The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish (33 page)

Jacques can’t dance, except on the toes of his partner, and he is not keen on parties, although he always accompanies me when we are invited; and he is not in the least bit interested in
decorations. He can’t even remember where he put the Croix de Guerre with Bar which he was awarded on the field whilst fighting in Germany towards the end of the war! I only found out he had
the medal when, before moving from Paris, I was turning out a drawer and came across it. He laughed when I asked him why he had received this award. ‘I chased the Germans out of France all by
myself,’ he teased. ‘Didn’t you know?’ And he has never elaborated further.

He hates what he calls ‘fuss’, with the result that our wedding was original to say the least. We got married in the lunch hour! Well, Jacques’ lunch hour. I’d stopped
working two days before. It would have been unthinkable in the 1950s for an executive’s wife to have worked outside the home. Jacques chose the date, bang in the middle of August, when
absolutely everyone has fled to the coast for
les grandes vacances
and Paris is empty . . . of Parisians. My parents were staying at my brother’s house in Connemara at the time and
offered to come over for the occasion, but I told them not to bother. Being the kind of people they were, they didn’t insist but took me at my word. Jacques’ parents were in the family
house in Narbonne for the
vendange
(grape harvest), where we later joined them. So we were a wedding party of four.

When my witness – an old Sandhurst friend of my brother who was in Paris for a few days on his way to Korea – and I arrived in the church porch, only Jacques’ witness was there
waiting for us. The bridegroom hurtled in, breathless, with about twenty seconds to spare. At the end of the simple ceremony the vicar said, ‘Well, at least you can have the “Wedding
March”’, climbed up into the organ loft and played it himself. As we four marched, as solemnly as we could, down the aisle of this vast, echoing church with its 600 empty seats, we all
suddenly saw the funny side of this bizarre situation and were overcome with helpless giggles.

Once in the porch, Jacques said, ‘Sorry, I have to rush, I’m terribly busy at the office,’ and disappeared into a taxi. So Hugh took Anne and me to tea at Rumplemeyer’s,
after which he tactfully dropped me at the entrance to the block of flats, saying: ‘I expect Jacques will come home early and take you out for a celebration dinner.’ It was only after
he left that I realized Jacques had forgotten to give me the key to the flat. My frantic calls to his office were met with the stern reply that Monsieur Riols had given orders that he was not to be
disturbed on any account. It was August and the concierge, who had a spare key, was on holiday, so I sat on the stairs outside the flat until nine o’clock that evening, when the lift
disgorged my weary husband. He smiled at me, said, ‘Weddings are exhausting, aren’t they?’ and collapsed on the bed in a comatosed sleep.

A few years later my brother married: a sumptuous affair with pages and bridesmaids, over 300 guests and a splendid reception to follow in his in-laws’ garden. As the last guests drifted
across the lawn to say goodbye, I collapsed onto a seat under one of the trees, enjoying the relative peace of this gentle April evening after the hectic past few days. My father came across and
sat down beside me. ‘I wish we had been able to give you a wedding like this, dear,’ he said sadly. Remembering the exhaustion etched on the faces of my brother and his bride when they
left on their honeymoon, I turned to look at him in horror, and exclaimed emphatically, ‘I don’t.’

My sister-in-law turned out to be the sister I had never had, and the four of us became great friends. My links with my brother, which had strengthened after the tribulations he had put me
through during our early years, never lessened. I could always call on him when needed and know that he would be at my side, an invaluable asset when, in his early fifties, Jacques was rushed to
hospital with cardiac arrest and suffered a coronary thrombosis. Christopher, our youngest child, was only nine at the time and I did not know where to turn. Suddenly Geoffrey was there, with his
wife’s blessing, coping with everything and almost carrying me through what proved to be a few traumatic weeks. I knew he would never let me down. But in the end he did. Three days after his
seventy-fourth birthday he died. It was a terrible shock to us all. And the only time he didn’t keep the promise he’d made to me some years before. I had been indignant after my
mother-in-law’s funeral at what I considered to be the offhand way in which the pallbearers had slung her coffin between them as they walked down the aisle. And I voiced my anger . . .
loudly.

‘I’ve got sons and nephews,’ I said, ‘when I die I want to be carried on their shoulders, reverently. I don’t want to be waved about like that!’

‘Don’t you worry, old girl,’ my brother soothed. ‘I’ve organized many pallbearers at military funerals. I’ll be there to see you are properly carried.’
And I felt appeased. Now he wouldn’t be there. But when he died what hit me most, I think, was the realization that, as far as our English family was concerned, I was now alone. Our last
cousin on our mother’s side had died the year before, at only sixty. Since he had never married, there were no nieces or nephews left to remind us that he had ever lived. My father had been
the youngest of four children, so all our Yorkshire cousins were in their teens when I was born and had long since died. I was now the only one left: the sole survivor. It was a strange feeling. We
had never been a close family, our links were very tenuous, but all the same, it was odd to think that whenever I went to England there would be no one to welcome me. It was then that I realized
how lucky I was to have married into this close-knit French family, bristling with cousins and aunts and uncles who had all welcomed me wholeheartedly.

When Jacques and I married a whole new world opened up, and I was finally able to put the past behind me and start again. I feel so blessed when I hear other women complaining about their
mothers-in-law, some with good reason, because I was so lucky with mine. Jacques’ mother welcomed me, the ‘foreigner’ her son had married, with open arms, and once we were married
I immediately became part of his large extended family. Jacques seemed to have cousins who were so far removed they were vanishing into the distance, who whenever we met always greeted me warmly
with ‘Bonjour, Cousine,’ and a kiss on both cheeks. Being a part of this united family I had married into, so different from my reserved, one might almost say cold, English relations, I
at last found the love and the security which, perhaps even without realizing it, I had always craved.

I had been brought up by parents who were kind, but remote. They themselves had been raised in the late Victorian era, when to show any kind of emotion in public was simply ‘not
done’ in polite society. And they continued the tradition with my brother and me. Cuddles and spontaneous hugs were shows of affection I never experienced as a child. How different and how
much better things are today. When I see my grandchildren being showered with love by their parents I understand how, during my own childhood, without even consciously realizing it, I must have
missed the warmth and the wealth of affection my children give their offspring. They are so much wiser than I was. My children understand that, ‘done’ or ‘not done’, human
beings at every age need love; and they also need roots.

When I married Jacques I ‘adopted’ Narbonne in the Languedoc, the
pays
in south-west France, near the foothills of the Pyrenees, where Jacques’ father’s family
had been land-owners since the thirteenth century: and finally I began to put down roots. I was born in Malta so never felt I had any roots in England and, my father being in the Royal Navy, I had
never felt ‘rooted’ anywhere, since we moved around a great deal. My mother always complained that the curtains never fitted the windows in the next house. I have in fact inherited a
trunk full of curtains which she collected over the years, always hoping that one day she would move into a house where the windows and the curtains matched each other; but I don’t think she
ever did. My father’s base was Portsmouth, and my brother was born there, but although we had a house in Southsea, we only lived in it very briefly, and it was eventually sold.

When my father retired from the Navy in 1936 we went to live in Durham. But before we had had time to settle, much less put down roots, my father was recalled to the Service during the crisis in
1938, so we moved to London. In 1945, since the London house had been badly damaged during the war, not so much by bombs as by the tenants to whom my mother had rented it when she relocated to
Bath, my parents sold that house and retired to Essex. So by the time I finally said goodbye to England, and settled in Paris, it was without any fond attachment to or deep regret for any
particular region. There was really nowhere I could claim as ‘home’. All the houses I had lived in had merely been places where my parents had temporarily settled.

How different my life is now. After five years in Paris, where Jacques was born, we bought a rambling seventeenth-century house in Marly-le-Roi, a village outside Versailles, the place I now
call home. For more than fifty years we have lived in this delightful village and brought up our five children, now all ‘flown. We have filled the gap of the empty nest syndrome with outside
activities, becoming active in an association, Entente Cordiale – shades of F Section! – which groups British with French people anxious to speak and improve their English. I joined the
British Legion and became a poppy seller, and I am now secretary general of Libre Résistance, or ‘Amicale Buck’ as it is called affectionately.

Libre Résistance was created in 1946, immediately after the war. It grouped together former F Section agents, something like the Special Forces Club in London, though not so grand –
we’ve never had our own club house and survive on a shoestring. The organization has perforce dwindled to almost nothing as far as agents are concerned. I am the only woman survivor in France
and there are now only three men. André Watt is, I believe, ninety-six or ninety-eight and no longer active. Marcel Jaurent-Singer is ninety-two and does all the administrative work for the
association but does not feel up to attending ceremonies, although he still comes to Valençay and to the annual reunion before the memorial to the members of his resistance team who were
massacred. And Bob Maloubier, now president, probably the greatest saboteur we had, is ninety but still active. He and I basically represent the ‘upright’ members of the group who
attend ceremonies. We have many members: sons and daughters and other relatives of former agents, and also historians and writers who are interested in SOE but were not directly involved in it.
Soon, the ‘younger generation’, who, if sons and daughters, are no longer young, will have to take over since we three are not eternal. We welcome new members, encouraging them to join
through a ‘colloque’ (conference) held every year at somewhere grand – in 2012 it was at the École Militare in Paris and the year before at the Paris Town Hall – with
speakers and usually a film, followed by a get-together dinner for those who wish to stay. Through these various activities, hopefully, Libre Résistance will continue to live and keep alive
the memory of those who gave so much so that we might live in freedom today.

In all these activities, remaining quietly in the background, Jacques has wholeheartedly supported and encouraged me. Without his help I could not have carried them out. After the children left
home I began to write books, and Jacques became my unofficial editor. We didn’t always agree on the changes he made to my manuscripts. And I often went into a big sulk when he slashed my
favourite passages, stating that they were
hors sujet,
they distracted from the main narrative or, worse still, I was being self-indulgent! But on reflection, when I stopped sulking, I
nearly always had to admit that he was right.

How inspired I had been all those years ago, in spite of my misgivings, to take the plunge out of the shadows of bewilderment, and the dark tunnel of unhappiness, to find fulfilment and
contentment where the love I had been so desperately seeking, and not finding, was there where I least expected it: waiting for me to grasp with both hands. I had at last reached the end of the
rocky road on which I had been stumbling and been led to the man who was able to restore my confidence, give me back my zest for life and would finally lead me home. The man who doesn’t allow
me to take myself too seriously, who has brought love and laughter to my sometimes troubled world, teasing out the knots in my churning stomach and giving me his peace. Like all couples, we have
had our difficult times, our dramas and our tensions, but overriding them all is the memory of a hundred fragile moments showered on us like apple blossom in the spring. Moments to cherish, shared
with the man who has become my other self, and of whom, even in the midst of my tormenting doubts before my marriage, I was sure of one thing: in his company, I would never be bored. And I never
have been. Perhaps after all he was the man who was destined for me. What a lot of heartache I would have avoided, not only for myself but also for others, had I only realized that before.