You can read the first part of Daphne’s story here: “Flight from France: from Bordeaux to London”
We arrived in Bordeaux on 17th June, where a million refugees were swarming in its streets. Bordeaux was now the last western port remaining in French hands and the Government, in flight from Paris, had arrived there two days earlier. A ship was waiting to take us to England, but we needed exit visas. My parents plunged into interminable negotiations with officials while I sat on a hard bench for what seemed like hours. Somebody at the British Consulate angered my mother – he’d lived so long in France he’d forgotten his English. They sorted things out in French. We were free to leave – but before that, I remember sitting round a wireless set with a group of grown-ups and listening to an old, cracked voice: the once great Marshall Pétain telling us that France couldn’t fight any more. The adults were silent, white-faced. So that was it. For France, the proud country that had given us so much and where we’d been so happy, it was the end. Why?
Shame and disgrace seemed mixed up in this adventure of ours. They shouldn‘t have made Paris an open city, said my parents. What was an open city? The French thought Paris so beautiful they would rather let the Germans take their city than see her destroyed by bombs. Paris was certainly beautiful, I knew that. Who was right? Not for the first time, I was torn between the French and British view of things.
Le Verdon
Daphne Wall
Towards evening we headed out of the town along country roads until we’d reached Le Verdon, the westernmost point at the mouth of the river Gironde; now we could smell the sea. My father parked on the quay, alongside a row of abandoned cars. Carrying a suitcase each, my mother and I walked ahead and turned to watch him shut and lock our own car for the last time. It had served us well but now we were leaving it to its fate.
We went down steps to a beach where people were standing in silent groups. It was getting dark, but we could make out our rescue ship, a big shape out at sea. We expected a launch to fetch us, but night came and we were still waiting. I must have dozed, sitting on my suitcase, but woke to the scream of a dive-bomber, the ack-ack of machine gun fire and thunderous crashing out at sea. So now they were trying to kill us! It felt personal. But we were lucky, the noises died away and at daylight a launch arrived and took us out to the big ship. On board, the most extraordinary sight met our eyes. Every square inch of deck was covered with sleeping bodies wrapped in coats and blankets. They looked like ghostly corpses in the half light, though some of them were beginning to stir and pour cups of tea out of thermos flasks. There were families with children like me, and I noticed that some of them had their dogs with them: so we could have brought Lucky with us after all. Now it was too late.
I was used to boats, having crossed the Channel countless times; I’d also been on short cruises on the Queen Mary and the Normandie. I’d never in my life seen anything like this one. The SS Madura, a British India passenger ship of 11,000 tons, had been on the last leg of a long journey home from the Far East, when Winston Churchill ordered her to change course to Bordeaux to pick up the stranded British. Embarkation had been going on for 24 hours by the time we were taken on board and when we finally sailed that evening of the 18th June , the ship, registered for 290 including the crew, had taken on an extra 1, 400 passengers. We were lying low in the water “below the Plimsoll line” I heard someone say, and swallowed my bitter disappointment when some friends of ours, suddenly spotted on a raft, were not allowed to board; they were later rescued by a small Dutch cargo ship. This was also the day of General De Gaulle’s historic first broadcast of London, but I doubt whether any of us, except perhaps the Captain, were aware of this at the time.
Alexander Werth , a British journalist who’d been working for the Daily Express in Paris, wrote an account of the trip as soon as he got back to England. “British business men from Bordeaux, journalists from Paris, English people from Belgium…and also some specimens of the retired- Colonel class from the Riviera – that is, the last people in the world to see their well-ordered existence disturbed in this way,” was how he summed up his fellow passengers. No mention of families like us, we were too unimportant to be visible. I remember how difficult it was to move around a forest of tall adults. The passenger list was an extraordinary mix of distinguished names like Baron Rothschild and Marie Curie’s daughter Eve, as well as just about every representative of the British Press that had been working in France. The journalists’ view of the whole experience was different from mine; they all knew each other and as alcohol, unlike food, was plentiful, they seem to have partied most of the time, no doubt to forget the trauma they’d just been through, and the uncertainty that lay ahead.
Just before we sailed on the evening of the 18th June, there was more screaming of aircraft and what sounded like a building crashing on deck. In the small cabin that my mother and I had been given there was only one life jacket, and as she strapped it onto me and we sat waiting for the ship to sink, my thought was, that I could swim and she couldn‘t. But again, our luck held and we weren’t hit, in fact the plane attacking us was brought down into the water by one of the last French fighter planes still in the air.
“And so we sailed towards England. And as I looked out on the calm blue sea, far away from anywhere -for the coast of France was far away and could not be seen – it was hard to imagine that only a little over a week ago we were still in Paris.” Alexander Werth again. Yes, that’s how I remember it too, the blue sky, perfect weather, a miraculously calm sea. And then, on the third day, I heard a word passed round “Falmouth”. My parents knew where it was, and marvelled that we’d come so far west.
No gang-plank, only a rope-ladder this time. As I got ready to climb down, my precious doll was snatched from me without warning and hurled down the side of the ship where a sailor caught her. I was relieved and impressed. So this was England! Even the dolls were looked after. And in fact as we were processed through formalities in a big hall there was an extraordinary sense of purpose and calm, as if everybody knew what to expect and was braced for the ordeal ahead. Ladies in WVS uniform gave us food, drinks and sympathy. The next thing I knew, we were on a train to London.
This is an edited extract from :
The World I Lost by Daphne Wall
A moving true-life story of ten momentous years in the author’s early childhood, starting in a Paris suburb in the late 1930s, followed by a dramatic escape from the invading German army in June 1940 and a life turned upside down in the turbulent conditions of Second World War Britain. Available on Kindle here.
Daphne comments on writing up her memories here
Comment on the story here.
