Madame Barbara. Helen Forrester
she could use as a walking stick to help to balance herself. Nothing offered.
While the sound of battle growled on in the distance and flashes in the sky told of continuing aerial combat, she stood contemplating the problem. Then she kneeled down and crawled slowly across the pile, testing every stone before she put down knee or hand to go forward. Her thick long skirt, though an impediment, was painstakingly heaved forward each time she moved a knee, and it saved her already lacerated skin from further serious cuts. She was, however, crying with pain by the time she found a steady footing on the door itself.
Michel heard her and tried again to push the cave door open. The fallen house door wobbled under her.
‘Wait,’ she said sharply, and then as he obviously did not hear her clearly enough, she shrieked almost hysterically, ‘Wait, can’t you?’
Subdued, he waited.
She swiftly began to clear the debris. Whatever was not heavy, she threw as far as she could, so as not to disturb the pile over which she had climbed. On the other side of her, a sliver of pathway was bare before the commencement of a further pile of treacherous stones and broken beams; it might just give sufficient room to push the door to that side, she decided.
Some of the stones from the house walls were heavy, and these she laid carefully onto the slithery piles, hoping that she would not set off a cascade of debris back onto the door.
Finally, she had cleared everything up to the outhouse door. She was so exhausted that she prayed to the dear Virgin that she would not die before she got her beloved Michel out.
Swaying on her feet, she now very carefully considered how to move the door. Finally, she staggered the length of it to the outhouse.
‘Michel,’ she shouted.
‘Yes, Maman.’
‘Be ready – when I shout – to push hard and squeeze right through. Use the mallet, if necessary.’
‘Exactly what are you going to do?’
She explained how the unhinged house door was the wedge. Her voice was hoarse from dust, from exhaustion, from simply having to shout.
‘Don’t touch your door for a moment. Let it shut entirely to give me leeway. I’m going to try to lift the corner of the back door – it’s pressed against the rise of the back doorstep – so that it will clear the step. Once I shout, you do everything you can to get your door ajar.’
The first time she tried, she could not lift the corner. The damp, muddy grass seemed to suck the heavy wood down. She paused for a moment, and then with every scrap of strength she had she gave a frantic heave.
It lifted.
‘Push!’ she shrieked.
The door of the outhouse moved, as Michel pushed it from the inside.
‘Push!’ she screamed again.
Suddenly her end of the door jumped in her hands and slid upwards onto the second step of the house. She instinctively released it, and it bumped heavily down onto the top of the second step.
‘Push.’
The corner of the door slid unwillingly across the step, wedging again when it hit the sill of the gaping house doorway. It was sufficient, however, to give space for Michel to squeeze out of his prison.
As he emerged, his mother collapsed.
‘Maman,’ he gasped, as she fell against the house wall.
Weak with relief, he stood for a second leaning against the outside of the sturdy little outhouse; then he stumbled towards her.
At first, he thought the effort had killed her. He burst into tears, as he tenderly laid her on top of the fallen door, the only clear spot. ‘Maman!’
It seemed an eternity before she opened her eyes, to observe her younger son on his knees before her, crying like a child.
It took a moment or two more to realise where she was and what had happened. She smiled weakly at him.
‘We did it!’ she whispered.
He smiled back at her.
Amid the total destruction of their home, he knew that nothing really counted except that they had each other.
‘Clever, clever Maman,’ he told her, as he pushed back the thin grey hair from her filthy, bleeding face.
They lay exhausted under the shadow of the teetering chimney for some time. Then Michel said, ‘I’ll try to get into the kitchen to get some food.’
‘Mais non!’ she responded forcefully. ‘You haven’t yet looked at it. See, the roof is broken in.’ She glanced above her. ‘And this wall is threatening to come down. We must move – very carefully, very softly.’
He raised himself on his elbow, and glanced around him.
He understood the danger immediately.
As, very cautiously, he got up and helped his mother to her feet, he was dumbfounded by the destruction which surrounded them. Aghast, he stared at it in disbelief.
He finally whispered to his trembling mother, ‘Maman, what are we going to do? What can we do?’
But she could not answer him. What had happened to victory, to liberation? she wondered in dazed amazement. Here was no victory: it was yet another defeat.
As Michel and his mother stood shakily in what had been the vegetable patch, their ears eased slightly and they became more aware of the high-pitched shriek of shells directed over their heads at the near distance, where heavy gunfire made a steady roar. Occasionally, through the general cacophony, they caught the distant screams and shouts of troops in hand-to-hand combat, while high in the sky planes dived purposefully towards the sound of battle. The horizon was flushed with fires.
Both of them were so covered with dust – faces, hair, hands, clothing all blackened – that they resembled statues carved from coal. In addition, amid the grime, Madame Benion’s face was marked by copious tears and drying blood from abrasions on her forehead and one cheek.
Barely able to stand upright, together they surveyed, aghast, the utter decimation of their farm. They imagined, from the flushed skyline, the further destruction still being wreaked on the hapless countryside.
Two dead Germans, one decapitated, lay nearby in a churned-up hen run. A burned-out tank stood, still smoking, amid the stark skeleton of the barn. Even the apple trees had been blasted practically out of existence. The stable, where their horse had lived, the pigsty and, worst of all, the hen coops, were piles of smouldering wood; and from them, as from the tank, came the nauseating odour of cooked meat and burned feathers, mixed with the smell of death from human corpses. Michel sniffed and reckoned that there were other dead nearby.
Nauseated, the Benions swayed unsteadily on their feet, overwhelmed by sickening terror. While shells continued to whistle over their heads and the heavy gunfire persisted on the horizon, they were unable to move further themselves.
From low in the sky, through the dust, they saw that a few German fighter planes were rising to challenge a further wave of Allied bombers.
Michel pushed his mother to the ground, close to the protection of the wall of the storeroom.
‘We could go back into the cave,’ he shouted into her ear. But she feared being shut into it again, and yelled passionately back, ‘Non! Non!’
As they lay with eyes closed, Michel realised that the naval guns from the coast now seemed to have altered their range to a setting to the south-east of this little homestead. Frequently shrapnel hissed to the ground, but the Benions barely heard it. The dogfights above them had also shifted further