by Noreen Riols
After chatting for a while they rose, saying: ‘Better go, we’re on patrol. We’ll leave you to carry on making your bombs.’ And, laughing heartily, delighted with their own sense of humour, they gave him a friendly slap on the back and left. Like the woman courier at the level crossing, he’d taken the risk and got away with it.
I met Benny again after the war, quite by chance, when we were invited to dinner by a delightful elderly couple, Marthe and Henri Brun, friends of my husband. To my surprise Benny was there. It really is a small world. We learned that Henri Brun had sheltered many escaping Allied airmen during the war and that he had saved Benny’s life by hiding him behind the shutters on the balcony of their third-floor flat in the rue de la Pompe and helping him to escape across the roof when the Gestapo came looking for him. And I realized that evening that there must be dozens of other people, unsung heroes and heroines in France, who had done the same thing: served their country and the Allied cause in the same way and, when the war was over, disappeared unrecognized into the shadows.
Benny came alone that evening, but shortly afterwards Jacques and I had dinner with him and his delightful French wife. I was surprised when I met her. They seemed at first sight to be a very ill-matched couple. I had expected to meet a sturdy, jolly-hockey-sticks, no-nonsense woman, but she was exactly the opposite. She was in fact what everyone imagines a typical parisienne to be: tiny, elegant, vivacious. When they stood side by side his burly frame seemed to completely blot out her delicate body. After dinner, which was excellent – she was a very good cook – she chatted animatedly with Gallic flutterings of her hands while he sat smiling, contentedly puffing at his pipe, his eyes resting affectionately on her, happy to let her take centre stage. Occasionally their eyes met, and a smile would flit between them. It was obvious that they adored each other and, contrary to appearances, were a very happy couple. Once again I was taken by surprise, as I had often been during the debriefings at Orchard Court all those years before, when I thought I had understood once and for all that one cannot judge from appearances.
Pearl Witherington stands out in my memory because her story is a very romantic one. Were it to be made into a film, or written as a novel, people would say it was too far-fetched to be true. And yet it was true. Although British, Pearl had been brought up in France and in 1939 was engaged to a Frenchman, Henri Cornioley At the outbreak of war Henri was drafted into the French Army and taken prisoner at Dunkirk. When France fell, now being enemy aliens, Pearl and her family fled across Spain and into Portugal, finally arriving in England, where, angry at France’s defeat and having no news of her fiancé, she joined the WAAF. But she was anxious to return to France to ‘get her revenge’ on the Germans who had taken her fiancé prisoner and were now occupying what she considered to be ‘her country’, since she had never before actually lived in England. It was only a place she visited during the holidays.
Pearl was an ideal recruit for F Section and was soon spotted and sent for training. But although she spoke French like a native, she looked unmistakably English, which presented a problem. However, she solved it by piling her plaits on top of her head in the hope that she would be mistaken for a German. Thus disguised, she was parachuted into the Indre-et-Loire to join Maurice Southgate’s Stationer réseau, not knowing that Henri, her fiancé, had escaped from his prisoner-of-war camp and joined the Resistance. After her arrival back in France, she found him again. He was a member of the réseau which had received her! They both returned to England after the liberation of Paris in August 1944 and were married quietly in London the following October. As the French would say, ‘incroyable . . . mais vrai!’ (‘unbelievable. . . but true!’). Pearl and I became good friends and remained so right up until her death only a few years ago. On her return from the field I asked her whether she had been afraid when, waiting to jump, she had sat on the edge of the open trapdoor in the floor of the plane, her legs dangling in midair, while the plane circled over its target.
‘Afraid?’ she expostulated. ‘The only sensation I felt was a terrible urge to pee. As soon as I landed I did my “rouly-bouly”, tore off my parachute and leapt over a hedge. A few seconds later, I saw pinpoints of light from a torch seeping through the hedge and heard a man’s voice whisper hoarsely: “Where the devil has she gone? I saw her come down. There’s her parachute. But where is she?” I couldn’t immediately reply,’ Pearl giggled. ‘Because if he’d looked over the hedge, all he’d have seen was my bare bum!’
Pearl was parachuted into France to act as a courier, and her cover story was that she was a travelling saleswoman for cosmetics, the job her fiancé had done before the war. I found this cover very odd, because Pearl was what one might call a ‘no-nonsense’ woman. I don’t think I ever saw her wearing even a trace of make-up. But she was also an amazing woman. When Maurice Southgate, her organizer, was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, she and Amédée Mainguard, a Mauritian F Section agent, promptly divided their large Stationer réseau area into two. Pearl took over the northern side of the Indre, which became known as Wrestler – a very appropriate name – and Dédé, as he was called, turned the south side into the Shipwright circuit. The Germans had put a million francs price on Pearl’s head, but no one denounced her.
After D-Day, together with Henri, her fiancé, Pearl headed an army of 3,000 résistants and held up the German advance, taking 1,800 prisoners. When the war ended she was awarded the MBE, but in a civilian capacity. She sent it back, saying she had never done anything civil in her life. She later accepted it. . . when the category was changed to ‘military’.
In 2008 I went to Pearl’s funeral, together with the three remaining F Section male agents in France, one of whom had trained and been dropped with Pearl. It was held in the small French town where, during the war, she had operated and to which she and her husband had retired. There were about 300 people present on that cold February day, standing in the wind and the intermittent rain. It was held at the entrance to the chateau, since demolished, which had been Pearl’s headquarters and where a monument had been raised to the memory of those who fought there. Her husband’s ashes had been buried under the monument a few years before, and that afternoon Pearl’s urn was placed beside his. It was an amazing ceremony. Forty-eight standard-bearers and two surviving members of her Resistance group were present, as well as many local dignitaries, a high-ranking French officer and the military attaché from the British embassy. Pearl was ninety-three when she died, and her two remaining comrades-in-arms can’t have been much younger, but they insisted on standing to attention throughout the whole ceremony. ‘Pauline [her codename] is a legend around here,’ one said afterwards, wiping his eyes.
Only a few years before she died, when she was well into her eighties, Pearl was finally awarded her wings. Yvonne Baseden, who is in her early nineties, was given her wings about ten years ago. To mark the occasion, a splendid champagne lunch was organized in her honour at the Maison des Orphelins, where she and other members of her réseau had been arrested, to which former locally recruited members of the réseau were invited. Yvonne had not seen most of them for almost sixty years. But they came – a group of old men in their best suits, which many of them hadn’t worn since their weddings forty or more years earlier – and clustered around to congratulate her. With the celebratory champagne before lunch they presented her with her parachute, and with the armagnac after lunch, her pistol. She had refused to carry it at the time – it had been buried – since, if she had been caught, it would have been too much of a giveaway. Yvonne remained very calm and composed, although it must have been a very moving moment for her, and naturally her organizer, Gonzague de Saint-Geniès, who did not survive, was remembered with affection in their conversations. Her thoughts must have gone out to ‘Lucien’, with whom she had worked so closely, whose memory seems still to be very vivid, and his death so painful for her to recall. She was obviously very fond of him and even after sixty years could hardly bear to talk about h
im. Was there some romantic attachment there? I don’t know. Yvonne is a very private person: it would not be kind to pry.
The reason given as to why, unlike the men, these women agents had not received their wings years before was that a parachutist had to have made six jumps before being awarded wings: and, before they jumped into enemy-occupied territory, women agents in training did only five. The men did six! Also that they had to have made night jumps, which apparently the women never did – except the night they jumped into enemy territory. But that doesn’t seem to have counted! How many former women agents died without ever having received this recognition?
Another of my friends, Lise de Baissac, received her wings just before her ninety-ninth birthday. She died shortly afterwards. But many women agents died without ever having received this recognition of their bravery. Lise came from Mauritius, a compatriot of Dédé. She was dropped ‘blind’ near Poitiers under cover of being a widow living quietly. On landing she had to find accommodation for herself and then link up with Mary Lindell’s Marie-Claire escape route, based in Ruffec. There were many of these escape lines all over France, known at HQ as Section D/F, which were often run by F Section women agents. The main one, the Pat line, stretched from the Belgian border to the Pyrenees, and was operated by a Belgian national, Henri Guise, codename Pat O’Leary: hence the ‘Pat’ line. These lines transferred airmen who had been shot down and had managed to avoid being arrested by the Germans and escaping prisoners of war from safe house to safe house, until they were able to cross the Spanish frontier.
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 codename 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 mothe
r 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 landed in south-west France 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.