The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (28 page)

The war ended and the ‘peace’ began. But not the peace we had dreamt of during those turbulent years. The Second World War changed everything beyond recognition.
Some former agents who had performed heroic acts never really recovered from their traumatic experiences. They found it hard to accept this ‘peaceful’ world, which was far from the
peace they had fought for, and to which they had hoped to return.

Many agents received very poor post-war treatment. For the most part they were ignored, not only by General de Gaulle but also by the British authorities which had sent them into the field;
their value and their contributions to the war effort were never recognized.

Lise de Baissac, Yvonne Baseden and Pearl Cornioley had to wait until they reached a ripe old age before receiving their wings. Lise had hers pinned on her breast at ninety-nine! She died
shortly after. I remember seeing a photograph of the ceremony, Lise standing to attention, as slim and upright as ever, smiling happily as the wings were at last fastened to the lapel of her
jacket. Pearl and Yvonne were in their eighties before they received this deserved recognition. In February 2012, one month after her ninetieth birthday and more than ten years after receiving her
British ‘wings’, Yvonne’s wartime activities were finally recognized by the French authorities. At a private ceremony in London, where Yvonne now lives, Admiral Edouard de
Coriolis, the French defence attaché, pinned her French wings onto her dress. But I don’t think the French ever honoured in this way Lise and Pearl or any of the other F Section women
agents who had parachuted into France.

Radio operator Henri Diacono, after having performed heroic deeds while working in occupied France, discovered on his return to London that he had been demoted from captain to lieutenant! And it
was as a lieutenant that he retired. Perhaps it is not surprising that, when he was approached and asked to join Force 136 operating in the Far East, parachuting agents behind the lines into the
Burmese jungle to fight the Japanese, he declined the offer.

Like Henri, Krystyna Skarbek, known as Christine Granville, was also poorly treated by the authorities after the war. A Polish countess who had carried out undercover work with her husband in
her native country, she escaped to Egypt after her husband was killed, from where she was recruited by SOE’s Cairo office and sent to England for training. She was parachuted into France to
work as a courier for the Jockey
réseau,
where she carried out amazing and courageous acts of bravery. It was she who orchestrated the eleventh-hour release of Jockey’s
organizer, Francis Cammaerts (‘Roger’), and his two companions from a prison cell in Lyons, where they were awaiting execution at dawn that morning. When the war ended, she was no
longer able to return to her native Poland, where both her own and her husband’s estates had been confiscated. Almost penniless, Christine was obliged to work as a chambermaid in a hotel,
before taking a job as a stewardess on a cruise ship. In 1952, she was murdered: stabbed to death in the foyer of the third-rate London hotel where she lived.

Nancy Wake, who was awarded the George Medal and three Croix de Guerre with palm and one with star, the Médaille de la Résistance, the American Medal of Freedom and the insignia of
a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur, the Order of Australia and the New Zealand Returned Serviceman Gold Medal, was the most decorated woman agent of the war. But when in 1997 Nancy left her
native Australia and returned to England, she was obliged to sell her medals in order to live.

As in the case of Nancy, Christine and also Didi Nearne, many of the agents’ contributions went unrecognized and were only acknowledged when it was too late. Impressive funerals were held,
attended by high-ranking officials and bemedalled officers, but sadly that did not help the agents – by then they were beyond recognition – though the grieving families might have
derived some measure of comfort.

Many returning agents found it difficult to settle down to life in peacetime. Trauma doesn’t suddenly go away, it lives with you, maybe even colours the rest of your life. There was a
psychological trauma as well as a physical one, and some committed suicide. I don’t think the agents received any medical help; they were left to cope with their hallucinations, their
nightmares, their flashbacks, their depressions . . . and their bewildered families. Their lives spiralled out of control, and many marriages suffered, some irrevocably. Other agents seemed to slip
back easily into their former pre-war existence, with its normal relationships. It was a question of personality, a person’s make-up, and in some cases the severity of their experiences. Like
everyone else, those agents were individuals with their differing characters, and some were unable to come to grips with peace.

War had been so much part of our lives. We had cruised along not thinking about tomorrow, not thinking about anything except the job in hand. For those agents in the field, their mission would
have been impossible if they had done otherwise. We couldn’t afford to stop and wonder what the future might hold because, had we done so, we would have realized that for many of us there
would be no future We couldn’t waste time speculating on life after the war or lamenting the ‘might have beens’. Then suddenly it was all over. SOE was disbanded with undignified
haste, and we were all ‘out on the street’, wondering what to do with the rest of our lives. A chapter had now closed, and we were not sure what the next chapter held. Or even whether
we wanted to open it.

But one’s war doesn’t abruptly disappear from one day to the next. People cannot suddenly turn the page on six years of their lives. Even after the bunting had been removed, the
patriotic songs had faded, the blackout taken down and the streets were once again flooded with light, the agents’ wartime memories stayed with them . . . sometimes for a very long time.
Nothing was urgent any more. Nothing seemed important. It was all over. For some agents the war never left them. They realized that the ‘new world’, the world fit for heroes for which
they had believed they were risking their lives, was not going to happen.

The ‘new world’ we had fought to create and, once hostilities had ended, stepped confidently into was not very different from the one we had left behind in 1939. The old tensions,
the rivalries, the snobberies and the struggle for power which, if not absent, had been only underground rumblings during the war, sprang to life again. No longer united as a nation fighting a
common cause, society once again became fragmented, torn with the desire for power and self-gain, and we became the ‘me’ generation. It was hard for many who returned to realize that
those who had stayed behind, the ‘chair-borne brigade’, had climbed the ladder to success, while those who had risked their lives were left standing with a foot on the bottom rung,
obliged to start again. And, for some, bitter disillusionment set in.

At the time there were no psychiatrists, psychologists or counsellors on hand as there are today, waiting to treat victims of wartime stress. Or if there were, we didn’t hear of them. When
a difficult situation arose, or tragedy struck, as it so often did, we just picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves down and got on with life. We had no option. And perhaps it wasn’t such a bad
philosophy after all.

Had SOE survived, instead of being more or less annihilated, the files mostly destroyed by a ‘mysterious’ fire in December 1945, I think the authorities might have looked after
returning agents, and they would have received better treatment. No one knows how or why, or in some instances even where, the fire started. Records don’t seem able to agree on the exact
location though it was most probably central London, possibly at the HQ in Baker Street. However, some hazard that it was at nearby Michael House, the property belonging to Marks and Spencer which
had sheltered Leo Marks’s team of coders. Some theories say it was arson. Others blame MI6, and still further accusations have been made that two officers weeding through the files carelessly
threw a lighted cigarette butt into a waste-paper basket. All these theories are possible, though none can be proved. But suspicions were aroused at the time, and rumours circulated that it was not
an accident.

Was this arson? A deliberate attempt to completely wipe out any trace of SOE’s wartime activities? If so, who or what authority was responsible? One can only surmise. There is no proof. As
it was, many were left angry, often embittered, by the offhand treatment they received. General Eisenhower said that the work of SOE agents had shortened the war by at least eighteen months. How
many civilian and armed forces lives did that save? And the late Professor Michael Foot estimated that, when at its highest, the total strength of SOE was that of a weak Army division, and added
that no single division in any army exercised one-tenth of SOE’s influence on the course of the war.

For women who had lost loved ones the post-war period was very difficult. As long as the fighting continued, no one had had time to mourn. But when peace came, and they saw
their friends’ husbands and fiancés returning, they suddenly came face to face with reality, and the brutal truth hit them. Their men were not coming back.

I think that for women with children it must have been the hardest. Their children saw the parties being organized for returning dads. And when the long-awaited day finally arrived, they watched
as their friends excitedly hung across their front doors or garden gates improvised banners made out of old sheets with ‘Welcome Home Dad’ painted in gaudy letters: and they knew it was
a celebration which would never take place in their home. They saw their friends playing ball in the park with their fathers, and they knew their fathers would never come home to play games with
them. They would never again swing from his hand on a Saturday afternoon as they went off together to watch a football match. He would not be there to cheer them on when they played in the school
eleven, applaud them when they acted in their school’s end-of-term play . . . or just be a father. That was something which was now denied them for ever. And those women had to bear not only
their own pain, but a double pain. The pain, even the envy, they saw in their children’s eyes when they watched families leaving on holiday or fathers and sons setting out on expeditions
together.

Those women had to be father and mother at the same time. And sadly, I saw some of them lose their femininity. Especially mothers with sons. They realized that there was no father figure in the
home, no man to be not only loving, but stern at times, and lay down the law, no role model for their boys to look up to and follow, and they almost forgot that they were mothers and became
surrogate fathers instead. So the bewildered children sometimes ‘lost’ both parents.

Abraham Lincoln said: ‘The only good part of a war is its ending.’ Francis Cammaerts aptly remarked when it was all over – was it with bitterness or an ironic smile? –
‘War achieves nothing.’ And Winston Churchill summed it up, hitting the nail on the head, when he advised: ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.’ How right they all
three were.

When the war in Europe ended, it left a desolate void for many people. Once the church bells had stopped clanging, the dancing and singing in the streets had come to an end,
the shrieks of ‘We want the King’ coupled with the cheers of the crowds clamouring outside the gates of Buckingham Palace had faded, the street parties were over and the balloons and
bunting had been removed, we came down to earth with a bump: and were confronted with peace. And many didn’t know what to do with it. It was bewildering. All the landmarks had disappeared.
People had lost their anchor, that prop which had kept them going, despite all the odds: now they had to face the reality of a country, often a life, devastated by war, which would need to be
rebuilt. And they didn’t know where to begin.

Men came back from the war believing they could take up their lives where they had left off in 1939, that the wives they had left behind would be waiting to go back to the domestic round they
had followed in the 1930s. But for four or five years many wives had carried the weight of the responsibility of the family on their shoulders – they had had no option. They had worked
outside the home, driving buses, working in factories, acting as special constables, fire-fighters, air-raid wardens, and some were reluctant to relinquish their new-found liberty. They had
discovered independence and they didn’t want to go back to being the ‘little wife’, waiting at home for their husband’s return from the office each evening.

Other young women, dazzled by a uniform and caught in the heat of passion, had married hastily, sometimes after only a few days’ acquaintance. It had happened with some SOE agents about to
leave for the field. The uncertainty of anyone surviving the war had added an urgency to these marriages, a desire to grasp whatever happiness they could while they had the chance. It had been
thrilling, romantic; the scent of danger and the proximity of death had added excitement to their passion, and they were unable to look beyond today: nothing was permanent, nothing lasting, and
they had lived only for the moment. Later many realized that getting married had been one of those mad, impulsive things people did in wartime. Since no one knew whether they would still be alive
the following week, or even the next day, the thought that marriage was not a step one took lightly, without reflection or forethought, which might later prove to be a mistake, didn’t come
into it. One grabbed happiness as quickly as possible, when and where one could, without considering the consequences, since tomorrow might be too late.