Carve Her Name with Pride Read online

  9781848849365

  FOR TANIA

  Who is old enough now to read this story of her brave and wonderful mother

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE - EARLY INFLUENCES

  CHAPTER TWO - BRIXTON

  CHAPTER THREE - THE WAR BREAKS OUT

  CHAPTER FOUR - ETIENNE SZABO

  CHAPTER FIVE - BRIEF HOMECOMING

  CHAPTER SIX - WITH THE ACK-ACK BATTERY

  CHAPTER SEVEN - TANIA

  CHAPTER EIGHT - THE INTERVIEW

  CHAPTER NINE - INITIAL TRAINING

  CHAPTER TEN - FINISHING SCHOOL

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - READY TO GO

  CHAPTER TWELVE - HER FIRST MISSION

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - ON THE NORMANDY COAST

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - HOME

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - HER SECOND MISSION

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE AMBUSH

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - TO THE RESCUE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - INTO GERMANY

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - RAVENSBRÜCK

  CHAPTER TWENTY - WAITING FOR NEWS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - TANIA PUTS ON HER PARTY DRESS

  “She was the bravest of them all.”

  ODETTE CHURCHILL

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I AM indebted to a large number of people who helped me unstintingly by giving me their time, their memories of Violette Szabo, letters and photographs, and for going through those sections of the manuscript which dealt with incidents with which they were familiar. Of them all my greatest indebtedness is, of course, to Violette’s parents, Mr and Mrs Charles Bushell, with whom I had many talks before they went to Australia, and who have supplemented in long letters every episode on which I sought information. Miss Violet Buckingham, her cousin, Mrs Florence Lucas, aunt, and her son Norman Lucas, Mrs Winifred Sharpe, who was her girlhood friend Winnie Wilson, and Mrs Elsie Grundry, who was with Violette in the ATS, as well as the Battery Commander, Lieut.-Colonel J. W. Naylor, all helped greatly with the earlier episodes; Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, Miss Vera Atkins, Mr Selwyn Jepson gave me details of her enlistment, her training and her work as a secret agent, with very valuable supplementations from Robert Maloubier (Robert Mortier), Miss Jacqueline Dufour (Anastasie’s sister), Mr Harry Peuleve, and Mr F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas. I owe my thanks also to Monsieur and Madame Renaudie and many farmers and villagers at Salon-la-Tour, to her school teachers, Miss Beatrice Hardy, Miss Margaret Douglas and Miss Elsie Lowlett, to Miss Olive Bird, manageress of the perfumery department at the Bon Marché at Brixton, Sergeant Eric Ford and Miss Eileen R. Smith of the mixed ack-ack battery, Miss Winifred Mason, of the FANYs, Mrs Margaret Edwardes of Havant, Major Roger de Wesselow, Major Stephen Stewart, Mr Jerrard Tickell, Mr Paul Dehn, Mr C. M. Gosden, Mr Bernard Newman, Miss Cynthia Sadler, Miss Jean Overton Fuller, Miss Peggy Minchin (who was her conducting officer in Scotland), Mrs Nancy Roberts, Mr Louis Lee-Graham, also a secret agent, who was a prisoner at Torgau for two years, and for the Ravensbrück scenes in particular to Mrs Geoffrey Hallowes (Odette Churchill).

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS is the story of a girl, born of humble parents, one English, one French, and brought up chiefly in the back streets of London. She did not appear to be different from others. She had no discernible talents. There were no early signs of her being a prodigy either as a pianist or a painter, a singer or a dancer. She had beauty, a haunting beauty, though she did not exploit it. But there were qualities, noticeable only to a few, which, in a moment of crisis and peril, made her resolute, fearless, unresponsive under agonising torture, so that in Britain’s proud story she has her place as a heroine.

  In the recent war, though millions were engaged in it, individuals had mobility and were able by their ingenuity and valour to win renown. Not many women served as secret agents; the toll was high, for nearly a third of them died. This is the story of one of those who did not come back.

  As you read here of her heroic exploits you will no doubt ask yourself: “What were her feelings, what were her thoughts at such moments?” She was more intelligent than many, both boys and girls, who were at school with her. Were her actions then governed by the power of her thoughts, was she able to discipline and control herself by reason? She was imaginative but apparently knew no fear, she was sensitive but not it seems to pain, and her powers of endurance were extraordinary, for she seemed never to run out of strength. Her sense of fun and mischief was not a cover in a moment of tension, for she always had these traits; and her matey-ness was not a war-time development, a drawing together in the face of danger, as happened to so many during the stress of war, even at home, in the shelters.

  She was not dominating, assertive, vain or egocentric—extraordinarily enough she was not, though so many whose deeds are marked by heroism were. She must have enjoyed, one feels, the notice her beauty attracted, but she did not seem, outwardly at any rate, to be flattered by the attention of men. She seemed to take it as normal and met them on terms of unself-conscious equality, without any coyness or posturing or finesse. But one feels she must have enjoyed the experience of being looked at and admired. By becoming a secret agent she had to reverse this natural instinct, for she had to avoid being conspicuous, nor could her ego be elated by the unusual role she had assumed, for she was unable to talk of it either to her family or her friends, or to proclaim it by any badge or uniform for others to recognise and admire. She had to merge herself into the life around her, especially while moving among the simple country people in enemy-occupied France.

  She was indeed simple in herself, devoid of all affectations and completely without guile. But, with the gradual deepening of her purpose beneath her outward airiness and frivolity, she developed instincts of which she had been utterly unaware. Hating domesticity, she cheerfully undertook distasteful chores and eagerly volunteered for work that she knew would be exacting and perilous. She was aware that the price for what she hoped to accomplish might have to be paid with her life; in which event others would, she knew, as readily step in to complete what she had begun. Most of the time she battled alone, and against overwhelming odds, with the cunning and might of the Gestapo and the myriads they employed for their vile tasks. By her daring and astuteness, again and again she managed to outwit them; later the battle assumed even more alarming proportions when she had to turn and fight a powerful detachment of the Das Reich Panzer division, consisting of 400 men and two armoured cars—which roused the admiration even of the enemy. But, thereafter, all the cruel weight of the German nation was used to crush her, but she remained unyielding, although even mature and valiant men have confessed their inability to endure the agony of sustained torture.

  Posthumously the George Cross was awarded her. It was presented by King George the Sixth to her daughter, Tania, then a child of four.

  CHAPTER ONE

  EARLY INFLUENCES

  VIOLETTE BUSHELL was the daughter of an English father and a French mother. Her parents met during the First World War while her father, Charles Bushell, was fighting in France. He was billeted at Camiers, just outside Etaples. Mlle Reine Leroy, slight, petite and pretty, was staying in the village too with her cousins. They met, fell in love and after a courtship carried on amid the distractions and dangers of war for two interrupted years, were married just before the Armistice at Pont Remy, near Abbeville.

  Bushell regarded himself as a Cockney, though in fact he was born at Hampstead Norris in Berkshire, where his father was a farmer and a crack shot with a sporting gun. Young Bushell joined the regular army in 1908. He spent some years in the Royal Horse Artillery, transferred to the Royal Flying Corps when it was formed, but his plane crashed and he was invalided out. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he rejoined the army, became a motor driver in the Royal Army Service Corps and was engaged in driving army lorries when he met the girl he was to marry. She, though French by birth, had a partly English ancestry, for she was descended from a Lancashire family named Scott. The war over, the Bushells came to England and their first child, a boy named Roy, was born in London in 1920.

  The wave of prosperity which followed the Armistice soon spent itself and daily hundreds of men and women found themselves trudging the streets looking for work. Slowly the great army of unemployed grew. Mr Bushell, having no wish to be one of their number, decided to take his small family to Paris where he felt his energy and enterprise might find an outlet. With his gratuity he bought a large and attractive second-hand car and, using this as a private taxi, he drove visitors not only round Paris, but took them, when required, on much longer journeys. He took, for instance, an American family all the way from Paris to Venice. He had many noteworthy fares, among them the ex-King George of Greece and the much-married American actress Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Mrs Bushell was by now expecting her second child and it was in the British Hospital in Paris that Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell was born on June 26th, 1921. She was a small baby, scarcely as big as her name. She was dark, strong and very healthy.

  Mrs Bushell, taking the child home to their small apartment, looked forward to a life of ease and happiness in Paris, which she knew well, for she had worked there as a midinette and later as a dressmaker for Lucille and Paul Poiret. But they did not stay as long as she would have liked. In less than three years they were back in England. Times were not so good in Paris, and anyway Mr Bushell was glad to be out of it, for he could no
t cope with the language despite all his years in France during and since the war.

  But with nothing definite to come to in England it was to his parents’ home at Hampstead Norris that he took his family, Violette aged three by now, and the boy just over four. Once again his resourcefulness supplied Mr Bushell with an income at a time when unemployment was soaring to terrifying heights. He started a private bus service. He drove the bus himself and picked up passengers whenever hailed as he plied to and fro between Hampstead Norris and Newbury.

  So Violette’s earliest memories were almost entirely of the English countryside. Of Paris she retained fleeting sounds and scenes which were to reverberate as echoes when she revisited it many years later at a time of tension, for, at such times more than at any other, nostalgic memories are apt to possess one and to offer a certain melancholy solace. At Hampstead Norris she played in the garden, roved the fields, fearless of cows, bulls or even mice, as children generally are, but she was to retain this fearlessness. Papa used to place an apple on her head to Mama’s recurrent alarm while he tried his prowess with a gun in the familiar William Tell manner. Fortunately he never failed, but the child did not flinch once. Nor, when, after persistent effort, she climbed by herself a lofty wall and began to walk along the top of it, did she cry when she fell off. Her head was cut open, her nose broken, but there were no tears. It was Mama who cried and fussed and carried her, a mutilated and bleeding little mite, up to her bed, and even Papa was a little pale with fright. But Violette merely smiled at them from her bed and reassured them by saying: “It doesn’t hurt much—not really”—and they were to learn with the passing years that nothing ever did. She shut her eyes, said she wanted to ‘go dodo’ and fell asleep at once.

  She was a sturdy little child, strong and always active. Nothing her elder brother attempted seemed beyond her, and she would challenge him to fresh feats of prowess which, when he failed, she would undertake herself and accomplish successfully to the astonishment of all and to his intense annoyance. “She should have been a boy,” both her father and mother declared, for she was not at all interested in dolls and other girlish diversions of the sedentary kind, which is perhaps not surprising seeing that her sole companion was a boy. But they noticed also a boyish impishness, an unflagging indulgence in mischief, which earned her inevitably the tag of ‘little monkey’. This apparently she never outgrew, for even in maturity this faculty for fun was undimmed. But in childhood, as later, her pranks rarely got her into a scrape: occasionally the blame was visited on another, as, for example, when she induced her father to lift her by her ankles high above his head and waltz her round the room with her head imperilled by central ceiling lights and the hard, unyielding edges of wardrobe tops and brackets. Not that she feared or evaded punishment. Those who knew her as a child remember quite vividly the way she would look right into one’s eyes and say: “Yes, I did it.” Nothing seemed to daunt her. She shinned up trees, making her brother Roy follow her until she got him so high that he was too scared to attempt coming down without help. He called shrilly for Dad or anyone else who could hear and with assistance was brought down again. Violette could hardly be blamed, for she had gone a great deal higher and needed no assistance at all to descend. She turned cartwheels all over the house, in the sitting-room, the kitchen, in and out of bedrooms. She was like a fire-cracker. She jumped into the river, any river, and taught herself to swim and was soon a great deal better at it than her brother.

  Life in the country did not last long. The family moved to London where Papa felt he could make a better living by buying and selling motor-cars. Mama was by now expecting her third child. It was a boy this time and was named John.

  Living in the close, confined, often stifling back streets of Fulham, Violette missed the freedom and freshness of the countryside, as Mama missed them too, for much of her life had been spent in the countryside in France. So she took Vi, as the child was now inevitably called, on visits to an uncle and aunt and a host of cousins of Mr Bushell’s, who lived in Twickenham. Violet Buckingham, the only girl in this family, though some years older than Violette (who was given her name in its French form), remembers these visits well and in particular the first time the child stayed with her for a period of three weeks. Violette was not quite five, “but she played me up quite a bit. Once, when we were out for a walk, she ran off all by herself, in and out of various roads, with me panting behind until she was right out of sight. I was terrified that she would rush into the traffic on the main road. I called after her but got no answer and eventually, after an agony of anxiety, I found the little monkey some distance away, standing with her two arms round a red pillar box, smiling impishly at me, vastly amused at the flurry and concern she had caused.

  “She had an adventurous spirit,” says Violet Buckingham, “and thought running away was great fun. She was constantly doing it. She used to run remarkably well—I found it impossible to keep up with her. If she was missing for a moment I never knew what mischief she was up to or what danger she was in, either on land or in the water, for she was constantly drifting off towards the river.

  “She was really afraid of nothing. I remember one day she was upstairs helping me to make the beds—or rather trying hard to. We were busy for a while, then I missed her and to my horror saw her seated on the window-sill with her legs dangling out. She was talking cheerfully to my youngest brother, who had just got back from school. When I told her to get in she refused and was about to drop on to the scullery roof below, walk along its ledge and leap down to join my brother, but I stopped her just in time and brought her back in tears into the room. I had to console her by letting her make my brother’s bed into an apple-pie disorder. All my five brothers were very fond of her. They used to throw her up into the air and toss her from one to another like a ball. She thought it great fun. She used to spar quite a lot with them and went at it hammer and tongs with the youngest one who, though some years older, was nearer her own size. At skipping she beat them all. She loved getting on to the back of the motor-bike. Speed, thrill, excitement—that’s what she loved. She had a temper too and a very strong will. You could never make her do anything she didn’t want to. She would purse her lips together and her little chin would harden as she said—I can hear her saying it now—‘I won’t. I won’t.’ She said it with emphasis and determination. She had great determination—even when she grew up.”

  She seems to have got her determination and her resourcefulness from her father—and also her gaiety, for Mama was a quiet little woman, very charming and quite placid, taking all the knocks of life without turning a hair.

  Towards the end of 1926, when Violette was five-and-a-half, Mrs Bushell had her fourth child, a boy again whom she called Noel. It was the year of the General Strike. Unemployment rose by leaps and bounds and things weren’t going too well again for Mr Bushell. So the entire family went to try their luck in France. They lived this time with Mrs Bushell’s relatives at Pont Rémy. This had been the scene of their marriage. There was a stir of happier memories and their hopes ran high, for expenses were negligible in the house they shared with her father and his sister, Tante Maria. Her own sister, the children’s Aunt Marguerite, kept house for them. Pont Rémy is a small town with four bridges across the River Somme. Open country lies all round and not far away is the main road from Boulogne to Paris. Mr Bushell found conditions not much better here. Yet they stayed for three years. Mrs Bushell made a bit of money by dressmaking, while her husband tried his hand at this and that. But the children were growing fast and it was felt that there should be an end to this nomadic life. They decided to return to England so that Violette and the three boys might have the benefit of an English education. Violette was nearly nine now. She had received some schooling at the local convent and spoke French fluently—they all did. except Papa who still found the language quite beyond him.

  In England, they roved for a further three years, going first to West Kensington, then all the way to Leicester, then back again to London to live in Bayswater. The children moved from school to school. Violette had to face the ordeal of receiving instruction in a language with which she was only colloquially familiar. She seemed an alien to the other girls, for she spoke with a marked accent. But her voice was as pretty as her face and they found it fascinating to listen to her as, with her large violet eyes wide open, she told of the fun and diversity that life offered to a little girl in France.