Celestine Read Free

other times he said that whenever he sensed a German patrol might be near he would take to the fields and pretend to be tending the crops, a role in which he presumably looked so convincing that he was never questioned. Once he hastily joined a family who were digging up potatoes, muttering to them ‘I’m your cousin…’ Potatoes, cabbages and turnips – the main crops at that season in the chilly north – also provided his food. The motorized and provisioned troops of 1940 covered territory at speed; half France was in German hands almost before the distraught populace had grasped the scale of the defeat. But stragglers, deserters, escaped prisoners, and refugees were back to the pace of foot-soldiers living off the land, as in the days when France was ‘sixteen days wide and twenty-two days long’.
    His keenest anxiety during that journey was that he did not know whether his home country, that pays to which he was pertinaciously, almost instinctively making his way, was now in the Occupied Zone or in Pétain’s nominally Free one. In fact the Department of the Indre was just within the Free Zone: the line of demarcation was the River Cher, which bisects the old province of the Berry into two Napoleonic Departments, each named after its river. Bernardet only discovered the position of the frontier when he reached its banks. There he wandered for hours, avoiding the bridges which were now equipped with gun posts, gazing morosely at the farther shore. From any deserted water-meadow a swimmer could have made it easily to the other side. However, the rivers that criss-cross Bernardet’s landlocked native countryside are all smaller than the Cher. The Indre there is easily fordable; the larger Creuse is twenty miles away. So Bernardet had never learnt to swim.
    His saviour, who appeared at last as night was falling, was that classic figure of French folk-tale, a small boy herding cows. The child showed him where he could wade across, armpit deep. Some sixteen hours later, having walked in exhilaration all through the night, he strode into his own village. He went straight to his aunt, in the house that is now ours.
    He never travelled again after that. He had done it, and that was enough. Why should he wander in other people’s kingdoms when his own, so intimately known to him in all its rises and descents, its variations in soil, its pastures and crop fields, vineyards, copses and vegetable gardens, was there demanding his attention?
    Late in life, he did occasionally get on the train to visit his daughter, established in the suburbs of Paris, but this was on the understanding that her garden needed expert attention which her garage-mechanic husband could not be expected to provide. Each to his own skill. I believe that in his seventies, also, he did once relent so far as to accompany his wife on a day trip to the Atlantic coast, but till then it had been almost a matter of pride to him that he had never seen the sea.
    After the war, when the aged, limiting structure of French rural life was at last cracking open a little, one or two friends suggested to him that a man of his acknowledged capabilities might aspire now to a different job. The local Gendarmerie, perhaps, where a good friend was established? Or the railways? His army sergeant, in civilian life a railway worker, would put in a good word for him there. Bernardet considered these propositions but turned them down: the thought of a life unencumbered by the demands of either the fields or the animals that meant so much to him did not, after all, appeal.
    He grumbled furiously at times, but that is a general trait in farmers, subject as they are to forces of God and Government perpetually beyond their control. Not that he believed much in God, and he had a covert contempt for all forms of organized government from the Élysée Palace to the village municipal council. His ethic and his passion was work; it was his pride