It was the first time she had ever been in an airplane, and the noise terrified her. Catherine Gampel did not know what to do. But she knew the plane had come to pick her up, and so she was pleased. Then people said there was a lot of flak around the plane, and she thought: we are not there yet.

She did arrive safely. But by then, the young woman who had left Brittany for Paris in 1943 to work for the French Resistance had already spent months carrying messages, pistols, and warnings of arrest through streets full of Germans, had already felt the hand of the police on her shoulder, and had already learned to live with the knowledge that the people before her often never came back. Hugh Verity could not accept the idea of his family being under the Nazis. In the early years of the war he had been a night fighter pilot.

But in 1942 he volunteered for RAF special duties, and so became involved in one of the most extraordinary and effective operations of the secret war. Flying from the Sussex coast in an unarmed single-engine Lysander aircraft, landing in remote corners of German-occupied France to deliver and collect agents of the French resistance in absolute secrecy by the light of the moon. Throughout 1943 Verity led A Flight of 161 Special Duties Squadron. He was 24.

Commander of B Flight was Bob Hodges. Both flights were based near Bedford at RAF Tempsford. But Tempsford was too far north for operations in France, so 161 Squadron’s pick-up flight, A Flight, used to come down to Tangmere every moon period: one week before and one week after full moon. With the aid of the moon it was much easier to find your way over France.

Today RAF Tangmere is a memory and a museum. The famous control tower is a ruin. But nearby there is Tangmere Cottage, the nerve center of the secret missions. This was the operations room, first and last port of call for so many courageous men and women.

The present owner has preserved the spirit of the room, and it is little changed. Hugh Verity’s Lysander in 1943 has been reconstructed at Duxford near Cambridge. The Lysander was robust: powered by a single Mercury engine, it could land and take off within 150 yards. Each aircraft had its own code letter.

Hugh’s was J. And so he called it Jiminy Cricket. Jiminy Cricket seemed a suitable character from the Walt Disney films of his youth, after all, pretty good at jumping around the place. There were one or two important omissions on the reconstruction, though.

One was the lack of the ladder. There was always a fixed ladder on the port side of the fuselage. The other was an extra fuel tank between the wheels, shaped like a torpedo. One of his pilots, who had been a Spitfire pilot, said that Lysanders after Spitfires were like trying to fly a London bus.

Verity thought that was quite unnecessarily rude. He enjoyed flying a Lysander. It required a cool head, and a young one. His pilots were young.

Jimmy McCanns had flown with Douglas Bader. Peter Vaughan Fowler was aged 20. Bunny Rymills was just 22. And the moon came out.

Without the moon, Verity said, we would have been lost, I think. He had tried a landing before moonrise once. Twice. Just to see how frightening it was.

It frightened him so much he never tried it again. As commander of B Flight, Bob Hodges had specialized in parachuting secret agents into occupied Europe. He was made commander of the special squadron, trained himself to fly Lysanders and twin-engined Hudsons by night, and was soon landing by hand. Navigation in the Lysanders was particularly difficult.

One had to fly visually with maps on your knee. The maps would fall on the floor. It would be quite a job picking them up again with a torch. It was all quite tricky, but one got used to it.

Flying over the same stretches of country in the north of France between the Normandy coast and the Loire, down the Loire Valley, one got to know the country fairly well. That was where they used to cross the Loire. Verity thought that when God made the earth, he designed France with the Loire, because without it the Lysander pilots would have been lost. The catalyst was that every flight ended at the coast.

Once you saw the inlet, you were all right. The first leg of the trip was the land away. The clandestine activities of A Flight were known to very few people, least of all to the villagers of Tangmere, Sussex, where secrecy was essential. The cottage was just opposite the main gate of RAF Tangmere.

But the entrance to its car park was shielded by high fencing, so that once the secret service station wagons swept in through the gate, they were invisible from the road, and they could unload their passengers, the agents to be, without anybody seeing them. Every moon period, secret intelligence agents were driven down from London to a safe house on the Downs near Petworth. Major Anthony Bertram had offered his home for that purpose. His task was to ensure the security of the operation, and inevitably his wife, Barbara, was drawn into the secret web.

We lived entirely by the moon, she said. Next moon and last moon, not next month and last month at all. They were all agents working with the intelligence section of the resistance movement. They would come down to her at about three o’clock.

One of the things she had to do was to go through their luggage, looking at everything they had bought since they had been in England, to see if it was marked made in England. If so, remove it. Shirts and pajamas were easy. You rubbed very, very hard with Milton.

Either it rubbed it out or it rubbed a hole in the shirt, and that was all right. If they had bought a new suit, the buckle on the back of a man’s waistcoat had to be cut off and the straps sewn together. Some of them thought they could not withstand torture, that they would be sure to talk, and that would mean giving away their friends. They used to get her to sew a piece of poison into their cuff, and she was glad to say she never knew if any of them ever used it.

It was a horrible feeling. In the family living room, behind the dartboard, Major Bertram built a secret cupboard in which they kept the poison, the revolvers they were all given, coshes, and all sorts of things of that sort. Missions depended entirely on the weather. Sometimes, while they were having supper, Tangmere would ring up and say it was off: it was going to rain, it was going to be foggy.

Then they would have to have a terribly jolly evening. Sometimes the pilots themselves would come over, which made quite a big crowd in the smallish house. They would ask them to come and have a little party with the house guests to cheer them up a bit, because the pilots got fidgety waiting for their operation, terribly keyed up. It was good for them to have a chance to chat to people, and there was no security objection.

They would always end with a sing-song, singing Alouette and Au Clair de la Lune, well-known songs of that sort. It was always a very jolly evening. To while away the time, the agents might play darts in the pub in nearby Sutton, but they were never told the name of the village. Because towards the end, one of the questions the Gestapo asked them was: did you pass through Major Bertram’s house?

And if they said yes, the first next question was: where is it? They did not know. When at last the skies cleared or fog lifted, the message came from Tangmere: it’s on. Then it was necessary to let the people in the networks in France know which field they were coming to.

That was done by prearranged coded messages transmitted after the French news by the BBC. One of the code names for an operation was Catalina, the name of their goat. So a lot of messages went out night after night: Catalina’s gone for a walk today, Catalina’s done this, Catalina’s done that. Then suddenly: Catalina’s bought a new blue dress.

That meant it was on that night. The agent responsible for the operation on the ground would have heard the message and would get together his team, the reception committee. They would have got a field at least 500 yards long. Into wind at least 100 meters from the boundary of the field would be the first pocket torch or bicycle lamp or whatever they could get hold of, possibly on a stick about three feet high, kept up clear of the long grass.

One hundred and fifty meters into wind would be the second lamp, and 50 meters to the right of that the third lamp. By the first lamp the agent would wait for the sound of a Lysander engine and then flash a prearranged Morse letter. The pilot would reply with his downward white light from below the cockpit with another prearranged letter, so the agent would know it was okay. At which point the other lights would be lit up, and there would be a triangle, a little L-shaped triangle of lights.

The aim of the Lysander pilots was to land, exchange their secret passengers and equipment, and take off, all within the space of three minutes. If it was not a muddy sticky field, the Lysander would be airborne in about 100 yards. The dedication, skill, and sheer daring of the pickup pilots was matched only by their modesty. Really, you could not compare the risks with the risks run by the bomber aircraft going over Germany, whose losses were horrific.

They were all so young. Fred Gardner had left school at 14 and been a cabinet maker before joining Bomber Command. He was the sergeant wireless operator in a Lancaster taking part in a night raid on Germany in 1943 when they were attacked by a Messerschmitt fighter. Fred managed to bail out of the blazing aircraft and landed in darkness in a field in occupied Belgium, narrowly missing the power lines.

At daybreak he spotted a village nearby and set off in search of help. Then he heard a lorry approaching. He thought it could only be Germans who had motor vehicles here. He was opposite a cottage door, so he opened the door and jumped in quickly and closed the door behind him.

There was a window alongside the door. He looked out, and a German army truck went past full of soldiers. He was sure they were part of some sort of search party for any surviving crew members. He turned to see where he was in the room.

There was an elderly lady, and she burst into tears. He did not know whether she was sorry for him because he was a bit roughed up, or whether she was scared. Probably the latter. He had landed among friends.

Quickly provided with civilian clothes, he was passed on to a sympathetic local priest who gave him a further disguise: a cassock, so he was well camouflaged. A rendezvous had been arranged for him to meet a resistance man in the woods. They met, and there was some danger because they were out in the curfew. As civilians they could have been picked up for no reason at all other than being out.

The resistance man was armed, and he gave Fred a pistol and showed him how to release the safety catch. Then they set off. The resistance fighter, code-named Raymond, was wanted by the Gestapo. German troops were everywhere.

They had to pass close to some barracks, and at that moment a door opened and the light streamed out, and some German soldiers came out with their rifles slung across their shoulders. Two of them made toward bicycles leaning against the hut, mounted the bicycles, and started coming pedaling slowly toward them. By this time they were both in the ditch at the side of the road, crouched down, waiting for them to pass, which they did very close to them. What bothered Fred particularly was that his companion pulled out his pistol, pointed it at the Germans, and kept it trained on them as they passed about three yards away.

Fred was having palpitations. If they had coughed or sneezed, he thought, there would have been some bullets flying. At his next secret rendezvous Fred was equipped with forged papers, but then he was led to a private room in a small hotel. The doors were locked, and one of the men in the room was Flight Sergeant Herbert Pond, pilot in the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

Pond was in rather a difficult spot. The resistance men thought he was a German plant, and he was in danger of them executing him, in fact. The resistance men asked Fred if he could vouch for him. Fred asked Pond a few questions, and it transpired that Pond and he had been on a training station some months before.

They had not known each other at the time, but they had both witnessed a quite bizarre incident where some Australian crews had acquired some chickens and had flown them from upstairs windows to see how far they could fly across the parade ground. There were bets placed on it, too. No German could have known those details, so Fred was able to clear Pond. Afterwards Pond said: I’m sure you saved my life.

Gardner and Pond were now on the famous Possum escape route from Belgium down into France. For weeks they traveled together in constant danger and with only a few words of French between them. Misreading a notice, Fred shoved his way onto a train and into the wrong carriage. He was followed by lots of German officers in their very resplendent uniforms.

One or two actually said excuse me in French as they pushed past him in the corridor. Fred thought: yes, you don’t know I’m wearing an RAF PT vest. The Lysander pilots had to bear in mind the possibility of some form of prank on landing on fields which were unfortunately going across ditches. For those occasions one wanted to be able to merge into the German scenery and not look too much like an RAF pilot.

So some of them wore civilian clothes underneath with a little bit of uniform on top, just in case they were caught by the Germans before they were able to do a run. In a flight log book which Verity treasured there was a remark by Wing Commander Hodges: of course, I’d always want to wear my tunic. Otherwise, walking into a prison camp, they wouldn’t know what I was. In the moon period of September 1943, which Verity called a harvest moon, they had nights fit for pickup operations 12 nights running, from the 10th to the 21st of September.

It was an exceptionally good moon period. They attempted 25 landings and achieved 19. There were six pilots in the flight at that time, and the squadron commander, Wing Commander Hodges, also did two pickup operations with them, one with a Hudson and one with a Lysander. Verity was an experienced pilot with night flying experience which was particularly valuable.

He had the ability to weld the flight into a very closely knit and efficient organization, led extremely well from the front, and carried out a lot of operations himself. After five weeks on the run, Fred Gardner had reached a house near Reims. From the last house where they were hidden, they were told there would be a chance for Flight Sergeant Pond and himself to be flown home. They were quite amazed at this, and Fred thought they would be very lucky if that came off.

Verity did a single pickup north northwest of Reims. This was for the Possum MI9 network, a Belgian escape and evasion network. Three or four resistance men arrived together with a Belgian agent, and they set off into the darkness. It was quite a moonlight night.

Verity remembered it as rather dodgy for two reasons. One was that there was no welcome for him when he arrived over the field, and he had to circle the area for an hour waiting for a light to come up. The other was that there was a haystack very close indeed to the strip of ground he had to land on. On the ground, Fred thought the aircraft was early or they were late.

The Lysander came overhead rather sometime before they got to the landing strip, circling round and flashing its identification lights. Fred thought it was impossible. They had to run the last half mile to get to the field. Then they found that some of it had been plowed.

That caused some consternation amongst the resistance men. But there was a small part left with grass. The area of good solid ground on which one landed and rolled was much too narrow. They quickly set out three torches as a flare path.

It was Fred’s job as wireless operator to do the signaling. He flashed the letter R, he remembered distinctly, to the pilot as he did a circuit. The Lysander came in over the haystack, and despite a rather big bounce, made a good landing. They were all crowded into the little cockpit.

Again it was Fred’s job to give a signal over a microphone in the back to the pilot that they were clear to take off. The hatch was closed, and within seconds, really, they were in the air again, into a moonlit sky, and had quite a reasonable flight home. They were not molested by the enemy until they got to the French coast. There were a few searchlights that wavered about, but they were not picked up, and they came across the channel.

Fred remembered looking down on Brighton. His grandmother lived at Portslade, and he could almost pick out her house as they flew over. She did not know he was safe. They came into a beautifully smooth landing at Tangmere.

Then they were taken into the cottage and introduced to their pilot, Squadron Leader Verity. Fred had to compliment him on his navigation. He could not understand how he could find a field in the middle of France, when as a bomber crew they had, he did not like to say it, quite some difficulty in finding the target sometimes. It was certainly a very strange adventure.

Fred could not really believe it was happening to him. It seemed like something out of a boy’s magazine. The reality was that the man who had organized Fred’s final escape was dead within months. Commander on Poitier did a number of operations getting evading air crew onto flights back to England.

But he was eventually betrayed and captured, and ruthlessly tortured to get information out of him. When it got to the point that he had one eye gouged out by his interrogators, he could not stand it anymore. He jumped out of a window to kill himself. There seems little doubt that the sacrifices made by the resistance and their helpers shortened the war by six months or more.

After the war, Fred and his wife made several trips to Belgium to visit these very heroic people again. On one occasion they were interviewed by the press, and as a result they had several phone calls, including one from a gendarme who, as a boy, had found Fred’s forage cap in the field near the crash. He asked Fred if he would like it back. They went along to the police station, and there was a ceremony when he presented Fred with his cap.

A strange story, and one that does not quite end there. Decades later, at an event, the pilot met his passenger again, 52 years on. Hello, Captain Verity. Yes, Fred.

Lovely to see you again. Yes, good to see you. My goodness. I’ll come on into the field.

52 years. Yes, come on into the field. Another young woman, Diana Dors, wanted to contribute to the war too. She could not do anything.

She spoke languages. And of course she could sing, very useful, she thought ironically, for a war aim. But when you are young, you feel heroic. She just wanted to be involved.

How? She had no idea. From 1941 to 1944 Diana moved in a shadowy world of secret agents and secret information as a private courier for two of the most powerful spymasters of the Second World War. Diana was born in England and held a British passport, but she was brought up in the south of France within a few miles of the Italian border, as good a place as any to observe the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

Her mother, Helene, was Welsh, and her father, Louis Dors, an anti-fascist Italian aristocrat. Here in France, still in her early teens, Diana began her lifelong affair with the politics of Europe. She used to listen on French radio to Goebbels. Her German was always rotten, but she could understand the excitement that was being built up.

For a young girl she was politically conscious, far more so than her school friends, who were not interested. She had also inherited a quite remarkable voice, a natural soprano, and soon she was receiving lessons from her great aunt, Mary Louise Edvina, star of the Paris Opera. Then war was declared. Diana had just celebrated her 18th birthday.

She thought: oh God, my friends will be killed, we’ll all be killed. She was very dramatic. From there she decided she was going to do something. But what?

Diana and her mother came to London, and Diana found a job in civil defense. But by 1941 she was part of the cosmopolitan swirl of artists and musicians who had escaped from Europe, and her extraordinary vocal talent marked her out. She went to an audition. She was taken.

She was offered the lead. She claimed she knew the parts, of course. She did not know anything. But she said yes, yes, of course I could.

Yes, she sang in Italian only. She did not know it in English and did not know it in either. Still, she got the contract and went to Dublin. She was to sing Lucia di Lammermoor, which had not been done since the days of Tetrazzini, and Gilda in Rigoletto.

And if successful, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Everything went the way she had prayed for. At the end of it she had an invitation to return. London was bursting at the seams, not just with emigre artists but with military attaches and secret intelligence officers of all nationalities, all on the lookout for the perfect recruit.

They felt that Diana could be perhaps useful in other ways. She was taken to see Colonel Moravec, who she subsequently learned was the chief of Czech intelligence. He was a very charming, nice man. He chatted to her a bit, but obviously she was not what he was interested in.

General de Gaulle had set up his Free French headquarters in Carlton House Terrace, and it was here that he installed a young French officer as head of French secret intelligence, Colonel Passy. Diana met Colonel Passy, of whom she knew nothing, through a friend who was a commander in the French Navy. Subsequently Passy introduced her to Colonel Claude Dansey. Dansey was deputy head of British intelligence, a true English gentleman, and ruthless.

Diana thought she was right to say they actually met at the Waldorf. They had tea. He asked her a few questions about Dublin and whether she was interested in going further afield to look for work. Yes, she was.

He said they could help her. From that, the seeds were sown. They could help her travel. She could go wherever she wanted.

She could go to Switzerland or Spain, or she could get auditions. Her ears stood up, her eyes glistened, and she was hooked. They lifted a curtain and said: look, we can help you, but you must help us. That was her meeting with Claude Dansey and Colonel Passy, who she learned quite quickly on were two of the great spymasters of the Second World War.

Although they had their own military intelligence units and all the paraphernalia, they also had what they used to refer to as their private collection: a few unknown, unattached bods that they could make use of. Diana happened to be one of them, because she could sing. The secrecy of the private collection was absolute. Nobody knew who the others were.

They wanted to be free to organize some pretty dirty tricks, which they did. André Dewavrin, alias Colonel Passy, was a French patriot and a brave one. He called himself Passy after the station on the Paris Metro. He visited his agents in occupied France and was brought back to England at least once by the famous Lysander pickup operation out of RAF Tangmere in Sussex.

At Bignor on the Sussex Downs just north of Tangmere, the intelligence services kept a safe house for secret agents, run by Major Anthony Bertram and his wife Barbara. The enigmatic Colonel Passy stayed there. Barbara Bertram remembered: Colonel Passy came down to Bignor and was not going over to Tangmere, so was left with me. My husband did not really quite like leaving him alone with me.

He never attracted me in the least. There was something cold about him. She never really took to him. He was very charming, rather cool.

The French can be a little bit what she called having an odeur, a sort of reserve. He was very intelligent, very charming always, very courteous, but underlying it she always felt that he was observing. He was assessing. Passy decided they could make use of Diana as a private courier.

Travel would be made possible if she used the camouflage of a young singer, young and quite pretty at the time, to go abroad, audition, try and get a broadcast, make contact with conductors, musicians, singers, and put forward her career. At the same time, she would fit in with the necessities and the service she would be asked to do on behalf of her masters. If she was to travel to other countries, she needed another passport, a neutral passport. She could have had a forged one, and the forged papers were top class.

Nevertheless, it was Passy who determined in his own very meticulous way that it would be better if she genuinely had foreign papers. Quite by chance, Diana’s brother-in-law, James Mason, was filming at the time, and he told her that a young stand-in was absolutely desperate to stay in England. Mason found it funny that Diana was desperate to get out, and the man was desperate to stay in. Diana asked what he was.

Spanish. They arranged a meeting. They had a chat. He told her why he wanted to stay in England.

She told him why she wanted to get out. She said: should we make a deal that we’d get married and divorce as quickly as possible. They did it. They went to Marylebone Registry Office and got married.

They shook hands, had a drink, and it was bye-bye. She had what she wanted. He had ostensibly what he wanted. It did not quite work out that way, though.

Still, Passy was not satisfied. Diana was given an order to attend Lewes Prison. She was somewhat surprised and said why. They said: well, your husband’s there.

She duly attended the prison. She was very impressed by its outside; it had lovely greenery hanging around it. Not very impressed with the inside. She asked him if there was anything she could do, what had happened.

He said he had been arrested on a trumped-up charge of having firearms. She asked what was going to happen. He said he did not know. They were going to send him to prison or intern him or both.

She said she was awfully sorry, and she went away and reported that she had done what she could and asked what had happened. They said: mind your business. Got nothing to do with you. This is perfect.

You’re married to a Spaniard. He’s been imprisoned, and he will be interned, and at the end of the war we’ll kick him out, and you’ve got nothing more to do with it. In the process, Diana made it very clear that she was not any heroine in the making. She knew too much about the kind of thing that could occur to people who were apprehended and arrested in enemy territory.

In 1943 a young French girl arrived in Paris. It was full of Germans, which she called the dorifor, the Colorado beetle. Catherine had come to Paris from Brittany, the heart of the French Resistance movement. A few days earlier, Jean Camaret had arrived from England to be a senior officer in the Resistance.

Catherine met Jean Camaret at her cousin’s flat a few days after he had been landed in occupied France in the most famous Lysander operation: three Lysanders came down with nine men, and he was one of those. That evening over supper, Camaret recruited Catherine. He said he needed somebody to go somewhere for him. She said: well, I go.

Perhaps it was to deliver a message that an appointment had been changed, something very, very simple like that. They used to get messages via radio from England. Those messages had to be coded or decoded and then delivered to the people interested. So Catherine learned to code and decode.

Then sometime she was asked to carry some arms. She remembered one day going to Saint-Sulpice with a silenced pistol. Other times she went to tell people that they were going to be arrested and that they should move and get away. One day she was sent to Le Mans.

She arrived at the station, took the bus, and went to the house. She rang the bell. Nobody answered. She did not dare turn around.

She was so frightened that the Germans would be behind her back and would arrest her. She did not know what to do. She closed her eyes, turned around closing her eyes, and opened them again. There was nobody there.

She rushed back to the main road and took the bus. Diana’s duties, by contrast, were comparatively simple. They did not ask one to do anything like encoding or decoding or deciphering or using radio. You went, you were a messenger.

You were not a diplomatic bag, but you were a post bag. The methods used nine times out of ten were through music. If she had a score or number of sheet music, songs from different kinds suitable for auditioning, although all music was sealed in England before she departed, once she was abroad it was perfectly simple. She opened the seal, took out the music, took out the piece she was told to deliver, and received in return a song to add to her collection.

Encoded within sheet music was the most secret and sensitive information: Allied troop movements, sabotage plans, instructions that would affect the entire conduct of the war. For almost four years Diana carried her secret songs to and from the capitals of neutral Europe, flying sometimes in small planes from remote airfields in Scotland and the West Country to Madrid, Geneva, Stockholm, Dublin, and Lisbon. In Lisbon especially, agents and double agents mingled easily with diplomats and bankers and with the young singer just arrived for a concert. Thus Diana was able to deliver and collect not only coded information for her masters, but all the gossip or rumor which she overheard.

Intelligence work of any description is made up mainly of boring, long analysis and assessment. All kinds of little items that you might glean at a cocktail party could in effect carry some minute piece of information which just fitted into a puzzle. Ears were very important. And in her case, wariness.

She was born wary. She thought this was perhaps the one characteristic that both her masters noted. Back in London, Diana delivered her freshly coded songs and her news to Colonel Passy and Colonel Dansey for their eyes and ears only. If they met one to one, there would be a discussion as to how things had turned out.

What she had observed. What did she feel? Was she anxious? Otherwise they would perhaps be a little group, a small group of four or five naval men, army men, at Carlton House Terrace, sitting in circles of six or seven at a table, sometimes with General de Gaulle, who would appear.

She never sat at his table, but she would sit just alongside him and see the great man. She was always what the French term a solitaire, not solitary in the sense that it might be translated, but always very self-contained. The only thing that she had which she thought was probably a great recommendation was a pretty phenomenal memory. She never drank.

She did not smoke. She was a virgin until she was over 21, unique, because in the war people were hopping in and out of bed, because tomorrow might not come. She was very much reserved, very watchful, very wary. For the young Catherine Gampel, wariness and danger went hand in hand on the streets of Paris.

One day she was told to go and collect some money. She was warned that the person who had been before her never came back. But she said: all right, I’ll go. She went.

There was a courier that she did not know who handed her a parcel. She never saw that courier anymore. In any case, she was walking along with her parcel. Suddenly she felt a hand on her left shoulder, a hand on her right shoulder, and people said: police.

She was a little bit afraid of what was going to happen later on. As a matter of fact, they looked at her parcel. They noticed that it was money, and they said: all right, we’ll go to the commissariat of police at Picpus, and you explain what that parcel is, and where it comes from, and where it’s going. They walked along quietly, not too fast.

Then suddenly she heard: all right, you go. We keep the parcel. She left. She went to the first tube station, and there she stayed in the tube practically the whole day, changing trains every time she could.

She was so frightened that they had put somebody following her to know where she was going, where she was coming from, where she was going next. She was so aware of her safety and the dreadful risks that other people who were field people, field agents, took. She did not think there was anyone who had similar work to hers who did not feel the same. A certain relief that they were safe, and a sense of guilt that other people were putting their lives on the line.

Another agent Diana encountered was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, real name, to Diana’s mind exactly like a cinema spy, but you never knew next time she came what colored hair she would have. Sometimes she was red, sometimes she was dark, all sorts. One night in the agent’s safe house at Bignor, Marie-Madeleine spoke to Barbara Bertram about torture. Barbara thought torture was a thing of the past.

In a war, you expected people to be killed, but torture was something new and something absolutely horrible. Some of them had already been tortured. They were going out liable to be arrested and knew that they would be tortured again. It was a horrible feeling somehow.

She thought six weeks was considered the average life of an agent dropped. After the D-Day invasion, Catherine and her group left Paris. Jean Camaret, her cousin Vivet, their radio operator, and a courier, and herself, left on bicycles to go to the country, because this is what they had been told to do by headquarters. They headed for the Loire Valley and a small town.

Every day at noon they checked their secret letter box in a village church nearby. They were expecting two people coming from England who had been dispatched, and one of them was supposed to replace Jean Camaret, who had been under great strain since many months. But they never saw them. It was decided that Catherine should be picked up by an RAF Lysander and brought to safety.

Catherine did arrive safely. She married a fellow resistance fighter and now helps to run the family art gallery in Mayfair. It was the first time since 50 years that she spoke of all those days, because she had lost so many friends. Diana remained part of the private collection until towards the end of 1944, but her connection with the French as such really came to an end earlier than that.

Partly because General de Gaulle’s headquarters had moved to Algiers, partly because she thought she was superfluous to requirements. It was not because she had a difference of opinion with Colonel Passy. She did not think for a moment he would have given a jot for her feelings, but politically they were poles apart. He extreme right wing, she very much left wing.

She had not changed, she added for the record. For many years after the war Diana continued to gather secret information behind the Iron Curtain, but that is another story. And whatever became of her Spanish husband, last heard of in Lewes Prison? In 1962, her last recital at the Wigmore Hall.

Afterwards in the green room with the usual kindly well-wishers, a tall, rather good-looking man came up to her, kissed her hand, and said in perfect English: I had no idea you sang Spanish songs so beautifully. She simpered and said thank you, very kind. He said: and you said you don’t know me, do you? She said no, should I?

He said: well, yes, I was your husband. And with that, he walked off. That’s it.

She never saw or heard of him again.