Carved with pride

Eileen Nearne died aged eighty-nine of a heart attack in her home in Torquay on the south-west coast of England at the beginning of this month. She died alone, without family or friends, just another sad story, just another Eleanor Rigby. But she wasn’t; she was something quite special.

I read in The Times yesterday that she was destined for a council grave but officials, sifting through her papers in the hope of finding the names of relatives or friends, discovered something quite unexpected; she was a decorated war hero, awarded an MBE, found among her citations for bravery.

Eileen Nearne, you see, was one of a select band of who served in the Special Operations Executive, set up during the Second World War to carry out highly dangerous missions in German Occupied Europe. She was one of only thirty-nine women to do so, a company that included the likes of Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan. Her story is not completely unknown (she has a page on Wikipedia) but local people seemed to have known virtually nothing, beyond that she had something to do with the ‘resistance.’

She certainly had. Under the code name ‘Rose’, she was flown to in secret in a light Lysander aircraft in March 1944 to Les Lagnys in central France, where she joined the Wizard network as a radio operator. The average life expectancy for such people was only six weeks, though ‘Rose’ managed to evade capture until July 1944, some four months after her arrival, when her radio signal was finally detected.

After torture by the Gestapo, she was eventually sent to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. It was here where Violette Szabo, along with Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort and Lillian Rolfe, also SOE operatives, were murdered. Nearne was more fortunate, surviving Ravensbrück, where an estimated 92,000 women died, and a labour camp in Silesia. In April 1945 she managed to escape with two French girls from a work gang, finding refuge with a priest near Leipzig prior to the arrival of American troops.

Eileen Nearne MBE may not have talked with her immediate neighbours about her past, but it is something that she herself never forgot. In 1993 she went back to Ravensbrück to unveil a plaque to her fellow agents who were murdered there.

I admire these women so much, the operatives of SOE, who were chosen not because of extraordinary qualities but, as in the case of Nearne and Szabo, because they could speak French well enough to pass as a native. They able to learn certain skills, operation of the radio being the most important, but courage is something one does not learn; courage is innate, found even in the most unexpected places.

I would like to think that in similar circumstances I would have behaved in the same composed manner of the women of SOE, though I’m not at all sure that I would be able to withstand the constant paranoia, the fear of discovery or betrayal or capture, the endless strain on one’s nerves.

Nearne, along with Szabo, Khan and the others, deserves to have her name carved with pride. I’m glad to mark her passage on this day, the Battle of Britain Day.

Apostles and Swallows

I started to read an article on Kim Philby, one of a small and notorious group of Cambridge alumni who spied for the Soviets before, during and after the Second World War, but I gave up because the treatment – an insider account of spying techniques and protocol – bored me.

I did, however, cause me to reflect more broadly on Philby and his fellow spies, a group that both fascinates and repels me at one and the same time. A lot has been written about the motives of these people, though it seems to me that one dimension has always been overlooked, or simply not given enough emphasis.

Struggling to find the right words, I would define it as the exclusive within the exclusive, clumsy, I know, but it may go some way to offering a slightly fuller explanation. You see, as far as I can determine, it was not all down to politics: it was down to being different; to feeling different from one's class and one's community, and taking pride in this difference.

The individuals in question were the ideal candidates for the Soviet intelligence service; in the British establishment but not of the British establishment. There the were, marked by birth and background; marked by membership of the Cambridge Apostles, marked by forms of sexuality that emphasised a further dimension of alienation from many of their peers.

They were, if I can put it like this, 'outside insiders', flattered by the attentions of the Soviets; pleased to be serving a wider cause; pleased, in the end, to be serving themselves, their egos and their particular, narrowly-defined ends. Empty vessels waiting to be filled, they were the Swallows; all the others were the Amazons. It was a game; once begun, it could not be stopped.

Death to Spies

People who have read the James Bond novels will be familiar with an organisation known as SMERSH-Death to Spies. What they might not know is that this was a real branch of the Soviet Secret Service, once headed by the notorious Viktor Abakumov. It only had a short three-year existence, from 1943 to 1946, though it clearly left an abiding impression on the mind of Ian Fleming. Anyone who comes away from a reading of From Russia with Love without pleasant and cosy feelings towards General Franco's Fascists clearly has not understood the latent message!