PART travel book, part history, part personal memoir, this is a gripping read. When Yorkshire writer Rosemary Bailey went to live in a former monastery in the south of France, she became fascinated by the landscape and its history.

The Pyrenees are the high mountain range that divide France from Spain. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, thousands of refugees struggled over them to seek safety from Franco’s fascist regime in appalling conditions in France. There wasn’t enough food or shelter for them. Many lived in holes in the sand on the beach.

Among the people and organisations who helped were British Quakers, who established a community and also helped many children escape to new lives.

A few years later, when the Germans controlled France, the Pyrenees once again became an escape route for people fleeing the German occupation, or conducting guerrilla warfare against their invaders. The Resistance was busy, based among the high mountain crags.

For those of us whose knowledge of the time is based on watching ’Allo ’Allo or those old black and white films, this book is a revelation.

In Britain we have no idea of what it must be like to be an occupied country – the divided loyalties, the treachery. So difficult that 60 years later, people are still reluctant to talk about it. There were episodes of extraordinary cruelty, hardship and equal bravery. Half a century later, the bitter rifts still show in some of these villages.

This is very much a journalist’s account – letting the actual people involved speak for themselves, often for the first time. Rosemary Bailey unravels the story in a meticulous, entirely neutral, unjudgemental way – and because of that it is all the more powerful.