The Tree of Life

“Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came.” Spoken with an eerie calm by Laurence Olivier, these words marked my first awareness of Oradour-sur-Glane. They accompanied the opening images of ITV’s landmark documentary series “The World At War”, first shown in 1973. I had no clear idea then of where this skeletal, never-rebuilt town stood; I never imagined I would ever visit, let alone one day live an hour or so away. But allow me to relate a tale which links Oradour in an unexpectedly uplifting way to the west of Scotland and the Isle of Man, via the hair-raising wartime experiences of a gentleman I am proud to have briefly known.

The seven-man crew baled out into the starless night as their crippled aircraft blazed its way to the ground

After a couple of nights sleeping in a forest near Bar-le-Duc, hunger drove Denys to approach a local workman. In Germanoccupied France the penalty for failing to report seeing an “aviateur anglais” was severe; to feed, clothe and hide one risked execution for a whole family. Yet Denys was taken in and over the following months hidden in villages and farm buildings by a succession of defiantly courageous French people. Escape back to Britain being out of the question, he learned to speak French and was provided with a forged identity card in the name of Denis Lebenec from Brittany, to explain his very different accent.

White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars recovering ammunition drops and once derailing a German supply train.

When D-Day finally came, Denys had been in hiding for nine months. More airmen, British, American and Australian, were found and concealed. A pair of local brothers at one point had fourteen men hidden on their farm. Appalling reprisals were carried out by the retreating German army but eventually Allied forces liberated the area. Exhausted and suffering from scabies, Denys was returned home to Liverpool after twelve months in hiding. A decade after the war Denys Teare published his memoir “Evader”. The book was republished in the mid-1990s, around the time I met him through his connection to my sister-in-law’s family. Denys inscribed my copy and gave me several photographs taken over the years on his annual return to Revigny-sur-Ornain, the village whose brave inhabitants had saved his life. The pictures feature many of the friends he made during the war and show Denys laying a wreath at annual commemorations. He later retired to live in the Isle of Man.

Denys Teare grew up near Liverpool, surviving the destruction of his parents’ house in the German bombing of 1941. He joined the RAF and a couple of years later was flying his 15th mission as a crew member on an Avro Lancaster bomber returning from a night attack on the German city of Mannheim. Denys was just 21 years old. The massive barrage of ground defences had disabled two of the plane’s engines and somewhere over eastern France a fire took hold. The sevenman crew baled out into the starless night as their crippled aircraft blazed its way to the ground. Although all survived they would not meet again until after the war ended.

With the German army commandeering virtually all agricultural produce, food shortages were severe but at each hiding place local people made sure Denys was fed, (one couple told him that when they were down to their last potato, it would be divided into three). In return, he helped out working on numerous farms but whereas each family knew only their next contact in the sequence, Denys could identify the entire chain. His capture would have been catastrophic. It came terrifyingly close when local Resistance organiser Robert Lhuerre was arrested in his office by the Gestapo; Denys was one floor above, hiding in a stationery cupboard. Lhuerre was later shot. Denys met the head of the area Maquis and became an active operative, assisting in

At this point my friend Alan from North Wales enters the story. When he first visited us here in France, Alan asked to see Oradour-sur-Glane. During our visit he randomly picked up three acorns from beneath a gnarled oak tree standing near the church, planting them in pots when he was back home. Later, when Alan was in the Isle of Man for the TT motorcycle races, I arranged for him to meet Denys. In 2022 Alan’s little oaks had matured. He has kept one at home and planted one in a Dumfries woodland at a favourite spot of his late mother’s. The third he took to the Isle of Man and with local permissions, picked out a location the airman and Evader Extraordinaire would have loved. I like to imagine Denys Teare’s oak tree one day closing this circle, spreading its branches to offer anyone in need shelter from the storm.