The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (13 page)

There were also bona fide agents who played the double game in order to obtain important and useful information, which they then passed on to London. But, in doing so, they
were taking an enormous risk.

I heard of one F Section agent, though I never met him, who almost lost his life pretending to be a double agent. He was the organizer of a resistance group who, in order to glean information
which he then passed on to London, was ‘friendly’ with the German soldiers stationed in the area. He naturally kept his double game a secret even from the members of his
réseau.
It would have been too dangerous if the Germans had discovered his deceit. But the members of his
réseau
became suspicious and began to doubt his loyalties
when they saw him being ‘hail fellow well met’ with the enemy. And especially when they saw him spending evenings in bars with these soldiers, laughing and joking and encouraging them
to have another drink. When their tongues were loosened by too many glasses of red wine, the agent often obtained vital information which he then transmitted to London. Oblivious to their
organizer’s ingenuity, the members of his own
réseau
wanted to execute him for treason, convinced he was a traitor. But he persuaded them to wait twenty-four hours and send a
message personnel
to London, requesting urgently that it be broadcast the following evening. ‘If you hear this message on the BBC’s French Service programme tomorrow evening,
you’ll know I am genuine,’ he told them. ‘But if you don’t, then go ahead and do what you have to do.’ They agreed to keep him under close arrest for twenty-four
hours. The following evening the message came over loud and clear, convincing the members of his group of his innocence. He was untied, handshakes were exchanged all round, and that evening the red
wine flowed freely.

Another F Section agent who risked his life playing the double game stands out in my mind, probably because he was the ‘coolest’ man I ever met. Stocky, strong, nearer forty than
thirty, Benny Cowburn was a dour, tough, down-to-earth Yorkshire-man with an accent you could cut with a knife, even though he had been brought up and had spent most of his life in France.

A member of F Section, he was parachuted into France four times and would probably have gone for a fifth try had the German surrender not put an end to his activities. On one of his missions
Benny was dropped as organizer of the Tinker circuit in the Aube. Here, like his F Section colleague, he also played a very dangerous game, pretending to be friendly with the local Germans,
greeting them on the streets and spending evenings drinking with them in cafes. But he also was taking an enormous risk. On the surface it looked as if he was working for the enemy, and the members
of his
réseau
could easily have believed that he was a German plant, in other words a traitor, and summarily executed him. They never did. So I imagine he must have inspired absolute
confidence.

Ben trusted nobody, not even the members of his
réseau.
He did everything himself because, as he put it, his résistants ‘blabbed in cafés’. One accepted
such a remark from Ben simply because he loved France, had chosen to live in France and in some ways was more French than English. Whether his accusation was true or not, I don’t know. But he
wasn’t taking any risks. So he made his own ammunition from the raw material parachuted in, working alone in a little hut in the mountains. At about three o’clock one morning, when he
was busy at his work bench, there was a knock on the door of the hut, and a voice shouted: ‘Open up! German patrol.’ Quickly shovelling what he could out of sight, he went to open the
door. To his immense relief it was his ‘friends’, a local group of German soldiers. ‘Whatever are you doing here in the middle of the night?’ they asked, open-mouthed.

‘I’m making bombs,’ Ben replied. ‘I’m going to blow up yon railway line to stop you chaps advancing.’ The soldiers looked at him aghast, then burst out
laughing, saying the French equivalent of ‘You are a one!’ One of them actually winked and nudged him joking: ‘Real British humour, eh!’ never realizing that he had in fact
spoken the truth in jest, since they all believed he was a local-born Frenchman.

‘Got any beer?’ asked their leader.

‘Sure chaps,’ Ben replied. ‘Come on in and help yourselves.’ He backed away and sat at his bench with his arms spread out in an attempt to hide his material. They helped
themselves to beer, but he declined. ‘No, you go ahead. I never drink when I’m working. Need to keep a clear head otherwise I might blow myself up. Dynamite’s tricky stuff to
handle.’ They apparently roared with laughter again and thought he was even more amusing.

After chatting for a while they rose, saying: ‘Better go, we’re on patrol. We’ll leave you to carry on making your bombs.’ And, laughing heartily, delighted with their
own sense of humour, they gave him a friendly slap on the back and left. Like the woman courier at the level crossing, he’d taken the risk and got away with it.

I met Benny again after the war, quite by chance, when we were invited to dinner by a delightful elderly couple, Marthe and Henri Brun, friends of my husband. To my surprise Benny was there. It
really is a small world. We learned that Henri Brun had sheltered many escaping Allied airmen during the war and that he had saved Benny’s life by hiding him behind the shutters on the
balcony of their third-floor flat in the rue de la Pompe and helping him to escape across the roof when the Gestapo came looking for him. And I realized that evening that there must be dozens of
other people, unsung heroes and heroines in France, who had done the same thing: served their country and the Allied cause in the same way and, when the war was over, disappeared unrecognized into
the shadows.

Benny came alone that evening, but shortly afterwards Jacques and I had dinner with him and his delightful French wife. I was surprised when I met her. They seemed at first sight to be a very
ill-matched couple. I had expected to meet a sturdy, jolly-hockey-sticks, no-nonsense woman, but she was exactly the opposite. She was in fact what everyone imagines a typical
parisienne
to be: tiny, elegant, vivacious. When they stood side by side his burly frame seemed to completely blot out her delicate body. After dinner, which was excellent – she was a very good cook
– she chatted animatedly with Gallic flutterings of her hands while he sat smiling, contentedly puffing at his pipe, his eyes resting affectionately on her, happy to let her take centre
stage. Occasionally their eyes met, and a smile would flit between them. It was obvious that they adored each other and, contrary to appearances, were a very happy couple. Once again I was taken by
surprise, as I had often been during the debriefings at Orchard Court all those years before, when I thought I had understood once and for all that one cannot judge from appearances.

Pearl Witherington stands out in my memory because her story is a very romantic one. Were it to be made into a film, or written as a novel, people would say it was too far-fetched to be true.
And yet it was true. Although British, Pearl had been brought up in France and in 1939 was engaged to a Frenchman, Henri Cornioley. At the outbreak of war Henri was drafted into the French Army and
taken prisoner at Dunkirk. When France fell, now being enemy aliens, Pearl and her family fled across Spain and into Portugal, finally arriving in England, where, angry at France’s defeat and
having no news of her fiancé, she joined the WAAF. But she was anxious to return to France to ‘get her revenge’ on the Germans who had taken her fiancé prisoner and were now
occupying what she considered to be ‘her country’, since she had never before actually lived in England. It was only a place she visited during the holidays.

Pearl was an ideal recruit for F Section and was soon spotted and sent for training. But although she spoke French like a native, she looked unmistakably English, which presented a problem.
However, she solved it by piling her plaits on top of her head in the hope that she would be mistaken for a German. Thus disguised, she was parachuted into the Indre-et-Loire to join Maurice
Southgate’s Stationer
réseau,
not knowing that Henri, her fiancé, had escaped from his prisoner-of-war camp and joined the Resistance. After her arrival back in France,
she found him again. He was a member of the
réseau
which had received her! They both returned to England after the liberation of Paris in August 1944 and were married quietly in
London the following October. As the French would say, ‘incroyable . . . mais vrai!’ (‘unbelievable . . . but true!’). Pearl and I became good friends and remained so right
up until her death only a few years ago. On her return from the field I asked her whether she had been afraid when, waiting to jump, she had sat on the edge of the open trapdoor in the floor of the
plane, her legs dangling in midair, while the plane circled over its target.

‘Afraid?’ she expostulated. ‘The only sensation I felt was a terrible urge to pee. As soon as I landed I did my “rouly-bouly”, tore off my parachute and leapt over
a hedge. A few seconds later, I saw pinpoints of light from a torch seeping through the hedge and heard a man’s voice whisper hoarsely: “Where the devil has she gone? I saw her come
down. There’s her parachute. But where is she?” I couldn’t immediately reply,’ Pearl giggled. ‘Because if he’d looked over the hedge, all he’d have seen
was my bare bum!’

Pearl was parachuted into France to act as a courier, and her cover story was that she was a travelling saleswoman for cosmetics, the job her fiancé had done before the war. I found this
cover very odd, because Pearl was what one might call a ‘no-nonsense’ woman. I don’t think I ever saw her wearing even a trace of make-up. But she was also an amazing woman. When
Maurice Southgate, her organizer, was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, she and Amédée Mainguard, a Mauritian F Section agent, promptly divided their large Stationer
réseau
area into two. Pearl took over the northern side of the Indre, which became known as Wrestler – a very appropriate name – and Dédé, as he was
called, turned the south side into the Shipwright circuit. The Germans had put a million francs price on Pearl’s head, but no one denounced her.

After D-Day, together with Henri, her fiancé, Pearl headed an army of 3,000 résistants and held up the German advance, taking 1,800 prisoners. When the war ended she was awarded
the MBE, but in a civilian capacity. She sent it back, saying she had never done anything civil in her life. She later accepted it . . . when the category was changed to ‘military’.

In 2008 I went to Pearl’s funeral, together with the three remaining F Section male agents in France, one of whom had trained and been dropped with Pearl. It was held in the small French
town where, during the war, she had operated and to which she and her husband had retired. There were about 300 people present on that cold February day, standing in the wind and the intermittent
rain. It was held at the entrance to the chateau, since demolished, which had been Pearl’s headquarters and where a monument had been raised to the memory of those who fought there. Her
husband’s ashes had been buried under the monument a few years before, and that afternoon Pearl’s urn was placed beside his. It was an amazing ceremony. Forty-eight standard-bearers and
two surviving members of her Resistance group were present, as well as many local dignitaries, a high-ranking French officer and the military attaché from the British embassy. Pearl was
ninety-three when she died, and her two remaining comrades-in-arms can’t have been much younger, but they insisted on standing to attention throughout the whole ceremony. ‘Pauline [her
codename] is a legend around here,’ one said afterwards, wiping his eyes.

Only a few years before she died, when she was well into her eighties, Pearl was finally awarded her wings. Yvonne Baseden, who is in her early nineties, was given her wings about ten years ago.
To mark the occasion, a splendid champagne lunch was organized in her honour at the Maison des Orphelins, where she and other members of her
réseau
had been arrested, to which
former locally recruited members of the
réseau
were invited. Yvonne had not seen most of them for almost sixty years. But they came – a group of old men in their best suits,
which many of them hadn’t worn since their weddings forty or more years earlier – and clustered around to congratulate her. With the celebratory champagne before lunch they presented
her with her parachute, and with the armagnac after lunch, her pistol. She had refused to carry it at the time – it had been buried – since, if she had been caught, it would have been
too much of a giveaway. Yvonne remained very calm and composed, although it must have been a very moving moment for her, and naturally her organizer, Gonzague de Saint-Geniès, who did not
survive, was remembered with affection in their conversations. Her thoughts must have gone out to ‘Lucien’, with whom she had worked so closely, whose memory seems still to be very
vivid, and his death so painful for her to recall. She was obviously very fond of him and even after sixty years could hardly bear to talk about him. Was there some romantic attachment there? I
don’t know. Yvonne is a very private person: it would not be kind to pry.

The reason given as to why, unlike the men, these women agents had not received their wings years before was that a parachutist had to have made six jumps before being awarded wings: and, before
they jumped into enemy-occupied territory, women agents in training did only five. The men did six! Also that they had to have made night jumps, which apparently the women never did – except
the night they jumped into enemy territory. But that doesn’t seem to have counted! How many former women agents died without ever having received this recognition?

Another of my friends, Lise de Baissac, received her wings just before her ninety-ninth birthday. She died shortly afterwards. But many women agents died without ever having received this
recognition of their bravery. Lise came from Mauritius, a compatriot of Dédé. She was dropped ‘blind’ near Poitiers under cover of being a widow living quietly. On landing
she had to find accommodation for herself and then link up with Mary Lindell’s Marie-Claire escape route, based in Ruffec. There were many of these escape lines all over France, known at HQ
as Section D/F, which were often run by F Section women agents. The main one, the Pat line, stretched from the Belgian border to the Pyrenees, and was operated by a Belgian national, Henri Guise,
codename Pat O’Leary: hence the ‘Pat’ line. These lines transferred airmen who had been shot down and had managed to avoid being arrested by the Germans and escaping prisoners of
war from safe house to safe house, until they were able to cross the Spanish frontier.