Nancy Wake: World War Two’s Most Rebellious Spy

by Braddon, Russell

  She was perfectly correct. The ship docked safely at Greenock on 17 June 1943, and the passengers slowly filed along. Soon Nancy reached the immigration official’s desk.

  ‘Name?’ he demanded.

  She told him.

  ‘Passport.’

  ‘I have no passport.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I have no passport. It hasn’t been terribly fashionable to carry British passports in France since 1940.’ The official glared at her suspiciously.

  ‘What documents of identification have you got then?’ he inquired curtly.

  ‘None. The War Office put me on board this ship. You people should have been notified of my arrival by them.’

  ‘Well, we haven’t,’ he snapped. ‘You’d better get back on the end of the queue.’

  Nancy had no intention of returning to the end of any queue. Instead she found an officer who was being repatriated and who had by then become a friend.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ she said. ‘Send this telegram for me when you get ashore.’ She handed him the message she had written out. ‘And for God’s sake don’t let the immigration people know I’ve been talking to you. They’re convinced I’m a spy.’

  Her friend got safely ashore and duly sent off the telegram, which was addressed to Captain Ian Garrow at the War Office. It told him in no uncertain terms exactly what Nancy’s trouble was.

  Whilst she waited for the message to have its effect, Nancy also made herself quite odious to all the officials who kept her in custody and by the time the War Office had sent someone along to collect her, she was no longer talking to any of them. She was placed in a special carriage, all alone, on a train to London. On the outskirts of the city she was taken off the train and driven in a War Office car into the West End. A room had been reserved for her at the St James Hotel. Later she was entertained with a large dinner party at Quaglino’s. Very late that night she went to bed.

  ‘ You’ll never get back ,’ the customs man had threatened her, when she had insisted on sailing to Boulogne with Micheline years earlier. ‘ If you go now you’ll never get back! ’

  Luxuriously she pulled the sheets up round her ears and relaxed in the bed. Well, she’d done it. She’d worked on an escape circuit for two and a half years (1,037 men altogether were to escape from France along the route she helped create). She had engineered Garrow’s escape from imprisonment and she had herself been rescued from jail. She had survived a hundred roadblocks, train checks, control points and dangerous journeys. She had escaped traps, ambushes, the Milice, the Spaniards and the Gestapo. She had fought for her husband’s France and now, at last, she was home. But the War had not ended yet. Nor, though she was blissfully unaware of the fact, had her part in it.

  10 THE MAD HOUSE

  In safety at last, the reaction to endless months of danger, and to the past few weeks of lack of sleep, set in swiftly. For days on end Nancy wanted only to lie in bed or to be alone. Each evening she slipped out on her own into London’s crowds and hid from the people who wanted to entertain and fete her. After a few drinks she would return to the flat she had rented and go miserably to bed.

  It was not until the middle of July that she began to feel her normal cheerful self again. By then, however, she had become convinced that Henri would not be able to follow her out of France, so she called on Free French Headquarters in London and suggested to them that they might care to send her back there as a saboteur.

  Unfortunately, at this time there was considerable antipathy between General de Gaulle and Churchill, and this antipathy was mirrored in Free French Headquarters by the violent suspicions they entertained there against the British War Office.

  The French were slow to accept Nancy’s offer – not because they doubted her value but, frankly, because they suspected that she had been sent to them by the War Office only to spy on their activities and then report back to the British.

  That such spies had been planted in the French headquarters was quickly proved. A War Office representative called on Nancy and asked her why she had offered herself to the French rather than to themselves – a matter that should have been as unknown to them as it was confidential to the de Gaullists.

  Nancy was not lost for a good reason as to why she had not volunteered for MI9. She strongly disliked one of its chief executive officers and she said so. ‘I’d never consider working for him,’ she declared bluntly. ‘Hate the sight of him.’

  ‘Why not join Buckmaster’s group, then?’ they suggested.

  ‘Never heard of it, that’s why. What’s Buckmaster’s group?’

  ‘SOE,’ they told her. ‘Special Operations Executive.’

  Straight away an appointment was made for her to be interviewed by a Major Morell on behalf of SOE. He infuriated Nancy, who had seen more Resistance work than most, by asking a lot of questions which she described to herself as ‘bloody silly’ and which were best summed up in his final query.

  ‘Why do you want to go over to France?’ he asked. ‘Is it because you think the job’s glamorous?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Nancy exploded, ‘if I want glamour I can get much more of it here in London than over in Occupied France.’ So saying, she stalked out of the office and went to lunch with Ian Garrow.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he asked curiously. With great venom she told him. Garrow laughed and they then talked about other things. After lunch Garrow telephoned Major Morell and told him about Nancy’s indignation. Morell was undisturbed.

  ‘Just wanted to see her reaction,’ he said.

  Soon after that Colonel Buckmaster (who had known of her work for some time) himself asked that Nancy should be enlisted in his group. Another appointment was then made and, unhesitatingly, she accepted the invitation. Enlisting under her maiden name of Wake, she signed up for service at the headquarters of a group known most misleadingly as the FANYs.

  The initials FANY stand for First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. The unit had been created in 1907 to enable wealthy women to serve their country in a state of congenial company, mild discipline and attractive uniform. All FANYs were of the same class; rank was quite unimportant and the uniform was flattering. Thus, when Nancy joined the unit, there was a general’s wife who held the rank of private, all ranks wore silk stockings (elsewhere forbidden) and a large proportion of their numbers were in no way connected either with first aid or with nursing – they were, in fact, young women training to be dropped as saboteurs into Nazi-dominated Europe. It was a unit ideally suited to a woman with the temperament of a Nancy Wake.

  That weekend Micheline and a friend called Alfred came to stay with her so Nancy shared her room with Micheline whilst Alfred slept in the front room. She went to bed early and slept soundly, and as she slept she had a most curious dream.

  She saw one of her best friends in Marseille – called Dédée – standing at the door of her flat, saying, ‘Come in.’ Nancy went inside the flat and looked around. ‘Where’s Paul?’ she asked.

  ‘In there on the bed,’ Dédée announced flatly. ‘Go in and see him.’

  Nancy walked through into the bedroom. Lying stretched out on the bed, quite dead, was Dédée’s husband.

  ‘But, Dédée,’ Nancy whispered, ‘he’s dead.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied indifferently. And yet Dédée and her husband had been gloriously in love for fifteen years.

  Then, shrieking, Nancy woke up. She rushed out of her bedroom into the sitting room. Alfred seized her and asked what was wrong. Micheline followed her anxiously.

  ‘It’s Henri,’ she sobbed. ‘I’ve just had a dream. He’s dead. I know it, and I wasn’t there.’

  Desperately the other two tried to quieten her but, inconsolable, she wept on. It was 16 October 1943, and Nancy was illogically certain that her husband was dead.

  For several days Nancy was haunted by the certainty of her dream. Then common sense and the arguments of her friends began to make her see how unreasonable her fears had been.

  ‘Wh
y,’ her friends asked, ‘decide that Henri is dead when the dream you had was about Dédée’s husband, Paul?’

  ‘Because Dédée and Paul were so much in love. She could never have looked at him like that.’

  Could she have looked at Henri like that?

  No.

  ‘Then what are you worrying about? You ate too much for dinner, that’s all that was wrong. Forget it, Nancy.’ And so the conversation switched from Nancy’s dreams to Italy’s declaration of war against her one-time ally, Germany.

  Slowly, then, she forgot it, but always after that she found herself hollowly incapable ever again of feeling close to her husband. Instinctively she took refuge in the thought of getting back to France and resuming her war against the Germans.

  Her training course started. They began in an establishment known respectfully to its inhabitants as ‘The Mad House’. First came the obstacle course.

  ‘These are your instructions,’ the conducting officer told her. His name was Denis Rake and he had once been an actor and his father had been executed with Edith Cavell in the First World War for espionage against the Germans. ‘This is an obstacle course. Each obstacle has a sign showing its point value. The total number of points possible for the course is eighty-five, but you pass if you score fifty. Decide for yourself where you want to start and which obstacles you want to attempt.’ Then she was shown the course.

  There were trees to be climbed, gaps to be jumped, high slack ropes to be crossed with only another slack rope above to be used as a handhold, difficult walls to be scaled, a seventy-foot rope to be slid down, a dizzy platform off which one must jump to catch a rope six feet away and so slither down to safety. Nancy looked at all these obstacles with marked distaste.

  ‘Which would you like to attempt?’ she was asked. The answer that came quickest to her mind was ‘None of them’; obviously, however, that was not what the officer hoped to hear. Cautiously she made her choice. She passed the test, but with no distinction and even less enthusiasm. It occurred to her that in all her two and a half years of Resistance work so far she had never been required to scale a fifty-foot fireman’s ladder and that she would make quite certain that such a frightful contingency should never arise in the future.

  Having thus tested her nerve and her strength, Nancy now found that the organisation wished to test her for imagination and resourcefulness.

  ‘This plot of land is a minefield,’ Rake told her. ‘It is extremely dangerous but you must cross it somehow.’

  Overhead was a horizontal wooden bar about fifteen feet above the ground. Nancy looked at it curiously and decided that it must be there for a purpose. Suddenly it occurred to her that it could be used for swinging – and swinging meant a rope. She searched round the ‘minefield’ and eventually, hidden in a pile of rubbish, found the rope. She tossed one end of it over the bar, caught it as it swung back, tied the two ends of the rope together, grasped the rope high and then flung herself – her knees drawn up – into space across the ‘minefield’. At the furthest point of the rope’s arc, she let go and thudded to the ground safely beyond the danger zone.

  Next she was taken to a rectangular pool of water. The water was only about six inches deep and the pool was twenty feet long by ten feet wide.

  ‘This pool is sulphuric acid,’ she was told. ‘If the acid touches any part of you, you will be badly burnt. You must cross it.’

  Nancy had overheard some gossip among earlier contestants concerning this obstacle and she knew in advance what to look for. It never occurred to her that this was cheating. She wanted desperately to get back to France and she would use any methods now, just as she would then. She made a pretence of fumbling round to find stepping stones and finally, in good time, unearthed three blocks of wood, each about a foot high and eight inches wide. Planting them carefully in the ‘acid’, leap-frogging her way, she walked the length of the pool on top of them. Rake, the conducting officer, duly pronounced her to possess individual imagination and resourcefulness.

  But she was also, it seemed, required to possess a group sense of imagination and resourcefulness. For this purpose she and five men formed a group and they were then asked to manoeuvre heavy weights over high obstacles, to cross ponds that were apparently uncrossable and to project themselves somehow over a barbed-wire barrier six feet thick, six feet high and ‘electrified’ . . . all within a specified time. Each test required all of the group to achieve the crossing (none could be used as a human springboard and then left behind) and the tests certainly demanded the highest degree of cooperation and enterprise among the six team members.

  Nancy, to her delight, found herself with a mad collection of irrepressible team mates and had no trouble at all with the course. They passed their tests with flying colours.

  The next test was to be the one Nancy hated most. It was the room-searching test. Here the ‘room’ was marked out by a series of imaginary lines and, occasionally, by ropes. The candidate was supposed to search, in this non-existent room, for a non-existent paper that was somewhere concealed in the non-existent furniture.

  ‘Ducks,’ Rake reproved gently, ‘you’ve just walked straight through a wall!’

  ‘Hell,’ his candidate exploded, ‘where is the wall?’

  ‘Runs right down there, old thing. Oops – now you’re standing on the sofa.’

  ‘Bloody nonsense,’ she muttered to herself. ‘If they want me to search a room, why don’t they give me a room? It’s no good, Denis. I never could play at make-believe.’

  ‘Sometime you might have to,’ he threatened.

  ‘I doubt the Germans will ever hide imaginary papers in an imaginary room,’ she observed moodily. ‘And if they do, I can’t see London asking me to go and find them. Give me a real room and real papers and I’ll find ’em for you in no time.’

  Rake grinned and understood her point. He had every reason to. He too had already worked in France. He had landed on the Cote d’Azur and had quite often, when in Cannes, taken cover in the hospitable home of none other than Monsieur Miracca, manager of the Palm Beach Casino. Miracca had asked no questions, provided Rake with a bed and a room (from which he could tap out his messages to London) and never mentioned these extraordinary visitations to anyone. After a long tour of very successful operations, Rake – described by his chief, the dissimulating Colonel Buckmaster, as the ‘incomparable Denis’ – had returned to Britain and now helped to instruct new recruits to the cause, like Nancy.

  Next there was an obstacle race. Denis Rake stood at the beginning of a maze of impediments, all marked clearly A or B.

  ‘You will cover the course as quickly as you can,’ he instructed in a whisper, ‘and you will go over everything marked A , under everything marked B. Do you understand?’

  Others preceded her along the course and she was a little perplexed to observe some of them going under and not over A ’s, some going round and not under B ’s. Well, she had been told over A ’s and under B ’s – that was how she would do it.

  All went well till she came to a car tyre that was not marked at all. ‘Over or under?’ she pondered. ‘Through,’ she decided boldly. Halfway through she felt her trousers start to drag off. Almost undressed she fell out the far side, but she continued the course. Under, over, under, over. Colonel Buckmaster and a psychiatrist watched carefully from the sidelines.

  She came to another tyre and looked in amusement across to Buckmaster. ‘Not again,’ she shouted. ‘This time I’d probably lose them entirely.’ Howls of laughter accompanied her as she crawled under the tyre and completed the course.

  ‘Good girl,’ Denis congratulated her.

  The final ordeal at the ‘Mad House’ was an interview with the psychiatrist. Understanding nothing of psychiatry Nancy decided in advance that she would not enjoy this interview. Impatiently she sat in his waiting room until the candidate ahead should be finished. The door opened and she came out. As the door closed behind her she ran quickly across to Nancy and whispered, ‘B
lots. They show you hundreds of blots and ask you what they look like.’

  ‘Well, what do they look like?’ Nancy whispered back.

  ‘Blots! But you don’t say that. You say corsets and butterflies and head waiters and things like that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, but you do.’

  The doorknob rattled and the woman fled. A little puzzled, Nancy entered the psychiatrist’s office.

  He asked her a long series of questions, none of which she considered had anything to do with subversive work in France as she understood it. She therefore amused herself by lying.

  ‘Are your mother and father happy together?’

  Nancy, recollecting how her mother had been alone in life for twenty years, replied, ‘Very.’

  ‘Was your home life a happy one?’

  Nancy, remembering her two attempts at running away, replied, ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Have you ever indulged in fantasies – you know . . . wished your mother was dead or tried to draw attention to yourself by lying, or anything like that?’

  Nancy, who had, at the age of five, stuffed a small cushion down her front and announced that she was going to have a baby (because the pregnant lady next door received so much kind attention) responded gravely, ‘Never.’

  The questions continued and the colourful answers came back readily. Then she was shown the series of pictures made by blots of ink being folded in a sheet of paper so that they squelched symmetrically out on either side of the fold and produced curiously insect-like results. There were about a hundred of them, nightmarish, spidery, of various colours.

  As each one was shown to her the psychiatrist asked her to name the immediate object with which her mind associated it.

  ‘Blot,’ said Nancy. ‘Blot . . . blot . . . blot . . . blot . . . blot . . . blot.’ Every single picture to her looked, she claimed, only like a blot. Expressionlessly the psychiatrist put the papers away. ‘Surely you can see something?’ he suggested.