Rosie's War

by Rosemary Say

  We encountered, in fact, a gentle warmth from the people of the village. I had a long conversation with the owner of a bar-cum-shop who was delighted to discover that my parents’ house (that I was now returning to) was just a mile away from where his brother lived in Cricklewood, North London. I had my first taste of Guinness there and he would not let me pay for it.

  There must have been about thirty of us encamped at the hotel. We were a mixed bag but we were used to that by now: embassy and consular staff on leave, naval officers from Gibraltar and three distinctly rich ladies in furs whom I never managed to engage in conversation. Indeed, once they ascertained I couldn’t make up a fourth at bridge they barely looked at me. One of the officers had been at Cambridge with my brother. We talked at length after dinner but it was rather hard going. The only topics he was interested in were his undergraduate days and the ballerina Margot Fonteyn.

  We were taken by launch to a seaplane bobbing about in the water. It was the first and last time that I ever flew in this exciting form of transport. Take-off and descent were like some great bird whooshing through the water with its wings spread. At last, after so many months of travel, we arrived back in England. We landed at Poole Harbour, where Frida and I faced intense questioning and form-filling. We were considered with some suspicion until the authorities had satisfied themselves that our stories were indeed true. In my particular case, they kept on coming back to the fact that I had gone up to Paris just as the Germans were about to arrive. Why?

  We were interrogated separately for over six hours. In a cold, drab, darkened room I faced a young captain in the Intelligence Corps who questioned me in the tone of voice which implied ‘You won’t be able to answer that one!’ I was given cups of tepid tea and invited to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The only thing missing was the Bible. After an exhausting session (I remember his ashtray full of cigarette butts) he suddenly seemed to make a decision about me.

  ‘Well,’ he said as he put his papers together. ‘That all appears to be correct and above board. I suppose you know that you will have to refund the money advanced to you. And, of course, you’ll be getting your call-up papers at once.’

  Finally, Frida and I were put on a train for Waterloo. We arrived to find a huge group of family, friends and the press all waiting for us. To our delight, we made the front page of the London Evening Standard that night with a large picture of us smiling. We were good propaganda value. As the reporter wrote, we stepped off the train as if we were ‘just back from a Continental holiday … with big suitcases and string bags filled with pineapples and other good things from Lisbon.’

  It was 14 March 1942. Precisely one year, nine months and three days since I had left Avignon to go home.

  Epilogue

  Frida and I had a hectic time during the first weeks following our arrival. I wrote this in a letter to Marek just four weeks after my return:

  Since we arrived back at the station we haven’t had a moment’s rest. Reporters, articles in several newspapers, photographs – the whole caboodle. We’ve given a number of talks on radio and addressed meetings.

  Curiously the British authorities left us totally alone and I was never fully debriefed in London. My long interrogation on arrival at Poole had been merely to satisfy them that I was a bona fide British escapee. Nobody in authority in London, however, seemed to have the slightest interest in the fact that I had recent and intimate knowledge of both Vichy and Occupied France.

  Once the initial flurry of excitement had subsided I had what must have been a delayed reaction to my experiences. I started to become emotionally very volatile: from giddy excitement to deep depression almost overnight. I was constantly tired. Many weekends were spent almost entirely in bed. In those days there was no counselling or therapy to help me to cope with any after-effects of my ordeal. I was left to get on with life.

  What was I going to do with myself now that I was back in England? I didn’t really know. I expected to get my call-up papers anytime in those first few weeks. One thing was certain: I flatly refused to go into military uniform and live behind the barbed wires of a camp again, even if this time I would be allowed to walk through its gates as and when I wanted. My father, perhaps sensing my distress, arranged for me to go for an office job at the Admiralty, but I left the building without a word just before I was called in for interview. He never mentioned the incident afterwards.

  In the early summer of 1942 I heard on the grapevine that there was an outfit in central London called the Special Operations Executive or SOE, which was involved in clandestine operations in Occupied Europe. I wrote to them and outlined my background. Within a few days I received a reply from the head of their French section, a Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, inviting me to present myself for interview at their offices in Baker Street.

  Just as I had been clear that I didn’t want to go into the armed forces, I was equally certain that I didn’t want to become an agent. I made this point forcefully at the interview. I was all too willing to help in the struggle against Germany, so long as this did not involve my returning to France. Understandably, I was viewed by SOE as prime agent material, given my knowledge of the country and its language. But I had no intention of going back there. I had lived in a France controlled by the Germans for nearly two years – from their triumphal victory in June 1940 until my departure in February 1942. I had been incarcerated and had escaped. That was enough for me. I wanted an office job.

  I worked at SOE for the rest of the war. Technically I was a secretary but in reality I was a general dogsbody in the French section. I sometimes took agents to restaurants in the tense days before their departure for France, spent many an hour stamping on new French currency to make it appear old and even did some pretty disastrous coding work.

  I returned to Spain in 1943, where I worked for a year attached to the SOE team at the British Embassy in Madrid. A lot of our time was spent dealing with British service personnel who had escaped from France into neutral Spain. We effectively ‘bought’ agents from the Spanish officials who were holding them. I remember getting particularly annoyed with two agents in San Sebastian in the north of Spain. They had been too unfit to cross the Pyrenees and had thereby endangered their helpers. But they were oblivious of this fact and spent the entire car journey to Madrid complaining about everyone and everything.

  To my secret delight, my work took me several times to the British Consulate in Barcelona. Before my first visit I spent ages dressing myself as smartly as I could. I entered through the front door very slowly and deliberately. I was determined to savour the very real and satisfying thrill of walking past the condescending official who had so smoothly directed Frida and myself in our tattered clothes to the side entrance the year before.

  After a year of hard work and strenuous social life I left Spain to go back to London. It wasn’t the most glorious of exits. I had fallen in love with a Spaniard called Ricardo. During the week he was the head porter at the hotel where I had first stayed and on Sundays he was a moderately successful bullfighter. My superiors at the embassy considered that this was not appropriate behaviour for a British diplomatic official. I was returned to England to work again at SOE’s Baker Street offices for the last few months of its existence, with the legendary Vera Atkins as my boss.

  At least the British Government paid for my ignominious return from Spain. It had to: I was a British diplomat. But the government was still chasing me for money I owed from my repatriation. This battle over my debt was to drag on until 1947.

  It had taken me about four months to get from Marseille to England during the winter of 1941–42. During that time I had been advanced money (in order to live) by the US Consul in Marseille and British consular officials in Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon. My father had paid both mine and Frida’s air fares of £36.0s.6d. each from Lisbon to Poole.

  The Foreign Office presented me with its final assessment of my debt about a year after my return. They calculated th
at I owed them precisely £64.1s.9d. (or over £2,500 in today’s money.) Of this, £39 corresponded to my time in Marseille; presumably the Americans had asked for their money back too.

  I failed to see why I should have to pay HMG anything. After all, whose fault was it that I had ended up in Paris just a couple of days before the Germans arrived in June 1940? I pointed out to the Foreign Office that I had been badly advised at the time by the British Consulate in Marseille. They had urged me to go northwards and slip through to St-Malo. I wrote: ‘It cannot be denied that had the British Consul advised me to remain in Marseille, I would most certainly have been able to leave the city.’

  The Foreign Office would have none of this. The question of repayment, they replied, could only be waived on the grounds of destitution. What were my financial circumstances and what could I afford to pay by monthly instalments?

  I ignored a number of letters on this score. In September 1943, much to my indignation, I was warned that they would take legal action. We eventually reached a settlement. I was to make an immediate payment of £6, followed by contributions of £1 per month, starting in October. This I duly did and thereafter I received a little letter every month from the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who presented his compliments and acknowledged my cheque for £1.

  I was still bitterly resentful that I had to pay the full cost of my escape and that no recognition had been given of what I had done or had been through. I was by now working as a secretary to Tom Driberg, the Labour MP. In that capacity I had come into contact on several occasions with a very helpful official at the Foreign Office – a Mr Guy Burgess. I wrote to him, requesting that the remaining debt be written off. I couldn’t help adding the gratuitously insulting comment that had I escaped as a member of the armed forces and not as a private citizen I would probably have been presented with an MBE and not a bill!

  A few days later I received a reply from Mr Burgess. He had made enquiries, he wrote, and had found that I had made a good effort at repayment. As I was now in financial difficulties, the Foreign Office would be prepared to waive the balance of £18.5s.7d.

  A few years later, when Guy Burgess was exposed as a Soviet spy and defected to the Soviet Union, I briefly thought about selling his autographed letter but decided against it. After all, I had at least managed to get him to cough up the princely sum of £18.5s.7d!

  APPENDIX A

  Rosie’s Journey

  APPENDIX B

  What Happened Next

  Frida worked in London during the war for General de Gaulle’s Free French organization. She later married a microbiologist and had four children. She remained a committed Communist all her life, wrote a number of books on music and the French Resistance and was a life-long member of CND. She died in 1996.

  Shula remained at the Vittel camp until its liberation. She married a fellow artist and had two children. They moved to Brittany where she still lives and paints.

  Père Manguin, the head of the Manguin family, died in 1949. His daughter, Lucile, became a very celebrated couturier in Paris after the war. Biquet, the boy I used to take to school on my oversize bicycle, owns a guesthouse in Avignon.

  Madame Izard was soon reunited with her husband, Georges. He joined the Resistance and had a brilliant postwar career as a barrister. I kept in contact with her for many years after the war and we became good friends, with the younger members of our family doing language-exchange visits. Christophe, who as a small child would accompany me on my daily visits to the Kommandantur in Paris, later became a celebrated television producer.

  Marek got away from Marseille in April 1942. He sent me a telegram from America of just one word: ‘Safe.’ He enlisted in the US Army the following year. The last time I heard from him was a letter in late 1943 from ‘somewhere in England’.

  Hoytie Wiborg arrived safely in America not long after I got back to England. I received a kind letter from her in May of that year; the headed notepaper was (appropriately) from one of the Vanderbilt mansions on Fifth Avenue, New York. I never heard from her again. She died in 1964.

  Nancy Wake went back to Australia after the war. On the death of her second husband, she settled in the Stafford Hotel in London, selling her collection of medals to finance her stay. For the past few years she has been at a home for ex-service people in Richmond, West London, financially supported (according to press reports) by Prince Charles.

  Sofka Skipworth was released from the camp at Vittel in 1944. She returned to work for Laurence Olivier after the war. She remained a committed Communist, retiring to Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. I would see her from time to time when I visited my sister, Joan, who lived near by. Her life story, Sofka: The Autobiography of a Princess, was published in 1968 by Hart-Davis.

  Mr Sutton sent me a charming letter in August 1945. He was by now at the British Consulate General in Strasbourg. He wrote: ‘As you may observe … I survived.’

  The Caserne Vauban at Besançon continued as a military camp until just a few years ago. It now belongs to the municipality of Besançon, which plans to redevelop the seven-acre site as a housing complex. It is in a derelict condition and seems to be a favoured place for local youths to hold (unauthorized) parties.

  The Vittel camp was used in the latter stages of the war to house Jewish prisoners en route to almost certain death in concentration camps in Germany and Poland. It was liberated by the Allies in September 1944. The Grand Hotel is now part of the Club Med organization.

  After leaving SOE, Rosie worked first for the Labour MP Tom Driberg and then for the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin. She later became a professional journalist and was for many years a theatre critic at The Sunday Telegraph and the Financial Times. She was married twice: first to the political journalist Ian Mackay, who died in 1952, and then to the newspaper and BBC journalist Julian Holland, by whom she had two children. She stayed a North London girl all her life and, after her divorce from Julian, lived in Primrose Hill until her death in 1996.

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Thanks to David Woodroffe for the wonderful illustrations (I), (II) and (III).

  Thanks to Jimmy Knight for permission to use the evocative sketches by his mother Frida (I), (II), (III), (IV), (V) and (VI).

  Thanks also to the following agencies who supplied images for the plate section.

  (I): Guerre 1939–1945. Besançon.

  Camp d’internés civils. Vue des immeubles.

  © Photothèque CICR (DR) (Image reference: V-P-HIST-E-00793)

  (II): Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC

  (III): Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC

  Footnotes

  1 Germany was at war with Britain and France from September 1939 but there was hardly any fighting that winter of the so-called Phoney War. The following spring, however, the German blitzkrieg campaign saw its army overrun much of Western Europe in a few weeks.

  2 A reference to the Bank of France’s 200 largest shareholders (who represented virtually all the great French families). Until 1936 they were the only shareholders allowed to vote in its General Assembly. There was a widespread feeling that the country was effectively run by these families.

  3 The brainchild of the Norwegion explorer Fridtjof Nansen, these were internationally recognized identity cards given initially to refugees from Russia fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. They were issued under the auspices of the League of Nations by various countries, in this case the United Kingdom.

  4 The Marquis of Vauban, an adviser to Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, was one of the greatest military engineers of all time. He upgraded or constructed hundreds of fortresses in France, a number of which are now UNESCO World Heritage sites.

  5 The food situation was worsening. Substitute products – known as national or ersatz – were increasingly used. There was bitter resentment at German requisitioning of French goods and foodstuffs.

  INDEX

  Index Note: Rosemary Say is abbreviated to RS in parts of the index. Whe
re the full names of people have not been included in the book an identifying note in parenthesis has been added to their entry.

  Alain (workman at Vittel) (1), (2), (3), (4)

  America see United States of America

  American Ambulance Corps. (1)

  American Hospital, Neuilly (1), (2)

  arrest (RS’s) (1) see also Caserne Vauban barracks; escape; Vittel

  art and artists (1), (2), (3), (4) see also Manguin, Père

  Atkins, Vera (1)

  au pairing (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Australia (1)

  Avignon town (1), (2) see also au pairing; Manguin, Odette and Claude

  Balkans (1)

  Bank of France (1)

  Barcelona (1), (2)

  BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Besançon (1), (2) see also Caserne Vauban barracks

  black market (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  blackouts (1), (2)

  Blitz (1), (2)

  Bluebell Girls (1), (2), (3)

  boarding school (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Bobby (boyfriend in London) (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Boinet, André (1)

  books (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)

  boyfriends (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Bobby (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Marek (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Patrice (1), (2), (3)

  Brierly, Penelope (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)

  Britain, Battle of (1)

  British Embassy and Consulates

  France (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)