The Bordeaux Bakery

Chapter 1

Despite the stormy wind, Marie-Louise Dumontier, slumped in the bottom of the small felucca, could just make out a solitary bell tolling forlornly. Church bells had always given her comfort, but not tonight. The sound drifted eerily across the water from a chapel in the tiny fishing village of Sainte Maxime…Now, enemy territory. Territory where she’d soon be stepping ashore. 

The captain was tense, concentrating hard on his sail, the jagged rocks, and his compass. It was hard to see anything in the dark, but he knew he must get these two foreign women off his boat tonight and escape from this coastline before he was caught. He hated these deliveries for the British. They were getting far too dangerous.

*     *     *

When Marie-Louise and Martha had first stepped on to the small wooden felucca in Gibraltar, the captain had eyed them suspiciously. He hadn’t been informed that his passengers would be women. Marie-Louise and Martha were too weak and exhausted to care much about his assessment. They’d just spent thirty-six hours in the tight confines of a British Naval submarine, and for at least thirty of those hours, they’d had their heads bowed over buckets, retching up what felt like every meal and drop of liquid they‘d ever consumed. 

Inexplicably, their suffering had made the submarine crew very cheery. 

“Don’t worry, ladies. At first, you’ll be worried that you’re going to die. Later, you’ll be more worried that you aren’t going to die,” was the phrase repeated by chuckling sailors, far more accustomed to being at sea than either of the women would ever be. By the time they’d collapsed onto the Navy dock beneath the towering Rock of Gibraltar, neither woman ever wanted to enter a submarine again. 

They were given little time to recover before the next leg of their journey. Using a tap and a bucket, Marie-Louise washed herself and her clothes behind a naval warehouse. Freshened, she felt like a new woman. She’d lost weight, and her already slight frame resembled that of a girl, not a woman in her twenties. She’d always hoped she’d develop some curves one day, now especially, but then chastised herself. Why would she need curves in France? She was going there to work, to help the resistance, not to impress the locals! But still…

Just an hour later, they boarded a flimsy felucca beneath the disapproving gaze of its captain and his single crew member. The sun was dipping below the horizon as the boat slipped out of the harbor and turned her nose east. Martha didn’t bother with any niceties. Instead, she disappeared down into the tiny cabin and crawled straight onto a bunk.

Marie-Louise made her way to the cockpit. The captain was an older Arab, though she found it hard to estimate his age, as his leathery skin spoke of countless hours exposed to wind and harsh sun. His dark eyes never left the water for long. He studiously ignored the intruder standing next to him, enjoying the fresh sea air. She’d developed a sudden deep appreciation of fresh air after her sub-sea voyage. 

“I like your boat,” she commented in French, smiling at him. She wasn’t going to hide downstairs like Martha for the next three days; she wasn’t going to go through that again. He didn’t totally ignore her, but with his grunted response, he may as well have. She repeated her words in fluent Arabic.

“You speak Arabic!” he declared, a wide smile crinkling his already weather-furrowed face.

“And English, Italian, and German. I studied languages at university and then worked in Cairo,” she replied with a smile of her own. She didn’t mention that she’d worked in the British Embassy there as a translator. He didn’t need to know that. He nodded approvingly. He was having trouble clinging to ancient prejudices now, and she decided to capitalize on his confusion.

“Your sail. It’s a very interesting color. I don’t think I have ever seen one like that.”

“My wife dyed it so we can’t be seen so easily at night. The problem is the sea air washes off the dye, so it runs and looks like a sheep crossed with a goat. The only things that hold the color are my wife’s hands. She looks like a mechanic now.” He threw back his head and laughed at his own description. 

Marie-Louise had won her victory. His name was Abdul, and he’d been trading between Morocco and Spain his entire life. And lately, he’d ferried a few men between Gibraltar and France’s Mediterranean coast for the British, who paid him quite well. Once she got him talking, it was impossible to stop him. Before long, his life story was tumbling out like a confession he had been dying to share. She learned about his wife, his five kids, and his countless adventures at sea. Of course, no real conversation in that part of the world would be complete without a few recipes thrown in. Marie-Louise had long since learned that all countries bordering the Mediterranean seemed to regard cooking and food as integral to any good dialog. 

Talking to Abdul helped pass the time. The journey to a coastal village somewhere near Cannes would take three days, or rather, three nights. By day, they dropped the sail and tried to remain as invisible as they could from any German or Italian ship. At night, they hoisted it again and tried to cover as much water as they could in the shortest amount of time. Abdul enjoyed her company, but the women brought great risk with them, and the sooner he could drop them on the French coast, the better. 

He never asked about their background or why they were being secretly ferried to France. He knew that they were British, and this was confusing in itself. Women being sent into a country occupied by those fascist swine who’d bombed his country and helped Franco to power was incomprehensible. He’d lost two brothers fighting for the Republicans against Franco and had nearly died himself. Why on earth would any woman want to go to France now that the Nazi fascists were there?

Marie-Louise was grateful to be distracted. She wasn’t exactly sure why she’d joined the Special Operations Executive herself. She knew that partly it was to defy a mother who’d never found anything nicer to say about her daughter than she was an ordinary little bird, a little like a sparrow. What saddened Marie-Louise the most was that her mother hadn’t even meant it as an insult. She’d simply described her as she saw her: quiet, petite, and sharp-featured, without ever realizing the hurt her words had caused her daughter. 

But she knew the real reason wasn’t her mother. She was returning home to France to fight Hitler’s occupation. The Germans seemed to be enjoying their occupation, with no plans to leave any time soon. There were nervous whispers in Britain… What was really happening in France after its army had been so badly defeated in 1940? Were the French ever going to rise up against Hitler? People were said to be starving. There were rumors about Jews being arrested and disappearing. She didn’t know what she would find, but knew it wouldn’t be good.

She’d spent her first fifteen years living in a village in the Loire Valley, between Paris and Tours. Her father, Roger, a French surgeon at the Western Front, had married her mother, an English nurse, after she’d become pregnant. Marie-Louise had loved her childhood. She’d loved her quiet father dearly, as had her mother, Marion. But his years of sewing up punctured and blown-apart bodies had damaged him, and he knew he couldn’t simply sew his own soul back together. Marion found him one sunny September morning hanging from a bough of their oak tree.

They’d returned to her mother’s family, back in England, where she’d spent the next eight years, including the four years reading languages at Bristol University. She’d loved studying.

Then, one day, someone at the British Embassy in Cairo overheard her speaking to a colleague in French, and the next thing she was on a ship back to England for an interview with a rather prim woman, Miss Atkins, who’d asked a lot of questions about her life in France. She was accepted into the Special Operations Executive then and there, a special organization that Churchill had launched, which sent trained people to infiltrate behind enemy lines in Europe. Secret agents and wireless operators, explosive experts, and couriers…she was being trained to be one of those. It seemed unfathomable. 

The SOE mostly recruited native French speakers who’d blend in with the locals easily while carrying out their undercover work. She knew she’d blend in fine. No one would even notice her.

  The SOE training was anything but ordinary. She fired guns, jumped out of airplanes, mastered Morse code, and learned half a dozen different ways to kill an enemy. The course was much harder than anything she’d ever done, and she was terrified most of the time. She kept to herself in order to hide her fear as best she could. She constantly questioned herself: was she up to this? Would she be able to perform the extraordinary when she really needed to? Or was she simply a coward?

And yet, here she was, bound for her new life as an undercover agent in France. She was to work as a courier for the network in Bordeaux, she was told a day before getting on the submarine. At least she wasn’t going to be an explosives expert; the thought made her palms sticky, even though she had mastered this aspect of her training better than most of the men in her group.

*     *     *

On the final night, the wind picked up. Abdul assured her that wind was normal in the Mediterranean at that time of year, but she could see he was worried. He ordered young Ali to take a tuck in the sail and then, less than a half hour later, to take another. But still, the boat yawed alarmingly toward starboard. Around midnight, the felucca bucked and twisted its way close to the coast, and the two women heard the bells peeling above the wind. Soon, they could hear the crashing of waves and spot a flash in the moonlight of white surf breaking over rocks in front of them. The rocks looked far too sharp and much too close. 

Abdul was very quiet. He muttered under his breath. They couldn’t tell if he was cursing or praying. Marie-Louise felt her terror gauge rise again. Even if they made it ashore safely through those rocks, their lives could be snuffed out without a second thought at any moment anyway. Vichy France was not safe for foreign agents, although it was safer than occupied France, she conceded. 

Abdul steered his fragile craft close to where the waves thundered onto the rocks, its bow bucking wildly. A dim light suddenly flashed from the shore, then twice, and again a third time. 

Abdul cursed and wrestled the wheel to bring the bow around to head back towards open water.

“Twice good,” he shouted over the hiss of the incoming waves. “Three times bad. We try again tomorrow night.” 

Marie-Louise stared straight ahead. The thought of trying to cross that mountainous surf in a tiny rowing boat had terrified her, but now they had to wait for another twenty-four hours, which terrified her just as much. One layer of terror is built upon another. She didn’t know how much more she could take. She longed to talk to Martha about it, just as she’d longed to share her fears with some of the other SOE women trainees. But she never had. The others didn’t appear to be burdened by the same paralysis as her. She recalled one blonde woman on her parachute course who shrieked in delight as she jumped out first from the plane to parachute down, down, down to the ground below. 

Or maybe they were collectively smothered by fear and knew that to speak of it openly would break the spell of courage that they presented to the world. Either way, it was taboo. And a little lonely.

Chapter 2

The wind gathered in strength just before dawn, and then, as the sky turned a delicate pink, it seemed to give up on itself and drop away altogether. By the time the sun eventually rose, the water was as calm and silent as a pond, and it was difficult to imagine the angry monster that had been so desperate to drag them under the night before. The second attempt at landing was looking as though it would be easier, but Abdul was still tense. He didn’t like the idea of moving so close inshore two nights in a row. If they’d been spotted on their first attempt, it was highly likely that there could be a trap lying in wait for them on the second. He fretted all day, but to his credit, as the sun set, once again, he headed back towards the coast just east of Sainte Maxime.

Once more, they got near enough to shore to catch the midnight bells. This time, they could hear them ringing clearly across the calm sea. So beautiful, yet so ominous, thought Marie-Louise. Then a torch flashed twice, and Abdul ordered Ali to drop the sail but be on standby to haul it up again quickly if needed. Without the sail up to steady the boat, it rocked badly, and the women slipped into each other and fell heavily onto the deck. Martha cried out in pain. 

“Quiet!” Abdul hissed at them.

They lay where they fell for more than twenty minutes, with nobody on deck saying a word. Finally, the silence was broken by the lapping of oars dragging a small rowing boat towards them. Abdul smiled down at the pair slumped together on the deck. 

“How do you know it is our people?” Martha whispered.

“Rowing boat. Not even the Italians would try to capture us with a rowing boat.” His wide smile underlined his relief. It was contagious, and Marie-Louise grinned up at him. 

Abdul’s role was almost played out, and he was jubilant. For the two women, however, this was just the beginning, the moment they would finally step onto the main stage. They had trained for months for this. Were they up to the job? Martha clung hard to Marie-Louise, and something lifted inside her as she realized she was not alone. Martha was just as scared as she was.

“Thank you, Abdul,” she reached up her hand for him to haul her up, “you are very brave to help us.”

Abdul grasped her hand fiercely and pulled her to her feet. “You women watch out for those Nazi swine. Go now!”

As the rowing boat pulled alongside, and the two agents jumped gingerly from one rocking boat to the other, the tiny, grizzled man doing the rowing smiled cheerfully a them, revealing the absence of several teeth. He rowed back towards the shore with a quiet determination that never faltered. Faultlessly, he nudged his boat’s bow against some stone steps that led right down into the water from the slope above, and he then nodded for both women to go ashore. As soon as they did so, he pulled away again and moments later vanished into the darkness.   

The two agents stared mutely at each other. Neither of them had a clue what to do next. After months of preparation and an interminable journey, they now stood on enemy soil, and somehow, the moment seemed to lack something. Neither woman was able to pinpoint quite what that something was. They felt very alone.  

There was no sign of the guide. They should have been there to meet them off the boat. Had they been abandoned, or worse still, set up? 

“What now?” Martha whispered.

“I’ve no idea. We climb up the steps to the village, I guess.”

They turned and cautiously ascended the slippery stone steps, not knowing where they led. Marie-Louise discovered that this was to become a recurring theme during her time in France. She would be given instructions, often somewhat vague in their scope, and once on the ground, reality would be very different from what she’d expected. Over time, she’d become better able to improvise in any situation, but in those first hours of those early days, it was confusing and frightening.

The stairs joined up with a narrow gravel path that ran parallel to the shore. Where was their guide? To their left, they could just make out the silhouette of a stone building with a spire that probably housed the bells that they’d just heard. To their right, they could see the black outline of distant hills. 

Marie-Louise opted to take the path that led right, eastward, as it seemed to be leading away from the village, and the village was where they were most likely to run into a patrol. No sooner had they begun walking than a woman suddenly emerged from the shadows. Martha grabbed Marie-Louise’s arm again and stopped in her tracks.

“What the…???” 

“Follow me,” the woman whispered urgently. She lead them off the path and further inland from the coast. They followed, stumbling through low bushes, which gave off an exotic fragrance as they brushed against them, a mixture of herbs and salt, and then finally stepped out onto another track parallel to the original path but slightly wider.

“That path is called the Chemin des Douaniers.” Their guide whispered. “It’s the old customs path that runs along the coast from Italy to the north of France. It was created at the time of Napoleon so that customs officers could search for smugglers.” The woman giving them a history lesson was not anything like the resistance fighter that Marie-Louise had envisaged meeting. She was middle-aged, dark-eyed, short, and squat. The sort of person one would expect to be working as a cook or a cleaner rather than smuggling foreign agents into France under the cover of darkness.

“It’s a dangerous path because it is very easy for patrols to use. This route is longer but safer.”

“Have there been many patrols?” Marie-Louise hadn’t intended to ask this question, but it seemed to just slide from her lips like an uninvited guest. 

“Italians, yes. Germans, not so much. Germans are far more dangerous. They hate us, I think.” The guide had the sing-song accent of Marseilles that was very pronounced even though she was only whispering, and despite the bizarre circumstances, they found themselves in, both agents couldn’t help but smile. 

They continued walking, almost jogging, and although they were fit after their months of training in secret locations around Britain, they were soon struggling to keep up. Their route never deviated far from the coastline except when, for reasons known only to herself, the woman chose to abandon the track and move through patches of forest tumbling down the hills. 

Marie-Louise had a million questions. The one thing that had been drummed into them repeatedly during their training was that information was both precious and dangerous. Occasionally, the woman would break her silence to point out a landmark like the huge brown cliffs of Roquebrune or where the Italians had once had a firefight with the locals. Mostly, they moved relentlessly east and trudged in silence behind their guide. 

The older woman didn’t lessen her pace, and rest breaks were few. When they occasionally stopped, she handed them pieces of hard local cheese and apple slices. Not much, but very welcome all the same.

“You must eat,” she insisted. “Good to eat.”

As they trudged along the path, Marie-Louise tried to work out what drove this woman to do something so dangerous. She knew that they were both driven by a similar desire to defeat Hitler’s regime in France. The difference lay in their ages. This woman probably had a family and maybe even grandchildren. She simply couldn’t imagine the wrench this woman must experience so often when choosing between being there for her family or stepping out into the dangerous darkness to help people she’d never met. And yet, here she was, marching forward fearlessly, knowing full well the price she and her family would pay tonight if she were caught. 

The agents carried forged identity papers in their purses and their painstakingly rehearsed cover stories in their heads. Marie-Louise was Yvonne Poirot. Martha was Pauline Bernier. But their papers gave no protection against them breaking the night curfew. Soldiers could shoot them all on sight if they failed to stop.  

Suddenly, their guide stopped abruptly and forcibly shoved them into the forest that edged the track. Exhaustion was immediately washed away by adrenalin. 

Branches and thorns grasped at their clothes and flesh as they darted away from the track. The older woman dived onto her belly. They followed, dropping onto the forest floor on either side of her. Marie-Louise’s heart pounded like a bass drum as she fought a fierce battle against her rising panic. The sound of running feet and shouting cut through the trees. Torch lights swept the forest.

“It was here!” one voice barked in Italian.

“What was here?” demanded another.

“Something ran into the forest. Didn’t you hear it crashing through the bushes?”

“Wild boar, you idiot.” This deeper voice from one of the late arrivals, still breathing heavily.

“Do you think so?”

“These woods are full of them. If it was the French locals, we’d be in a firefight by now.”

“Maybe we should fire some shots? We could be eating fresh meat for breakfast.”

“You know,” the deeper voice continued, “you city boys from Naples really don’t have a clue. That boar is in Toulouse by now, and you made me sprint up this track like some stupid gangster from the inner city. Now pass me a cigarette, and the next time you see a boar, you’re on your own.”

For fifteen endless minutes, the patrol smoked and joked with one another less than thirty meters from the foreign agents, who lay rigid, their faces pressing into the pine needles. Marie-Louise was terrified the needles would bring on a sneezing attack, as they often did. It was only after the Italians, still laughing and joking, finally left that they tentatively stretched out in the dirt. It was another ten minutes before the guide led them back to the track. 

Less than an hour later, they could make out the town of Frejus silhouetted against the first rays of sunrise. This is symbolic, thought Marie-Louise. A new dawn, a new life, and a beautiful, serene France worth fighting for. She swiped at the tears that, like a spring, had welled up from deep within her. You have to stop this, Marie-Louise. You are a weak woman, she reprimanded herself.

The guide then sat them down behind an abandoned church, where she provided detailed directions on how to find the station. At the last moment, after more cheese and apple, she tearfully gave them each a hug, then turned abruptly and began her journey home. More than four hours of walking lay ahead of her.

Marie-Louise and Martha would also separate here. Marie-Louise was to catch a series of trains that would eventually bring her to the western city of Bordeaux. Martha’s mission lay somewhere to the north-east towards the Alps, but no details were allowed to be shared between them. The need to know, as always, dominated the confidentiality of the operations of the SOE and its agents. 

As they were saying their goodbyes, Martha surprised Marie-Louise by fiercely embracing her. 

“I have to tell you, Marie-Louise, you’re an inspiration to me. I’ve always admired the way you stay so calm under pressure.”

Marie-Louise gaped at Martha, open-mouthed. She hadn’t been expecting this at all. On the one hand, of course, she was flattered. On the other hand, she felt like a fraud and knew she needed to address that.

“Martha, I promise you, I’ve been terrified throughout all of this. I’m simply hanging in there by my fingernails and doing the best I can.” 

“You mean you’ve been frightened, too?” Martha looked stunned. 

“Often to the point of throwing up. I guess we’ve been hiding behind our protective masks. Perhaps that was wrong. I never realized you were frightened. I’m so sorry, Martha. I was so busy being terrified that I didn’t even ask you how you were.” 

For a moment, they just stared at one another, seeing themselves and the other through a new lens. They’d spoken little during their training, but maybe the hardships they’d shared during the last week would have laid the grounds for a friendship. 

 It was not one that was destined to bloom. 

Weeks later, Martha was betrayed by a French collaborator and captured in a Nazi raid. After days of vicious interrogation, she would disappear to a concentration camp, and die of typhus six months later.