Hartford Bridge was a wartime base in England where Romain Gary served with his squadron and wrote A European Education amid the routine and losses of air operations. Its mess and cramped corrugated-iron hut frame two milestones in his life: the news that his first novel would be published and the award of the Cross of the Liberation.

Operational Base and Writing Hut

After his squadron was transferred to England in August 1943, Gary devoted more time to finishing A European Education. At Hartford Bridge, conditions for writing were harsh. He shared a corrugated-iron hut with three fellow officers and, in the cold, wrote at night in his flying jacket and fur-lined boots, propped up in bed until dawn with numbed fingers. The freezing conditions even helped him evoke the novel’s snow-covered Polish forests, where its central action takes place.

Writing fitted into an exacting cycle. At about three or four in the morning, Gary would put down his fountain pen, ride his bicycle to the mess for tea, then climb into his Boston bomber and leave in the gray dawn for a mission. He regarded flying and writing not as separate lives but as parts of the same effort to discover life’s hidden meaning.

Missions and Losses

The missions launched from Hartford Bridge were dangerous and often costly. The Lorraine Squadron specialized in low-level attacks, sometimes hedge-hopping for as long as two hours before reaching a target. On one particularly lively day, three crews were brought down. On another mission, while crossing the coast at the wrong point on the way to Charleroi, seven crews were lost at once.

The losses accumulated around the base and altered the atmosphere among those who remained. Gary recalled fellow airmen falling in quick succession, followed by the disappearance of the last of the men he had known when he first arrived in England. Only a handful—including the brothers Langer—were left from that earlier circle; the survivors often looked at one another in silence. Once, Gary found himself alone in the hut after Petit and his entire crew had been shot down over France.

News Received at the Base

Hartford Bridge also became the setting for a sudden literary breakthrough. After finishing A European Education, Gary sent the manuscript to Moura Budberg and heard nothing. Returning to base from a mission on which three crews had been brought down, he found a telegram from an English publisher saying that the book was being translated and was expected to appear within five months. Gary stood for a long time staring at the message. He sent the news to his mother via Switzerland and hoped the novel would fulfill her artistic ambitions, but her letters made no mention of it; he understood her silence as a reproach that she expected fighting deeds while France remained occupied.

A later telegram at Hartford Bridge carried a different recognition. Gary had been interviewed at the BBC with Arnaud Langer about a sortie, and an account appeared in the Evening Standard the next day. Back at the base, in the mess, an orderly handed him a telegram signed by Charles de Gaulle: Gary had been awarded the Cross of the Liberation. The base thus links the recognition of his writing with an honor he understood through the comrades lost in the war; he reflected that only a very few living people, apart from the most distinguished dead, had received it.