A House in the Sunflowers by Ruth Silvestre

Author:Ruth Silvestre [Ruth Silvestre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749015985
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2013-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

One morning Matthew came in very excited. ‘You’ll never guess what Philippe and I’ve been doing,’ he cried. ‘Grandpa’s got this old car – ’

‘Grandpa has nothing but old cars, vans and that old 2CV – ’

‘No! No! Really old. A 1929 Citroen. It’s in a barn behind the church. It’s been there ever since the war. He hid it from the Germans!’ Matthew was wide-eyed.

By now we were all interested. ‘Philippe says he’s going to ask him if we can get it out.’

Later that afternoon we went to look. Raymond and Grandpa led us to a barn that we had never even noticed before. Tucked behind the church, the huge doors creaked as we pushed them slowly open. Inside was a museum. Ancient farm machinery, wooden carts with great high wheels and oxen yokes attached, a pony trap and, hidden behind them all, covered with sacks, gleamed the dark green body of the old Citroen. It had Grandpa’s name on the back and the original tyres with DUNLOP clearly marked on the spare wheel. ‘Has it really been here since the war?’ we asked.

The old man nodded. ‘We hid her from the Germans,’ he shouted triumphantly. ‘We were supposed to give up all our vehicles but they never found mine.’

‘But why didn’t you get her out afterwards?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember. I hadn’t the time. There was too much to do and anyway petrol was short.’

‘Can we get her out now, Grandpa?’ begged the boys. He looked at the car. ‘If you want to,’ he said and then without another word he turned abruptly and walked off. I watched his small figure trudging back to the house and wondered what memories he was recalling.

Eagerly the boys uncovered her to reveal her high stately shape. ‘She’s just like in “Bonnie and Clyde”,’ said Matthew. They jacked her up to remove the wooden blocks on which she had rested and pumped up the tyres which astonishingly stayed hard. She would not start, however, that had been too much to hope for.

‘I’m afraid the motor’s seized up,’ said Raymond sadly. However, Claudette’s cousin, who kept the garage in a neighbouring village arrived the following morning and a small crowd assembled to watch as, pulled by the tractor, she began slowly to emerge from obscurity after almost forty-five years.

The cousin towed her away to see if it were possible to revive her. Two hours later he telephoned to say that he had a problem. He needed a new cylinder head gasket and, if we could find it, a radiator cap. For a 1929 Citroen? Raymond scratched his head. He had heard that there was a specialist in old cars somewhere near Villeneuve and off we went, none too hopefully, to see whether he could help us.

In several acres of ground which stretched down to the river Lot we found a tall, dishevelled, gentle man who ran a nursing home for hundreds of old cars, the most precious wrapped in old eiderdowns. While he

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