The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish Read online

  One particularly hectic evening a secretary, who should have been hovering, was writing a letter to her current boyfriend. Thoughtfully sucking the end of her pen, she looked up and enquired of the tense sub-editor standing impatiently over the poor harassed translator: ‘Does passionately have one or two ns?’ I thought he was going to hit the roof.

  We worked in shifts round the clock. When we were on the ‘dawn shift’, preparing the early-morning bulletin or press review, we began at around three in the morning. Since in the 1940s few people had cars, we had to rely on public transport, which didn’t run all night. So we used to arrive at Bush House at some time during the evening, go to ‘Bed Bookings’, collect our sheets and pillowcase from a rather austere lady called ‘Phil’, who lived in a cubbyhole on the ground floor, off reception, and go to a communal unisex dormitory for a few hours’ sleep. We didn’t get much. People were coming and going all night and snoring in a variety of languages. Just as one was dropping off, a commissionaire would tiptoe in and shake the person in the next bed, it could be a man or a woman, and whisper: ‘Your call, sir/madam. It’s two o’clock,’ or three or four or whatever time they had asked to be roused. Groans and creaking of bed springs would follow as the person shook themselves awake and heaved themselves to the floor.

  On the other hand, when finishing a ‘shift’ at some impossible time of the night, if one lived in London, a BBC car would take one home. The chauffeur had orders to always wait until his passenger had actually entered his or her house or block of flats and closed the door before driving away. It was all very civilized.

  Being on the late shift, I walked into the News Room one afternoon to find Lise de Baissac busily typing. We looked at each other in surprise. Introductions were made, and we mentioned that we had already met, without going into further explanations. It was only later, when we escaped to the canteen, that we were able to take a trip together down memory lane.

  One day, Buck appeared in the corridor. He had been asked to do a series of talks and had come have his paper vetted before recording the first one. Once again we neither of us mentioned where we had previously met. When he came as usual to the office one evening I noticed him chatting amicably to a girl I vaguely knew. She was secretary to one of the ‘high-ups’ in the Section. Her name was Rée, but I hadn’t liked to ask her whether Harry Rée, one of F Section’s better-known former agents, belonged to her family. Harry was a great friend of Francis Cammaerts. I think they had been at university together, and both been schoolmasters before the war. It was Harry who had introduced Francis to SOE. So, after Buck ambled off to the recording studio, I tentatively approached her. She looked up and smiled when I entered her office. ‘Are you by any chance related to Harry Rée?’ I ventured. She gave me a curious glance.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m his niece. Why do you ask? Do you know him?’ The ice was broken, and I told her I had met her uncle during the war, but didn’t elaborate further. The secrecy rule still held fast! I glanced down at her left hand. She was wearing an engagement ring. ‘He’s Czech,’ she explained. ‘But there’s no news!’ I gathered that her fiancé was an agent, but one who would probably not come back. She obviously realized that I knew more than I had revealed about ‘the racket’.

  When the series of talks Buck had been commissioned to give ended, he held a Christmas party in one of the larger basement studios at Bush House. It must have been in December 1947. He invited former F Section agents to gather there and send greetings over the air to the Resistance workers they had recruited in the field in France. I think it was on that afternoon that I realized that human reactions can often work in reverse. Having heard so many courageous stories, usually modestly told, from returning agents during their Y9, and been amazed at their incredible bravery in the face of terrible danger, I came across the reverse reaction. I can only compare it to the elephant and the mouse syndrome.

  I was one of the last to arrive in the studio for the party and was met by Odette Churchill, who as Odette Sansom had been Peter Churchill’s courier in the Vosges area. ‘We are ’aving a terrrrible time with Peter!’ she whispered, her eyes rolling theatrically, and her delightful French accent more pronounced than ever. I raised my eyebrows in surprise. ‘’E is terrrrified,’ she announced dramatically.

  ‘What of?’ I enquired, puzzled. I couldn’t imagine Peter being terrified of anything. Odette looked at me as if I were a complete nincompoop, obviously thinking I should have immediately understood why he was afraid.

  ‘The microphone!’ she declared. ‘We’ve ’ad to give ’im two stiff whiskies. And . . . look at ’im.’ She pointed to where her husband was sitting in a far corner on the edge of a table, his knuckles white as he grasped its sides, literally shaking with fear.

  I’m afraid I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was unbelievable that this highly decorated man, who had become almost a legend, after having dropped twice by parachute into occupied France, been infiltrated there by submarine and then survived a concentration camp, was nerve-racked at the thought of having to speak into a microphone. As I once heard a wise old Yorkshire farmer say, ‘There’s nowt so funny as folk!’

  During the war, and in the immediate post-war era, Bush House, the home of the BBC World Service, was known as ‘the best club in London’. It was staffed by multinational, often eccentric people not unlike those I had worked with in Norgeby House. The best brains in Europe were gathered there. As in F Section, at every turn in the corridor one met interesting people racing around in what appeared to be a great hurry. Like the Crazy Gang, they were all very pleasant and easy to get on with, which made my transition from one French Section to another remarkably easy. A friendly, but rather vague, member of staff was the poet Louis MacNeice, a strikingly handsome man with a shock of prematurely white hair who worked at Central Desk, the News Room on the second floor. He always seemed to be darting in and out of it, looking wild, his magnificent mane bouncing in all directions. He was often followed by Joanna Scott-Moncrieff, looking tragic; but then she always looked tragic.

  Intellectuals, the ‘brains’ of all the occupied European countries, many fleeing from the Nazi terror, as well as émigré Russian aristocrats, ‘White Russians’ as they were called, had flocked to London, and many had found their way into the World Service. As in my time with SOE, I don’t think I realized how privileged I was to meet so many Hungarian counts, Russian princes, unusual, irresistible people. There was a splendid Russian prince, slightly older than I, whom all his Section declared, with much eye-rolling and clasping of hands, was the image of Peter the Great. If that was the case, then Peter the Great must have been a remarkably handsome man. Valerien was a bona fide prince, with an illustrious title, but hated to be addressed by it. He preferred to be known as ‘Jook’, or that’s what it sounded like, claiming it was the nickname his mother had given him when he was born, because she said he looked like a beetle! One of my friends always insisted on introducing him as Prince Obolensky, which annoyed him greatly, and even more so when she asked for a message using his full title to be broadcast loud and clear over the tannoy in the canteen.

  My father had been in Russia during the Revolution, sent there as part of the naval brigade, so I already knew a great many White Russians who had fled the terror and settled in London. My friend Tamara had been brought up with Jook in the south of France before the war, their respective families having been friends during the imperialist days of old Russia. Having a White Russian mother and an English father, Tamara was completely trilingual and never appeared to be aware of which language she was speaking, jumping haphazardly between English, French and Russian according to her audience. But when she dived into Russian, she changed completely, adopting slurred vowels, speaking through her nose and gesticulating wildly. Her grandfather had been a general in the Czar’s Imperial Army. In 1940, after the Germans invaded France, she had fled with her family from Nice wearing shorts and a tennis shirt, her only luggage her grandfather’s sword
, which she had reverently carried to safety. It now graced almost an entire wall of their Kensington flat.

  Tamara and I were often invited to the same parties, and when that happened I usually stayed with the family overnight. I cannot imagine what our very English escorts must have thought when they arrived to collect us. The door was opened by Olga, an old retainer who had stayed with the family when they left Russia during the Revolution. Olga didn’t appear to speak any known language. Once admitted, they were then vetted by Grandfather Postovsky, who must have stood almost two metres in his socks. He was adorable, but could at first glance be a forbidding figure, with his clipped white beard and heavy gold watch and chain draped across his waistcoat. Invited to take a seat, our bewildered escorts would be offered a glass of sherry and a cup of steaming consommé. It was impossible to convince Olga that we were not about to cross the frozen steppes on a sledge pulled by huskies!

  The members of the Russian section, whose head was Carleton Greene, another man of impressive stature, brother of the well-known novelist Graham Greene, lived on the floor below us. They were all terribly Slav, pessimistic and melodramatic, given to bouts of hysteria. I invited myself into the cubicle when a well-known Russian pianist was to give a recital and arrived early at the same time as the studio manager, hoping to hear the pianist rehearsing before performing live on the air. Peering through the plate-glass window, to our horror we saw the lady flat on her back on the studio floor. Rushing in to administer first aid, not that I knew much about it and I’m not sure the SM did either, we discovered the pianist’s English husband sitting unperturbed, reading the evening paper. He seemed surprised at our panic. ‘Oh, don’t take any notice of her,’ he said dismissively, when the SM suggested calling the emergency service. ‘She always throws one of her tantrums before a concert.’ He poked her prostrate form with his foot, and she opened her eyes. ‘Pantomime over,’ he declared. She leapt to her feet, sat down on the piano stool and crashed into a series of resounding arpeggios, to the immense relief of the SM and the anxious programme producer, who had joined the first-aid team.

  Gyorgy Mikos was a member of the Hungarian Section. He had a very beautiful Hungarian actress wife, who occasionally was to be seen with him in the canteen. She must have specialized in tragedy, since she never smiled and always gave the impression that the end of the world was imminent. In the late 1940s, as George Mikes, Gyorgy, who looked like a surprised baby, with his round face and protruding eyes, won fame in the literary world when his highly entertaining book How to Be an Alien was published. The Hungarians, or ‘Hunks’ as they were known, were also very pessimistic, but marginally less dramatic than the Russians.

  The Poles lived on the floor above us. They were enormous fun and always seemed to be laughing, though at the time I don’t think they had a great deal to laugh about. They ‘adopted’ me, and when Marian Sigmund, the Polish Army officer with the magnificent bass-baritone voice, gave a recital, knowing my foible for him, they invited me into the studio to listen. He turned up in uniform, a splendidly handsome man who also must have been almost two metres tall.

  The German Section was across the corridor from the French. We shared the loos but, unlike the dormitory, they were not unisex. The men’s loos were on the German side, the ladies’ on the French. Whenever I went to the cinema to see a war film I had the impression that the entire German section was on the screen, strutting around in Nazi uniforms. Most of them had fled the Nazi terror, so it was perhaps their revenge, and must have been very satisfying for them, since in the immediate post-war period the war films that were made never portrayed the Nazis as anything but idiotic. Ferdy Mayne, who later featured in many very amusing Louis de Funès films – he was a perfect foil for the well-known French comedian – and Marius Goring, whom I idolized at the time, were frequently seen roaming the German Section corridors.

  I became friendly with Albrecht, one of the young Germans in the Section, who had been cleared of any Nazi affiliation. His grandfather, or perhaps his great-grandfather, I don’t remember which, had been the German ambassador (not von Ribbentrop!) to the Court of St James before the war. Albrecht taught me to ice-skate. We used to go to the Bayswater ice-rink every Thursday morning. I’m sure we should both have been working, but discipline in the Sections was very lax, one might say almost non-existent. I had been promoted to ‘Programmes’ by this time, and as long as the programme was ready and went out on time, no one seemed to bother over much how or when it had been prepared. On my first visit to the rink, I wobbled about on the edge, clinging desperately to the rail, until Albrecht sailed over, grasped both my hands in a figure of eight crossover movement and swung me out into the middle of the rink. I was terrified but soon became exhilarated as, through his expertise, we did fantastic movements, twisting and turning, practically looping the loop – until the day he decided I needed to ‘stand on my own two skates’. He waltzed me into the middle of the rink and left me stranded, tottering precariously and crying out for help, until he came to my rescue. I don’t know what he was trying to prove. Perhaps that Germany was the ‘master race’ after all!

  After we became friendly, he seemed to spend more time stalking the corridors of the French Section than the German and used to park himself against our open office door, completely blocking it, he was very tall, reading love poems out loud. Our friendship was entirely platonic, we were merely skating partners, so I was surprised when one afternoon my ‘boss’, a delightful Frenchman, said with a deep sigh, ‘Noreen, why don’t you marry the poor fellow and put him out of his misery?’ adding sotto voce, ‘And get him off my back.’

  I could only reply, ‘Because he’s never asked me, and I don’t think he has any intention of doing so. And even if he did, I’d say no. We are, as all the film stars say, “only good friends”’.

  The French Service was not without its celebrities. Our head was Tangye Lean, brother of the film director David Lean, who made many epic films. The well-known actress Peggy Ashcroft’s brother, Edward, was another member of the team. Jean Dutourd also belonged to the Section. Later, on his return to Paris, he became a well-known writer and broadcaster and ended as an académicien, a member of the prestigious Académie Française, the highest literary accolade in France. He had a high-pitched, rather squeaky voice which didn’t go with the pipe-smoking, tweedy masculinity he wished to portray. His secretary always insisted that the door of their office be kept wide open, saying she felt safer that way, since he was known to be a coureur de jupons, a ‘womanizer’. He used to prowl the corridors, puffing at his pipe and, according to rumours, seeking out his prey, though I never had personal experience of his amorous advances. The fact that he was married didn’t seem to bother him one iota, even though his wife used to sometimes appear and hang around in an attempt to catch her husband in the act.

  Michel Saint-Denis, who, as Jacques Duchesne, had been part of the wartime team – it wasn’t only SOE who used codenames! – later went on to become a very well-known and respected director at the Old Vic and at all the Shakespeare festivals.

  One of the sub-editors in the News Room was Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s younger son, whose book Son of Oscar Wilde had just been published. I don’t think Vyvyan, a gentle, courteous, quietly spoken man, ever got over the tragedy which had ruined his family when, as a young boy, his mother had fled with him and his brother to France after her husband had been condemned for homosexuality and imprisoned in the infamous Reading Gaol. Vyvyan had a very beautiful Australian wife, much younger than him. When he was on duty she often wheeled Merlin, their little son, in his pushchair into the Section to say ‘hallo’ to his dad.

  With a few exceptions, all the men working for the French Section, in fact in every section, appeared to drink a great deal.

  They were encouraged by the numerous correspondents of French newspapers who seemed to circulate endlessly in the corridors, urging them to come and have a pint with the boys. There was almost a groove in the street running a
cross the back of Aldwych from Bush House to Finch’s, the pub on the opposite pavement. If ever a newsreader didn’t appear on time, the cry was always: ‘Ring Finch’s, that’s where he’ll be.’ And he invariably was. I remember one newsreader staggering back from Finch’s at the last minute, totally oblivious of his surroundings. Once in front of the microphone, he spelt out every word, full stop, comma and question mark in the bulletin, until the horrified editor, who always sat beside the announcer, in case he said something seditious or blasphemous, pressed down the censor key and put an end to his antics.

  One memorable Sunday evening, in the same state of inebriation, he almost ruined a programme. It was pre-recorded on discs, large versions of the old 78s we used to listen to on wind-up gramophones. He wasn’t reading the news that evening, thank goodness. But as the programme assistant appeared in the corridor on her way to the studio with the discs in her arms, he snatched them from her, threw them onto the floor and jumped on them, shattering the lot. She screamed, burst into tears and was led away in hysterics.