Rosie's War by Rosemary Say

were the Bluebell Girls, dancers from the Folies Bergère (traditionally English), girls who looked after the horses at the Longchamps racecourse, women in fur coats and leopard-skin hats straight out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, middle-aged governesses or nannies and prostitutes from the French Channel ports and the maisons closes . There were many quite elderly women who had lived in France for years, some since before the First World War. They had survived that war unscathed and many were bewildered by their arrest. We ‘proper’ English probably made up less than a quarter of the total. I didn’t realize at the time how protected that made me. I was told later that even in the allocation of seats on the train we were given preferential treatment. I don’t know if this was true.
    In my compartment there was a young English girl with blonde hair tightly curled into a bun. She was one of the most typical examples of a prefect at an English girls’ public school that I had ever set eyes on. I looked at her superb self-possession and slightly questioning manner towards me with complete understanding. As the train lumbered through the Parisian suburbs we regarded each other blankly for a while and then smiled with open relief.
    ‘How long have you been in Paris?’ she asked.
    ‘A few months.’
    ‘Did you come over with your parents or to see friends?’
    ‘I was working in the South of France and was advised to go home via Paris.’
    It seems bizarre to think now that we were sitting on that train delicately finding out each other’s social position. But then nothing had actually happened yet to jolt us out of ourselves. We had seen the Germans in Paris and had not been hurt. And unlike most of the passengers, we were already away from home.
    A young girl with black, curly hair was crouched in the corner watching us. She had been crying and seemed very young and frightened. This was my first sight of Shulamith Przepiorka, or Shula, as she was known. She wrote to me after the war:
When we got to the train I looked for young people among all these poor, old, grey, frightened women. I saw you, Pat, with your curly hair and your unmistakeable English manner. You were talking to another very English girl and I didn’t understand a word. Then you said hello to me and started talking in French, which gave me back my nerve. I hoped we would stick together.
    Shula told us that she was the daughter of a Jewish leather worker and an immigrant Polish woman living in Porte Saint-Martin. She was born in Haifa during a family visit to Jerusalem, then in Palestine, where a British official had registered her birth. She thereby had a British passport unlike the rest of her family. She spoke no English and was desperately worried about her relatives.
    We stopped for a long time at Belfort, very near the Swiss and German borders. Rumours had gone round that we were going to work in a munitions factory near Hamburg or that we were being sent to a prison camp somewhere in Germany. I suppose this was the unspoken fear of us all; if we could somehow stay in France we would be safe. But there was no definite news. The German guards in the corridors refused to tell us anything when we finally got going again.
    ‘We’re changing direction,’ someone called out excitedly. ‘We’re going south.’
    ‘We’re headed for Besançon,’ a bossy woman in the carriage told us. ‘It’s an old garrison town near Switzerland. It can’t possibly be our destination. There’s nothing there.’
    But it was at Besançon that we stopped. It was almost worth it just to see that woman’s face. It was a scene of utter chaos as we spilled out onto the platform after our two-day ordeal, shuffling and cursing as we gathered our belongings together. A reception committee of German officers and guards awaited us. They did not have the same smooth, self-satisfied manner we had got to know among the occupying forces in Paris. These soldiers seemed flustered