Sean Rayment - Tales from the Special Forces Club

‘It was a Saturday afternoon, about 4pm, and I had never been so terrified in my life. He looked at me shaking and said, “Don’t just stand there dithering, come in.” I went in and I thought he was just going to have a quick look and then leave. Not a bit of it. He went into the bedroom and bounced on the bed, went into the bathroom and turned on taps, went through some drawers and cupboards. It was awful, every time we heard the lift I thought Wormwood Scrubs here we come. Then he started fiddling with the curtains, examining the photos on the piano – it probably lasted 10 minutes but it felt as if it was about four days. I was almost fainting by the end of it.

‘As part of the compensation for this ordeal he took me to an underground pub in Piccadilly where he managed to revive me. We had a few drinks and then he took me to the theatre. What amazed me, when I thought about it afterwards, was how cool he was, completely unflappable. I was almost rigid with panic and my only thought was to get out, but he was completely comfortable.’

The experience was both fascinating and frightening for Noreen, who now fully realised how agents in the field had to work under conditions of almost unimaginable stress and still be able to think clearly.

There were occasions during the 96-hour exercise when events seemed to become almost tragically real. The agents were now so close to deploying into occupied countries that they no longer regarded themselves as students – the lines between exercise and reality became blurred. One such occasion involved a French SOE member who excelled in sabotage and silent killing in training.

‘When he went on his 96, one of the decoys had been ordered by Buck to see if she could get him to talk about what he was doing. She met him in a bar, a classic scenario, and they spent the whole evening chatting, and the next day they had lunch together and went on a romantic walk together in a forest somewhere. She was chatting to him and becoming more and more romantic and they got into some sort of passionate embrace, at which point he grabbed her by the throat and began to squeeze until this poor girl almost fell into unconsciousness. At that point he released his grip and as the girl gasped for breath he said, “Now go back and tell Buckmaster to be more careful next time.”’

Everyone was fully aware of the risks involved with being an agent, although, according to Noreen, the knowledge that death and torture would almost certainly follow capture was not something anyone dwelt upon.

‘We weren’t told about deaths or executions immediately after they happened – the news sort of filtered down. For example, if a radio op came up on schedule every day and then one day he didn’t, Baker Street might suspect that he was wary that the Germans were on to him and he was trying to find a safe house. But if there was still silence after six or seven days you had to accept that he or she had been killed or captured. Everyone was obviously very sad when the news came through, but no one made a fuss. There was never any real outpouring of emotion. I think we mourned privately.

‘I always thought the work was particularly dangerous for the radio operators. They were told that they had just a 50 per cent chance of surviving the mission – imagine what that must have been like. They received no extra pay for the work they were undertaking, it would have been the same rate as anyone of equal rank.

‘The radio operators must have had nerves of steel – it was the most dangerous job, and they were highly valued and looked after very carefully. If a group lost their radio operator they lost all contact, because he was the only one who knew how to encode and decode messages.

‘The golden rule for radio operators was never to transmit for more than 15 minutes, because it took the Germans 20 minutes to get a fix on a location.

‘One radio operator told me that he had a horror of transmitting from inside a house, because he had this terrible feeling that the door would one day burst open and the Germans would catch him in the act, so to avoid this he always tried to transmit in the open. He would throw his aerial over a tree and always had two members of the Resistance with him who stood with guns at the ready and would warn him if there were any Germans approaching.’

Noreen also recalled the exploits of one agent called Benny Cowburn who was parachuted into occupied France four times between 1939 and 1941. He was awarded the MC and Bar, the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal War medal, 1939–45, the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre avec Palme.

Cowburn was extremely self-reliant and even used to make his own bombs. His base was a hut in the mountains.

‘Benny played a very dangerous game, because he pretended to be friendly with the Germans. He must have had a tremendous confidence in his Resistance group, because they could have shot him for being a traitor. But he became quite friendly with the Germans, and one night, when he had been busy making his bombs, at about 3am, there was a terrible banging on the door. He opened the door and the German soldiers wanted to come in for a drink and a smoke, saying words to the effect of, “What are you doing up at this time of night?” and he said, “Oh, I’m making some bombs to blow up a bridge.”

‘But the Germans didn’t take any notice because they thought he was joking, obviously, and said, “Have you got any beer?” He let them come in and gave them some beer. They asked him if he was going to have one and he said, “No, you have to keep a clear head when you are playing with dynamite,” and they all thought he was terribly funny and screamed with laughter. After they had their beer they left. I think Benny was probably the coolest man I knew.’

Noreen harboured a secret ambition to become an agent herself, but two critical facts were against her – she was too young and the war was coming to an end. The youngest female agent was Anne-Marie Walters, who was aged just 21 when she arrived in France, but Noreen was only 20 at the end of the war in Europe.

Walters was recruited into the SOE from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in July 1943, aged just 20. She was born in Geneva to a French mother and an English father. The family left Switzerland at the outbreak of war, and two years later Walters joined the WAAF. Her SOE codename was Colette and she parachuted into south-west France in January 1944, where she remained until the invasion of Normandy. She survived the war and was decorated by both the British and French governments for her work in occupied France.

‘One of my last memories from life at Beaulieu involved a little Cockney corporal called Frank, whose job seemed to be getting us girls out of scrapes. Frank was engaged to a girl called Doris who worked in Woolworths. On VE Day we had a party and I was staggering over to The Rings, our HQ, a rather ugly stockbroker Tudor house in the middle of the estate. I was rather worse for wear because I had danced until dawn and had a few drinks. Suddenly out of a rhododendron bush appeared Frank and he said, “As it’s VE Day, could I kiss you?” and I said, “Frank, what about Doris?” and he said, “I’ll tell her that it’s my last sacrifice for the war effort.” Not really very flattering for me.’

As the Allied forces began pushing through France the need for agents to be sent into Europe decreased rapidly, but there was still a need for volunteers for service in the Far East, especially Burma, where Force 136, also part of SOE, were harrying the retreating Japanese.

‘We all knew that the war in Europe was coming to an end. By the end of 1944, or even as early as D-Day, there was a certain inevitability about it. But when the end came at Beaulieu it was all a bit sudden. But there was still a war to be fought in Burma and I hoped to be sent there. In fact I was actually on embarkation leave when the atomic bomb was dropped in August 1945.