Germany surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945. The surrender went into effect the following day, May 8, Victory in Europe or V-E Day. But France was liberated sooner, throughout the summer and fall of 1944. This meant that the Maquis—and the SOE agents who had worked with them—were finished with their work at that time as well. Charles de Gaulle, anxious to not credit the British for their help during the Resistance, gave most British SOE agents just 48 hours to leave France upon his return. But since Pearl was a permanent French resident and Henri a French native, they weren’t forced to leave like the other members of the SOE. They left France in the fall of 1944 only in order to report back to the SOE offices in London, at which time they were also finally married. Pearl was asked to join several postwar activities as a representative of the SOE, and she also received several awards.
I was sent to France with a personal allowance of 200,000 francs—before the franc was devalued. The person in charge of SOE’s budget in London said, “We’d like you to keep accounts; obviously not for small expenses, but for large ones, yes.”
When the Maquis started, we had to find money. London sent us some, but we also requisitioned things and borrowed money—we were able to do this. We explained to people that if they wanted a guarantee, the BBC would send a message. They just had to give us their own message and we would instruct the BBC to broadcast it in the evening. This was how they knew London would reimburse them.
I’d been asked to keep accounts, and, being disciplined, I realized it was going to involve fairly large sums of money so thought I’d better do the job properly. Luckily we had Gaëtan Ravineau in our Maquis, and later he became chief treasurer and paymaster. He was still a student at the time, but he knew a good deal about accounting. I asked him if he would take care of the accounts and he did them for all four Maquis until the end. He really put his heart into it because it wasn’t an easy job.
When I returned to London in September 1944, I handed over my accounts to the SOE officer, who asked, “What are these?”
“They’re accounts of money spent for the Maquis.”
“Well it’s the first time I’ve seen anything of the sort.”
Nobody ever spoke about these papers detailing my finances with the SOE. I thought they must have got lost and there was no trace of them. Then one day at a dinner of former SOE agents held in Paris in 1994, SOE’s archivist at the Foreign Office said, “You know there’s a very thick file about you at the office.”
“Really?”
“I even saw a paper I thought was strange; it was full of very detailed accounts.”
“You’re joking, you really have those accounts?”
I could have hugged him. I thought, So they still exist and I’m going to ask for them; I can do that.
Between the four Maquis groups, we ended up spending, if I remember correctly, almost six million francs. The money was used to pay people and to pay for food and other expenses. When we could, we also bought uniforms.
Towards the end of the war we gave money to all the members; I can’t remember how much, somewhere between 5 and 20 francs each.
When we arrived in England, Henri had the remaining cash in a suitcase and at the office in London they couldn’t believe it. We returned all the remaining money, every last penny.
When I arrived back in London, I was wearing a strange “uniform.” Instead of sending me a proper uniform, they had sent me an army khaki battle dress jacket with trousers that were too short and a cap that was too small. I pinched a beret from one of the lads because I had to put something on my head. Philippe de Vomécourt gave me my shoes. They had belonged to Murielle Byck, who was parachuted in as a radio operator and who died of meningitis in Romorantin in the Loir-et-Cher. They were really ski boots, but I didn’t have any other shoes to wear. I also had a civilian raincoat, but I’d lost its belt.
Well, that’s how I was dressed when I arrived in London. I asked where my uniform was because I wanted to dress correctly. I was told I had to wait; it was in a stock room or something. I waited for a week.
But during the week I wasn’t going to remain shut up inside. I went to Regent Street with my sisters and some French people, and we were just about to enter a chemist’s [drugstore] when at the last minute I decided to stay outside. Three women were coming out of the shop—I was in the doorway—when I heard one say, “Did you see that funny uniform?” It wasn’t a uniform at all. That’s how I’m dressed in the photograph with Francis Perdriset, Robert Knéper, and Jim Menzies.
At the time, V2s [German rockets sent from Holland] were exploding all over England. I never saw the V1s in England. They must have been horrifying, because you could hear them but you couldn’t see where they were going to explode, whereas the V2s fell silently and exploded afterwards. With a V2 you didn’t have time to get worried, you knew it wasn’t for you.
Henri and I couldn’t marry during the clandestine period because Henri would have been a bigamist. I had forged papers, and he would have married Mademoiselle Vergès instead of Mademoiselle Witherington; it’s not the same thing. When we arrived in England, we decided to get married. Naturally we had to wait for the banns to be published [a public announcement required two weeks prior to a British wedding] amongst other formalities.
We were married at a register office in London, on the 26th of October, 1944. My mother and two of my sisters came, plus two or three friends. My third sister, who was married, didn’t come. It was the simplest of ceremonies. Henri’s family wasn’t there because there was no traveling between France and England at the time, except of course for people who were on military missions. So we thought we would have a church wedding in France. But we stayed in England until December.
Then we returned to France on the “Judex Mission”: There was Colonel Buckmaster with an assistant, Nancy Fraser-Campbell; a Frenchman representing de Gaulle; Henri and I; Jacqueline Nearne, who was Maurice Southgate’s other courier; and, finally, Jones, Philippe de Vomécourt’s radio operator. We were to visit the families who had personally helped us SOE agents. We couldn’t give them decorations because there weren’t any, but the colonel handed out a letter thanking them for the assistance they had given the resistance.
Our first visit was to Doulçay farm to visit the Trochet family. In December 1944 we arrived at the Trochet farm without warning; there were about 10 of us. They weren’t expecting us at all. But Grandma Trochet, who was a very good cook, prepared an excellent lunch for 10 people within an hour.
There was also some financial assistance for people who needed it, for example the Sabassier family. We gave them about 20,000 francs. They had lost everything in the fire, absolutely everything; they didn’t have a stick of furniture left. The money we gave them helped them to get back to normal.
We also went to Châteauroux, where all our chaps from the Maquis were in barracks. I was welcomed like a queen: “Oh, here’s Pauline!” as if I had come from the moon! It was very amusing. I was dressed in RAF uniform. We went to Clermont-Ferrand, then on to Montluçon. A hotel where we stayed during the clandestine period was apparently used by the Gestapo. The Resistance had blown it up. There were no rooms left in the other hotel, so the whole Judex Mission had to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor of a bistro.
We returned to Paris, we were discharged, then we worked on all the papers for a church wedding at L’Oratoire du Louvre [a chapel in Paris] for January 3, 1945. There was hardly anybody at the church wedding: Henri’s father, his aunt, his mother, and another witness who was Henri’s father’s partner. There were six of us—we had the church to ourselves. We were so broke we were married in uniform; we didn’t even have our photo taken, honestly. We don’t have many souvenirs from our wedding: while we were walking home from the church along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, we went into a leather goods shop and bought a manicure set. We still have it. And we did prepare a card: “Mrs. Gertrude Witherington has the honour of announcing the marriage of her daughter …” We sent that announcement afterward. But, you know, we’ve never managed to do things like everyone else.
In January 1945, I was summoned to SOE’s postwar office in Paris, and the officer there said, “Read this.” It was an account of events during part of my mission. I didn’t know what it was leading up to until the very end of the text, when I realized that I had been nominated for an MBE [Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire]. But there are two categories of MBE, military and civil. I was on the civil list. I thought, They have a nerve, treating me as though I had spent the war sitting behind a desk. You see, I had been sent to France as a civilian in uniform, therefore I wasn’t entitled to a military decoration, something of which I was totally unaware.
I asked the officer, “What’s all this about then?”
“It’s a press release.”
“A what? A civilian decoration? I don’t agree with that at all.”
“Neither do I,” he replied, “get a typewriter and send a reply immediately.”
I know it’s not the done thing, but I wrote to say I was sorry, a civil decoration wasn’t fair. It was the first time they’d sent women to work in an occupied country, and if all they could do was to give me a civil decoration then I didn’t want it. Either they did things properly or not at all. I said that I hadn’t done anything remotely civil for England during the war.
It stirred up such a fuss, what a reaction. Even the French press covered the story. I had no idea it would create such a stir.
Later, in February 1946, I received a phone call from Vera Atkins in London. She said, “You’ve been asked to go to America.” I was to participate in a series of conferences on England’s role in the war. And who should I bump into there? My former boss, Douglas Colyer, who was then head of the RAF delegation in the United States. He saw me arrive in uniform with all the French decorations. I wasn’t wearing the MBE.
He said, in a tone he’d never used before, “What’s all this business about the MBE?” I told him my side of the story, and he replied, “Well, whatever happened, you cannot tour America wearing all those French decorations and not the English one. Put it on, it’s an order.”
I said, “All right, but as soon as I leave America I’m taking it off, because I don’t want it.”
The speaker who preceded me on the American tour’s roster was Constance Babington-Smith, the WAAF who located Peenemünde research station for V1s and V2s on the Baltic coast, by examining aerial photos taken by the RAF. Douglas Colyer must have thought that it would also be a good idea to send a WAAF who had been in field work. The tour included New York, Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Philadelphia. The conferences were held in schools, clubs, and so on, of which there are many in the US, and I spoke about the role of the Resistance and the SOE.
In one city there was a large German American community, but nobody had warned me. Whilst I was talking I could feel there was some discomfort. After the talk, an American approached me and he said, “Do you think all Germans are like that?”
To get out of it I said, “I don’t know, I only saw Nazis!”
On the way back to England, I was on the same liner—the Queen Mary—as Douglas Colyer. As I was an honorary flight officer and wanted to speak to him—an air marshal—I had to go through his aide-de-camp to arrange a meeting.
I went to his cabin and said, “Now we’re alone, let me explain why I refused the MBE.” I told him everything and asked him if he thought it was fair. I reminded him that when he was in Paris he always grumbled that the Administration, with a capital A, never understood anything. These decorations were governed by certain rules, but now the rules had to be changed. The type of mission carried out by all the women sent to France was unprecedented in British war history.
He didn’t make any comment at the time, but in September 1946 I was finally awarded the military MBE along with several other SOE women agents and one man, a former radio operator. I received the MBE from the British ambassador but not in the embassy itself. The ceremony was in a building on the corner of the rue d’Aguesseau that belonged to the Roger Gallet firm. General De Larminat was present, and when my nomination was announced, he applauded—which was unheard of.
I parachuted four times: three in training—two day jumps and one at night—and the fourth was in operation, when I landed in France. The SOE men all jumped four times in training and a fifth in operation, which gave them the right to wear wings, the parachutists’ license for which you needed five jumps. When I got back to England after the war I was told, “No, you can’t wear wings, you have only jumped four times.”
This was their way of granting the award to men only. I didn’t care. I had jumped, I went into operation; I was going to wear them [see note on page 169].
From December 1944 until April 1948, apart from the two-to-three-month mission in the States, I was “without a profession”; in other words, I took care of my husband and our home in Rue de Buci. When our daughter, Claire, was born on April 7, 1948, I took her to Doulçay farm.
Immediately after the war, life in Paris was very difficult, especially when compared with modern life. There weren’t all the facilities there are today such as washing machines, disposable nappies [diapers], telephones, televisions, taxis, cars, and so forth. People today can’t imagine how we lived: there was no coffee, no tea, no cocoa, no milk except for children under 14, no potatoes. Sugar and bread were rationed; we had 50 grams [less than two ounces, about a third of a stick] of butter a week and 350 grams [about three-quarters of a pound] of meat, plus three hours queuing to get it!
Gas pressure was so low that we blocked every other hole in the burner with bread crumbs. We had 200 kilos of coal for the whole winter [about one-tenth of the normal requirement]. I used to light the fire just before Henri came home from work. It was only 3°C [37°F] in the bedroom. We had to make do with what we had.
When Henri came to the farm from Paris [in August 1948], our daughter was four months old. He said, “We’ve lost everything; the business has gone bust [see note on page 170].” He hadn’t even had enough money to take the train; he had to come back to Doulçay from Paris by bike! We were absolutely penniless.
I asked him, “What are we going to do?”
When he replied, “I don’t know,” I was panic stricken. We owe so much to the French because the Trochet family looked after Henri and our daughter at the farm while I returned to Paris. It was easier for me to find a job.
Someone had maliciously spread a rumor that we had received gold and platinum ingots [bars of pure precious metals] by parachute, but it wasn’t true. And no one was ever capable of saying what we’d bought with them! When the Trochets bought Jaugy, a château in Gièvres in the Loir-et-Cher departement, they were accused of using them: “With all the ingots you received during the war you could afford it.” No ingots were ever parachuted, none, of any kind!
When I arrived in Paris from the farm I was lucky. My former boss, Air Marshal Douglas Colyer, whom I liked very much, had been transferred to the embassy in Paris just after the war. So I went to see him, told him about our problems, and explained that I absolutely had to find a job. He said, “All right, I’ll see to it.” He gave me three to choose from. That’s how I started working in the Canadian embassy in August 1948. None of this work was linked to my work during the war and the Resistance. We just needed to cope, to find work. We had to start all over again.
After seven years at the Canadian embassy, I worked at the World Bank for a total of 28 years. For the first seven years there I had a boss who wanted me to be available 24 hours a day. On three occasions when I was given a salary raise, he said, “You’d better organize your life so you can give all your time to the World Bank.” I had a hard time, but I put up with it because I had no choice. I cried all weekend. Then I worked for John Miller at the World Bank for 12 years. They were the happiest because we worked like clockwork together.
In the end I was given the job of librarian, which quickly turned to research assistant. I was in charge of sending out all the documentation on the organizations that were part of the World Bank and on the Bank itself. I sent literature to Europe, Africa, and even Indochina. I was quite busy.