In 1928 Mariquita’s mother died and left her house in Nice to her daughter. By 1931 the family had packed up their belongings, closed up the house in Boulogne-sur-Mer and moved to Nice, to 60 bis, avenue des Arènes de Cimiez. Situated in the old part of Nice, in the gentle hills behind the coastline, the house was only a short distance from the seafront and the elegant promenade des Anglais, playground of the rich and famous. The family would live there very happily until the Germans invaded France in 1940.
Francis left school in 1930 when he was 16 and went on to a commercial college, where he took a business course and, having passed it, became a representative for a confectionery company. Over the next few years he had a variety of sales jobs that never seemed to last long, so, tiring of sales, he tried working as a barman. Then in 1938, against an increasingly difficult economic backdrop, he lost yet another job and, despite applying for different positions, remained unemployed for the next two years.5
Frederick left school just before the start of the war and also found it difficult to obtain work. He considered going back to England to see if it would be any easier to get a job there and was still weighing up his options when the Germans marched into Poland in September 1939. Didi had not even begun to look for work by then, as she had only just left school at the age of 18. She wanted to be a beautician, but with the political unrest that was making itself felt more and more each day, and the ever-present question of what the immediate future might bring, her parents convinced her to stay at home with them until what was happening became clearer. When the war started she gave up the idea, pushing it to the back of her mind in the belief that she would be able pursue her chosen career once the war was over.
Of all the children, Jacqueline was the only one who found a secure job. When she left school she too became a sales representative, working for an office equipment company, and, although based in Nice, she travelled all over the country. In those days such an occupation was considered to be quite an unusual one for a girl but she enjoyed the work, and the travel, which allowed her to see a lot of the countryside. Although she didn’t know it at the time, it would be a foretaste of what was in store for her a few years later.
For the first few months of the war nothing really changed for the Nearne family. The sun was still shining over their home in Nice; Jacqueline was doing well in her job; Francis, who had recently married a young Frenchwoman, Thérèse Poulet, was continuing to look for work; Frederick was thinking about going to England to join the Royal Air Force; and Didi remained at home with her mother and father.
Then, on 10 May 1940, German troops swept into Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland, and all three countries capitulated. Two weeks later Calais and Boulogne were attacked, and the British Expeditionary Force, pinned down by the Germans in the coastal town of Dunkirk, was evacuated, along with several thousand French troops, in what was known as Operation Dynamo. By the middle of June Paris had fallen to the Germans and, on 22 June, the French signed an armistice in the forest of Compiègne, north of Paris, in the same railway carriage in which the Germans had surrendered at the end of the First World War. The threatened war had suddenly become real.
Some months earlier Jacqueline had gone to Boulogne to make sure that the family home on the boulevard Saint-Beuve was secure. The furniture was covered with dust sheets, the curtains drawn, and all the windows and doors locked, but there was little else that she could do to ensure its safety in the event of the German invasion they had all prayed would not take place. Now that had happened, and the family began to wonder what would become of them if enemy troops reached them in the south of France. They didn’t have long to wait for their answer.
Following the French surrender, the country was divided into two parts. The northern part was occupied by the Germans, while the southern sector remained in French hands, with the whole country nominally under the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of the Battle of Verdun of 1916, who had taken over when Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned days before the armistice. Pétain, no longer showing any heroic qualities, based his regime in the city of Vichy, from where he and the puppet administration did nothing for the French people, bowing completely to the will of the Germans. It was an enormous betrayal. Three days after the French surrender Pétain’s betrayal was compounded by the signing of another armistice, this time with Italy, and the formation of a demilitarized zone within France, which included the cities of Nice and Grenoble and which was administered by occupying Italian forces.
Foreign nationals were being forced to move from the coastal areas of France and the Nearne family was no exception. Even French-born Mariquita was regarded as being foreign, as she was married to an Englishman. The Nearnes were given just eight days to pack up and leave their home in Nice and find somewhere else to live.6 The edict that forced them to move was known as ‘residence forcée’ – enforced residence in an area, where residents were kept under police surveillance and life was often made very difficult for no apparent reason, other than that they were not French. The seaside house in Boulogne was obviously not an option as a place to relocate to and they doubted that they would be able to return to the Paris apartment even if they had wanted to, because the capital was swarming with Germans. After a hurried discussion, Jack and Mariquita elected to go to the Grenoble area which, although in Italian-occupied France, was where Francis and his wife had settled. Thérèse was expecting the couple’s first baby later that summer and they wanted to remain close for the arrival of their first grandchild.7
The family home at avenue des Arènes de Cimiez was leased to a Frenchwoman at an inexpensive rent and the Nearnes left Nice, taking as many of their personal belongings as they could carry to a hotel in Grenoble, where they remained while searching for a new home. Eventually in rue Adolphe Muguet, Saint-Egrève, in the mountains north-west of the city, they found a large, rambling old villa that needed restoring and they were able to purchase it. It was nothing like the comfortable home they had had in Nice, although the views of the mountains were beautiful. But at least they had their own house again and their enforced move meant that they were closer to the newest member of the family, a boy born on 24 August, whom Thérèse and Francis named Jack, after his paternal grandfather.8
Gradually the Nearnes managed to introduce some degree of comfort to the draughty old house, but Jack and Mariquita, their two daughters and younger son never really regarded the villa as a home. For them it was just somewhere to stay until the Nazis had been defeated, when they could reclaim the house in Nice and find out what had become of their other home in Boulogne and their Paris apartment.
By the late autumn of 1940 Frederick, along with so many other young men, had decided that, with no job and the ever-present threat of being sent for forced labour to Germany, he could no longer remain in France and would therefore go to England. It must have been a time of great anxiety for his parents, but they knew better than to try to persuade him to remain with them in Grenoble, believing that Britain would be a safer place for him than German-occupied France. Upon arrival in England he volunteered for the RAF, was sent to the recruits’ centre at RAF Station Uxbridge in Middlesex, and as Aircraftman 2nd Class Frederick John Nearne (1270875) began his service career on 1 November 1940. A month later he was posted to Ford in Sussex and six days later started his training at HQ Number 17 (Training) Group, part of Coastal Command. He remained there for a year before being posted, on 5 January 1942, to the Middle East Command, where he served at the RAF station in Amman, Jordan; the Middle East Torpedo (Training) school; Lydda (now in Israel); and various maintenance and operational training units in the Levant. He eventually returned to England and received his discharge on 23 October 1946.9
No longer seen as the well-to-do French family that they had previously appeared to be, the members of the Nearne family who remained in France were