Here in my dark silent cell, my heart is thumping. I am afraid again. They will come for me soon.
The wheels struck the ground. There was a fierce bumping as the Lysander hurtled over the rough field. The dark shadows of trees whipped by like a smear from a paintbrush. Would they ever stop? They stopped, but the propellers kept spinning. The engine noise sounded dangerously loud.
‘Out, out!’ they yelled, pushing Noor through the door.
She was already dressed to look like a nursemaid. She was to pretend to be on her way to Paris to look after an old lady. So she was wearing a war-worn but well-tailored suit, a beret over her black short hair and black walking shoes. She would look as if she was on her way back from leave. They tossed her suitcase out to her; shabby and scratched, but hidden within its false lining, under her nurse’s apron and cap, were her transmitter and her instructions.
‘You will meet Garry,’ they had told her. ‘Your network is called Prospero. He will take you to them.’
No sooner had she leaped to the ground than the Lysander was already moving again and was sky-borne – before she’d even turned to meet the man standing in the shadows.
He grasped her hand in the darkness. ‘Viens. Vite!’ He snatched her suitcase with his other hand and began to run, tugging her along. They must get away from the field. Someone may have heard the plane. The Germans could be on their way. Already Noor had a stitch in her side; she was bent double, gasping – but kept running, allowing him to drag her along, pushing her through hedges and over stiles. At last they reached a small clearing. A car was waiting. Someone opened the door. ‘Get in.’ The case was thrown into the boot, then they were off – driving without lights – and hit the road to Paris.
‘Garry!’ My heart is thumping again. I call out his name. It has a hollow ring in this dark stone cell. ‘Where are you now?’
Where are any of them? Gilbert, Antoine, Marguerite, Valentin. Some are dead. She had only been in Paris a week when the Nazis rounded up nearly all of the cell called Prospero. There was treachery everywhere, but the Gestapo didn’t know her yet, so she slipped away and kept up radio contact with London.
She moved from one dreary apartment to another, hanging her aerial out of the windows to pick up signals from London, while trying to evade the direction-finding trucks which roamed the streets listening out for illegal transmissions.
I can still laugh – a croaking, gulping, last-gasp laugh – when I remember one fool of a Nazi coming in on me as I tried to fix up my aerial. He thought it was a washing line and helped me.
She lived like this for three months, the only British radio operative in Paris still free, still transmitting to London – staying on air a few minutes at a time, then moving on. A man called ‘B’ arrived from England to check out what was left of the Resistance.
‘Come home with me,’ he advised. ‘You know you’ll be shot if they catch you?’
She refused. ‘They don’t know me. I can still go on working for you. There’s no one else left. You need me.’ So ‘B’ returned without her.
But the Nazis were after her. Somehow they got to know her code name – Madeleine. Someone had betrayed her. She arrived back to her apartment one day to find a Gestapo officer in her room.
‘She was like a wild cat,’ he had reported later. She fought and bit and tried to get out. ‘I had to pull a gun on her.’ He phoned for help and other officers arrived. They ransacked her room and found her transmitter, notebooks, codes and ciphers. They took her to their headquarters at the Avenue Foch for interrogation.
‘Just tell us all you know. Give us names, contacts. Tell us what the British are planning to do.’
‘My name is Norah Baker. My number is 9901 – assistant section officer for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Transport Service,’ was all she would tell them.
‘You’re a fool.’ They shook their heads with false pity. ‘You’ll soon speak. Take her away.’
She made another desperate attempt to escape by climbing through a window and slithering across the rooftops. But they caught her and dragged her back.
She was now classified as a ‘dangerous prisoner’.
‘They hurt me, Papa. They hurt me so much.
‘We already know everything,’ sneered the Gestapo. ‘Your colleague broke. We know all about the plans. You might as well give in and save yourself more pain.’
‘My name is Norah Baker, number 9901 …’ She refused to give more than her name, rank and number.
Her masters thought she would break in the end. It was part of the plan. She would pass on false information; would tell them there was a plan to invade, that the Allies would land in Calais – not Normandy. But after five weeks of fierce interrogation, she stayed silent.
Love is action; action is knowledge; knowledge is truth; truth is love.
She was put on a train to Karlsruhe in Germany. There she stayed for ten months, in solitary confinement, shackled in chains. In September 1944 she was put on another train.
So this is where I am, Papa; Dachau. Not many people walk out alive from here. There are three other women from my section. We will meet for the first time in a few moments. I can hear the first birdsong of dawn. Yes – even in my cell, their song reaches me. I hear footsteps. They are coming.
‘Awake! For morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that put the stars to flight.’
Four women were taken out at dawn to a place all strewn with sand.
The sand is stained with blood.
I am a hare.
They were told to kneel. Four women – strangers to each other till then – held hands like sisters and knelt down together. An SS man came up behind them and, one by one, shot them dead.
Postscript: Princess Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross by the British and the Croix de Guerre by the French.
Joan Aiken
When the Second World War began in 1939, Joan Aiken had been sent away to a small boarding school in Oxford. At the time of the Blitz on London, two years later, her school had closed down and at seventeen she found herself a job at the BBC which had been evacuated out of London. Her ‘war work’ consisted of ruling lines on the backs of filing cards to save paper, which impressed her so strongly that all her life she saved paper by writing her new stories on the backs of old ones. Wanting to be more involved in the war effort she had, by the age of nineteen, found a job at the United Nations Information Office in a bomb-damaged building on the corner of Russell Square, near the British Museum. The Battle of Britain, the six-week battle in 1940, when the RAF defeated the German air force, was over, but the Germans were still sending hundreds of V1s, pilotless aircraft that fell and exploded, and V2s, which were huge twelve-ton rockets that made an incredible noise when they blew up. She even managed to joke about it: ‘A V1 fell in Russell Square, blowing all the leaves off the trees, breaking the office windows, and messing up my filing system.’
But she stored the experience and it reappears in ‘Albert’s Cap’, along with something she found much more frightening – the spirit of evil which causes humans to prey on the weakness of others. Joan Aiken went on to write over one hundred books. She died in 2004, aged seventy-nine – three days after sending off this story. She was a fighting spirit to the end, but her weapons against injustice were her words.
Lizza Aiken
ALBERT’S CAP
This story was told me by my gran. It happened to her in London. But not the London we know now.
It was in the war.
I had been sent away for a couple of years (said my gran) to escape the bombing. I stayed with cousins in Wales. It wasn’t bad, but after a while I had a letter from my mum. (Your great-grandma.)
‘Dear Gwenno,’ she wrote, ‘I’ve decided you can come back. I miss you such a lot. And Elsie Tarn says there’s no more danger from raids here now. And if Dad got leave, he’d like to find you at home. So I’m sending the money for your ticket.’
Dad was in
the navy, in submarines. I hadn’t seen him for nearly three years.
Of course I was happy to go home. But it was a bit of a shock when I saw the district where we lived, around Well Street, Rumbury Town.
We’d always been in that part of London. Our flat, on the third floor of a block called Percy Mansions, was up six short flights of stairs. (Mind you – they didn’t seem so short when you were lugging a bike and a heavy duffelbag up them). Inside our front door, on the right, there were three rooms overlooking the street; one of them was a kitchen. And on the left, a long passage. Halfway down the passage, a bathroom and toilet. At the far end, three more rooms. Or, at least, there had been, before. Now there was only one room. A family called Green had shared the flat with us, and lived in the back rooms. Now they were gone – Mum didn’t say where – and Elsie Tarn lived in the one room that was left. The rest of the building had been sheered off, clean as you’d cut a chunk of cheese with one of those wires they used to have in grocers’ shops. Two of the doors at the far end of the passage were boarded and bricked up – because outside of them was only space.
The first thing I noticed was that Mum had got very thin and pale and tired-looking. Her hair, that used to be bright red, was grey now. But she was really pleased to see me.
‘I’ve been saving up flour, and my sugar and marge rations. And an egg!’ she said. ‘And some raisins. I made you Welshcakes for a treat.’
I hadn’t the heart to tell her that, on the farm with Aunt Myfanwy, where no one took much notice of rationing – for there was plenty of milk, butter and eggs – we’d had Welshcakes almost every day.
Anyway, Mum’s Welshcakes were extra good. But I did wish she hadn’t invited Elsie Tarn to tea with us.
I couldn’t remember Mrs Tarn – though she said she remembered me. She used to live, she told me, round the corner in Jugg Street. I didn’t like her. She had thin nocoloured frizzy hair, she smiled a lot – all the time, just about – and she talked through her long nose. She sounded like the drone of a distant plane.
‘No, no, there’s no danger now, none at all,’ she kept saying. ‘Oh, Annie! Isn’t it just grand to have young Gwenno back! I had such a job persuading your mum to send for you,’ she said, giving me another of her long-play smiles, crinkling her eyes up till they looked like specks of grit in cracks. She smelled strange – sweetish, musky – like things that have been shut a long time in old cupboards.
‘But what about the doodlebugs?’ I asked.
They were the flying bombs, pilotless planes, that would buzz along rather slowly overhead, then suddenly cut out, and explode on the spot where they landed. I’d heard about them, of course, though they hadn’t got as far as Wales.
‘Oh, we just laugh at them – don’t we, Annie?’ said Mrs Tarn. ‘All but old Tomkin – he goes under the bed.’ She cast a look of scorn and dislike at our tabby cat. But I thought he showed good sense.
After tea I went out, to walk round the old neigh-bourhood. ‘Don’t go too far,’ Mum warned. ‘It’ll be blackout time soon. And keep off the bombsites – specially the one round at the back. Some children did go on it and they just sank in – it’s like a bog – they got stuck and they were only just rescued in time. The council say it’s not safe to build there, it’s unstable underneath. They’ll have to put down hundreds of tons of concrete before building on top.’
Well, it was strange to see the old neighbourhood so changed. At the far end of Well Street, going south, you turn left into Pentecost Row. Then, left again into Jugg Street. Then, left again, Ettrick Lane takes you back to Well Street. All that area – houses where my friends used to live, and lots of people I knew, as well as the laundry, the primary school, St Philip’s Chapel, the Rumbury District Hospital, the bank – all of it was just flattened. Nothing but earth, rough and lumpy, inside a wire mesh fence, with some bits of brick and timber showing. And plants, bushes (beginning to grow), thistles, willowherb, buddleia with purple flowers. The back of our block of flats had been sliced off, sheer, like a cliff, and was now cemented over, with a couple of big wooden buttresses to support it.
‘What did that?’ I asked Mum when I got home.
‘A landmine,’ she said.
I didn’t dare ask what happened to all the people who lived in those houses. Some of them must have been indoors at the time. Mum had been down in the air-raid shelter in the tube, she told me.
Our little street still stood, like a line of trees in the desert: Percy Mansions and the row of small shops and businesses beyond, butcher, cafe, cycle shop, baker, chemist and the pub, the Mousetrap.
‘Funny sort of name for a pub, I’d say,’ remarked Mrs Tarn, wrinkling up her long nose. ‘That sign! It’s common, if you ask me! Gives me the sick, it does.’ The sign was a huge mouse, a lump of cheese and mug of beer.
Mum sighed. ‘Jim and I used to go there, Saturday nights. It’s not a bad pub. Now I haven’t the heart. Wish we ever saw a bit of cheese like that now.’
The cheese ration was two ounces a week. Meat: one chop and a bit of gristle. Bacon: two rashers. (Mum used to swap her bacon for tea.) Sugar: a packet once a month. Soap: one bar. And a pot of either jam or marmalade. Real eggs you only saw one at a time, if you were lucky. What did we eat? Veg hotpot and baked beans.
London was very, very quiet in those days. No cars in the street. All dark at night, bar the searchlights, lancing about the sky.
And it was extra dark, extra quiet, in the space behind our block, I thought, in that wide, empty gap between Pentecost Row and Ettrick Lane.
Sometimes, of an evening, I’d tiptoe to the end of the passage and stand beside one of the two boarded-up doors, listening.
Mrs Tarn caught me doing that once. Quick and without the least noise – the way a mole suddenly comes out of the ground – there she was, beside me.
‘Oh – Mrs Tarn – you made me jump!’
Her smell was very strong, there in the dark passage. ‘Aunt Elsie – you must call me Aunt Elsie, dear!’
But I could never do that.
‘What ever were you doing, Gwenno, love?’
‘Just thinking how quiet it is – on the other side of that wall. Such a long way to the ground.’
‘Do you know what I think?’ said Mrs Tarn. ‘Out there is empty ground. But it hasn’t been empty like that, not for hundreds and hundreds of years. There’s always been houses on top. Things must be stirring – and coming up – under that loose earth. Things that haven’t been free to move – or seen the light of day – for ever such a long time—’
‘How do you mean, Mrs … Aunt?’ I said, not at all keen on the idea. ‘Worms?’
‘Oh – mercy – I don’t know, ducky,’ she said, laughing. ‘When there are wars, they stir up all kinds of ancient things, left over from old ancient times – perhaps even from before there were people like us. Don’t you think so? Just one of Auntie Elsie’s funny fancies, you know.’
I suppose I looked puzzled and startled, for she said quickly, ‘Never mind it! You’ve not been into my room yet – have you, Gwenno dear? Like to come and have a look-see?’
And she opened the third door, the door that was not bricked up, and drew me into her room.
Dark hadn’t fully come yet, it wasn’t quite blackout time, but Mrs Tarn quickly crossed the room and twitched down the heavy black cloth blinds over the window that looked over the bombsite. Then she switched on a light or two.
The room seemed to be full of clutter – bits of furniture crammed close together, boxes, bundles of cloth, jugs, basins, umbrella stands, all piled hugger-mugger. And there were rows of silver articles, not very big, sugar bowls, cream jugs, teaspoons, napkin rings, salt cellars, laid out on a dirty old newspaper, faintly gleaming in the dusky light.
‘Polishing silver – that’s my little hobby. While you and your mum are listening in to Forces’ Favourites, I’m busy at my polishing. See, this is what I use …’
With her skinny, bony hand she picked up a thick, du
sty circle of what looked like grey felt. An old beret perhaps.
‘I dip this, you see, I dip it in a special mixture that I make myself – nobody else has the secret, only old Auntie Elsie – and then I use it to polish up all my little treasures. Y’mum used to help me sometimes – but she’s rather poorly these days, not so perky as she was, is she? Shame, she used to be such a live wire, such good company, your mum. You must brisk her up, Gwenno dear. That’s why I made her get you back—’
‘She misses Dad.’
‘Ah, of course she does! And that would be the trouble, no doubt. Now, I’ll tell you another use I have for this cloth—’
‘It’s an old beret, isn’t it?’ I said, trying to be polite, trying not to show how much I hated being in this cramped, fusty room.
‘Clever girlie! I call it my Tarn-cap, you see. My little joke, that is! When I put it on my head – or would you like to try it? Maybe it’s just a tiny bit on the big size for you? I must ask my brother – he has …’
The dusty cap smelled foul – a sick, stale, dusky smell. Like that of Aunt Elsie herself, but much stronger. I’d sooner have died than put it on.
I backed away, fast. ‘Oh no – thank you very much—’
‘Why, ducky, you aren’t scared, are you?’ she said, laughing. ‘Now, your mum …’
But just then (thank goodness) I heard Mum herself calling, ‘Gwenno? Gwenno! Where are you?’ Quite frantic, she sounded. And I was able to nip hastily out of the door and along the passage.
‘I’m stupid, I know,’ said Mum. She was dead pale, a dew of sweat on her cheekbones. ‘I heard you go down the passage and – sometimes – I get to think about those doors – opening on to thin air …’
War Stories Page 16
