Continued from Part One.

I knew the line was coming…

“And I never saw him, again,” said my grandmother.

It was the story of grandmother’s eldest brother; a man deeply important to her, almost another parent – she the youngest sibling.

There was a tone of bitterness there. My Grandmother had suffered a hard life. Her husband, my paternal Grandfather, had also survived the Somme and come home to Bolton, where he immediately sold his medals and turned to drink; the horrors of what he had lived through too powerful for his fun-loving heart and mind.

“Stephen survived the Somme and met a local girl…” She always paused at this point. I had heard it many times, but was happy to listen again. It helped Grandma to tell it, though there were always tears in her eyes at the end, sometimes floods of them.

“They married in France, near St Omer, at the end of the war (WW1). She got a wife’s allowance from the British Army. Their daughter, Madelaine, was born here in Bolton.”

“They couldn’t settle in Bolton – she had no English and hated the place!”

Her tears were flowing. “They left… the family in France offered him a future as a baker in their shop.” A whisper. “ I never saw him again…” She died a few years after this. I often thought how wonderful it would be to find the missing relatives. But I was young and without resources.

Stephen and Adrienne returned to a small village near Audruicq, south-east of Calais, (see map). His French bread was said to be ‘unusual’; but he was loved and adopted as part of a shaken-up life in post-war France. No-one could conceive, then, that the further horrors of war were only two decades away in the form of a resurgent fascist Germany.

At the start of WW2, Stephen made a last attempt to travel back to Britain, but was stopped by the authorities. Being English – though now a French citizen – Stephen was watched closely by the occupying Nazis during WW2. They did not know that this simple baker, in France because of his new family, was also an active helper of the Resistance.

The family in Bolton knew nothing of all this. They hoped for the best, but feared the worst.

Wars end, eventually… By the time it did, Stephen was living a typically French life and raising a family. Between 1919 and 1927,Stephen and Adrienne had four daughters and one son – also ‘Stephen’ – Etienne. They, in turn had children, taking the timeline to my own generation, where, ironically, I am the only Stephen.

After WW2, the family prospered and eventually took over a classically-French cafe and bar in Audruicq, where they saw out their days.

In 2016, my wife Bernie’s developing expertise in online family-trees set her on a search for my ‘lost French family’. One evening, she turned to me and said with a smile, “I think I’ve found them!’

She showed me the screen of her laptop. There was a simple message from a lady named Mado, who wrote: ‘We have tried everything we know to locate our English relatives but with no success. I am leaving this message attached to our family tree in the hope that someone will find it in the future.”

It was literally the digital equivalent of a ‘message in a bottle’.

Sadly, the note was seven years old. In hope rather than expectation, we sent a message, detailing our connection to Stephen … and waited.

A week later, there came an email from a very excited Mado. The two sides of the family were about to be reunited … after 100 years of separation.

I will tell the story of what followed in another blog post. The above was to set the scene for the ‘girl on a motorcycle’ to appear. One of Stephen and Adrienne’s daughters, Micheline, had two boys. One of the boys had two children, a girl and a boy. The girl’s name is Cecile.

Cecile is the girl on a motorcycle…

The French family were and are based, in Calais, with another smaller group in Lille, near the Belgian border. Over the course of the next three years, until the Covid epidemic, we visited them all, and hosted holidays from them back to our house in Kendal to which others in the English families were invited.

One of the people we met in the second round of visits was Cecile. Her photo is above. She is from the family based in Lille. We first met her when she was visiting her then boyfriend in Edinburgh. Her parents and younger brother were already with us. One evening, they were speaking to her on the phone, in Edinburgh, and I suggested she could easily get the train to Oxenholme – our local station and on the West Coast mainline – and join us for a day or two.

She jumped at the chance, arriving at Oxenholme several hours later and throughly enjoying her stay and the reunion with her own family. She liked where we lived and we said she was welcome to return at any time. I well remembered similar hospitality being extended to me when I was of a similar age. It makes a big difference to a young life.

Fast forward to August of this year…

Cecile contacted us to ask if she could come back and stay for a few days. She said she would be on her way to Edinburgh to visit the Scottish side of the family. We were happy to oblige. We knew she was now a qualified engineer, working in Paris – a job she had always wanted to do.

We assumed she would be arriving by train, again. To our surprise, she said she would be travelling by motorcycle…

On the 13th August, in the late afternoon, a 650 cc Suzuki motorcycle purred down the narrow lane that leads to our house. In typical ‘Cecile fashion’ she swung herself off the bike and took off her helmet, her long hair cascading like a model in an advert. Quite a contrast to my ‘drowned rat’ arrival in Glasgow all those years ago. She had travelled all the way from London using only the A-roads … and looked as fresh as a daisy.

She settled in, and we talked about bikes. She had no idea I was a biker, and she laughed when I told her I had made a sodden journey to Scotland at sixteen at the same time of year. She was going up to stay with Louise – the same Louise who had been the first to greet me when I stumbled, half-dead, up their path in Glasgow. Louise and her family now run a farm in Haddington, near Edinburgh.

We took Cecile sightseeing, and over a coffee in Keswick, she asked if she could plot a route to Edinburgh to take in what she had heard was the beautiful Shap Summit. I had to pinch myself – so many echoes of my 1970 trip!

I smiled and assured her she could and offered to accompany her on my own bike some of the way. She jumped at the chance. I suspect I am her only relative who rides a motorcycle.

On Tuesday the 15th August, we saddled up. She wearing a brightly coloured outer riding suit that I had given her from a box of stuff I no longer use. It would keep her a lot more visible than the brown jacket and jeans she had arrived in.

With me leading at a gentle pace on the Honda, we crossed Kendal to get to the start of the Shap road. When I was sixteen, this was where the rain began to beat down… But not this day. Bright sunshine accompanied us all the way to Penrith and beyond, with her giving me the thumbs-up every time the bikes drew level.

I smiled, ruefully, at how pleasant Shap could be… and how awful.

Cecile was keen to avoid the motorway unless absolutely necessary. We followed the A6 to just south of Carlisle where we had to join the M6 which became the M74. I smiled as the first sign to Glasgow appeared.

The plan had been to try for lunch in Moffat, further north, but Cecile pulled alongside me and indicated she was in distress and needed to stop. We came off the at the next junction… Lockerbie! The place where the lady cafe owner had let me drip all over her floor and fed me hot food to revive my washed out and frozen being.

We cruised slowly into the town and found the main car park. She told me she was getting cramps and needed to walk to relieve them,

“And eat!’ She said. “I’m really hungry.”

I was not surprised when the Cafe 91 we had spied from the bikes turned out to be the (renamed) place that saved my life that wet day in 1970. I was grinning so much, Cecile asked me – after ordering a huge lunch – what was so funny?

I waved at the interior of the cafe and told her more of the detail of my sodden ride to Glasgow. As I re-lived the tale, I could see she was working on a proposal. “Why don’t you come all the way to Edinburgh? You and Louise are best friends, and she would love to have you..”

We’d covered about two-thirds of the distance to Haddington. But there was a poetry about parting here in Lockerbie. Her road to Edinburgh – the place where nearly all my Scottish relatives now live – was a different road on her different journey. And that was what mattered. Fate and coincidence had provided me with a beautiful experience containing so many magical coincidences, and we had shared that.

It was right that she go the final leg on her own…

The circularity … and lack of suffering of this special day had been wonderful.

An hour later, well fed and with her phone programmed to take her onwards over some of the most beautiful roads in southern Scotland, we parted company at the edge of the car park: she going north, me returning south.

Now it was just her story… and her journey. Perhaps some day she might write it up in her own blog … and mention her second cousin, once removed.

Two hours later, I was home, having taken the fast road back. I hate biking on motorways… but they have their uses.

I thought about the whole improbable story arc on the way back to Kendal, summoning up the face of my grandma in memory to talk to her in my mind.

“I didn’t get to see your beloved Stephen, but I did get to meet his son, Etienne, weeks before he died… but the link – the circuit of time – had been made. After nearly a hundred years the families had been reunited… and now that union continued to flourish.

Cecile arrived safely in Haddington 90 minutes after she left Lockerbie; safe and well. She had a great holiday and is now back in Paris … with a new and highly visible riding suit… which is a bit too big, but not so much that she won’t use it in a downpour…

©Stephen Tanham 2023

Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog