by Noreen Riols
I raised my eyes. It was my friend Tilly. I immediately cheered up. She had been at the Lycée with me and was great fun.
‘What’s up?’ she smiled, linking her arm in mine and propelling me along Holborn.
I told her of my tragic situation. She was sympathetic, but didn’t seem to find it as dramatic as I did. In fact, she laughed, which didn’t help.
‘Come and have a cup of coffee in the canteen. We can talk it over.’
‘What canteen?’ I asked suspiciously, envisaging the British Restaurants the government had patriotically set up and which served cheap, unappetizing meals and grey stuff in thick white cups referred to as ‘coffee’.
‘The BBC, down the road at Bush House. I’m on my way there now. I work in the German section. The French Section is just across the corridor, I’m sure they’d give you a job.’
My spirits immediately rocketed. I hadn’t thought of the BBC. What an opportunity. Blow the hat.
Settling me at a formica-topped table in the BBC World Service’s underground canteen with a cup of coffee, which looked and tasted like coffee, and a currant bun, Tilly disappeared to make enquiries. I was fascinated. All around me interesting-looking people were jabbering away in a variety of languages. They seemed very friendly and smiled at me as they passed with their trays. The canteen was crowded, and a young Norwegian asked if he could share my table. He and I were getting along very nicely, practically on first-name terms, when Tilly returned.
‘Mission accomplished,’ she announced, her dark-brown eyes shining. ‘One of my friends is secretary to the head of the French Section. She spoke to him about you, and he can see you now. I’ll take you up.’ She linked her arm in mine again and made for the lift. ‘It’ll be fun having you around,’ she smiled. Tilly was always smiling. ‘This is a great place to work.’
I thought the Norwegian looked disappointed when I got up to leave. I was too. Never mind, I consoled myself, I’ll meet him again when I’m on the staff.
I got the job. To start immediately. All I needed was the approval of the Labour Office.
Euphoric, I raced back to the Labour Office, clutching the papers the Head of the French Section had given me, requesting that I be allowed to take up employment there. But the office was just closing.
‘Come back at two o’clock,’ Vinegar-face snorted, firmly locking the door behind her.
Believing I had won, I was prepared to wait and savour my victory. Drifting into the nearest British restaurant, I was served a lump of indifferent cottage pie and some soggy cabbage by a WVS volunteer who called me ‘luv’. (The Women’s Voluntary Service was a band of worthy middle-aged ladies who wore a grey uniform with an unflattering flat hat and valiantly served their country.) Having demolished my cottage pie, I still had almost an hour to waste, so I attacked a treacle pudding, and even drank a cup of tepid grey coffee.
I was waiting on the doorstep when Vinegar-face returned and unlocked the door. I followed her impressive silhouette – she was built like a barrage balloon – and sat down triumphantly in front of her desk, deciding to be magnanimous. After all, I had won – or so I thought. She took no notice of me. She disappeared behind a curtain to make herself a cup of tea, returning with it steaming in her hand, but didn’t offer me one. I didn’t care. My beautiful future was stretching out before me. I could put up with her acid remarks for a few minutes longer. When she finally stopped slurping, she looked up and jerked her head in my direction. I passed the papers across the table for her to sign. She glanced at them and slashed a red pencil across the application with the word ‘refused’ written in caps. I gasped.
‘Not a reserved occupation,’ she snapped, and handed them back to me.
‘I don’t understand,’ I spluttered.
‘It’s . . . not . . . a . . . reserved . . . occupation,’ she enunciated, syllable by syllable, obviously convinced I was a halfwit. ‘I should have thought what I said was perfectly clear.’ She sighed deeply before dredging up a few more syllables. ‘You . . . can’t . . . work . . . for . . . the . . . BBC,’ she ended triumphantly and paused to gloat over her victory before dealing her final blow. ‘It’ll have to be a factory.’
‘But why can’t I?’ I snapped back, seeing her select an ominous form from among the pile on her desk. It had something about ‘munitions’ written across it as far as I could make out, since I had to read it upside down. The milk of human kindness I had decided to pour out on her now disappeared down the drain with remarkable speed. ‘Why can’t I? My friend from the Lycée is already working there. If she can, why can’t I?’ I was now beside myself with anger and disappointment. She looked at me coldly. ‘She’s doing in the German Section exactly the same job as I would be doing in the French,’ I fumed. That last remark was my undoing.
‘Ah,’ she trumpeted, her false teeth leaping to attention like recruits on parade. ‘An enemy alien.’
‘Tilly an enemy alien,’ I shot back. ‘What nonsense!’
‘What nationality is she?’ she barked.
‘Nationality?’ I stammered. ‘Well, I suppose she’s British.’ We had been such a hotchpotch of nationalities at the Lycée, nobody ever thought about it.
‘You suppose’, she said sarcastically, ‘but you don’t know.’
‘It never occurred to me to ask her. She speaks English as well as I do, I assumed . . .’ My voice trailed off, terrible doubts about Tilly slithering into my mind. I began to wonder how many more of Hitler’s personal friends had crept into the Lycée. Then reason came to the rescue, and I cheered up. Not Tilly! It wasn’t possible. She was far too jolly.
Vinegar-face had her pen raised ready to despatch me that very afternoon to a factory.
‘Tilly was born in Germany,’ I panted earnestly, forcing a smile and hoping to awaken a spark of human kindness in her. But her spark, had it ever existed, had gone out. ‘Her parents sent her to England to live with a family in ’33 when Hitler came to power. She’s Jewish,’ I added lamely, and immediately realized I’d said the wrong thing. Vinegar-face’s eyes narrowed. She was certainly a member of Oswald Mosley’s Fascist gang. I could see her sporting a black shirt and marching resolutely behind him carrying a banner, her arm raised in a Nazi salute.
‘In other words, an enemy alien,’ she sneered.
I shrugged and gave a deep sigh. ‘If you say so,’ I ended wearily, abandoning any further attempt to placate her.
‘Can’t have such people in the armed forces,’ she sniffed, as if Tilly were a bad smell. ‘That’s why she’s allowed to work at the BBC. But it isn’t your case.’
Her pen, held aloft until then, descended. ‘If you still haven’t made up your mind, I’ll put you down for a factory.’
She had insulted my friend and destroyed my dreams, and I suddenly saw red.
‘I will not go to work in a factory,’ I shouted, getting up and stamping my foot to emphasize my determination.
The door opened and a city gent, wearing a bowler hat, with a copy of The Times tucked under his arm, walked in. He raised his eyebrows enquiringly in my direction. I was by now puce with rage. Vinegar-face, taken off her guard by my outburst, was staring at me, her mouth gaping open like a question mark, obviously not expecting what had appeared to be a nicely brought-up young lady to behave like a Marseilles fishwife.
‘I’ve been offered a job in the BBC French Service,’ I exploded, ‘and she says I’ve got to work in a factory. Well, I won’t.’ My feet may have given a few more stamps to emphasize that my decision was irrevocable.
His lips twitched. He seemed to find the situation amusing.
‘I’ll take over this case, Miss Hoskins,’ he said, holding out his hand for my file, which Vinegar-face had been gleefully massacring since our morning meeting. ‘Come with me, young lady,’ he smiled and, leading the way down a long corridor, entered a small office, tucked at the far end, and motioned me to a seat.
‘Now then,’ he said, sitting down at his desk and looking carefully at
Vinegar-face’s Victorian scrawl. ‘I see you have just left the French Lycée.’
I nodded, wondering what was coming next. ‘So you speak fluent French?’
‘I’m bilingual,’ I replied, now on the defensive.
He continued to study my file. Then, putting it aside, he began asking me a great many questions that had nothing to do with the warship I had expected to be invited to command, jumping backwards and forwards between English and French like a demented kangaroo. He seemed surprised that I was able to keep up. After a few more linguistic gymnastics, he made an incomprehensible telephone call, scribbled on a piece of paper and told me to go to this address, where someone was expecting me. The address meant nothing to me. But, relieved to be out of Vinegar-face’s clutches, I took the paper and, with a final triumphant smirk in her direction, stalked from the building. My smirk was wasted. She didn’t even look up. She was too busy destroying another candidate’s hopes.
My mystery destination turned out to be the Foreign Office, and the room I was to find a windowless broom cupboard filled by an Army officer. The room was so small that he and I were practically rubbing noses across his desk while he asked me a lot of bewildering questions which had nothing to do with the Navy. It was the beginning of a series of weary wanderings, answering questions which, to my mind, were completely off the mark. I felt like one of the lost tribes of Israel trailing behind Moses on an aimless ramble from one desert to another. This tour of London didn’t appear to be getting me anywhere, and I was becoming seriously concerned, wondering when I was going to be given my seductive hat.
My final port of call was Norgeby House, a large building in central London, at 64 Baker Street. I knew the building well, but thought it was just another government ministry. The plaque on the wall outside read ‘Inter-Services Research Bureau’, which didn’t mean a thing. I think that was the idea. Like the hordes of people who passed by every day, never had I imagined or even suspected that this was the Headquarters of SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the official name for Churchill’s Secret Army, which he created in July 1940 after General de Gaulle’s radio appeal to the French in occupied Europe to join him in London and continue the fight against Hitler. I wonder if I even knew of the existence of such an army. I certainly didn’t realize, and doubt whether any of the other thousands of passers-by did either, that behind those innocuous-looking walls representatives from every occupied European country were busy organizing acts of sabotage and the infiltration at night of secret agents behind the lines into enemy-occupied territory, by fishing boats, feluccas, submarines and parachutes.
The officer who received me must have approved because, after a few more questions, he picked up his telephone, spoke briefly and told me to go a certain room, where Captain Miller was expecting me.
The said captain may have been expecting me then, but when I arrived in his office five minutes later, he’d forgotten! He stared at me as if I’d dropped in from outer space, and without any further introduction suddenly barked, ‘No one, but no one, must know what you do here. Not your father, your mother, your sister, your brother, your fiancé . . .’
I tried to tell him that I didn’t have a fiancé and not to worry about my father asking questions, since he was floating about on a submarine depot ship somewhere between Trincomalee and Mombasa. We didn’t see him for four years. My little brother was at school in Yorkshire and not in the least bit interested in his big sister’s antics, and my mother had moved to Bath, relieved that her offspring had now left the Lycée and was away from the clutches of those wild French airmen. Had she got wind of my last paramour, whom my classmates had nicknamed Tahiti, she would most certainly have stayed in London.
I never did discover who else wasn’t supposed to know what I was about to do because before Harry, the officer I thought was interviewing me, had time to tick off a few more members of my family on his fingers, a very tall Irish Guards officer, who must have been about six foot six, exploded into the room like a bomb, making strange squeaking sounds. Some sort of crisis must have occurred – not an unusual occurrence, I was to learn – because Harry, apparently understanding the squeaks, threw up his hands in horror, sending the papers on his desk flying in every direction, and the two of them roared off down the corridor to join other hyperactive members of this strange organization.
I was abandoned to a major sticking coloured pins in a map on the wall, who now turned round. ‘Don’t talk and don’t ask questions,’ he said briefly. ‘The less you know the less you can reveal if the worst happens.’ And he went back to his pins.
I was beginning to wonder what could be worse than the madhouse I seemed to have been trapped in. It turned out to be a German victory, and we were all apparently on their ‘hit list’. But I wasn’t to learn that until much later.
I would also learn that Harry and his Irish chum had recently returned from ‘the field’, the codename for enemy territory – everything was in code – and were still slightly on edge. That was putting it mildly. It turned out that the Irishman had been shot in the throat while escaping, hence the strange squeaking voice, which made him sound rather like a ventriloquist’s doll. But at the time I was unaware of these details and was convinced I had been lured into a lunatic asylum run by the Crazy Gang.
A young girl in uniform, slightly older than I, was sitting unperturbed at her desk, studying her finger nails. I looked across at her. ‘Is it always like this here?’ I ventured.
‘No,’ she reassured me, getting up and collecting the papers the two officers had scattered in every direction in their precipitous departure. ‘It’s usually worse!’ She sighed. ‘You’ll get used to it.’ She was right. I didn’t have any option. I had entered the hidden world of secret agents on special missions.
Nothing in life is all bad. Not even in a war. And lighter moments often interspersed the tragedies that went to make up our daily lives in SOE. Otherwise, I think it would have been difficult to cope with the tensions and dramas we lived with every day, not only between SOE’s walls, but in the wider world of wartime England. There were some good times, even some amusing times. As the French say, in life there are les hauts et les bas, and, strange as it may seem, comical incidents often happened during the air raids.
Living in London, we rarely had a good night’s sleep. If ever we did finish early we often spent the rest of the evening and most of the night in an air-raid shelter, sitting huddled around the four sides like terrified patients in a dentist’s waiting room, listening to the bombs thumping overhead, or hunched on the dirty platform in the local underground station, surrounded by picnickers, sleeping bags, crying babies and buskers, listening to impromptu ‘choirs’ roaring ‘We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’ – a popular song which was slightly out of date after June 1940, but we sang it all the same – or ‘Roll out the Barrel’, whiling away the time, waiting for Hitler’s Luftwaffe to stop dumping bombs on us and fly back home.
The morning after a raid, we got up, picked our way through the rubble and continued as usual.
For those who were less sociable there was always the cellar, if one’s house happened to have one. I remember having dinner with a friend at her parents’ house in Hampstead when an air raid caught us unawares, so we all trooped down to the basement. At about four o’clock in the morning the ‘all clear’ sounded, and we settled down to sleep, for what was left of the rest of the night, on the various mattresses scattered about the cellar floor. Half an hour later, just when we had all got nicely off, my friend’s mother shot up in ‘bed’ and announced, ‘I shall never get to sleep with that clock ticking.’ We had had a particularly ear-splitting night – bombs raining down non-stop, the ack-ack guns booming in our defence – and, now that it was quiet, the tick of the alarm clock was keeping her awake!
The Morrison shelter was the brainchild of the fiery, redheaded government minister Herbert Morrison. The corrugated-iron Anderson shelters, which had been hastily assembled in su
burban back gardens after the Munich crisis in 1938, were soon found to flood every time it rained, leaving their occupants up to their knees or waists or entirely submerged in water, depending on their size and age. Instead, the new Morrison shelters were erected inside houses. They were enormously heavy cast-iron structures, secured to the floor, and took up an entire room, leaving no space for any other piece of furniture.
They were slightly less noisy than spending the night on the platform of the local tube station or in one of the municipal air-raid shelters, marginally more private (though not much) and were supposedly made to resist any assault. The only danger, when cowering under them, was that if the house collapsed on top, there was more than a chance that the occupants would be buried alive. In most homes the Morrison shelter replaced the dining-room table, there not being room for both. The family not only sat around it for meals, but also squashed themselves under it as soon as the air-raid siren sounded. They were very chummy structures, but could get rather crowded if guests who had come for the evening were caught by an air raid. Then everyone squeezed under the table together, and it was a case of when father turns we all turn, except that in most houses there was no father. He was either in the armed forces, on duty firefighting or standing on a high roof scanning the sky for approaching enemy planes. If he were too old for any of these activities, he patrolled the streets wearing a tin hat and being officious, blowing a whistle and yelling, ‘Put that light out,’ if anyone dared to smoke a cigarette outside, or leave a chink in the blackout curtains.
These inside shelters were often erected on Saturdays by volunteer Boy Scouts, and one was expected, as a thank you offering, to put money into their ‘Prisoner of War Box’, which they rattled hopefully everywhere and anywhere at every opportunity. When home from school on holiday, my little brother used to help put up Morrison shelters. He also, without fail, positioned himself outside the bathroom door when any guest to our house went in and noisily rattled his box when they came out saying loudly, ‘Don’t forget the prisoners of war,’ to the intense embarrassment of my sixteen-year-old friends. It’s amazing how a horrible little boy can later metamorphose into a charming young man. Once full, these boxes were emptied at a central depot, and the money used to provide comforts for our prisoners behind barbed wire in Nazi Germany. My little bro’s concern and patriotism were praiseworthy, but at times highly embarrassing. And I almost strangled him on more than one occasion.