Rosie's War Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Michael O’Mara Books Limited 9 Lion Yard Tremadoc Road London SW4 7NQ

  This electronic edition published in 2011

  ISBN: 978-1-84317-646-6 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978-1-84317-647-3 in Mobipocket format

  ISBN: 978-1-84317-557-5 in hardback print format

  Copyright © Rosemary Say and Noel Holland 2011

  The right of Rosemary Say and Noel Holland to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publishers, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work.

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover design by Geoff Hayes

  Designed and typeset by K.DESIGN, Winscombe, Somerset

  www.mombooks.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE: An Englishwoman Abroad January 1939 – December 1940

   CHAPTER ONE: Departure for France

   CHAPTER TWO: Settling Into Avignon

   CHAPTER THREE: France at War

   CHAPTER FOUR: Paris and the American Hospital

   CHAPTER FIVE: The Police Canteen

  PART TWO: Enemy Alien December 1940 – May 1941

   CHAPTER SIX: Arrest and Imprisonment

   CHAPTER SEVEN: Settling Into Besançon

   CHAPTER EIGHT: People, Post, Prayers and Prostitutes

   CHAPTER NINE: Doctors, Birthday and Moving Camps

  PART THREE: Breaking Free May – November 1941

   CHAPTER TEN: Vittel: The Model Camp

   CHAPTER ELEVEN: Camp Routine

   CHAPTER TWELVE: Thoughts of Leaving

   CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Escape

  PART FOUR: The Long Road Home November 1941 – March 1942

   CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Into Unoccupied France

   CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Settling Down in Marseille

   CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Wait

   CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: To London

  Epilogue

   APPENDIX A: Rosie’s Journey

   APPENDIX B: What Happened Next

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  Plates

  Prologue

  ‘Oh, come on, Mum! We’re nearly finished now. Surely you must remember how you reacted?’

  Silence.

  ‘Look. Think back. You’re an English girl. It’s June 1940. You’re standing on the Champs-Elysées and the German army’s marching right past you into Paris …’

  More silence.

  ‘You must have reacted. Why doesn’t your generation seem to feel anything?’

  Mum looked at me. She wasn’t going to react. We were having tea in her North London flat while we talked about her wartime escapades in France. She had asked for our help in setting it all down in a book. But I think she was fast beginning to regret involving us – her daughter and son-in-law – in anything to do with her story.

  ‘Well,’ she said, giving my husband a big smile, ‘I fancy some wine. How about you two?’

  ‘Bloody stonewalling, Mum. Don’t just ignore my questions.’

  I could keep on protesting but I knew it was all over for today. My mother was a determined woman. The very experiences we were writing about had made her a lot tougher than me. If she decided that she did not want to express her feelings then that was that.

  I watched her struggle to her feet and walk over to the kitchen. She was a tall woman in her late seventies, bent low by the onset of Parkinson’s. But you could still clearly see the active and slightly ungainly girl who smiled out from the wartime photographs that were spread out on the table in front of us.

  She had started to write down her story before she became ill. We had offered to help her complete it, asking questions and fleshing out the rough draft. But, as usual, our efforts to explore further were reaching a stalemate. We didn’t seem to be able to get any deeper into her life or thoughts. Most sessions would end like this one, with me getting frustrated and fast reverting back to petulant adolescence, my husband being a bit embarrassed and my mother becoming annoyed at my strident tone. Hence her offer of a drink as a way of ending the interview.

  I am old enough to have parents who experienced the Second World War as adults. Like many other children of my generation, I grew up on their wartime stories.

  In my mother’s case, these adventures were particularly dashing. She was trapped in France after the German army had invaded that country in 1940, was imprisoned in a German-run camp in the east of France and escaped to England in the middle of the war. She subsequently worked in Spain for the glamorous and secretive Special Operations Executive until a scandalous romantic entanglement led to her being sent back to England.

  These tales were all part of our family myth. They had become a series of funny episodes that helped to explain some of the eccentricities of my mother’s character. Why did a quiet family weekend away, for example, mean at least six complete changes of clothes, enough food for a week and several large emergency items (I remember a plastic washing-up bowl on one occasion)? Why did she have an almost pathological hatred of being left in the dark right to the end of her life? And how had she acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of nineteenth-century French literature? She had certainly never formally studied the subject.

  Memory plays tricks. At this late stage in her life my mother could not always disentangle myth from reality and often she didn’t want to. She had honed her stories over the years. She had literally dined out on them for more than half a century. They might be delivered before the pudding or after someone else’s tale. Her aim would be to produce from her listeners the appropriate responses of amusement or awe. Historical accuracy was not necessarily so important.

  In this way, the long passage of time had turned the coherent events of a little over three years in the life of a young girl into a series of humorous but mostly unrelated cameos. My mother loved being seen as a great character and she certainly had the life stories to match. Her war escapades were the high point. Like most children, I simply accepted the stories, having heard them hundreds of times. It was not until we began to write them down that I realized how complex is the relationship between memory and truth. On a simple level, my mother would confuse key wartime facts or dates, even when she was using them to explain or remember her own experiences.

  The death of the actor Leslie Howard is an example. When she escaped from the German prison camp and travelled across Europe, she had real difficulty in getting a seat on a flight to Ireland from Portugal. Why? Because Leslie Howard had been killed on the same route just a few weeks previously, his plane having been shot down by the Luftwaffe. At least, that was my mother’s explanation. It was not until after her death that we checked the facts: Howard’s fatal crash was actually a year later. Yet my mother had been certain for over half a century that the crash had been in some way the reason for her problems in getting a flight.

  Stress or panic alters memory. In my mother’s account there are at least thirteen Saturdays to a month. She seemed
to talk of everything happening on a Saturday. This meant that throughout her escape and travels she was continually being blocked and frustrated by shops closing early or offices not open. Yet again the curse of the weekend, she would moan! But when we checked the dates we found that this had happened only once or twice. Just often enough to leave a recollection of such panic that it coloured all her reminiscences.

  Memories are personal possessions. But once you tell them to others they are out there to be used. I remember her indignation at finding her own stories being purloined for someone else’s autobiography. ‘How would she know that? She was never around the camp at the time. I told her that story after the war when I was working at The New Statesman.’ Such was her typically caustic comment on one woman’s so-called autobiography. That particular book is sitting on the shelf in front of me as I write this.

  Feelings were rarely present in what my mother recounted. Her tales were all about action and events. Emotion would only surface when she felt that someone else had borrowed her remembrances for their own ends. Yet her story was that of a young woman, with all the self-doubt, introspection and emotion of youth. Exciting or amusing adventures are all very well but they only explain what happened, not why something happened.

  ‘Weren’t you scared when you saw the Germans marching into Paris? Or exhilarated? You were only yards away from them.

  ‘Why did you leave it until June 1940, when Hitler was practically on your doorstep, before you tried to get home to England? Didn’t you want to be with your family at such a dangerous time?’

  These were the sorts of questions that my mother simply refused to answer. Many of her background and generation – a middle-class girl born in 1919 – refuse to analyze or even acknowledge their motives and feelings. Maybe this was the way it had to be. Perhaps the war generation managed to survive and be so brave precisely because they didn’t try to explain or rationalize. The same phrases recur in their memoirs: ‘You just did it’; ‘It was expected of you’; ‘No one questioned it’; ‘I just happened to be there’; ‘Anyone would have done the same’.

  It’s all so self-effacing, so relentlessly cheery, so matter-of-fact. Any attempt to probe further or to dig deeper is dismissed with a casual remark: ‘Oh, I don’t know about that … Now, shall we have another drink?’

  Perhaps we underestimate the impact of signing the Official Secrets Act. That signature covers you for life, not just until you finish your job. If you can’t talk about significant events when they happen, you withdraw over time even from your own past. That was certainly the case with my mother.

  Just take a glance at the Colditz escape accounts of Pat Reid or Airey Neave. Watch the wartime films of John Mills. Or marvel at the cheery Kenneth More playing the part of the terribly injured Douglas Bader. All phlegmatic. Distant. Detached.

  Such reticence came up again and again as we talked to my mother and her friends and read autobiographies of the time. You feel as if you only ever hear half the story. The person seems to be recounting someone else’s life, not their own. There is a tremendous remoteness and coldness in the tale.

  For us – the therapy generation – such detachment may be understandable but we still want more. We not only want to tell the tale, we also want to explain it.

  My mother died before we could finish this account together. She told us all she was able to. This story is the result of her memory and our bullying.

  PART ONE

  An

  Englishwoman

  Abroad

  JANUARY 1939 – DECEMBER 1940

  CHAPTER ONE

  Departure for France

  Late October 1938. A blustery, mid-autumn morning.

  I was at a job interview, sitting by the window in a rather shabby, second-floor office of the National Union of Students in central London. I was waiting for some further comments from the lady who was interviewing me, a Miss Coulter. In the meantime, I had quite a good view out of the corner of my eye of the buses crawling down to the Aldwych.

  Miss Coulter was elderly and fastidious. She had been silent for quite a time, her lips pursed as she read through some documents piled on her desk. She seemed to shift a little uneasily in her seat.

  Had I said something wrong?

  I had been trying to sound eager but not desperate. Perhaps I had overdone it and she simply thought that I was either slightly mad, or naïve, and she wasn’t sure how to break the news to me.

  I had applied through her organization to go and live in Germany, working as an au pair. Perhaps my choice of location seemed a bit strange, given that we had nearly been at war with that country just a few weeks before. I wasn’t totally ignorant. I had seen the trenches being dug in Hyde Park – a primitive sort of air raid shelter – during the crisis over Czechoslovakia. I had witnessed the panic in London. But, like the majority of ordinary people, I didn’t think war would ever come. Nothing would interfere with my life.

  ‘Well, Miss Say,’ Miss Coulter said at long last. ‘I don’t think that we’ll be able to help you in your specific request.’ She smiled somewhat patronizingly. ‘I’m sure you appreciate that we can’t really encourage any young person to go to Germany at this particular time.’

  She shuffled her papers and looked up at me. I nodded and stared at her rather blankly. I was beginning to feel a bit foolish and embarrassed by the whole procedure. After all, I wasn’t a student, I knew nothing about looking after children and I barely spoke French, let alone any other European language. I felt she knew all this and was politely trying to let me down.

  ‘What about France?’ she asked after another long silence.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Well, we could try to place you in France instead of Germany.’

  ‘That’s fine with me.’

  She looked a bit startled by my ready agreement. I felt like telling her that I would have agreed to go to China if she had told me that it was a good idea. I simply wanted to get away from London and from my family.

  Let me give you a little of my background.

  I came from a solid, middle-class family. We lived just off Hampstead Heath in North London. My father, a former naval officer, had a comfortable job in the City. He and my mother were Edwardian in outlook, with entirely traditional aspirations for their three children. So, while my brother David had gone up to Cambridge to read theology, I had enrolled on a secretarial course in central London with my older sister Joan.

  I was now nineteen years old and had been working for the past year as a secretary at a catering college near to where we lived. It was a large, austere building which reminded me of school, with long, grim corridors where a domestic always seemed to be polishing the floors. It even smelt like school: soap and watery food. I had a very comfortable if rather predictable existence at home. I willingly gave half of my thirty-five shillings a week wages to my mother. I suppose I didn’t really have much need for money: I walked to work where I had food provided, had no desire to save for the future and was paid for at the cinema, the theatre or restaurant by my boyfriend Bobby.

  Bobby was part of the problem. He was just too right: ten years older than me, good-looking, our parents firm friends. He was in the process of taking over his father’s auction house in Lisson Grove. It was a business that he would in the future make very successful. On a couple of occasions he had even selected items of furniture for me at the showroom after a night out in town. Our relationship was a settled one and I suppose everyone assumed that we would eventually marry. But it was all very chaste and unexciting.

  My great passion was poetry. I took myself very seriously here. I filled notebooks with my own attempts, diligently writing something every day as practice for the future. A rather precious and intellectually arrogant young woman, I would walk the short distance up to Hampstead High Street to hear the major new poets reading their work. I remember listening with rapture one evening as a young W.H. Auden read aloud.

  Poetry was even the cause of r
ows between my mother and me. She rejected poets such as Auden and MacNeice, for example, on the grounds that they were vulgar. Her strait-laced attitude merely strengthened all my feelings of being misunderstood.

  I was bored with my safe and predictable life: I wanted out. I longed to dance the light fandango and be silly. It wasn’t that I meant to make trouble for my family, but rather that I didn’t want to go on placating my mother while feeling absolutely mean about how tired I made her. She was a tall, thin woman who always seemed to find life an effort. She had had me at the then advanced age of thirty-four. I had been sent off to boarding school (unlike my siblings) at the age of seven because I was too energetic and noisy. She still seemed to find me too much to cope with.

  I had decided earlier in the year that I had to do something different and radical that would break the mould being set for me. But what? It wasn’t until early that autumn, walking over Hampstead Heath one bright, cold afternoon with my schoolfriend Peggy, that I decided exactly what I would do.

  ‘I’m going to live abroad,’ I declared.

  ‘Where? How will you live?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t got that far yet.’

  ‘But what will your parents say?’

  I looked at Peggy and shrugged my shoulders. The truth was that I had decided on what I was going to do but as yet had no idea of how I would do it. We walked around Highgate Ponds discussing which country I should go to and how I might support myself. All the potential destinations were carefully dissected. After her initial scepticism, Peggy became much more enthusiastic about the whole scheme.

  ‘My uncle went to Argentina years ago,’ she said. ‘He works for a British railway company there. Perhaps he’d help.’

  ‘No, it’s too far. I don’t fancy weeks at sea.’