The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (20 page)

Like Denis Rake, they were both very colourful characters. At seventeen, when France fell, Bob, urged by his father, who had fought with the Allies during the First World War, left his home in
Brittany and cycled to the Pyrenees and crossed into Spain. From there he managed to get to North Africa, where, after multiple adventures, he was recruited by SOE and flown to England for
training. Bob was probably F Section’s greatest saboteur. After D-Day, in order to prevent the German Army from sending reinforcements to the Normandy front, by himself he blew up eight
bridges. And when the war in Europe ended, not content with having parachuted twice into occupied France, he volunteered for Force 136 in the Far East, where the war against the Japanese was still
raging, and was dropped into Laos.

Violette’s young husband had been killed fighting with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Anger at his death led Violette to join SOE. Violette, who was perhaps the most beautiful
amongst a bevy of F Section’s beautiful women agents, was arrested shortly after arriving on her second mission into France, following a gun battle during which she manned a machine-gun from
the back seat of a car until she ran out of ammunition. She then leapt out of the car, and with the Germans in hot pursuit, firing at her from all angles, she attempted to escape across a field and
into the shelter of a wood and had almost reached her target when she tripped and twisted her ankle. Her male companion attempted to carry her to safety, but she insisted that there was no point in
both of them being caught, and told him to save himself. He reached the wood, but she was captured, tortured and, aged just twenty-three, finally executed in Ravensbrück.

Bob and Violette had first met when Bob walked down the steps of the Studio Club in Knightsbridge and saw Violette, wearing a simple, unadorned black dress, leaning against the piano. He said
she was so breathtakingly beautiful that he just stood rooted to the spot, staring at her. They were introduced, and she reached up on tiptoe – she was petite – and kissed him on both
cheeks, overwhelming him still further with a whiff of expensive French perfume. Violette had worked on the beauty counter at Bon Marché in Brixton, where she was brought up – she
never lost the local accent! – before joining SOE. Whilst in training Violette met and fell in love with Harry Peulevé, like her a ‘half and half, and they became lovers. Harry
had already left on his second mission into France when she and Bob met. Harry was also arrested during this second mission, but survived the concentration camp to which he was sent. He returned to
London at the end of the war, eager to find Violette again and marry her. The shock of discovering that she had not survived hit him badly, and he never got over it. He did eventually marry a
Danish woman and fathered two children, but the marriage didn’t last. Harry left his wife and young family and wandered the world, taking job after job, endlessly restless, and finally dying
in his early fifties.

Bob and Violette became friends while waiting to leave on their separate missions. I had thought at one time that their relationship went beyond mere friendship, but apparently not, it was just
a firm friendship, not a romantic liaison. They had a mutual passion – poker – and were both fanatical players. They later left together to be parachuted into France and, according to
Bob, they didn’t sleep in the plane on the way over as they’d been advised to do, they played poker. The despatcher joined in and turned out to be better at the game than they were,
with the result that the two agents ended up broke! When the plane arrived at the landing ground, there was no reception committee waiting for them, so the pilot turned and headed back home. Since
the two agents had been ‘fleeced’ by the despatcher, there was no longer any point in playing poker on the way back. So they slept.

When Bob and Violette climbed into the plane that June night and soared into the dark sky, they were unaware of the momentous event which was about to unfold. On 5 June that
message
personnel
every organizer had been eagerly awaiting was finally broadcast. ‘Les carottes sont cuites’ (‘The carrots are cooked’) came over the air waves loud and clear,
announcing the imminent landing, the following morning, of Allied troops on French soil. It was the eve of the Normandy landings! The next morning, when they awoke, they learned that at dawn Allied
troops had landed on the Normandy beaches. It was D-Day. The long-awaited invasion had finally happened! ‘Thousands of little ships had sailed by below us. Hundreds of aircraft had thundered
past us,’ Bob said dejectedly. ‘And . . . we had slept right through it.’

Between the time of the message and the landing, nine hundred and sixty sabotage attacks against railway lines had been carried out, and every train between Marseilles and Lyons conveying German
reinforcements to the front derailed at least once. During the following days, the Germans brought in Army teams to repair the railway lines: and at night resistance workers laid charges along
sections of those lines that were not heavily guarded, and blew them up again.

As a result there were terrible reprisals against civilians. For every German officer killed at least fifty civilians, sometimes even a hundred, depending on the officer’s rank, were
rounded up and summarily executed. Most people have heard of the dreadful massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane when the entire village was wiped out – the men rounded up and shot, and the women and
children locked in the church and burnt alive.

We three women were used as decoys so, for obvious reasons, we never met or had any contact with the students who came to Group B before we linked up on exercises. Had they
known us, the whole operation would have been futile. Jean worked in Southampton; my pitch was Bournemouth. Like the other occupants of the block of flats at Orchard Court, the inhabitants of both
those large coastal towns hadn’t the remotest idea, I don’t think they even suspected, what was going on under their very noses.

A student would be let loose in Bournemouth and told that a young girl wearing a headscarf and a dirty mac and carrying a shopping bag would probably be walking along the sea front opposite the
pier pavilion at a given time. He was told to detect her and, once he had found her, to follow her and discover where she was going and whom she might be meeting, without her suspecting anything.
This also worked in reverse when they were taught how to detect if someone was shadowing them and then to shake them off without any suspicions being aroused.

My job was much easier than theirs. A young man, in or out of uniform, wandering around a seaside resort in the middle of the day was much more conspicuous than a young woman with a shopping
basket. They were everywhere. We always carried shopping bags wherever we went in case we came across a queue which we could join and, hopefully, buy something ‘off the ration’. It
didn’t matter what it was: if it was ‘off the ration’ it was worth having . . . and worth queuing for!

Once decanted in Bournemouth, I used to head for the appointed spot, then walk along a street facing the sea, which was lined with shops, and stop to look at the window displays – not that
there was a great deal to display in those lean wartime years! This way, from the reflection in the plate-glass window, I could see anyone passing me or more importantly lingering behind me. Sure
enough, my victim would sooner or later saunter into view and, if he spotted me, would stop and gaze into the window of the shop next door. But I outgazed him, and eventually he moved on. If my
judgement had been right and he was my ‘victim’, he usually halted after a few yards to tie a shoelace which wasn’t undone. This was my cue. I knew I had spotted my man. So I
would head for a large department store called Plummers, the only department store in Bournemouth at the time, and make straight for the ladies’ lingerie section.

I don’t know whether modern men like wandering alone around a ladies’ lingerie department, but in the early 1940s they most certainly didn’t. They were usually highly
embarrassed. I knew that and, when I saw him slink furtively in, I invariably held up to the light a few ‘unmentionables’ in order to embarrass him even further. When I felt I had
taunted him enough, to put him out of his misery I would stroll across to the lift and press the button. I knew exactly what he would do next. So, when he casually reached the lift, at the last
second before the doors closed I would either change my mind and leap out or not get in at all, but run down the stairs on the other side to another department which was more crowded. On the way
down I would whip off my headscarf and mac and stuff them into my shopping bag so that when, breathless, he arrived at the top of the stairs – he’d probably had to go to the next floor
and race back down – the girl he had been tracking had disappeared. And only a girl in a tweed suit, her hair flowing out behind her, was visible walking briskly towards the street door,
through which she rapidly disappeared. Even had he spotted me it would have been pointless to try to catch up with me, because there were several roads joining outside the shop, and I could have
dived down any one of them.

I also used to wait at a bus stop until my victim joined the queue. When the bus arrived, I’d loiter on the platform and leap off just as it was gathering speed. He couldn’t follow
me – it would have been too obvious, and also dangerous – so the poor, frustrated man had to sit and fume till the next stop, by which time, when he hared back, there was no sign of me.
This exercise would have been much easier on the London Underground because if one leapt out just as the doors were closing, one knew that one had lost him for good. But we didn’t have an
underground in Bournemouth, so I had to make do with buses.

We also taught the future agents to pass on messages without being noticed, and without moving their lips. I would be told that at around three o’clock that afternoon there would be a man
in the pier gardens, sitting on a bench facing the sea reading a newspaper, who had a message for me. So I would stroll to the pier gardens, hoping that other people would not have crowded onto the
bench before I arrived. That would definitely queer the pitch. If it was all clear, I would sit down, open my handbag and take out a cigarette. I have never been a smoker, but I made the supreme
sacrifice during the war and puffed my way to victory. After a while, without any sign of recognition having passed between us, he would put down his newspaper and walk away. I would then casually
pick it up and flick through the pages. This was not unusual, and in no way remarkable. Newspapers were in very short supply, and everyone wanted to read them, so whenever one was abandoned it was
always immediately spotted and grabbed. Every newspaper must have been read by at least twelve people. Somewhere inside this newspaper there would be a message. Perhaps part of the crossword, if
there was one. As soon as I found it, I would fold the paper and put it back on the bench for the next person who sat down to read.

We often passed messages to trainee agents in telephone booths. This was not as easy as linking up on the park bench. There were very few private telephones during the war, and everyone wanted
to make calls, so public call boxes were in great demand and always had a line of people waiting to use them. We were asked, or rather told, by the authorities not to make a call last longer than
three minutes. If it was a long-distance call every three minutes the pips would sound, the operator would come on the line and, if one didn’t immediately put more coins in the box, the call
was cut off.

This exercise was much more complicated for me than the bench operation, because I had to be absolutely sure I had spotted the right man. And also contrive to squeeze in behind him in the queue,
and not behind someone else. Otherwise, the outcome could be embarrassing, even disastrous, if I muttered a compromising message to a complete stranger, especially if he was with his wife! Our
rendezvous would often be in the telephone booth in the pier gardens. For me this entailed a great deal of time wasted lurking in bushes in order to be sure to leap out as soon as I spotted my
‘victim’. Luckily, there was a clump of bushes beside the pier gardens telephone box.

Once we had shuffled into line, he would go into the booth and search for a number in the telephone directory, put his two pence in the slot, pick up the receiver and make a fictitious phone
call. After few seconds, he would replace the receiver and, since he hadn’t pressed Button A to put him through to the person he was calling, he would then press button B to retrieve his
money. This sounds unbelievably complicated in this modern age of mobile phones, but it was the way things worked in those days. On leaving the booth, he would smile at me – no doubt
desperately hoping I was the person he was supposed to contact – and say, ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.’ We were very polite in those days. Then, without moving
his lips, he would hiss through the side of his mouth, ‘H for Harris.’ I would smile back, murmur, ‘It’s quite all right,’ and hiss back, ‘OK. H for
Harris,’ then enter the booth and re-enact the same comedy, except that when I flicked through the pages of the telephone directory to H, I would surreptitiously read or slide out the
message, continue the pantomime to the bitter end and leave, smiling my apologies to the next person in the queue.