The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (7 page)

I was sent first to Montague Mansions, a block of flats in the street behind Norgeby House, to work with the Crazy Gang, the secret agents I had met that first afternoon when I
was interviewed by Harry Miller. Once I was part of their team, I discovered they were in fact delightful, and very friendly. But all the same the place made me think of a windmill operated by the
Marx Brothers. The doors were always wide open and men and women in shirt-sleeves, mostly men, seemed to be perpetually roaring up and down the corridors, shrieking to each other. The entire block
might have been teeming with members of the Secret Army, but if it was I never found out. We were such a closed group, even among ourselves.

Montague Mansions was never designed to be an office complex. It was a sedate, rather luxurious block of flats which had been taken over by SOE. And it could not have been a more inconvenient
place in which to work. We used to trip endlessly backwards and forwards between Norgeby House and Montague Mansions: the crucial thing we needed or the person we were looking for was always in the
other building. The house had three floors plus a basement. I was working on the top floor. And there was no lift. I cannot think how many times I raced up and down those flights of stairs, and I
do mean raced. I’d caught the bug from all the other hyperactive inhabitants tearing about the place.

On my way down I flew past Leo Marks’s office on the ground floor. Marks was probably the greatest cryptologist of the war. He was very young – only about twenty-two at the time
– short and stocky with a bulbous nose but a captivating smile. He had a great personality. His door was always wide open, and there always seemed to be a party going on inside. Apart from
the fact that he was very popular, there was the added attraction that his mum always sent him to work laden with cakes and sandwiches, which he shared around – commodities that were not to
be found on every table during the war. Leo had been recruited to cope with the coded messages that came in from the different
réseaux
and was in charge of a roomful of decoders,
all girls I believe, who worked in Michael House, a neighbouring building belonging to Marks and Spencer.

Before Leo’s arrival, messages that the decoders found difficult, even impossible, to transcribe – they called them ‘indecipherables’ – were often returned to the
pianist with a request for retransmission. But given how much pressure the radio operators were under, it was inevitable that they made mistakes. Sometimes the organizer dictated messages to the
pianist while he was actually transmitting, which meant he had to encode them as he transmitted – an almost impossible task. And the result was often a jumble of letters which the girls
couldn’t decipher. But when Leo arrived he decided that there was no such thing as an ‘indecipherable’. If the pianist had risked his life to send the message, then the least
people at the receiving end could do was work at it until a solution was found rather than ask the radio operator to risk his life again. He inspired the girls with his enthusiasm, but sometimes
they still had to admit defeat. Then Leo took over, going through endless permutations until he finally deciphered the message – I believe the greatest number was over 900, and it took him
three days to work it out. Leo found perfectly encoded messages suspicious. He concluded that they came either from a German operator who had somehow managed to secure the code or a pianist who had
been arrested and was being forced to continue transmitting under German control, thereby enabling the enemy to discover plans for drops as well as other useful information. But this unfortunate
situation was not as dramatic as it might appear, because it also worked the other way round, to our advantage. If the Section head knew that the code, and possibly the radio operator, were in
enemy hands, he was able to feign ignorance of the fact and reply to the ‘false’ message with ‘false’ information – which might explain how the rumour was spread that
the D-Day landings were to take place near Calais, sending German troops scurrying to the front in the wrong direction. Leo could always recognize an operator’s ‘fist’, or the way
he transmitted. And he could also tell whether the message actually came from our pianist or from a German operator who had either captured the code or was working his set.

One of my first tasks on arrival at Montague Mansions was to make sure that the
messages personnels
, which went out on the BBC every evening, were delivered to the basement by five
o’clock. These were always prepared at the very last minute. I don’t know why. To my mind, they could easily have been handed to me earlier, enabling me to make a regal descent of the
staircase, instead of having to breathlessly hurtle down it like an unexploded bomb and slither into the basement at the last minute, where an elderly sergeant, a hardened veteran from the First
World War, was in charge. Well, in a sense. He had a staff of one: a young corporal, who sat at a table in the far corner of the room, wearing headphones and tapping out something on a machine. I
don’t know what. I had quickly taken to heart the order I had received on my first day not to ask questions. The sergeant appeared to have been born with an unlit home-made cigarette screwed
permanently to his upper lip. What he did I don’t know. He didn’t appear to do anything. But I imagine he must have had some kind of function. He was a pleasant chappie, but then I
suppose he had no reason to be otherwise, since his sole raison d’être appeared to be to stand and glower at the poor corporal. I felt sorry for the young man. But, since he never
looked up from his tapping, I couldn’t smile and convey my sympathy.

These
messages personnels
, which were not coded but were broadcast
en clair,
were the brainchild of Georges Bégué, the first F Section agent to be parachuted into
occupied France, in May 1941. He dropped ‘blind’, that is with no reception committee waiting to receive him, and had to find his own ‘safe house’, from where he transmitted
the first radio message back to London. The person who received him, Max Hymans, lived in Valençay and later became a prominent member of the local Resistance movement, which, with his help,
Georges Bégué recruited. But once the
réseau
was up and running, Bégué realized that in order to receive the necessary supplies of agents, money, arms,
food, ammunition, clothing and combat boots, and also to inform HQ of enemy movements and sabotage operations, a system had to be devised whereby an agent in the field could safely communicate with
London without fear of a message being intercepted by the enemy. Not only had the organizer to send a message via the radio operator during one of his daily ‘skeds’, but there had to be
some means by which London could safely reply, announcing when the requested drop would take place. And that reply had also to be rapid and watertight, with no chance of the enemy intercepting it
and using it to their own advantage, which would have been a hazard had it been sent to the pianist. So the
messages personnels
were born.

I’ve no idea what happened to the
messages personnels
once I’d handed them over, nor do I know how they arrived at the BBC. I imagine someone must have collected and
delivered them. I remember one afternoon crashing into the basement at the last minute and bumping into a young Free French sergeant I had often swayed with on the crowded tube in the early
morning. While clinging desperately to the overhanging straps, in an attempt to remain upright, we always greeted each other with nods and smiles, since we were both attempting to read a newspaper
sent out by the Free French. He got in after me and, oddly enough, left at Baker Street, my stop. Now I knew why. He must work somewhere in the building. We gaped at each other in surprise. I said,
‘You!’ He smiled and nodded. I never saw him again. Perhaps he’d decided to travel by bus. Or perhaps he’d been locked up in a dungeon somewhere because he had been
‘recognized’. We worked in a very funny set-up.

The BBC played a very important role during the war. For France alone there were eight or nine programmes broadcast daily. And the French listened to them, risking arrest if they were
discovered. The Germans also tuned into to the BBC’s programmes and jammed the lines, making listening almost impossible. Sabine, a friend of mine who was a young girl during the war, told me
that before tuning in to the BBC every evening to listen to the news from London, her father used to put a blanket over their wireless set to cushion the sound. He then disappeared beneath it,
followed by as many members of the family as could squeeze in. As she was only eight years old at the time, her presence wasn’t considered essential. But she apparently pushed herself between
a collection of knees to hear the ominous boom of Big Ben followed by the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – da, da, da, dah – before the threat of suffocation forced
her to abandon her post. But one evening her father peered round the blanket and called her back, making room for her close to the set. She was puzzled, but when she began to question him he put
his finger to his lips and said, ‘Shush . . . listen.’ ‘I could hardly believe it,’ she told me all those years later, her eyes shining at the recollection. ‘The voice
of the young Princess Elizabeth, the heir to the British throne, came over the crackling airwaves. I was so excited, I held my breath. She spoke for about five minutes sending a message of hope and
encouragement to the children and young people of France. At the end she said, “My sister, Margaret Rose, is here beside me waiting to greet you.” And the two young princesses sent
their final good wishes before they said goodnight. For me it was the most wonderful moment,’ Sabine continued. ‘The princesses’ tinkling voices had given us hope in the midst of
a dark and dreary war.’ She cannot have been the only young person in France who was helped and encouraged by our future Queen that evening.

The BBC was listened to by millions of French people, and the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth were whistled loudly in the streets, the whistler often putting up two fingers, the defiant
victory signal used by Churchill, to accompany the tune. Suddenly a voice had pierced the darkness, bringing hope and encouragement, boosting their morale and giving them the strength to resist
throughout the years of occupation.

The main programme of the day went out at seven-fifteen every evening. Big Ben chimed the hour. The introductions were made, followed by the latest news. The correct news was always reported,
good or bad. And there wasn’t much good news to report in the beginning. Perhaps that’s why the French went to such great pains to listen, knowing that the news they heard from London
was the truth, because all they were fed by Radio Paris were lies and German propaganda.

I asked Jacques, my husband, who was in France during the greater part of the war, before he joined General (later Maréchal) de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army, to tell me
what the reactions were to the BBC broadcasts. This is what he said.

‘When I was a student, I believed that Paris was the hub of the world, that the sun never set on the French colonial empire and that the French Army, victorious in World War I, was
invincible, the best army in the world. So when, in June 1940, France collapsed, the German Army paraded down the Champs-Elysées, Hitler was photographed at the Eiffel Tower and German
domination and rule penetrated every fibre of my country’s life, disillusionment and humiliation dealt me a devastating blow. A dark cloud had descended on France. In the occupied zone it
hovered overhead. In the so-called “free zone” under the control of the Vichy Government it threatened on the horizon. We were now part of Nazi-dominated Europe, cut off from the
remaining, but dwindling, free world. And our former ally Great Britain had become, so we were told, our enemy.

‘The media – newspaper and radio – was in German hands. The French prime minister, Pierre Laval, loudly declared that he wished for a German victory, while with eloquent
violence Philippe Henriot, the French propaganda minister, known as the French Goebbels, poured out his bitter hatred of the Allies, the Jews, the résistants and, among others, General de
Gaulle.
¹
Every day, Radio Paris broadcast a talk by a well-known journalist, Jean Hérold-Paquis, who always ended his commentary with the stirring
words: “England, like Carthage, shall be destroyed.” Into this despair, the voice of the BBC sounding daily during eight or nine French news bulletins was the only weapon, the only ray
of hope we had left during those dark times. It was strictly forbidden by the Germans to listen to these broadcasts and, if we were caught, the risk was great: arrest, prison, often ending in a
concentration camp. In an attempt to stifle this voice of hope and freedom the Germans jammed the BBC French broadcasts, making listening almost impossible. But since these programmes were
available on several wavelengths, we managed to tune in and, with luck, hear them.

‘Big Ben would chime, followed by toc toc toc toc, toc toc toc, the V for Victory signal tapped out in Morse, then, as the signature tune, Handel’s – an anglicized German, what
irony! –
Water Music,
faded a confident voice would announce: “Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français.” (“This is London. The French speaking
to the French.”)