Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  Such blunt candour was too much for the guide. He asked a few cautious questions. Nancy gave the correct answer to each. He went with her to collect the rest of the party and then they began the trek into Spain.

  They walked in the darkness for about three hours, then they met the main group of guides. These were all men who, before the War, had made their living entirely by smuggling across the frontier. Then it had been contraband; now it was bodies. Some of them were a cut-throat-looking crew but they knew their job – and their mountains – perfectly.

  Nancy and her party were hidden for the rest of the night in a hollow on the hilltop and at dawn were pushed into the back of a coal lorry. Coal, loose and in bags, was then packed all around and over them. The lorry drove off. Soon they entered the twenty-kilometre strip of French territory which the Germans had made a forbidden zone to anyone who did not actually live in it. At the end of this zone lay the frontier. On the other side of the frontier was another forbidden zone to a depth of fifty kilometres. These seventy kilometres in all, and the Pyrenees (which were heavily patrolled with sentries and dogs), were the danger areas.

  The coal truck was frequently checked on its run through the French zone but no attempt was ever made to search the coal in the back. At last the truck halted and they were told to get out and take cover in the bush. Wearily they flopped to the ground and allowed a sickly sun to warm their grimy bodies.

  At sunset two guides and a dog called for them. The senior guide was a Spaniard whose Resistance name was Jean. He was wanted in France by the Gestapo for espionage and in Spain by the police for murder. He was tall, thin and dark, about thirty years old, and seemed unperturbed by the price that lay on his head on both sides of the frontier.

  The second guide was a young woman, Pilar. She was a good-looking peasant, as strong as an ox and just as taciturn as Jean. The dog belonged to her and it knew its way backwards and forwards across the mountains even better than the Spaniards did. Somehow Nancy felt that the presence of this dog, a mongrel fox terrier, was a good omen. Sadly, though, she wondered how things were going with Picon . . . and Henri . . . and her friends.

  All of them were instructed to remove their shoes and put on rope espadrilles instead. These were better for rock climbing and quieter. They had to go by the rockiest paths because these alone could foil the soft-padded police dogs of the Gestapo. They had to march silently because sentries on the dark mountainsides relied even more on hearing movement than they did on seeing it.

  They set off. For forty-seven hours on end they marched and climbed with only ten minutes’ rest every two hours. Jean and Pilar were implacable about this – and the little terrier pranced with impatience at every stop.

  Each time they rested they had to take off their wet socks and put on dry ones – otherwise the wet socks would have iced up and frostbitten their feet. They would keep the wet socks in their pockets and then put them on again, after removing the dry ones, just before the march resumed.

  Jean allowed no talking or coughing or smoking. If anyone wanted to cough he had to smother it completely under his coat or with his fist, anything, so long as there was no noise.

  All of them began to be afflicted by colic. They had eaten some black-market lamb and it had apparently been tainted. The trip became hellish. One guide always went ahead, preceded by a silent, prancing mongrel dog, and the other always flogged them on from the rear.

  They clawed their way up into the highest, craggiest reaches of the Pyrenees, using their hands and their feet equally, panting and despairing. They were hungry, which was bad, but they were also thirsty, which Nancy considered worse. She ate handful after handful of snow. The others argued with her about it but she ignored them. Nothing would stop her walking but she must have something to drink. It was a bitter, alpine climb.

  Time after time they would ask Jean or Pilar how much further.

  ‘One more mountain,’ they were invariably told. But each time they crossed a mountain, a valley and another mountain lay ahead. Ruthlessly they were driven on.

  On the second part of their forty-seven-hour trek they were lashed with a biting snowstorm. A blizzard raged and the ice and snow cut into them like needles. But they pressed on through it. One of the Americans cried out that they must halt, he couldn’t go on. Nancy slapped him savagely and he went on. One of the women said she could go no further. Nancy whispered to Jean, and Jean calmly tripped her into an icy stream. Then she had to go on or freeze to death.

  But finally it ended. They reached a hut, lit a fire, dried their clothes and waited until nightfall. Ahead lay a river. When they crossed that river they were out of German-controlled Europe and into Spain. Nancy slept badly as she waited on this last leg of her dash for freedom. There were several alarms, but nothing came of them.

  Then, under cover of darkness, they eluded the sentries, crossed the river and left the sentries behind them.

  ‘Henri, my dear,’ Nancy muttered as she reached the other side, ‘I hope you’ll be as lucky in your journey as I’ve been.’

  9 WELCOME HOME

  While Jean went ahead into Barcelona to warn the consul that British and American subjects had arrived somewhat unexpectedly in neutral Spain, Pilar took the party to a farm.

  There they were given their first meal in thirty-six hours – baby rabbits and chicken, with a batter of egg, flour and breadcrumbs, deep fried in boiling oil and then garnished with mayonnaise and garlic. They ate their fill, dried their clothes and then slept till dawn.

  As the sun rose they were all told to go and hide in the fields. They were well fed during the day and returned to the house at nightfall. Jean reappeared and announced that the consul had promised to send a car to a place near the farm the following morning. This car would collect all the escapees – and their worries would then be over. In the meantime, afraid of police in the area, he had suggested that they should spend the night in the barn, rather than in the house. Happily, they all climbed into a haystack.

  A few minutes later Bernard whispered urgently to Nancy, ‘This accursed colic; lend me some of your toilet paper.’ Nancy reached into her bra and produced two sheets. ‘The last,’ she told him gravely. Hurriedly he left – followed by one of the women who was having the same trouble.

  The haystack now held Nancy, Jean, Pilar and her dog, two Americans, a Frenchwoman and the New Zealander; and that was the moment the Spanish police – suspecting the farmer of hoarding produce – chose to swoop on the farm. Stamping round in their heavy boots, looking fearsome in their medieval three-cornered black hats, they found nothing in the house or under the farm machinery that lay scattered round the bam. They were about to leave when one of them casually prodded the haystack with a pitchfork. In the process he prodded Pilar.

  With a shriek of rage and pain Pilar bounded out of the stack, hotly pursued by her mongrel dog. Sure-footed she leapt from one piece of farm machinery to another and then out of a window. The guardias civiles all started firing at her like madmen – but they all missed. The last sight Nancy had of her was of a lithe figure vanishing into the dark field. Streaking ahead of her, dashing non-stop on the route to France he knew so well, was Pilar’s mongrel dog!

  Deciding not to wait until she too was stabbed with a pitchfork, Nancy calmly climbed out of the haystack and sat down on a plough. She was not going to worry. She spoke no Spanish and she had no idea what would happen, but she was not going to worry. Quickly the rest of the party were winkled out and a policeman came and examined Nancy suspiciously.

  ‘Americano,’ she assured him blandly. At that the Spaniard burst into a blood-curdling diatribe of which she understood not a syllable, except that she gathered he did not approve of her story.

  With difficulty the Spaniards persuaded their undisciplined prisoners to fall in and start walking. They marched about three miles to a town called Besalu. They were thoroughly happy and sang rude songs in French and English all the way because they were confident that at any moment the
consul would intervene and then all would be well.

  A little to their surprise, however, the consul did not materialise and instead they found themselves bundled unceremoniously into a top floor cell in Besalu’s jail. The cell was about six feet wide by ten feet long; there was straw on the floor and a can in the middle; it had obviously been constructed in the days of the Inquisition; it was freezing cold and there were eleven inhabitants in it already – so that now the cell held seventeen. They were not comfortable that night and they slept badly.

  When morning came there was still no consular intervention. Jean explained this unfortunate diplomatic lapse by pointing out that there was a festival on (and, of course, no one in Spain ever transacted any official business whatsoever during festivals) so there would be no one available with whom the consul could negotiate the prisoners’ release.

  ‘How long does this festival last?’ Nancy demanded.

  ‘Three days,’ Jean answered lugubriously.

  For that time not only the government officials but also the jail officials took a holiday. No one thought of bringing the seventeen prisoners in the upstairs cell any food at all. On the third night, however, Nancy was taken rudely out of the cell and led downstairs.

  ‘Why me?’ she wondered as she followed the sentry. She was not at all pleased with this sign of special notice. And when, downstairs, they chained her ankles and wrists and then questioned her at great speed for several hours, she was even less pleased. She made no attempt to understand a word they said and only occasionally said anything herself. When she did speak it was always to announce that her name was Nancy Farmer and that she was an Americano . She relied on the British Consulate to hear about her interrogation, and to realise that the name Nancy Farmer indicated the initials NF and that NF meant, in reality, Nancy Fiocca.

  Exhausted by their attempts to question her and make her talk, the Spaniards suddenly offered her a drink.

  ‘Whisky,’ one urged enticingly in curious English. ‘Scotch!’ Nancy looked at the bottle. It was pure Scotch whisky, made in Spain.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m hungry.’ She made unmistakable gestures to indicate that she wanted food, not drink. So they offered her food – which only convinced her that they were going to take her outside after a last meal and shoot her. She knew that Spain was full of Nazi agents and that the government and police were often bullied or bribed by the Germans into doing what suited the Reich. Now she was certain that the Gestapo, realising that she had escaped them in France, had arranged that the police should execute her in Spain. Accordingly, on the principle that if she put off the last meal she would also postpone the execution, she refused to eat.

  For a while they left her alone and then they returned to the fray – this time with a little tailor who spoke bad but comprehensible English. He informed her that he was to act as interpreter.

  ‘Well, now, you don’t need an interpreter to be shot,’ Nancy told herself, immediately sensing that somehow or other she had gained an advantage over the Spaniards. Again she was offered food. This time she chose to be aggressive. Filled with that sense of superiority towards the natives that afflicts some Britons overseas, she announced arrogantly, ‘I’ll have nothing to eat or drink, thank you, unless all my friends in the cell get some too.’ This the tailor volubly translated.

  All her friends were at once dragged downstairs, chained up and fed. Again Nancy complained through the interpreter. ‘How dare you expect us to eat with chains on our wrists?’ The chains were removed. After which they ate a huge and cheerful meal and topped it all off with two of the bottles of pure Spanish Scotch whisky. Then they returned to their cell, Nancy included, and there they were each of them very sick indeed into the can, because pure Spanish Scotch is not good for the stomach.

  In the middle of the night Nancy was again led out of the cell and the tailor-interpreter told her she was to be taken to sleep in a hotel in the village. Assuming that this move must have been prompted by consular intervention in Barcelona, she made no attempt to escape during the night but satisfied herself with being as rude as possible to everyone through the medium of the tailor. The Spaniards accepted her rudeness meekly, thereby confirming her suspicions that all was now well.

  In the morning she was joined by the rest of the party. They were herded into a bus and sat in pairs, each pair chained together. Prisoners sat on the left-hand side of the bus, ordinary passengers on the right – an arrangement to which the ordinary passengers seemed quite accustomed.

  Jean, knowing that he was wanted in Barcelona for a murder he had allegedly committed during the Spanish Civil War, was now getting anxious. He was chained to a Belgian priest and he sat by the bus window. He passed the word along that he would attempt to escape somewhere en route to Gerona, which was the bus’s destination. Guards sat by the front exit and on the full-length back seats as the bus rattled on its way.

  Nancy, sitting immediately in front of Jean, heard him desperately fiddling with the chains on his wrists. Then, after a while, she heard the quiet clicking cease and had to fight with herself so that she would not turn round to see how he was faring.

  Some minutes later, the guard by the front exit looked casually back along his half bus of prisoners – and suddenly his face registered first dismay and then utter horror. Jean’s seat was empty, his window wide open. The guards on the rear seat were talking animatedly amongst themselves. They had been too engrossed in their own discussions to observe Jean’s disappearance through the window.

  The bus jerked to a halt. All the guardias piled out on to the road, and away in the fields to the left Jean was to be seen, leaping and bounding like a deer, bolting to safety. Amid a fusillade of rifle shots from the guards and roars of encouragement from Nancy and her friends, the Spanish guide vanished out of sight. The police blundered into the field after him, slow and cumbersome in their boots. Rifle shots rang out intermittently. Finally, the guards returned, looking self-conscious and ridiculous, and Nancy knew that Jean was safe.

  At Gerona they were told that they were to appear before the governor, charged with illegal entry. On this score the British Vice-Consul, a man called Rapley, advised them to be tactful but not to worry – the Germans having just been routed in Tripoli, the Spaniards were in no mood to be anti-British!

  The case was, in fact, heard that afternoon when a large fat man who sat behind a large fat desk made the motions of going through a formal trial. A present in the right direction having already ensured that he would return a favourable verdict, it was difficult for Nancy to take the fat man as seriously as he took himself.

  ‘You were well-treated in prison?’ he suggested.

  ‘I was not!’ she assured him stoutly. ‘There were seventeen of us in one cell and the lavatory was filthy!’ Rapley flashed a look of reproach at her and she remembered his instructions about being tactful.

  ‘Sorry,’ she announced cheerfully. ‘We were very well-treated, and the lavatory was lovely!’ Apparently, the governor did not consider this tact. He looked furious and dismissed them peremptorily into Rapley’s hands. After a gift of £1,000 there was, of course, little else that he could do, but at least he did it with the worst possible grace. So Nancy took the train to Barcelona and for the first time since 1940 knew that she was really free.

  The British Consul at Barcelona provided Nancy with plenty of money so that, having no financial worries, she stayed for a while in Barcelona and then travelled down to Madrid. The first thing she did when she arrived there was to call at Cook’s and ask whether perhaps they had a trunk for her, addressed to ‘Miss Nancy Wake’ and dispatched by Cook’s at Marseille. The trunk was there and triumphantly she ordered it to be sent to her hotel.

  The loyal Ficetole had done well when, with his cart and Picon II, he had collected the trunk from her flat. He had first taken it to his own home and there, searching out suitable words from advertisements in the paper, had found three large words which he had then cut out and
laid on top of the clothes inside the trunk. When Nancy, in her bedroom in Madrid, opened the trunk, the first thing she saw was Ficetole’s message. Very simply, very touchingly, it read: Love from Henri.

  Complete with her trunk Nancy proceeded on to Gibraltar and there, ten days later, was put aboard one of the ships in a large convoy heading for Britain. Standing by the ship rail, near the gangway, she was soon engaged in conversation by a young man, who obviously approved of her dark good looks, when suddenly she noticed a familiar figure coming up the gangway towards her. It was Micheline, the girl whom, three years earlier, she had escorted home to France from the convent at Weybridge. Micheline was no longer a girl but now a married woman with a baby in her arms. Excitedly Nancy called her name and the young mother rushed forward and embraced her.

  As Nancy took the child out of Micheline’s arms to give her a rest, they chattered together about how they had contrived their respective escapes and why. Finally, Nancy turned round to introduce Micheline to the young man with whom she had been talking. But, depressed by all the symptoms of motherhood he had observed, and mistaking Micheline for Nancy’s hired nurse, the young man had fled.

  ‘I think you’ve disillusioned him,’ Nancy laughed.

  ‘Too bad,’ Micheline replied. ‘By the way, where’s Henri?’

  ‘He’ll be following soon – I hope! How is Mme Digard?’ Whilst the two young women continued discussing their families, Gibraltar began slowly to fall behind them. By sheer chance Nancy was returning to England in June of 1943 with the same girl who had been her companion when, in 1939, she had left it.

  Theirs was a large convoy of seventy vessels in a month when the Bay of Biscay was to be the main target area for U-Boat packs that had just been forced to withdraw from the North Atlantic. The ten-day voyage was depressing and interrupted by constant alarms and attacks from the air. But Nancy felt too exhausted to be frightened and was indifferent to all the hazards of sea warfare. She simply could not believe that anything would happen to her now that she had come so far.