The Sisters of St. Croix

by Diney Costeloe

  She and Cora had grown close during their training, each helping the other in areas where they felt insecure, but at the end of their training, Cora had disappeared, sent on some mission of her own. Adelaide did not know where or what that might be. No one knew anything that was not absolutely essential; even the most courageous would eventually talk if caught and questioned by the Gestapo. Knowledge of another agent put that agent at even greater risk. Now Cora had gone, Adelaide was on her own, to live and die by her own wits… and the silence of others.

  “You’ll be dropped near the town of Albert in north-east France.” It was Captain Jenner, the officer who had first recruited her who was briefing her now, sitting across the table in the tiny flat, as if they were normal people sharing a pot of tea. “Your accent will pass in that area and we need someone to carry out some special work there.” He looked at her and smiled. “The reports that have come through about your training are very good, and we think that you are the right person.”

  “Thank you, sir,” was all Adelaide said, wondering what was coming next.

  “Your codename will be Antoinette,” Jenner told her. “You are going to join up with a resistance circuit being built in the Somme area. We have already dropped in a wireless operator who has linked up with the local resistance to gather information. We need information about anything and everything that might be of use to us, both now and in the future. We need to know exactly what the Germans are up to. What they are building, what they are manufacturing, where their troops are and why. Airfields, anti-aircraft guns, roads and railways, any troop movement. All that is vital and the local circuit is beginning to gather such information for us. However, though you’ll have a link with them, we have a special job we want you to do. Marcel, the local resistance leader, will be told why you are there and will give you any help that doesn’t put the circuit at risk. Marcel, that’s a codename too of course, will be your cut-out. He, and only he, will liaise with you. You will know no one else in the circuit unless he feels that it is essential, and then only by codename. That way if anyone is arrested, neither you nor they will jeopardise the whole network. Do you understand?”

  Adelaide nodded. “Yes, sir, but…”

  Major Jenner went on as if she had not spoken. “Marcel is arranging his end of the cover story you will be given. I’ll give you that to work on before I leave today.”

  “Am I responsible to him?” asked Adelaide. “This Marcel?”

  “No,” replied Jenner, “but you will need him and you should be guided by him. He’s the man on the ground, the man with the knowledge of exactly how things stand in the area.” Jenner looked at Adelaide sharply. “Why, is that a problem?”

  “No, sir,” she answered, “I just wanted to be sure of my status.”

  “Your status, as you put it, is that you work for us. You are responsible to us, but to have any hope of completing the task you will have to have a good working relationship with the local réseau.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Adelaide persisted, “but if the resistance already have a network, and I’m not to be part of it, what am I going to be doing?”

  “The farm you are going to is near a village called St Croix in the Somme area,” the major told her.

  Adelaide’s surprise was clear on her face.

  “Yes, I know you are familiar with the area. I know you visited it for a few days before the war. That’s why we’re considering you. It adds to the risk in some ways, but we think the advantages of using you will outweigh that.”

  “I see,” said Adelaide lamely.

  “No, you don’t,” replied Jenner cheerfully, “but you will. Now what we want you to do is this…”

  He outlined the plan, not dwelling on the added risk he was asking her to take, but not ignoring it either. He went into no detail of what would be required of her. That would come later… when he was sure. Now he spoke only in generalities.

  “We need you to get work in the convent, as a maid, or a cleaner or some such, so that you can come and go without causing comment. They employ girls from the village, I believe.” Jenner looked across at her, watching her face, gauging her reaction to his words. If he was not completely sure about her, there was still time to pull her out, to try and find someone else. He didn’t want to do that. In most ways she was perfect for the job he had in mind, and training someone else for it would take time he could ill afford. He had said the advantage she offered outweighed the risk, but did it?

  “Will there be anyone who might recognise you?” he asked.

  Adelaide thought for a moment. Apart from her aunt and great-aunt, she doubted that any of the nuns would recognise her as the reverend mother’s niece. It had been almost five years ago and she had only stayed at the convent for three days. Now if she turned up there, she would be completely out of context, completely unexpected. With a different hairstyle, with no make-up, wearing the clothes of a French working girl, she would bear little resemblance to the chic young lady who had visited the reverend mother all those years ago, but Adelaide knew that she must not jeopardise any potential operation by being too confident about this.

  “I doubt it, sir,” she replied, “apart from my aunts. But I suppose the possibility is there.”

  “I understood an aunt of yours is the reverend mother,” Jenner said, “but you said aunts, plural.”

  Adelaide explained about her Great-Aunt Anne. “But she’s virtually bedridden. In fact I don’t even know for sure that she’s still alive. Obviously I’ve had no news of them since France fell.”

  “Hmm.” Jenner was thoughtful. A thorough check had been made on Adelaide’s background before she had been cleared, finally, for training. It had not turned up the information about her connection with the convent at St Croix. It was purely by chance that he had learned of that from her cousin, Andrew Driver, before he had returned to France for the last time. Together, they had been debriefing an airman who had been shot down over France and somehow managed to get home. When the man had gone, Driver had made his observation. “This convent Ham mentioned, I think it may be the one where Adelaide’s aunt is the Reverend Mum. You know my cousin Adelaide Anson-Gravetty? You’ve got her in training now.”

  From this snippet of information, an idea had been sown in Jenner’s mind, had germinated, taken root and grown. At first he had considered sending Driver and Adelaide in together, but Driver had been captured by the Gestapo, and had disappeared, so that plan had to be discarded.

  Now, after another mention of the convent had appeared in a report from the local resistance leader, they were considering resurrecting it, but sending Adelaide in on her own? Jenner had come to have another look at her, to sound her out, perhaps to prepare the ground. “Tell me about these aunts,” he said. “How do two English women come to be nuns in a French convent?”

  “They nursed in the convent hospital during the Great War,” Adelaide explained. “My great-aunt was already a nun there, I’m not sure how she came to be there, but Aunt Sarah went out to St Croix with her maid to help nurse the wounded in the hospital. After the war, she stayed on.” She smiled ruefully at Captain Jenner. “I only heard about them in 1937, when I was twenty-one. They were related to my natural father who was killed on the Somme. My father, the man I thought of as my father, was actually my stepfather. That’s when I went to see them. I wanted to find out more about my blood father, Freddie Hurst. Sarah, Mother Marie-Pierre, is his sister.”

  Jenner nodded, encouraging her to go on.

  “I went to visit them that year, but I only stayed for three days. I haven’t seen them since, and I doubt if either of them would recognise me immediately. As to the other nuns, though I was staying there, they paid little attention to me. They have a small guest wing at the convent where people can go and stay for retreats… quiet weekends… so they have people coming to stay quite often. I doubt if they would remember me particularly.” She looked across at Jenner. “If I’m not actually to live in the convent it is most unl
ikely that anyone would think of me as anything but a local village girl. I would have thought that any risk of being recognised would be minimal.”

  “Fair enough,” Jenner said, and got to his feet. “I’ll have to get the final all-clear, but then I’ll be back to brief you fully, probably in a few days’ time. You’ll stay here, in this flat, and I’ll come back to you. Please don’t leave the building, I may need to talk to you again. In the meantime,” he handed her a sheaf of papers, “get stuck into these… and make sure you’re word perfect when I get back.”

  Adelaide waited anxiously through the whole of the next day. She had thought she was definitely on her way, and now it was all up in the air. There were only a few days on either side of the full moon when a drop was feasible. If she missed her slot she would not be able to go for another month, and the thought of delay filled her with dread. Now that her training was complete, she wanted to go and get on with what she had been trained to do. Idling her time here in the tiny London flat, she felt claustrophobic; her anxieties grew, expanding, feasting on each other, and the coiled spring of her nerves became ever more tightly wound.

  She was allowed to see no one except Monica, the woman who looked after her in the flat. Monica had done her best. She spent hours taking Adelaide through the cover story Jenner had left with her, rehearsing it over and over, answering questions that might be put by a nosy gendarme or a curious agent of the Gestapo. Her papers named her as Adèle Durant. “Better to keep as close to your own name as possible,” they had told her when working on her new life history, “and birthday too, so that you really don’t have to think about that.” She was the niece of Gerard Launay, an elderly farmer who lived with his wife, Marie, on a farm outside the village of St Croix. Their son, Victor, had been killed in the early days of the war and she, also on her own, had come to live with them and to give a hand on the farm, perhaps to find work locally too. Speaking only in French, Monica questioned her over and over again. Where was she born? Who were her parents? When did they die? Why had she come to St Croix? Where had she lived before? Had she other relations? How old was she? Always speaking in French.

  “You’ll do,” Monica said eventually, but as they spent the evening playing backgammon or chess, she would toss in a question in English, trying to catch Adelaide off her guard. This drilling on her story gave Adelaide some confidence, but even so, long before Major Jenner returned, two days later, she was pacing the flat like a caged lion.

  When he did finally come back, they sat together once more in the small living room overlooking the park.

  “We have been discussing the information you gave me,” he said coming straight to the point, but not saying who “we” were. “And we’ve decided that although there is extra risk in your going to an area where you were known before the war, we are going to send you. Now, what I tell you from now on is for you alone to know. You may not discuss it with anyone, except your reverend mother aunt.”

  “With Aunt Sarah?” Adelaide was amazed. “What has this got to do with her? Surely you’re not going to embroil her in the resistance.”

  Jenner smiled at her outrage. “She is already embroiled, as you term it. She is already helping Jews, and our airmen who have been shot down, to escape from the occupied territory.”

  Adelaide listened in amazement as she heard how her Aunt Sarah had helped a flight sergeant called Terry Ham to escape from the Germans by disguising him as a nun.

  “He isn’t the only one. We have heard through our contacts in the area that she has also assisted a Jewish family to escape from the Germans. What we want you to do is try and establish a permanent escape route, using the convent as a base. Clearly your aunt is prepared to help our airmen, but we need to get in on the ground there and build up a secure escape route, so that the men can be moved on quickly across the country to safety. Your job will be to organise the section in the Somme, and the convent seems to be excellent cover. You’ll persuade your aunt to give you a job there, so that you can come and go without question. The Germans will be unlikely to suspect the place is a safe house. We learned from Terry Ham that there are cellars under the convent, which sound as if they could be adapted to suit our purposes. I like the sound of this convent.” Jenner nodded to himself. “Yes, I do. It has possibilities. What we need you to do is convince your aunt. If you’re there, she’ll have no need to take any more risks herself. If she’ll just give you a job in the convent, so that you can come and go without looking suspicious, you can work out how to hide these men while they are in your area. You can plan a way to move them on, to provide them with what they need… papers, clothing, money.”

  “But where…?” began Adelaide, but Jenner cut her off.

  “That is why you will need to liaise with Marcel. He will help to procure the necessaries, papers, clothes. Find out from your aunt how she managed to sneak the Jews out from under the nose of the Germans. Once you have considered what you need to put this scheme into operation, messages can be sent back through Bertrand.”

  “When do I leave?”

  “Tomorrow night, if the weather holds,” replied Jenner getting up. “Monica will make sure you’re ready to go.”

  Monica had driven them both to Bedfordshire the next day, where they had arrived at a country house outside the village of Sandy. They’d eaten a meal together in an elegant dining room, and when they had drunk their coffee, the best coffee Adelaide had tasted since the beginning of the war, they had gone up to the room set aside for them.

  “Now we must sort out your clothes,” Monica said. “You’ll have to change from the skin out. Everything you wear must be French-made. There are some things here for you to try on.”

  Adelaide stripped to the skin, her own underwear and clothes set aside to be packed into a suitcase to await her return. In their place she pulled on the chemise and cotton drawers which Monica handed her, followed by a navy blue coat and skirt, and a white blouse, all cut in the French style. Thick stockings and a pair of scuffed black leather shoes completed her outfit. The shoes had the name of the French cordonnier inside them, the coat and skirt a label from a store in the Rue de Ste Anne in Paris. When she was satisfied with how Adelaide looked in these clothes, Monica gave her some more underwear, a flannel nightgown, two more blouses, another skirt, a handmade cardigan. “And for when you are helping your Uncle Gerard on the farm,” she said with a smile, “some dungarees and sabots.” Lastly, she gave Adelaide a grey felt hat and an old grey raincoat that reached nearly to her heels and was belted at the waist. It had once been good quality, and although it had seen better days, it would still keep out the cold and rain. “It used to belong to your mother,” remarked Monica casually when Adelaide tried it on, “that’s why it is a little too large.”

  Adelaide looked at the clothes, wondering where they had come from. Who had worn them before? Who had pulled that grey felt hat onto her head or cinched the belt tightly about the waist of the raincoat? Had they been worn here, in England, or on some other, previous mission in France? It was hardly a large wardrobe, but adequate for the poor country girl that she was purporting to be, and each garment carried a French label. She packed them into the small cardboard suitcase Monica had provided, along with some toiletries… all of French make.

  “Now your hair,” said Monica and led her to the dressing table. “I think we need a change of style here.” She picked up a pair of scissors, and started snipping at Adelaide’s hair, reshaping it with such speed and dexterity that within ten minutes the whole shape of her head seemed to have changed. Gone was the smooth thick pleat of hair that Adelaide had worn up under her cap as a WAAF, and tied back out of the way during her training. In its place was a rather ragged bob, hair framing her face and straggling to her collar. It looked, Adelaide decided as she studied herself in the mirror, as if she had hacked it off herself with a pair of blunt garden shears. When she said as much to Monica, Monica laughed. “I’ve no doubt you will have to cut your own hair from now on if you
want it cut at all. Adèle Durant won’t be able to afford to go to a hairdresser.” She looked at her critically in the mirror for a moment. “Here, these might help,” she said, and picking up a pair of combs slid them into Adelaide’s hair, scooping it up above her ears.

  “There,” she said. “That’s better. Not hair that’s been styled, but clearly this girl has made an effort to look chic!”

  Adelaide exploded into laughter. “That’s chic?”

  She had been given another meal before she left, a good hot meal of beef and roast potatoes with thick savoury gravy.

  “I couldn’t,” she murmured, as she looked at the food heaped on her plate.

  “You must try,” encouraged Monica. “You may not get anything else for some time now, and you need to keep alert… more difficult when you’re hungry.”

  Adelaide did as she was told and as she began to eat she found that she was much hungrier than she had thought. Surprisingly the food seemed to quell the butterflies which had been flapping so violently in her stomach, and when at last she was driven to the nearby Tempsford Airfield to board the Hudson that was to take her to France, she found it was yet again the thought of the actual jump from the plane that terrified her, not the thought of what awaited her when she landed.

  The jump had been all right, she thought as she lay curled up in the feather bed at the farmhouse. There had been no time to hesitate as she had been almost pushed out of the aircraft. Now, she had to meet up with Uncle Gerard and Aunt Marie, and get herself established and accepted in the village. From now her every thought and word must be conducted in the manner of Adèle Durant, a young girl, displaced by the cruelties of the war.

  Gradually, at last, the warmth of the bed overcame her and she relaxed into sleep, and so conditioned was her mind that even her dreams that accompanied that sleep were in French.

  16

  Over there, coming in now,” murmured Marcel as he and Adelaide mingled with the crowd who had just got off the train from Amiens. “The one in the black cap.”