Carve Her Name with Pride

R J Minney

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848849365
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

The thrilling and inspiring true story of Violette Szabo, the fearless British cloak-and-dagger agent who infiltrated Nazi occupied France.
 
Switchboard operator and volunteer for the Women's Land Army, Violette Szabo was only twenty-two years old when her husband, Etienne, a captain in the French Foreign Legion, died at El Alamein. His death only made the resilient young widow more determined than ever to join England's war effort in World War II. To Violette's surprise, opportunity came at the request of Britain's Special Organization Executive.
 
The purpose of the SOE was to conduct sabotage and espionage, and to aide local resistance movements in occupied Europe. Trained in secret in the Scottish Highlands, Violette became an expert in fieldcraft, covert navigation, and weapons and demolition. Then, on June 7, 1944, Szabo parachuted into Limoges. Her task was to coordinate the work of the French Resistance in the first days after D-Day. Violette Szabo was about to make history.
 
"Violette's bravery and spirit shine throughout" this arresting true story of a heroic woman, undaunted by her missions, or the reality of the fate that would most likely await her in the closing years of war. R. J. Minney's stirring historical narrative was the basis for the classic 1959 film starring Virginia Mckenna and Paul Scofield ( Portland Book Review).

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 not 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.

Papa was out almost all the time looking for a job and with Mama away most of the day, for she provided much of the income now and had to go out fitting her customers, the care of the boys fell inevitably to Violette. She had to wash and dress them and prepare a snack of sorts when she and Roy and John came back from school for their midday dinner; little Noel, not quite three, needed of course additional attention. These were among the things she did not enjoy doing, but as the only girl in the family, it was a role she had to assume. She undertook it cheerfully, for she never grumbled or sulked—that formed no part of her temperament. It helped, of course, to develop in her a sense of responsibility, of keeping to a routine, since meals had to be served at well-defined times and they had to be back in school before the bell went. But they all looked extremely clean and neat in the clothes their mother made for them and they had remarkably fine manners.

In the summer of 1932 the family went to live in Brixton where they were to remain for the rest of Violette’s life. She had already, at eleven, run through nearly half her allotted span. Hitler even now stood snarling in the wings, getting ready for the grim drama in which she was to play so heroic a role.

CHAPTER TWO

BRIXTON

WHEN Mr Bushell went looking for rooms in Brixton he said, aware that landladies may jib at a large family, that he had three sons, one of whom was going to stay with relatives in France.

Mrs Tripp, who let out rooms at No 12 Stockwell Park Walk, showed him the small top flat and the family moved in two weeks later. It was then discovered that there was also a little girl. The two boys who came were Roy and John. The youngest, Noel, had been parked with Aunt Marguerite at Pont Rémy.

Mrs Tripp, a quaint soul with a most generous heart, mothered the enormous household of assorted lodgers. She had with her her own two children, now almost grown up, and a nephew and niece, both orphans, whom she had taken under her care from childhood. Of these the one nearest in age to Violette was Winnie Wilson, five years her senior and at that stage not regarded as a contemporary, for there is little that a girl of sixteen can have in common with a girl of only eleven. Among the lodgers was a German named von Kettler: he was always referred to as ‘Mr Hitler’, casually at first with that name so much even then in the newspapers, but constantly after the remarkable rise to power a few months later of the Charlie Chaplin-like corporal who became the Führer. How Kettler got the ‘von’ nobody knows; it is possible that he did not assume it since his father was a friend of von Papen’s, then actually the German Chancellor and at one time a German spy. But the link was without significance, for von Kettler has no part in this story other than by his presence in the household, where he remained until the time of Munich and showed a desperate anxiety amid the flurry and excitement to return to his own home so as not to be seized and interned here in the event of a war. He was regarded by the others as very charming and was always smartly dressed in a household that was far from affluent. But Violette saw little of him for she did not mix much with the grown-ups downstairs. Her father, on the other hand, was constantly with them, playing billiards with the boys, swopping yarns, going round for a drink at the pub, gay, genial and known to all as Charlie.

The first they saw of Violette was one evening when a timid knock was heard at the kitchen door and a dark attractive little girl came in holding out some coppers in her hand. She wanted a sixpence for the gas-meter.

Winnie, who was sitting at the kitchen table working at her shorthand, remembers the moment well. “The little girl was very beautiful. Both my aunt and I gasped when we saw her and Aunt said afterwards, ‘What a lovely little girl—isn’t she remarkably pretty?’

“She had large violet eyes with a dash of green in them. They were very expressive eyes and seemed to change in colour. She had very long black silken lashes and two tiny beauty spots, one by the side of her mouth, the other on her chin.

“She had a small but fascinating voice. There was a marked French accent, which she later lost, but at that time one might almost say she spoke broken English. At any rate that is the impression we had. She was quite unaffected—a very natural, unspoilt child. We all got to like her very much. Aunt was particularly fond of her.”

Violette and the two boys went to the school in Stockwell Road, just round the corner. It is an enormous London County Council school and takes nearly 1000 children, boys as well as girls, about a third of them juniors. The building is unattractive and stands back from the busy Stockwell Road with its roar of traffic, its buses, its many cycle shops and second-hand car marts, all painted a hideous red, its ill-kempt housewives with their shopping bags and baskets, its boxes of fruit and vegetables spilling from the shops on to the pavement, its stalls of whelks and winkles and, at that time, the buzz, flash and clatter too of large bouncing trams. Violette and her brothers had to cross the road to school, with its apron of a playground in front, its large solitary tree and high walls topped by wire netting.

Quite a large number of the children here were the children of the costermongers who sold flowers and fruit from barrows in Brixton Market. A few were the children of theatrical parents, of whom there had once been many in this neighbourhood; but their numbers had been declining for some time and were swelled only at intervals by troupes of children who performed in the evenings in pantomimes or as a dance act on the music-hall stage and were of course required by law to attend a school. A small sprinkling of the children came from the homes of policemen, of whom quite a number lived in the district and there are now even more. Surprisingly they all mixed well, if a little noisily and boisterously.

But even in this varied setting Violette stood out, partly because of her French accent and exotic mannerisms and gestures, but chiefly because she was strong-limbed, lithe and exceedingly daring. There was no drain-pipe she could not climb, no wall she could not scale, feats that were often beyond the scope of even the boys; when faced with a challenge and pitted specifically against another, to the shouted delight of them all, Violette always triumphed. It was a skill she had acquired in her endless contests against her brothers in the countryside and in the water, in England and in France, and even inside the home, for Mrs Tripp and the others found the Bushell children involved in an unceasing clatter overhead and could never determine whether the girl was fighting both her brothers at once or was merely having a game that involved a great deal of rough-and-tumble.

It is denied, even by her schoolmistress, that there was any sense of superiority or boastfulness in Violette’s behaviour. She did it all confidently and quite unself-consciously, and, far from rousing jealousies and antagonism, she managed to win the admiration as well as the affection of those with whom she talked and played. “Her manner was friendly, her disposition gay and vivacious, and with those large, lovely eyes, she looked like something not quite of this world,” says one of her teachers. “Indeed with her ability to speak French and her life in the French countryside of which she often talked, she seemed to many of the children to possess the key to two worlds—and yet she remained quite modest and unassuming, as though it was natural for her to be different.”

The teachers found she had a quick and lively mind. Although she had already been to a number of English schools, there was still a need for much adjustment, not only in arithmetical calculations, which in her early instruction had revolved wholly round the metric system, but in the use of phrases and idioms which differed so markedly from those current in her home where she still talked a great deal of French with her mother and brothers.

“Physically she was very strong,” says the physical training instructress, “she had firm and sturdy limbs and was quite outstanding in everything I set the girls to do.” But at history and geography she was not quite so good, however hard she strove in those overcrowded gas-lit classrooms. At needlework, as at all other domestic tasks, such as cooking and work in the laundry, which she really detested, her progress was equally lagging.

“She vibrated with personality. She seemed to have a lot of push and drive. She was a sort of immature leader,” says the then headmistress; “where she led the others followed eagerly—and the interesting thing is that she did not lead them into any mischief or naughtiness. She was indeed very amenable to discipline. Mind you, she had a strong will, but it was well controlled.”

She apparently never got into trouble. It is of course possible that she contrived to be careful enough never to be caught at her innocent mischief. If indeed she possessed such early astuteness it would certainly have been a great asset to her in the work she was called upon to undertake during the war; but this is doubtful. The one thing above all else that they recall in school as at home is that she would never tell a lie. She faced up to every situation unflinchingly and at times a little defiantly.

It was before the days of school meals. The really necessitous children were collected by bus and taken off to an LCC centre where special meals were served to them. The others either ate sandwiches their mothers had packed for them or went home for their midday dinner. Violette and her brothers went home. They would not want the stigma of poverty to be applied to them, for they were proud, and besides Papa was working now for a builder he had met through the Tripps and was indeed fortunate to get a job so soon after the 1931 crisis when unemployment spread even more rapidly than before. Through good times and bad Violette and her brothers always looked well cared for and well fed. In school she wore the navy tunic and red jersey which the children wear to this day.

Going home they sometimes encountered in the street some of the rougher boys who, having finished their meal of fish and chips out of a newspaper, lay in wait to rub the greasy wrapping int...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 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