The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (14 page)

From Ruffec, Mary Lindell organized the Marie-Claire line, linking up with Lise de Baissac’s safe house near Poitiers at the edge of the occupied zone. When a transfer was to be made, Mary
would send a message to Lise, announcing the arrival of one, two or three parcels’ around a certain date, according to the number of escapees she was to expect.

Mary was an incredible character: an aristocratic English woman with an almost grown-up family, married to a French count. She was very much the countess’, especially when dealing with
obstreperous Germans, whom she treated with haughty disdain. She lived up to her theory that if you share confidences in a bar or bistro in a very loud voice, nobody takes a blind bit of notice;
but lean confidentially towards another person and whisper and there is a sudden silence, with every ear tuned in to hear what is being said. Putting this theory into practice, Mary totally
disregarded the fact that she was an enemy alien’ likely to be arrested and interned if discovered, and even worse if her activities as an SOE agent were revealed, and treated the occupying
forces with contempt. When travelling on public transport she frequently spoke English, calling from one end of a crowded bus to her passengers – often ‘downed’ airmen cowering at
the other end hoping to escape notice – that this was their ‘stop’. She appeared to be indifferent to the possibility that she could be arrested and taken into custody.

Mary took enormous risks and finally paid the price for her complete disregard for security. Although the Gestapo were not actively searching for her at the time, her luck ran out when with her
son Maurice, who helped her in her mission, she was about to cross the frontier into Spain. At Pau station the border police must have been suspicious, because she was arrested, through a simple,
careless oversight. She had neglected to renew her visa, which was a few days out of date. There is no record of Maurice’s arrest, so perhaps she managed in her high-handed manner to convince
the police that he was in no way connected with her.

On her way to Paris for interrogation Mary attempted to escape, jumping from a moving train as it approached a bend. But as she fell to the ground her guard shot her three times in the head and
picked her up for dead. How she didn’t die from her wounds is a mystery, but she survived and was imprisoned in Dijon. It was there that she met a fellow SOE agent, the radio operator Yvonne
Baseden, who, from a nearby cell in the prison, was astonished to hear Mary singing loudly in English. The two women finally shared a cell before they were both transferred to Ravensbrück,
where Mary, her spirit still undaunted after her imprisonment and the torture she had endured, continuing in her usual high-handed manner, declared that she was a Red Cross nurse and took over the
running of the infirmary, bullying the Germans into giving her the medicines and supplies she needed. Her captors named her ‘the Arrogant English Lady’. It’s incredible that she
managed to get away with such behaviour. I imagine that with Mary it was a question of ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. She was certainly an example of, I believe it was
Yeo-Thomas’s theory, ‘age is a most unreliable means of assessing capabilities’, since she must have been over forty at the time.

Mary was a formidable woman! I did not meet her until after the war, here in Paris, where she returned to live once peace was declared. By that time she had mellowed into a gentle, dignified
‘old lady’, but was still very much the ‘countess’. Looking at her sitting peacefully in an armchair, drinking tea, it was almost impossible to believe or even imagine the
amazing feats she had performed during those traumatic years.

In September 1944 Mary’s young compatriot and former cellmate Yvonne Baseden was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she remained until 1945. She became very ill, suffering
from torture, malnutrition and advanced tuberculosis. The camp doctor said that there was no hope of her recovering: she was dying. However, in her position in the infirmary Mary saved
Yvonne’s life by engineering a place for her on one of the last convoys of Swedish Red Cross buses to leave the camp. These humanitarian convoys to a neutral country had been negotiated by
Count Bernadotte, the head of the Swedish Red Cross. When she arrived in Stockholm Yvonne spent some time in a sanatorium before being repatriated to England, where she was nursed at the military
hospital in Midhurst for another year until she finally regained her health. She later married and had a son.

Upon her return to England, I asked Lise de Baissac, Mary Lindell’s co-worker, what it was like to parachute alone to no reception committee, and whether she had been afraid. She had,
after all, been obliged to make her own way and find accommodation in a strange town in an occupied country with the Gestapo or the Milice on every street corner; enough to make anyone afraid. Lise
was a very quiet, reserved, undemonstrative person. ‘Afraid?’ she queried. ‘No. If anything, it was boring. Living quietly, being unable to make friends with anybody, was awfully
lonely.’

Lise later went back to France, parachuted this time on a more ‘active’ mission: to organize a
réseau
of her own in Normandy. But on arrival she decided, with
Buck’s permission, that she would rather work as a courier for her brother Claude, then organizer of the Scientist
réseau
in Brittany. Buck must have had tremendous confidence
in Lise’s competence and cool-headedness when he gave her permission, once in the field, to transfer to her brother’s
réseau.
As far as I know, it was the only time that
such a partnership was allowed. The risk was too great since, under interrogation, an agent might ‘crack’ if confronted with a close member of his family being tortured. It was one of
the Gestapo’s charming ploys with hostages or others they suspected of working for the enemy. This partnership was also most unusual since not only relatives, but even people who had been
friends, or had known each other before the war, were never allowed to work together. Pearl had been at school in Paris with her organizer, Maurice Southgate, but, knowing only his code-name before
her departure, she discovered only on landing in France that her organizer was her former school friend.

Not long before she left for the field, one of F Section’s most efficient and prolific radio operators, Yvonne Cormeau, was shown a photograph of ‘Hilaire’, the organizer of
the Wheelwright
réseau
in south-west France, which she was to join, and realized that she knew him. George Starr (‘Hilaire’) and her late husband had been members of the
same cricket team when both families were living in Brussels before the war. But Yvonne never mentioned their earlier friendship to anyone, in case it would prevent her from leaving.

I have since wondered about the effect that their mother suddenly disappearing for what could be a year, without any news or any knowledge of her whereabouts being passed on, must have had on
the young children these women agents often left behind. Odette Sansom left three little girls, the youngest only three years old, in a convent when she was parachuted as a courier to Peter
Churchill’s
réseau.
Their father was in the British Army, nothing to do with SOE. He and Odette were not divorced but they were certainly estranged. However, they did get
divorced after the war, and Odette married her wartime lover and organizer, Peter Churchill. But that marriage also ended in divorce, and she later married Geoffrey Hallowes, another former agent,
who was several years younger than her.

I recently met her middle daughter, Marianne, and asked her how she felt about being left in a convent.

‘That convent was dreadful,’ she answered, casting her eyes dramatically towards the ceiling as her mother would have done. ‘But what were your feelings towards your
mother?’ I probed. ‘Did you feel bitter and resentful at being abandoned?’ She paused and bit her lip, frowning.

‘I was only six at the time and the little girl in me cried: “Mummy, Mummy, how could you do it? How could you leave us?”’ Then she smiled. ‘But the adult in me
says: “I’m so proud of my mother and what she did.” And,’ she added, ‘she gave us two wonderful stepfathers.’

Violette Szabo left Tania, aged two, with her parents. Violette’s husband, a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion, had been killed in North Africa, so when her mother was executed at
Ravensbrück, Tania was left an orphan. Yvonne Cormeau also left her six-year-old daughter in a convent. Her husband had been killed in Chelsea during the Blitz, so had she not returned I
don’t know what would have happened to the little girl. Yvonne’s family would most probably have been in France and strangers to the child. Did she have English grandparents or family
to turn to? Did any of them? What happened to these children during the school holidays, at half-term or on visiting days? Were they left isolated? I don’t know the answer to that either.

Yvonne Rudellat, who also perished in a concentration camp, was the oldest F Section woman agent. She was forty-five and a grandmother when she was infiltrated into France by felucca, with two
male agents, Henri Frager and Harry Despaigne, landing between Cannes and Juan-les-Pins, very close to the villa where the Duke of Windsor used to stay. Yvonne was divorced from her English
husband, and her daughter was a twenty-one-year-old mother at the time and in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service). But even at twenty-one, it is good to have family to turn to, a mother to give
a listening ear or to welcome one home on leave. A grandmother to coo over and babysit her child. In their circumstances I don’t think I could have volunteered to train as a secret agent and
be infiltrated behind the lines into enemy-occupied territory. I wonder what motivated them? I know that in Violette’s case anger at her husband’s death and desire for revenge on the
people whom she considered responsible were the driving force. But in the end I wonder whether she thought it had been worth it. As for the others, I have no idea.

There were several couples who met while in training and married. But they were never allowed to work together or to be sent to a
réseau
anywhere near where the other was
operating, resulting in some very heartrending goodbyes. Guy and Sonia d’Artois parted almost immediately after their honeymoon. Sonia was dropped into France first and Guy parachuted soon
afterwards, but to a different
réseau
in another part of the country. Their story had a happy ending. They were reunited at the end of the war, and Guy took his wife back home with
him, to Canada.

Yolande Beekman was in the same position. Sadly, her honeymoon was the only glimpse she had of married life. After saying goodbye to Jan when it ended, she was dropped into France as a radio
operator to work for ‘Guy’, Gustave Bieler, organizer of the Musician
réseau
near St-Quentin. ‘Guy’ was a Canadian who had left a wife and two young children
behind when he sailed for England to enlist in the British Army. He wasn’t obliged to enlist. The war was being waged in a country he hardly knew, many miles away across an enormous ocean.
What motivated him? Four months later both he and Yolande were arrested and brutally tortured: but neither spoke. In September 1944 ‘Guy’ was shot at Flossenbürg, and Yolande
(codename ‘Yvonne’) shot at Dachau. Other agents never had a chance, or the time, to get married before leaving.

Eliane Plewman was one of these. She was already married to a British Army officer not connected to SOE but, while in training, she met and fell desperately in love with a Corsican student, Eric
Cauchi. They became lovers and were inseparable. During the weeks while they were waiting to leave, their love became even more intense and passionate as they realized that time was running out and
they would soon be parted. For how long? Neither of them knew. After two abortive attempts to leap into the dark sky over occupied France, she to join the Monk
réseau
in Marseilles,
and he the Stockbroker
réseau
in the Jura, having faced heart-rending goodbyes on the airstrip, they found themselves sitting opposite each other at the breakfast table the
following morning: the flight had been cancelled at the last moment. But in August 1943, at the third attempt, they finally left. Once again, Eliane and Eric, the man who would have become her
husband had she not been executed at Dachau the following March, just one month after he had been shot and killed in a brawl in a bar in the Doubs, clung to each other, unable to say goodbye, while
two planes hummed on the airstrip waiting to take each one to France – but to different destinations.

There were nine women agents belonging to RF Section operating in France during the war. Out of the thirty F Section women agents infiltrated into France, fifteen never
returned, twelve having been brutally executed in various concentration camps, many in Ravensbrück. Four women agents were cremated alive at Natzweiler, also known as Struthof, camp, in
Alsace. They were given an injection of phenol, which they were told was an anti-tetanus jab. Being suspicious, they resisted, but to no avail. The injection paralysed them. They were then heaved,
helpless into the furnace. The last one to be incinerated was coming round from the injection when her executioner tilted the stretcher before tipping her into the flames. She sat up and, in an
attempt to save herself from such a terrible fate, viciously scratched his face. Sadly, her attempt was unsuccessful. She was burnt alive like her three companions before her. Their four scorched
and blackened corpses were removed from the incinerator the following morning.