by Noreen Riols
The producer grabbed me, the only person in sight, and, without wasting his breath on explanations, raced me down to the studio. We arrived, gasping for breath, in the narrow passageway separating the studio manager’s cabin from the studio itself, just as the news bulletin was ending.
‘We’ll have to improvise,’ he panted, when our breathing began to slide back to normal. ‘We’re in a genteel guesthouse in Brighton. OK?’ I nodded dumbly. ‘And we’re two of the residents. I’m pompous old Colonel Ponsonby; you’re Miss Thistlethwaite, an elderly strait-laced spinster.’
The newsreader noiselessly left the studio, nodded to us as we all collided in the passage, and we heard the presenter announcing the programme, La Vie à Londres et en Angleterre (Life in London and in England). We tiptoed into the studio, the light flashed on, and Robin, the producer (he later went on to become someone terribly important in television) plunged in. Somehow I managed to continue the ‘conversation’ when he paused for breath and pointed at me to take over. Standing opposite each other, on either side of the microphone, we improvised for the full half-hour. I don’t know how we did it. Had I been warned beforehand, I’d have had hysterics too, but, taken by surprise, we just went ahead and carried on. Perhaps my wartime training came to my aid that evening. According to Miss Peacock, the result was very much appreciated by the listening public.
Miss Peacock, a delightful middle-aged lady, plump but tightly corseted, had an office on the third floor, which she shared with a bevy of ‘debs’ manning the telephones, and her assistant, a bosomy, deep-throated woman with a sexy voice and a come-hither look. Miss Peacock was in charge of ‘Listener Research’ and enthusiastically announced – she was an enthusiastic kind of person – that reports on the programme had declared it very lively and well constructed. It was certainly lively, I’ll grant her that but. . . well constructed? Well, I suppose everyone is entitled to his or her opinion – even the listener!
The hard-drinking newsreader, who had a particularly melodious voice and knew it, thought he was invincible. But that second episode signalled the end of his career at the BBC. When we turned up for work the following day, he was no longer a member of staff.
Another member of the French Section staff who disappeared overnight was a French journalist who was supposed to be preparing the early-morning press review. Perhaps he needed a break from reading the pile of first editions of the next day’s newspapers which were always delivered to Bush House shortly before midnight, but whatever the reason, the night watchman, doing his early-morning rounds, discovered him and a secretary, who was supposed to be working on the press review with him, lying on a sofa in the head of Sections office – the only item of clothing between them a pair of dark glasses. The unlucky journalist made the fatal mistake of trying to bribe the night watchman to keep his mouth shut. Without that offence, he might have got away with it. As it was with his colleague, both he and the secretary were out on their ear by the morning.
I later bumped into him on my first visit to Paris. He was then working on a French ‘daily’ – the French are more broadminded about these youthful lapses! He offered to show me Paris, lent me his sister’s bicycle, and we spent a pleasant Sunday cycling round the city, seeing the sights. That was in 1949. I’m not sure I would venture to cycle round Paris today!
In a similar vein a well-known English newsreader was arrested in the early hours of the morning and taken into custody by the police. He was drunk. Cooling off at around six o’clock, he rattled the bars of his cell, insisting loudly that they must let him out, since he had to get to Broadcasting House in time to read the seven o’clock news. The police officer was unimpressed.
‘Oh yeah?’ he replied. ‘And I’m Father Christmas.’ Unlike television, radio is faceless, so the poor newsreader wasn’t recognized. Shortly afterwards, an amusing cartoon was posted on the noticeboard in Bush House showing a dishevelled, barefoot announcer, with tousled hair, open-necked shirt, collarless, no tie – an unthinkable sin at the time – standing in front of the microphone, one hand clutching the bulletin, the other holding up his trousers, bunched together at his waist, with the caption: ‘Here is the seven o’clock news, and this is Frank Phillips reading it – because nobody knows where the hell Freddie Allen is!’
The French Section was not unlike Montague Mansions, my first glimpse of SOE. A windmill – all the office doors wide open, and interesting people whirling incessantly in the corridors. One morning, when I’d advanced into ‘Programmes’, I was asked to look after Joyce Grenfell when she came to record a talk. She was a charming lady, very tall. I felt quite petite trotting along beside her. I also once went up in the lift with Laurence Olivier, just him and me. I didn’t immediately recognize him – in person he seemed much smaller than on the screen. It was only when he removed his dark glasses, smiled and said ‘hallo’ in that unforgettably beautiful voice of his that I realized who he was and almost missed my floor!
Like SOE, the World Service in those immediate post-war years was a true democracy, where everyone was equal. In the canteen, heads of sections could often be seen sharing a table and chatting animatedly with one of the many ex-servicemen who operated the lifts. I particularly remember one of them, because he had lost an arm in the war. Many years later I met him again. He was working in Broadcasting House, where I had gone to record an interview after one of my books had been published, and I was very touched when he recognized me. He greeted me warmly, like an old friend. ‘Bush ’Ouse is not like it was in the old days, miss,’ he confided, as we rose to my floor. ‘Different clarse a’ people working there nowadays.’
In 1950, just before I left the BBC, I voted in a general election in England for the first and last time. In those days before computers it took ages, possibly days, for the final election results to be announced. I remember sitting on the stairs outside the Central Desk News Room on the second floor – there no longer being any more room inside – listening to the results as they came through. I was with Pam, one of my friends from the French Section, the daughter of a well-known filmmaker. Pam was married to a chappie in the Dutch Section. I think he was there too; we were quite a crowd. We were all biting our fingernails, being frightfully dramatic and wailing, ‘What shall we do if they don’t get in?’, ‘they’ being the Labour Party. We’d all voted Labour, simply because our families were staunch Conservatives. Pam’s father-in-law was a minister in the recently formed Dutch government, so her husband would most certainly have been a Labour supporter, just to be different. He may even have influenced his wife’s choice. None of us having had time to work through our rebellious stage and indulge in our teenage crisis during the war, we were no doubt being ridiculous and having it then, fiercely opposing everything our families stood for.
Now I understand the routine. Our five children did exactly the same, in rapid succession, one after the other.
Chapter 18
When I joined the BBC in late August 1945 I decided to put the war and my time in SOE behind me, but I discovered that I couldn’t. People from the past kept ‘popping up’ in unexpected places, as Buck and Lise had done. And it was inevitable that meeting them again, and being able to share in a way one was never able to share with anyone who had not been part of ‘the racket’, kept that past alive.
In 1939, when war was declared, I had been a happy, self-assured teenager with my future mapped out. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I planned to go to Oxford and take an arts degree before going on to study medicine: doctors in those days were often literary people. Then, after stunning the world with my incredible medical expertise, I intended to marry a tall, dark, handsome man who would whisk me off to a thatched cottage in the country, suitably staffed of course, with a pony poking its head over a paddock gate, and there produce six boys, all with red hair. I’d arranged it all, even down to the wedding, imagining myself floating down the aisle lost in a mist of tulle and old lace, the cathedral bells clanging, the organ thundering, and a cloud of l
ittle pages and bridesmaids tripping along behind me. The only thing I hadn’t organized was the bridegroom! But I considered that a minor detail which could be sorted out at the last minute!
Then Herr Hitler decided otherwise and . . . the lights went out all over Europe. When they went on again, I was no longer a happy, carefree, self-assured teenager, I was a woman, a woman who had suffered, a very different person from the girl I had been in 1939. We were all different. It was impossible to be otherwise.
I had thought I could turn my back on the war, close that door and start afresh. But the memories seemed to colour my every waking moment and sometimes my dreams. In an effort to forget I refused to join the club which former members of SOE had started. I shunned old friends, those I had worked with and especially those young women whose men had survived. I didn’t want to share in their happiness. I realize now how foolish and selfish I was. But perhaps it was my way of coping.
The youth who had survived the war went crazy. They were heady with the newfound freedom peace brought, blinded by the brilliant lights blazing and flashing across the city again, drunk with the sudden release of tension and fear, and the heartbreak of war. And I joined the crowd. London was swinging in those immediate post-war years. A spate of musicals had arrived from the United States: Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Carousel, each one more gay and colourful than the one before. The Café de Paris came into its own again, and in order to attract a younger clientele they founded the Guinea Pig Club, offering Sandhurst cadets and young subalterns an evening with dinner and the cabaret for a guinea. And, of course, ‘ringside’ tables to show the world how young and swinging they were. Geoffrey immediately became a guinea pig, and I often made up the numbers when their party needed an extra woman.
There were rumours at the time of a budding romance between the young Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, a handsome naval officer, and every time they arrived, or even if the princess came with a party of friends without her handsome prince, the band would immediately break into: ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’. It was reported that one evening in the ladies’ powder room Princess Elizabeth rebuked her younger sister, Princess Margaret Rose, as she was then known, for putting on too much lipstick, whereupon Margaret was heard to reply, ‘You look after your Empire and leave me to look after my face.’ Though how true this is, I cannot say.
A couple of days before he left Sandhurst I received an SOS from my little bro. ‘You remember Archie, don’t you?’ I didn’t. ‘He was one of the party the last time we went to the Café de Paris,’ Geoffrey explained. ‘Henrietta was with him. Well she’s let him down. He’s frightfully cut up about it. He was taking her to the passing-out ball on Friday and she’s changed her mind: decided at the last minute to go to her best friend’s engagement knees-up instead. It’s too late now for him to invite anyone else, so I’ve offered him you. You’re coming to the passing-out parade, so you’ll be there anyway. I told him you’re terribly old. Twenty-four. But, as he said, “I can’t be fussy at this stage, old chap. I’ll have to take what I can get.”’
So I swallowed my hurt pride and went. And had a wonderful time. Archie picked me up in his old boneshaker, which appeared to be held together with bits of string and sealing wax. We almost made it to the top of the hill when it fell to bits. Archie got out, opened the bonnet, poked about, scratched his head, then gave the engine a few resounding whacks with a shooting stick. ‘I must have run out of petrol,’ he announced apologetically, when his efforts produced no visible result. He gave me a sweet smile. ‘If you wouldn’t mind getting out and giving the old girl a push, once we get to the top of the hill we can roll down to the garage at the bottom.’ I did mind but I didn’t see I had any choice. The other alternative would have left us stuck there so, hitching up my trailing ball gown, I got out and pushed.
Several chauffeur-driven limousines carrying the season’s ‘debs’ to the passing-out ball cruised by, treating us to astonished stares. But no offer of help. We finally slithered to the garage, where Archie asked the attendant for a pint of petrol. He looked at him scathingly, shook his head and cast his eyes skywards – I think he was used in impecunious Sandhurst cadets – before complying with his request. When Archie handed him the money, he sniffed and said, ‘I s’pose you wouldn’t like me to cough in your tyres as well while I’m at it?’ Archie assured him that it wouldn’t be necessary. We finally spluttered through the Sandhurst gates and made it to the ball in one piece. I danced till dawn to the lilting tunes of Humphrey Lyttleton’s band, which later was not allowed to play at Sandhurst, since Humphrey had been at Eton with so many of the cadets that he was treated as one of the party. After a splendid evening, which I wouldn’t have missed for anything, in the pink and golden light of early morning we all punted down to Bray for breakfast.
I was pleased afterwards that I had accepted this rather unusual invitation, since not long after Archie left Sandhurst to join the Gloucesters in Korea he was taken prisoner. Even in my miserable, self-centred state, I’d have had the grace to feel guilty if I’d got on my high horse and taken umbrage and deprived him of his passing-out ball.
Shortly afterwards, in Copenhagen, I met a young Dane who asked me to marry him. Bjorn and I became engaged but mercifully, before we married, the whole situation exploded. I was terribly unhappy, and so was he. I didn’t understand what had happened, and I don’t think he did either. I had thought I was in love with Bjorn. Perhaps I was. I realize now that I was desperate to find the love I had lost. To be loved again. I thought that with Bjorn I could replace the love I had lost when Bill did not return, which is where I made my mistake. One cannot replace one love with another. Each is separate and special.
Before I came to my senses, I was to go through this experience again a few years later when one of my brother’s fellow officers, who had been with him in Malaya, proposed to me. I met Andrew at a New Year’s Eve regimental ball. I danced with him, but no more than with the other men in our party, so I was surprised when, the following morning, he rang me at the hotel where I was staying the night and invited me to lunch. Lunch drifted into tea and, finally, he offered to drive me back to London. He said he was going that way, and that it wasn’t a detour, but I don’t think that was strictly true. Before we parted he asked me whether I would care to accompany him on the following Saturday to a point-to-point meeting near where he was stationed. That meeting drifted into dinner and another drive back to London. I didn’t enquire where he got his petrol coupons from. Petrol was still in short supply and strictly rationed. The following weekend he was on duty but he invited me to the traditional curry lunch in the mess after church parade.
By now I was getting to know his fellow officers, some of whom were married. Offers of beds in married quarters whenever I was there for a weekend began to flow towards me from every direction. I was enjoying Andrew’s company; we laughed a lot, I liked his friends and I gradually began to wonder whether I hadn’t fallen in love. So when, one Sunday afternoon, while having tea in the River Room at the Savoy, Andrew produced a small black velvet box with a beautiful five-diamond ring inside and told me, ‘Those five diamonds mean “Will you be my wife?”’, I accepted his proposal. As he slipped the ring on my finger I truly believed I was in love and had finally wiped out the past and found happiness. But one Saturday afternoon, when we were discussing the plans for our wedding, to his bewilderment, I gave Andrew back his beautiful ring. I don’t know what went wrong. I, too, was bewildered. He took it very well. Perhaps he had also begun to realize that we had both made a mistake. Nonetheless, I was desperately unhappy, not understanding why all my friends seemed to sail through engagements into happy married life, while mine tended to disintegrate at the last moment.
Between my two engagements I had fallen in love yet again, this time with a German, a former Luftwaffe pilot. I met Franz through my father, who had been part of a reconciliation programme called the World Friendship Organization. I don’t think it was very well known o
r had a very long life, but my father was involved in it for three or four years. I remember meeting Dutch and Danes and Germans who passed through his hands, and I helped him entertain them. Franz was slightly older than the others, twenty-eight at the time, and had come on a study tour. My father asked me to show him the sights. There was an instant rapport between us, and I think, had he been allowed to settle in England or even been prepared to emigrate to the New World, as so many young people were doing immediately after the war, I would have married him. But he was fiercely patriotic, viscerally attached to his country, in spite of the fact that his father and his brother-in-law, both Army officers, had lost their lives because of their anti-Nazi sentiments. He wanted to rebuild Germany, put it back on its feet with a new regime. And I wasn’t prepared to help him. Quite apart from my feelings, in 1949, marriage to a German was unthinkable, especially if I wanted to put the war behind me and live a ‘normal’ life. I realized, too, that I would have hurt my family, who had suffered such tragic losses, and also lost most of my friends, who would have either condemned me or shunned me. It occurred to me that Franz might even have flown the plane which dropped its bombs the night my cousin’s wife was killed, or those which destroyed my grandparents’ home. But apart from that, deep down I knew I could never marry a man whose countrymen had tortured and killed so many of my friends; nor could I go and live in Germany and become what was still considered one of ‘the enemy’. At the time, the ‘no fraternization’ rule between the local population and the British occupying forces in Germany was strictly enforced. How different it would have been today! So, once again, there were two unhappy people.
Confused and uncomprehending, I began to wonder whether this was to be the pattern of my life from now on: finding love and then seeing it evade my grasp. A couple of years later, when my second engagement was broken, I asked myself how many more lives I was going to damage before I either found the right man or gave up the idea of marriage altogether.