Spies in the spare room: How a brave Sussex housewife sheltered secret agents bound for occupied France A HOUSE FOR SPIES BY EDWARD WAKE-WALKER (Robert Hale £19.99) By BEL MOONEY Last updated at 7:34 AM on 27th January 2012 Bravery: Cate Blanchett as a Resistance worker in Charlotte Gray As a child growing up in the Fifties, I loved reading my brother’s Lion and Eagle comics, packed with strip cartoons about the war, where all the British were heroes and ‘Fritz’ was the enemy. In those days, when memories of the blackout were fresh and ration books still in the kitchen drawer, we lapped up the Biggles stories by Capt W.E. Johns. Tales of derring-do in the skies and behind enemy lines were a reminder that the game of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ had only recently been played out in grim earnest. Like all children, we needed heroes, and we needed no convincing that they were on our side. Reading A House For Spies reminded me of those comic strips, and novels, as well as countless black-and-white war films. Because it all happened - and, if anything, the reality was more daring than fictional versions. This book provides a series of vivid vignettes of extraordinary courage and danger - any one of which would be worthy of a movie script. The cast list of daring pilots, steely spies, and dedicated undercover operatives on the ground in Britain is - frankly - thrilling. The stories unfold in loops, so you must keep your wits about you as introductions to British and French heroes come thick and fast. Edward Wake-Walker is clear about his intention to ‘follow a handful of individuals through their experiences’ - rather than to write an analysis of the work of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6. These are stories which deserve to be told - as many are here for the first time. The author’s way into this multi-layered account of the SIS is through his great-aunt, Barbara Bertram, whose husband Anthony (a fluent French-speaker) was a conducting officer for the organisation. Their house in Sussex - on the surface, a normal family home with children playing in the garden - became a stop-over haven for men and women of the French Resistance who, acting as intelligence agents for the SIS, were flown into and out of the nearby airfield by RAF pilots. We can easily imagine what it was like for the brave spies - picked up at night in a French field, with German soldiers always a threat nearby - to arrive safely at Tangmere aerodrome, and be taken to the welcoming house, a good meal and a soft bed. The Bertrams’ cover for the secret goings-on at night was that they were running a convalescent home for French officers. Mrs Bertram couldn’t even tell her relatives what she and her husband were doing. Their wartime work was top secret. What’s more, she ‘never knew the real names of her guests and could only guess at the nature of their missions’. For their part, they were never allowed to know precisely where they were. If they did not know the name or location of the house, they would not be able to divulge it under torture. Resistance: Members of the maquisards being given machine gun instruction One of her tasks was to make sure that no agent returning to France had anything British on him - such as a cigarette, for example. What she would supply, as well as ordinary items of French origin, were ‘maps of France printed on fine silk, fountain pens which released tear gas, and cyanide tablets, which, if they asked for them, she would sew into the cuffs of departing agents’. This grim detail reminds us that in case of capture, many an agent, knowing how they’d be treated, did not want to be taken alive. We have heard much about the work of Winston Churchill’s saboteurs, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The ‘dirty tricks’ department was created to wreak havoc behind enemy lines, but sometimes their agents were working in the same area as SIS operatives, with conflicting aims. The SIS aimed to gather intelligence on the ground as quietly as possible, while the SOE was involved with sabotage and assassination, ‘setting Europe ablaze’. There was often friction between these two departments - although both required secret transportation by the RAF in and out of enemy territory. Right at the beginning of a detailed book, Edward Wake-Walker poses this imaginative question: ‘You might ask yourself what sort of effect the sight of a tiny British aeroplane, bumping down into a moonlit field after its lonely plod over a hostile land mass, had on a man about to make his escape from occupied France.’ In spite of all the fictional versions, it is still hard for us to imagine the heart-thumping tension of waiting in the darkness, lighting the torches at the last minute for the pilot to see where to land - and all the while waiting for the shouts in the darkness that would tell the awful truth, that they had been spotted, maybe betrayed. You feel awestruck at the tales of French courage that Wake-Walker tells (far too many to choose from for this space, although I’d pick the story of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade to show that courage has no gender), but I confess that the deeds of the daredevil British pilots filled my heart with patriotic pride. The young heroes would hang out at Bignor Manor with the Bertrams, filling the room with cigarette smoke, sipping whisky, joshing, teasing Barbara Bertram - and waiting to hear if that night’s mission was ‘On’ or ‘Off’. Mrs Bertram always hated the partings, because she knew the dangers they faced and that this goodbye could be the last. With nicknames like Bunny, Sticky and Mac, the intrepid pilots would wait for the signal to jump into a tiny Lysander aircraft and take off into the darkness, to navigate their perilous way to France with no lights, peering down into the blackness for the flickering torches, and finally touching down in a field to drop one agent and pick up another. They also had to trust that those on the ground had picked a spot with no mud and no dangerous trees. There are stories of a Lysander hastily taking off again when shots rang out, of another getting lost in fog, of fuel tanks close to empty, and of course, of the ones that didn’t make it: ‘. . . a fiercely burning Lysander on its nose, the pilot trapped in the cockpit and obviously dead.’ Edward Wake-Walker’s meticulously researched chronicles of desperate resistance, audacity, duty, determination and daring are a valuable addition to the history of World War II - and yet another reminder of that extraordinary light within the human spirit which flames even in the darkest times. Read more: Spies in the spare room: How a brave Sussex housewife sheltered secret agents bound for occupied France: A HOUSE FOR SPIES BY EDWARD WAKE-WALKER | Mail Online
MI6 Kill List Operation Overlord: http://www.scribd.com/doc/143573844/MI6-Operation-Overlord-World-War-II-and-a-secret-kill-list
