The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish by Noreen Riols Read Free Book Online Page A

hewing stones, and kept on a starvation diet. She developed tuberculosis and was not
expected to live, which probably saved her life. She was not executed with the other women SOE agents in the camp before the Allies’ arrival. The camp commandant probably thought it was not
worth wasting a bullet on someone who was about to die anyway. (Both Yvonne and her locally recruited courier, Denise, are still alive, Yvonne living in England and Denise in France.) A few years
ago, at a commemoration ceremony at the F Section Memorial in Valençay, they were joyfully reunited for the first time since Yvonne’s arrest in 1944. Each had believed the other to be
dead.
    In 2008 I was asked to lay the wreath on Remembrance Day at the SOE memorial in Westminster Abbey. There was already a crowd gathered in front of the plaque when suddenly Yvonne inched up next
to me. ‘I heard it was you laying the wreath,’ she whispered, ‘so I asked my son to bring me to the ceremony.’ I was very touched, since she now rarely ventures out alone
and never without her walking stick. Sometimes it is difficult to imagine the tremendous acts of bravery these now frail old ladies once performed.
    Apart from the
chef de réseau
and the pianist, the third member of the team was the courier. Until the beginning of 1942, women were not allowed ‘in the field’, nor
to train as agents. Then the British authorities realized that a woman walking in a town or village during the day was far less conspicuous and therefore much more useful than a man, especially a
young man, who ran the risk of being rounded up in a
rafle.
A
rafle,
or raid, was when the Gestapo would suddenly appear, usually in the middle of the day in a crowded place,
arrest all the young men in sight and send them to work in Germany as forced labour, usually in a munitions factory, on the railways or on the land, regardless of the profession shown on their
identity papers.
    The courier often accompanied escaped British airmen, who had been shot down and managed to evade German capture, and escaped prisoners of war, most of whom didn’t speak a word of French,
from ‘safe house’ to ‘safe house’ until they were able to cross the frontier into relative safety, and hopefully make their way back to England. Her real mission, however,
was as a messenger for the
chefde réseau.
    Female couriers were also a great help to the radio operators since a young man, especially a young man carrying a heavy suitcase, risked being stopped and searched, whereas a woman carrying a
shopping bag was able to move around more freely. In the beginning the transmitting set, or radio, weighed about twenty pounds and fitted into what could be mistaken for a small weekend case. So it
was nearly always the courier who carried the radio from place to place, hiding it in the bottom of a basket and covering it with leeks and carrots and turnips, giving the impression that she was
just another housewife on her way home from the market. As such, she was rarely questioned or searched.
    Maureen O’Sullivan was a courier who was stopped. One day Maureen had to carry the transmitter further than usual so she strapped it onto the back of her bicycle. But she was held up at a
level crossing. While waiting for the train to pass through, a car full of Gestapo officers drew up beside her. One of them wound down his window, pointed and asked her what she had in her
suitcase. She knew that if she hesitated or appeared flustered she was lost, so she gave a big smile – like most of the young couriers she was very pretty – and said: ‘I’ve
got a radio transmitter and I’m going to contact London and tell them all about you.’ The officer’s eyes narrowed. The train whistled through and as the barrier was slowly raised
she hesitated as to whether to risk making a run for it. But she knew she stood no chance of escaping, so she just continued to smile. Finally the officer smiled back and said: ‘You’re