We were smuggled from Dunkirk on a wing and a prayer
Regine Gray has only just heard the full story of her escape as a child. She shares it with Joe Shute
Madeleine Marendaz was famous in her family for never telling a lie. In fact, when it came to her wartime experience, close connections to the Belgian Resistance and being evacuated from Dunkirk on a Royal Navy Destroyer, she never really said much at all.
But following her death about 15 years ago, just three weeks shy of her 100th birthday, she left behind a dozen hour-long tape recordings, detailing her remarkable life. It is only in the past few weeks that her daughter and only child, Regine, who was just nine years old when she joined her mother at Dunkirk, has finally been able to finish the tapes.
“They were very emotional to listen to,” says the now 90-year-old, sitting in her conservatory near Bracknell, Berkshire. Listening to the tapes has also prompted her to open up about her own wartime past – something she never even discussed with her husband of 67 years, who died three years ago. “These are stories none of us ever spoke to anybody about,” she says.
This evening, Regine appears in a new Channel 4 series presented by Dermot O’leary called 48 Hours to Victory, which examines the pivotal moments in three of the events which shaped British history – Waterloo, the Battle of the Somme and the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940.
More than 338,000 troops were evacuated between May 26 and June 4 from the French port of Dunkirk. These days, only a handful of eyewitnesses to the evacuation remain alive – another reason why, at the age of 90, Regine has finally decided to publicly tell her story.
She grew up in a comfortable middle-class home in Brussels to a Swiss mother and Belgian father. “My father’s family were patissiers and my mother’s family chocolatiers,” she smiles. “So I had a very nice childhood.”
However, England featured prominently in Regine’s life. Her maternal grandparents had moved to the north of England to work in the confectionery business and her mother had spent a number of years at school in Liverpool before settling back in Brussels. As a result, Madeleine spoke fluent English; something that would later become a matter of life and death.
In the years building up to the outbreak of war in 1939, Regine remembers her mother and father inviting strange guests to their apartment, and her being ushered out of rooms for important meetings to take place.
Later, she would discover they were establishing a Belgian resistance cell. Her godmother, meanwhile, had a café in Mons where later in the war she would hide downed RAF pilots from the Nazis and help them escape back to Britain as part of the famous Comet Line network.
By the spring of 1940, Regine knew a German invasion was imminent. She recalls pamphlets being dropped by Luftwaffe aircraft urging the inhabitants of Brussels to stay calm. Her father, Jean, had by that stage already been conscripted into the Belgian army.
One sunny May morning, her mother suddenly told her to pack her things and prepare to leave. Regine was permitted just one toy and chose a doll her Swiss grandfather had bought her the previous Christmas.
Her mother, meanwhile, decided to wear her best high heels and winter fur coat which she stuffed with wads of cash for the journey. And so the evacuees tottered off on foot from their apartment, bound for Dunkirk.
Incredibly, says Regine, her memories of the five-day journey in which they covered 100 or so miles either on foot alongside columns of refugees or hitchhiking in whatever vehicle would offer them a lift, are largely happy ones.
As they walked, her mother, who she describes as a “force of nature” that belied her slight 5ft frame, would keep their spirits up by singing Maurice Chevalier tunes. “The strange thing was I didn’t really get a feeling of danger or helplessness at all,” Regine recalls. “My mother made it sound like an adventure.”
The first night they slept in a barn, eating bread and dripping as the only food on offer. Later, they spent two nights on a mattress in the town hall of Ypres which had been reduced to rubble in the First World War, and was once again swarming with retreating British troops.
During one long walk along a Belgian road, low-flying German Stukas started strafing the refugees with machine gun fire. “My mother pushed me into a ditch and got on top of me so tightly, I thought I might suffocate,” Regine says. “She then took my hand and said: ‘Close your eyes, and what song would you like to sing?’ ”As they walked on, she remembers seeing bodies on the road.
But then their luck began to turn. One morning, Madeleine, who would always speak English with the soldiers whose paths they crossed, treated a group of half a dozen or so to breakfast in a café. They told her there was a convoy setting off for Dunkirk and she could accompany them if she could persuade the Royal Military Police officers who were organising it.
“One of the Red Caps was controlling the convoy in the middle of the road and he and my mother saw each other and hugged,” Regine says. “Incredibly, it turned out they had been at school together in Liverpool, so we were allowed to get on.”
Even while driving in the military convoy, the peril of the German advance was never far away. At one point, Regine saw Luftwaffe aircraft bomb a train carrying wounded troops, though they missed the target.
When they arrived at Dunkirk, the air thick with acrid plumes of smoke, they were taken straight to the harbour (which later became partially blocked by ships sunk by German aircraft) and placed in a large hangar filled with terrified refugees.
With such a shortage of boats and so many troops to save, it didn’t seem as if they had a chance of making it on to a Naval vessel, but Regine remembers her mother disappearing for a while before returning and telling her to immediately walk with her. They boarded a Navy Destroyer and were given a cabin near the wardroom, where they were later invited for dinner.
When they arrived in England, the pair were put up in draughty barracks smelling of carbolic soap, the only food on offer tapioca, where Madeleine was interrogated by intelligence officers for a week. Frustratingly, Regine says, she doesn’t disclose on the tapes exactly what she said to get them on to the Destroyer, but she believes it was her resistance connections which persuaded them.
Regine and her mother spent the rest of the war in England with her grandparents, while her father, Jean, remained in Belgium running resistance operations. “We prayed for him every night,” she says.
But in October 1943, his network was broken by the Germans and he was sent to a concentration camp as a political prisoner – one of 10 where he was an inmate. Jean was eventually freed during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945 when he was discovered by a US soldier on a pile of naked bodies being bulldozed into a mass grave, breathing but barely alive.
“They became close friends and stayed in touch after the war,” Regine says. “But Father couldn’t talk about what happened to him to anyone else.”
In 1952 Regine married a British Army officer, with whom she had two children, six grandchildren and two great grandchildren. She is telling her story now, she says, as much to remember the stoic heroism of her mother as to record her memories of Dunkirk.
And so, if they ever listen to the tapes her mother left, the next generation will know a little of the bravery of the woman who
recorded them.
‘I didn’t really get a feeling of danger at all… my mother made it sound like an adventure’
The first episode of 48 Hours to Victory is on Channel 4 tonight at 7.40pm