The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (29 page)

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 bloodstained 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 teens 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.

One particularly hectic evening a secretary, who should have been hovering, was writing a letter to her current boyfriend. Thoughtfully sucking the end of her pen, she looked up and enquired of
the tense sub-editor standing impatiently over the poor harassed translator: ‘Does passionately have one or two
n
s?’ I thought he was going to hit the roof.

We worked in shifts round the clock. When we were on the ‘dawn shift’, preparing the early-morning bulletin or press review, we began at around three in the morning. Since in the
1940s few people had cars, we had to rely on public transport, which didn’t run all night. So we used to arrive at Bush House at some time during the evening, go to ‘Bed
Bookings’, collect our sheets and pillowcase from a rather austere lady called ‘Phil’, who lived in a cubbyhole on the ground floor, off reception, and go to a communal unisex
dormitory for a few hours’ sleep. We didn’t get much. People were coming and going all night and snoring in a variety of languages. Just as one was dropping off, a commissionaire would
tiptoe in and shake the person in the next bed, it could be a man or a woman, and whisper: ‘Your call, sir/madam. It’s two o’clock,’ or three or four or whatever time they
had asked to be roused. Groans and creaking of bed springs would follow as the person shook themselves awake and heaved themselves to the floor.

On the other hand, when finishing a ‘shift’ at some impossible time of the night, if one lived in London, a BBC car would take one home. The chauffeur had orders to always wait until
his passenger had actually entered his or her house or block of flats and closed the door before driving away. It was all very civilized.

Being on the late shift, I walked into the News Room one afternoon to find Lise de Baissac busily typing. We looked at each other in surprise. Introductions were made, and we mentioned that we
had already met, without going into further explanations. It was only later, when we escaped to the canteen, that we were able to take a trip together down memory lane.

One day, Buck appeared in the corridor. He had been asked to do a series of talks and had come have his paper vetted before recording the first one. Once again we neither of us mentioned where
we had previously met. When he came as usual to the office one evening I noticed him chatting amicably to a girl I vaguely knew. She was secretary to one of the ‘high-ups’ in the
Section. Her name was Rée, but I hadn’t liked to ask her whether Harry Rée, one of F Section’s better-known former agents, belonged to her family. Harry was a great friend
of Francis Cammaerts. I think they had been at university together, and both been schoolmasters before the war. It was Harry who had introduced Francis to SOE. So, after Buck ambled off to the
recording studio, I tentatively approached her. She looked up and smiled when I entered her office. ‘Are you by any chance related to Harry Rée?’ I ventured. She gave me a
curious glance.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m his niece. Why do you ask? Do you know him?’ The ice was broken, and I told her I had met her uncle during the war, but didn’t
elaborate further. The secrecy rule still held fast! I glanced down at her left hand. She was wearing an engagement ring. ‘He’s Czech,’ she explained. ‘But there’s no
news!’ I gathered that her fiancé was an agent, but one who would probably not come back. She obviously realized that I knew more than I had revealed about ‘the
racket’.

When the series of talks Buck had been commissioned to give ended, he held a Christmas party in one of the larger basement studios at Bush House. It must have been in December 1947. He invited
former F Section agents to gather there and send greetings over the air to the Resistance workers they had recruited in the field in France. I think it was on that afternoon that I realized that
human reactions can often work in reverse. Having heard so many courageous stories, usually modestly told, from returning agents during their Y9, and been amazed at their incredible bravery in the
face of terrible danger, I came across the reverse reaction. I can only compare it to the elephant and the mouse syndrome.

I was one of the last to arrive in the studio for the party and was met by Odette Churchill, who as Odette Sansom had been Peter Churchill’s courier in the Vosges area. ‘We are
’aving a terrrrible time with Peter!’ she whispered, her eyes rolling theatrically, and her delightful French accent more pronounced than ever. I raised my eyebrows in surprise.
‘’E is terrrrified,’ she announced dramatically.

‘What of?’ I enquired, puzzled. I couldn’t imagine Peter being terrified of anything. Odette looked at me as if I were a complete nincompoop, obviously thinking I should have
immediately understood why he was afraid.