Gardens of Stone
Stephen Grady’s remarkable wartime memoir traces a teenage gardener’s journey from Ypres to the French Resistance and beyond.
- Author
- Stephen Grady and Michael Wright
- Publisher
- Hodder & Stoughton
- Price
- £20
- ISBN
- 9781444760590
- Published
- 2017
Gardens of Stone by Stephen Grady and Michael Wright
At the age of fourteen, Stephen Grady lived near Ypres where his father worked as head gardener for the Imperial War Graves Commission. As the German advance swept through Belgium, fighting raged around them and Grady and his friend Marcel scavenged the detritus of war—fragments of aircraft, empty shell cases and other souvenirs.
Arrested at sixteen, accused of sabotage and threatened with a firing squad or deportation to Germany, Grady was released after interrogation and joined the French Resistance in 1941. Working with Captain Michael Trotobas and the SOE-backed Sylvestre-Farmer network, he took on courier runs and operational tasks that brought constant danger.
Following liberation, Grady transferred to the British Army, serving as an officer in the Intelligence Corps before beginning a long career with the newly renamed Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Gardens of Stone is both an evocative portrait of wartime Flanders and a tribute to the young resisters who fought back.
ISBN 9781444760590. Hodder & Stoughton. £20.