The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (36 page)

The local choir sang not only the National Anthem – all three verses – and the ‘Marseillaise’, but also ‘Le Chant des Partisans’, that haunting refrain which
hostages and many members of Resistance groups sang as they were led away to be executed and even when tied to their posts before being shot. A guard of honour of French SAS commando parachutists
was flown in from their base in Pau especially for the occasion. Their colonel and one of his men later jumped into an adjoining field, one waving a British and the other a French flag.

On that sunny morning, when we commemorated those sometimes forgotten, little-known or unacknowledged heroes and heroines of F Section who did not return, there must have been almost seven
hundred people of all nationalities at the country crossroads outside the little town of Valençay, on which the monument stands. They were gathered on a grassy knoll which undulates
slightly, giving way to the shelter of trees. Not being entirely flat, it allowed everyone to watch the ceremony. On the gravel space round the memorial were rows of chairs, but most of the people
were standing, or sitting on the grass.

Sadly, out of the seven hundred people present, only Bob Maloubier and I were left to represent F Section. After the speeches, given by the princess, who spoke in both French and English, the
préfet,
the mayor, Bob, now president of Libre Résistance, whose speech was worthy of Winston Churchill, quoting at the end Winston’s famous words: ‘We shall
never surrender’, there followed the traditional laying of wreaths at the foot of the memorial. Each year since the monument was erected, surviving agents have read out, in turn, the names of
their 104 comrades who gave their lives, inscribed on a tablet next to the memorial. As the years have passed, so the number of readers has dwindled. In May 2011, only Bob Maloubier and I were
present.

When our names were announced we both went forward to the microphone. As we stood, side by side, Bob put his arm round my shoulders and held me tight. I was feeling emotional: we both knew so
many of the people whose names we were about to call, and his affectionate gesture almost made the tears, which were not far from the surface, spill over.

‘You start,’ he whispered. Perhaps he was feeling emotional too. So, taking a deep breath, I began. As I did so, faces from the past, those whose names I was calling out, rose up and
drifted in front of my eyes, then floated away to be replaced by others, all of them youthful and smiling as they had been before they left on their last fateful journey. After I had read fifty-two
names, Bob took over and read the remaining half. At the end we both said, ‘Morts pour la France’ (‘Died for France’), and Bob added, ‘And for England.’ I then
recited the exhortation, Laurence Binyon’s famous lines, which, in Britain, are so often quoted on 11 November in front of war memorials.

Bob repeated those moving lines in French, after which the Last Post was sounded by a British military bugler. When we turned to go back to our seats, Bob gave my shoulder an affectionate
squeeze and kissed my cheek. I managed to stumble back to my seat next to Wing-Commander Leonard Ratliff, the ninety-two-year-old former ‘Moonlight Squadron’ pilot who had flown into
France to rescue Bob. Leonard had been listening intently as we read out the names: he also must have known some of those who had not come back – had even ‘dropped’ them from the
night sky over France. When I sat down beside him, he placed his hand over mine. It had been another very moving few minutes for the three of us. So many memories had surfaced, and faded with the
bugler’s last quivering notes. I couldn’t help thinking that, had I not been too young to be trained and parachuted into occupied France, my name might well have been inscribed on that
memorial. Or perhaps, like Bob, I would have returned with only the memory of those I had left behind to pass on to the next generation.

At the reception in the Château de Valençay after the ceremony, many people told me that for them the most moving moment of the ceremony, the most poignant of all their memories of
that day at Valençay, had been when Bob had put his arm around my shoulders and held me tight as we prepared to read out the names of many of our comrades who will not grow old as we who are
left have grown old. They said his gesture had brought tears to many eyes. I understood. It had brought tears to mine. Such moments remind me that we will not forget, but will remember with pride
those who will forever remain young in the hearts of all who knew and loved them.

When the files were opened in the year 2000, Lord Montagu invited SOE survivors to a wonderful reception at his home in Beaulieu, the place which for so many of us held fond,
often painful, memories. He himself did not share those memories. He had been at Eton at the time, ending his schooldays a short while before the Japanese surrender in August 1945, by which time
the heart and soul of ‘Group B’ had become only a ghost. And all that was left of SOE’s presence on his family’s estate was rapidly being torn down as the houses which had
sheltered agents from so many different European countries were handed back to their original owners.

On that glorious summer day we gathered as old friends in the grounds of Palace House. Princess Anne was present, as well as members of the Montagu family. Sadly, Lord Montagu’s mother,
who had been with us at the House in the Woods on that memorable evening when we had had a splendid party and rejoiced because the war in Europe was finally over, had died shortly before, aged 100.
When I was presented to the princess she seemed to be genuinely interested in hearing about all that had happened at Beaulieu during the war. The Montagus are, after all, distant relatives of her
family. While we were talking, three Hudson aircraft thundered overhead, giving the salute. People cheered and waved, and we all looked up and watched as they vanished then reappeared, dipped their
wings and saluted us again.

‘When I see those Second World War planes and hear them roaring overhead, I feel shivers going up and down my spine, don’t you?’ the princess enquired. I could only agree.

The following day, I went back to the House in the Woods to revive old memories. But it’s strange how one’s memory can play tricks. Everything seemed to be on a smaller scale than I
remembered. The House in the Woods, which had been home to the twenty-five officer instructors, had seemed enormous in the early 1940s. But when I went inside more than sixty years later and stood
in the beautiful drawing room where the grand piano, on which Colonel Woolrych had played every morning before breakfast, still held pride of place, I couldn’t believe that this was the room
where I had danced on the eve of VE Day. It appeared to have shrunk. How had we all crowded into it on that spring evening so many years ago? Yet we had. Now the house stood empty; only the ghosts
of its former wartime occupants inhabited its rooms and corridors, and hovered on the wide staircase.

‘The Rings’, our rather ugly stockbroker-Tudor HQ, had been knocked down, and a large, modern bungalow, which I found equally ugly, now stood in its place, but the owners had kept
part of the original name. I think it was called ‘Rings Corner’ or something equally twee.

Lastly I knocked on the door of the cottage where I had lived all those years ago. It was now inhabited by a market gardener, who was astonished and eager to know more when I told him how his
little cottage had been involved in our activities on the estate during the war. The files had only just been opened and, like so many people, he had no idea even of SOE’s existence, much
less the important role the Beaulieu estate and his cottage had played during those dramatic years.

The sun began to sink, a fiery red ball slowly drifting towards the horizon, as I walked once again in the sheltered cloisters housing the Montagu family chapel, out of whose dim interior the
Grenadier Guards’ band had poured on the previous day to Beat the Retreat. On one wall of the cloisters a plaque had been unveiled in April 1969 by General Sir Colin Gubbins, former head of
SOE, honouring the memory of all the trainee agents who had passed through this tranquil place, which had been perhaps their final glimpse of England before entering enemy territory. I stood in
front of the plaque, remembering those men and women I had known, many of whom had not returned, and read the inscription: ‘Remember before God those men and women of the European Resistance
Movement who were secretly trained in Beaulieu to fight their lonely battle against Hitler’s Germany, and who, before entering Nazi-occupied territory here found some measure of the peace for
which they fought.’ Those words commemorate over 3,000 men and women of at least fifteen different European nationalities, and a number of Canadians and Americans, who, during the Second
World War, had been trained at Beaulieu.

And I remember thinking, and fervently hoping, that they had found peace, their last days of peace before they entered enemy territory to face the turmoil and tensions and fear of living
undercover in German-occupied Europe. Peace, that peace which we all seek and long for, not only in wartime, when it is a vision we grasp and one day hope to achieve, but in our ordinary, everyday
‘peacetime’ life. Sadly, in this modern world, that peace for which courageous men and women fought and often sacrificed their lives still remains for many people only an illusion: a
goal they never reach.

As I turned away from the plaque that Indian summer evening, the inscription imprinted on my mind, I realized that out of the six women who had worked at Beaulieu during the war I may be the
only survivor. I looked around those sunlit cloisters and I think I understood a little of what those future agents must have felt when they too turned away from Beaulieu and faced with courage
whatever fate had in store for them. They were so young . . . with their whole lives before them. What must have been their thoughts as they drifted down out of the night sky to face an unknown
enemy?

When he returned, one agent told me with a smile that as he had dangled above the dark ground, not knowing whether friend or foe awaited him, he couldn’t help saying to himself,
‘What on earth am I doing here? I must be crazy. I could have been sitting in a bar in London, having a drink, spending a pleasant evening with friends, and enjoying the relative safety of a
free country, instead of leaping alone into the unknown.’ Then he had hit the ground with a bump, and out of the dark, willing hands had come forward to help him shed his parachute which,
caught in the wind, was dragging him along the ground. And as he had looked up into so many unknown, but friendly, faces smiling in welcome, he had felt a sudden surge of emotion and knew that had
he, at that moment, been able to change his mind and return to London, he would have chosen to be where he was, where he was meant to be, that what he was doing might be crazy, but for him it was
right.

I can only think and hope that this is how most of them must have felt – that what they were doing was right, whatever the future might hold. I feel very privileged to have been a member
of Churchill’s Secret Army, and very humbled to have known and, I hope, been a friend to so many exceptional, courageous and truly wonderful people, many of whom did not grow old, as we who
are left have grown old’. For they gave their youth, their hopes, their dreams, their joie de vivre . . . so that we might be free.

As I stood in those tranquil cloisters that September evening with the last rays of sunshine dappling the ancient stone walls, sending sunbeams dancing across the lawn, I closed my eyes, and
those faces from the past drifted before me. And in the light breeze which lifted my hair and caressed my cheeks I seemed to hear their distant voices whispering:

We will remember them . . .

Roll of Honour of F Section Agents who died in the struggle for the liberation of France

Agazarian
, Hon. Flight Lieutenant J. C. S., Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Landed July 1943, on his second mission, as a member of the two-man Gamekeeper
team. Captured within a few days. Killed in captivity at Flossenbürg, 29 March 1945.
Mentioned in Despatches; Croix de Guerre avec Palme.

Alexandre
, Lieutenant R. E. J., General List. Dropped February 1944 with Byerly, Deniset and Ledoux (q.v.) to establish and lead the Surveyor
réseau
. Captured on landing. Believed killed in captivity at Gross Rosen, August–September 1944.

Allard
, Lieutenant E. A. L., General List. Dropped April 1944 with Leccia and Geelen (q.v.) as a member of the Labourer
réseau
. Captured within
a few days. Killed in captivity at Buchenwald, 14 September 1944.