Fortunately, we were not hit. We had lunch in a Café at La Ferte Bernard and at Le Mans. After we set off again the car engine started over-heating.

That night we slept in the car off the main road in a wooded area. At dawn we were woken by a peculiar noise. We wondered what the ‘devilish’ Germans were up to now, only to discover that it was a large number of frogs croaking in the near by ponds!

By June 9th we were in La Fleche, we had breakfast and cleaned up in a café, Angers at Chole. Unfortunately the car had two punctures and my dad had to buy two inner tubes. We later arrived at La- Roche-sur-Yon, Saint-Jean-de-Monts on the coast, but their was no sign of Dad’s colleague. The town was packed with refugees and holidaymakers; all the hotels were full.

We motored South to Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie a sardine fishing port. We were told not to worry about the sirens, as they wailed not because of air raids but to summon the sardine girls to the canning factory when the boats came in.

We found accommodation in a hotel for two nights. On the 11th June, my parents found a friendly farmer in an isolated farmhouse who said we could stay in his dairy. We stayed there until the 18th June. So far our escape had clocked up a total mileage from Mantes of 260 miles or 414 km.

The dairy was comfortable. My Great Grandmother slept on the mattress taken down from the top of the car. My parents were in a double bed and my brother and I were on a mattress made from straw. The bed linen we had wrapped everything in came in very handy. Mother cooked on an open fire with pinecones and needles for fuel. And we used the pots and pans we had brought with us.

The farm was a modernised older building. Dairy farming was its mainstay. Being on the edge of the forest there was plenty of pine cones and needles for fuel for cooking and heating the Dairy. During our stay news on the radio was sketchy, the Germans had occupied Paris on the 14th. I managed to make some new friends during our weeks’ stay, two or three of the local boys befriended me. We amused ourselves by jumping over streams and dykes bordering the fields. A long pole, pushed in to a cow’s hoof aided us, this stopped the pole sinking into the mud, unfortunately this didn’t stop me falling in. My Mum was not pleased.

There were no luxuries around, we had no sweets although there was a small amount of chocolate. The local boys chewed roasted broad beans, they didn’t taste too bad, rather like chestnuts. On the 16th we heard that General Wegan had signed a capitulation pact with the Germans. The farmer said to my Father, to: ‘GO, the Germans are coming’. So we left the next day. We left everything behind in the dairy except clothes wrapped up in bed sheets and the portable commode filled with petrol. Mother kept the commode by her feet in the front of the car, we had heard that petrol supplies were very short and did not want to run out. We gave a lift to a French Naval Officer as far as Less Salles d’Ollone. We intended to try to get to Spain, we stopped at La Rochelleto have lunch in a Café, we heard that there was an English boat in the harbour of La Rochelle at La Pallice. We went over to the harbour and made contact with English sailors who turned out to be Royal Naval Reservists.

We managed to get a place on the boat and left our car on the quayside. We just took our clothes wrapped in sheets and a car seat. The boat turned out to be a luxury yacht which had belonged to Lord and Lady Docker, the owners of Raleigh cycles. The yacht weighed 500 tons and was named the Maid Maison. It had a small 4-pounder gun placed in the bows. It was crewed by Royal Naval reservists and volunteers who were mostly apart from the Captain (an immaculately turned out young royal naval lieutenant) Devonian and Cornish fisherman.

The Maid Maison had escorted 2 Welsh colliers delivering anthracite coal to La Pallice, now empty these coal boats were to be filled with escaping Polish soldiers who had previously sabotaged their equipment. When we boarded the ship we had to climb up a rope ladder. My Great Grandma was hauled up in the car seat.

My parents, brother and great grandma settled down in the staterooms which even had a marble bathroom. I stayed on deck with a life jacket on and more life jackets to use as a mattress and pillow. During that night Polish soldiers were being transferred from shore to the Maid Maison and onto the two colliers attached alongside, all through the night the noise of the boats rubbing and crashing alongside each other made sleeping almost impossible.

Our family together with an English employee of WH Smith’s in Paris with his wife were allowed to stay on the boat. All night we could see the flames and smoke from the oil refineries at La Pallice. They had either been bombed or sabotaged. Our car had probably gone up in smoke too.

We left on the 18th and the 2 colliers it was towing slowed Maid Maison down. We weaved about for 4 nights and 3 days out into the middle of the Atlantic to try and miss possible attacks from U-boats (German Submarines). At times big drums stored on the deck would shoot over the side, when the ship was getting up speed and doing tight turns, great spouts of water would shoot up behind us.

I was only ten so cold not understand what was happening. I wasn’t frightened just very curious. I could not communicate with the other people on board. I did not speak English, only French and the sailors could not speak French. So I could gain no explanation to what was going on. I did recognise the big drums; they were like the ones at the paint factory where my Father worked. In the factory they contained paint, varnish and solvents not explosives as I was later told they contained on the boat. Food was scarce on board. I remember eating hard biscuits with corned beef and the occasional bun with a mug of tea.

After four days we docked at Plymouth, the Captain told my Dad that we had been shadowed by the U-boats for 3 days. Although we had British passports we were regarded with suspicion by the authorities, which rightly or wrongly were worried about the infiltration of enemy agents into Great Britain. We must have looked a sight. My Dad was unshaven, we had not washed for several days, our clothes were dirty and our spare clothes were tied up in sheets. However, we were given tea and ham sandwiches by the Women’s Volunteer Service and issued with identity cards. They were prefixed with the letters PAL, which stood for ‘Plymouth Alien Landing’. My card was PAL 1436, and was in blue, the colour for a child. The cards caused us a great deal of problems because they were different to the standard ID cards which had a 4-letter prefix not like our which only had 3.

We went on the train to London and got some funny stares. I think the other passengers thought we were gypsies as we were so unkempt. We eventually arrived at my Father’s Parents house in Sutton in Surrey and have lived in England ever since.

My Grandmother who remained in Mantes eventually received a letter from us months later (via the Red Cross) to say that we were safe. This was a massive relief to her.

POSTSCRIPT:
The above is a recollection of events together with my Parents account told to me much later and in particular taken from a tape recording made by my late Father 15 years ago.

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