Young, Brave and Beautiful Read online

  He wanted his family to be English – as he was – and to speak the bloody language as well. Violette and Roy now had brothers in England: John and Noël (known as George), followed by Harry, a sweet child who died aged five of diphtheria, and, in 1934, the youngest, Dickie. The death of Harry saddened Reine very much. Many years later, in Australia, she still spoke of the pain of losing that child. She had feared that maybe Dickie would be the next. She missed her two children in France and needed them beside her now.

  Charlie and Reine were looking forward to their family growing together. However, a third of the way through the Great Depression, by 1932, Reine had a shrewd idea of what Roy and Violette would be giving up by returning to the relative poverty of living in London in Talbot Road, Bayswater; with the added difficulty that now they could barely speak English. Lessons in England were difficult for Roy and Violette, not only due to language but also because of the dissimilar manner in which subjects were taught and, naturally, with different national emphasis.

  Although hot-tempered, often quite the martinet insisting on his own brand of discipline, Charlie was something of a spendthrift in his generosity to friends or those he thought of as friends. He loved his children and was proud of the burgeoning family he and Reine had created, and of his pretty, discreet and accomplished French wife, who stubbornly announced that if she must cook English fare then she would do it better than the English. She also taught herself to speak and write excellent English but never lost her delightful French accent. Charlie had always loved Reine, his independent French wife, passionately; their love continued into old age. Even after his children had grown up, Charlie Bushell still wrote love poems to his wife, Reine, his queen.

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  Although Charlie was enterprising with a strong streak of independence, he just did not have a good head for sustained business. Starting them up, yes – the original idea always found a niche in some market or other – but painstaking planning and persistence simply did not come easily to him. He refused to do anything illegal, but it was a thin line at times. One of Charlie’s sisters, Florrie Lucas, used to say jokingly that one day he would surely be in trouble with the police.

  He was happy to receive poached4 rabbit and game. He was always ‘into something’ and ready to make a go of it which led to his having been cashiered by the army in the First World War over ‘supplies’, he redeemed himself and was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant in the Royal Horse Transport. ‘Bucking the system is not a crime,’ he would tell his friends, ending with ‘but breaking the law is.’ His resolve to be an honest and upright citizen was bolstered by the horrors he had witnessed as an ambulance horse and lorry driver on the front line in the First World War. He had been lucky to come through in 1918 alive and outwardly unscathed.

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  The new war had hardened into ferocious fighting by 1940. The search was on for potential agents to slip surreptitiously into France and other European countries to help nascent resistant movements by setting up SOE circuits in those countries; initially to establish and supply sabotage networks, to organise reception committees and the training of Résistants, to find suitable terrain for supply drops and later to gain and pass on intelligence arising from these activities.

  While the first agents were creating their first networks and exploring how France was functioning, Violette was talent spotted by George Clement5 just before he went into the field as Édouard, a wireless operator for the Parsons circuit set up around Rennes in Brittany. Violette was security cleared by 1 July 1943.

  George also acted as SOE adviser under the name E. Alexander, who mentioned to Captain Jepson he had met a possible recruit, suggesting she be telephoned on her Bayswater 6188 number before she was snapped up permanently by the Belgian section where she had been active in some way and impatient to ‘do something useful’. Violette’s northern French accent was perfect for working both sides of the Franco-Belgian border, and she knew some Dutch and Flemish. She had been familiar with the area as a child and teenager travelling to Liège with Tante Marguerite and the Chorlets, briefly working for them in their factory offices when war broke out.

  George Clement, four years older than Violette, was born in Petrograd. He had gone to school in England, then studied at Brasenose College, Oxford6 before joining the army and then SOE. He had met Violette on various occasions at ‘swanky’ London clubs. Through these chance meetings, he felt she might be good material for the Service. She had mentioned her wish to continue doing something in the north of France, where her aunts and French grandparents lived. Unbeknownst to her, Violette had already been thoroughly checked out by SOE and put through various tests; she was then invited by Captain Jepson to join the French Section (or F Section) of SOE.

  After working in the Land Army in 1940, and just before joining SOE, she spent much of 1941 on the predictors along with her friend Elsie Gundry under Colonel Naylor of the 481 (mixed) Heavy AA Battery. Then in 1943 at various SOE special training schools (STSs) (the first was the induction school STS 7 at Winterfold in Cranleigh, Surrey), she submitted herself to rigorous training regimes, where she found herself living, no longer just mixing, with an eclectic mix of people, from the downright criminal to the cultured and sophisticated of British and European society.

  Another comment on Violette in the report with an illegible signature is:

  Although I am absolutely sure that she has not the faintest idea of what is going on the other side, she does not seem to bother to find out in the least, which in my opinion is a very bad sign.

  The reason is clear to me. She knew probably better than the writer of that report just what was going on in France at that time. It is my thinking that Violette was wholly intent on being trained for whatever might be in the offing. She would have had a good idea – she was not unintelligent and by living in France had already been involved albeit on the periphery of clandestine work. It was not her place to be inquisitive regarding future plans. She was to hold her own counsel which she obviously did. Many trainee agents failed in this respect and were found employment in less sensitive areas.

  This was a life she had embarked on with enthusiasm, optimism and a certain seriousness. Her training, physical and mental, was tough and exhausting but here she was living in manor houses with beautiful grounds, learning about the few artefacts that still graced them and their surrounding cottages. It was a gateway to knowledge of the arts and, through the lively conversations, the cultural and intellectual life in England and Europe. She had desperately missed the bourgeois life in the north of France and dressing up for special occasions. Now she was seeking to reach upwards and outwards, not realising this would be reaching for the sky in ways she had not imagined.

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  As well as the bourgeois social scene of Paris, Violette had encountered the London social scene at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand where her older brother, Roy, worked as a hall porter, having been promoted at seventeen from pageboy. He asked Violette to partner him to the Savoy Staff Ball in the autumn of 1937 as a gift for her sixteenth birthday. She was delighted.

  Roy had discussed the ball with his mother beforehand addressing his parents’ concern that Violette could be steered in the right direction by attending with him her first ball thus giving her a first taste of society. He could not have spoken better. It was both parents’ fear that Violette was too headstrong.

  Reine could not have agreed more, saying she would make her a lovely dress and thanking him for thinking of her. Roy described the evening planned by the Savoy to his mother saying there would be a big Glen Miller band, a superb meal by French chefs and some very nice people. He went on to say that the staff rankings, usually so stiff, would be relaxed a little, while everyone chatted and danced. He thought Violette was not half pretty and that with her slight Frenchiness and fluent French she would be a wow even with all the staff wearing the finest evening wear they could afford or ill-afford.

  Reine decided to make her a fine satin gown li
ke the dresses she had made for young women presented to King George VI, but not in debutante white, rather a soft oyster cream. Violette must attend the Savoy in a ball gown that would be something special, marked by Reine’s experience as a dressmaker in Paris. Her mother made the dress to be slinky in oyster satin but not outrageously so, reminiscent of the ‘roaring twenties’ – a simple low square neckline edged in a darker satin and inch-wide straps. Around her neck Violette wore a borrowed gold art deco snake chain. Reine also bought her a pair of size-four golden slippers. Then she made her a small satin purse with material left over from the gown’s straps.

  Violette was over the moon. It was an interminable wait from summer to autumn as she watched her mother design, cut and sew the dress by hand in her spare time. She was very excited and determined to look beautiful, speak beautifully and dance beautifully. She knew she was good-looking but perhaps did not realise how stunning she could be. She followed the twenties theme her mother had started and wore very red lipstick, to the grumpy tut-tuts of her father, enough eye make-up to highlight her large sparkling eyes,7 a light face-cream, and powder to stop the shine.

  She did not need to be heavy with makeup or flashy with clothes and followed her mother’s simple, classic and wise guidelines. Violette decided on a mass of kiss curls on her forehead and a tight chignon at the back of her neck, topped with a multi-coloured festive tiara.

  She met many interesting people that night, even spoke French with a few and danced the night away, impressing everyone with her glowing beauty and knowledge of France, the French and French writers and artists. At sweetest sixteen, she was, in turn, impressed and absolutely loved being in the grand institution that was the Savoy Hotel, mixing with the directors, high-ranking staff and their partners. Roy was somewhat miffed when the Savoy’s manager asked Violette to dance and he was left to whirl the manager’s wife around the dance floor. Roy’s friends and colleagues commented on her soft English, her vaguely foreign ways and her gaiety and easy laughter. And how well she danced!

  ‘It’s all just top notch, isn’t it, Gig? Oh thank you for such a swell evening.’

  ‘Come on then, let’s have another dance. I’ll even admit to being quite proud of you, and you do dance like a dream.’

  ‘For the moment, you’re my favourite brother!’

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  1 A ‘joe’ is the American term for any anonymous agent dropped into enemy territory, also used by the British.

  2 The Special Operations Executive was the undercover group formed on the instructions of Sir Winston Churchill during the Second World War to infiltrate and ‘set Europe ablaze’. The other services, e.g. the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), very often looked on SOE as an ‘outfit of amateurs’ and were loath to supply it with anything at all.

  3 Reine = queen. It is pronounced like the little bird, ‘wren’ with a French or trilled ‘r’.

  4 Poche = pocket in French – hence ‘poached eggs’ (in a watery pocket) and ‘pocketed’ literally as in ‘poached rabbit’.

  5 George Clement was trapped and caught transmitting on 28 November 1943.

  6 A Royal Charter established the body of principal and fellows on 15 January 1511/12. It founded a College to be called ‘The King’s Hall and College of Brasenose’ (in this sense Brasenose Hall still exists) for the study of sophistry, logic, philosophy and, above all, theology.

  7 Her irises were edged with violet, like the young Elizabeth Taylor’s; hence her French name Violette.

  2

  At the Farm

  Wednesday 5 to Thursday 6 April 1944,

  during the week before Easter Sunday

  Grey outlines, faint in the night’s gleam, were silently moving towards her. Fear prickled again so she felt relief as she recognised Philippe – with a man and a woman from the reception committee dressed in farming clothes. Philippe Liewer, Clément Beauchamp, had divested himself of his parachute kit. He strode along in a well-worn and somewhat crumpled French suit, shoes now muddied from the field. He had no firearm and refused to carry one, until after D-Day in June. Philippe also refused Violette permission to carry a firearm. He considered it more dangerous in this heavily patrolled area than not carrying.

  In French, he asked Violette: ‘You okay?’

  ‘Très bien,’ she answered.

  He continued: ‘We’re hopping on a couple of bikes and following these two to a nearby farmhouse where we’ll eat and sleep. Tomorrow, at dawn, will be soon enough to start that long haul on their crazy bikes to the station. That’s where we’ll get the afternoon train to Paris.’

  ‘D’accord,’ said Violette. ‘Hope there’s some good pinard d’un bon pinot8 to soothe our dreams.’ She laughed quietly at her own pun.

  Monsieur Chantelle, whose farm they had landed on, extended his hand in warm greeting. ‘Tu n’es pas blessée, petite? Tu pourras te réchauffer et manger chez nous à la ferme. Ma femme a prepare une belle omelette.’

  ‘No, not injured, merci.’ Violette smiled shyly in the dark. ‘How nice to get warm again and have a bite to eat. Merci beaucoup, monsieur.’

  A warm welcome awaited Philippe and Violette at the farm. Monsieur Octave Chantelle was not only a rich farmer but also the mayor of a tiny commune. He introduced his wife, Madeleine, and then brought from the cellar an ancient bottle of very special white wine in true French hospitality. The local red pinard was young but a perfect accompaniment to the farmhouse feast laid on by Madame Chantelle – a huge plat de charcuterie, an equally large omelette espagnole, made from leftover potato slices, fried onions and peas, accompanied by hot French bread straight out of the kitchen oven, made from their own wheat.

  As they tucked in hungrily, two members of the reception committee gave them the latest information. They were reminded that they had arrived in the Easter season with people moving about around the country to visit family and friends, making it considerably easier for Violette and Philippe to blend in.

  This was not the first time the small farming commune had put its members in direct danger of capture, being beaten, perhaps tortured and even killed. Many were Communist to the core, hating the Nazis and totally bent on ridding their ‘belle Marianne’, la belle France, of the sales Boches or, the sacrés Fritzs – the ‘damned krauts or Jerries’, as the British called them. Octave Chantelle was not a Communist but fervent in his disgust at the ‘attentistes’ – the wait-and-see brigade – and Pétain, once his hero, he now considered nothing but an old and diminished puppet, dancing to the German tune.

  While munching contentedly, the group quietly discussed the activities of the local Résistance fighters plus plans and training to be implemented by Paco, i.e. Bob Maloubier.

  The Résistants explained to Philippe they were short of everything – especially coffee and clothes for those living rough as members of the growing Maquis, and, of course, ammunition and explosives. They all discussed the help urgently needed from England: hard cash, armaments and training.

  Gaston Dubras, from the area around Valençay and leader of many reception committees, grumbled that it was necessary to put an end to those bastards by destroying their lines of communications to which Philippe agreed wholeheartedly letting them know that they would ‘continue to give it to them in spades!’

  Philippe then asked Violette to outline a few of the instructions from London for blowing up German lines of communication, without jeopardising them by giving too much information at this stage. It was, after all, not their immediate area. Violette and Philippe were going much further to the north. Gaston confirmed that the train service, although reduced, still ran, but not necessarily on time.

  ‘Vous savez,’ Madame Chantelle explained, ‘The trains are about the only good thing. At least they run fairly regularly – simply because the Germans need them to get from place to place. Things are going to get infinitely worse. Those filthy Jerries are incessantly piling requisition on requisition and our poor mayor is – like others all over
the country – absolutely worn out by the daily battles against their demands for more, more, more. Damn them all, I say. We need our food, our equipment and all the rest.’

  ‘But the Maquis showed up just last month in Beynat9 and made the transporters unload six cows and calves destined for the abattoirs and then Germany,’ the farmer stated with pride. ‘Twelve armed men got them off Monsieur Bugeat’s lorry and then the Maquis leader said the purchase commissioners could take delivery but only on their solemn promise that the cattle would not go to the Germans. “We’re for the people,” he said, “and we won’t let the lousy Boches step all over them”.’ Octave gave a satisfied laugh.

  Everyone clinked glasses and drank to victory.

  The two guests from London were astounded on being told that on 11 March 1944 various commercial organisations must have caught a whiff of victory – of the promised Allied invasion – and they chuckled when they were shown the local occupation newspaper asking the French to take four empty champagne bottles ‘in good condition to their usual supplier’ and they could ‘have delivered as an absolute priority as soon as transport facilities will allow and certainly before 31 December 1944 one bottle of their favourite champagne’.

  The farmer remarked that the factories and retailers were putting subscription lists together nine months in advance. He felt strongly that, now, they must have a whiff of something.

  In containers dropped with them, Violette and Philippe had brought for these Résistants provisions of real coffee, cigarettes, clothes, small arms, various explosives, ammunition and money as due recognition of the danger in which the reception committee and local people had put themselves. Warm thanks were passed to Philippe and Violette for all the British were doing, but these men of the Résistance were understandably impatient for more and concerned after the debacle of Dunkirk.