Susan Ottaway - Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice - The True Story of WWII Special Agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne

Jacqueline, who was seven years old when she arrived in France, had a much more straightforward time at the exclusive Convent of Les Oiseaux at Verneuil to the north-west of Paris, being only a few months behind her French classmates, who didn’t start school until they were six years old. She also found it less of a problem to speak French and quickly settled in to her new life.

The two youngest members of the family, Frederick and Didi, had not attended an English school at all, as neither was old enough, and by the time they went to French schools they were both able to speak the language as well as French children, so they didn’t have to make the adjustments their elder siblings had; their education was completely French, from beginning to end.

Mariquita was determined that all her children should be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. She herself had been educated at a Catholic convent and she intended that both her daughters should have a similar start in life. Didi enjoyed the rituals of the Catholic Church and at a very early age she found a strong faith in God, which stayed with her all her life. Her mother never had to insist that Didi attend church services, as she went willingly without any prompting. Jacqueline once remarked that Didi was the most religious member of the entire family, although they were all believers.

Didi was never far away from her sister. She hero-worshipped Jacqueline, and wanted to be like her and do whatever she did. It must sometimes have been irritating for Jacqueline to have her little sister trying to tag along wherever she and her friends went, but she was very fond of Didi and didn’t like to turn the little girl away unless she really had to.

After two years in the French capital the family was on the move again, this time to a terraced house that had been given to Mariquita by her parents, 260 boulevard Saint-Beuve on the seafront at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Francis and Frederick attended the Institution Haffreingue, a Catholic school, while Jacqueline was enrolled at the Ursuline convent in the town, where before long Didi joined her. Didi loved her new home. It was the first time she had lived on the coast and the beginning of her lifelong love of the sea.

The house in Boulogne was a happy home and the family felt very comfortable there. Jack Nearne had attempted to learn and improve his French but had had little success. The language didn’t come naturally to him and he was not confident about speaking it. Despite living in France for the rest of his life, he couldn’t ever be described as being fluent in either spoken or written French. This rather hampered his employment prospects but, as he was part of a wealthy family following his marriage to Mariquita, it did not seem to be a major problem. His ineptitude with the language gave his children an advantage, as well as amusing them greatly, because it meant that in order to communicate with their father they had to speak fluent English as well as French, a skill that would serve them all well in their future lives.

Both parents encouraged the children to work hard at school and to read or listen to music when at home. Jacqueline and Didi were avid readers. Jacqueline liked books such as Vanity Fair , Sherlock Holmes stories and The Forsyte Saga . Didi preferred religious books and didn’t like novels at all. They both enjoyed the music of Strauss, Chopin and Beethoven and later, when they were older, that of Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jean Sablon.

During the school holidays Jacqueline liked taking part in all kinds of outdoor activities. She loved sport and played for a girls’ hockey team called the Gulls, along with her friends Claire Turl, Marie, Jeanne and Madeleine Louchet, Anne and Marie Louise Cailliez and Nelly Pincedé. She also loved the countryside around Boulogne and cycled to local beauty spots or went for long walks with her friends. When they all got together at the home of one of the group they played cards, told each other jokes and laughed a lot. Jacqueline also liked to knit, and she made lots of colourful socks for herself and her friends. 4

When she was old enough Didi also played hockey, and she and her friends laughed a lot too. They all enjoyed fooling around, no one more so than Didi, but she also had a serious side. She liked being with other people, but was also able to keep busy and was quite content when she was alone. She was good at art, and liked to paint and make little clay models; and, of course, she had her belief in God.

In 1928 Mariquita’s mother died and left her house in Nice to her daughter. By 1931 the family had packed up their belongings, closed up the house in Boulogne-sur-Mer and moved to Nice, to 60 bis, avenue des Arènes de Cimiez. Situated in the old part of Nice, in the gentle hills behind the coastline, the house was only a short distance from the seafront and the elegant promenade des Anglais, playground of the rich and famous. The family would live there very happily until the Germans invaded France in 1940.

Francis left school in 1930 when he was 16 and went on to a commercial college, where he took a business course and, having passed it, became a representative for a confectionery company. Over the next few years he had a variety of sales jobs that never seemed to last long, so, tiring of sales, he tried working as a barman. Then in 1938, against an increasingly difficult economic backdrop, he lost yet another job and, despite applying for different positions, remained unemployed for the next two years. 5

Frederick left school just before the start of the war and also found it difficult to obtain work. He considered going back to England to see if it would be any easier to get a job there and was still weighing up his options when the Germans marched into Poland in September 1939. Didi had not even begun to look for work by then, as she had only just left school at the age of 18. She wanted to be a beautician, but with the political unrest that was making itself felt more and more each day, and the ever-present question of what the immediate future might bring, her parents convinced her to stay at home with them until what was happening became clearer. When the war started she gave up the idea, pushing it to the back of her mind in the belief that she would be able pursue her chosen career once the war was over.

Of all the children, Jacqueline was the only one who found a secure job. When she left school she too became a sales representative, working for an office equipment company, and, although based in Nice, she travelled all over the country. In those days such an occupation was considered to be quite an unusual one for a girl but she enjoyed the work, and the travel, which allowed her to see a lot of the countryside. Although she didn’t know it at the time, it would be a foretaste of what was in store for her a few years later.

For the first few months of the war nothing really changed for the Nearne family. The sun was still shining over their home in Nice; Jacqueline was doing well in her job; Francis, who had recently married a young Frenchwoman, Thérèse Poulet, was continuing to look for work; Frederick was thinking about going to England to join the Royal Air Force; and Didi remained at home with her mother and father.

Then, on 10 May 1940, German troops swept into Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland, and all three countries capitulated. Two weeks later Calais and Boulogne were attacked, and the British Expeditionary Force, pinned down by the Germans in the coastal town of Dunkirk, was evacuated, along with several thousand French troops, in what was known as Operation Dynamo. By the middle of June Paris had fallen to the Germans and, on 22 June, the French signed an armistice in the forest of Compiègne, north of Paris, in the same railway carriage in which the Germans had surrendered at the end of the First World War. The threatened war had suddenly become real.