Noor climbed into Frank Rymills’s Lysander around 10 p.m. on the night of June 16. She shared the cramped passenger section of the Lysander with Cecily Lefort. They hadn’t seen each other since their initial training at Wanborough Manor. After that, they had separated—Noor to learn about her Mark II radio, Lefort to be trained as a courier, messengers who traveled from circuit to circuit, acquiring intelligence about the Germans and passing it on to other cells or to radio operators to transmit to London. Noor was wearing a green oilskin coat. She would need it. Lysanders got chilly. The sky was clear; the moon was bright. That and a map and a compass were the only way Rymills could find his way. Noor was in good hands. In his first ten months ferrying agents to France, Rymills had flown sixty-five operations without a break, twice the usual number. He never lost anyone, going in or coming out.
Rymills was twenty-three years old. Tall, with fair hair and a casual manner, he was flying Lysanders almost accidentally. When he joined the RAF in 1939, he was assigned to massive Halifax bombers—forty feet longer than Lysanders, 34,000 pounds heavier, and with enough room for seven crew members and an arsenal of machine guns, four forward and four aft. Lysanders made Rymills laugh, especially after almost slamming into one while landing his Halifax. From high up in the Halifax, the Lysander looked like a scale model a boy scout had glued together from matchsticks and balsa wood. It moved about as slowly as a model, too, and could barely get out of Rymills’s way as he hurtled down the runway.
Soon after that incident, Charles Pickard, the commander of a squadron of Lysanders, spotted Rymills in the crew room. Most likely, Rymills’s cocker spaniel, Henry, was with him. Henry accompanied his master wherever he was allowed, and often where he wasn’t. Pickard and Rymills relaxed over drinks while Pickard slowly brought their banter around to the real reason for his sudden interest in Rymills. Would he like to fly a real plane, one that required a real pilot? In a Lysander, you can sense the air currents around you half a mile up and land in a field in the middle of nowhere guided only by two or three men standing on the damp ground, holding a flashlight in one hand and a revolver in the other. And you almost flew on cloth: other than the cockpit and the hot areas around the engine, a Lysander’s wooden frame was covered with specially treated cotton. With all that cloth, Lysanders were one step up from flying a laundry basket. Even better was that the pilot’s seat was the highest of any plane in the air force. Getting there was like climbing the rigging on a square-rigged ship: you slipped your feet into toeholds here and there, swung from a series of struts, and when you reached the summit, squirmed your way into the pilot’s seat. By winding a wheel next to your right leg, you cranked the seat so high that you could actually see over the nose of the engine. That oversized bomber which Rymills was flying, Pickard persisted, was essentially a tube made of steel and aluminum, and its crew, like studious accountants, calculated, every minute, the plane’s allowable speed depending on the amount of gas left in its tanks. Flying a Halifax wasn’t flying, not Lysander-flying.
Pickard, over six feet tall, was a great leader. When he looked you in the eye, it was difficult to look the other way. Knowing a good argument when he heard one, Rymills signed up with him before the night was up.
An officer who regularly prepared SOE agents for their secret flights said they had “a wonderful sense of humor and cheerfulness.” There was no false bravado. “On the contrary, it was real wit that came through. No written word can recapture the warmth of the atmosphere. Whenever . . . a feeling of dread pervaded, someone in the small group would rally the spirits of the others. They had, too, an extraordinary humility and a religious faith which was exemplified in the way they prepared themselves for their missions, such as making their confessions to a priest who would come to the station especially for this purpose.”
The “reception committees” who were waiting in France for these flights had a slightly different reaction. They were not alone. They had comrades. The Nazis had not extinguished freedom. Beyond the occupation was a land of honor and dignity, a land very different from the Nazis’ Greater Reich with its stiff-armed salutes to a false and very deluded messiah. The clatter of an approaching Lysander, said a résistante who greeted these planes, was “proof in ourselves and in the fraternity of combat . . . Those who haven’t known it have missed something. Not the crushing occupation, but this refusal by everyone to be defeated [by] creating the victory. This breathes liberty.”
When Rymills landed his Lysander near Angers in France, Noor and Cecily Lefort were handed bicycles. Pedaling about seven miles to the village of Ettriche, they then boarded a train for the two-hundred-mile-long trip to Paris. Lefort continued on to the Rhone Valley to join the circuit to which she had been assigned. Noor remained in Paris to meet the contacts that would take her to a cell being established in Le Mans, about 130 miles southwest of Paris.
Noor was no longer “Noor.” To anyone in the SOE or the Resistance, she was “Madeleine.” To everyone else—ordinary citizens and the Germans—she was “Jeanne Marie Regnier.” Before leaving England, Noor had practiced writing these names so they would flow from her pen as automatically as “Noor” had since she was a little girl.
Noor was no longer “Noor.” To anyone in the SOE or the Resistance, she was “Madeleine.” To everyone else—ordinary citizens and the Germans—she was “Jeanne Marie Regnier.”Some of Jeanne Marie’s cover story overlapped with Noor’s life. The rest was fiction, a pastiche of real towns and dates and imaginary lineages and careers. Jeanne Marie was born on April 25, 1918 in Blois, a small town along the Loire. Her father, a philosophy professor at Princeton, had been killed fighting in the Great War; her mother, an American, had moved to France in the 1920s. She fled to the United States just before the Nazis arrived. Like Noor, Jeanne Marie had studied child psychology at the Sorbonne. Unlike Noor, she had never written poetry or children’s stories, or composed music, or fled to England as Paris was falling. Jeanne Marie was a less interesting version of Noor, shorn of her artistry and imagination. Hopefully, she was so bland a concoction that no one would think twice about her. Her story was the one Noor would tell everyone who was not in the SOE or the Resistance from the moment she landed in France. “Never,” the SOE had told Noor, “come out of character. By this we mean not only from the clothes point of view, but from the mental.” Noor had to bury herself in Jeanne Marie. Bury herself, and forget herself.
The orders given to “Madeleine”—Noor’s other code name—were more exciting than the story invented for Jeanne Marie. As the radio operator for a cell named “Cinema,” Madeleine would, if possible, transmit messages to London around 9:05 a.m. on Sundays, 2:10 p.m. on Wednesdays, and 5:10 pm on Fridays. In turn, London would broadcast to Noor every day at 6 a.m. and 1 p.m. (Around the middle of August, this seems to have changed to 3 p.m daily.) When she landed in France, the head of Noor’s reception committee would tell her how to find the agent who ran her cell, a Frenchman named Emile-Henri Garry. If Noor had to find Garry on her own, she would proceed to his apartment on the eighth floor of 40 Rue Erlanger in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. He had two telephone numbers—AUTeil 62.35 and VAUgiras 86.55. Noor would sever contact with her reception committee as soon as possible. After that, she would try not to contact anyone who was not in her cell.
Noor and Garry had never met. Passwords were crucial for their first encounter. Noor’s was “Je viens de la part de votre ami Antoine pour des nouvelles au sujet de la Societé en Batiment” (“I come on behalf of your friend, Antoine, for news of the building company”); Garry’s reply was “L’affaire est en cours” (“The business is underway”). Unless Garry told Noor otherwise, she could only send messages that she got directly from him. If Garry “disappeared,” Noor should wait for further instructions from England. And as Noor had been told throughout her SOE training, she had to “be extremely careful with the filing” of her messages.
Noor’s orders covered numerous possibilities. If the Germans were looking for her as she was settling into Paris, she might have to stay in her flat for as long as six weeks, opening her door only to visitors who asked, “Puis je voir Jeanne Marie, la fille d’Ora” (“Can I see Jeanne Marie, Ora’s daughter?”). She would answer with “Vous voulez dire Babs” (“You mean Babs”). If she couldn’t transmit her address to London, she would mail a postcard to an address in neutral Portugal that the SOE had given her. The postcard would have her current address in Paris. She’d sign it “Madeleine.” And if she had to escape to Spain, she should mail a postcard to the address in Portugal that she’d been using, write “quatre” and “Madeleine” somewhere in her message, and head for the British consulate in Barcelona. Once there, she’d identify herself as “Inayat Khan.”
Noor couldn’t contact relatives, friends, teachers—anyone—she had known before the war. She always had to look purposeful (“Do something during the day,” the SOE told her. “Don’t hang about”). If she ran into old friends and they called her “Noor,” she couldn’t respond. Noor also had to learn her way around this new Paris. This wasn’t the city she had left three years ago. It was rife, according to Maurice Buckmaster, “with denunciations. You never knew if the young lady at the grocer’s who smiled so sweetly as she detached the coupon from your ration book was about to inform the security police of her suspicion as soon as your back was turned. A knock on the door in the evening set your heart thumping.” German soldiers were everywhere, often wandering around the Arc de Triomphe, pistols on their right hips, daggers sometimes on their left. Military bands played marching tunes on street corners. Posters appealed to Frenchmen to join Hitler’s battle against Communism—“If You Want France to Live, Fight in the Waffen-SS Against Bolshevism.” Tobacco rations were cut by a third, taxes on bikes shot up forty percent, and food rations were slashed to the lowest in Europe—175 to 350 grams of bread a day, 50 grams of cheese a week, 120 grams of meat a month. Different Métro stations were closed every week to keep Parisians jumpy and offguard. On the subway itself, Parisians pulled away from Germans who were riding it, lowering their gaze to deprive the occupiers of what a Frenchman called “the joy of an exchange of glances.”
Most taxis and cars had disappeared—only Nazis, black marketers, collaborators, and doctors (who were needed in medical emergencies, and there were many of them during the war) could afford gasoline. Everyone else got about on bikes, horse-drawn carts, and gazogenes (charcoal-fired autos that barely hit twenty-four miles an hour in top gear). One résistante said the city “now resembled Shanghai, with its thoroughfares thick with bicycles, tandems, and bicycle-taxis whose drivers, like Chinese coolies, got out of the way of the fast, powerful enemy cars with an enigmatic expression on the faces of their drivers.” The mostly empty, comparatively quiet streets were disorienting at first. Once you got accustomed to them, you learned to use them: the quiet helped you hear if someone was behind you.
The unrelenting surveillance made everyone claustrophobic, especially the closer you got to Avenue Foch, Europe’s most elegant boulevard, which the Nazis had turned into their own personal playground.The unrelenting surveillance made everyone claustrophobic, especially the closer you got to Avenue Foch, Europe’s most elegant boulevard, which the Nazis had turned into their own personal playground. Adolf Eichmann was planning the Final Solution at 31 Avenue Foch; the German police had their headquarters at 74 Avenue Foch; and the Gestapo had commandeered 19, 82, 84, and 86 Avenue Foch to house its men, torture prisoners, and plot how to tighten its grip on an unexpectedly querulous population. Shuttered mansions were scattered among these citadels of terror: Pierre Wertheimer, a Jewish partner in the prestigious house of Chanel, had abandoned 55 Avenue Foch for New York; Alfred Lindon, a Jewish diamond merchant, had fled 75 Avenue Foch for London. Baron Edmond de Rothschild had deserted 19 Avenue Foch. The broad avenue had been named after Ferdinand Foch, the French marshal who accepted Germany’s surrender in 1918. Furious that the Versailles Treaty hadn’t weakened Germany so much it could never threaten France again, Foch called it “an armistice for twenty years.” He was off by sixty-eight days.
∙ ∙ ∙
Before Noor left England, she had asked the SOE to mail a letter to her brother. Vilayat’s twenty-seventh birthday was on June 19, two days after Noor landed in France. As close as they were, Noor knew she could not leave the country without making sure he would receive a birthday message from her. “I was so disappointed not to have been with you on your birthday,” she wrote. “It is more than your birthday, anyway. . . . [It] is a day we shall never forget and never regret.” On June 19 three years earlier, Noor, Vilayat, and their sister and mother had been on an ancient Belgian freighter—decrepit and bug-infested—sailing from Le Verdon to Falmouth. “And now,” Noor continued,
you will be in your uniform—I am longing to see you. When will that be, I wonder? I expect you are frightfully busy at present. I feel so awfully proud of you. I guess I will be quite conceited, soon.
Til we meet again, brother dear. Such a lot of things we shall have to tell each other. Good luck to you and tally ho!
—Babuli
Military strategists like to say their plans are brilliant until they try them out. When Noor scrambled out of Frank Rymills’s Lysander, she didn’t know that the week before, a member of her reception committee—Henri Déricourt, who for months had been welcoming Lysanders and slipping agents in and out of France—had started feeding information about the SOE to the Germans. Or that in April the Germans had begun whittling away at Prosper, the SOE’s largest and most powerful network in France.
Accompanying Noor on the train to Paris was René Clement, a member of the reception committee that had greeted her Lysander. “Elle avait très peur,” Clement said later. “She was very scared.” In Paris, Noor made her way to Emile Garry’s flat. Overlooking an intersection at rue Erlanger and rue Molitor, the eighth-floor apartment had clear, unobstructed views in several directions. Garry’s cell hadn’t had a radio operator since he’d recently formed it. But after taking one look at Noor, he wasn’t sure about Noor. Why, as the Germans were picking apart Prosper—the SOE’s most effective network in Europe—was he stuck with this slip of a girl? Was this a joke? Or was the SOE so desperate it was sending him anyone who volunteered? Garry didn’t know and he didn’t have time to find out.
Noor couldn’t have come at a worse time. Two months before, the Gestapo had arrested the sisters who had helped a top SOE agent, Frank Suttill, organize Prosper. A few weeks later, the Germans caught a Resistance leader, André Marsac, and two of the SOE’s best agents, Peter Churchill and Odette Sansom. All three were tortured. Churchill and Sansom said nothing. Marsac talked, conned by a German officer who pretended he hated Hitler. Marsac’s misplaced trust was part of the beginning of the unraveling of Prosper.
Garry and his fiancée gave Noor a good meal. She’d barely eaten for more than a day: the SOE hadn’t told her how to use the ration cards it had given her and she didn’t think it was wise to ask strangers about them. Garry and his fiancée liked Noor. She was sweet and endearing, open about how much she appreciated their company and how hard it had been to leave her mother. But she looked and acted like she was twenty. Twenty-one, at the most. Too young to be on the run from Nazis in Paris. And too tired on this, her first night in occupied France, to run from anything. Noor had been awake for more than twenty-four hours. She fell asleep in front of them.
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