Early One Morning (37 page)

Authors: Robert Ryan

BOOK: Early One Morning

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Eve Williams was sitting cross-legged on the gravel when the big lorry inched its way in, indicators flashing, air brakes hissing as the driver sought to edge it in without demolishing the stone pillars. Clear of the gateway he edged forward, pulling the truck tight in against one of the paddock fences, away from where she sat. With a final shush the engine stopped and the driver climbed from the cab.

She looked up at him, then at the four wonderful doe-like eyes staring down at her from their crazy-paved necks. Giraffes. She pulled some specks of gravel from her forehead, feeling silly now. ‘The zoo is another fifty kilometres.’

‘I know.’

He stood there, arms folded, and Eve read the tag stitched on the overall’s breast pocket. Tambal. ‘Well, Mr Tambal, if it’s coffee you want, I can help. Anything else …’

She held out her hand and he strode over and pulled her to her feet. As she came up his arms went round her waist and for the first time she looked beyond the beard and the thin network of scars and the bent nose and the misshapen ear and felt as if she were going to be sick. ‘Ah …’ was all that came out.

He reached up and pulled the hair from her face, the way he had seventeen years before on a lonely beach in the headlights of a Rolls-Royce. ‘Hello, Eve.’

‘Will.’ Her voice was a frightened whisper. ‘Will?’

‘I was.’

‘No, no, you are …’ There was pleading in her voice. ‘You’re alive?’

‘No. Will’s dead.’

She took a step back, looking at him, making sure he was solid, not some tormenting spectre. ‘Why?’

‘Too many things. Just too many. Time to start over.’ He had done it before, he could do it again. Grover became Williams who became Grover-Williams. Now he had to die, for the terrible things he had done. Rose, Lock, and …

‘Robert?’

The worst sin of all. He shook his head.

‘Tell me.’

And he did, mostly. A friend given and then taken away, leaving him behind. After he had finished he said quietly: ‘Fresh start, OK? No questions, no recriminations. That’s the offer.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ she said and grinned. When he didn’t react she pinched him. ‘I’m joking.’

It would be a long time before he could really laugh out loud again, he knew. It was like after the King had died when he was a boy, and his father had turned them into a house full of whisperers. Now he felt the entire world should lower its voice in respect for and remembrance of what had happened to his friend.

‘The giraffes?’ Eve asked.

‘Long story.’

Then he saw the Atlantic. She noticed his eyes dart over there, saw the small, expectant smile on his face. Knew he was recalling the madness of driving it with Robert, risking their lives because they wanted that speed. It was a kind of insanity, he could see that now, but in a world gone completely mad, it was difficult to pick out what exactly was sane and what wasn’t. He looked at Eve again, disbelieving, and echoed Rose’s words: ‘You dug it up?’

‘Long story. But it works.’ She took him by the hand and pulled him across to the garage, yanking the barn door fully open and revealing the long, low shape he never thought to see again.

Eve climbed in, turned the key, pressed the ignition and the engine ripped into life, the familiar Bugatti signature, loud and raucous, in total contrast to the elegant wrapper. ‘Move over,’ he said.

She looked up at him and shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. Dead men don’t drive.’

Williams hesitated a moment, then jumped in the passenger side. Eve let in the clutch and the car leapt forward, wheels throwing up a storm of gravel, causing the giraffes to pull back in shock as she bumped the Atlantic out of the courtyard and turned left, away from Rose and everything she stood for, flooring the accelerator, throwing him back in the seat. Williams watched hypnotised as the line of plane trees rushed towards them, blurring together as the speedometer crept round the white face of the dial, the only evidence of gaps between the fat, peeling trunks the semaphore flashing of the early morning sun.

Author’s note

E
ARLY ONE MORNING
is a novel and should not be regarded as a historical document, but at the core of it are a few remarkable truths. Williams (aka William Grover aka William Charles Frederick Grover-Williams), a former chauffeur for Sir William Orpen, Robert Benoist and Jean-Pierre Wimille really did form a Resistance circuit in France in 1942–3. The idea of the fastest men in the world against the German occupiers is what sparked this work. Like so many other clandestine groups, they were betrayed to the Germans, and many people suffered and died as a result.

Robert Benoist was actually apprehended much later than Williams. His escapades herein, driving a Bugatti from under the noses of a convoy he had been forced to join and leaping from a moving police car (it was a Hotchkiss, not a van), are true. There were so many other tales of Robert’s bravery and resourcefulness that, for a while, SOE were suspicious of a man who could escape from the clutches of the Germans so often, until Robert came to England for training and they saw what he was made of. As far as we know, he was hanged by piano wire at Buchenwald, alongside 36 fellow Allied officers, by the SS on 12 September 1944.

Maurice Benoist was tried by a French court for collaboration. Due to ill health, he served only five years of a ten-year sentence. Still protesting his innocence, he died in 1955.

Some suspicion of betrayal also fell on Jean-Pierre Wimille, who was acquitted and exonerated by the court. After the war, racing for Alfa Romeo, he was well on his way to being belatedly recognised as one of the greatest drivers of his era, when he was killed at the 1949 Argentinian Grand Prix in Buenos Aires.

Yvonne Williams became a well-known dog breeder and a judge at Crufts Dog Show in London. The two Scotties on the Black & White whisky bottle were reputed to be hers. She died in 1973.

Although Williams was officially notified as executed at Sachsenhausen in March 1945, in May 1947 a communication was sent from Berlin by MI6 to SOE asking for help in relocating a former Bugatti race driver, Grover-Williams, to the USA. Sometime later a man calling himself Georges Tambal, closely resembling Wlliams, an expert on race cars and with the same date of birth, moved into Yvonne’s farmhouse. She was to claim he was her cousin. Tambal was knocked off his bicycle and killed by a carload of German tourists in 1983.

Keppler is modelled on Hans Josef Kieffer, who was hanged by the French. His crime was signing the execution order for a group of British commandos later in the war, not running the SD in Paris. SOE admitted there was little they could have pinned on him for his activities at Avenue Foch—he really was a man who preferred a deal to torture. Of course, that certainly wasn’t true of all Gestapo, SD and Abwehr officers.

Rose Miller is in no way based on the wonderful Vera Atkins of SOE, whom I had the privilege to meet shortly before her death. She told Jack Bond and me that she interviewed Kieffer after the war and managed to reduce him to tears within a short time. This did not endear him to her. Jack asked her over dinner at the Special Forces Club how she viewed the Germans sixty years after the events. There was a long pause while she drew on a cigarette and she eventually said, very softly, with great feeling: ‘As disagreeable as ever, really.’ Out of Williams and Benoist, both of whom she met, we got the impression that it was Robert she admired more.

Vera would not have approved of the way I have played with dates, for instance for how long the deeply flawed poem codes were used and the timetable of SOE operations (I have them up and running a little faster than reality). She would certainly have exploded at the suggestion of an SIS plant in SOE. I can only plead, once more, that this is a fiction with a bedrock of actual events.

However, a French company (which survives today as part of a US multinational) did manufacture Zyklon B during the Second World War as well documented in France by journalist Annie Lacroix-Riz, who has suffered much vilification for this and other exposures about industry’s role in the occupation.

Arthur Lock is based on Harry Cole, a British renegade, his career much as described, apart from his death.

It is likely Williams escaped from Sachsenhausen by striking a deal with an SS officer called Meyer to give a testimonial to the Allies. The famous Yeo-Thomas (The White Rabbit) used a similar method, as described in Mark Seaman’s excellent book
Bravest Of the Brave
(see below).

Virginia Thorpe is a total fiction, but several SOE agents did find themselves relatively comfortable homes in Avenue Foch and appeared to have a far too cosy relationship with the SD. Henri Dericourt (‘Gilbert’), who controlled Lysander flights for SOE, certainly did let the SD look at the mail. The debate over whether he was simply a traitor, a double agent or a triple agent has raged since the 1950s. There is no doubt, however, that being shown such documents seriously weakened the resolve of several agents when they were in Avenue Foch.

Around 480 SOE agents went into France by plane, parachute or boat. One hundred, and thirty were captured. Twenty-six returned. This is thought to be the tip of a very large iceberg—the official numbers take no account of collateral damage to the French population caused by a circuit’s collapse. There were many brave French and English men and women involved in the Chestnut circuit, including Lieutenant Roland Dowlen, an SOE radio operator who was sent to help Chestnut on 31 March 1943 and was billeted with Thérèse Lethias in Pontoise, away from the house at Auffargis, for security reasons. Nevertheless, he was captured on 31 July by DF vans, and his radio was subsequently operated by the Germans until 31 October. Dowlen was executed at Flossenburg. Other circuit members, too numerous to mention here, were also arrested and many died in concentration camps and prisons.
Early One Morning
is dedicated to all of them.

Both Benoist and Williams, whose enigma survives him, were awarded the Croix de Guerre and to this day trophies in both men’s names are raced for.

Sources

M
Y INITIAL RESEARCH
into the Williams/Benoist story was with Gervaise Cowell (now deceased), the SOE advisor for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Richard Day, curator of The Bugatti Trust in Gotherington, Gloucester. The results were published in
Arena
magazine as the short story
The Man With One Name
, for which I am grateful to the then editor Peter Howarth, who encouraged me to present it as fiction.

That was 1995. Two years later, after a meeting engineered by Duncan Stuart of SOE, I was fortunate enough to have use of the unstoppable energy and drive of the inimitable Jack Bond, film director and producer, who worked closely with Beatrice van Lith, Robert Benoist’s granddaughter, to uncover many of the details used herein, principally Williams’ survival of Sachsenhausen plus Beatrice’s insights into the character of Robert. Jack also showed a remarkable facility for prising out information from both the UK and French security services, the latter regarding the Zyklon B issue (and picked up a warning that digging too hard might be detrimental to his health). Jack also unearthed, from Eve’s neighbours, the tale of Tambal turning up with the giraffes.

Richard Smith, a man with a mission if ever I met one, trawled through the Public Records Office at Kew and dropped many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into place, proving beyond any doubt that Williams was not executed at the camp. To get an admission from SOE/MI6 that the files are wrong is a remarkable feat.

Again, I have played fast and loose with all these people’s exemplary work.

For those who wish to find out more about the characters and events without the gloss of fiction, I would direct you to the excellent website
www.64-baker-street.org
and the bibliography which follows.

Bibliography

ORPEN:
Mirror To an Age
by Bruce Arnold

The IRA
by Tim Pat Coogan

Memories of Montparnasse
by John Glassco

Americans in Paris
by Brian N. Morton

The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s
by William Wiser

Paris and Elsewhere
by Richard Cobb

The Josephine Baker Story
by Ean Wood

Driving Forces
by Peter Stevenson (a book about the Silver Arrows).

Hitler’s Grand Prix in England (Donnington 1937 and 1938)
by Christopher Hilton

Ettore Bugatti
by W.E Bradley

Bugatti, The Man and The Marque
by Jonathan Wood