White Mouse

by Nancy Wake

  He and his wife employed an excellent French bonne à tout faire but he insisted on writing all the instructions for cooking and serving the menu on a chart which he hung in the kitchen. He explained to his wife and the maid that he didn’t want anything to be served a minute too soon or a minute too late. They humoured him because he had been in captivity.

  Denden and I were among the guests invited. (At that stage we were unaware of the drama in the kitchen.) Everything was perfect. The food and the service could not be faulted. It was early in the morning when we returned from Hector’s place to Paris, travelling in six cars which were as full as the passengers. I remember I was wearing a beautiful gown from an exclusive Parisian couturière.

  Some bright spark suggested we play not cops and robbers but Gestapo and Maquis. Half the cars would be full of Maquisards and the other half Gestapo. When someone shouted ‘Gestapo’, the Maquisards threw themselves out of their cars, jumped into the culverts on the side of the road and started ‘shooting’ the Gestapo. After driving a few more kilometres, the roles would be reversed and it would be the turn of the Gestapo to ‘shoot’ the Maquisards. The performances continued until we reached the Porte Saint-Cloud and the bright lights of Paris.

  My dress was in shreds. My shoes and stockings were ruined. My legs, arms and face were covered in scratches. I looked as if someone had tipped a bucket of mud over my head then sprayed me with dead leaves. Denden’s appearance was no better than mine. In this disreputable state we collected our room keys with great dignity from the reception clerk at our hotel. The hotel had been requisitioned by the British Government and no remarks were passed by the staff as we wished them all a very good morning. But wow, it had been a dinner party to end all dinner parties.

  After our departure Hector turned to his wife and remarked on how perfectly the maid had carried out his written instructions, adding that it had been a wise decision to write them down on the chart. According to his wife there had been one significant problem. Their maid could not read French. Hector was speechless.

  Towards the end of 1948 I resigned from the Foreign Office and returned to Sydney. Looking back over the years I am convinced that instead of attempting to resettle in Sydney I should have enjoyed a holiday seeing my family and friends, then gone back to Europe where I felt more at ease. In 1949 Sydney was still a parochial city, especially in the suburbs, and I was too cosmopolitan for such an environment.

  Without a doubt the most stupid thing I ever did was to join the Liberal Party of New South Wales and become involved with politics. They used me in the same manner in which they used several men who had distinguished war records. I could accept the fact that the Opposition would attempt to blacken my reputation but I will never forgive some members of the Liberal Party for having gone out of their way to try and belittle me.

  When one looks at the trend Australia is taking in the eighties, it’s laughable to remember the trivial things I did which upset the Liberals. For instance, my legs were beautifully suntanned so I never wore stockings during the summer months. Nor did I wear a hat. One evening before dinner I was seen in a beer garden with the landlord and my Liberal Party organiser. The Carrs’ Park Branch of the Liberal Party stated they would not campaign for a female candidate who drank beer—and they didn’t!

  Horror of horrors. I crossed my legs when I was sitting on the platform of the Rockdale Town Hall at a women’s rally for the Liberal Party. I only crossed them because the stage platform was so elevated I was afraid the audience would see my panties. Some people complained that I spoke English with a French accent.

  I was contesting the Federal seat of Barton which was held by Dr Evatt for the Labor Party. I left my pamphlets in some of the wine saloons in the electorate. I did not accept any of the wines offered—I only wanted the customers’ votes. The president of the Barton Campaign Committee enquired as to how their candidate’s pamphlets had found their way into the wine saloons. When I pleaded ‘guilty’ I thought he was going to have a stroke, so I begged my brother to deliver my pamphlets. He had been in Changi and on the Burma Road and met a lot of his old POW mates during his rounds. Poor man! Very foolishly he drank wine with them all and was sick in bed for three days. The president of the Barton Campaign Committee had no sympathy or understanding. Brother Stan and sister Nancy were damned forever.

  In those days the sectarian issue was deplorable. Being a Protestant I thought it would be polite to visit the Roman Catholic priests first of all. Once more, I offended the Methodist laymen in the area. I couldn’t win a trick. In the end I just carried on with the campaign to the best of my ability and to hell with everything else.

  Fortunately I eventually found some kindred spirits in Barton. They were wonderful to me and saved my sanity.

  Of course there were a few amusing incidents. At an afternoon meeting in front of a huge audience, the president of the Barton Women’s Campaign introduced the senator who was the Minister for Social Services as ‘Mister’, adding that he was well-known in Canberra for his social activities. Her command of the English language could not keep up with her enthusiasm and she had already introduced me as the ‘great free lover’ of Barton.

  It was just as well that I did not win the campaign, although I reduced Evatt’s majority of 23,000 to 127 votes. I would never have become a yes-woman. That is the trouble with the majority of politicians; they make promises they never keep and once elected to parliament they are too scared to voice their beliefs and opinions.

  After the Federal elections in 1951, I left Australia and returned to England. My departure had nothing to do with my defeat. I could not find a job in accordance with my qualifications. As soon as I unpacked my trunks and settled into my little flat in London, I felt as if a great load had been lifted from my shoulders.

  The following year found me on the staff of the Air Ministry in Whitehall, in the department of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence). It was sheer bliss to be working with compatible people once more. No more stabbing in the back, no more sectarianism and no more pettiness and bickering. Five happy years lay ahead. I only resigned because I remarried.

  There were many aspects to my job at the Air Ministry. Not only were they interesting but on the whole I was working with men I could respect and admire. Our little unit was involved with the escape and evasion exercises which were being organised in remote areas of England and Wales in the 1950s. The Reserve Units ran several weekend exercises during the year but the main annual one was organised by our department in close co-operation with the Units.

  I was part of a team of four who lectured to the Reserve Units on evasion and escape, and also to specialist aircrews who at some time during their flying duties might need this information. I concentrated on the practical side, taking full advantage of my previous experience. We also flew to Bad Tolz in the Bavarian Alps to lecture the service personnel enrolled in the American School of Combat Survival.

  The Korean War Truce Agreement had been signed in August 1953. The following year I completed the interrogation reports of the United Nations’ POWs, who had been interviewed upon their release from captivity. Too many people have conveniently forgotten the gory details of that war. I have not.

  Whereas I had been horrified by the actions of the Nazis in the thirties and forties, now I was sickened by the evidence of a different example of barbaric cruelty. People who uphold and praise communism, and others who would have the world believe that Chinese communism is any more refined or civilised than its Russian counterpart, should go to their nearest public library and read and digest the sufferings of the POWs in the Korean War.

  I read the report of one brave young British soldier who, for several months, had been kept in an iron cage, out in the open irrespective of weather conditions. The cage was so small he had to crouch down all the time. Instead of going to the lavatory the Chinese and North Korean guards used to urinate all over him; and he was unable to go to the lavatory himself—or wash. He would not s
ign the ‘confession’ they had prepared. He never gave in. He sang ‘God Save the Queen’ at every opportunity.

  There were countless prisoners who suffered the degrading humiliation of having human excreta rubbed all over their faces. The treatment meted out by the guards was so savage and degenerate that my body turned numb and icy cold as I transcribed the reports from the tapes.

  From time to time prisoners did try to escape from the camps but most of the escapes were doomed from the word go. Not only were the men completely run down, they were starving and could seldom obtain extra food for the journey. If they did succeed in escaping, when they were caught the penalty was, at its very best, solitary confinement for several months without sufficient food or water, and in winter without any heat or warm clothing. On top of all this, it was impossible for these POWs to resemble a Chinese or North Korean. If the local population were caught attempting to help them they suffered in much the same way as did the prisoners.

  The conditions were absolutely appalling and although several men, and at least one woman, from various countries went on fact-finding missions to Korea, their investigations did not benefit the POWs. If the visitors were communists or fellow travellers they saw and believed what they wanted to. The non-communists only saw what the Chinese and North Koreans wanted them to see. The Russian onlookers were mentioned in most reports. They were always received with great respect and courtesy. Very few Red Cross parcels reached the POWs. According to the Chinese, the American Air Force was in the habit of bombing them in the same way they bombed the prisoners’ mail! The United Nations seemed powerless to bring any pressure on the captors and so alleviate the sufferings of the prisoners.

  I studied our interrogation report on Colonel Carne of the Gloucester Regiment, better known as the Glorious Gloucesters. It was in two parts and was a long and complicated one which took me weeks to decipher. The Chinese and North Koreans had done everything possible to break his spirit. They had humiliated him in a degrading manner. They were guilty of instigating a series of the most inhuman acts a so-called human could inflict on another. They were fiends. I will never know how he survived—nor how many of the other prisoners did, for that matter.

  Apart from the starvation diets, lack of medical treatment, plus the all-round putrid living conditions the POWs had to endure, they were forced to attend political study groups when they would be lectured on the ‘crimes’ they had committed and invited to sign their confessions. They would hear how the American people were starving to death, how the Soviet Union alone had defeated Germany and Japan, and various treatises on Marxism, or the translation of Russian propaganda. I could go on and on.

  I had never at any time believed that communism was the solution to a better way of life, having seen the behaviour of the Popular Front in France in the 1930s and, more recently, the events in Prague in the 1940s. Once I had completed these reports I knew that my original assessment of communism had been well-founded.

  I was nominated to write the manual of evasion and escape which was our next project. Following a suggestion by our counterpart in the United States, it was renamed the Manual of Combat Survival. It was to be a classified publication and would be of special interest to aircrews who might find themselves stranded in an unfriendly country.

  I had been issued with a permanent entrance pass to the War Office in Whitehall and spent some time in their photographic library and archives. One day, while searching for material for my manual, I came across a report on ‘Albert’ who had been in the O’Leary organisation. To my amazement this report, signed by O’Leary himself, stated that ‘Albert’ at great personal danger had procured an apartment in Marseille for the evaders. I could not believe my eyes. The danger had been to me, who had found the apartment, been interviewed by the estate agent and signed the lease, and then to my husband who had paid the first six months’ rent. I am fond of ‘Albert’, who did a magnificent job in France, but I was disgusted to see, in black and white, a deliberate untruth, to put it mildly, in an official document.

  From then on my clerk and I always kept an eye open for any papers concerning the O’Leary organisation. Consequently I was in a position to read a lot of official material that could embarrass the people concerned.

  The manual was duly completed. While it was being edited, I was granted what is known in the Royal Air Force as an ‘indulgence passage’. This meant that I was able to enjoy a free return flight to Australia on a service aircraft. I’d earned it. The Pentagon had had five people writing their manual, with a backup team of secretarial help. I worked with one clerk and the general typing pool. The outward journey was by Comet, a new aircraft in those days. I travelled back on a Hastings which stopped in several isolated places and I had a wonderful time both ways.

  Our Comet broke down and we waited three days in El Adem in Libya before the spare parts arrived from England. I wondered how on earth I could survive surrounded by sand, flies and mosquitoes—to say nothing of the heat.

  One of the passengers on the Comet was a British Army Brigadier. He was on his way to Melbourne to attend a defence conference. He was able to acquire army transport and invited some of us to accompany him to the military cemetery at Knightsbridge, where his brother-in-law was buried.

  We all set off after breakfast one morning. It was a very emotional experience to travel over the same territory and tracks that our fighting forces had taken years before—the same places that had been the scene of the bloody battles that had led to ultimate victory. All along the route we took I recognised the names of places that had meant something to the Allies during World War II.

  Eventually we reached the British cemetery. I was amazed to see so much green grass in the middle of the desert. It was beautifully kept. The Regimental Sergeant Major in charge had been for years in Egypt and apparently had acquired some special knowledge of growing a certain type of grass which survived the desert and their watering system. Whatever the secret, it had been put to good use here in the cemetery.

  Once inside the huge entrance gate one could see the high columns, each one representing the different Allied countries who had been fighting in North Africa. They were interspersed with rows of green grass. The whole area was immaculate and I felt it was a tribute to the RSM and to the men who had lost their lives in the desert.

  The French cemetery was a disaster. The Arabs were paid to maintain it and it was obvious the money had gone astray.

  We set off for Tobruk, anxious to visit the German cemetery which had been opened not long before by Frau Rommel. We stood outside the main gate and laughed. It was open three days per week and then only for two hours. Fancy going to Tobruk to find such hard and fast rules.

  A desert storm prevented us from going on to Knights-bridge so we spent the afternoon in Tobruk, where a British Army unit extended some welcome hospitality in the form of sandwiches, lovely cold beer and the use of their swimming pool. I was glad I had the opportunity to see the sites of so many battles and so much history. I marvelled at the stamina and tenacity of the men who had fought on our behalf. The price of victory had been high. It had been a long, hard battle but history had been made.

  From then on there was never a dull moment. The Brigadier was not a selfish man and when he was given the VIP treatment during our stop-overs, he always included any of the passengers who felt inclined to join his group.

  The journey back to England on the Hastings was not as comfortable as the one on the Comet had been, but it was just as interesting. We went via Singapore, Pakistan, Habbaniyalh in Iraq, Cyprus and Malta, but as we remained in each place for several days, there was plenty of time for sightseeing.

  John Forward, who was stationed in Malta, was waiting on the tarmac as the Hastings landed. We were both going to attend the wedding of mutual friends in England. The disease must have been catching as we married the week after. I had been widowed for fourteen years and it was a hard decision to make. I had three months in which to decide whether I would re
main in the WRAF which I had joined prior to being posted to the Air Ministry. Naturally, I resigned.

  I will always remember those years at the Air Ministry with nostalgia. I have always had a soft spot for the Royal Air Force and am grateful for the years I spent in their environment.

  Russell Braddon had written a book about me which had eventually been published in paperback and was on sale in all the bookshops in Malta the year I arrived to start my new marriage. As a result of all the publicity we were invited to many social gatherings and in this way we met some charming Maltese. In any case, as far as the Maltese people are concerned, there is a strong tie between their country and Australia, stemming from the First World War. The two years I spent in Malta were happy ones and we were both sorry to leave the island when John’s posting had been completed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  This story would not be complete without some reference to ‘the film that never was’.

  Between 1956 and 1972 there were six attempts to film my story and even the suggestion of a musical. With each offer I became quite excited, and each time I was let down.

  At one stage an English tycoon who had an option on my story was unaware that he and I shared a charlady. She noticed some correspondence on his desk concerning Nancy Wake, and told me. I sent her back with plenty of instructions so she could get exactly what I wanted. It didn’t take long to find out what a crook he was. After several similar disappointments, I eventually avoided publicity and anything connected with the film world.

  But then in August 1972 I received a letter from the English songwriter who’d wanted to make the musical years ago. She was living in California—more questions—more answers—more phone calls. This time there was one big difference—I was invited to California.