Bend it like Beckett

In August 1942, Irish writer Samuel Beckett was on the run in France, hunted by the Gestapo for his role in a Paris-based Resistance cell codenamed “Gloria”.

With many of the group already arrested, Beckett, a Paris resident since 1937, fled on foot with his lover, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, who later became his wife.

They eventually sat out the war in a tiny village called Roussillon in the mountainous south-east, where Beckett, fluent in French and German, continued to serve the Resistance, mainly as a translator.

It had taken Beckett and his partner more than a month to reach Roussillon, seeking shelter along the way in woods and ditches. Once there, Beckett,, a tragicomic novel he’d started in Paris featuring a forlorn servant named Watt that was published in 1953.