My Social Studies assignment was to interview an old person to see what I could learn about history, oral history. The oldest people I knew were Uncle Jacques and Auntie Edith, and they live here, somewhere in the city. They’re not actually my uncle and aunt and I wasn’t even sure how they’re related to me, but Mum would know and she’d probably know where they live.
Mum said they’re actually the brother and sister of her grandmother, so my great great uncle and aunt or something like that. “It was a big family,” she said, “and most of them came out to New Zealand after the war. Jacques and Edith are the only two left of that generation now. They lived through the war, so they should have good stories to tell.”
“World War Two,” I said.
“Yes, in France,” she said. “It was occupied by the Germans.”
“So, what did they do in the war?” I asked.
“That’s for you to go and find out.”
Uncle Jacques lived in a retirement village. I rang him and shouted down the phone to ask if I could visit him and do an interview.
“’Oo? Caleb? Oh, Doreen’s boy. Oui, oui, I know you,” he said. “I ‘aven’t seen you for a long time, but I remember you. Yes you can come in ze morning but not before ten o’clock. Saturday morning. Okay, see you zen.”
Then I rang Auntie Edith and arranged to meet with her in the afternoon. I could get them both done on the same day.
I biked to the retirement village and knocked on the door of Unit 9 and waited and knocked again and waited and walked around the back and knocked on the other door. Uncle Jacques eventually came to the door and let me in, into a stuffy room that smelled of rubbish and smoke and old age. Uncle shuffled unsteadily back to his arm chair and lowered himself into it. He looked every bit of ninety-five years old. He could have been a hundred and ninety-five. His face was all creased like crepe paper and he had a lizard neck with folds of sagging flesh. His eyes were dim and watery and red underlined with the inside of the lower lids that drooped away from his eyeballs. His head was spotty and streaked with a few thin strands of hair, like Gollum. And there were lots of food stains on the front of his shirt.
“So you’ve come to interrogate me, eh,” he said as he filled his pipe with a wad of tobacco with his shaky hands. “What do you want to know?”
I got out my notebook and pencil and asked, “What did you do in the war and what was it like in France when the Germans invaded?”
“What? ‘Ang on a minute.” He put his hearing aids into his ears and they emitted a high pitched squeal. “Zat’s better. Now what did you say? You been to France?”
“No,” I said. “What was it like in France when the Germans invaded and what did you do in the war?”
“Well, zat was a long time ago.” He seemed to be struggling to remember as he tamped the tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe, tamping and tamping. It was one of those pipes with a curved stem, so it was hanging down from his mouth. I’d seen one like it somewhere, maybe in the Lord of the Rings.
While he was loading his pipe I said, “Do you mind if I open a window, Uncle?”
“Eh? Oh yeah, go ahead. So, ze Germans,” he said. “Ze Germans bombed ze airstrips and zen ze tanks and troops rolled in. It was a massive war machine. Zey’d been building up zeir military for years. Our army was no match for zem. Zey occupied most of ze country but left us part of ze country in ze sous wiz our own government, but ze Germans controlled ze ‘ole country and our lot, the Vichy government, had to do whatever ze Germans said. Ze real patriots went underground to resist ze Germans.”
“So is that what you did?”
“Yeah, I was part of a group in the Maquis.”
“What sort of stuff did you do?”
The old man struck a match and sucked the flame into the bowl of his pipe. He drew air into it till the tobacco was all glowing and crackling. He took a deep draught and blew out a stream of blue smoke.
“Sabotage stuff,” he said, with his pipe clenched between his teeth. He took the pipe from his mouth to continue and the stem of his pipe was still tethered to his bottom lip with a string of saliva. “Blowing up bridges and railways. Being a nuisance to ze Nazis. Raiding post offices to steal ration cards to get food for people in ‘iding. Lots of Jews in ‘iding because zey were getting sent off to deas camp.” He took more puffs of smoke and recollected more war time exploits. “’Iding British airmen downed in France. Sending message to ze Brits to help zem fight ze Germans. And I ‘elped rescue some of my comrades from a Gestapo jail. All zat kind of stuff.”
“Wow. Cool. Did you kill any Germans?”
“Uh no, not me personally.”
“Any of your mates get killed by the Germans?”
He took a few puffs of his pipe but the fire had gone out so he relit it. He blew another stream of smoke up to the ceiling to join the cloud hanging there.
“Yeah, I lost some good friends,” he sighed.
“That must have been sad for you.”
“Yeah, I still feel pretty sad about zat.”
I tried to picture Uncle Jacques as a fit young man, bravely risking his life, standing up to the enemy occupying his country. I started coughing and said, “Thanks Uncle. This is good stuff. I gotta go now and I’ll visit Auntie Edith later on.”
Auntie Edith lived on her own in an apartment in town. I took the lift up to the third floor to her place, which was light and airy and had a good view of the harbour. She was really friendly and lively. She was like a talking marionette, with rosy cheeks and lines from the corners of her mouth down to her chin. She gave me a big hug and poured a glass of Coke for me. She had a cup of tea for herself. I told Auntie about my visit to Uncle Jacques and about how he told me about all the stuff he did in the Resistance in the war.
“Oh, what did he tell you?” she asked me.
I’d written it all down so I remembered it pretty well and she looked really interested when I went through the whole story. When I got to the end she said, “What bullshit!”
I was shocked, shocked that she actually used that word and I though she meant I was bullshitting. But no, she said Jacques was always a bullshitter and a blowhard. “He wasn’t in the Resistance at all. He had a nice safe job with the Red Cross. It was our older brother, Maurice, who was in the resistance. He’d be the one to talk to about the war, but he’s gone now, of course.”
I didn’t know what to make of that and I just said, “Oh, okay, so what did you do in the war, Auntie?”
“Me? I was just a young girl. I didn’t do anything. Well I helped my mother trying to keep putting food on the table and helped with growing vegetable in the garden. Food was scarce and there was never any meat. We ate cabbage and carrot tops and beet tops and anything we could get our hands on. Sometimes just potato peels. And I helped with sewing. We wore clothes with patches. They were tough times and life was hard.”
“And what about your brother, Maurice?”
“Maurice was always away and hiding out somewhere and we weren’t to talk about him to anyone. That’s what I remember.”
So I didn’t learn any more about the French Resistance. When I got home I told Mum about what Auntie Edith said. I had already told her about what Uncle Jacques said. I asked her if she thought he was just making it up.
She said, “I think you can believe what Auntie Edith said,” and she just carried on preparing dinner.
“So, he told me a made up story. Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he believes the story himself.”
“He sure sounded like he believed it. I don’t get it.”
Mum finished peeling potatoes and wiped her hands. “Well, for some people, when they get old, it’s not just their body that ages. Their brain suffers from old age as well. It affects their thinking.”
“You mean they go crazy?”
“Not crazy. They become forgetful and confused.”
“Does this run in families?” I was getting concerned.
“It can do.”
Well, that explained a lot. I thought of old Mrs Ryan, who I thought was too old to still be a teacher. And I’ve been noticing Granddad seems pretty confused at times. Mum seems to still be all right but I’ll be watching for signs now that I knew what to look for.