Rosie's War (37 page)

Fellow escapee and great friend Frida Stewart.

Inside the Grand Hotel in Vittel: (from left to right) Frida, Rosie, Shula and Penelope.

An official photograph of Rosie, taken in 1940.

Rosie and Alfred in Marseille, early 1942. Life in the zone libre was a good deal less constricted than in Occupied France.

‘Bonne Année’: New Year’s Day menu, Marseille, 1942.

Striking, generous, irrepressible: Nancy Wake. The Australian SOE agent, a key figure in the French Resistance, befriended Rosie in Marseille.

Rosemary is ‘very well’: letter from Hoytie Wiborg to Commander Say, January 1942.

Postcard to Pattison Road from Madrid, 3 March 1942. After nearly two years in an enemy-occupied country, Rosie reaches neutral territory.

Bill from the Hotel Mora in Madrid, for a room that Rosie and Frida shared.

£35. 15s. 6d.: the single-fare journey from Lisbon to the UK.

Twenty-eight balls of wool: a receipt from John Smith’s drapery in Adare, Co. Limerick.

Rosie’s telegram to her father on arriving at Bournemouth, following the flight from Ireland to Poole, March 1942.