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Tuesday 8 July 2014

This Long Journey

The celebrations for the 70th anniversary for D-Day have come and gone, as has the wonderful Chalke Valley History Festival, where I successfully submitted my pitch to the Penguin Historical Fiction Writer's Workshop. It doesn't mean much other than as an introduction and a boost to my confidence, but at least it tells me that the story is a good one and that I am on the right track. There's still a fair amount of editing to do but in the peace and tranquility that is daily life at Bardies, I'm determined to get to the end of this long journey.

When I started, I envisaged a non-fiction book about the brave and largely unrecognised women of the French Resistance. It angered me that General Charles de Gaulle, a military man who loathed the irregular forces of the FFIs [the Forces Francaises de l'Interieure formed at the beginning of 1944 from the various armed resistance groups inside France] awarded only six Croix de la Liberation to women, out of a total of 1,061. He hated the communists so the brave women, and most of the men too, of 'red Toulouse' and Ariege, especially those of Spanish Republican origin, were relegated to the footnotes of history. Military hierarchy had no place for women.

There are a number of reasons for this, not least the reluctance of the women themselves to talk about their wartime experiences. It was not just the war that they wished to forget. It was also the horrors of l'epuration in the immediate aftermath. No one knows exactly how many people were killed but estimates range upwards of 10,000, an enormous number by any measure. There was also a high degree of sexual retribution, as if the cowardly and politically impotent men of Vichy could only exonerate themselves by turning on the women that they labelled les collabos horizontales. A schoolteacher resister noted that 'in the shaving of heads and so on...we touched rock bottom'. It is estimated that 20,000 women were publicly brutalised.

In the women's accounts, in the main, there was a desire to move on, to rebuild what had been broken. So many people were displaced, so many families were fractured and so many graves were in need of tending; France had paid a high price. There was also the urgent need for reconstruction. France received seven times the tonnage of bombs that the UK received during the Blitz. It was not just the towns of Northern France. Biarritz, Nice, Marseilles and many other cities experienced the effects of Allied bombing. Fifty-seven thousand French people lost their lives after D-Day.

Seventy years on, a more nuanced history has emerged from the oral testimonies of resisters, particularly the women. These accounts give us a flavour of the time. While they do not tell the full story, they help us to comprehend that resistance takes many forms. So why a fictional story, I am asked? The answer is a simple one. I want to give them a voice. There are few contemporaneous oral testimonies from the women of Ariege and Haute-Garonne. I can guess at the thoughts and words of these brave women but I cannot know what they actually said. In a work of fiction, one has the freedom to generate meaningful dialogue and to attempt to recreate the landscape of the time, both physical and emotional.

I am lucky to live close to the town of St Girons, from where a number of evasion lines over the Pyrenees operated, including the O'Leary line. Many accounts can be read in Ed Stourton's Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees, which has stimulated a great deal of interest in our little piece of la France profonde. In his introduction, Ed writes of the genius loci of the place, the spirit that makes its story so special. Unsurprisingly, Ariege is called la terre courage on quaint roadside tourist signs. Napoleon Bonaparte designated it le pays du fer et des hommes. Life has always been hard here.

After the fall of Barcelona in January 1939, almost 500,000 desperate men, women and children of the Retirada walked over the mountains in brutal conditions to seek safety in France. Many died, either on the mountains or in the terrible concentration camps that were thrown together to greet them. A large number of them joined the Resistance. Others acted as passeurs, taking Jews, downed Allied airmen and other evaders over the smuggler's paths into neutral Spain, helped by a small secret army of women in safe houses who provided a hot meal and a bed for the night at tremendous personal risk to themselves and their families.

I hope that I can do these women justice. I dedicate my story to them. Now, as I work towards the final chapters, I have decided to use this blog to tell the stories of some of the real women of the Resistance. It seemed to me to be one way to resolve my dilemma about fact and fiction, and that difficult historical middle ground that Anthony Beevor desultorily designates as faction. One day, perhaps, I shall write that history but in the meantime I hope to pay tribute to their courage, their resolve and cunning, but most of all, their generosity of spirit.

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