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

far too pretty to risk your neck with such stupidities,’ saluted and drove off. As she later said, ‘He could have asked me to open the case and I’d probably have been shot. But at
least I’d have been shot for telling the truth!’
    The French called the agents sent from London
les hommes de Vombre
– the men of the shadows – which was a very apt description. We, however, called them the Crosse and
Blackwell Brigade. After being recruited, their uniform badges and buttons were changed. Their insignia was no longer that of their regiment, squadron or ship, but now read ‘By appointment to
His Majesty the King’ – the logo on the Crosse and Blackwell pickle jars. More affectionately they were known as ‘Buck’s Boys’, in honour of F Section’s head,
Maurice Buckmaster.
    Prospective agents were recruited from every branch of the Allied forces stationed in England. They were young, usually between twenty and thirty-five, although a few were approaching forty. But
they were the exception rather than the rule. Yeo-Thomas was forty, and Lise de Baissac thirty-seven when they parachuted into France; Yvonne Rudellat, who went in by submarine, was forty-five. The
recruits were courageous, motivated, often very idealistic and, glancing through old sepia photographs, mostly devastatingly handsome. And they were all volunteers. There were no special advantages
or privileges given to those who joined SOE. They received the same pay as their comrades of the same rank working in a ministry or filing papers in a government office.
    SOE recruits were the elite, the cream of whatever country they represented. They became, in effect, lone commandos, often on the run with the Gestapo at their heels. They knew from the start
that they had only a 50 per cent chance of survival. Right up to the last minute before they left, they were told that they were free to withdraw, and no one would think any the worse of them. I
don’t know how many, if any, changed their minds, but I personally never heard of anyone who did.
    Of course, if they elected not to go, they would have been sent to the cooler’. And perhaps the idea of being sent to that remote castle, a fortress really, in the very northern tip of
Scotland, nicknamed purgatory’ by the agents, made the prospect of being hunted by the Gestapo a better option. And it was a straight choice between the two. Once trained, the prospective
agent could not be returned to his unit: he knew too much. What happened at the cooler’ is still shrouded in mystery, although rumour had it that, cut off from the world without a calendar, a
watch, clocks or timepieces of any kind, the inmates lost all sense of time and place, becoming almost zombies in their isolation. Or perhaps they were ‘brainwashed’ to wipe out the
memory of their intensive SOE training, so that when they were finally released they had forgotten all the secrets they had learned. Or what they had learned had become so out of date’ that
it would no longer be relevant or useful to the enemy if revealed. I never actually met an agent who had spent time in the cooler. But that is hardly surprising. They would have been kept well away
from Baker Street. It might even be that, because of the extremely tight security we all lived under, these prospective agents were not released until the war ended. How true any of these theories
are I don’t know. But there must be some truth in the stories. And whatever happened in the cooler, if the general public had known about SOE at the time we would probably all have been
locked away as either insane or a public danger.
    Once an agent was infiltrated behind enemy lines, by whatever means, it was as if an iron curtain had come down between him and London. He could neither send nor receive personal messages. The
only news the family in England received, if there was a family, was an official card sent once a month by Vera Atkins, Buck’s assistant and a very prominent