Mum never got over the village massacre at the end of the war
I’ve just given a speech at an open-air mass on a football pitch in Northern France. In French. Not the kind of thing I tend to do on a typical Sunday, but this was no ordinary speech. Face aglow in the 32C heat, I’m relieved to have got through it without too many slip-ups.
And now, sitting in a 1940s Dodge army truck heading slowly towards the town hall in Rieux-en-Cambrésis, a small French village not far from the Belgian border, my fellow passengers are sweltering in their retro military regalia, Jacques the golden retriever panting under the weight of his saddle bags. Behind us is a marching band followed by a procession of villagers, many in Second World War uniform, a solemn parade accompanied by the sound of wartime sirens.
But this isn’t a fancy dress jolly or a war re-enactment. It is the day before the 80th anniversary of the day this village, like hundreds more in Northern France, was liberated by American troops. Instead of a day of jubilation, this day marks a tragedy for the villagers – and my mum was one of them. I’m here on her behalf to relay her memories of what happened that day, and the story she tells is chilling in the extreme.
With her Inspector Clouseau accent and the ultra-Gallic name of Jeanne, my mum is French to Brits in London where she eventually settled. But here in Rieux-en-Cambrésis everyone refers to her as l’Anglaise. The English Woman. Over the years, Mum, the youngest of three girls, has returned many times to this tiny community where their lives changed forever. Because it was here that my grandmother Nell, a stout, stoical Brummie, stranded with her girls in occupied France throughout the Second World War, found refuge.
In 1939 my grandad, Tom Sarginson, was an engineer at the Courtaulds factory in Calais where he and Nell were living happily with their little family. But Tom had been arrested when the Nazi forces invaded on May 10 1940 and Northern France was occupied. He was carted off to an internment camp in Upper Silesia in Central Europe along with all the other British men captured in the area (including, incidentally, PG Wodehouse, who Tom couldn’t stand).
Stranded in France and pushed from pillar to post by the German authorities, Nell had no choice but to wait it out – and in Rieux she knew she’d found refuge for her family, safe from the Nazis and the Allied Forces’ bombs raining down on bigger towns like Cambrai.
Eighty years on, I’m here to read Mum’s testimony to the gathered crowds. She is one of the only surviving villagers who can give a first-hand account of what happened on the day when tanks full of dusty, exhausted American troops arrived to free French citizens from the stranglehold of war. A day of long-anticipated joy. But, in the case of Rieux-en-Cambrésis, the joy was short-lived.
From her London home my mum, now aged 92, recalls the events. “That morning, September 2 1944, some of the local lads had knocked for us, all excited because they’d heard the US tanks were headed towards the village. They were lads we knew well, especially as one of them, Jean Wallez, was the boyfriend of my sister Marie, then 18. His brother Yves, 16, was always kind to me, once letting me ride his horse home from the nearby fields.
“Today, they were full of feverish anticipation. ‘Madame Nell, come with us, we’re going to meet the Americans, you can translate.’ We said we’d catch them up shortly, and off the boys went, laughing and buzzing with excitement at what lay ahead.
“But as we started walking up the hill in pursuit, a thick fog soon descended and, unable to see ahead, Nell decided we should turn back. Seconds after we got back to the house a German armoured vehicle whizzed past and up the hill, the soldiers armed to the teeth – trapped and defeated, they were ready to shoot anything that moved. Shortly afterwards we heard shots… our neighbour said the US soldiers must have got them.
“A few minutes later, when two American tanks arrived in the village, they were greeted with cheers of wild delight. After more than four long years for France the war was over – liberation at last! The soldiers looked exhausted, their eyes red and their black skin grey from the dust of the road, but they grinned as everyone kissed and hugged them, laughing and crying, handing them bottles of wine and bouquets of flowers, with the church bells ringing…
“Then, at the villagers’ request, Nell asked the soldiers if they’d seen the lads en route. ‘No ma’am we ain’t seen no boys, but we saw some bodies near the road,’ one soldier replied in a slow Deep South drawl. My mum’s voice shook with emotion as she translated his description of what they’d seen, and the mood changed in an instant.
“The truth dawned on the gathered crowd and jubilation turned to tears and screams. Thirteen village men and youths had been massacred – their noses first broken with rifle butts, they’d been gunned down in the middle of a field. All the villagers had lost someone – a nephew, a father, a son, a brother. The youngest was 14.”
It’s a haunting story I know only too well because it torments Mum. “What if we had carried on and found the boys? Would the German soldiers have shot a woman and three girls, or worse? As the weeping crowds dispersed, I remember my mum, Nell, reaching for her handbag and lighting a cigarette with shaking hands as I’d seen her do so many times throughout the war. Having safely got her girls through so many challenges and dangers, the thought that she’d almost got the four of us shot made her blood run cold.”
It later emerged that the massacred group from the village were members of the FFI, the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur – the formal name General de Gaulle gave for the French Resistance. Would this perhaps have emboldened them to ignore orders, shared on the radio, for civilians to stay at home rather than risk going out to meet the Americans? Whatever the case they were unarmed – and paid with their lives.
In Rieux, 80 years later, it’s a sunny end-of-summer day. Mass and speeches done, people have come from far and wide to soak up the 1940s vibe at this weekend-long commemorative event – part village fete, part wake. People are recounting stories, kids are playing games, flags are waving, delicious wine and food are being shared (we are in France, after all), couples are dancing, and all to a soundtrack of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet. The whole event couldn’t be more French if it tried.
And there are plenty of moments of levity. Later, as 13 flaming red lanterns representing the lives lost are released in the cool night air, an orchestra is playing a sombre tune. Suddenly, the wind changes direction and onlookers giggle as a stray lantern bounces, aflame, across the tops of the heads of the orchestra, threatening at any moment to set their hair alight.
But later, at the Salle de Fetes, it’s hard not to be touched by the displays of images everywhere of the teenage lads with their 1940s haircuts and clothes, smiling happily or goofing around in the photos taken before their brutal death. There are two sets of brothers and cousins. There’s Jean, 23, Marie’s boyfriend with his curly hair and glasses, and Yves, 16, with his laughing eyes.
There are a few dads who joined the lads at the last minute. Meeting descendants of families who lost loved ones is sobering. Like the husband of Nicole Dupuis who was eight when her dad left the house to go and join the posse heading off to greet the Americans. “She never got over it when he was killed,” her husband tells me through tears. His late wife’s trauma has impacted his whole family. As it has mine.
Seeing her friends’ bodies brought back from the field by ox and cart left my mum with emotional scars that have never healed. “They’d left our house laughing, full of joy and positivity. And they paid the ultimate price. To think of those young lads who could have been fathers and grandfathers… It’s affected my whole life. I used to be a happy, mischievous child, but since that day I’ve been quite guarded. I’d seen so much as a 12-year-old that superficial socialising became impossible. I had a burden to carry, and telling the story now is a great relief because I don’t want it to be forgotten.”
After the war, Nell and the girls were reunited with my grandad Tom on the station platform at Birmingham’s Snow Hill (“It was like the famous ‘My daddy, my daddy’ scene in The Railway Children”). Like other post-war families, the Sarginsons did their best to recover from the horrors they’d endured, counting their blessings that all had survived.
Years later, Mum became a French/English tour guide showing French schoolkids round Bath and Bristol. She also wrote Nell and The Girls, published when she was 84, recounting the whole French escapade. She needed to get it off her chest. “Apart from being separated from my dad, the war had been a bit of an adventure for me. But that ended on liberation day. It’s just one story in one village of many in France – but I was there and I can remember it. It’s a story that needs to be told.”
Towards the end of the war, the English weren’t exactly popular among the French, when bombs, dropped to hasten the defeat of the Nazis by taking out French rail centres and road networks as well as German military bases, resulted in the deaths of thousands French civilians. At times people were hostile, but in Rieux my grandmother Nell and her three girls were offered friendship and help.
It perhaps explains my connection to France and why, in my 20s, I lived for a few years in Amiens in the Somme, not far from Rieux-en-Cambrésis, working in bars and even commuting for a year to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. The warmth and humour of Northern French people makes me feel right at home, and now, on this incredibly poignant weekend, welcomed with open arms by people who are, essentially, strangers, I feel a genuine magnetic pull.
In Rieux, the flower bed outside the town hall now sports a new plaque, unveiled by the mayor as the marching band played La Marseillaise. The plaque is emblazoned with 13 now-familiar black and white photos of boys and men forever frozen in time.
Nell and the Girls: The True Story of a British Girl and Her Family in Occupied France 1940-44 (Myrmidon) is available at Waterstones