Daughters, Sons and Shadows by Bill Cariad

Author:Bill Cariad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nursing, history, drama, wartime, parenting, murder, adultery, past and present
ISBN: 9781783339655
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2014
Published: 2014-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Who is the happy warrior? Who is he whom every man in arms should wish to be? (Wordsworth)

Saturday 31 st May 1944

The last day of May was only four hours old in the County of Surrey when the camouflaged army truck slowly coasted to a halt on the darkened driveway of Carshalton’s ‘Ridgeway House’.

Early risers within the feathered fraternity chattered their individual versions of ‘salute the morning’, whilst down-wind of the now stationary vehicle a prowling dog-fox warily flattened himself to the ground as he saw four shapes with the scent of man detach themselves from the thing which now stood between him and his den. The shapes moved towards some trees before stopping and the animal saw the steam as its nostrils registered another familiar scent. The four shapes then moved back to meld with the thing which had brought them here, and only then did the fox rise to pad silently in search of a safer way home.

Already closing their eyes in anticipation of two hours sleep, the two Frenchmen, Laporte and Chevalier, were in the back of the truck wordlessly wriggling into their sleeping bags. Laporte, a leanly tall and darkly handsome man in his thirties, was a skilled Carpenter by trade. ‘A man with the hands of an angel and the eyes of the devil’ was how, in pre-war days, he had been described by those Parisienne mothers who had foolishly allowed their daughters to accompany them when browsing to buy a Laporte creation to grace their homes. Those same angelic hands which had deftly disrobed Parisienne daughters as skilfully as they’d brought inanimate wood to life in the form of elegant furniture, had spent the past five years fashioning quite different creations. Laporte’s explosive devices had been used to devastating effect against his country’s invaders.

Chevalier, Jewish by birth and Structural Engineer by profession, had reached his ripe old age of forty-two summers only because some years before he’d set eyes on the truck within which he now lay, thanks to a woman named Chantal he had narrowly evaded another kind of truck on its way to Auschwitz.

Both Frenchmen lay now in British army uniforms, in the back of a British truck on English soil, because two weeks ago they had been chosen from the several who had stepped forward in a Bordeaux farmhouse cellar in response to a call for volunteers.

The Welshman and the Englishman were slouched in the front cabin of the truck; both wearing British battledress proclaiming them to be serving with the Royal Corps of Signals. Sergeant’s stripes authoritatively adorned the tunic sleeves of the powerfully built Welshman named Glyn Parish, whilst on each shoulder of the Englishman’s slim frame was a dullish-bronze crown denoting the rank of Major. The Englishman named Carter had lost the toss to decide who would grab an hour’s sleep first, so he was currently awake.

Even seated and asleep, the Welshman looked ferocious. Still remembered by his former regiment of Fusiliers as ‘Parish the Power’, the

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