The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

“Will you marry me?” she said. “I don’t know how it’ll work, other than I’ll at least be nearby in France for the next six months, but I don’t really care about the practicalities and the things I usually live by. I want every memory of you, from now until forever, to be mine.”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he kissed her unrestrainedly and with far too much passion, obviously forgetting they were in a room with their grandparents.

  Kat smiled against Elliott’s lips. “Does that mean yes?”

  “We’ll get married in Josh and D’Arcy’s chateau,” he said, smiling too. Then he took her hand and drew her over to the bed. “Grandpa,” he said, “I’d like you to meet my fiancée.”

  “Fiancée,” Nicholas said. “I always wanted to get properly married.” And then he looked at Skye.

  Whether, for just a millisecond, he had remembered who Skye was and that he’d loved her, and with that look had wanted to convey that the only proper marriage would have been the one between her and him, Kat didn’t know. But it was what she chose to believe.

  Skye leaned forward and kissed Nicholas’s lips. “We were always married, Nicholas,” she said. “And it was magnificent. We were magnificent.”

  As Nicholas drew Skye’s hand up to his cheek, Kat felt the years fall away. She saw a dark-haired man and a dark-haired woman on a beach, wrapped in a blanket and in one another’s arms, the woman’s finger wound with a seaweed ring. Across the sand, laughing, ran the ghosts of the girls they had wanted together; and around them all a vow that echoed through time: We are boundless.

  Yes, Kat thought, smiling at Elliott. We are.

  Author’s Note

  The idea for this book came to me when I was reading Anne Sebba’s book Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s. There, I learned of Catherine Dior—Christian Dior’s sister: her work with the Resistance throughout the war until her capture by the Nazis and her imprisonment in Ravensbrück concentration camp. How had I never heard of this woman, other than as the person after whom her brother Christian named his perfume, Miss Dior?

  I determined to find out more and was shocked to discover that there is, sadly, little information about Catherine Dior, who was very reticent about her wartime activities. I did glean some scant facts from Villa Les Rhumbs, the ex-Dior family home in Granville, now a museum, and some from Christian Dior’s autobiography. Catherine risked her life by working for F2, a British-supported Resistance organization that primarily worked out of southern France. However, Catherine and her partner, Hervé Papillault des Charbonneries, carried out Resistance activities in Paris too, using Christian’s apartment as a meeting place for the network. For her work during the war, Catherine was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Légion d’honneur by the French, and the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom by the British.

  As takes place in my book, Catherine was arrested on July 6, 1944, in Paris and sent on the last train to Ravensbrück. She spent some time doing forced labor at Ravensbrück satellite camps at Torgau, Abteroda and Markkleeberg. I have only included Torgau here, rather than have the reader jump to several different locations in a short space of time.

  Until mid-2019, I hadn’t been able to find a consistent explanation about how Catherine left Ravensbrück in 1945. Most sources note only that she was “freed” or “liberated” near Dresden. Sebba, for instance, mentions only that Catherine was “released” in April 1945. In the absence of certainty, I chose to place her on one of the Red Cross convoys that took French prisoners from Ravensbrück in April 1945. But Justine Picardie, who, with the help of the House of Dior, is writing a book about Catherine Dior, published an immensely useful article in Harper’s Bazaar in March 2019 in which she states that Catherine escaped while on a death march from Markkleeberg satellite camp in April 1945. By the time I came across this explanation in May 2019, my book was largely finished. Therefore you will have to treat as fiction the section of my book where I have Catherine leaving on the Red Cross convoy. I look forward to reading Justine’s book and learning more about Catherine.

  I find that stories usually come from two or three unrelated ideas suddenly colliding and this was certainly the case for The Paris Secret. While researching The Paris Orphan, I learned about the Air Transport Auxiliary, and the important role women played in that organization despite initial prejudices and difficulties. I also came across the story of 161 Squadron, who flew by moonlight into France to deliver SOE agents whose job it was to sabotage the Germans and to spy on them. I knew I wanted to write about both groups of pilots.

  The final link that brought it all together came when I visited the Dior exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2017. There, I discovered that Australia was the very first place outside France to show Dior’s gowns in 1947, that David Jones had organized a special showing of Dior’s gowns in 1948, and that Australia thus had a strong connection with the House of Dior.

  Many people in the book are based on real historical figures: Pauline Gower, Rosemary Rees, Joan Hughes, Vera Atkins, Amy Johnson, and Catherine and Christian Dior being among the most integral to the story. Wherever I have used a name of a female pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary, that is the name of a real person. I had to change history slightly with regard to Pauline Gower: she was in charge of the women’s section of the ATA, but Margot Gore was the commanding officer at Hamble, not Pauline. However, it didn’t make sense to introduce another person after the reader had already become comfortable with Pauline; and besides, I already had a Margaux in my story and it would have been confusing to add another.

  Many of the incidents I cover in relation to the ATA are based on fact. All the awful quotes from magazines and newspapers about the women pilots are real, as is the first press call, and the fact that the women flew open-cockpit planes to Scotland all through that first bitter winter. I borrowed ATA pilot Maureen Dunlop’s image in the Picture Post of her stepping out of a plane, hand in hair, for Skye. Maureen’s picture was taken at a later time than I have used in the book.

  Many books that I read about the ATA referred to the nude medical examination the women were subjected to on joining the ATA—and I have moved the timeframe of this to suit my story. It was the new female American ATA pilots who refused to be subjected to such treatment, but I would like to think that Skye, should she have existed, would have objected too.

  The progression of the women from trainer aircraft to fighters to bombers, and the opposition mounted against them at each stage, was also recorded in many of the books that I read. Margot Gore, CO at Hamble, did organize for two of her pilots to go to an RAF base and deliver smiles to a squadron that had suffered losses. The wording I’ve given Pauline, “Efficient and pretty, please,” and her asking the pilots to make themselves as attractive as possible, are both recorded in, among other sources, Sisters in Arms: British and American Women Pilots During World War II by Helena Page Schrader. In the same book is the story of a female ATA pilot being tasked with delivering a Beaufighter to an RAF base to show the men, who had refused to fly that aircraft type, that even a woman could fly it.

  Skye’s stay at RAF Leavesden and the attitude of the RAF toward women flying the largest planes, and requiring them to do more practice circuits than the men, is based on Lettice Curtis’s experiences, recorded in Bomber Girls by M. J. Foreman. The grounding of all women for further physical and cognitive assessments after Mona Friedlander burst a tire on a plane is noted in Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell.

  The lunch at which Skye speaks about allowing women to fly a wider range of operational aircraft to help resolve the pilot shortage in Britain is based on similar lunches at which Pauline Gower spoke on the same topic. The film They Flew Alone, about pilot Amy Johnson, that Skye sees in London is a real film.

  All of the information about the difficult flying conditions faced by the ATA is based on fact: they did fly without instruments and radio, instead using visual navigation and de
ad reckoning, and avoiding clouds at all costs; and they were unarmed. Many of their pilots died on the job; and occasional attacks on the ferry pilots by German planes did occur.

  Other sources I consulted for information about the Air Transport Auxiliary include: Diana Barnato Walker’s memoir, Spreading My Wings; Rosemary du Cros’s (née Rees) memoir, ATA Girl; Brief Glory by E. C. Cheesman; the Air Transport Auxiliary’s Ferry Pilots Notes; and the collection of papers about the Air Transport Auxiliary held at the National Archives in Kew. The Imperial War Museum at Duxford allowed me to see many of the different kinds of airplanes that Skye would have flown, and helped me understand the mechanics of flight.

  The Dior family home, Villa Les Rhumbs, is a beautiful building set in stunning grounds atop a cliff in Granville, France. I visited the house, gardens and the Dior museum now located there in October 2017 and knew immediately that I wanted to use the house in my book. The only issue was that the Diors, who purchased the villa in 1905, were forced to sell it in 1932 due to money problems. It was purchased by the town of Granville in 1932, meaning the Diors were no longer living there in the 1940s. I hope you will forgive me for using the home anyway, as I just couldn’t imagine that part of the story unfolding anywhere else.

  All of the gowns Kat finds in the house in Cornwall are real Dior gowns. The four outfits bequeathed to the museum Kat works at are based on the four original Dior designs shown at the Paris Fashions For All parade at David Jones in 1947. The mysterious blue dress is a figment of my imagination.

  For information about Christian Dior, I referred to Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, published by Thames & Hudson; Dior by Dior: The Autobiography of Christian Dior; and The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture by the National Gallery of Victoria. I also visited the Dior exhibition at the NGV in 2017, and the Dior exhibition at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris in 2017, and read many of the extant newspaper articles published in Australian newspapers about the Dior showings in 1947 and 1948, as well as copies of the David Jones newsletters from this time.

  161 Squadron did conduct moonlight flights into France for two weeks every month, carrying secret agents and supplies for the Resistance; and operated out of the secret base RAF Tempsford, with forward operations carried out from RAF Tangmere. For this part of the story I referred to Lysander Pilot: Secret Operations with 161 Squadron by former pilot James Atterby McCairn; We Landed by Moonlight by former pilot Hugh Verity; RAF Tempsford: Churchill’s Most Secret Airfield by Bernard O’Connor; Runways to Freedom: The Special Duties Squadrons of RAF Tempsford by Robert Body; the collection of records of 161 Squadron held at the National Archives in Kew; and the collections of the RAF Tangmere museum, which I visited in October 2017. I also read former WAAF Doreen Galvin’s memoir, Arts to Intelligence, to help me understand the role of the women of the WAAF at RAF Tempsford.

  Another part of the story that I have manipulated slightly is to do with Margaux and Nicholas’s cover story. Once several women were working for SOE, their cover was that they worked for the Inter-Services Research Bureau, a fictional organization. Female SOE agents were recruited from the WAAF, and several were commissioned as junior officers in the WAAF, like Margaux. I made Margaux one of the first women to work for SOE, before protocols for women were clear, so that I could create an engagement cover story. It’s possible that this could have happened; as SOE was a secret organization, nobody knows everything about how it worked. As SOE expert M. R. D. Foot says in his book SOE 1940–1946, “the exact size of SOE has never been revealed . . . exactly who did and did not belong to SOE are questions so difficult and intricate . . .” Therefore, I went with what was possible.

  Much of the information Elliott reveals to Kat about SOE is based on fact, including the mishandling of the search for missing agents—especially the women—toward the end of the war. I gleaned much of this from Sarah Helm’s excellent book A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE. In this book, I also discovered the story of the misidentification of agents Sonia Olschanesky and Nora (or Noor) Inayat Khan.

  As well as the above-mentioned books, my research on SOE took me to the Imperial War Museum in London and I found, in particular, their Secret War permanent collection very useful. I also read through the SOE papers held at the National Archives in Kew, and referred to the book The Women Who Spied for Britain: Female Secret Agents of the Second World War by Robyn Walker and The Heroines of SOE: F Section, Britain’s Secret Women in France by Beryl E. Escott.

  Some SOE historians take issue with the use of the word “spy” in relation to SOE agents, preferring to call them secret agents. However, as Sarah Helm notes, the women were working for a secret service; they wore no military uniform and were thus liable to be executed as spies; they had no legal protection as, when the Hague Convention was drawn up, it had never been envisaged that women would be used as combatants; and they were performing clandestine work in enemy territory. If this doesn’t make them spies, then I don’t know what does!

  The hardest thing of all to write about in this book was Ravensbrück concentration camp. Geneviève de Gaulle’s memoir, The Dawn of Hope: A Memoir of Ravensbrück, is heartbreaking reading. I borrowed the story about the birthday cake made of crumbs and decorated with twig candles from this book. Sarah Helm’s Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp For Women was thorough, important and haunting, and I used many of the anecdotes that women recounted to Helm for my story, including everything relating to the Kinderzimmer, the death buses in the woods, the dumping of bodies for sorting outside the Revier, the retrospective order to Camp Commandant Suhren to kill two thousand prisoners each month, the Good Friday round-up of women, and Jeannie Rousseau’s heroics at Torgau. Two further memoirs from Ravensbrück survivors, Forgive, Don’t Forget: Surviving Ravensbrück by Jacqueline Péry d’Alincourt and An American Heroine in the French Resistance by Virginia D’Albert-Lake, provided further detail and also the epigraphs on pages 437 and 381.

  I am indebted to Suzanne Chee, fashion conservator at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, who invited me to spend a day with her so I could understand what her job involves, and who let me (with gloves on!) touch and examine some of the museum’s collection of Dior gowns from the late 1940s. She also gave me a copy of Marika Genty’s presentation on Christian Dior, which was very helpful. I also owe a big thank-you to Elizabeth Carter, manager of the Vibrational Spectroscopy Facility at the University of Sydney, who talked to me about how one might analyze fabric and inks, and showed me how spectroscopes were used for this kind of analytical work.

  The lost garden that Skye and Nicholas find, and which Liberty resurrects, is based on the Lost Gardens of Heligan at St. Austell in Cornwall. Finally, I apologize to whoever lives in the house atop the cliff just outside the town of Porthleven in Cornwall for my clambering all over the surrounding land trying to take photographs. The position of your house inspired the Penroses’ home in this book.

  Reading Group Guide

  Discussion Questions

  Note that these questions might contain some plot spoilers.

  Had you heard of the Air Transport Auxiliary and the women who worked for that organization before you read this book? Which of their experiences in dealing with the Royal Air Force and the male establishment did you find the most deplorable?

  Why do you think women like Catherine Dior have been forgotten by history? Is it due to their gender, their reticence to speak about their wartime experiences, the nature of the savagery they endured, or other factors? What can we do to make sure the heroines of today aren’t similarly forgotten in the future?

  How much did you know about Ravensbrück, Hitler’s concentration camp for women, before you read The Paris Secret? How difficult was this part of the book for you to read, and do you think the author achieved her aim of bringing to light the injustices and terrible acts committed against women in the camp? Why do you think the Nazis established a concentra
tion camp solely for women?

  Did Skye and Liberty do the “right” thing after the war? Can you understand why neither was in touch with the other afterward? How might things have changed if they had tried harder to find each other? Is pretending to be someone else ever acceptable, and what did you think of their actions after the war?

  How would the book have been different if it had been told from Liberty’s point of view? In what way would the childhood sections of the book have changed? What did you think of Liberty, and did this perception alter as the book progressed? Would you have liked to have seen more from the perspective of any other character?

  Take a look on the internet and see if you can find pictures of the Dior gowns referenced in The Paris Secret. Do you have a favorite? If you do, why do you think the author chose that particular dress for that particular moment in the book? Can fashion be art, and can it, as Margaux says, restore and revive the spirits? Can it have any meaning beyond providing protective covering, or is fashion merely frivolous?

  The Story Behind the Book

  The Real Hero: Catherine Dior

  I expect that before you read The Paris Secret you had heard of Christian Dior. But had you heard of his sister Catherine? I certainly hadn’t until I read about her in Anne Sebba’s wonderful book Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation. Sebba mentioned Catherine a few times, that she had worked with the French Resistance and had been captured by the Nazis and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her work with the Resistance was so heroic and so important that, after the war, Catherine was awarded a Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur by the French, and the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom by the British.