I’m grateful to M. Hervé Larroque for entrusting to me with the task of shaping the precious material he garnered from his personal interviews with Pearl Witherington Cornioley. I’d also like to thank him and my husband, John, for their innumerable interlanguage communications in which they precisely hammered out translation renderings, geography, and photograph identification. John, your tireless attention to detail was especially appreciated during your review of the original French against the English translation, which proved to be an illuminating and clarifying effort.
I’d like to thank my editor, Lisa Reardon, for her insightful insistence that I place the material within a framework suitable for young adult readers and for making many other helpful suggestions along the way.
Thanks also to Michelle Schoob for cheerfully fielding some last-minute changes and to Chris Erichsen for his beautiful work on the maps.
The attempt to make an accurate map from Pearl Witherington’s understated description of her difficult travels out of occupied France begged the addition of some detail, so a special note of thanks is due to two people for their help in this regard: M. Pierre Vergnon, a current resident of Genélard (Saône et Loire), France, near where Pearl very likely crossed the line of demarcation, and who was a nine-year-old boy at the time; and Sébastien Joly, a historian specializing in the demarcation line, professor of history and geography (Saône-et-Loire). Their insights helped to form a clear picture of what it must have been like for four women fleeing the Nazis to get off a train in rural France in December 1940 and make their way cross-country to Vichy, more than 68 miles away, without a vehicle.
And finally, special thanks to Sarah Olson for her impressive book jacket design; I wouldn’t have thought it possible to come so close to a visual distillation of Pearl Witherington’s SOE career, but apparently I was wrong.