Xandra Bingley - Bertie, May and Mrs Fish

I say, ‘ Oui, merci , it is true.’

The mayor of Graye-sur-Mer says to me, ‘When I was a child I must go with no shoes. Certain things are not remembered. My family are going in the fields at night for food. It is food for cows. I do not know the names.’

I say, ‘Turnips, swedes, mangolds.’

He says, ‘ C’est ça . If they see us the enemy shoot.’

I say, ‘Is there nothing left in the shops for you to buy?’

And he says, ‘ Pour les collaborateurs … bien sûr , madame, there is everything.’

A Frenchman in a black beret reaches up and embraces me and says, ‘Madame, I live at Jerusalem Crossroads, a hamlet. The British soldiers come. We give them wine and flowers and tell them “Thank you.” We hear aeroplanes. A soldier calls, ‘It is Yanks, OK, OK, yellow – yellow.’ The soldier quickly spreads yellow silk squares on the two vehicles. A yellow smoke goes up into the sky. The driver says, ‘It is for the Yanks to see we are les amis .’ The American planes fly over firing. I run away with another boy. When I return, all Jerusalem Crossroads and all the soldiers are dead. I think I am lucky to be here with you today. It is a great honour and I say thank you, for your father. You are proud of him? I think so.’

British officer veterans drink French champagne and laugh and tell me, ‘We shouldn’t laugh, we oughtn’t to.’

I say, ‘Why not?’

They say, ‘We’re remembering hunting a Hun along Juno beach. Bloody hell he ran. We got him with the flail tank chains.’

I ask, ‘What are flail tank chains for?’

One says, ‘For mine-sweeping. Tank bars on the front swing the chains and find mines hidden under sand.’

Outside the farm courtyard I stand in wildflowers and lean on a sunny stone wall and look at a field of pale-cream Charolet cattle and hum ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’, and hear my father’s high tenor voice descant. I see him walk across our farmyard past a downstairs window and look in. I am piling up pennies and half-pennies on his desk and Gigi is playing on the radiogram. He shouts at the window … Turn that bloody man off … turn that man off … do you hear me … at once. Maurice Chevalier is singing … Thank ’eaven for leetle girls … for leetle girls grow bigger every day … thank ’eaven for leet-le girls … I open the window and he stammers … I w-will n-not … r-repeat n-not … h-have d-damned c-collaborateurs in m-my h-home.

I turn off the radiogram and he calls from the hall … That’s m-more like it … the so-and-so should be locked up by rights … one first-class slippery customer … or after the invasion we’d have caught him fair and square. Hey-ho … you keep an eagle eye out for cowardly types when your turn comes old girl … that’s my advice.

He closes the window and says … I hear the bastard’s filthy rich these days … three cheers for the ignorant hoi polloi … now who’s next on parade? What say we bring in the beloved horses and give them their tea … jump to it … enough fraternising with the enemy for you today. Did I tell you in confidence I risked the Lion of Judah over Dewpond sliprails … went at them like an Eleventh Hussar trooper … took off from his hocks … only had him in a rubber snaffle … mouth soft as a baby’s bottom.

His brilliant blue eyes look my way and his finger taps his lips … Mum’s the word … shh-hh … if I am called upon to make a confession I shall simply say to your mother … not a hope in hell of stopping a young horse who’s made up his mind to jump a fence … you’ll know that as well as I do. He and I walk up the yard and he sings … Chirri-birri-bin … chirri-birri-bin … I love you so-o …

At Five Acre gate he calls the horses … Come on … come on, girls and boys … teatime … teatime …

I climb the elmwood bars and say … What is a collaborateur …

He says … Not now … not now … keep your mind on one thing at a time … look out … here they come … a fine sight if ever I saw one … open the damned gate … get a move on … don’t stand there coffee-housing like the bloody French … off the bars … I am in no mood to pay for new hinges … that’s more like it … have a leg up onto Glory Boy … then lead on. The rest will follow … if we’re lucky.

I ride bareback up Rickyard Lane astride my father’s tall chestnut and look over the Cotswold grey-stone wall built on Calfpen bank to our hills and woods. He pulls fistfuls of linseed barrel nuts out of his green corduroy trouser pockets. Loose horses follow and push and shove to nuzzle his pockets. We pass the twin stone barns tall as churches and turn down into the farmyard.

My mother’s Irish money buys our Elizabethan farm in 1941, the second summer of World War Two. My father’s Inns of Court regiment is fighting a mock battle on the Cotswold hills and from a high point he looks down and sees what he thinks is a small village or a hamlet in a hollow. He tells his armoured car driver … Head downhill … we’ll make a quick recce … His car roars down Homefield and he finds the deserted farm.

A doll’s house face under triple gables looks at a farmyard circle of stone barns and stables spreading to cattle sheds and lanes. A front door path is between two green squares of lawn edged by sprawling pink roses on a drystone wall. The garden swerves away past a cherry tree and south around two apple trees to the wicket gate at the damson tree by the Rushy Brook stream. The house faces north because Elizabethans believe flies spread the plague and sun shining on windows attracts flies. They are wrong. Xenopsylla cheopsis , the rat flea carries the plague and fleas are brought to England by black rat hosts from China.

He telephones my mother at her Corps headquarters at Camberley south-west of London and says … God willing I’ve found the Bears a home.

My mother has joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – FANYs – created in 1907 to train English girls to gallop on horseback onto battlefields and give first aid to wounded soldiers and carry the injured to field hospitals in horse-drawn ambulances. In the 1930s FANYs become a mechanised Women’s Transport Service. Upper class girls drive and service transport lorries and motorbikes and chauffeur army personnel and chant:

I wish my mother could see me now,With a grease gun under my car,Filling the differentialEre I start for the sea afar,A-top a sheet of frozen iron, in cold that would make you cry .

I used to be in Society once,Danced and hunted and flirted once,Had white hands and complexions once,Now I am a FANY .

She says to me when she is an old lady … I was never lost or behind schedule driving my brigadier-general … even in the blackout on the very long journeys with no car lights, when we went from the north of England all the way down south to Devon.

My father telephones her FANY HQ in summer 1941 and tells her … Steal a tank of petrol and concoct some excuse to drive down here p.d.q. This is a land of milk and honey. I give you my word. Take the London – Oxford A40 road past Burford and Northleach. On the ridge look left-handed across open country. A single clump of trees on the far horizon is the farm boundary. Stay on the A40. Look for a red iron gate in a line of beeches. If you fetch up at Seven Springs crossroads you’ve gone too far. The drive is half a mile of bloody awful potholes. If I’m right – and I’m damned sure I am – this is a home for us for ever. Those old boys knew how to build to last. No flies on the Elizabethans … and no flies on us. We’ll be sheltered on all sides. The Almighty had his eye carefully on our future when the War Office boffins planned today’s regimental exercise.