The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (24 page)

When Mary’s condition became obvious and she was no longer able to carry out her duties, Lise de Baissac looked after her until Claudine (after Mary’s codename) was born, after which
Lise returned to London. One morning, while sitting up in bed in Lise’s flat, feeding her baby, Mary was surprised by the Gestapo, who burst into the room and arrested her. Claudine was
placed in an orphanage and Mary was taken to Gestapo HQ. She succeeded in convincing them that she could not possibly be an SOE agent since she had just given birth to her daughter, sticking to her
cover story that she was a widow whose husband had abandoned her in Alexandria – her knowledge of Alexandria and the fact that she spoke Arabic gave authenticity to her story – and in
the end they believed her and let her go. They had mistaken her for Lise, the agent they had really come to arrest.

She managed to find baby Claudine and, with the help of two old ladies Lise had introduced her to, found accommodation in Poitiers with a couple who agreed to take in her and Claudine as
lodgers. There she laid low until she left for England. When she returned, Claude recognized the child as his and married Mary. But it was a marriage of convenience in order to give Claudine a
name, an arrangement which suited them both until 1960, when they divorced. For their daughter’s sake, in spite of the fact that Claude later married, they remained in close contact, and
Claudine remembers having a very happy childhood, loved and cared for by both her parents.

Mary never remarried and in January 1983, at the age of seventy-nine, she was found hanging from an apple tree in her garden. She left no note and had given no signs of being anxious or
depressed, and there was no obvious reason for what appeared to be her suicide, though both Claudine and her cousin Clothilde, Claude and Lise’s niece, another Mauritian now living in Paris
who has become a friend of mine, vehemently refute the idea. Unfortunately, although they both refuse to believe that Mary committed suicide, they can offer no other explanation. It would be
interesting to know what the doctor who signed her death certificate thought.

But the story doesn’t end there. Only a few weeks ago, at a reception in London, I was introduced to a young man whose face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place him.
‘This is Claudine’s son,’ I was told. What a bombshell. Then the penny dropped, and I exclaimed: ‘You look exactly like your grandfather!’ He was the image of Claude
de Baissac at the time he had married Mary Herbert. The young man smiled, then told me his story. He had been adopted at birth by a wonderful couple who gave him not only their name but also a very
happy childhood yet didn’t hide from him the fact that they were not his birth parents. But it wasn’t until he became a member of the Special Forces Club in 1990 and saw photographs of
both Lise and Claude de Baissac on the wall that he began to wonder about his real mother and to ask himself whether there might be some family connection between himself and these two famous
agents, since the name on his birth certificate was ‘Jean de Baissac’, not a common name in England. But it wasn’t until 2009 that he seriously looked into his true parentage.
That year he met Claudine in Los Angeles, where she had lived for the previous fifty years, and learned that not only was she his mother but that he was indeed Claude de Baissac and Mary
Herbert’s grandson.

What a series of revelations! He is now interested in tracing all his ‘lost’ Mauritian relatives and was anxious to begin his search by contacting my friend Clothilde. So when I
returned to Paris I excitedly rang her to give her the news of her long-lost cousin – and almost gave her a heart attack! ‘But Claudine never had any children,’ she protested.
Then the story came out.

Claudine was very young when her son was born, studying ballet in London with high hopes of becoming a ballerina. I don’t know why she gave up her child: perhaps because of pressure from
her mother, who disliked the idea of a scandal in the family, or perhaps because it would have been difficult to continue her career and look after a baby at the same time. Whatever the reason, he
was adopted at birth. Not long afterwards Claudine was involved in a car accident and very badly injured, which ended her hopes of a career as a dancer. Did she ever regret giving up her baby now
that she had been obliged to give up her career? One cannot help wondering. She later married an American and left for the New World. But she never had any other children.

Her son, who since their meeting is now in regular contact with his mother, is shortly coming to Paris to meet some of his new-found Mauritian family living here. The revelation has caused a
tremendous stir, not only with those members of his family living in Paris but also with those in Mauritius, and the telephone lines between the two countries have been buzzing non-stop ever since
the news broke: they are all dumbfounded by it. Like her birth parents, Claudine would obviously have been a good recruit for SOE had the occasion arisen, since she clearly knew how to keep her
mouth shut and, in a way, live a double life. Once again an SOE story proves the veracity of the old saying: ‘truth is stranger than fiction.

I think the women agents who survived mostly recovered. Yvonne Baseden, who at over ninety is now very frail, is able to talk calmly about her traumatic wartime experiences: being arrested,
tortured, imprisoned first in Dole, and finally, in August 1944, in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she remained under appalling conditions until repatriated the following April. The
only moment in her story when she shows any emotion and seems upset is when she talks about her organizer, Gonzague de Saint-Geniès, and remembers how he took his life rather than risk
giving away information to the Gestapo and thereby betraying his friends.

Nancy Wake was another one of F Section’s larger-than-life, colourful characters who, once the war ended, seemed to survive life in peacetime, seemingly putting the past behind her and
embracing the future with open arms. Nancy was a New Zealand-born Australian journalist married to a French businessman. They were living in Marseilles, her husband’s home town, when France
fell. Nancy immediately went to work organizing an escape line across the Pyrenees into Spain for downed Allied pilots and escaping British prisoners – until the Germans got wind of her
activities. Urged by her husband, with whom she was very much in love, to leave the country and make her way to England, with his help she escaped into Spain by the same route, leaving Marseilles
only a day before the Gestapo came to the house to arrest her. Her husband denied all knowledge of her whereabouts or her clandestine activities, whereupon he was arrested in her place and taken
into custody. When he refused to speak he was terribly tortured and, according to a priest who was in the prison cell next to his, on the night before he was executed his back was so raw from the
beatings he had received that his kidneys were exposed. Knowing that he was to be shot the following morning her husband managed to tap a message through the wall of his cell to the priest, who
gave it to Nancy when she returned to France after the war, hoping to be reunited with the man she loved. ‘Tell Nancy that I love her and that I didn’t betray her,’ it read.

It is perhaps not surprising that when Nancy returned and learned of her husband’s terrible end she is reputed to have said, ‘I love killing Germans.’ At first, I hesitated to
put this comment onto these pages: it could portray her in such a hard, cruel light, and Nancy was neither hard nor cruel. But very recently I met, quite by chance, an Australian who had been one
of Nancy’s great friends, and he put the remark in context. He told me that, there no longer being anything to keep her in Europe, after the war Nancy had returned to live in her native
Australia, where she frequently spoke in schools about her wartime exploits. He often accompanied her on these speaking engagements and, one afternoon, when she had held her young audience
spellbound for almost an hour and a half, a young teenage girl, of obvious German extraction, got up and challenged her, remarking: ‘You once were heard to say that you loved killing Germans.
Is that true?’ There was a deathly silence in the audience, followed by an embarrassed shuffling of feet.

Nancy looked at the girl sadly, shook her head and replied, ‘You silly girl. I don’t hate Germans. I have been many times to Germany, where I have two German godchildren and many
German friends.’ She paused and looked straight at her. ‘But I hate Nazis. And all they stand for.’

This hatred of the Nazis had been born before the war, when Nancy was Reuters correspondent in Paris. On an official visit to Germany in 1938, when she was travelling with a group of foreign
journalists, the bus had passed through a village where Nancy noticed what looked like a large Ferris wheel, with people attached to it, turning round and round. When she asked the guide what was
happening he glanced out of the window of the bus and replied dismissively, ‘Oh, they’re only Jews!’ At that moment an intense hatred of the Nazi element in Germany was born, and
she vowed to do something to stop the massacre.

Nancy was an agent who thrived while carrying out her clandestine activities and was perfect for the work she had been chosen to do. She didn’t know the meaning of fear, was never arrested
and was called by the Germans ‘the White Mouse’ because she always managed to slip through their fingers. George Starr, a man not given to over-enthusiastic comments about a
woman’s charms once remarked, possibly echoing the thoughts of countless other men who didn’t express them vocally, that Nancy was the sexiest woman he had ever met.

She admitted in her daring, audacious way that in the field she had had a German officer as a lover. ‘Of course, I shall have to kill him,’ she was heard to remark at the height of
their affair. And she did. Not personally. She betrayed him, which led to his execution. She could be a warm, loving, loyal friend but also ruthless when the occasion demanded. I don’t know
how she felt about his death but I do know of one case where she had to pronounce the death sentence, which upset her deeply. She had made friends with a Dutch girl who was a member of her
Resistance group. There were not many women in these Resistance groups, and if one met one with whom one felt an immediate bond it was a bonus, and a very special relationship. Sadly, the
‘Dutch’ girl turned out to be not Dutch at all but a German agent working for the Abwehr. When her true identity was revealed, she was sentenced to death by the members of the
réseau.
Nancy did not carry out the execution herself, even though she had pronounced the sentence, but she was there to witness it. When the girl was led out and passed Nancy, she
spat on her. Then, just before the bullet which ended her life rang out, she looked at Nancy and said, ‘I am a patriot too.’ It was perhaps this last remark which upset Nancy more than
the loss of her friend.

I last spoke to Nancy a couple of years ago. It was on her ninety-sixth or ninety-seventh birthday, I can’t remember which. She was back in England, having married an Englishman, a former
pilot. Now widowed for the second time, she was living in a Star and Garter home in Richmond. Tim Buckmaster, Buck’s son, was with her to celebrate and help her cut her cake. Tim had
apparently mentioned that he had seen me the month before, and Nancy had said she would love to see me again. So Tim rang me up. At first she seemed to be just as perky as ever, but after a few
minutes the conversation faded out, and the line went dead. Tim picked up the receiver. ‘She’s dropped off,’ he explained. Perhaps at ninety-six or ninety-seven I shall
‘drop off’ in the middle of a sentence too!

Nancy died just two weeks before her ninety-ninth birthday and had a very impressive memorial service in St Clement Danes, a beautiful old church in the Strand opposite Australia House. It was a
wonderful ceremony: three robed clergy officiating, a magnificent choir, a flurry of FANYs showing an impressive number of distinguished guests and top brass to their reserved seats. The Duke of
Edinburgh had sent his equerry to represent him, and I recognized Viscount Slim sitting at the other end of the pew with a lady MP whose face I knew, but whose name I couldn’t recall, sitting
behind. An assortment of military attachés in full regalia from various embassies read the lessons or said the prayers, and the Australian high commissioner gave the address. The church was
packed to the rafters, with many celebrities present. But it wasn’t Nancy! The Church of England wasn’t her cup of tea at all. I don’t think any church was. Had her spirit been
present, hovering over the elaborate ceremony, she would have roared with her raucous, throaty laughter and doubtless used some unrepeatable epithet to describe the occasion.

When the service ended the high commissioner gave a splendid reception, and, as we left the church and crossed the road to Australia House to attend, the bells began to ring, peal after peal of
joyous chimes, which seemed to echo and reverberate all over London. A wonderful goodbye and a wonderful tribute to Nancy, an exceptional woman, the most decorated woman in the Second World War. I
think Nancy would have liked that.

On 10 March 2013 Nancy’s ashes were taken to Verneix in central France, where she had operated during the war and where she is still remembered. They had been brought from London by
Brigadier Bill Sowry, the Australian defence attaché. In a splendid ceremony attended by the local mayor, the military attaché from the Australian embassy in Paris and two FANYs who
had come especially from London, as well as other local dignitaries and ordinary folk, a few who remembered Nancy, Brigadier Sowry scattered her ashes in the woods outside Verneix. ‘We are
here today to pay our respects and give her the tribute she deserves,’ he said. During the splendid lunch, hosted by the mayor, which followed, the mayor said that this little part of France
was now also part of Australia and announced that later in the year a plaque would be unveiled in the centre of the village in memory of Nancy. But it was far from being a sombre occasion. Nancy
was a woman who loved life and lived it to the full. She also was very partial to an early-morning gin and tonic. So, after her ashes had been scattered, there was, as she had requested, a drinks
reception in the town hall.