Yesterday there was mention of activities by the French Resistance in Tarn in WW II. This morning let’s flesh this out. This picture works up a bit of atmosphere depicting the Resistance scooping up parachutes dropped by the RAF. Rather improbably it seems to be a full moon which was a no-no for discrete drops.
As I am on holiday I will let the information board and the memorial speak for themselves.
The beautiful old stone house that my friends bought is Garrhan-Penne, name checked on line two of the memorial. The house today is set amid mossy dry stone walls, woods and pasture. The serenity of the setting gives no clue to the events of some seventy years ago but it does remind me of Tennyson’s Mariana in the moated grange.
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
The gable-wall will soon be repointed, the broken sheds spruced up in Farrow and Ball livery and the ancient latch anointed with a drop of oil.