They started to get more Jews, after ’42. Before that it had been mostly communists, Spaniards, foreigners. But for some reason, from ’42 onwards more and more Jews came through, all trying to get to Spain or to the Italian zone. She used to feel really sorry for them. They’d lived quiet and peaceable till the present, why start persecuting them now? Once they’d had a Jewish lady from Poland, an awfully nice woman, who’d lost her husband, taken off somewhere. It was really sad. And the kids so sweet. They never ran or shouted, just crouched inside the house, like pheasants in the grass. None of them had any money; they’d been forced out of their businesses and homes. It wasn’t right.

Looking after them, the Jews or the others, was nothing compared with what happened in ’43 when the Nazis started taking workers to Germany. It was compulsory for young men, like the call-up for military service. At first it didn’t matter to her personally. Georges was exempt as an agricultural worker, and Roger and Claude, too. The young men who came to them then were from the towns, and couldn’t get exemptions, and said they weren’t going to go to Germany, whatever anyone said about good wages and how it would be doing our prisoners of war a good turn, since one of them could come home for every three workers that went over there. That was a bad bargain, as any peasant could tell you. Why couldn’t the prisoners work in Germany, if it was so great, and they were over there already?

Then things got worse and the government withdrew the exemptions for farmers. Georges’ call-up came and he said, ‘No way.’ There was a group of lads already living in the forests the other side of Montfefoul and he wanted to go with them. They’d kept the boys well out of all Henri’s business with the doctor. They’d thought it better, safer for them, if they knew nothing. But later, she wished she’d let Henri use them. Georges might have learned that you can’t be too careful. One day he was picked up by the police in the market place with half a dozen others. Fortunately, they didn’t deal with him as a terrorist. They just sent him straight to Germany. They must have been short on their quota of workers and he and his mates fitted the bill. She didn’t know if it was a good thing or not. If he’d been held in prison he would have been nearer home, but who knows what might have been the outcome. But Germany was a long way off and it couldn’t be too good there now with the bombing and all. She worried about him a lot. More than about Roger and Claude. They’d taken to the maquis the moment Georges was arrested. They didn’t waste a minute.

Food was what concerned her. Young people eat twice what an older person does, especially when they’re living in the open. Bread was a problem. There wasn’t so much of it, even on the ration. Potatoes too, unobtainable. Sometimes they stole things from the Milice, the French paramilitaries. Henri kept his boys on a strict regime and there was a rota of supply from all the neighbouring farms. Some Resistance groups would terrorise the peasants into giving them stuff from their farms, but Henri was against that. He said it just led to denunciations, so there was no point. She was glad when the liberation came, because they had eaten her out of house and home.