‘Anything coming in this week?’
‘I believe there will be some bacon. And coffee. Very little butter. I hope to have the exact rations later today.’
We gazed out of the window. Old René had reached the church. He stopped to talk to the priest. It was not hard to guess what they were discussing. When the priest began to laugh, and René bent double for the fourth time, I couldn’t suppress a giggle.
‘Any news from your husband?’
I turned back to the mayor. ‘Not since August, when I had a postcard. He was near Amiens. He didn’t say much.’ I think of you day and night, the postcard had said, in his beautiful loopy scrawl. You are my lodestar in this world of madness. I had lain awake for two nights worrying after I had received it, until Hélène had pointed out that ‘this world of madness’ might equally apply to a world in which one lived on black bread so hard it required a billhook to cut it, and kept pigs in a bread oven.
‘The last I received from my eldest son came nearly three months ago. They were pushing forward towards Cambrai. Spirits good, he said.’
‘I hope they are still good. How is Louisa?’
‘Not too bad, thank you.’ His youngest daughter had been born with a palsy; she failed to thrive, could eat only certain foods and, at eleven, was frequently ill. Keeping her well was a preoccupation of our little town. If there was milk or any dried vegetable to be had, a little spare usually found its way to the mayor’s house.
‘When she is strong again, tell her Mimi was asking after her. Hélène is sewing a doll for her that is to be the exact twin of Mimi’s own. She asked that they might be sisters.’
The mayor patted her hand. ‘You girls are too kind. I thank God that you returned here when you could have stayed in the safety of Paris.’
‘Pah. There is no guarantee that the Boche won’t be marching down the Champs-Élysées before long. And besides, I could not leave Hélène alone here.’
‘She would not have survived this without you. You have grown into such a fine young woman. Paris was good for you.’
‘My husband is good for me.’
‘Then God save him. God save us all.’ The mayor smiled, placed his hat on his head and stood up to leave.
St Péronne, where the Bessette family had run Le Coq Rouge for generations, had been among the first towns to fall to the Germans in the autumn of 1914. Hélène and I, our parents long dead and our husbands at the Front, had determined to keep the hotel going. We were not alone in taking on men’s work: the shops, the local farms, the school were almost entirely run by women, aided by old men and boys. By 1915 there were barely any men left in the town.
We did good business in the early months, with French soldiers passing through and the British not far behind. Food was still plentiful, music and cheering accompanied the marching troops, and most of us still believed the war would be over within months, at worst. There were a few hints of the horrors taking place a hundred miles away: we gave food to the Belgian refugees who traipsed past, their belongings teetering on wagons; some were still clad in slippers and the clothes they had worn when they had left their homes. Occasionally, if the wind blew from the east, we could just make out the distant boom of the guns. But although we knew that the war was close by, few believed St Péronne, our proud little town, could possibly join those that had fallen under German rule.
Proof of how wrong we had been had come accompanied by the sound of gunfire on a still, cold, autumn morning, when Madame Fougère and Madame Dérin had set out for their daily six forty-five a.m. stroll to the boulangerie, and were shot dead as they crossed the square.
I had pulled back the curtains at the noise and it had taken me several moments to comprehend what I saw: the bodies of those two women, widows and friends for most of their seventy-odd years, sprawled on the pavement, headscarves askew, their empty baskets upended at their feet. A sticky red pool spread around them in an almost perfect circle, as if it had come from one entity.
The German officers claimed afterwards that snipers had shot at them and that they had acted in retaliation. (Apparently they said the same of every village they took.) If they had wanted to prompt insurrection in the town, they could not have done better than their killing of those old women. But the outrage did not stop there. They set fire to barns and shot down the statue of Mayor Leclerc. Twenty-four hours later they marched in formation down our main street, their Pickelhaube helmets shining in the wintry sunlight, as we stood outside our homes and shops and watched in shocked silence. They ordered the few remaining men outside so that they could count them.
The shopkeepers and stallholders simply shut their shops and stalls and refused to serve them. Most of us had stockpiled food; we knew we could survive. I think we believed they might give up, faced with such intransigence, and march on to another village. But then Kommandant Becker had decreed that any shopkeeper who failed to open during normal working hours would be shot. One by one, the boulangerie, the boucherie, the market stalls and even Le Coq Rouge reopened. Reluctantly, our little town was prodded back into sullen, mutinous life.
Eighteen months on, there was little left to buy. St Péronne was cut off from its neighbours, deprived of news and dependent on the irregular delivery of aid, supplemented by costly black-market provisions when they were available. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Free France knew what we were suffering. The Germans were the only ones who ate well; their horses (our horses) were sleek and fat, and ate the crushed wheat that should have been used to make our bread. They raided our wine cellars, and took the food produced by our farms.