by Noreen Riols
As in the case of Nancy, Christine and also Didi Nearne, many of the agents’ contributions went unrecognized and were only acknowledged when it was too late. Impressive funerals were held, attended by high-ranking officials and bemedalled officers, but sadly that did not help the agents – by then they were beyond recognition – though the grieving families might have derived some measure of comfort.
Many returning agents found it difficult to settle down to life in peacetime. Trauma doesn’t suddenly go away, it lives with you, maybe even colours the rest of your life. There was a psychological trauma as well as a physical one, and some committed suicide. I don’t think the agents received any medical help; they were left to cope with their hallucinations, their nightmares, their flashbacks, their depressions . . . and their bewildered families. Their lives spiralled out of control, and many marriages suffered, some irrevocably. Other agents seemed to slip back easily into their former pre-war existence, with its normal relationships. It was a question of personality, a person’s make-up, and in some cases the severity of their experiences. Like everyone else, those agents were individuals with their differing characters, and some were unable to come to grips with peace.
War had been so much part of our lives. We had cruised along not thinking about tomorrow, not thinking about anything except the job in hand. For those agents in the field, their mission would have been impossible if they had done otherwise. We couldn’t afford to stop and wonder what the future might hold because, had we done so, we would have realized that for many of us there would be no future We couldn’t waste time speculating on life after the war or lamenting the ‘might have beens’. Then suddenly it was all over. SOE was disbanded with undignified haste, and we were all ‘out on the street’, wondering what to do with the rest of our lives. A chapter had now closed, and we were not sure what the next chapter held. Or even whether we wanted to open it.
But one’s war doesn’t abruptly disappear from one day to the next. People cannot suddenly turn the page on six years of their lives. Even after the bunting had been removed, the patriotic songs had faded, the blackout taken down and the streets were once again flooded with light, the agents’ wartime memories stayed with them . . . sometimes for a very long time. Nothing was urgent any more. Nothing seemed important. It was all over. For some agents the war never left them. They realized that the ‘new world’, the world fit for heroes for which they had believed they were risking their lives, was not going to happen.
The ‘new world’ we had fought to create and, once hostilities had ended, stepped confidently into was not very different from the one we had left behind in 1939. The old tensions, the rivalries, the snobberies and the struggle for power which, if not absent, had been only underground rumblings during the war, sprang to life again. No longer united as a nation fighting a common cause, society once again became fragmented, torn with the desire for power and self-gain, and we became the ‘me’ generation. It was hard for many who returned to realize that those who had stayed behind, the ‘chair-borne brigade’, had climbed the ladder to success, while those who had risked their lives were left standing with a foot on the bottom rung, obliged to start again. And, for some, bitter disillusionment set in.
At the time there were no psychiatrists, psychologists or counsellors on hand as there are today, waiting to treat victims of wartime stress. Or if there were, we didn’t hear of them. When a difficult situation arose, or tragedy struck, as it so often did, we just picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves down and got on with life. We had no option. And perhaps it wasn’t such a bad philosophy after all.
Had SOE survived, instead of being more or less annihilated, the files mostly destroyed by a ‘mysterious’ fire in December 1945, I think the authorities might have looked after returning agents, and they would have received better treatment. No one knows how or why, or in some instances even where, the fire started. Records don’t seem able to agree on the exact location though it was most probably central London, possibly at the HQ in Baker Street. However, some hazard that it was at nearby Michael House, the property belonging to Marks and Spencer which had sheltered Leo Marks’s team of coders. Some theories say it was arson. Others blame MI6, and still further accusations have been made that two officers weeding through the files carelessly threw a lighted cigarette butt into a waste-paper basket. All these theories are possible, though none can be proved. But suspicions were aroused at the time, and rumours circulated that it was not an accident.
Was this arson? A deliberate attempt to completely wipe out any trace of SOE’s wartime activities? If so, who or what authority was responsible? One can only surmise. There is no proof. As it was, many were left angry, often embittered, by the offhand treatment they received. General Eisenhower said that the work of SOE agents had shortened the war by at least eighteen months. How many civilian and armed forces lives did that save? And the late Professor Michael Foot estimated that, when at its highest, the total strength of SOE was that of a weak Army division, and added that no single division in any army exercised one-tenth of SOE’s influence on the course of the war.
For women who had lost loved ones the post-war period was very difficult. As long as the fighting continued, no one had had time to mourn. But when peace came, and they saw their friends’ husbands and fiancés returning, they suddenly came face to face with reality, and the brutal truth hit them. Their men were not coming back.
I think that for women with children it must have been the hardest. Their children saw the parties being organized for returning dads. And when the long-awaited day finally arrived, they watched as their friends excitedly hung across their front doors or garden gates improvised banners made out of old sheets with ‘Welcome Home Dad’ painted in gaudy letters: and they knew it was a celebration which would never take place in their home. They saw their friends playing ball in the park with their fathers, and they knew their fathers would never come home to play games with them. They would never again swing from his hand on a Saturday afternoon as they went off together to watch a football match. He would not be there to cheer them on when they played in the school eleven, applaud them when they acted in their school’s end-of-term play . . . or just be a father. That was something which was now denied them for ever. And those women had to bear not only their own pain, but a double pain. The pain, even the envy, they saw in their children’s eyes when they watched families leaving on holiday or fathers and sons setting out on expeditions together.
Those women had to be father and mother at the same time. And sadly, I saw some of them lose their femininity. Especially mothers with sons. They realized that there was no father figure in the home, no man to be not only loving, but stern at times, and lay down the law, no role model for their boys to look up to and follow, and they almost forgot that they were mothers and became surrogate fathers instead. So the bewildered children sometimes ‘lost’ both parents.
Abraham Lincoln said: ‘The only good part of a war is its ending.’ Francis Cammaerts aptly remarked when it was all over – was it with bitterness or an ironic smile? – ‘War achieves nothing.’ And Winston Churchill summed it up, hitting the nail on the head, when he advised: ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.’ How right they all three were.
Chapter 17
When the war in Europe ended, it left a desolate void for many people. Once the church bells had stopped clanging, the dancing and singing in the streets had come to an end, the shrieks of ‘We want the King’ coupled with the cheers of the crowds clamouring outside the gates of Buckingham Palace had faded, the street parties were over and the balloons and bunting had been removed, we came down to earth with a bump: and were confronted with peace. And many didn’t know what to do with it. It was bewildering. All the landmarks had disappeared. People had lost their anchor, that prop which had kept them going, despite all the odds: now they had to face the reality of a country, often a life, devastated by war, which would need to be rebuilt. And they didn’t know where to be
gin.
Men came back from the war believing they could take up their lives where they had left off in 1939, that the wives they had left behind would be waiting to go back to the domestic round they had followed in the 1930s. But for four or five years many wives had carried the weight of the responsibility of the family on their shoulders – they had had no option. They had worked outside the home, driving buses, working in factories, acting as special constables, fire-fighters, air-raid wardens, and some were reluctant to relinquish their new-found liberty. They had discovered independence and they didn’t want to go back to being the ‘little wife’, waiting at home for their husband’s return from the office each evening.
Other young women, dazzled by a uniform and caught in the heat of passion, had married hastily, sometimes after only a few days’ acquaintance. It had happened with some SOE agents about to leave for the field. The uncertainty of anyone surviving the war had added an urgency to these marriages, a desire to grasp whatever happiness they could while they had the chance. It had been thrilling, romantic; the scent of danger and the proximity of death had added excitement to their passion, and they were unable to look beyond today: nothing was permanent, nothing lasting, and they had lived only for the moment. Later many realized that getting married had been one of those mad, impulsive things people did in wartime. Since no one knew whether they would still be alive the following week, or even the next day, the thought that marriage was not a step one took lightly, without reflection or forethought, which might later prove to be a mistake, didn’t come into it. One grabbed happiness as quickly as possible, when and where one could, without considering the consequences, since tomorrow might be too late.
But with the end of hostilities, the handsome pilot with wings on his chest, the dashing young army or naval officer came home to them in an ill-fitting ‘demob’ suit, and many realized that their hasty marriage had been a mistake. This wasn’t the man who had swept them off their feet, the glamorous daredevil they had fallen in love with. No one would notice him in a crowd; they would no longer be given the best table in a restaurant; her friends would not now glance at her enviously as she walked down the street with her handsome hero by her side. They had been in love with love, and the heart-stopping precariousness of life in wartime. The danger had been an aphrodisiac forcing them, blinded by passion, to snatch at happiness. But once peace came, many couples realized they no longer had anything in common. Some of these marriages survived after the war. But many didn’t, and in the late 1940s divorce petitions, which ten years before had been something which only happened to film stars in Hollywood, blocked the law courts.
In June 1945 I was sent to work at SOE HQ in London, there no longer being any need for ‘decoys’ at Beaulieu. In early August, I received a letter from General Koenig commanding the FFI, the Free French Forces of the Interior, thanking me for my services, after which my time as a member of Churchill’s Secret Army came to an end. I was left wondering what to do with the rest of my life. It was as if a vital part of me had suddenly been torn away, ripped out, leaving me wounded. No one had had time to mourn during the war, not openly. Now one had all the time in the world, but it was almost too late. We no longer knew how to cry.
My mother left Bath and returned to London when my father, after four years in the Far East serving with the Royal Navy, came home. When he turned up unexpectedly one Sunday evening in December 1944 on his way from Greenock, where his ship had docked, to his base in Portsmouth, he didn’t recognize his only son. Four years in a teenager’s life can bring about startling changes. When he had left, Geoffrey had been a little boy, but on his return, he discovered a man. It also worked the other way round. My cousin’s small daughter crept into her mother’s room in the early hours of the morning and suddenly shrieked, ‘Mummy, wake up! There’s a man in your bed!’ Her father, whom she scarcely remembered, had returned home from the Middle East during the night.
Although she rarely voiced them, I know my mother had had fears about my father’s survival. William Joyce, the American-born British traitor, nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, had defected to Germany and throughout the war years had been actively involved in Goebbels’ Political Warfare broadcasts. He frequently announced, on his radio programme from Berlin, Germany Calling – ‘Jairmenny carling’, as he pronounced it, affecting what he must have imagined to be an upper-class British accent – that the Adamant, my father’s ship, had been sunk. The ship – and my father – survived, but our family had been decimated.
In June 1940 my twenty-year-old cousin had gone down at Narvik with his first ship, the Glorious. My father had been in Narvik at the time the Glorious was torpedoed and met the few survivors who were brought ashore. Jack was not among them. Although my father said that no one could have survived for more than a couple of minutes in those icy waters, my aunt continued to hope that after the war Jack would return. But when less than a year later her husband’s ship was also hit by a U-boat, and his father followed their only son to the depths of the ocean, I think her stoic attitude began to falter.
It was Eastertime, and I was on holiday from school when we received the news. ‘Clifford’s ship has gone down,’ my mother announced bleakly, her eyes scanning the letter. ‘He’s missing, believed killed. We must go to Eleanor at once.’ She looked up, her eyes misty. It was late March. The weather had been grey and stormy for some days. ‘No one could have survived in the Atlantic at this time of year,’ she ended sadly.
When we arrived, my aunt opened the door to us, her face creased with pain, but true to the British ‘stiff upper lip’ tradition all she said was: ‘Wasn’t one enough?’ and continued to present a brave face to the world. I cannot help thinking how much more natural, more healthy it would have been had she released her anguish in a torrent of tears and emotion.
Another cousin had survived Dunkirk only to spend his leave digging for his young wife after her block of flats received a direct hit on the night he arrived. Knowing that her husband was on his way home, and wanting to be there to welcome him, she had refused to go to the shelter when the air raid began. On the day which would have been their first wedding anniversary, his week’s leave over, John rejoined his regiment, his frantic search for his wife having revealed only a torn fragment of her blood-stained nightdress. My aunt, my father’s elder sister, had lost her husband, daughter and son-in-law, and my grandparents had lost their home: the home in which my father had been born.
So, coupled with the fact that food was still strictly rationed and would continue to be for almost another ten years, and in spite of the joy of the four of us being once again united as a family after four long years, Christmas 1945 was a rather sombre affair, though my mother did manage to persuade the butcher to give her a rabbit, which she roasted, and we pretended it was a turkey. And she somehow made a Christmas pudding out of carrots!
Shortly afterwards, my brother went to Sandhurst, one of the first post-war intakes, and two and a half years later we said goodbye to him when he left for Singapore. So, for our family, life continued to be a reminder of war . . . and goodbyes.
That dreary February day when Geoffrey left, the bands were playing, the kilts of Scottish regiments were swinging and the crowds were cheering and frantically waving as the troops were marched through Waterloo station to board the train which would take them to Southampton to embark on their long sea voyage. But Geoffrey was not among them. He was to travel alone, only leaping into his compartment when the guard blew his final whistle. The Green Howards, the regiment he was joining, were already in Malaya, fighting a desperate war. That afternoon, as the train departed and the crowds slowly dispersed and walked away, many wiping their eyes, some openly weeping, Waterloo station, reminiscent of so many heart-breaking goodbyes, resembled a scene from a First World War film. I was feeling miserable at the thought of possibly losing my little brother to a sniper’s bullet in the steamy jungles surrounding Kuala Lumpur. The age gap between us had become less significant as we left our te
ens behind, and we had become very close. And I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Not again’: we had fought a war to end all wars, or so we had believed. What had it all been for?
Now that I have sons of my own, I cannot help wondering about my mother’s feelings when she watched the train slowly draw away from the platform taking her only son, ‘her baby’, on a journey to fight a bloody war which could go on for years. Being British, like my aunt, and true to her Victorian upbringing, she said nothing: she showed no emotion, unable to release the anguish which must have risen deep inside her. And I followed her example. Perhaps it would have been better had we both given vent to our feelings and cried together, as so many leaving the station that afternoon were doing.
Thanks to ‘Vinegar-face’, I had been forced to decline the offer I had received during the war to work at the BBC, but, sensing my disappointment at what I considered to be Vinegar-face’s callous refusal, the head of the French Service had assured me at the time that there would be a job for me once hostilities were over. So, at the end of August 1945, when I left Baker Street, I presented myself in his office. I don’t know whether he remembered me or whether he was even particularly pleased to see me but, being a ‘gent’, he kept his word and took me on. And so began a few interesting but turbulent years, years when the environment, and the turbulence, were not so very different from my time in SOE. I had left the French Section there to continue my life in another French Section, equally exciting, though in a less dramatic way, and peopled with equally fascinating characters.
I was sent to work first of all in the News Room, a hive of frantic activity, especially when the hour for the regular bulletins to go on the air approached: telephones ringing non-stop and the clatter of old-fashioned Royal and Remington typewriters going hammer and tongs as we became submerged by the news items being sent up from the Central News Desk. On receiving the papers the sub-editors hastily glanced through them, selected the relevant ones, then rushed across the corridor to us and practically hurled the papers at the seven or eight translators already hard at work. Sometimes a ‘flash’, an important item of news, arrived after the newsreader had left for the studio. Then it was action stations all round. The ‘flash’ was speedily translated, usually with a sub-editor standing over the poor translator, who was desperately typing, dictating the flash to him or her at the rate of knots, while a secretary hovered in the background ready to grab the page the second it was ripped from the typewriter and hurtle with it down the four flights of stairs to the basement studio. No time to wait for the lift.