by Noreen Riols
But the story doesn’t end there. Only a few weeks ago, at a reception in London, I was introduced to a young man whose face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t immediately place him. ‘This is Claudine’s son,’ I was told. What a bombshell. Then the penny dropped, and I exclaimed: ‘You look exactly like your grandfather!’ He was the image of Claude de Baissac at the time he had married Mary Herbert. The young man smiled, then told me his story. He had been adopted at birth by a wonderful couple who gave him not only their name but also a very happy childhood yet didn’t hide from him the fact that they were not his birth parents. But it wasn’t until he became a member of the Special Forces Club in 1990 and saw photographs of both Lise and Claude de Baissac on the wall that he began to wonder about his real mother and to ask himself whether there might be some family connection between himself and these two famous agents, since the name on his birth certificate was ‘Jean de Baissac’, not a common name in England. But it wasn’t until 2009 that he seriously looked into his true parentage. That year he met Claudine in Los Angeles, where she had lived for the previous fifty years, and learned that not only was she his mother but that he was indeed Claude de Baissac and Mary Herbert’s grandson.
What a series of revelations! He is now interested in tracing all his ‘lost’ Mauritian relatives and was anxious to begin his search by contacting my friend Clothilde. So when I returned to Paris I excitedly rang her to give her the news of her long-lost cousin – and almost gave her a heart attack! ‘But Claudine never had any children,’ she protested. Then the story came out.
Claudine was very young when her son was born, studying ballet in London with high hopes of becoming a ballerina. I don’t know why she gave up her child: perhaps because of pressure from her mother, who disliked the idea of a scandal in the family, or perhaps because it would have been difficult to continue her career and look after a baby at the same time. Whatever the reason, he was adopted at birth. Not long afterwards Claudine was involved in a car accident and very badly injured, which ended her hopes of a career as a dancer. Did she ever regret giving up her baby now that she had been obliged to give up her career? One cannot help wondering. She later married an American and left for the New World. But she never had any other children.
Her son, who since their meeting is now in regular contact with his mother, is shortly coming to Paris to meet some of his new-found Mauritian family living here. The revelation has caused a tremendous stir, not only with those members of his family living in Paris but also with those in Mauritius, and the telephone lines between the two countries have been buzzing non-stop ever since the news broke: they are all dumbfounded by it. Like her birth parents, Claudine would obviously have been a good recruit for SOE had the occasion arisen, since she clearly knew how to keep her mouth shut and, in a way, live a double life. Once again an SOE story proves the veracity of the old saying: ‘truth is stranger than fiction’.
I think the women agents who survived mostly recovered. Yvonne Baseden, who at over ninety is now very frail, is able to talk calmly about her traumatic wartime experiences: being arrested, tortured, imprisoned first in Dole, and finally, in August 1944, in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she remained under appalling conditions until repatriated the following April. The only moment in her story when she shows any emotion and seems upset is when she talks about her organizer, Gonzague de Saint-Geniès, and remembers how he took his life rather than risk giving away information to the Gestapo and thereby betraying his friends.
Nancy Wake was another one of F Section’s larger-than-life, colourful characters who, once the war ended, seemed to survive life in peacetime, seemingly putting the past behind her and embracing the future with open arms. Nancy was a New Zealand-born Australian journalist married to a French businessman. They were living in Marseilles, her husband’s home town, when France fell. Nancy immediately went to work organizing an escape line across the Pyrenees into Spain for downed Allied pilots and escaping British prisoners – until the Germans got wind of her activities. Urged by her husband, with whom she was very much in love, to leave the country and make her way to England, with his help she escaped into Spain by the same route, leaving Marseilles only a day before the Gestapo came to the house to arrest her. Her husband denied all knowledge of her whereabouts or her clandestine activities, whereupon he was arrested in her place and taken into custody. When he refused to speak he was terribly tortured and, according to a priest who was in the prison cell next to his, on the night before he was executed his back was so raw from the beatings he had received that his kidneys were exposed. Knowing that he was to be shot the following morning her husband managed to tap a message through the wall of his cell to the priest, who gave it to Nancy when she returned to France after the war, hoping to be reunited with the man she loved. ‘Tell Nancy that I love her and that I didn’t betray her,’ it read.
It is perhaps not surprising that when Nancy returned and learned of her husband’s terrible end she is reputed to have said, ‘I love killing Germans.’ At first, I hesitated to put this comment onto these pages: it could portray her in such a hard, cruel light, and Nancy was neither hard nor cruel. But very recently I met, quite by chance, an Australian who had been one of Nancy’s great friends, and he put the remark in context. He told me that, there no longer being anything to keep her in Europe, after the war Nancy had returned to live in her native Australia, where she frequently spoke in schools about her wartime exploits. He often accompanied her on these speaking engagements and, one afternoon, when she had held her young audience spellbound for almost an hour and a half, a young teenage girl, of obvious German extraction, got up and challenged her, remarking: ‘You once were heard to say that you loved killing Germans. Is that true?’ There was a deathly silence in the audience, followed by an embarrassed shuffling of feet.
Nancy looked at the girl sadly, shook her head and replied, ‘You silly girl. I don’t hate Germans. I have been many times to Germany, where I have two German godchildren and many German friends.’ She paused and looked straight at her. ‘But I hate Nazis. And all they stand for.’
This hatred of the Nazis had been born before the war, when Nancy was Reuters correspondent in Paris. On an official visit to Germany in 1938, when she was travelling with a group of foreign journalists, the bus had passed through a village where Nancy noticed what looked like a large Ferris wheel, with people attached to it, turning round and round. When she asked the guide what was happening he glanced out of the window of the bus and replied dismissively, ‘Oh, they’re only Jews!’ At that moment an intense hatred of the Nazi element in Germany was born, and she vowed to do something to stop the massacre.
Nancy was an agent who thrived while carrying out her clandestine activities and was perfect for the work she had been chosen to do. She didn’t know the meaning of fear, was never arrested and was called by the Germans ‘the White Mouse’ because she always managed to slip through their fingers. George Starr, a man not given to over-enthusiastic comments about a woman’s charms once remarked, possibly echoing the thoughts of countless other men who didn’t express them vocally, that Nancy was the sexiest woman he had ever met.
She admitted in her daring, audacious way that in the field she had had a German officer as a lover. ‘Of course, I shall have to kill him,’ she was heard to remark at the height of their affair. And she did. Not personally. She betrayed him, which led to his execution. She could be a warm, loving, loyal friend but also ruthless when the occasion demanded. I don’t know how she felt about his death but I do know of one case where she had to pronounce the death sentence, which upset her deeply. She had made friends with a Dutch girl who was a member of her Resistance group. There were not many women in these Resistance groups, and if one met one with whom one felt an immediate bond it was a bonus, and a very special relationship. Sadly, the ‘Dutch’ girl turned out to be not Dutch at all but a German agent working for the Abwehr. When her true identity was revealed, she was sentenced to death by t
he members of the réseau. Nancy did not carry out the execution herself, even though she had pronounced the sentence, but she was there to witness it. When the girl was led out and passed Nancy, she spat on her. Then, just before the bullet which ended her life rang out, she looked at Nancy and said, ‘I am a patriot too.’ It was perhaps this last remark which upset Nancy more than the loss of her friend.
I last spoke to Nancy a couple of years ago. It was on her ninety-sixth or ninety-seventh birthday, I can’t remember which. She was back in England, having married an Englishman, a former pilot. Now widowed for the second time, she was living in a Star and Garter home in Richmond. Tim Buckmaster, Buck’s son, was with her to celebrate and help her cut her cake. Tim had apparently mentioned that he had seen me the month before, and Nancy had said she would love to see me again. So Tim rang me up. At first she seemed to be just as perky as ever, but after a few minutes the conversation faded out, and the line went dead. Tim picked up the receiver. ‘She’s dropped off,’ he explained. Perhaps at ninety-six or ninety-seven I shall ‘drop off’ in the middle of a sentence too!
Nancy died just two weeks before her ninety-ninth birthday and had a very impressive memorial service in St Clement Danes, a beautiful old church in the Strand opposite Australia House. It was a wonderful ceremony: three robed clergy officiating, a magnificent choir, a flurry of FANYs showing an impressive number of distinguished guests and top brass to their reserved seats. The Duke of Edinburgh had sent his equerry to represent him, and I recognized Viscount Slim sitting at the other end of the pew with a lady MP whose face I knew, but whose name I couldn’t recall, sitting behind. An assortment of military attachés in full regalia from various embassies read the lessons or said the prayers, and the Australian high commissioner gave the address. The church was packed to the rafters, with many celebrities present. But it wasn’t Nancy! The Church of England wasn’t her ‘cup of tea’ at all. I don’t think any church was. Had her spirit been present, hovering over the elaborate ceremony, she would have roared with her raucous, throaty laughter and doubtless used some unrepeatable epithet to describe the occasion.
When the service ended the high commissioner gave a splendid reception, and, as we left the church and crossed the road to Australia House to attend, the bells began to ring, peal after peal of joyous chimes, which seemed to echo and reverberate all over London. A wonderful goodbye and a wonderful tribute to Nancy, an exceptional woman, the most decorated woman in the Second World War. I think Nancy would have liked that.
On 10 March 2013 Nancy’s ashes were taken to Verneix in central France, where she had operated during the war and where she is still remembered. They had been brought from London by Brigadier Bill Sowry, the Australian defence attaché. In a splendid ceremony attended by the local mayor, the military attaché from the Australian embassy in Paris and two FANYs who had come especially from London, as well as other local dignitaries and ordinary folk, a few who remembered Nancy, Brigadier Sowry scattered her ashes in the woods outside Verneix. ‘We are here today to pay our respects and give her the tribute she deserves,’ he said. During the splendid lunch, hosted by the mayor, which followed, the mayor said that this little part of France was now also part of Australia and announced that later in the year a plaque would be unveiled in the centre of the village in memory of Nancy. But it was far from being a sombre occasion. Nancy was a woman who loved life and lived it to the full. She also was very partial to an early-morning gin and tonic. So, after her ashes had been scattered, there was, as she had requested, a drinks reception in the town hall.
Eileen Nearne was made of a different fibre. She was tough in one way, but fragile in another, surviving arrest, hard labour and two concentration camps. But once she returned to peacetime life her life seemed to go to pieces, and it was a long time before she was able to recover her former joie de vivre.
Born of an Anglo-Spanish marriage and brought up in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Eileen was the youngest of four children, three of whom – Jacqueline, Eileen, or Didi as she was always known, and Francis – became F Section agents. We know very little about her brother Francis’s activities. Her elder sister Jacqueline, the more beautiful of the two beautiful sisters, seems to be the one who is better known. Like Eileen, Jacqueline trained as a radio operator; she had one successful but uneventful mission, from which she returned unscathed. Didi’s exploits were much more spectacular, so spectacular in fact that she took a long time to recover from them, whereas in 1946, immediately the war ended, Jacqueline went on to begin a successful career with the United Nations in New York.
As ‘Rose’, Didi landed by Lysander in March 1944 to work as a radio operator for Wizard, a small réseau outside Paris. She was arrested the following July, just after transmitting. In spite of telling a fairly convincing story about being a governess, she was given the ‘bath treatment’, imprisoned at Fresnes and then sent to Ravensbrück and on to Torgau, the nearby concentration camp. Here she was sent to work in the fields, dig roads and work in factories, before being sent back to Ravensbrück and ending up at Markkleeberg. Managing, with another woman prisoner, to escape from a death march, she was finally discovered by the advancing Allied armies hiding in a belfry and taken into care. But on her return to England after the liberation in 1945 she was in such a state of physical and mental shock that she was hospitalized for over a year. During this time she painted abstract pictures in vivid colours, which might have given a glimpse into her mental state at the time. When she was discharged she took up a position as an auxiliary nurse in a hospital and after her mother’s death in 1950 returned briefly to France, but came back to England after a few months and went to work as a care nurse in an old people’s home. This position she held until she retired.
Although the two sisters were close and kept up a steady correspondence, their lifestyles were very different, and each remained independent of the other, though occasionally Jacqueline did help Didi out financially. Didi recovered from her horrendous experiences and was able to live what one might call a normal life. In her later years she became a recluse, knowing no one, having few visitors, living a solitary life with her cat in a flat in a seaside town in Dorset. She kept very much to herself, and the neighbours seemingly knew nothing about her. When she was found dead from natural causes in 2010 she was about to be buried in a pauper’s grave when the authorities, searching her flat seeking some evidence of next of kin, stumbled across her medals, an impressive array, and her citations and realized that she was a ‘forgotten war heroine’. Then, all the stops were pulled out. She was given a wonderful funeral, with standard-bearers, flags, magnificent wreaths, lots of top brass and splendid newspaper coverage.
But it was too late for Didi. She had died alone and, apart from her niece who lives in Spain and visited her when she could, forgotten. What a pity the authorities had not enquired of her welfare while she was still alive. In Didi’s case, taking into account all she had suffered, it was surprising that her mind had not flipped. Some people can endure the most dreadful mental and physical torture and survive.
The terrible massacre inflicted by the German Army in Oradour-sur-Glane is well known, but few people realize that this was not the only village in France to experience such a dreadful fate. Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon in the Gers also suffered, and another massacre took place in St Pathus, a village outside Paris, shortly afterwards. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944 twenty-year-old Jeannine Pernette, having recently qualified as a nurse, decided to follow the retreating German Army in order to tend any wounded they had left behind. She went to St Pathus, east of Paris – where Henri Diacono had been radio operator for the Spiritualist réseau – with a jubilant lorryload of résistants, who believed that only a handful of Germans, whom they could engage and easily defeat, remained in the area. But when they arrived they were met by an entire contingent of German soldiers, and a fierce battle took place. The résistants, hopelessly outnumbered, were quickly defeated, leaving many casualties on both sides.
Jeannine was busy tending the wounded when the remaining résistants, together with the villagers, were lined up to be shot. Jeannine was with them when one of the Germans recognized her. ‘Don’t shoot her,’ he shouted. ‘She looked after our wounded.’ On his testimony, her life was spared, and she was told she was free to leave. But she didn’t leave.
‘I am a nurse,’ Jeannine replied with as much dignity as she could muster. ‘I tend the wounded. I do not ask their nationality.’ And she insisted on accompanying the wounded of both sides who were being loaded onto a lorry, in order to look after them on the journey to wherever they were going. She did not know whether she was heading for Germany or not!
After a long, tiring journey they arrived at the Red Cross camp at Armentières-sur-Brie, to the east of Meaux, where the French were put into prison camps and the Germans taken to a German military hospital. Jeannine thought that she was now free to leave and return to Paris to resume her nursing career. But she was arrested and sent to Metz and later imprisoned in the fortress at Queuleu, where she remained until the following April, when the Americans, together with Leclerc’s army, liberated her.
After the war we became friends. Jeannine was a lovely woman, a typical parisienne, very slight, scarcely more than five feet tall. She died in June 2012, aged eighty-eight, and it was only at her funeral in a crowded church overflowing with magnificent floral tributes, and standard-bearers, with many dignitaries present, that I realized the extent of her bravery and learned of the decorations she had received, including the prestigious Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Like all true heroines Jeannine was very modest and had hardly ever mentioned her dramatic wartime experiences.