‘Damn nice bike that, too,’ the other drunk noted, as he picked Marc’s bag off the ground.

Marc tried not to cry as they helped him hobble towards the café, but he already had a tear streaking down his cheek.

‘Looks like a nasty cut,’ the waitress said. ‘Better bring him inside and I’ll clean it up.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The first stretch out of Paris was a crawl, but the hard work really started when the Citroën joined up with the main road heading south. Mr Clarke had hoped to travel 120 kilometres to Orléans and then stop overnight with an old friend who was a buyer at the town’s department store.

Clarke had the advantage of a car, and the thousands of kilometres he’d driven as a salesman for Imperial Wireless had left him with excellent knowledge of France’s back roads. But the refugees formed an impenetrable mass of slow-moving carts and bodies. Driving through them was agonising – constantly stopping and starting, rarely managing to break out of first gear and, in spots where the road narrowed, the car was actually a disadvantage. A blast of the horn achieved nothing and he had to use the car to physically push people aside. This was easily overdone and arguments regularly flared between drivers and foot-sloggers.

The Citroën suffered small attacks – from people pounding it with fists and boots or scratching the paint with keys. In one instance a man whose daughter suffered a painful knock from the front bumper ripped off a door mirror. Fearing that he would smash a window next, Clarke placed a hand on the gun he’d seized from the German, but luckily the man hurled the mirror into a hedge and backed off in a volley of foul language.

Paul knew he was in the midst of something extraordinary. He grabbed a pad from his satchel and made quick sketches of refugees, overloaded carts and bombed cottages. Alarmingly, he kept seeing cars similar to their own that had succumbed to slow driving and warm weather and blown their radiators.

While Paul withdrew into himself Rosie did the opposite, and constantly expressed pity as she gave a running commentary on some of the more pathetic refugees. There were people on crutches, people so old that they could barely walk; while the dead and unconscious littered the sides of the road. A few casualties were the result of air raids, but most had simply collapsed after walking hundreds of kilometres, laden with possessions.

‘Enough,’ Mr Clarke said finally, after his daughter noticed a British serviceman with his arm in a sling amidst the crowd. ‘I can see! I have eyes! I can’t think straight with your constant babbling.’