Mr Campion's War

by Mike Ripley

  Back in London, Elsie had fixed up another visit for me with our French friends to glean more local knowledge. Not the Second Bureau this time, but at the Free French headquarters across the park in Carlton Gardens, which was quite convenient for the RAC Club where General de Gaulle took his lunch.

  I was kept waiting in a very comfortable drawing room with the latest issue of La Lettre de la France Libre, a twee little newspaper – more a parish magazine really – issued by the press service there. It was hardly riveting reading. Much more interesting were old copies of Marseille-Matin and the Marseille edition of Le Petit Provençal, which were hardly up-to-date briefing materials but did provide a flavour of what I might expect. Particularly worrying were reports of the Vichy government’s Interdits aux Juifs or, more officially, Le Statut des Israélites, which excluded Jews from various professions and provided rather chilling simplified family-tree diagrams which identified which children were classed as Jews and which as ‘non-Jews’. If both parents and all four grandparents were Jewish, then the situation was clear enough. If only one parent and two grandparents were Jewish, then a child was a non-Jew, but if a newborn baby was careless enough to have one parent and three grandparents who were Jewish, then he or she was clearly a Jew, or at least it was clear to the rather twisted minds to whom such things mattered.

  Eventually a young staff officer with the temerity to be about half my age appeared and demanded to know how he could be of assistance, though he gave the impression that assistance was the last thing he had on offer. I spun him a yarn about needing to know the latest gossip from Marseilles, as I had to brief a Canadian diplomat who was about to be posted there. It was a thin story, but by that stage of the war I was getting pretty good at lying, and in a way he was pleased that someone had come seeking their expertise, as the Free French were surprisingly unpopular among the French population of London.

  He produced a pile of paper from the depths of the press office and showed me what official documents now looked like, although they seemed to look exactly as they had before the war, except now the official heading Republique Française had a line drawn through it and the words État Français added in blue inked capitals. The obliteration of the very name of a proud republic must have stung every true Frenchman, and my young officer made it clear he had no time for Marshal Pétain and his Vichy regime of collaboration.

  ‘You should always keep in mind,’ he told me, ‘that the police in Vichy regard Gaullists, communists, Jews, the British and then the Germans as enemies, and in that order.’

  I felt he was being rather harsh on his compatriots, but I did not want to engage in a debate on French politics which I would most certainly lose. Oddly, we found common ground when, in among the papers and documents he was showing me, I spotted a small flyer for The French Club in St James’s, where violinist Stéphane Grappelli was playing. That I could honestly say I was a great fan, and that I had seen Grappelli play in Paris at La Grosse Pomme before the war, boosted my standing with the Free French officer no end – possibly with the entire Free French organization – and he was nothing but charm and helpfulness after that.

  He produced detailed street maps of Marseilles, which were useful for getting my bearings, or rather bearings which I could pass on to my ‘Canadian diplomat’, and he rattled off figures for the amount of bread, meat and sugar that were available on a Vichy ration book. I had to do a fair amount of mental gymnastics to compare grams and ounces, made more difficult by the fact that we rationed meat by price rather than weight, but on balance it seemed that we were doing better in London than they were in Marseilles, although of course they had wine …

  I left Carlton Gardens with one final piece of advice from, by now, my new best Free French friend, for my non-existent Canadian diplomat friend.

  ‘Be careful of dealing on the black market in Marseilles,’ he confided. ‘It is extensive and run by well-organized gangs of criminals from the Panier district. Those gangsters are making a lot of money from the war and they hate the Resistance and they hate the Free French. They are not to be trusted.’

  ‘I have found,’ I told him, ‘that tends to be an occupational hazard with gangsters.’

  My next port of call was on those jolly chaps in MI9, whom I half expected to be operating out of a garden shed in Cricklewood but were to be found occupying a floor of the Great Central Hotel opposite Marylebone Station.

  These were the chaps, and they all looked like excitable chemistry teachers dying to show off an explosive gas to the Lower IVth, who specialized in gizmos and gadgets designed mainly to help shot-down aircrew find their way home. It was said they could knit you a pullover which, if you held it up to the light, would be a map of occupied Europe, and they could print an entire code book on the silk lining of one’s bowler hat.

  We all took rather a childish delight in teasing those eager-beavers at Nine, tempting them to come up with answers to quite ridiculous hypothetical problems. One of our lads had them going for quite some time, claiming that he couldn’t possibly be parachuted into occupied Holland until the brain boxes at Nine had developed a piece of luggage in which he could carry not only his dinner jacket, dress shirts and cricket whites, but also his butler.

  But we all took MI9 very seriously when they told us our escape routes. They knew nothing of the meat of my mission – I wasn’t too sure I did at that stage – only that I might be in need of a safe way to get out of southern France. They gave me two; the first involving a route well travelled, as they put it, by escaping RAF types over the Pyrenees into Spain. For that I would need a good pair of hiking boots and details of how to contact my Spanish guide, which I had to memorize on the spot. The boots I had to find for myself.

  The second escape option they offered was more problematic, as it went against what I had already heard: I could try and find passage on a ship out of Marseilles, working as a deck hand if necessary, by contacting the leading wheeler-and-dealer in the black market in the port, a man called Magnus Asher, who was, whether I believed it or not, an Englishman. That would, however, probably require a large amount of cash, as Asher was that sort of an Englishman and cash, like boots, I had to find for myself.

  To help keep me alive they were very happy to provide me with a panoply of weaponry and survival equipment, all of which could be secreted about my person.

  I told them straight off that I wasn’t shopping for anything lethal, although the idea of a poison pen – a fountain pen which actually squirted poison rather than ink – did have a certain appeal. In the end, despite their best efforts at salesmanship, I settled on a pair of tiny compasses disguised as buttons, which could be sewn on to the suit I planned on wearing.

  They were particularly disappointed when they offered me their latest design set of lock picks and I rejected them as I already had a set.

  After that, it was a question of paperwork, by which I mean false paperwork, to create my new identity as a Canadian diplomat. Fortunately, Elsie Corkran had a team of forgers on the pay roll, who were the best to be found outside Wormwood Scrubs, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find that most of them were well acquainted with the interior of that particular establishment.

  Elsie had decided that I was to be Jean-Baptiste Hamelin, a name he had picked out of an obscure American history book dealing with the War of Independence, as they called it, and the Revolt of the Thirteen Colonies, as Elsie still referred to it. My namesake, the original M. Hamelin, had been a French Canadian who had, somewhat unsportingly, opted to fight for the revolting Americans rather than the good old British. The way Elsie put it to me made me query whether I was right in thinking that now it was 1942 and not 1776, and we were all fighting on the same side, at which Elsie told me to pull myself together and stop being an ass. ‘There’s no room for smart talk and horseplay when you’re on enemy territory,’ he had growled.

  It was that admonishment more than anything which made me realize, as if someone had thrown a glass of cold wat
er in my face, that although I might not, technically, be going behind enemy lines, I was indeed going to be in enemy territory. In the weeks since I had first chatted to good old Étienne Fleurey, when I could not help but be reminded of glorious, carefree visits to France in peacetime, I had become acutely aware that Vichy France was not a place I would wish to go on holiday, and that as an Englishman I might not be made welcome. And now Elsie had warned me about what Amanda called my ‘most irritating bad habits’ – or at least two of them – and the sudden, icy realization that I would be in an unfriendly foreign place and Amanda would not only have no idea where I was, but if she attempted to find out she would be lied to by people she thought she could trust.

  At least I did not have to lie to her, for Amanda was far too sensible and knew that I could not divulge the nature of my work. Over our final dinner together she bit her beautiful bottom lip and pretended to be satisfied that I had been given an ‘indeterminate posting overseas’, as the jargon went. Brave girl that she was, she did not ask where or when I might return.

  Once he had made sure Mrs Campion was safely located out in the country away from the main targets for German bombing, Mr Campion disappeared – to all intents and purposes – but a certain Canadian diplomat, a perfectly charming but rather bland sort of fellow you would pass in the street without noticing, called Jean-Baptiste Hamelin, began to make regular visits to Canada House. The visits were purely for the benefit of any enemy agents who may have been still active and lurking around Trafalgar Square. It was standard deception protocol, but I really don’t think anyone noticed me, not even the real Canadians who worked there.

  Then it was time to pack my bag, make sure all my false papers were in order and that I carried nothing about my person, not even a birthmark, which would identify me as Albert Campion, and I was ready for the off. I had even gone to the trouble of getting some new spectacles, really quite ugly wire-framed ones, and was cultivating a bit of a moustache on my upper lip which I hoped would be in full flower, and in fashion, by the time I got to France.

  Elsie Corkran accompanied me in the drive down to Poole, quizzing me all the way on my plans and new identity, where I was booked on the Empire Flying Boat to Lisbon. They still flew a twice-weekly service even during the war, although the flight time could be anything up to eight hours as the planes took a wide detour, swinging out over the Atlantic to keep out of range of the Luftwaffe fighters based on the west coast of France.

  Elsie said he was coming to Poole to see me off, though I suspect it was to make sure I actually got on the plane. If he did wave a handkerchief as we took off, I didn’t see it. For the first part of the flight the flying boat’s windows had their blinds firmly down to prevent the passengers observing any naval manoeuvres or shipping movements down in Southampton Water or the Channel.

  After what was certainly the most uncomfortable flight I have ever experienced without actually being shot at, we landed in the River Tagus – which of course we were supposed to do as a flying boat – and a motor launch took me into Lisbon where I was met by one of our local agents from the Iberia Section, as MI6 now called its activities in Portugal and Spain.

  Lisbon was quite a sight, so colourful and brightly lit up after London – no blackout here – but I didn’t get a chance to enjoy the scenery. I was allowed a few hours’ sleep and a bath in a cheap hotel and then hustled off to the railway station. Our local agent was terribly apologetic but insisted that Lisbon was such a nest of spies that I would surely come to somebody’s attention if I loitered. He packed me on to a night sleeper train for Madrid, having made sure I had all the right permits and visas, and said I would be met by the head of the Iberia Section once I got to the Spanish capital.

  As it turned out, that was an honour I had to forgo, although I have no regrets on that score. The head of Section was far too busy to meet-and-greet amateur field agents on unspecified missions who were simply passing through and treating the Iberia Section like a glorified travel agent, and so the sheriff sent one of his deputies to chaperone me, which was really a stroke of luck, as Kenneth Benton turned out to be a charming chap despite being about ten years younger than me, but he couldn’t have been more helpful.

  He was a career MI6 man – he’d retired only two years ago and taken up a new career penning thrillers, believe it or not – and, rather intimidatingly, compared to me, seemed to know what he was doing. One of his duties, of course, was to find out exactly what I was doing swanning through his patch; all I could tell him was that I was heading for Marseilles, which he knew full well as he had personally arranged my itinerary.

  As to why I was going to Marseilles, I played to my strengths and was as vague as I possibly could be. Benton was not offended or annoyed; he would have expected nothing less than lies and obfuscation. It was that sort of world for us: everything was hush-hush, whether it really needed to be or not. Even among those of us on the same side, the rule was that it was best if the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. Sometimes it was better if the left hand didn’t know there was a right hand.

  Getting in to Vichy was one thing, getting out quite another. Benton introduced me to Reuben Vidal as the answer to my problem, though my initial impression of that short, thin, weathered figure wearing a sheepskin waistcoat – which doubled his girth – and a greasy black beret, was that he could be an unemployed gardener looking for work.

  He was, Benton assured me, a real ‘mountain man’, who knew all the old pilgrim trails over the Pyrenees and had been assisting escaping British airmen find sanctuary in Spain for more than two years. He traced the easiest routes with a nicotine-stained finger on a map for me, though it was often difficult to follow the contour lines through the cloud of smoke he produced. Clearly the mountain air agreed with Vidal’s chain-smoking habit.

  In all I spent three days in Madrid with Benton, who gave me some useful tips on arranging secret rendezvous and how to make sure I wasn’t being followed, as well as briefing me on my travel arrangements. He also told a good story of how one of the Iberia Section, a young lad on his first posting overseas, was convinced that the flamenco dancer in his local night club was using her castanets to send messages in Morse code to the Abwehr agents sitting in serried ranks at the bar. The novice agent had been wrong about the castanets but had unwittingly identified a club which the local branch of the Abwehr used as a place to hand over bribes to Spanish army generals, many of whom were receiving similar bribes from British intelligence.

  Putting on his most serious and concerned face, Benton convinced me that our modest attempts at spy-craft were no laughing matter, as the Abwehr operated widely and with impunity in Spain.

  ‘However,’ he said sternly, ‘you should be aware that some of their best agents are based in Marseilles. Those boys are sharp. If you’re not careful, they’ll have you spotted and picked up within half an hour of getting off the boat.’

  I did not have the heart to tell him that I was counting on exactly that.

  I suffered another interminable train journey across Spain to Barcelona, where I was grateful for Benton’s advice to buy myself a broad-brimmed Panama hat, as the temperatures on the coast were even higher than those in Madrid.

  Barcelona was hot, very hot and dusty and shabby, still recovering from its bombing by the aeroplanes of Franco’s friends Hitler and Mussolini towards the end of the civil war. I was not there long enough to see much, but I did make sure I was seen wandering around the port area as conspicuously as possible, something of which Benton would certainly have disapproved.

  He had managed to book me passage on the single-funnel steamer the SS Maloja, which was registered in Basel and owned by the Swiss Shipping Company. Now I hadn’t realized that Switzerland had a merchant navy, but when war broke out they had wisely bought up what ships they could to ensure that their supplies from the outside world got through. The Maloja was a cargo ship with no special facilities for passengers or day-trippers, so I had to bunk in wit
h the crew – mainly Portuguese but also a couple of Dutch who eyed me warily – and hope that the Swiss flag, the painting of the Swiss flag on the funnel and the word ‘Switzerland’ in large letters along the side, kept us free from air or submarine attacks from either side as we chugged across the Gulf of Lion at a nerve-straining speed of no more than nine knots an hour.

  After a day and a night nervously scanning the waves or the sky for sight or sound of danger, I was mightily relieved when we shouldered our way into the Old Port of Marseilles, which was odd considering that I was now on enemy territory.

  It did not feel like enemy territory; it felt like France – or, to be more accurate, it smelled like France. All dockside areas give off the pungent aroma of fishiness and spilled diesel oil, especially on a hot day, but the air of a French port will also contain the perfumes of black tobacco, melting butter and freshly baked bread, along with, it has to be said, the distinct tang of drains.

  Jean-Baptiste Hamelin looked around the Vieux-Port, taking in its harbour walls and the solid forts which guarded them, its cranes swinging unidentified cargoes into the air and its ships – some bustling with activity, others which looked as if they had settled in to rust there – as if he had seen nothing like it in the world before. Which a Canadian diplomat on his first posting to Europe probably never had, and I thought I was giving a good impression of one, even though the imposter Albert Campion, who had been well briefed in London, knew that the port of Marseilles was now handling less than one-tenth of the tonnage it had in May 1940.