An incredible secret story of the French Resistance, a chateau and me
Jane Torday finds a series of fascinating and moving connections in ‘War in the Shadows, Resistance, Deception and Betrayal in Occupied France.’ by Patrick Marnham (Oneworld Publications)
A HOUSE OF SECRETS
I remember several glorious autumn mornings in France. Two in particular stand out in my memory. They were connected, but with fifty three years between them
The first was in September 1964, when I flew into the airport at Tours, capital town of the Loire Valley. Waiting to meet me, smiling, was a trim Frenchwoman wearing blue workman’s denims, her short black hair slicked back over a gamine face, tanned, with dark brown eyes. She introduced herself as the daughter of the Comtesse de Bernard, into whose charge my parents had committed my fifteen year old self to study French culture and conversation up until Christmas. Her daughter’s formal title was Madame Watson, but she always went by the name of Moune. I remember the exotic whiff of Gauloises cigarettes as I climbed into her Peugeot saloon. She whizzed us through the changing colours of the countryside towards Blois, pointing out places of interest in English, until from a minor village road, we swept through one of those pale, French grey iron gateways into a graveled yard. My first sight of the Chateau de Nanteuil.
Out of the warm rays of the sun, Moune led me through the front door into the cool of the antique interior. From the shadows in the hall stepped a tall, impressively erect figure of some considerable age. Madame de Bernard, around whom bounded an ebullient boxer dog, anxious to get out for a walk. With gracious formality, Madame welcomed me with a handshake and a few courteous enquiries before waving me towards the dining room where lunch had been kept warm for me.
That moment — that moment of my first lunch at Nanteuil — is like a ripe plum still shining among the desiccated leaves of my memories of that place. On the long white cloth covering the dining room table, a fresh linen napkin lay beside the cutlery set out for me. Two stag’s heads gazed down from the walls, from which an ancestral portrait also hung, and on the chimney piece were two old portrait photos in black and white, one of an attractive woman, the other of General de Gaulle. A hot serving dish somehow materialized from somewhere…when the lid was lifted, an appetizing, savoury aroma was released from the dark, rich red ragout of tender beef. My first sampling of French regional cooking from the kitchen at Nanteuil, produced by the sweet capabilities of their cook of many years, Suzanne.
As a new arrival, a novelty, at some stage soon I would meet my fellow guests and pitch into girlish chatter, satisfying mutual curiosity, so long the conversation was conducted in the French that we were all there to refine and polish. This reasonable rule would be ignored as often as we were out of French earshot, which would be frequently.
It was the atmosphere in Chateau that I breathed in first, overlaying all other initial impressions. My bedroom window opening out onto the view of the terrace below, with a few garden chairs and pots of traditional scarlet geraniums; just beyond, the brown River Cosson flowed past, seemingly innocuous. There was an open fireplace, with no suggestion of a fire in its grate; facing the window was a table and chair at which to work; in a corner, a washstand with a bowl and jug; a handsome high backed chair upholstered in dark red velvet; the bed was a fine one, with an eiderdown, but pillows are not rated by the French, perhaps there was just a bolster; then an armoire for my clothes. I unpacked my small, tightly packed suitcase with unusual care, proud of the new ‘with it’ additions to my wardrobe. In the mirror, the appearance of my fine, unruly fair hair and rather beaky little pink face was as usual a source of anxiety, but there were no immediate measures I could take to transform it before descending downstairs to see, not without shyness, what the afternoon might hold.
Whatever the initial impact of my fellow guests, it is eclipsed by another memory, that of a distinctive ritual at the chateau. Afternoon tea poured from an English pot in the dining room. Tea-time, a baffling custom to the French, but one that was, unusually, upheld at Nanteuil. But then, as I was to learn, it was a most unusual household.
Behind the tea pot presided the third principle woman of the Chateau, Nanny. Small, rotund, sensible and British, she was fluent in a French of her own invention. She indulged us with English. Her short, grey hair fastened with Kirby grips, her eyes missing nothing behind the pebble glass lenses of her rimless spectacles; Nanny had been depended upon at Nanteuil in an astonishing variety of capacities since her arrival there for the post of ‘Nanny’ in the 1920s, speaking not a word of French. She found the young mother, now the Comptesse de Bernard, so intimidating and curt of temper that she nearly left on several occasions. An affection for her two little daughters, and a gradual understanding between herself and Madame developed into deep respect and friendship. Here she still was, over forty years later……and would remain, for the rest of her ninety or so years of life.
For an awkward teenager abroad, the discovery of a cup of hot and homely tea in this curious chateau was a moment of reassurance. As time went on, the other girls, namely Anna, Angela, Peggy, Meg and Marieka, and myself, were to discover that Nanny was a repository of stories that were anything but reassuring. Descriptions of some of the events at the chateau in World War 11, when Nanteuil was commandeered by the Germans in Nazi Occupied France, and with fearsome consequences. If it had not been for that dark seam running through the history of a household that had been lively with young people, a prewar majority of young men, English university students, that autumn of 1964 might have melted into the realms of an amusing memory, one of those short phases in growing up which at the time seemed so long.
In smaller numbers, young men were still coming to Nanteuil. Just two years previously, in 1962, Patrick, a pre Cambridge student, was dispatched to the chateau by his father for his cultural enlightenment. In his recently acquired little car, he drove himself across France to Nanteuil in the Loire. From the outset, Patrick was beguiled by the chateau and intrigued by its unusual inhabitants. It turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong friendship. His initial stay there was in the company of other young people, one of whom was the daughter of friends of my parents. They recommended the chateau as a delightful educational destination.
The Chateau de Nanteuil is situated in that part of the Loire known as the Sologne, an area of literary association through ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’, a romantic novel of magical quality, set in the landscape of a house hidden among the forests and lakes of the region, a place where childhood, innocence and love are lost. It’s author, Alain Fournier, was killed in 1914, in the first month of the First World War, making the his story yet more poignant. Patrick’s allusions to the lost world of ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ during his first stay at Nanteuil, enhance his evocation of the real chateau, the real people, that I remember from three months there in my giggling youth, but which nonetheless made an enduring impression.
Patrick Marnham was destined to become a hot shot journalist, Private Eye his first success, later a Paris Correspondent, an editor and an acclaimed writer of travel books and biographies. His enthralling new book reveals much about the women of Nanteuil in their courageous roles during the French Occupation in WW2. Madame de Bernard, Nanny and Moune are the emotional thread at the heart of his detailed investigation into leading characters and events in two major networks of the French Resistance at a crucial point in the conflict. ‘War in the Shadows, Resistance, Deception and Betrayal in Occupied France.’ It is a sequel to a book published 20 years ago ‘The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost.’
Jean Moulin was General de Gaulle’s top political undercover agent in France. A Hero of the Resistance, he was betrayed, then captured in the ‘secret’ meeting place of a doctor’s waiting room near Lyon, in June 1943. A month of sustained torture immediately followed, under the direction of the Gestapo’s ‘Butcher of Lyon’, Klaus Barbie. Mentally supremely strong, physically utterly broken, Jean Moulin died at the end of the process of this relentless brutality. He spilt not the tiniest bean of betrayal, revealing not a single member of the Resistance nor impeding any major strategic action in progress.
Following the publication Jean Moulin’s biography, Patrick Marnham received an anonymous letter suggesting that his conclusions in the book were wrong and that there was an unrecognized link between the Gestapo operations designed to break the back of two key networks of the Resistance, both in June 1943: One in Lyon and the other in The Sologne,. Evidently well informed, the ‘Ghost’ letter writer seemed intent on provoking the author into further investigation into details of the circumstances surrounding the death of this incorruptible figure of prime importance to Nazi defeat, Jean Moulin.
Eventually, Patrick Marnham grasped the nettle held to him by his anonymous correspondent, undertaking fresh research, entering ‘an increasingly complex labyrinth of calculation, deception and betrayal, an underworld of dead ends and false leads that characterized the warfare of secret intelligence. In that war, allies were prepared to obstruct each other’s work.’ The astonishingly contradictory allegiances of what Churchill called ‘The bodyguard of lies’, the means by which truth is protected in wartime and then ‘can be stood down in peacetime and replaced with a wall of silence.’
This renewed enquiry led Patrick back to Nanteuil, to refresh his memory of all he had understood from his good friends there when they were alive, more detailed evidence of the their experiences there under German Occupation, particularly from the moment when life for everyone at the Chateau went steeply downhill in that midsummer of 1943, with the acceleration of arrests and executions. Nanteuil was still in the ownership of the family, now managed by Madame de Barnard’s grandson as a little country house hotel, not entirely different from the paying students who had sustained it up to and after the war.
Joining up the dots of the true story at Nanteuil is something I have harboured a recurring curiosity to do, beyond Nanny’s teapot….A pot that during the war contained the reviving leaves wholly unobtainable in France. The pilots of the British SOE brought packets over especially for Nanny. She was a popular and highly respected figure whose bravery turned out to range further afield than her management of a large household inhabited and surrounded by Germans. Her own undercover work.
*
In 1964, as I settled into a routine at Nanteuil, my preoccupations on the surface were typically teenage. At fifteen, I was the youngest, having completed my O levels in the summer, left school, and was now in the privileged position of being in this remarkable place, the immediate significance of which tended to be lost in a round of truly trivial pursuits. A reminder that this was an educational expedition arrived in the shape of my O level results. That I had passed them all was not impressive to my father as they lacked distinction…and now here he was paying further fees for an expensive 3 month French holiday! A study of French at a reasonably advanced standard was part of the agenda, with individual lessons on weekday mornings.
It fell to Madame de Bernard to be my teacher. It was very quickly clear that this relationship was not rewarding to either instructor or pupil. Retrospectively, my sympathy is wholly sincere, for this Grande dame in her seventies, taking random paying students to stay afloat. Madame had a curious turn of mind. Early on, she set me an essay : ‘Qui est votre Favorite, votre Père ou votre Mère?’ If she had been a teasing woman, but she was not….it was her way of setting me a challenge to reveal my thoughts on the nature of my home life. I was shocked by this divisive task, believing in loyalty and equal of love of both my parents, whatever my private, personal feelings might be just then. In stilted French, I drafted some kind of priggish moral tract to hand in to her.
At lunchtimes, it was easiest to avoid sitting within Madame’s range at the head of the table, to steer clear of her regular mutterings about ‘La Chasse’, the hunting which was her lifelong passion, and more often, ‘La Guerre’, a conversational opening that I would have seized upon in times ahead when individual accounts of the last war became a fascination to me. My reluctance to engage with her also lay in my anxiety about mis-understanding her rather lisping French enunciation. I was nervous of her, and rightly so. Young men of charm were more to her taste, as they were to the rest of us.
Madame’s smiles were largely for her boxer Karim, encouraged to go round the dining table and lick our plates — “Viens Karim!’ — returning triumphantly to Madame to be kissed and have his slobbery chops wiped by her table napkin, then replaced in its ring. Some days, I saw the lone figure of Madame through the long windows , striding through the grounds in her tailored gaberdine mackintosh, her proud head, her perfect posture, with Karim bouncing in front of her. Impressive, but with a lingering tristesse.
It was decided that I should receive my morning lessons from Moune. A lot more lively and fun to study the plays of Moliere and Racine with her. But the first book she pressed upon me was the deceptively simple, illustrated fable, ‘Le Petit Prince’ by Antoine de St Exupery, pioneering pilot, warrior and poet. Banned in Occupied France, this little illustrated classic was published abroad in 1943. It’s core message, ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ By the Liberation of France in 1944, Antoine de St Exupery himself was dead, ostensibly shot down over Marseilles. That this book might have carried a meaning for Moune, I was not blessed with the intuition to see. It felt more as if I was being softened up with a children’s book, patronised even; I was too teenage to access the sensibility and love of The Little Prince.
Life before the war at Nanteuil included games and dressing up in amateur dramatics. As a little twelve year old in the mid 1930s, Moune, who loved writing plays and wearing costumes had become fascinated by the Nazi party in Germany. Wearing home-made uniforms, it was what she called ‘The boots and drums’, the theatrical side of the movement and a lethally successful one, with its ‘torches, songs, marches, uniforms and rhythms’ that she found beguiling ….until that is, Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. She grew up into a fighter for freedom, like her mother, Madame Anne Marie de Bernard.
By the time I met Moune, there was little outward evidence of obsession with the recent past of the war, but she lightly communicated her knowledge of history of previous centuries that we were there to absorb. She had her own retreat, a converted stable flat on the other side of the courtyard where she could enjoy her own interests — photography, Jazz, writing a novel, cosseting her cats, smoking Gauloises.
Through the veil of the early morning autumn mists, Moune drove groups of us to visit to the chateaux of the Loire in the Peugeot saloon. Nearby, the Royal chateau at Blois, where King Henri 111 commanded the murder of the Duc de Guise by a cohort of 28 assassins; The monolith of Chambord with its 44 staircases; the reflective beauty of Chenonceaux built over the river Cher; the Renaissance Chateau de Chaumont; my own favourite, the little chateau at Amboise where Leornardo de Vinci spent his last year of life, the cellar there exhibited a stellar collection of his drawings and designs… the first aeroplane…way in advance of their time.
Sometimes we visited a cathedral, like mediaeval Chartres which from its summit commands a 25 km view of the surrounding landscape. We climbed up the narrow staircase of the tower, where near the top, I bumped into the postboy from my home village in Hampshire. This co-incidence seemed quite incredible. In the unlikely event of my being alive and available to visit the cathedral before the war, I might have been able to gaze down at the panorama beneath, and in La Place de la Republique, detect Jean Moulin in his role as the Prefect of Chartres. The brightest, youngest, civil servant in the country, when the Germans invaded in June 1940, he disobeyed government orders to abandon the town, and stood his ground, before being arrested by the Nazis. He was beaten up for 7 hours for failing to sign a falsifying document indicting the remaining innocent citizens. He narrowly escaped death. Jean Moulin became the Chairman of the National Council for the Resistance, two months before his final arrest by the Gestapo in June 1943.
Madame rarely accompanied us on the tours of the chateaux. She resented the idea of encountering German tourists, ‘Boches’, in French castles. This was a protection for us as it happened, as her driving was fast and lethal. Her particular loathing for the German race was not confined to Hitler and the Nazis. It dated back to the First World War, when Northern France was ravaged by the same enemy in another form, killing many of the young men with whom she had grown up, danced, rode and hunted.
Cheverny, an elegant 17th century chateau was a hunting lodge with which Madame had a long connection as a passionate horsewoman, who rode to hounds throughout all the hunting seasons that she was able to do so. Stags were the principle quarry. Her valuable knowledge of the ways through the wild surrounding woodlands would prove crucial during the Nazi Occupation, once she and her husband Pierre became active members of the Resistance in the Sologne. There was hope of support from other landowners in their chateau strongholds. It was expedient, or at least convenient for many of the upper classes to maintain their allegiance to Petain’s puppet government in Vichy. The owner of Cheverney, and Master of the Hunt, rejected Madame de Bernard’s appeal for help, appalled to learn that she was supporting ‘That Judeo, Freemasonic Communist — General de Gaulle.’ Crikey! ‘Once she left her enemy occupied house, Madame was not on friendly territory. The company of her fellow countrymen could be even more hazardous than the occupying forces.’
*
It was on June 14 1940 that terror struck, as German planes flew over the chateau and ‘machine gunned the refugees passing on the main road’, Madame at first took her children, servants and guests, including a family of Belgian refugees currently staying, to temporary safety in the old icehouse in the park …but there was much intense anxiety and on 17th June, with the ‘terrifying sounds of war clearly audible’, a procession of three cars bearing Madame and Monsieur, the family and staff, plus Moune’s cat, drove out of the courtyard, setting off south to escape of the rapid German advance. ‘They all feared they would never see Nanteuil again.’
‘Close to tear of rage at the French military collapse, ’ Madame drove the big Ford 8 with Nanny sitting beside her. Behind them, attached to the car, was a heavy double horsebox bearing the Count’s ‘luxurious American mattress with metal springs, his silver dressing case, a considerable amount of cash, table linen, bed linen and his shotguns.’ After two nights when passengers in all three cars were obliged to sleep in them, Madame lost patience with their slow progress on the crowded roads and she took the next turning into a field, where they found a deserted barn and stayed there for a week. Their living arrangements were conducted in a formal manner, Monsieur and Madame changed for dinner, and the maids worn clean blue muslin aprons to serve food which was essentially rice, jam…and a few chickens they found in the barn. Everyone slept on piles of straw, except for Madame and Monsieur, who slept on the American mattress.
Deciding to return to Nanteuil, they drove back on empty roads in just over two hours. German and French troops had passed through, and wreckage awaited them. Electricity and water had been cut off, the cellar ransacked, clothes and books stolen and personal belongings scattered around among broken glass. The gardener said it was the French troops who had caused the most damage….. ‘Within days, German soldiers arrived at Nanteuil to pitch tents and occupy the park. The senior officers took the English students’ bedrooms, while the junior officers slept on the dining room floor.’… with the Stags proud heads above them, or perhaps in the bedroom I now occupied.
*
Madame started working with the Red Cross in Blois, entitling her to a travel pass to and from the town, soon a helpful security cover for the underground missions she would begin to undertake, fired by her utter fury with the German presence. Physically and mentally fearless, with an unquestionable sense of authority, she would become an important member of a major Resistance network in the Sologne — ‘The Solognots’ Her husband, Pierre, united with his wife in this dangerous work, but Nanny referred to him with a slight sniffiness, hinting that he was not quite of the same metal. Patrick Marnham records that Pierre talked too much and had a tendency to be vague about arrangements. He was however exceedingly precise about certain standards…his American double bed…his wardrobe being in order, a preoccupation with elegance and formality in all circumstances: ’Bow tie, plus fours and highly polished shoes’ of which he had forty pairs. Le Compte Pierre had a grey overall which he wore for ‘rough work’; polishing his own shoes, or cleaning guns.
Madame was ‘A natural rebel but not a natural outlaw’. She shared a view with a random representation of local ‘patriots with only one conviction in common: a loathing for the country’s Vichy government and a refusal to accept that for France the war was over.’ The early secret groups of resistants would gradually become far better organised in their connections for perilous undercover undertakings, any one of which would lead to arrest.
It would only be a matter of time before certain powerful, individual Nazis would become known and feared in the area. In Blois, a man known as ‘Gestapo Bauer’ and equally intimidating was his female interpreter, a brutal woman nicknamed ‘Mona-la-Blonde.’
Madame’s most dependable kindred spirits tended to be those in a profession, contributing skills and resources : known to her through her love of horses, the first was a vet; then a hotel owner, a manager of an electrical supply company, garage owner, wine merchant, gamekeeper… and poacher.
At Nanteuil, one of Madame’s roles was to assist fugitives and evaders in making a safe passage into the Unoccupied Zone, involving crossing the demarcation line over the River Cher, 30 miles away. Jean Moulin used this route in 1940/41 in his mission for Resistance groups in the region. Nazi controls at the stopping points were strict, but Madame devised an effective form of theatre, as one means of getting people across. ‘Burying them.’ Knowing that a funeral party was likely to be treated with respect, she would arrange a funeral in the unoccupied Vichy zone, ‘hire a hearse, place a fugitive airman in the coffin and cast other evaders as undertakers, and she herself sometimes played the part of a grieving widow….’ A death certificate had been arranged ‘with a sympathetic doctor in Blois’, a service booked with a co-operative curate, and permission for an ‘ausweis’ obtained. The funeral cortege would be stamped through at the control post. Meticulous planning was required. There were many other operations on her watch which could have been subject to sabotage in the unpredictable circumstances of living alongside the enemy.
*
When Nanny returned to teatime with us after a day helping Madame’s daughter Bette with her young children, memories of war were often still near the surface of her mind. In English in an indefinable accent that also embraced her French, she slipped in anecdotes of wartime at Nanteuil. On one occasion, an event that marked a dreadful swerve in the wrong direction, changing the lives of everyone at the chateau. We learned that one afternoon in August 1943, the Germans came to arrest Monsieur. A snapshot records everyone relaxing around a picnic hamper on the grass, only three days earlier. Before taking him away, the Gestapo ransacked the chateau, dismantling an ordinary radio, removing all his money, searching the cellars under the stables. ‘He was visibly trembling’. They told Monsieur he would be home by Saturday.
Saturday passed, then another week…Desperately worried, Madame, with friends beside her, set off for Blois. They were directed to Orleans, with these words to her: “Your husband will be released.” She did not see him, but found herself alone in a room with two German officers and a female interpreter who said: “Would you like to sit down? Madame, we have received an order from Paris to arrest you.’
Madame was interned at Compeigne Royallieu, the only fully German run camp for French terrorists. ‘The ominous yellow postcard’ dated 29 January 1944, arrived at Nanteuil: ‘Anne Marie-de Bernard departed leaving no address.’ Departed = Deported.
Moune now worked at the Prefecture in Blois, which gave her, like her mother, a permanent pass to come and go….so useful now in her additional work as a courier for another local group of Resistants, part of a much larger Communist led network, ‘Front National’. She was convinced she would never see her mother again.
*
Nanny found herself in charge of the Chateau for the remaining two years of World War11. Her employers were both in prison, their cash taken by the Germans, their bank accounts frozen. Stalwart in the face of daily fear, apprehensive for the safety of spirited Moune and her younger sister Bette, and for the loyal staff there who all worked without pay for the duration. The Germans were an unavoidable presence at Nanteuil, and whilst Nanny diplomatically, literally, polished their boots, she preferred them to the entire convent of nuns and their dependents foisted on the Chateau during the soldiers’ absence elsewhere for a period. A house with only two lavatories.
Tirelessly, Nanny stayed on top of this unusual household, even as she continued to support the Resistance and others in the various Intelligence agencies connected to it; Patrick unpicks their competing functions for a readership with superior knowledge of this arcane world of subterfuge, espionage, counter espionage and double or triple dealings. We can all respond to the down to earth character of Nesta Cox, Nanny’s real name, a highly intelligent heroine in her own right. It is to her among others that that Patrick’s book is dedicated.
*
D Day, June 1944. The Allied invasion of France, the signpost to victory. In France itself, there was no end of new trouble. Conditions did not improve in any way for French civilians.
With fierce battles once again being fought on French soil, there was a new rash of terrible, indiscriminate Nazi reprisals. One example of many in the Loire, a seventeen year old farmhand in his shirtsleeves working in a local field was stopped and demanded his papers. His jacket was out of reach and he could not immediately produce them. He was instantly shot.
Nerve wracking times. Nanny remained steady. She started to always carry her precious prayer book in her pocket whenever she left the house. There were also strategic attacks by the Allies to be contended with. When the nearby river bridge was destroyed by the RAF, she saw ‘The bombers flying in formation quite low over the chateau, then heard the explosions before the planes circled over the house again before departure.’
*
Although France was liberated in August 1944, there were many from that country for whom the war showed no signs of ending, the very reverse in fact. Cruel conditions were stepped up on the Prisoners of War in the hard labour and death camps in Germany and Poland. A notorious women’s hard labour camp was Ravensbruck, guarded by 546 female SS guards, Aufseherinnen. The prison policy was to work the prisoners to death. This is where Madame Anne Marie de Bernard had been taken.
The friendship of women prisoners was fundamental to sustaining heart and soul, as their physical selves deteriorated and disintegrated. Anne Marie is remembered by her friends as someone to whom others turned for help. ‘Her incredible vitality and strength of character.’ remembered one. Another wrote that ‘She could still see Anne Marie at the interminable roll calls, standing straight, always ready to fight back, so that her friends often had to calm her with a gentle squeeze of the arm, lest she become a target of a fatal punishment beating.’
In the last months, Madame de Bernard was in a group ‘marched along frozen winter tracks’ to a subsidiary camp where they were worked day and night, with almost no food and without blankets to sleep under. She was one of the few to return to Ravensbruck, and in an indescribable condition. A friend saw her in the freezing dawn next morning, ‘Still queuing and on her feet, but so thin, so weak that the breeze blew around her like a reed.’
When the war came to an end, there was no news of the indomitable, courageous Anne Marie de Bernard. She was assumed dead. On 12th July 1945, Nanny heard a list of returning deportees read out on French Radio and Madame de Bernard’s name was on it. Her life had been saved by a thread. In April 1945, she had been taken to a Swedish hospital to be treated and carefully nursed back to life. When she returned home later that year, she was still virtually a skeleton.
Her husband Pierre, a prisoner at Buchenwald concentration camp, had returned to Nanteuil sooner, desperately thin and with raging pneumonia. His prison experience never left him. Back in France, all resources for civilised living, food, fuel and clothes, had been usurped by the enemy and rationing continued for a long time after the war. Madame and Monsieur needed to retrieve their strength to start their lives again. There were no guests at the hospitable Chateau de Nanteuil for a year.
I did not know that nine years before I met her, the Contesse de Bernard was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, the highest French Order of Merit.
*
My 3 month stay at Nanteuil, skimming the surface of the Loire valley, started to draw to a close. The manner of its ending was low key and revealed another now comprehensible quirk of Madame de Bernard’s: Her concern about the use of water, the expense of it. Baths were to be small and limited in number; washing our own clothes was frowned upon, forbidden if discovered. We were all used to English home economies… cold houses… but Madame’s seeming discouragement of measures of cleanliness….we put it down to being French! These domestic anxieties were left over from the war under Occupation, when water was often cut off and simple soap was completely unavailable.
In late November I retired to bed with swollen glands, sore throat and a temperature. A doctor visited me, advising Madame as she oversaw his examination that I was to be given medicine, liquids, soup and soft food. On his departure, she explained to me that the doctor had directed that I was to have no food until I was well… My French was sufficiently adequate to detect the difference between the two prescriptions for my recovery. My keenest advocate at Nanteuil was the femme de menage, Jeanne, tiny, bent with age and thoroughly kind. In her company I enthusiastically exercised my French — she was always popping into my room to deliver nuggets of gossip, cackling with laughter. When I was bed bound, she sneaked upstairs to deliver lunch and edible treats from under her apron. Someone lent me Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A little light reading which, lying in bed, gave me a sense of proportion…. Once I was well enough, I was allowed to ring my parents, a very expensive long distance call from the single black Bakelite telephone with its steel dial, corded to the wall, by the staircase. I told them I would like to come home.
*
It’s hard not to learn anything when you are young, however marginal the effort put into the process. At the chateau, radio still had a role, on our cool little transistors we could listen to the Top Twenty from Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops on the Light Programme, or Radio Luxembourg, and brilliantly list the whole Twenty at the Top. Petula Clark singing ‘Downtown’…“When you get lonely and the lights are low, You can always go downtown, downtown”, was the current anthem for us girls, or one of them. I can verify that without aid of drink or drugs, barely even jokes, teenage girls can wind themselves up into an ecstasy of uncontrollable laughter, a form of exercise and recreation. We instigated a post lunch session called ‘Rire Temps.’ We needed more male company than was available, except for older men, sometimes married, at the very occasional soiree. “Voulez vous coucher avec moi” we jested daringly….
One day a pretty seventeen year old fellow student and I bicycled into Blois for a little light shopping. I went to the Fromagerie and gazed at the selection of delectable goat’s cheeses, specialities in the Loire, a step up from Kraft and Primula cheese of home. I bought a little log of fromage de chevre. Obviously this was weird. Chocolate and sweets would have been normal. My rather sophisticated companion had other plans. When she told me we were meeting up with a man of our acquaintance in a café, it seemed an innocent opportunity for any refreshments. Soon it became apparent that my friend knew the gentleman of our assignation rather well….After forty minutes or so, he bid us Adieu, embracing both of us before returning home to his wife. Dusk was falling as we cycled home and my friend told me how she crept out of the chateau at night to meet her lover….that they were engaged in a passionate affair that would change their lives forever.
In terms of life at that moment, the little bicycle expedition was the most startling event of my stay at Nanteuil, shattering my youthful belief that such things only happen in novels. I was in awe, fascinated, slightly envious and somewhat fearful for her. Over the coming days we spoke in confidence of this romance….until the door slammed. All had been discovered and my friend was to return to England at once. She left me a letter full of emotion, telling that I was free to share her the story with the other girls after her departure. I was proud of being her confidant and keeping her secret. The immediate kudos of revealing such hot gossip gave me only momentary pleasure, not least because there were so many questions I was unable to answer.
*
Independent Moune was a married woman, but long separated and remaining on friendly terms with her husband, an intriguing Englishman, Oscar Watson. They met in 1946 when he was a visiting student at Nanteuil, appropriately enough researching for what turned out to be a Cambridge prize winning dissertation on the wartime Resistance movement in the Sologne. Oscar and Moune were married in 1954. Moune’s English, was good, absorbed at Nanny’s knee and polished by her own father, an Englishman, Billy Gardnor Beard, whose French was also excellent, from his upbringing in Switzerland. After Trinity College, Cambridge he took young students on study parties in France. Staying as paying guest in a country house in the Loire, he met Anne Marie, a cousin of his hosts. They became engaged soon after, marrying in 1921.
As a wedding present for his wife, Billy purchased the Chateau de Nanteuil, with its enclosed park in the beautiful region where Anne Marie had grown up. Tree saplings grew right up to the front door of the 18th century Chateau, a building in need of full restoration. The grounds were cleared to include a fives and a tennis court, in preparation for the students to come, at the pre-war charge of one guinea a day Near the new boathouse on the bank of the River Cosson, Billy erected a diving board over a deep pool; In June 1943, when threats of arrest by the Gestapo were a little too close, a forbidden radio transmitter at Nanteuil was sealed in a waterproof cover and taken by stealth at night in their canoe by Moune and her sister Bette, then lowered into the deepest spot, just below the diving board their father had made. (When the radio was retrieved after the war, it still worked. “Of course’ said Nanny, ‘It’s English.”)
Billy Gardnor’Beard’s health had never been strong. A near neighbour, Compte Pierre de Bernard, was a friend and regular visitor at Nanteuil, and a great admirer of Anne Marie. In 1938, as Billy’s life drew to a close, he expressed the wish to Nanny that after he had gone, Anne Marie might marry Pierre. In 1940, just before the Fall of France, the local village mayor officiated at the wedding of the Compte and Comptesse de Bernard.
It would take time for people to think of Anne Marie Gardnor Beard, wife of an Englishman for 17 years, as Contesse de Bernard, married to a Frenchman. The English were not regarded with any special favour at this time. ‘They were as unpopular as the Germans, if not more so.’ Madame was a quiet woman but with strong feelings on the side of right and justice, and a lifelong tendency to flare up in anger. This was in full measure what she felt in the shame of France’s military collapse. She isolated herself from her friends by her total opposition to Marshall Petain’s call for surrender. She knew the resistant direction she must take, although not yet by which route. Patrick Marnham concludes that ‘It was anger that kept Anne Marie alive in Ravensbruck and some of it remained with her for the rest of her life.’
***
September 2017. A glorious autumn morning in Lyon, but a dark time for families, friends and neighbours divided over the meaning of Brexit. The French think we are mad. In Britain, how are we going to achieve separation and divorce in place of our flawed marriage to the EU, without impairing the friendship with the country to whom we were allied, for better or worse, through two World Wars. I love France. My son and son in law and I are in Lyon on a weekend break , trying to ignore this cloud over our visit. Bathed in in autumn sunshine, we want to make the most of this historic, elegant, civilised city of bridges, where the flow of two great rivers, the Rhone and the Saone, unite and merge together.
Restaurants, galleries, churches, the museum of Silk , for which Lyon was famous, the Print Museum…..and another one of great interest to me, The Museum of the Resistance. I persuaded my obliging young men to accompany me there, by a combination of trim trams and trains in a super clean metro. We arrived at the museum in the morning sunshine, as golden leaves fluttered down around this building with a horrific history underpinning its current function. Displayed in its well-lit rooms are personal accounts, artworks, photographs and memories on video of acts of immense risk and courage undertaken by the Resistance.
We witnessed these exhibits inside what was one of France’s darkest chambers in WW2, the former French Military Medical college, the Ecole Sante Militaire, commandeered by the Gestapo in 1942 as detention centre for the interrogation and torture of the agents of the Resistance now honoured there. The SS officer in command was the notorious Klaus Barbie, responsible for the brutalisation and death of the Resistance hero, Jean Moulin, whose life is at the centre of both this book and Patrick Marnham’s earlier biography of him. Until that morning, when we walked past the Rue Jean Moulin with its commemorative plaque, none of us were aware of his existence as one of the greatest of Frenchmen, to whom there are monuments all over France, and in Paris, an entire museum Jean Moulin. I now know that there is a Museum of the Resistance in Blois, unrepresentative of its local heroes, ‘underfunded and ill equipped and frequently closed.’
In the museum in Lyon lay a huge directory, the size of an old church bible, on its own lectern. It contained, in small print, the names and addresses of all the Jews arrested, imprisoned and deported from France in WW2. To just open the pages of this immense volume was sobering and chilling. So very many names listed in its columns of small print. It slowed me down. The boys were now ahead of me in our tour, keen to get out into the sunshine and explore the pleasures that we were there for, not least lunch in a little restaurant. They waved me goodbye and disappeared down into the museum’s pleasant, innocuous forecourt were we would meet up again shortly.
I cast a last look round and then headed for the Exit. The door swung shut behind me. Exiting turned out to be not so much the end, as the beginning of the exploration of this place. There was a nearly tangible atmosphere as I followed the flights of concrete steps down a dark stairwell, sinister, blackened, seemingly bloodstained, by the victims of its past. I felt desperate to get out as soon as possible. My feeling was that the rough nature of this exit was not an economy, but an intentional conclusion to the experience of The Museum of Resistance.
I was then in the early stages of researching for a book which focuses on a small number of women and their experiences in the last war. At any mention of the Resistance, the Comptesse de Bernard, Moune, and Nanny, would surface to the top of my mind. How little I knew of their story except the bare, stark bones of how Madame had worked that France might be free, was arrested, imprisoned, deported, returned and survived; the far less defined figure of her late husband Pierre; how Nanny had been a lynchpin in the household, before, during and after the war; the brave, mysterious nature of Moune, our principle teacher.
Patrick Marnham’s book, published this September, reveals untold truths from layers of secrecy in Allied and enemy undercover operations in WW11. So much that I wanted to know and understand I have found within its covers, backwards, forwards and around its evocation of the lost world of Nanteuil in the Sologne, in peace and in war. From the most significant to the least of our encounters, all of our lives have touched upon each other’s.
*
My last vision of the Loire valley is of snow falling gently on the turrets of the Chateau de Chambord, in the pearly early morning light of November. A fairy tale. Moune was driving me back the way I had come, to the airport at Tours and the flight home.
