In the event, Charbonneau didn’t stay long in London. He left the week after Cleve, posted to Corsica to prepare for Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France that took place two months later. He was liaising between General de Lattre de Tassigny’s French Army B and the US 7th Army. He sent me a regular supply of postcards detailing how fed up he was — and how well fed he was.
I remember going on a three-day holiday to Woolacombe in Devon towards the end of June. An English GPW photographer — Gerry Mallow — had a cottage there and a ketch, named Palinurus, moored in Ilfracombe harbour. We would take the ketch out with a picnic and many bottles of beer and cider and sail out to Lundy Island.
It was an odd experience being on a holiday like that with people I didn’t really know very well. I went for walks and read books, happy to leave the running of the office to Faith. In an unconscious way I was also coming to terms with my father’s death, I now realise. I wasn’t feeling grief; I was assessing the end of a relationship. My natural father — daughter relationship with B. V. Clay had ended that afternoon when, in his madness, he had tried to kill us both. Every encounter I had with him subsequently had been shadowed by that event and despite the civil, dutiful signs of affection between us, I was always wary of him, watchful. The bonds had been broken and all that was left was the official designation — a father, a daughter.
I took a camera with me to Woolacombe, of course, but barely used it. One day when we were out sailing on the Palinurus I left it by the wheelhouse and somebody took a photograph of me. I discovered it two weeks later when I had the film developed.
*
Me on the Palinurus, 1944.
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I don’t have many photographs of myself — a trait common to most professional photographers, I believe — but I’ve always been fond of this one, for some reason. It’s probably my second favourite photograph of myself, after the one taken on my wedding day.
Flam has made a speedy recovery. The familiar dog in him is back. We walked over to the McLennans’ today and it tired him out rather — I mustn’t forget he’s as old as me in dog years.
*
I remember the doorbell ringing in my Chelsea flat very early in the morning on 1 July. It was 6.30, I saw by the kitchen clock. It rang and rang. I hauled on my dressing gown and hurried downstairs to the street entrance. It was my mother, but my mother as I’d never seen her — hair wild, eyes red-raw from weeping. I rushed her upstairs, she was wordless, sobbing, and sat her down. She sat there shaking, staring at her hands.
‘What is it mother, what’s happened?’
‘It’s Xan. I’ve had a telegram.’
I felt my lungs empty and my spine arch. I sat down slowly.
‘Xan’s missing. Missing in action, they say.’
4. PARIS
I LOOKED AT THE map again.
‘Take the next right,’ I said to Pearson Sorel, the driver of my jeep.
We bumped along a track, a sunken lane between high hedges of beech and hazel in the depths of the Normandy bocage, and turned right, pulling into the front yard of a farm called Le Moulin à Vent. A tethered collie gave a harsh peal of angry barks and then lay down again.
‘Wait here,’ I said to Pearson, stepped out of the jeep and approached the front door of a low stone building with a shallow-pitched tile roof. To one side of the courtyard there was an open wooden barn and a small stable with two loose boxes. I was wearing olive-green fatigues and a tin helmet, wanting to look as martial as I could. I had my camera in my knapsack and a box of 200 Lucky Strike cigarettes for use as a potential present, if required. I knocked on the door and said ‘Bonjour’ to the stooped ancient woman wrapped in a shawl who opened it. She looked me up and down and shouted ‘Arnaud! Arnaud!’ — and Arnaud duly appeared, a toothless smiley man with rosy cheeks and an immense soup-strainer moustache, like Nietzsche’s. Son or spouse? It wasn’t clear. I showed him the document I had — in French — my French wasn’t good enough to explain what I wanted. He searched for and found a pair of spectacles and read it carefully.
‘Ah, finalement,’ he said. ‘Suivez-moi, mademoiselle.’
We walked across the farmyard and through a gap between the barn and the stables. The land sloped down to a large apple orchard, an acre or so in extent. It was now September and the leaves were turning yellow and the ground between the trees was lumpy with windfalls. We made our way down through the orchard towards its end. Halfway through our progress I began to see the smashed trees, some snapped cleanly in half, and there, like some sort of bizarre tilted metallic ruin, was Xan’s Typhoon. The great boss of the propeller was buried deep in the turf, the blades shattered, the plane’s back broken. The Perspex canopy had been pushed open and the seat and the instrument panel already looked mossy and mouldy and I saw a spider’s web strung from the joystick to the cockpit fairing. One wing was fifty yards away, ripped off by the impact; the other wing was lifted crazily, near-vertical, showing the empty rail mountings where the rockets had been slung.
Strangely, the Typhoon, smashed and broken up like this, seemed even bigger and heftier in the orchard than it had when parked by the runway at RAF Cawston. Maybe it was the size of the apple trees, mature yet stunted and broad as apple trees are, that caused this delusion of scale, making the crashed plane seem even more surreally out of place in this orchard than it already was.
Arnaud was complaining and I understood enough to know that he was asking why this wreck that had been in his orchard for over two months now had not been cleared away.
‘Bientôt,’ I said, confidently. ‘Très bientôt,’ as if I had some power to effect its removal. I walked around the Typhoon, taking photographs, thinking about Xan’s last flight. I had used my journalistic connections with the air ministry, and then his squadron, to piece together as much information as was available.
Xan had flown a sortie at the end of June, the target a chateau in the Argentan area that was believed to be an army-group headquarters. He and the three other Typhoons in the flight had released their rockets in the face of only light anti-aircraft fire and had substantially damaged the chateau. It was therefore bad luck that Xan’s plane was hit, I was told, as it was observed peeling away after the first pass and trailing smoke and was then seen to crash in an apple orchard a few miles away. Apparently Xan had survived the crash and was standing waiting by his plane when he was shot dead by the first panicked German troops that arrived. A week later when Canadian forces overran the sector they were led by the local priest to Xan’s body, lying in a crypt in the church.
These were the few facts I had and as I walked around the plane I tried not to let my mind fill in the gaps and failed. Xan’s relief at surviving the crash, climbing stiffly out of the cockpit — maybe he lit a cigarette. . Then hearing shouts, seeing the German soldiers running through the trees towards him, resigning himself to becoming a prisoner, raising his hands in surrender. Then the shots. .