Philly #2
One afternoon in early June, just before the D-Day landings, Tony Bertram told me they would be bringing back a very special pickup that night and he’d like me to be there when they landed.
We were in the Ops Room at the cottage, preparing a French agent for his return and a British wireless operator for insertion into a network in the Corrèze.
I was updating the map with the latest intelligence we had, showing the areas most heavily defended by flak and preparing the maps the Lysander pilot would be using to navigate.
We needed to cut the maps into strips and stick them together to form a long roll that could be unfurled as the journey progressed, making it easier for the pilot to follow the safest route, then we’d add a much larger scale section at the end showing the landing site, helping pinpoint the darkened field where the maquisards would be waiting with their torches.
I could picture it all so well, after my own ‘visits’.
But these days I always felt a pang of dread as I added the final, large-scale map, wondering whether this mission might end up being compromised as Ben’s had been.
Would the faint pinpricks of light guiding in the pilot be torches held by local members of the Resistance, I wondered, or might we be sending him into another trap where German soldiers lay in wait in the darkness?
I was at the airfield the next day in the early hours as the welcome party gathered – a more sizeable one than usual.
We’d heard the pickup had been successful and only then had Major Bertram told me who it was they were bringing over.
The Lysander landed, taxied, came to a standstill beside the hangar, and the three passengers were helped down the ladder.
The first wore a priest’s robes, and I recognised the unnamed man who’d led me to the chateau on my arrival there, and who’d appeared at my bedside from time to time as I hovered between life and death.
The second was a woman, dressed in a tweed suit and a smart hat, carrying a handbag, as if she’d just popped out to the shops rather than escaped from the heart of Nazi-occupied France.
And the third was her husband – the man I’d known as Bolek. British Intelligence had finally brought their most important French connection across the Channel and back to England. Gustave Bertrand stepped forward and shook my hand. ‘Eveline,’ he said. ‘It’s very good to see you again.’
My feelings towards him were a little mixed.
I’d got the impression he was the one who’d been stalling the Polish team’s escape from France, that British Intelligence wouldn’t have sent me to deliver their message to the Poles if he’d heeded it in the first place.
But then I remembered I owed my life to this man, who’d procured the chloroform that had enabled the French surgeon to operate on my leg.
I knew, too, that he had looked after the Polish team, found a safe place for them and given them sanctuary when their lives were at risk.
The British could have tried to bring them across earlier in the war as well but had simply taken their invaluable intelligence – which had helped Alan and Dilly get such a head start with their continuing work on decoding Enigma – and left the Poles in France.
Nothing is ever black and white in life, especially in the world of secrets in which intelligence officers operate.
I knew that as well as anyone. So I welcomed him and Madame Bertrand, and stayed with them in the cottage until the car arrived to take them to their new temporary home.
They were to be living in Hertfordshire, close to the Polish intercept station where Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski were now working.
I never understood it all. I just knew that the complex links between British, French and Polish intelligence continued, that uneasy confederacy of convenience born out of the necessity of war.
In the aftermath of D-Day, more agents were to be dropped into France, building the momentum being gained by the Resistance circuits.
I met Violette Szabo again, the agent known as Louise who’d reported the news of Ben.
She was being dropped into France once more.
We sat in the Operations Room in Tangmere Cottage drinking one cup of tea after another just to pass the time, as we waited for the message to come through giving the go-ahead for her flight that night.
I asked her whether there were any more details she could give me about the sighting of Ben by her contact in the Resistance.
She thought hard, then shook her head. ‘All they said was he was in the prison in Poitiers. He’d tried to escape, apparently, but was caught.
They interrogated him but he said nothing, other than telling them he was a British pilot, despite the fact that he was wearing civilian clothes. ’
Even that snippet of information was a help. The Lysander pilots didn’t wear their uniforms as the missions were so risky and it was always possible they’d need to go on the run. I was more certain than ever the man in the prison in Poitiers was him.
‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ Violette promised. ‘Maybe they’ll have more news of him.’
Just then the phone rang, and Major Bertram answered it.
Violette and I watched him expectantly. He replaced the receiver and shook his head.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘ C’est off. It’s a no-go for tonight.
The weather’s good enough, but the reception committee over there are calling it off because they say there are too many German patrols about. We’ll have to rethink.’
In the end, Violette parachuted into France a couple of days later, leaving from another airfield.
I waited to hear news of her – and hopefully of Ben – but when it finally came it was devastating.
She had landed near Limoges and been dispatched southwards to liaise with a Resistance circuit in the Corrèze.
The area was crawling with Germans, as the Panzer divisions swept northwards in the wake of the Normandy invasions, and the car she was travelling in had been stopped at an unexpected roadblock.
The maquisards she was travelling with were killed and, despite fighting courageously, she was captured and taken for questioning, then deported to the camps in the east.
After that, I stopped asking the other French agents I met at the airfield to try to find out news of Ben for me. They already faced enough risks without feeling they needed to ask any other potentially leading questions. I only learned of the fates of Noor and Violette once the war had ended.
Noor Inayat Khan had been executed in Dachau alongside three other female agents. Her last word was reported to have been ‘ Liberté ’.
Violette Szabo’s life ended in Ravensbrück concentration camp in February 1945, when she was executed alongside two other female SOE agents.
I hoped she still repeated the poem to herself: she’d learned it so well, they could never take it from her no matter what else they did.
And the words would have brought her a little light in that darkest of places.
The twins were toddling by the time the war ended.
They sat beneath festoons of bunting at one of the long trestle tables set up for the VE Day street party in our village, solemnly cramming slices of chocolate cake into their mouths.
We’d made the cake with powdered egg and bulked it out with grated potato, but the addition of the last of our precious cocoa rations had transformed it into something miraculous as far as my babies were concerned.
With the war now over, I redoubled my efforts to try to find out what had happened to Ben.
There was news – and shocking footage – of the liberation of the camps with names like Dachau and Auschwitz.
I scanned the sunken faces on the newsreels, certain I’d recognise Ben if he was there among the living dead they found in those places.
I spoke to people at the Red Cross, and I pestered everyone I could get hold of in the Air Force and in Military intelligence, using every contact I could think of.
Even though I dreaded finding his name on one of the long, long lists of those who’d lost their lives, at least it would have given me the certainty of his death.
It would have ended the not-knowing, given me a resolution to the story I would one day have to tell my children about their daddy.
Although it was hard to leave the cottage where I’d been so happy with Ben, especially through those dark-moon fortnights, and the village that had been such a source of support for me and my twins, I needed a job that would provide for the three of us.
On one of her visits, bringing sweets for the children and the latest copy of Picture Post for me, Jess told me the Government Code and Cypher School had been renamed Government Communications Headquarters, shortened to GCHQ.
The organisation was being moved from Bletchley Park to a temporary new home, and a new site was being developed on the outskirts of Cheltenham.
She put in a word for me with her boss, and so it was that I returned to the world of Signals Intelligence, remaining there for much of the rest of my career as two of the world’s superpowers became locked in the global arm wrestle we came to call the Cold War.
I moved with the twins to Cheltenham from Tangmere and, even though I recognised a few familiar faces at work, we still never spoke about our time at Bletchley Park.
It was only in the 1970s, once enough time had passed and we were released from the promise we’d made when we’d signed the Official Secrets Act so long ago, that the work we did there began to become known.
Over the years, as I continued my search to find out what had become of Ben, I heard the stories of so many others.
There were thousands of people who’d lost loved ones in the war and didn’t know what had happened to them or where they might be buried.
The stories I heard moved me and I suppose they brought me some sort of comfort, too, even if it was only in the knowledge that I wasn’t alone.
I was in the company of many others who had been left in this limbo of not-knowing.
I realised that, even if I couldn’t lay my beloved Ben to rest, perhaps I could help some of those other people find the ones they’d lost. And that was how eventually, after many years at GCHQ, I came to join the JCCC, the MOD’s Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre, an outfit also known more familiarly as the War Detectives.