Amazing Airmen. Ian Darling
friend of the Resistance, the colonel spoke English and assured Renner he could trust Father Laboulle. He also presented Renner with a few cigars.
While at Father Laboulle’s home, a member of the Resistance took Renner’s photo to create false identification papers for him. The papers said he was Willy Leon Ravel, who was “un cordonnier” — a shoemaker. Having arrived in Belgium without his shoes, Renner appreciated the irony of his occupation. The priest also arranged for Renner to obtain civilian clothes to replace his air force uniform.
One day, Father Laboulle decided to take his Canadian guest on a motorcycle to a store in downtown Charleroi, to buy him a pair of shoes. On the way, the priest stopped his motorcycle and fired a pistol. He wanted to make sure it worked. Although startled, Renner realized he was riding with a brave, bold priest.
When they arrived in Charleroi, the two men walked up a staircase at the back of a shoe store. The stairs led to an apartment occupied by the owner of the store. They couldn’t risk entering the store itself in case someone who didn’t support the Allies saw them.
The owner came up the interior staircase. Before he could find a pair of shoes for Renner, he noticed some unwanted customers in his store. “Les Boches,” he whispered, using a pejorative word to describe Germans.
Renner looked down the staircase into the store. He could see several men in uniforms. He was not mistaken this time. German soldiers were right below him.
Renner quietly backed away from the staircase in the shoe store. The Germans had not seen him. He didn’t know why they were in the store. They might have been looking for him and other Allied airmen, or they might simply have been looking for shoes.
Regardless of what they wanted, they made him nervous. Renner remembered that Father Laboulle had a pistol and wondered if he would have to use it.
The soldiers only stayed in the store for about five minutes, then they left.
The store owner took Renner’s shoe size, went down to his store and returned with a set of shoes that fit him. Having helped the Allied airman, the owner offered Renner and Father Laboulle a drink. The two men enjoyed a glass of wine before going back to the priest’s home.
Back in Preston, Renner’s parents, John and Louise, received a telegram a few days after JD463 failed to return to Middleton St. George. It said their son was missing in action. Six months later they were informed that he was presumed dead. Despite this devastating news, Louise Renner presumed he was alive, a presumption based on her faith.
Renner’s parents were not the only people deeply affected by the information about their son, who was an apprentice machinist before the war. It was also dreadful news for Renner’s fiancée, Elizabeth Pulbrook. He had become engaged to her before he left Canada.
In early November, a few days after Renner acquired his shoes, Dr. Fanuel came to Father Laboulle’s home to convey an urgent message. The doctor had come with a member of a Franciscan order, Brother Materne, to tell Renner and the two Russians that they should leave immediately. The Gestapo were searching the area.
Maria Dardenne.
They all left the house within minutes. Renner departed on Brother Materne’s bicycle. The ride was not very comfortable because Brother Materne was also on the bike. The priest pedalled while Renner sat on the seat. Renner did not know where he was going. He just had his rosary beads and his faith that this stranger would take him to an appropriate location.
Brother Materne took Renner a few kilometres away from Laneffe, to the home of Dr. Fanuel’s aunt.
The doctor had made the right decision when he urged Renner to get out of the house. Within hours, the Gestapo came to Father Laboulle’s home and took the priest away for questioning. They held him for a week before releasing him.
Dr. Fanuel’s decision to put Renner in his aunt’s home was not so wise. She was too nervous to look after an Allied airman. The doctor decided that Renner should go to another home. After he stayed with the aunt for two nights, he again sat on the seat of a bicycle while Brother Materne pedalled.
Renner went about fifteen kilometres, to the home of Maria Dardenne in the hamlet of Fairoul. Maria, who was forty, had a particular reason to support the Belgian Resistance. She hated Germans because her older brother, Raymond, was critically wounded by German soldiers who invaded Belgium during the First World War. Gangrene had developed in his legs and Maria, who was a teenager at the time, took care of him until he died.
Even though twenty-five years had passed since the end of the First World War, she still had a vivid memory of her brother and the way he died. “Les Boches,” she said contemptuously when talking about the country that her brother fought.
This memory motivated Maria to look after Allied flyers during the Second World War, when German troops again invaded her country. Renner was not the first flyer she sheltered. She had previously taken in Flight Sergeant Douglas Knight of the Royal Air Force. The Germans eventually caught Knight, who became a prisoner of war. They shot the member of the Resistance who was escorting him at the time.
The Belgian Resistance had offered Maria money to compensate her for looking after the Allied evaders who stayed with her, but she wouldn’t accept any compensation. She didn’t want to be paid for helping flyers who risked their lives to fight Nazi Germany.
Maria lived in a large stone house that had two storeys and an attic. Renner stayed in a room on the second floor. Maria’s eighty-four-year-old father, Joseph Dardenne, lived in another room on the same floor. She did not tell her father about Renner because she thought they would all be safer if few people knew about him.
Maria’s father stayed in his room most of the time, coming out to go across the street with her to eat meals at the farm operated by her brother, Joseph Dardenne Jr.
Joseph Jr. knew Renner was hiding in Maria’s house, and he also knew what happened to the person who was escorting the previous Allied evader Maria had sheltered. “Prenez garde. Prenez garde,” he said to his sister as he urged her to be careful. He was concerned not only for his sister, but also for himself, his father, his wife, and his infant son, who was born the week Renner arrived.
Most of the time, Renner remained in his room. He would go out to use the washroom, and when the father left the house. Even in his room he had to be careful. The room faced the street and he did not want anyone in the hamlet to see him through the window.
If Renner did have to hide quickly, he could go to another bedroom that had a trap door to the attic. For added security, Maria and Joseph Jr. had strung an electrical wire between their homes. Anyone in the farmhouse could use the line to activate a buzzer in Maria’s kitchen if a suspicious person approached.
Maria was concerned about security even when she did the laundry. After she washed Renner’s clothes, she would hang them inside hers on a clothesline so neighbours would not see them. She also used her coat to cover the food she brought from the farmhouse to his room every evening after she finished working on her brother’s farm.
During his first few months at Maria’s home, Renner studied French. Maria helped him, and gave him a dictionary and newspapers. The French he learned at St. Jerome’s High School quickly came back to him.
He also helped Maria to learn English. She found the language to be exasperating and asked him to explain why certain grammar rules existed. Renner, not an English scholar, did his best.
Renner spent a lot of time on his own. Elisabeth Neuville, the sister of a local Resistance leader, brought him two