Pied Piper by Nevil Shute
Set in France as it falls to the Nazis, this novel concerns a love affair interrupted by war. As John, a British airman, returns home from a rendezvous in Paris, his French fiancee Nicole returns to her home to apply for a visa to come to him and his widowed father in London. Wanting to “do things properly,” they wait to tell him together of their plans to marry. The declaration of war derails their plans and the young pilot is killed.
Devastated by the news of John’s death, his beloved Nicole finds some consolation when John’s elderly father, John Howard, visits the family home seeking help. Travelling with the motley clutch of young children he has undertaken to see safely back to England, he wants to be put in touch with a man who can row them across the channel.
From England, some of Mr. Howard’s charges will go on to his daughter in America, where people are caring for refugees. A French farmer met enroute expresses astonishment that people would take on the cost and responsibility of raising “a foreign child of which one knows nothing.” Yet he himself has in his employ a Jewish boy whose parents where murdered. In the end, he hands the youngster off to Mr. Howard, who undertakes to get him to “one of the many people in America” who will provide for him, because “Americans are like that.”
Sensing a chance to throw off her despair, Nicole insists on going with Mr. Howard and help with the children and get in touch with the boatman. As the group travel by train, cart, car and on foot across occupied France, she slowly opens up to her lover’s father, telling him of her love for his son and their plans to marry. Through their mutual efforts to save their young charges from the Nazis, the old man and the young woman grow close, so that when questioned by German soldiers, Mr. Howard introduces Nicole as his daughter-in-law.
The imagery and language are profoundly impressive. Against a row of parked tanks and armored cars, we see “a band of German soldiers…playing doggedly, methodically, doing their duty to their Fuhrer.” In another occupied town, Mr. Howard observes that the soldiers seem “ill at ease,” their behaviour “studiously correct.” They wander around in twos or threes, “grey and tired looking.” He finds one thing very noticeable: “they never seem to laugh.” We are also shown the puzzlement of Nazi officers who are “confused and perplexed” when the prisoners seem unimpressed by the display of “crushing might and power of their mighty land.” That the prisoners are so flippant as to “play games with the children in the corridor outside the very office of the Gestapo” seems “an insult which could not be properly defined.” They begin to see that this victory is “not as they thought it would be.”
Through such descriptions we are drawn into each scene and shown the attitudes of various characters. As for the protagonists, both John Howard and Nicole leap off the page straight into the reader’s heart. Conscious of his helplessness in the face of their latest setback, the old man watches the children sleep on makeshift beds of hay. In this moment of extremity, he resorts to faith, knowing that “their future lay in the small hands of two children, and in the hands of God.”
Nicole too must rely on faith, though this has proven an enormous challenge. In one of her frank conversations with Monsieur Howard, she tries to explain why she insisted on coming along with him to seek the boatman. When he expresses his puzzlement at her words, she tells him, “‘One loses faith…One thinks that everything is false and bad…I did not think there could be anyone so kind and brave as John,’ she said,. ‘But I was wrong, monsieur. There was another one. There was his father.’”
When the time comes for them to part, she once more resists his exhortation to accompany him and the children on the boat, saying her place now is with her family. After describing the the fall of Belgium and Dunkirk that coincided with John’s death, and the ugly anti-British propaganda that followed, she assures Mr. Howard she has regained the faith she had lost, and “will not lose it again.”
Through getting to know him and helping him on his mission, she has overcome her former feeling “that everything had gone mad and crazy and foul, that God had died or gone away and left the world to Hitler…and even these little children were to go on suffering.” Instead, the young woman has developed a vision that attributes purpose to her agony. “It was not meant that John and I should be happy, save for a week…now it is intended that these children should escape from Europe and grow up in peace…This may be what John and I were brought together for…In thirty years, the world may need one of these little ones…When that happens, monsieur, it will be because I met your son to show him Paris, and we fell in love.”
In a few pivotal scenes between Mr. Howard and the Gestapo officer, we witness the power of courage, integrity and kindness. Indeed, Mr. Howard’s transparent frankness and his determination to save the children from the war leads to an astonishing plot development I found deeply satisfying. In spite of the grim subject matter, the book is luminous with hope.
I first encountered Nevil Shute’s work in high school. Chilled by the despairing atmosphere of On the Beach (1957), I read no more of his books until I picked up A Town Like Alice decades later. Set in Australia, this romance was also backdropped by war. It was based on the true story of a couple who fall in love in a WWII prison camp in Malaya, were separated and found their way back to one another. The tale was made into a television series, aired on Masterpiece Theatre in 1981.