The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish Read online

  I remember saying to Henri that afternoon: ‘Do you think today’s young people would do what we did?’

  ‘Of course they would,’ he laughed. ‘You only have to see them at football matches. They love a fight.’ I’m not sure those agents volunteered because they ‘loved a fight’. But it’s a theory. I like to think it was because we all had a stronger sense of patriotism than do the youth of today, an allegiance to king and country, and were prepared to take the risk because of our ideals and the values we believed in. Or was it just naivety? Perhaps today’s youth see things more clearly than we did and are not blinded by the standards we lived by. Only the future will tell.

  Two or three years ago the History Channel made a film for the BBC called Churchill’s Secret Army, in which Marcel Jaurent-Singer, Bob Maloubier, Henri and I were featured. Towards the end, Bob, Henri and I were filmed sitting chatting at a table outside a café in my village near Paris. Henri had cancer, but was then in remission. On screen he seemed very well, but two months before the film was shown he died, and the production company dedicated it to his memory.

  His death was very sudden and came as a shock. He had seemed fine just two weeks before. When I heard he was in hospital I went to see him, but he was already in a coma. I remember sitting by his bed, holding his hand and talking to him about the old days, clinging to the hope that he could hear me, telling him how much his friendship had meant to me and how much we all loved him – he was a very loveable person. That was a Wednesday afternoon. Early on the Friday morning his son rang to say that his father had died.

  The funeral was held a few days later at four in the afternoon. I was due to speak at a big meeting in the mairie that evening, so Jacques didn’t want to me to attend. ‘Françoise [Henri’s widow] will understand,’ he said. ‘You’ll barely have time to get home and change before we have to leave. You can’t do it; you’ll be too upset.’ But I knew I had to go. And I wanted to go. So my husband took me. ‘You must have been one of the last people to see him alive,’ Françoise said when we got to the crematorium. I had never met their son, who lives in New York, but when he got up to speak, I had a shock. He was an older version of the Henri I had known as the twenty-year-old who had parachuted ‘blind’ into France all those years before: the same mannerisms, the same build, the same thick black curly hair. When the service ended, Bob, who had been sitting on the other side of the crematorium from me, got up and left. He didn’t wait outside to greet me as he normally would. I understood. We were both too upset.

  That evening I gave my talk. I had given the same talk, albeit in English, a few years before. The mairie had been packed; the entire British colony seemed to have turned out. On that occasion, Henri and Françoise had been there, too. When I began to tell the audience about what the radio operators did, I had suddenly said, ‘But we’ve got a live one here, sitting in the front row. Get up, Henri, and let us applaud you. You’re one of our unsung heroes.’ Reluctantly, Henri had risen to his feet and faced the room. The applause was thunderous.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he chided me afterwards. Like all heroes, he was a truly modest man.

  Now, giving the talk in French, at the end I found myself recalling that moment and told the assembled gathering that I had attended Henri’s funeral that afternoon. I don’t think I showed any outward emotion, but what I said must have touched the audience. I got a standing ovation.

  Chapter 20

  A couple of years ago, there was an amusing incident connected with SOE, which supports the theory that one cannot judge from appearances! I received a telephone call from Help for Heroes, a charity I greatly admire, asking me if I would be willing to go to a small airfield near Dreux, in Normandy, where Tania Szabo, Violette’s daughter, would be landing in a Second World War plane, the same kind of plane from which her mother twice parachuted into France – the second time never to return. The occasion was the annual Help for Heroes sponsored bicycle race from London to Paris. Three hundred cyclists – some of them soldiers still on active service, there were three generals among them, but most of them disabled ex-service men – would be arriving en masse at this airfield, their last leg before entering Paris, the following afternoon, and cycling up the Champs-Elysées to rekindle the flame at the tomb of the Unknown Warrior.

  I readily agreed. I knew Tania and liked her: it would be fun to see her again. At over sixty she is still a very beautiful woman, but not as beautiful as her mother had been. All the men had been in love with Violette. Tania’s beauty is different: she is very vivacious, bubbly, like a bowl of soap suds.

  ‘It’s an early start,’ I was warned. ‘The plane is due to arrive at nine-thirty, so we’ll send a car for you the night before and put you up at our hotel. We’re also inviting Bob Maloubier,’ she ended.

  But, when she telephoned Bob, he cancelled the arrangements. ‘I’ll bring Noreen down,’ he announced magnanimously.

  On hearing this, my heart sank. At eighty-seven Bob was still flying his own plane, and I had a horrible feeling that that was how he intended to transport me. The thought of hurtling through the clouds in the early morning sitting behind him in an open cockpit made me shudder. I was all set to refuse his offer when he announced that we would be driving down to Normandy. That idea was only slightly less terrifying. Bob drives a long, low, open sports car resembling a guided missile, the sort of vehicle James Bond leaps in and out of.

  ‘I’m not going in that bomb of yours,’ I said firmly. So he agreed to borrow his wife’s more conventional vehicle.

  The outing started badly. The day scheduled was Thursday, but at seven o’clock on the Wednesday morning our sleep was shattered by telephones and the doorbell all ringing at once.

  ‘I’m outside your front door,’ Bob announced. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘But Bob,’ I yawned, shaking myself awake, ‘we’re expected tomorrow.’

  He insisted I had made a mistake.

  ‘Go down and give Bob a cup of coffee while I throw on some clothes,’ I spluttered, shaking my comatosed husband awake.

  My ‘toilette’ took all often minutes.

  ‘Bob, are you sure it’s today?’ I queried, when I joined the two of them, slurping coffee. ‘Have you got a contact number we can check before we rush off?’

  The sleepy cameraman who answered the phone was not too pleased to be dragged from his bed at seven-fifteen. He’d been filming until four o’clock that morning and had hardly got to sleep. He confirmed that our rendezvous was for the following day. So Bob slurped some more coffee and went home. Jacques climbed back into bed but, since I was dressed, I didn’t see any point in getting undressed only to start all over again, so I finished the coffee.

  We drew up at the airfield the following morning and were greeted by the officials already on the tarmac waiting for the plane. When it was announced, I had imagined that Bob and I would, like everyone else, greet Tania when she alighted. Bob had dandled her on his knee when she was a toddler. But no such luck.

  ‘Get in, Noreen,’ the organizer said briskly, urging me forward, when the plane ground to a halt and the door was flung open.

  I gasped. ‘I’m not going up in that thing,’ I protested. ‘It’s come out of the ark!’ But I was already being propelled up the steps and into the cabin, where Tania was sitting together with a couple of FANY ‘Queen Bees’ and an Army officer. I sat down gingerly beside her, and we waited. After a while the telephone inside the cabin rang. ‘Right,’ the pilot announced, replacing the receiver, ‘we’re going up.’

  Tania and I had been laughing and chatting, reminiscing together, but at his words my happy mood evaporated and panic took over. ‘Lord,’ I prayed, squeezing my eyes tightly shut when the engine whirred and I felt a jolt as the plane lifted off the ground, ‘I’m coming!’ When I dared to open them again we were circling round in a bright blue sky.

  ‘There they are,’ the pilot announced. ‘Look out of the window. You can see them.’

  Below
us were 300 specks, the cyclists, standing below on the tarmac, waving at us. I felt a stab of disappointment. I wasn’t in heaven after all.

  We landed, and the door was opened. I was handed a poppy wreath and helped down the steps, where a piper in full dress uniform, bearskin and all, was waiting. Bob, standing in solitary state on the tarmac, came forward and embraced me warmly. It seemed rather silly, since I’d been with him for the past three hours. Tania, also carrying a wreath, and the officials followed, and a bugler appeared from nowhere. The piper put his best foot forward and began to pipe. Tania and I and the officials marched behind him in crocodile formation, with the bugler bringing up the rear, no one knowing where they were going or what they were supposed to do once they got there. So we blindly followed the bagpipes till they gave a last gasp in front of a barrier, where we were marshalled into line.

  ‘Go forward and place the wreaths,’ a voice from behind us urged, so Tania and I went forward and put them on the ground in front of the barrier, since there didn’t appear to be anywhere else. The bugler sounded the ‘Last Post’, the piper puffed out his cheeks, went puce in the face and attacked his bagpipes, which spluttered into a mournful wail, and we all marched to where the cheering, waving cyclists were waiting to receive us. They escorted us, en masse, into a large hangar, where a splendid buffet was laid out. I didn’t eat much because all these lovely young men, so many of them handicapped victims of recent wars, wanted to talk to us. It was a very humbling experience.

  The next day the local paper carried a large front-page photo of Bob hugging me when I landed, with the caption: ‘A touching reunion between two former agents.’

  A lesson in subversion, showing not only how easy it is to deceive, but also how wrong it is to judge from appearances . . . and how foolish to believe all one reads in the newspapers!

  Chapter 21

  Every year on 6 May we meet at Valençay, in the Indre-et-Loire. It was on this day in 1941 that Georges Bégué, the first F Section agent to be dropped into occupied France, landed in the area. He dropped ‘blind’ near Valençay, and from this small beginning the whole infiltration system into occupied France of over 400 F Section agents, including thirty women, began.

  We, the survivors of F Section, together with the families and friends of agents, gather to commemorate the memory of those whose names are inscribed on the memorial which stands on the outskirts of this small town in the Loire Valley. The simple memorial is dedicated to the 104 F Section agents who were executed in Nazi concentration camps, among whom were fifteen women. We welcome others with no connection to F Section or even to SOE, but who feel drawn to honour and pay tribute to those who so willingly sacrificed their lives.

  At the ‘Brits’ dinner’ on the evening before the ceremony, between twenty and thirty of us meet in an ancient auberge in Valençay. It’s a wonderfully picturesque place, with low, raftered ceilings and creaky, twisting staircases. The plumbing in the bathrooms is antiquated, but somehow it adds to the charm of our two nights’ stay. If the weather is fine, and it usually is, we meet beforehand for drinks in the courtyard and sit reminiscing under a canopy of wisteria before going in to a splendid, more than copious, regional meal.

  At this dinner in May 2011, I witnessed a very touching reunion between a pilot and a wounded agent he had picked up from a field near Angers in western France. Ninety-two-year-old Leonard Ratliff, a former ‘Moonlight Squadron pilot who made more than forty landings in occupied territory during the war, met again Bob Maloubier, then eighty-eight, the badly wounded agent he had picked up in February 1945. Bob had been shot in a lung, his liver and his intestines in a gun fight while escaping from the Germans but had managed to swim across a stream and throw off the dogs pursing him, since they lost the scent. On arriving on the other bank, weak and losing blood rapidly, he had collapsed in a wood. In February in Brittany the water in the stream was extremely cold, but it was the freezing temperature that saved his life. The shock of hitting the icy water stopped the haemorrhage. Picked up by Leonard, Bob was repatriated to England.

  These two men finally met again, sixty-seven years later, at our dinner party. It was a very moving moment when Bob walked into the room. Leonard rushed to greet him, and the two fell into each other’s arms in a great bear hug. ‘The last time I saw you,’ Bob quipped, ‘was when you cruised to a rapid standstill. Your head shot out of the cockpit and you yelled, “Get him on board quick before the Germans arrive.” If I had to do it again,’ Bob ended quietly, ‘I would trust my life with you even now.’ At that moment, there was hardly a dry eye in the room.

  These poignant moments, full of memories, are not easy to erase. That is the story of a Lysander rescue which succeeded. But sadly it was not always the case.

  The sixth of May 2011 was the seventieth anniversary of that memorable night in 1941 when Georges Bégué was dropped near Valençay, and also the twentieth anniversary of that rainy day in 1991 when Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, unveiled the F Section memorial there. As it was a very special occasion, HRH Princess Anne graced us with her presence. On the death of her grandmother, the late Queen Mother, the princess succeeded her as patron of the Special Forces Club, and also patron of Libre Résistance.

  To honour the occasion on that beautiful spring morning in 2011 there were many prominent people present. Sir Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador to France, Sir Colin McColl, president of the Special Forces Club, the préfet (rather like an English lord lieutenant) of the Indre-et-Loire, the mayor of Valençay, the defence attaché from the British embassy in Paris, various other embassy attachés, local dignitaries and a military band. A splendid array of standard-bearers, including two British representatives carrying the Union and Legion flags, marched into position in front of the monument. After the ceremony, they were all warmly greeted by the princess. But she seemed especially pleased to talk to a group of schoolchildren, some English among them, all waving miniature Union Jacks.

  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 wer
e 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.

  They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old.

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

  We will remember them.

  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.