by Noreen Riols
Like Denis Rake, they were both very colourful characters. At seventeen, when France fell, Bob, urged by his father, who had fought with the Allies during the First World War, left his home in Brittany and cycled to the Pyrenees and crossed into Spain. From there he managed to get to North Africa, where, after multiple adventures, he was recruited by SOE and flown to England for training. Bob was probably F Section’s greatest saboteur. After D-Day, in order to prevent the German Army from sending reinforcements to the Normandy front, by himself he blew up eight bridges. And when the war in Europe ended, not content with having parachuted twice into occupied France, he volunteered for Force 136 in the Far East, where the war against the Japanese was still raging, and was dropped into Laos.
Violette’s young husband had been killed fighting with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Anger at his death led Violette to join SOE. Violette, who was perhaps the most beautiful amongst a bevy of F Section’s beautiful women agents, was arrested shortly after arriving on her second mission into France, following a gun battle during which she manned a machine-gun from the back seat of a car until she ran out of ammunition. She then leapt out of the car, and with the Germans in hot pursuit, firing at her from all angles, she attempted to escape across a field and into the shelter of a wood and had almost reached her target when she tripped and twisted her ankle. Her male companion attempted to carry her to safety, but she insisted that there was no point in both of them being caught, and told him to save himself. He reached the wood, but she was captured, tortured and, aged just twenty-three, finally executed in Ravensbrück.
Bob and Violette had first met when Bob walked down the steps of the Studio Club in Knightsbridge and saw Violette, wearing a simple, unadorned black dress, leaning against the piano. He said she was so breathtakingly beautiful that he just stood rooted to the spot, staring at her. They were introduced, and she reached up on tiptoe – she was petite – and kissed him on both cheeks, overwhelming him still further with a whiff of expensive French perfume. Violette had worked on the beauty counter at Bon Marché in Brixton, where she was brought up – she never lost the local accent! – before joining SOE. Whilst in training Violette met and fell in love with Harry Peulevé, like her a ‘half and half, and they became lovers. Harry had already left on his second mission into France when she and Bob met. Harry was also arrested during this second mission, but survived the concentration camp to which he was sent. He returned to London at the end of the war, eager to find Violette again and marry her. The shock of discovering that she had not survived hit him badly, and he never got over it. He did eventually marry a Danish woman and fathered two children, but the marriage didn’t last. Harry left his wife and young family and wandered the world, taking job after job, endlessly restless, and finally dying in his early fifties.
Bob and Violette became friends while waiting to leave on their separate missions. I had thought at one time that their relationship went beyond mere friendship, but apparently not, it was just a firm friendship, not a romantic liaison. They had a mutual passion – poker – and were both fanatical players. They later left together to be parachuted into France and, according to Bob, they didn’t sleep in the plane on the way over as they’d been advised to do, they played poker. The despatcher joined in and turned out to be better at the game than they were, with the result that the two agents ended up broke! When the plane arrived at the landing ground, there was no reception committee waiting for them, so the pilot turned and headed back home. Since the two agents had been ‘fleeced’ by the despatcher, there was no longer any point in playing poker on the way back. So they slept.
When Bob and Violette climbed into the plane that June night and soared into the dark sky, they were unaware of the momentous event which was about to unfold. On 5 June that message personnel every organizer had been eagerly awaiting was finally broadcast. ‘Les carottes sont cuites’ (‘The carrots are cooked’) came over the air waves loud and clear, announcing the imminent landing, the following morning, of Allied troops on French soil. It was the eve of the Normandy landings! The next morning, when they awoke, they learned that at dawn Allied troops had landed on the Normandy beaches. It was D-Day. The long-awaited invasion had finally happened! ‘Thousands of little ships had sailed by below us. Hundreds of aircraft had thundered past us,’ Bob said dejectedly. ‘And . . . we had slept right through it.’
Between the time of the message and the landing, nine hundred and sixty sabotage attacks against railway lines had been carried out, and every train between Marseilles and Lyons conveying German reinforcements to the front derailed at least once. During the following days, the Germans brought in Army teams to repair the railway lines: and at night resistance workers laid charges along sections of those lines that were not heavily guarded, and blew them up again.
As a result there were terrible reprisals against civilians. For every German officer killed at least fifty civilians, sometimes even a hundred, depending on the officer’s rank, were rounded up and summarily executed. Most people have heard of the dreadful massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane when the entire village was wiped out – the men rounded up and shot, and the women and children locked in the church and burnt alive.
Chapter 10
We three women were used as decoys so, for obvious reasons, we never met or had any contact with the students who came to Group B before we linked up on exercises. Had they known us, the whole operation would have been futile. Jean worked in Southampton; my pitch was Bournemouth. Like the other occupants of the block of flats at Orchard Court, the inhabitants of both those large coastal towns hadn’t the remotest idea, I don’t think they even suspected, what was going on under their very noses.
A student would be let loose in Bournemouth and told that a young girl wearing a headscarf and a dirty mac and carrying a shopping bag would probably be walking along the sea front opposite the pier pavilion at a given time. He was told to detect her and, once he had found her, to follow her and discover where she was going and whom she might be meeting, without her suspecting anything. This also worked in reverse when they were taught how to detect if someone was shadowing them and then to shake them off without any suspicions being aroused.
My job was much easier than theirs. A young man, in or out of uniform, wandering around a seaside resort in the middle of the day was much more conspicuous than a young woman with a shopping basket. They were everywhere. We always carried shopping bags wherever we went in case we came across a queue which we could join and, hopefully, buy something ‘off the ration’. It didn’t matter what it was: if it was ‘off the ration it was worth having . . . and worth queuing for!
Once decanted in Bournemouth, I used to head for the appointed spot, then walk along a street facing the sea, which was lined with shops, and stop to look at the window displays – not that there was a great deal to display in those lean wartime years! This way, from the reflection in the plate-glass window, I could see anyone passing me or more importantly lingering behind me. Sure enough, my victim would sooner or later saunter into view and, if he spotted me, would stop and gaze into the window of the shop next door. But I outgazed him, and eventually he moved on. If my judgement had been right and he was my ‘victim’, he usually halted after a few yards to tie a shoelace which wasn’t undone. This was my cue. I knew I had spotted my man. So I would head for a large department store called Plummers, the only department store in Bournemouth at the time, and make straight for the ladies’ lingerie section.
I don’t know whether modern men like wandering alone around a ladies’ lingerie department, but in the early 1940s they most certainly didn’t. They were usually highly embarrassed. I knew that and, when I saw him slink furtively in, I invariably held up to the light a few ‘unmentionables’ in order to embarrass him even further. When I felt I had taunted him enough, to put him out of his misery I would stroll across to the lift and press the button. I knew exactly what he would do next. So, when he casually reached the lift, at the last sec
ond before the doors closed I would either change my mind and leap out or not get in at all, but run down the stairs on the other side to another department which was more crowded. On the way down I would whip off my headscarf and mac and stuff them into my shopping bag so that when, breathless, he arrived at the top of the stairs – he’d probably had to go to the next floor and race back down – the girl he had been tracking had disappeared. And only a girl in a tweed suit, her hair flowing out behind her, was visible walking briskly towards the street door, through which she rapidly disappeared. Even had he spotted me it would have been pointless to try to catch up with me, because there were several roads joining outside the shop, and I could have dived down any one of them.
I also used to wait at a bus stop until my victim joined the queue. When the bus arrived, I’d loiter on the platform and leap off just as it was gathering speed. He couldn’t follow me – it would have been too obvious, and also dangerous – so the poor, frustrated man had to sit and fume till the next stop, by which time, when he hared back, there was no sign of me. This exercise would have been much easier on the London Underground because if one leapt out just as the doors were closing, one knew that one had lost him for good. But we didn’t have an underground in Bournemouth, so I had to make do with buses.
We also taught the future agents to pass on messages without being noticed, and without moving their lips. I would be told that at around three o’clock that afternoon there would be a man in the pier gardens, sitting on a bench facing the sea reading a newspaper, who had a message for me. So I would stroll to the pier gardens, hoping that other people would not have crowded onto the bench before I arrived. That would definitely queer the pitch. If it was all clear, I would sit down, open my handbag and take out a cigarette. I have never been a smoker, but I made the supreme sacrifice during the war and puffed my way to victory. After a while, without any sign of recognition having passed between us, he would put down his newspaper and walk away. I would then casually pick it up and flick through the pages. This was not unusual, and in no way remarkable. Newspapers were in very short supply, and everyone wanted to read them, so whenever one was abandoned it was always immediately spotted and grabbed. Every newspaper must have been read by at least twelve people. Somewhere inside this newspaper there would be a message. Perhaps part of the crossword, if there was one. As soon as I found it, I would fold the paper and put it back on the bench for the next person who sat down to read.
We often passed messages to trainee agents in telephone booths. This was not as easy as linking up on the park bench. There were very few private telephones during the war, and everyone wanted to make calls, so public call boxes were in great demand and always had a line of people waiting to use them. We were asked, or rather told, by the authorities not to make a call last longer than three minutes. If it was a long-distance call every three minutes the pips would sound, the operator would come on the line and, if one didn’t immediately put more coins in the box, the call was cut off.
This exercise was much more complicated for me than the bench operation, because I had to be absolutely sure I had spotted the right man. And also contrive to squeeze in behind him in the queue, and not behind someone else. Otherwise, the outcome could be embarrassing, even disastrous, if I muttered a compromising message to a complete stranger, especially if he was with his wife! Our rendezvous would often be in the telephone booth in the pier gardens. For me this entailed a great deal of time wasted lurking in bushes in order to be sure to leap out as soon as I spotted my ‘victim’. Luckily, there was a clump of bushes beside the pier gardens telephone box.
Once we had shuffled into line, he would go into the booth and search for a number in the telephone directory, put his two-pence in the slot, pick up the receiver and make a fictitious phone call. After few seconds, he would replace the receiver and, since he hadn’t pressed Button A to put him through to the person he was calling, he would then press button B to retrieve his money. This sounds unbelievably complicated in this modern age of mobile phones, but it was the way things worked in those days. On leaving the booth, he would smile at me – no doubt desperately hoping I was the person he was supposed to contact – and say, ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.’ We were very polite in those days. Then, without moving his lips, he would hiss through the side of his mouth, ‘H for Harris.’ I would smile back, murmur, ‘It’s quite all right,’ and hiss back, ‘OK. H for Harris,’ then enter the booth and re-enact the same comedy, except that when I flicked through the pages of the telephone directory to H, I would surreptitiously read or slide out the message, continue the pantomime to the bitter end and leave, smiling my apologies to the next person in the queue.
I often performed this rigmarole in cafés and restaurants. A favourite place was the tea-room above the Gaumont Cinema, where I would order morning coffee and a bath bun, or, should it be after three o’clock, tea and toast and occasionally a poached egg, if my ‘victim’ didn’t immediately loom into view, thereby stringing the operation out until I was absolutely sure I had spotted my man. Any mistake on my part – murmuring a message out of the corner of my mouth giving a rendezvous, or dropping a note onto the lap of a total stranger indicating when and where we were to meet – could not only be embarrassing, but could even lead me into serious trouble with the police for soliciting.
But I think the most ‘James Bond’ exercise – hardly surprising since James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, worked for Naval Intelligence during the war, and his brother Peter was an SOE agent – took place in hotels, without anyone even suspecting the drama being enacted before their very eyes.
There were two very pleasant hotels in Bournemouth, the Royal Bath and the Lincoln. I preferred to operate at the Royal Bath, because adjoining the dining room was a large terrace overlooking the sea which, on a warm, moonlit evening, lent itself to a very romantic scenario, making my task much easier. The Lincoln unfortunately didn’t possess such a commodity. Very often, on a student’s last night of the course before being returned to his Section in London, where his fate would be decided, his conducting officer would invite him out for dinner to celebrate. The conducting officers sat in on many of the classes and watched the students closely, studying their different reactions to situations, their relationship with other students, whether they were level-headed, practical, gossips, volatile or knew how to ‘hold their drink’ or ‘keep their cool’. Every student wasn’t favoured with an invitation to dinner, so I can only think that the officers chose those whom they suspected might ‘talk’.
Beforehand a little one-act play was worked out between the officer and myself. When he and the future agent were in the hotel lounge having a drink before dinner I would stroll in, and the officer would exclaim in surprise, ‘Noreen, how lovely to see you. What are you doing in Bournemouth? Come and have a drink. Meet my friend.’ Or he might say to the agent when they linked up, ‘An extraordinary thing happened this afternoon. I bumped into a girl I hadn’t seen since the beginning of the war. I was at school with her brother.’ My little brother was still at school at the time, so that was stretching it a bit far. But the bod wasn’t to know that. ‘She’s staying in Bournemouth for a few days, and I’ve asked her to join us for a drink. You don’t mind, do you?’
If the future agent were a Brit he usually minded very much. He’d been looking forward to a boozy evening with the boys, and here was this wretched woman coming to put a damper on things. But the foreigners were often very pleased, since they didn’t have that many opportunities to meet English girls. When the second glass of sherry arrived the officer, as planned, would ask me to join them for dinner, and after a few blushing protestations I would gracefully accept his invitation. But when it was time to put down our glasses and stroll across to the dining room, there would be a telephone call for the officer. He would return, apologizing profusely: something had happened which had to be dealt with immediately. ‘But you two go ahead and start dinner. I’ll join you as soon as I ca
n.’ Of course, he never did, or only when the meal was over. Then it was up to me. This is where the Royal Bath’s superior facilities came into play. If it was a warm, moonlit night, and I could edge my victim out onto the terrace overlooking the sea, there was more of a chance that he would relax, possibly become sentimental. . . and talk.
The Brits mostly remained mute, saying, ‘Oh, I’m on some boring old course for the War Box,’ and smilingly refuse to elaborate, putting a finger to their lips if ever I insisted, whispering ‘careless talk costs lives’, a slogan written up on posters all over the walls. One man said he was a salesman for toothpaste, which was ridiculous. We didn’t have any toothpaste: we cleaned our teeth with soot or salt. But it was his story, and he stuck to it. With a foreigner it was often easier, and some of them talked, especially the young ones. I understood them. They were lonely and must have often felt isolated, far from their families and their countries, not knowing whether their friends and relatives were alive or dead, or whether they would have a home or family or even a country to return to when the war was finally over.
I remember one student in particular. I don’t think I shall ever forget him. His reaction on learning he’d been betrayed affected me deeply. I think it was then that I realized that my life in SOE was based on deception, on lies. I lied to my mother. I lied to my friends. I lied to everyone I met outside of F Section. It was inevitable. I was unable to tell them the truth, reveal what I was doing. This particular student was a Dane, a gorgeous blond Adonis, not unlike the Norwegian I had found so attractive in the BBC canteen. We met at the Royal Bath Hotel on a warm spring evening with a full moon, and I managed to persuade him to wander out onto the terrace. To be honest, he didn’t need an awful lot of persuading. I think he was rather attracted to me. At the time I weighed twelve kilos less, didn’t have white hair and didn’t need glasses to read the small print! Once propped against the balustrade, gazing at the sea, he became sentimental. They often did. It was to be expected. On a glorious moonlit evening, with the silver-tinted sea lapping gently against the shore below, the scene was set for it. He asked me whether we could spend the following Sunday together, and I accepted his invitation, knowing full well that there was not the slightest chance of my being able to keep my promise. But his invitation gave me my lead, my chance to probe further, enquire about his next move, his activities, his final destination . . . and his intentions. In the end he talked: he told me what he was doing and where he was going.
