Gare de Lyon

By Bill Lockwood

Mary O'Riley, native of Boston, goes to Paris to study art on the eve of WWII. Caught in the occupation, she works in a bakery but finds herself frequently carrying messages for her boss. When the SS raids the bakery and arrests the owner, Mary must flee Paris to avoid her own arrest, and the Resistance group she has helped assigns her to escort a downed RAF flyer south to Lyon.

Freddy Winston volunteered to fly secret missions to occupied France. On one of his runs, gunfire surprises him as Resistance members unload passengers and supplies. The plane catches fire, stranding him behind enemy lines. Freddy doesn't like that Mary is Irish. She insists she's just American. They may not like each other but discover quickly they must team up to reach their mutual goal of escaping the Nazis.

• Language: Unknown
• Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781509237760

Bill Lockwood

Bill Lockwood was a social worker by day for the States of MD and VT until he retired in June of 2015. By night he was an avid amateur theater participant and writer. He wrote reviews and feature articles in a Baltimore theater newsletter, had four short stories published in obscure literary magazines in the early 1990, wrote articles on the arts, personalities, and rural downtown development in the "Bellows Falls Town Crier" in VT in the late 1990's through 2006. He also wrote articles in Vermont tourist publications. In 2006 he was Greater Falls Regional Chamber of Commerce Person of the Year in recognition of his work as Chairman of the Bellows Falls Opera House Restoration Committee. He now contributes regularly to the weekly "Shopper and Vermont journal" and to the daily "Eagle Times", both papers in his area. He now has three historical fiction novels with The Wild Rose Press, and a fourth under contract.

Book preview

The Germans have marched into the Rhineland, Madame Gagnon said. We will be next. They will march for Paris, just like in the last war. You mark my word.

No, no, Madame. Maurice laughed. My father is a veteran of that last war. He assures me this time our great army will hold firm.

Madame Gagnon quickly disagreed. They almost reached Paris in that war. They bombarded us with their artillery.

But Paris remained otherwise out of their reach, Maurice said.

There was fighting in Spain before I came here, Marie added. People told me not to come here, but I have found what I came across that big ocean to find. Paris has been safe and perfectly wonderful for me.

Ah, that is so. Madame Gagnon gave a shrug. You are both so young. You are not old enough to have the memories that I have. You do not see the world as I do.

Yes, Marie said brightly. France is not at war right now. Maybe it will be, but for now, things are good for us at the school. We must enjoy life as it is.

Maurice pulled Marie toward the stairs. He laughed. She laughed. And they hurried to her apartment up the stairs.

Madame Gagnon frowned and shook her head. Then she shrugged again. They are so young, she said out loud, as if she had to explain, though no one else was there to hear her.

Praise for Bill Lockwood

"Lockwood writes with authority and keeps the reader rooted in the eighties with references to famous people, music, and more. He does not miss a single beat in BURIED GOLD whose main characters are Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. …[T]he characters interact and move about with precision and the reader is firmly grounded in all aspects of movement, setting, and storyline. The dialogue is spot-on, too. The language is as diverse as the characters. Not only can I hear them, but I can see them, too. The characters each have their appropriate share of grace; their humanity is present and they appear in the flesh. In the end, isn’t that what readers look for?"

~Shelley Carpenter, Candle-Ends: Reviews,

Toasted Cheese Literary Journal

Gare de Lyon

by

Bill Lockwood

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Gare de Lyon

COPYRIGHT © 2021 by William B. Lockwood

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Contact Information: [e-mail]

Cover Art by Jennifer Greeff

The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

PO Box 708

Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

Publishing History

First Edition, 2021

Trade Paperback ISBN 978-1-5092-3775-3

Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-3776-0

Published in the United States of America

Dedication

To the WWII soldiers of the US 29th Division,

a number of whom were from

my home town of Baltimore, MD,

and some of whom died

on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my wife of over forty years, Jeanie Levesque, once a French teacher, for her consultation on French language and culture.

And to our good friend Catherine Sherwood, who was born in St. Christophe in the Vienne region of central France and lived as a child in Bordeaux just after WWII. Though she has lived many years in the US, and many of them in our little town, she has been more than helpful sharing her knowledge of French culture and language, helping to correct the French words I try to spell, and the things she heard about the war from those who had lived through it.

Author’s Historical Notes

French General and later President Charles DeGaulle has been accused of greatly overstating the size and role of the Résistance in France during World War II. But whatever the truth, there is no question of the contribution of so many French men and women and other nationals caught up in the times to oppose the evils of the Hitler regime.

On June 14, 1940, the first German troops entered Paris and began the occupation. They remained till the conclusion of the battle for the city on August 25, 1944. It was a very dark time between those dates for Paris, the rest of France, the rest of Europe, and for most of the rest of the world.

The war had started in Europe when Germany invaded Poland on September 3, 1939. At that time the US declared its neutrality. After Germany invaded France, the French signed an armistice with Germany on June 22, 1940. It left the southeast part of France and its North African colonies as an unoccupied zone under the administration of the collaborating Vichy French government. The US did not enter the war until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Germany then declared war on the US on December 11, 1941. The primary action in this story takes place after the occupation of Paris but before the Allied forces invaded North Africa, which led to the complete German occupation of France on November 11. 1942.

Paris, the eternal city of light, has come to epitomize the loss of all that was good before the war. To many, Paris of the ’30s, despite the Depression and some political unrest, was the cultural capital of the world, attracting writers, painters, musicians, dancers, sculptors, and intellectuals of many kinds. Then, if one took the train from the Gare de Lyon south and east, one would reach the major rail center in the city of Lyon. Today it is known for its restaurants and fine food culture. At the time of the war, it was a middle-class city whose citizens, unlike those in Paris and even Marseille, prided themselves on bourgeois values. Lyon is an old medieval city full of narrow passages and warrens excellent for hiding out for the members of the Résistance. And, like the legends of Parisians at the barricades, Lyon has a history of rebellion of its own. So too, each city and town in all France and in all Europe had its own history and stories of change from those earlier times.

Things were a little less under the German eyes in Lyon. It was in the unoccupied zone. And Marseille, the teeming Mediterranean seaport of tainted reputation known during the Cold War as a traffic point for the organized drug trade and for Fort St. Jean, home of the notorious French Foreign Legion, was in a small, far-southeastern zone of France occupied by Germany’s ally, Italy. Way across the Mediterranean was Morocco and its port city of Casablanca on the Atlantic Ocean. It was part of the French colonial empire and also part of unoccupied Vichy France. Many refugees ended up there in a melting pot of Moroccan and French Colonial cultures, and, as the US was then a neutral country, many went to its consulate seeking papers for passage to safe havens away from the war.

For an American caught up in those times, it could be a complete nightmare or a great adventure.

Little One, a soldier does not cry.

~Maurice Coustrnoble, a member of

the French Résistance

Being in the underground, even for a day, was not a game.

~Ronald C. Rosbottom, in his book

When Paris Went Dark

Chapter 1

Mary O’Riley was a college student in Boston, even though it was the mid-1930s and the country was in the throes of a great depression. Unlike many students who came from other cities and places and lived in dorms, Mary commuted to her classes every day from her parents’ house where she had grown up in working-class South Boston. Like most of the population of that area, she was of Irish Catholic ancestry. She was a bright student, and the nuns, who were her teachers, had found a way for her to get a scholarship and complete college. They were, of course, expecting her to become a teacher, and marry, and become a pillar of their Catholic community. Somehow the good sisters had missed the fact that their good student also had a sense of adventure.

Mary studied art. One day her portrait teacher, Madame Blanchette, who had come to the US as an adult, said to her, Mary, you are so good. You need to study in Paris with the really good teachers, and besides, in Paris, you will really learn of the world. And that seed of an idea grew.

One of the many boyfriends Mary seemed to easily attract was from Quebec in French Canada. Mary had taken French in high school, and she began speaking it with Pierre. Then she started speaking it with Madame Blanchette as well. The older woman laughed at first, then became serious, correcting Mary’s pronunciation away from the Québécois accent of Pierre to that of a true Parisian.

Pierre remained skeptical. How will you ever afford to go to Paris? he asked her.

Mary smiled. My father runs a pub. The end of Prohibition greatly helped his business. People like to drink. They always find money for that. I can work for him as a waitress.

What about being a teacher? Pierre asked.

Mary laughed. I will come back and teach when I’m older like Madame Blanchette. Then she added, After I’m a famous artist.

Okay, Pierre said. He accepted her dream.

Mary’s mother wasn’t so easily convinced. Why can’t you just study art in Boston? she kept asking. To that Mary just kept rolling her eyes.

****

She called herself Marie when she got to Paris. She had picked a bad time to do it, though. It was 1938, and the clouds of war were gathering over Europe and actually all over the rest of the world as well. But Paris was still very much the place where the great artists had gone for at least fifty years before, a golden age for them there. Sidewalk cafes abounded, the weather and the world most often felt grand, and enjoyment and fun sparkled in so many eyes.

She studied art at a school in the fifth Arrondissement on the Left Bank. Always with the hope of getting her work in some gallery or perhaps a student exhibition, and selling the occasional work to a tourist on the street, Marie supported herself by modeling for classes at the school. Her classic nude appearance was quite popular with the students. The work was certainly more glamorous than being a waitress in her father’s Irish pub. She also discovered the club life of pre-war Paris, and for about a year she lived a wonderfully scandalous life that would have appalled the good nuns of Boston.

Then one day, in early March 1939, Marie came home to her apartment building with a baguette, some brie, a bottle of Côtes du Rhône red wine, and her French boyfriend Maurice, her boyfriend for at least that month, from the figure-drawing class at school. To their surprise Madame Gagnon, her usually noncommittal concierge, was in a very dark mood.

The Germans have marched into the Rhineland, Madame Gagnon said. We will be next. They will march for Paris, just like in the last war. You mark my word.

No, no, Madame. Maurice laughed. My father is a veteran of that last war. He assures me this time our great army will hold firm.

Madame Gagnon quickly disagreed. They almost reached Paris in that war. They bombarded us with their artillery.

But Paris remained otherwise out of their reach, Maurice said.

There was fighting in Spain before I came here, Marie added. People told me not to come here, but I have found what I came across that big ocean to find. Paris has been safe and perfectly wonderful for me.

Ah, that is so. Madame Gagnon gave a shrug. You are both so young. You are not old enough to have the memories that I have. You do not see the world as I do.

Yes, Marie said brightly. France is not at war right now. Maybe it will be, but for now, things are good for us at the school. We must enjoy life as it is.

Maurice pulled Marie toward the stairs. He laughed. She laughed. And they hurried to her apartment up the stairs.

Madame Gagnon frowned and shook her head. Then she shrugged again. They are so young, she said out loud, as if she had to explain, though no one else was there to hear her.

****

Then it all went bad. After September 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, war was declared all over Europe. France and Germany were officially at war, and England was on France’s side. An invasion was now definitely expected, and things began to change.

The everyday effects of the change were slow at first. The Germans did not invade for months, though a giant French army stood firmly at the border. In many ways the club life continued on. Who wouldn’t want to still live in Paris, after all. Even with the world of the arts and beauty slowly crashing down, going home to working-class South Boston seemed hardly an option to Marie now. That world all seemed so far away and long ago. The art school began to lose students, and it suddenly closed. Marie saw her friends less and less. Maurice had gone the way of any number of other casual boyfriends. Some went to homes in other countries, some went off to the war, and some to other pursuits seemingly more urgent than the world of art. Still Marie stayed on.

Marie wished very much to continue living in her tiny apartment off Avenue Ledrun-Rollin near the Pont d’Austerlitz, a bridge that crossed the Seine, and close to the Gare de Lyon, the train station that connected Paris with the city of Lyon to the south and all the little stops in between. She had come to depend on her concierge, Madame Gagnon. The older woman knew where Marie could get anything. Marie even thought of stopping by the nearby church and praying to the God the nuns had taught her to pray to so that her good life would continue, even if such a life would be totally strange to the nuns she had known.

Madame Bouchard, proprietor of the bread shop near her apartment, noticed Marie’s dejected demeanor in the days after her school closed when she came in for her daily baguette. It was one of Marie’s favorite spots. All the staff recognized her and treated her as if she were every bit a Parisian as they were. The smell of fresh baked bread always permeated the air, and the pastries on display always seemed so