{"id":12296,"date":"2023-01-18T16:53:18","date_gmt":"2023-01-18T16:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.co.uk\/?p=12296"},"modified":"2023-01-18T16:53:18","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T16:53:18","slug":"rooney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/18\/rooney\/","title":{"rendered":"Rooney<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rooney was obviously not her real name <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Mark Anthony was not my real name <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These were our passwords <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rooney was a Dutch woman of about thirty years<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her features were a little unusual as she was pleasant to look at but had rather large teeth <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These gave her a rather alarming look when she smiled <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She told me that all her family resembled her <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what was important was that she spoke fluent German <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which was as important as my fluent French <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were both due to attend the wedding of a high ranking German officer in Utrecht <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rooney and I were posing as the cousins Valmont who were both art historians <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was partially why we had been invited as we were going to value looted paintings <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What to keep and put on the train and what to leave in place <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However our real mission was to meet Enobarbus who was to pass us secret papers so important that they might seriously shorten the war <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our mission had been a disaster from the first day as the original crew of the plane that we had been scheduled to travel on had been lost on a previous mission and the replacement crew had through lack of experience flown into heavy fire which forced us to land on mud flats not far from the sea on the Dutch coast <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a change of plan Enobarbus had met us in a small village not far from the crash site but had been unable to bring the papers with him as they had yet to be stolen which was the plan as the theft would go unnoticed during the wedding celebrations <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a mess but we decided to go on <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had also lost contact with London <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first part of the mission had been a success as I had the Domino Papers sewn into the lining of my raincoat <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enobarbus had left us in a hotel where we were due to meet the officer in charge of the removal of the paintings<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But he had been delayed by bombings elsewhere <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rooney said that we should split up as being Dutch she would be less likely to attract attention and my knowledge of art history was superior to hers <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I disagreed noting that if I was either killed or captured then she knew where I had hidden the papers <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is why we were in a hotel about an hour from Amsterdam<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wedding had taken place without a hitch and as planned Enobarbus had stolen the papers <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we were living on borrowed time as the net would tighten considerably when the crime was uncovered <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had been booked into separate rooms but often spent time in each others rooms as if our tedious behaviours changed we might arouse suspicion <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A romantic attachment pure and chaste seemed to be an option <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this was just to kill the days before we met the German officer <\/p>\n\n\n\n

London had been contacted at last but we would have to make our own way to the coast in order to be picked up and there was talk of a paid traitor that neither of us could ignore<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rooney had been reading La Joie De Vivre <\/em>by Emile Zola and we discussed this rather sunny book at length during silent afternoons <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel centres around a ten year old girl called Pauline Quenu who is an orphan and is found living with her late fathers relatives in a seaside village called Bonneville which is about ten kilometres from Arromanches-les-Bains in Normandy <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This interested me as I used to summer there before the war <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pauline is a happy child full of optimism and has an open heart <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was a million miles away from out present imprisonment <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the household is not a happy one as there is much illness and resentment in the house and this manifests itself in the son of the house Lazare who is much taken by the writings of Schopenhauer <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is she feels saturated in the pessimism of the philosopher <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A number of years pass without Pauline’s sunny disposition being disturbed <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lazare’s mother after a series of failed schemes borrows with Pauline’s full acceptance amounts of money from her inheritance <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scheme after scheme fails and the coastal village is slowly being swallowed up by the sea<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Pauline loves the family and this extends also to the village itself as she provides money and food for the village poor <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though it is obvious that they and her family are manipulating her <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some reason Lazare’s mother begins to hate Pauline blaming her for a series of ills <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Pauline ignores this and agrees to become engaged to Lazare <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is aware of the ulterior motives but chooses to ignore them <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the engagement does not run its course as Pauline releases Lazare from this arrangement so that Lazare can marry a rich bankers daughter <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She does not resent this change of plan as she plans to enjoy her cousins continuing friendship<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later in the book the bankers daughter gives birth to a stillborn child but Pauline saves its life by breathing her life into the infants lungs <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Happily the child enjoys ongoing good health from then on <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pauline however discovers that most of her inheritance has been squandered by the greedy family and her own altruism but still retains her sunny view of life <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The village is fading into the waves as nothing is being sensibly done to prevent its erosion and the novel ends with the suicide of a  family servant and the disgust that this action brings to Lazare’s mother who sees her fight against the misery of life as a joy in the face of total misery <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will not go into depth but our mission was a success but we lost Enobarbus as he was betrayed and subsequently executed <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The officer who we were due to meet was also killed in an air raid <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So heavily disguised we made our way to the coast posing not as art historians but as ordinary farmworkers <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This ruse did not last long and we were involved in a firefight when we were challenged by a German patrol <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were both lightly wounded and captured but to our great surprise we were released by the officer in charge (or rather we were left in field<\/em>) as he was sick of the war and he and his remaining soldiers just wanted to fade into the confusion of the conflict and hopefully survive <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This he did and I do correspond with him still as we have become good friends<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was his totally unexpected decision that enabled our mission to succeed <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He should have had us shot but he released us even though we had been responsible for the deaths of some of his command<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yes the Domino Papers did help to shorten the war <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rooney went back to her country after the war and now is a politician who is much respected by her colleagues<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I returned to my profession of an Art Historian married and had two boys who we named Mark and Anthony for obvious reasons <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My wartime experiences are well known but I speak little of them as too many people died <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rooney and I were the lucky ones <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Incidentally my wife is also called Pauline and has a similar sunny disposition as the character in Zola’s novel <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She actually comes from Normandy and is Anglo-French <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pauline served as a nurse in London which is where I met her as my wounds took a while to heal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rooney was obviously not her real name  As Mark Anthony was not my real name  These were our passwords  Rooney was a Dutch woman of about thirty years Her features were a little unusual as she was pleasant to look at but had rather large teeth  These gave her a rather alarming look when she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12297,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12296\/revisions\/12297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}