Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  Time, however, had flowed swiftly under the Admiralty’s Arch. By then Pérès had found himself a most congenial companion ashore. He greeted the news of his success in this dispute over his naval status with the demand that now he must also be allowed to sail with the lady of his heart on board.

  Again it was frantically explained to him that on none of His Majesty’s ships were women allowed to sail.

  ‘All right,’ answered Pérès logically, ‘then I do not go to sea.’ After that he made discussion doubly difficult by suddenly forgetting all his English and talking only French.

  In the end, complete with straight rings on his cuffs and his mistress on board – herself carrying the rank of an officer – Pérès sailed into the Bay of Biscay. The Belgian who masqueraded under the name of Patrick O’Leary sailed with him.

  On a subsequent special landing operation, which it was his task to supervise, O’Leary was cut off from the Fidelity which, complete with her captain and her captain’s mistress, then had to abandon him in the fading darkness. This was the man Nancy demanded of Garrow that she should meet, the man who was to assist in their circuit. He was brought by Garrow to her flat. She liked him at once and he liked her. Instinctively she realised, however, that he did not like Henri, which upset her. She decided, however, that that was a matter between the two men themselves and so determined, loyally, to continue her endless travels to Cannes, Nîmes, Nice and even Perpignan. She also continued her normal social life in Marseille and her charitable works for people like the Ficetoles.

  Calling on Mme Ficetole one day she learnt that Monsieur Ficetole was anxious to start a business of his own as a carrier. He wanted to buy a horse and cart.

  ‘Well, why doesn’t he?’ demanded Nancy.

  ‘It is the money,’ Mme Ficetole explained.

  ‘Then I shall see Henri,’ Nancy announced. ‘Don’t worry about it any more.’ Tactfully changing the subject, she asked, ‘How are the children?’

  Mme Ficetole explained that they were not very well. The food available to a poor family in wartime Marseille was not good for growing children. Nancy made a note to do something about this too and then took her leave.

  She went direct to Henri. The result was an interview between Henri and Ficetole. Several days later Ficetole was in the carrying business with a horse and cart. The horse he immediately christened Picon II!

  At this time the mother of one of Nancy’s closest friends died. As a compliment, she was invited to the lying-in-state of the dead woman.

  ‘Must I go?’ she asked Henri.

  ‘Afraid so, my dear,’ he told her. ‘It would be considered very rude if you didn’t.’

  ‘But, Henri, I hate dead things. I’m terrified of them.’

  ‘I know, Nanny, I know,’ he reassured her, ‘but just walk past the coffin and don’t look.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed doubtfully. ‘I suppose I could do that.’

  Clad sombrely in black, she and Henri attended their friend’s home. There the men lined up in one file, the women in a second, and then each file slowly moved past either side of the body of the old lady who lay pallid in her coffin. With her head turned desperately away from the casket, Nancy shuffled forward.

  And then, at the very last second, the bereaved daughter, as a special sign of Nancy’s esteemed position in the family, grasped her hand and placed it caressingly on the cheek of the old dead lady.

  Nancy trembled, felt her knees melt, heard the pound of blood in her ears and waves of alternate clamminess and chill sweeping over her forehead and was horrified to find herself thinking – almost aloud – ‘My God, I’m going to faint.’

  Swaying, she forced herself to remain in the file of mourning women. The second she was out of the room she signalled Henri in the file of mourning men and, as he walked swiftly to her, almost sobbed at him, ‘Quick, get me outside.’ Gently but firmly her husband led her away.

  Later, when Henri’s own mother died and Nancy had to attend her lying-in-state – not to have done so would have been regarded as insulting in the extreme – Henri carefully kept his wife out of the room until all the rest of the family had paid their last respects. Then he shut the coffin lid firmly and led Nancy quickly past it.

  ‘I feel such an idiot, Henri,’ she apologised. ‘I don’t know, though, I just can’t stand any sort of violence. Death always seems violent to me.’

  ‘I know, Nanny,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t worry about it any more.’

  Another Christmas passed. It had seen the Japanese, encouraged by Germany’s resounding victories over the Soviets, bomb Pearl Harbor, and the United States come into the War in Europe. This meant that, as well as the Fort St Jean internees and (more recently) RAF aircrew, there were now American aviators to be shuttled along the escape circuit. The Milice and the German and Italian commissions consequently redoubled their efforts to check all unauthorised movements and black marketeering. But the circuit carried on undeterred and evaders in increasing numbers continued to cross the Pyrenees and eventually to return to England.

  Garrow’s career (in jeopardy ever since he had escaped from Fort St Jean and gone into hiding) now came to an abrupt conclusion. He was arrested by the police and tried and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in Meauzac concentration camp. First, though, he was to serve three months’ solitary confinement in Fort St Nicolas in Marseille. It thus became O’Leary’s task to take over command of the circuit from Garrow.

  For the first two months O’Leary had to go north to organise contacts, and during that time Nancy still worked in Marseille. Then O’Leary returned and arrived suddenly at Henri’s flat. It was about ten minutes before noon when he appeared at the door. Nancy let him in, offered him a drink, told him Henri would be home any minute for lunch and then asked him why he had come.

  ‘I’m afraid I need money again,’ he said.

  ‘Will you ask him for it yourself, please, Pat?’ Nancy asked him. ‘I’ve collected more from him already than I should have done. He seems to have so many people to look after. But if you ask him, he’ll give it to you. He likes you.’

  ‘All right,’ O’Leary replied. ‘I’ll ask him. I’m sorry we all call on him so often.’ He and Nancy stared at one another as he spoke. She noticed the penetrating quality of his eyes and the curious flecks in their dark blueness; but she continued to stare so that he became disconcerted by the dispassionate candour of her gaze, and was glad when her eyes, still staring at him, suddenly lost their thoughtfulness and went blank. O’Leary then knew that in future, if he wanted financial support from the Fioccas, he would have to respect Henri more. He had understood from Nancy’s stare that at last she was telling him that he must no longer take her husband’s generosity for granted. A few minutes later Henri arrived home and he and O’Leary started talking earnestly together.

  Watching them, Nancy felt a twinge of foreboding. O’Leary was a young man of about thirty, with sparse blond hair; tallish and authoritative. Henri was tall, strongly built, heavy, elegant, humorous and suave. They made an oddly contrasting pair. Finally, Henri took out his wallet and passed the other man a wad of notes. O’Leary, whom he had always liked, had now also won his confidence. His wife sighed heavily then as she realised that, though O’Leary accepted the money, neither the confidence nor the liking were returned by the Belgian.

  In the midst of all her other activities Nancy, having just received a letter from Garrow in Fort St Nicolas, decided to add another and much more dangerous project to her list.

  Garrow had written that after three months’ solitary confinement he was very emaciated and consequently anxious about the outcome of his ten years’ sentence. Nancy determined to visit him in the fort, to find out how he was, to feed him and eventually – if possible – to organise his escape.

  Before lunch she had dispatched the letter which was to be the basis of all her future actions in this affair. Mon cher cousin , she addressed Garrow, as the daughter of your mother’s sister, I am most s
orry to hear of your condition and will try to obtain permission to visit you.

  Knowing that all letters to Garrow would be censored before he received them, she felt confident that the authorities would draw the conclusion she desired from this odd and mendacious epistle. They would decide that Mme Fiocca’s mother had had a sister who married a Briton and produced a son. Thus, Ian Garrow, the Scot, and Mme Fiocca, the Frenchwoman, would be first cousins!

  When Henri arrived home for lunch he took Nancy to task. ‘You’ve heard from Garrow, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, how did you know?’

  ‘I saw his letter in the box this morning as I left for work. Recognised his writing on the envelope.’

  ‘He’s ill in Fort St Nicolas.’

  ‘Nanny, I forbid you to try to see him.’

  For some minutes Nancy did not reply. She knew exactly why Henri forbade her to see Garrow and she knew also that, in many ways, he was perfectly correct to do so. Her position grew daily more vulnerable. As an Australian working under the noses of the Milice and the Gestapo, to contact Garrow now, even as his fictitious first cousin, would hardly improve matters. Also, Henri and his own family were being irrevocably compromised by her activities if ever they should be uncovered.

  Nevertheless, there was the matter of her own conscience to be considered. France may have been defeated but Britain had not – and Nancy now felt very British. France may have been occupied but her soul had not – and, in this respect, Nancy also felt fanatically French. It was a matter upon which everyone had to take his own decision and there could be no other loyalties once the decision was made.

  ‘Henri,’ she murmured, ‘Garrow is ill. If anyone, even a dog, were in his position, I’d feel I had to do something about it. You might as well know that I’ve already sent him a letter making out that we’re first cousins. He is my oldest aunt’s son! If that works with the fort authorities, I intend on seeing him and doing everything I can to help.’

  ‘Is that your final answer?’ Henri asked quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then we shan’t discuss it any more,’ he concluded. ‘I disapprove completely but you may count on me for anything you need. Now – where shall we go for dinner?’

  It was not only Henri who was alarmed by Nancy’s determination to help Garrow. To O’Leary her blatant pose as the cousin of a jailed Englishman seemed most dangerous. Furthermore, he disapproved strongly of the work she was doing with the Toulon group of French Resistance workers. And so, for some time after this the British organisation – convinced that she was leading too dangerous a life – kept clear of her.

  She visited the fort three times a week as soon as permission had been granted for her to do so. She actually saw Garrow on her first visit and on two other occasions. To see him, however, was not her purpose: the main object of her visits was to take him food and to cheer him up by making him realise that he was not forgotten. Every day, when she did not actually visit the fort, she wrote to him – a thing that Henri found difficult to understand.

  ‘You don’t love him, Nancy,’ he protested. ‘How can you write to him so often?’

  ‘Because I know how much letters, no matter who they were from, would mean to me if I were in his position,’ she retorted.

  He put his arm round her shoulder affectionately. ‘You’re a very kind creature,’ he told her. ‘Sometimes I think I’m not good enough for you. You go on writing your letters.’

  The man in the next cell to Garrow, a Frenchman called Frank Arnal, was that week acquitted on his appeal against a similar sentence to Garrow’s. He was released and came to see Nancy and promptly resumed his Resistance work.

  Arnal encouraged Nancy from two points of view. First of all because he had appealed against his sentence and been released – if he had succeeded, why shouldn’t Garrow? Secondly, because he had told Nancy that there was a guard at the Meauzac concentration camp (where Garrow would be sent if his appeal failed) who could be bribed so that eventually an escape should be possible. It had already been contrived once, Arnal told her, so there was no reason why it should not be contrived again.

  O’Leary thereupon undertook to find a good counsel for Garrow’s defence in his coming appeal. At the same time Nancy decided, as a special bolster to Garrow’s morale, to send to him regular consignments of Scotch whisky.

  She cultivated a hotelier known to have a stock of Scotch and she visited him every day. On each of her subsequent visits to the fort she would deliver, in her food parcel, a bottle of hair tonic or cough mixture or patent medicine. Every single bottle arrived intact and it was never suspected that none of these bottles was what it purported to be.

  But then, to Nancy’s great disappointment, Garrow lost his appeal. She made inquiries and found that the counsel whom O’Leary had hired for Garrow had not even troubled to appear on behalf of his client. Very angrily she went to see O’Leary and told him exactly what she thought of his lawyer. Having put him at a marked moral disadvantage by this furious and justifiable outburst she then made her offer.

  ‘If I do all the preliminary work,’ she demanded, ‘will you get him away later on?’

  O’Leary nodded.

  ‘Out of France?’ she persisted.

  ‘Out of France,’ he promised. So the breach with O’Leary’s group was healed.

  At this time Nancy at last decided that it was no longer fair to Henri, with his business and family responsibilities, to have so many visitors, many of them now active enemies of Germany, coming into his home. For one thing, the flat opposite was owned by a Vichy commissaire and the commissaire was watching them much too closely. Accordingly, she asked Henri for the money to lease another flat well away from their home – a flat which O’Leary and the organisation could then use as their sole rendezvous.

  Blissfully married, she had to pretend to the estate agent, who knew her well, that she now had a lover which made a second apartment necessary. Full of Gallic understanding, he made one available to her. Henri was highly amused at the deception.

  Every day after that she ordered two gallons of milk (and meat and vegetables and bread in similar quantities) for this flat alone. She hired a maid to clean it and to deliver the food. She herself went to the flat only twice after she leased it. As Garrow’s ‘cousin’ she was too conspicuous; and as a member of the Toulon group she was sometimes not even welcome. Henceforth all the planning for O’Leary’s group was done at this apartment.

  Nancy naturally took extraordinary care that as few other people as possible should know for what purpose the flat was used – the woman who had the apartment beneath it, for one. On the stairs one day, on Nancy’s second and final visit to the place, this woman stopped her.

  ‘Madame Fiocca, I have been worried about you,’ she said. ‘You have bad colic, yes?’ Nancy was about to deny the colic strenuously when the extraordinary nature of the question suddenly made her cautious.

  ‘How very kind of you to concern yourself,’ she replied. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Because your cistern goes twenty times a night,’ the good woman told her. ‘Every night, when I hear your cistern, I think to myself, that poor girl . . .’

  Nancy suppressed the temptation to laugh. ‘Don’t worry any more, my dear,’ she reassured the other woman, ‘today I have been much better!’

  Then she rushed upstairs and burst into the flat.

  Half humorously, half angrily she rebuked the men inside. ‘How often have I told you lot not to pull the chain unless it’s absolutely necessary?’ she demanded. ‘Thanks to all of you, and your exaggerated sense of hygiene, I have been saddled with a terrible bout of colic.’ The men looked puzzled and crestfallen. Very clearly she explained to them what she meant, and with considerable authority she concluded, ‘ You should know as well as I do that we’re all in too deep to draw attention to ourselves. In future, more security and less lavatory flushing.’

  When they had married, Henri had given Nancy a chalet near Néva
che. She and a friend, Mme Marques, chose this moment in the fine summer of 1942 to visit the chalet to buy a black-market piglet and to give the two Ficetole children a holiday in the country.

  The piglet, Nancy arranged, would be fed by a neighbouring farmer and when it had reached full growth would be shared equally between them. A small piglet could easily become a 300-pound pig. That would mean 150 pounds of pork, bacon and ham each. And in hungry France it was well worth the money spent on the piglet and the train and bus fares all the way to Névache to get 150 pounds of pork.

  The day the two women and the fattened Ficetole children were preparing to return to Marseille, three Frenchmen arrived, all of them in trouble with the Vichy police. They had been sent to the chalet by Nancy’s contact in Toulon. Until arrangements were made to get them away again, Nancy would have to stay on at the chalet to look after them. She did so cheerfully, confining her three hunted guests to the upstairs rooms.

  The next morning, she went down to the village to gossip and so find out casually about Milice checking points and other matters of esoteric interest to people such as herself. In the course of this gossiping the village teenagers complained to her that nowadays they could never dance because the authorities – acting on German orders – forbade all public assemblies. And a public assembly was any group of more than three people.

  ‘You can’t dance with only three people,’ they grumbled, ‘and the police won’t let us use any hall around here.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ suggested Nancy, always anxious to undermine authority. ‘Why don’t all of you come each night to my chalet? There are no police for miles around up there and I’ve got a gramophone with lots of dance records.’

  Thereafter there were illegal refracteurs upstairs and illegal dancers downstairs for night after night at Nancy’s chalet. The Ficetole children loved it. And each morning Nancy and Mme Marques would go down on their knees and scrub all the dancers’ heel marks off the white wooden floor – using much elbow grease and steel wool – so that no trace of these activities should ever remain to be seen by the suspicious eyes of either Milice or Gestapo.