...Tell Me a Yarn: 1942-1944: The tiny, uncomfortable farmhouse they called home

My grandfather described the place where my grandparents and aunt lived in hiding for several years to me, and it didn't sound like a very pleasant place to live:

   In Beaumont-lès-Valence, we ... were living in a house, a home several centuries old. Which was not used for a long, long time. It had one room, and the floor was hard dirt and the roof was covered with straw. Well it was a thatched roof; very primitive. Of course no water. There was a well outside, where you had to turn a lever, had a chain to go down pick up water. So we didn’t have any hot water. We had hardly cold water which we took from the well. And one time Roma pulled out of the deep well, a rat. It was not pleasant. We boiled the water before drinking.
   And the non-threshed [grain]… I don’t know how to say it in English. We put in our old, centuries-old home; we took it in the attic, and in the attic, I was threshing it with a stick. Then, at nighttime, the grain which I got, I put in a buggy, which I pushed by myself a couple of miles to the mill, and the miller took half for himself, and half he gave back to me in form of flour. And I got flour to Roma, and Roma made bread by herself ... And there was no range, no electric range, no gas range. She baked it on a stove in which wood was burning.
   And to get wood, I was cutting the trees, and with an ax, I was getting sufficiently small pieces to be burned. And then they were not burning very well because they were not dry. I had no time to wait a year before using them.
   So, in winter, our temperature inside was eight degrees centigrade in our small room – if I take eight degrees, and I multiply it by one point eight, and add 32, I will get the temperature – 46 degrees [Fahrenheit].
--Arthur Lubinski, 1988

The cottage was owned by Léon and Élise Auvergne, and I'd always envisioned that it was tucked on some forgotten corner of their farm, but I think that it was actually just across the yard from the main house, though I can't be sure. After the war, the farm was sold and developed into a town neighborhood, and now looks very different than it did in the 1940s when it was rural farmland.

Michel, my French historian friend was able to track down the address: 11 Rue des Faures, Beaumont-lès-Valence, France.

The cottage was torn down, and I'm not sure which of these houses is the main house, but the stone well mentioned above is still there, which you can see in the picture below:

Click to enlarge. Note the well in that little flower bed.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/M4F8Jfx4tLZkpSR77

When Aunt Lilly was a teenager, she wrote down some of her early memories of France, and her stories do describe the area a little bit:

I remember two of my many revolting hobbies. The first was finding, imprisoning and later torturing huge snails. The second and more worthwhile hobby was raising rabbits. On a warm afternoon while I was walking through the sunlit fields behind our house, gathering various plants to feed my nine rabbits, I heard a terrible explosion nearby. Upon arriving home in hysterics I was told that a bomb had been dropped a few miles away. We quickly sought shelter underground and before long the attack was over with no harm done in our immediate vicinity.

She would have been only four years old when the rabbit story took place (I believe it occurred during the bombing of Valence on August 15, 1944)

I looked through my grandparents' photo album for images that might show the cottage or at least the yard, but my grandparents, like all first-time parents, focused on their child so there are few strong clues in the photos. Click on any of the photos to enlarge.