The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (3 page)

‘In other words, an enemy alien,’ she sneered.

I shrugged and gave a deep sigh. ‘If you say so,’ I ended wearily, abandoning any further attempt to placate her.

‘Can’t have such people in the armed forces,’ she sniffed, as if Tilly were a bad smell.
‘That’s
why she’s allowed to work at the BBC. But it
isn’t your case.’

Her pen, held aloft until then, descended. ‘If you still haven’t made up your mind, I’ll put you down for a factory.’

She had insulted my friend and destroyed my dreams, and I suddenly saw red.

‘I will
not
go to work in a factory,’ I shouted, getting up and stamping my foot to emphasize my determination.

The door opened and a city gent, wearing a bowler hat, with a copy of
The Times
tucked under his arm, walked in. He raised his eyebrows enquiringly in my direction. I was by now puce
with rage. Vinegar-face, taken off her guard by my outburst, was staring at me, her mouth gaping open like a question mark, obviously not expecting what had appeared to be a nicely brought-up young
lady to behave like a Marseilles fishwife.

‘I’ve been offered a job in the BBC French Service,’ I exploded, ‘and
she
says I’ve got to work in a factory. Well, I
won’t
.’ My feet
may have given a few more stamps to emphasize that my decision was irrevocable.

His lips twitched. He seemed to find the situation amusing.

‘I’ll take over this case, Miss Hoskins,’ he said, holding out his hand for my file, which Vinegar-face had been gleefully massacring since our morning meeting. ‘Come
with me, young lady,’ he smiled and, leading the way down a long corridor, entered a small office, tucked at the far end, and motioned me to a seat.

‘Now then,’ he said, sitting down at his desk and looking carefully at Vinegar-face’s Victorian scrawl. ‘I see you have just left the French Lycée.’

I nodded, wondering what was coming next. ‘So you speak fluent French?’

‘I’m bilingual,’ I replied, now on the defensive.

He continued to study my file. Then, putting it aside, he began asking me a great many questions that had nothing to do with the warship I had expected to be invited to command, jumping
backwards and forwards between English and French like a demented kangaroo. He seemed surprised that I was able to keep up. After a few more linguistic gymnastics, he made an incomprehensible
telephone call, scribbled on a piece of paper and told me to go to this address, where someone was expecting me. The address meant nothing to me. But, relieved to be out of Vinegar-face’s
clutches, I took the paper and, with a final triumphant smirk in her direction, stalked from the building. My smirk was wasted. She didn’t even look up. She was too busy destroying another
candidate’s hopes.

My mystery destination turned out to be the Foreign Office, and the room I was to find a windowless broom cupboard filled by an Army officer. The room was so small that he and I were practically
rubbing noses across his desk while he asked me a lot of bewildering questions which had nothing to do with the Navy. It was the beginning of a series of weary wanderings, answering questions
which, to my mind, were completely off the mark. I felt like one of the lost tribes of Israel trailing behind Moses on an aimless ramble from one desert to another. This tour of London didn’t
appear to be getting me anywhere, and I was becoming seriously concerned, wondering when I was going to be given my seductive hat.

My final port of call was Norgeby House, a large building in central London, at 64 Baker Street. I knew the building well, but thought it was just another government ministry. The plaque on the
wall outside read ‘Inter-Services Research Bureau’, which didn’t mean a thing. I think that was the idea. Like the hordes of people who passed by every day, never had I imagined
or even suspected that this was the Headquarters of SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the official name for Churchill’s Secret Army, which he created in July 1940 after General de
Gaulle’s radio appeal to the French in occupied Europe to join him in London and continue the fight against Hitler. I wonder if I even knew of the existence of such an army. I certainly
didn’t realize, and doubt whether any of the other thousands of passers-by did either, that behind those innocuous-looking walls representatives from every occupied European country were busy
organizing acts of sabotage and the infiltration at night of secret agents behind the lines into enemy-occupied territory, by fishing boats, feluccas, submarines and parachutes.

The officer who received me must have approved because, after a few more questions, he picked up his telephone, spoke briefly and told me to go a certain room, where Captain Miller was expecting
me.

The said captain may have been expecting me
then,
but when I arrived in his office five minutes later, he’d forgotten! He stared at me as if I’d dropped in from outer space,
and without any further introduction suddenly barked, ‘No one, but
no one,
must know what you do here. Not your father, your mother, your sister, your brother, your fiancé . .
.’

I tried to tell him that I didn’t have a fiancé and not to worry about my father asking questions, since he was floating about on a submarine depot ship somewhere between
Trincomalee and Mombasa. We didn’t see him for four years. My little brother was at school in Yorkshire and not in the least bit interested in his big sister’s antics, and my mother had
moved to Bath, relieved that her offspring had now left the Lycée and was away from the clutches of those wild French airmen. Had she got wind of my last paramour, whom my classmates had
nicknamed Tahiti, she would most certainly have stayed in London.

I never did discover who else wasn’t supposed to know what I was about to do because before Harry, the officer I thought was interviewing me, had time to tick off a few more members of my
family on his fingers, a very tall Irish Guards officer, who must have been about six foot six, exploded into the room like a bomb, making strange squeaking sounds. Some sort of crisis must have
occurred – not an unusual occurrence, I was to learn – because Harry, apparently understanding the squeaks, threw up his hands in horror, sending the papers on his desk flying in every
direction, and the two of them roared off down the corridor to join other hyperactive members of this strange organization.

I was abandoned to a major sticking coloured pins in a map on the wall, who now turned round. ‘Don’t talk and don’t ask questions,’ he said briefly. ‘The less you
know the less you can reveal if the worst happens.’ And he went back to his pins.

I was beginning to wonder what could be worse than the madhouse I seemed to have been trapped in. It turned out to be a German victory, and we were all apparently on their ‘hit
list’. But I wasn’t to learn that until much later.

I would also learn that Harry and his Irish chum had recently returned from ‘the field’, the codename for enemy territory – everything was in code – and were still
slightly on edge. That was putting it mildly. It turned out that the Irishman had been shot in the throat while escaping, hence the strange squeaking voice, which made him sound rather like a
ventriloquist’s doll. But at the time I was unaware of these details and was convinced I had been lured into a lunatic asylum run by the Crazy Gang.

A young girl in uniform, slightly older than I, was sitting unperturbed at her desk, studying her finger nails. I looked across at her. ‘Is it
always
like this here?’ I
ventured.

‘No,’ she reassured me, getting up and collecting the papers the two officers had scattered in every direction in their precipitous departure. ‘It’s usually worse!’
She sighed. ‘You’ll get used to it.’ She was right. I didn’t have any option. I had entered the hidden world of secret agents on special missions.

Nothing in life is all bad. Not even in a war. And lighter moments often interspersed the tragedies that went to make up our daily lives in SOE. Otherwise, I think it would
have been difficult to cope with the tensions and dramas we lived with every day, not only between SOE’s walls, but in the wider world of wartime England. There were some good times, even
some amusing times. As the French say, in life there are
les hauts et les has,
and, strange as it may seem, comical incidents often happened during the air raids.

Living in London, we rarely had a good night’s sleep. If ever we did finish early we often spent the rest of the evening and most of the night in an air-raid shelter, sitting huddled
around the four sides like terrified patients in a dentist’s waiting room, listening to the bombs thumping overhead, or hunched on the dirty platform in the local underground station,
surrounded by picnickers, sleeping bags, crying babies and buskers, listening to impromptu ‘choirs’ roaring ‘We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’
– a popular song which was slightly out of date after June 1940, but we sang it all the same – or ‘Roll out the Barrel’, whiling away the time, waiting for Hitler’s
Luftwaffe to stop dumping bombs on us and fly back home.

The morning after a raid, we got up, picked our way through the rubble and continued as usual.

For those who were less sociable there was always the cellar, if one’s house happened to have one. I remember having dinner with a friend at her parents’ house in Hampstead when an
air raid caught us unawares, so we all trooped down to the basement. At about four o’clock in the morning the ‘all clear’ sounded, and we settled down to sleep, for what was left
of the rest of the night, on the various mattresses scattered about the cellar floor. Half an hour later, just when we had all got nicely off, my friend’s mother shot up in ‘bed’
and announced, ‘I shall never get to sleep with that clock ticking.’ We had had a particularly ear-splitting night – bombs raining down non-stop, the ack-ack guns booming in our
defence – and, now that it was quiet, the tick of the alarm clock was keeping her awake!

The Morrison shelter was the brainchild of the fiery, redheaded government minister Herbert Morrison. The corrugated-iron Anderson shelters, which had been hastily assembled in suburban back
gardens after the Munich crisis in 1938, were soon found to flood every time it rained, leaving their occupants up to their knees or waists or entirely submerged in water, depending on their size
and age. Instead, the new Morrison shelters were erected inside houses. They were enormously heavy cast-iron structures, secured to the floor, and took up an entire room, leaving no space for any
other piece of furniture.

They were slightly less noisy than spending the night on the platform of the local tube station or in one of the municipal air-raid shelters, marginally more private (though not much) and were
supposedly made to resist any assault. The only danger, when cowering under them, was that if the house collapsed on top, there was more than a chance that the occupants would be buried alive. In
most homes the Morrison shelter replaced the dining-room table, there not being room for both. The family not only sat around it for meals, but also squashed themselves under it as soon as the
air-raid siren sounded. They were very chummy structures, but could get rather crowded if guests who had come for the evening were caught by an air raid. Then everyone squeezed under the table
together, and it was a case of when father turns we all turn, except that in most houses there was no father. He was either in the armed forces, on duty firefighting or standing on a high roof
scanning the sky for approaching enemy planes. If he were too old for any of these activities, he patrolled the streets wearing a tin hat and being officious, blowing a whistle and yelling,
‘Put that light out,’ if anyone dared to smoke a cigarette outside, or leave a chink in the blackout curtains.

These inside shelters were often erected on Saturdays by volunteer Boy Scouts, and one was expected, as a thank you offering, to put money into their ‘Prisoner of War Box’, which
they rattled hopefully everywhere and anywhere at every opportunity. When home from school on holiday, my little brother used to help put up Morrison shelters. He also, without fail, positioned
himself outside the bathroom door when any guest to our house went in and noisily rattled his box when they came out saying loudly, ‘Don’t forget the prisoners of war,’ to the
intense embarrassment of my sixteen-year-old friends. It’s amazing how a horrible little boy can later metamorphose into a charming young man. Once full, these boxes were emptied at a central
depot, and the money used to provide comforts for our prisoners behind barbed wire in Nazi Germany. My little bro’s concern and patriotism were praiseworthy, but at times highly embarrassing.
And I almost strangled him on more than one occasion.

Another of my little brother’s contributions to the war effort, when home from school for the holidays, was to organize his friends into a window-cleaning brigade. Carrying ladders,
buckets and cloths, Geoffrey would marshal his troops at our house at 8 a.m. and set off. They were always in demand since, apart from there being no other window cleaners available during the war
(it was not a ‘reserved occupation, so they were all working in munitions factories or serving in the armed forces), the ‘Geoffrey brigade’ was less expensive, only asking for a
contribution to their boxes.

One summer evening, a friend of ours heard her elderly mother scream with terror. My bro had suddenly appeared on a ladder at her bedroom window at 11 p.m. and started furiously polishing. Her
daughter telephoned my mother, who was out scouring the streets looking for her son.

‘Is your brother going to clean windows all night?’ she enquired, when I answered the phone.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Only until a bomb knocks him off his ladder.’ We didn’t have television to entertain us in those days, much less computers, the internet, Twitter,
Facebook – or mobile phones. We had to find other ways of amusing ourselves, even in wartime!