Mr Clarke smiled wryly. Paul never spoke much, but that only made his words count for more when he did. ‘All I know is that if your mother’s up there watching over us, I’d be fairly certain that right now she’s standing with her hands on her hips wishing she could yell at me.’

CHAPTER NINE

Marc wheeled the director’s bike away from the cottage and kept low as he rushed through the field of wheat behind the orphanage. He had money, transport, a knife and a pigskin bag stolen from the director into which he’d stuffed tins of food and a can opener which he’d vowed to figure out later. Clothing, however, was still a problem.

Marc wore nothing but the blood-spattered shorts in which he’d emerged from bed. Fortunately the nuns were scrupulous in washing the orphans’ ragged clothes, and shirts and trousers had been left to hang overnight on half a dozen crisscrossed washing lines. Everyone was on the opposite side of the house, either attending the wounded soldiers or forming part of the human chain passing buckets and saucepans of water to douse the blazing barn, so it was easy enough to strip trousers, under-shorts, socks and two white shirts from the line.

Shoes were trickier. Besides the stinking rubber boots he wore for mucking out the dairy shed, Marc only owned a pair of fifth-hand canvas plimsolls that were too small. He always threw them off and ran barefoot as soon as he was out of school, and they were completely unsuited to a long journey.

However, some of the older boys were apprenticed to work for local tradesmen and needed proper boots for their work. Marc had always coveted a pair of boots, especially in the winter, when bare feet or soggy canvas plimsolls were painfully cold. On the other hand, he didn’t want to steal an older boy’s boots, partly because the director would probably call the boy careless and beat him for losing them and partly because boots were about the most valuable thing any orphan owned. If Marc ever came back he’d have more than just the director to reckon with.

But Marc couldn’t make it to Paris without something decent on his feet, so he didn’t have much choice, and he raced into the orphanage. The dust that had blown out of the fireplaces had settled and it stuck to his damp soles as he ran up the stairs.

He’d planned to go all the way up to the attic, but he could hear Tomas up there with two of the oldest boys. As he peered up the stairs he could see them standing in the hallway, inspecting the damaged chimney. If the director recognised the stolen pigskin bag slung over Marc’s back his escape would come to an abrupt and painful end.