Mass – David McVey
I do not think a week has gone by when I have not thought about the man, not prayed for him, not speculated on what happened to him, not wondered how long he lived after our strange, short relationship ended. And today it is 25 years since what the British call ‘D-Day’. I wonder still.
Before the Great War I had worked in one of the bigger hotels in Glasgow, Scotland. Being French was enough back then, you didn’t have to be a good chef—although I was. I came back to France in 1914 and served in the army throughout the war. When war came again, as an old soldier and someone with enough English to communicate with British agents, I was drawn into the resistance early on.
Of course, by then I was too old for active service. However, as well as my English I was known to be a careful observer, a good listener, someone with a grasp of detail. Chefs tend to have these qualities. I saw many things in the early years of the war, things that haunt me still, but by the spring of 1944 I was being called into service less often. And then one day as I strolled in the park I recognised a heavy-set man in an overcoat making the barely-perceptible sign. I joined him, a metre distant, as he looked over the railings of the duck pond. Of course, there were no ducks any more. We’d all been hungry.
“You go to church?” he asked, gruffly. The man was, I knew, a Communist and he struggled to hide his distaste at the question, and his greater distaste at my answer.
“I do.”
“The Church of St. George? The 9:30 mass on Sundays?”
“Every week,” I said. My wife had died in an air raid, my two sons were either prisoners of war or in England and my café was in the efficient hands of my staff. What was to keep me from worship?
“Keep doing so.” He slipped me a piece of paper. “Memorise the details of the information requested and then burn this. Go to the 9:30 mass every week. Always go to the same pew. A man will sit next to you, on your right. Leave your notes in your prayer-book. He will swap prayer-books with you and extract the notes. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
We could not say, but we both knew that this was in connection with the expected landings by the British, Canadians and Americans. We knew it was coming. So did the occupiers.
The instructions had told me to go past certain locations—railway yards, German army posts and the like—and to record the activity I saw. We had a simple code for this kind of information, which would conceal our meaning yet not look immediately suspicious if found. I was well-known in the locality as someone who owned a café, who attended the church and who was a veteran of The Great War. No one questioned the right of a middle-aged man to walk around his home town.
That first Sunday, I wrote my notes just before going to church. I had my ways of remembering what I’d seen, a chef’s ways. After all, we have to remember what meals we are preparing, how many want the beef, how many the pork, which sauces they want, who does not wish to have a certain vegetable. I had a restaurant-trained memory. And for security reasons I transferred my observations to paper at the last possible moment.
Even that first bright March Sunday morning there were nervous moments. I passed two sullen German soldiers in the main street. I didn’t recognise them—they all looked the same in those sinister helmets—but they probably recognised me if they’d been here at any time. Some of them made a point of staring menacingly at worshippers on their way to St. Georges, or to the Église Évangélique a couple of streets away. You needed to remember that you did not stand out, they did not know your secrets, there was nothing about you to attract their attention. It was natural to feel vulnerable and conspicuous, but you were not. But you must continue to behave in an unobtrusive manner.
I sat in the centre pews near the back and the service began. At one point there was a short prayer and we knelt and at the amen we slipped back into our seats and I realised then that there was a man seated on my right.
I did not make the mistake of turning and looking at him. I closed my prayer-book and put it close to his. At the next prayer, he would take up mine and remove the tiny slip of paper on which I had recorded the information.
I do not mean this unkindly, but he did not smell British, but rather of strong French cigarettes, of herbs and of pomade. I had lived in Scotland long enough to know of their weak cigarettes, the smell of grease that hung about them after eating, the faint memory of hot tea. He was French, or he was British but had adopted French ways.
We stood up to sing a hymn and I focused on the words in my hymnal. When the hymn was over, the organ ceased groaning, and I sat down, putting my hymn-book next to my prayer-book. Both prayer-books were still there but the stranger’s place was empty. At the next prayer I used the book he had picked up. The slip of paper was gone.
We repeated this procedure over a number of weeks. The man was never in church when I arrived; sometimes he came in just a minute or two after me, sometimes as much as half an hour into the service. Perhaps he waited across the street out of sight until I arrived and only then entered the church, and not always right away in order to further allay suspicions. Often, I noticed, there was a strong smell of fresh cigarette smoke from him. From French cigarettes.
I never saw him but I felt myself drawn to know what he looked like. I wondered who he was, where he was from and how he had been drawn into this strange world of conceal and pretend. I had a vague impression, as you perhaps get from peripheral vision, of a man in early middle age wearing a suit and tie. Not unlike me.
At one 9:30 mass, however, my curiosity overpowered me. We had been exchanging information for a few weeks by then. This Sunday coincided with the feast day of St. George, and Father Augustine mentioned the saint once or twice in his sermon. By then, I had passed the information and my companion had retrieved it.
There is a rather crude stained glass portrayal of St George and his dragon in one of the windows in the south wall of our church. Father Augustine again mentioned the saint, but this time drew our attention, by way of illustration, to the St George window.
In the instant before I turned to view the window I remembered that I would be turning towards my unknown comrade. I should not have done, but I decided to risk looking at him rather than the window. He, of course, would also have turned towards the window but I would perhaps see his profile and certainly gain an impression of his height and build, of the clothes he wore. And he would not be aware that I was looking at him.
And so I followed the priest’s pointing finger, glanced at the window, and then flicked my eyes a little further to the right to examine the mysterious agent.
Of course he had gone already. He was good, someone who could move noiselessly and unseen, like a ghost or a pillar of mist. But, as I was to learn, he could not make himself invisible to all.
Pettet was the village chemist, a talkative man, a dangerous quality in an occupied area. One of my staff had gone on holiday to greet a new grandchild, so I was in the café working behind the counter. During a quiet spell Pettet was my only customer. He finished his coffee and approached the counter with his uneven, sailor-like walk, a squat, unpleasant looking man in his early forties.
“That bloke who always sits next to you in church, chief…”
I had been involved in subversive warfare for four years by then, and had served throughout the killing years of The Great War, but the words chilled me more than anything else I had experienced.
“What?” I finally replied. “I go to church alone.”
“Well, yeah, I know that, ‘course you do. But there’s always this bloke sits in the same pew, on your right. Haven’t you noticed him?”
“No, I haven’t,” I lied. “I have certainly never spoken to any such person.” This part, of course, was true.
“Yeah, anyway, he’s a funny bloke. I wasn’t in church last Sunday but I saw him coming out of the church when I was passing. Always leaves before the end, haven’t you noticed that? Guess where he went? Right into the Église Évangélique. Now tell me that isn’t a funny thing.”
I smiled, uneasily. “Perhaps he is a wavering believer who does not quite know his spiritual home, yet. I do not know the man.”
“Well, something funny about it, if you ask me…”
Was I being warned, or threatened? Could miserable little Pettet really be a collaborator with the Nazis? Or was he really just nosy, interfering and annoying? There was this intriguing thought, too; perhaps my contact had another source of information who attended the Église Évangélique? It seemed a risky arrangement.
I continued as normal with my weekly round, watching, noting and remembering. Then, just before mass on the Sunday, I committed my information to paper and secreted the notes in my prayer-book.
When I arrived in church, I made my way to my usual pew. On the way, near the back, I saw Pettet sitting with his arms folded. He smiled to me.
I put my prayer-book down as usual and awaited the arrival of my secret comrade. Through song and hymn, prayer and scripture, sermon and Eucharist, I waited, but he never appeared. Had something gone wrong? If the Allies now had enough information about this remote corner of Normandy and my contact had been stood down they would not necessarily inform me. But the possibility remained that he had been captured. Was Pettet the informer?
I had to leave the church carrying a prayer-book that still held the secret information. As I walked to the vestibule I avoided Pettet’s eye, but I could not help imagining him staring at me as I passed. I shook hands with Father Augustine holding the prayer-book tightly in my left hand, so tightly that I could feel the slickness of sweat between book and skin. It felt like wet soap. I walked home hurriedly, at one point almost walking into two German soldiers. I offered my apologies and in return they swore at me. At home, I lit the fire using my secret notes.
I could not eat that lunchtime. If the man had been captured, he would be interrogated. No ordinary mortal could withstand Gestapo viciousness for long and he would eventually gasp with his last breath about the middle-aged Frenchman and his regular place in church. Or perhaps Pettet had identified both of us and they were playing with me and observing me, seeing who else I could implicate. Every second I feared the door being broken through and jackboots hammering on the floor. At even the slightest sound, I started like a frightened child.
Yet I went about my daily business. I worked in the café when necessary, I took my walks but did not observe Nazi activity. I played chess with old friends outside the café and went to church. Sunday morning mass was a tense business, now, and I could not help wondering whether this would be the day I would be dragged from worship by unyielding German soldiers and delivered to the local Gestapo.
My contact never appeared again. The Germans never came for me. Just weeks later the Allies landed and by the end of August the local occupying forces were packing up and clearing out. Some youths managed to isolate odd German soldiers, and they were brutally beaten up and left for dead. On a hot Sunday in early September I came out of mass to find the village square full of Scottish soldiers, their accents just like the ones I remembered from long before. They were being feted by various villagers and I welcomed them myself and told them of my days in Glasgow. They were good lads, but weary and with good reason.
Resistance was no longer necessary but recrimination between the Communists and the different factions continued, reprisals were carried out against collaborators on the flimsiest of evidence. Pettet was never identified as such, but I suspect that the more effective Nazi agents were never even suspected.
I never heard from anyone in the resistance again. Many afterwards claimed to have been involved but had not, while those of us who risked our lives were often pushed aside and received no recognition. This did not worry me. I was happy with my life, in my faith, and in the company of my sons who both returned from the war, one from a prison camp and one from the Free French forces.
Again this Sunday, I will go to church and pray for the soul of my wartime comrade.
David McVey lectures at New College Lanarkshire in Scotland. He has published over 120 short stories and a great deal of non-fiction that focuses on history and the outdoors. He enjoys hillwalking (ie, hiking), visiting historic sites, reading, watching telly (ie, TV), and supporting his home-town football (ie, soccer) team, Kirkintilloch Rob Roy FC.
