The job which led to my most disturbing incident as a British agent started quite simply when I met one of the many dozens of resistance men I had worked with in the Angers area. I saw him in a bar, and as we sat over a coffee one morning in mid-1943, he told me that he could let me have all the future train movements for months to come, every ammunition train, every troop train, every food train, which had been planned with characteristic German efficiency and listed in one slim file which rested in a steel drawer inside the movement control office at Le Mans station.

I was, of course, instantly aware of the value of this information. Armed with it, I could brief the Royal Air Force to attack the trains and could let the saboteurs in the groups know when food trains were passing so that they could be derailed and the goods taken into the secret stores of the Resistance. How, I asked, were these plans to reach me?

‘Monsieur, I have a contact at Le Mans who is a movements control officer. He can tell you where they are kept and you can come in and get them.’

That was all very well, I told him – but what about guards, locked doors and so on? And if he worked there, why couldn’t he collect the papers?

He explained that there was only one guard on at nights, a Frenchman, and that he could be tempted away by the offer of a couple of brandies in a bar close by the offices. He would leave a shutter open in a ground-floor room and the window unlocked so I could come in that way. There would be no problem. As for locked doors, he would give me wax impressions of the only key I would need which opened the door from the room with the open shutters into the room where the file was kept, but he would even try to keep that unlocked for the night I would make my burglary.

‘I cannot take the file out as I am a Frenchman. Every Frenchman is searched when they leave the offices and I could not risk smuggling the papers through myself,’ he told me.

But there was another snag. If the file disappeared, the Germans would know that it had been stolen and they would change the whole of the schedule. If I took the file, I asked my contact, could he smuggle it back the following day without being discovered?

‘Yes, they don’t search people going in. If you photograph the documents and let me have them back in a day or so, then I can cover up for that length of time. If a German asks to see the file I can put him off by pretending that another officer is looking at it, and put it back later without anyone knowing that it has been out of the office.’

That settled all my inquiries. He told me when I could have the impression of the key and I made arrangements for this to be picked up. I also arranged that he would give the date on which the raid could be made to another contact I would send to him.

I received the impression of the key a few days later and, as I was working legitimately as a lathe operator in a factory making tungsten drills – perfect cover for me – I was able to make my own key from the wax impression. I was ready for the burglary from then on. I was told the day by a courier who reached me at Angers and I arranged to be taken by van out to Le Mans. The driver knew nothing of the job I was on, just that I wanted transport there and back. I dressed in my dark-blue overalls and my black beret, as they would help to conceal me in the dark, got into the van and was driven off. At 11 p.m., the time arranged, I was hiding in the shadows by the offices when I saw my contact come out and chat to a guard who had been paying little interest in his job of sentry. After a few minutes the two moved off towards the café, from which I could hear, distantly, the clatter of glasses and the hum of talk.

I waited for the two to get out of my sight and then, with my heart beating heavily at the thought of my coming burglary and the chances of being captured, strolled over to the offices and to the shutters.

The shutters opened at a touch and without any noise – he must have oiled them. The window, too, was opened as he had promised and I pulled myself up into the dark, quiet room. I stood listening for steps, but all I heard were the voices from the café. I pulled my .45 revolver out, carried it in one hand after pushing off the safety catch, and took out a pencil-slim electric torch from another pocket.

I eased myself quietly across the room to the door which led into the office where the files were kept, and leaned my shoulder against it as I turned the handle. That, too, was open and there was no need for my key. I opened this slowly – again there was no noise – entered the room and closed the door behind me. I switched my torch on, shone it on to the floor and took two paces towards the files.

Then, all at once, the lights in the room came on and a girl’s voice ordered:

‘Stay where you are, don’t move.’ I swung to my left and saw a pretty young girl of twenty-three or twenty-four standing there dressed in a white blouse and a blue skirt. In her right hand she held a pistol which was pointing straight at me, but wavering so much that the muzzle seemed to be blurred. I fired from the hip. She fired at the same time. Her shot hit the ceiling, mine hit her in the left breast, and I had the crazy thought that my pistol instructor would have been proud of me. The heavy .45 bullet flung her across the room and she crashed on her back on the floor. She gasped and started to moan, and the blood seeped into her trim white blouse.

I should have shot her in the head, snatched the plans and run before the noise of the shots brought searchers. But I was sickened because I had shot a pretty girl, so I put my gun down, knelt on the floor beside her and cradled her head in my lap. I stayed like that for some minutes, as the girl gasped her last breaths, and then died. Shocked, I still held her for another minute or two. I laid her down gently, picked up the two guns and switched the lights off. I leaned against the wall and thought for a moment that I was going to be sick. The room reeked of gunpowder and, mingled with it was a trace of the girl’s perfume. I can smell it even now. I pulled myself together and then realised that the blast from my .45 must have been heard a long way off. But I heard no shouts, no running feet. Automatically I turned to the right file, switched on my torch and brought out the plans which I tucked into one of my big, overall pockets. I stepped over the body of the girl, walked to the door, went into the next office and stood by the open window. I looked out, saw no one, and the only sounds were those from the bar. I dropped to the ground and ran into the darkness towards the van which was tucked away a few streets off.

I stopped, panting. It was only then that I realised I had committed a murder. I leaned against a wall catching my breath, as the shock of this hit me for the first time. Murder was a frightening word at any time. But to have committed a murder oneself, and that of a pretty girl, was enough to turn one’s senses. I wanted to run, run anywhere, but I fought the panic that rose in me and forced myself to be calm.

Then another thought came into my mind. How the hell did that girl know I was going to be there? Who had talked and who was she? Had my contact betrayed me? What had happened and how was I going to escape being caught and tried?

But reason told me that the Germans could not trace me for I had left no fingerprints and they would not be too thorough just because a slip of a girl had been killed. I would photograph the plans and have them delivered back to my man as we had planned. And in the meantime I would try to find out the identity of the girl.

I was driven back to Angers and dropped at my house. The next day I arranged for the plans to be photographed and asked for information to be obtained for me on the previous night’s events.

I heard within a few hours that the girl, who was named Marthe – I never did know more than that – was a recent recruit to the Milice, the French plainclothes equivalent of the Gestapo. Her boyfriend worked at the movement control and by chance overheard my contact discussing my coming raid on their offices. The boyfriend told Marthe about this as an interesting anecdote – he was a loyal Frenchman – not realising his girl was a member of the Milice.

Marthe was young and eager and, I presumed, had sought to impress her new chief by catching a thief single-handed. It was her misfortune to meet a fully armed and trained British army officer instead of a frightened, unarmed French thief. I felt a little better when I knew that the girl was an enemy of France. But I shall never forget that I was forced to kill a girl. Until now no one has known I was Marthe’s killer – not even SOE. I was too ashamed.

As it was, the plans were not as vital as I had been led to believe. They were useful, but only covered a small section of the future movements of the railways through Le Mans junction. The Germans hunted the murderer, checks were made in Le Mans, but no one, outside my contact at the control office, found out the killer.

The final reaction set in a couple of days after her death. I could not stop trembling, I could not eat. I was very tensed up and preoccupied for many days. At night I lay awake, hearing again the sound of her cries as she lay dying, and smelling again the fresh, exciting perfume she had worn. I was remorseful and wondered why the hell I had wanted to become a British agent. How, I asked myself, had I managed to become an assassin? I thought back to the beginning of the war when I, and many like me, still thought that war was an awfully big adventure.

It started when a friend walked into my golf club and said: ‘Here you are, Richard – just the job you were looking for,’ and handed over an advertisement asking for recruits of good education, speaking several languages, who would have a hard but interesting life in the Field Security Police.

‘Well, that seems all right,’ I told him. ‘But I’m not all that interested in being a policeman chasing drunken soldiers who’ve run off with someone’s wife.’

‘No, no – it’s not that sort of job at all. It’s security, checking up on spies and seeing that the Germans don’t steal our secrets. Should be just the thing.’

That sounded much more interesting, so I applied. I was called for an interview in February 1940, passed the language tests, and I was in.

I went through the normal military training of the day when I reported to Sheerness in April – square bashing, bull, and the rest of it. Then came lectures on field security, which were much more to my liking. We were taught how to follow a person without being seen, how to spot false papers, and so on. I realised as the weeks passed that I had found just the sort of work I wanted.

Dunkirk came and went. There were a few bombs in the distance, but, apart from that, the war seemed a long way off. It came fairly close, though, when there were two serious invasion threats, and in one I was sent to a defensive position with a rifle and five rounds of ammunition. Five rounds did not seem very many to hold off the German Army, and I asked the company sergeant-major what I should do when my five rounds were used.

‘Run like hell,’ was his succinct reply.

They made me a Lance Corporal, unpaid. I joined a group doing port control work in the north and was then ordered back to the depot of the security force, which now had the title ‘Corps’ rather than Police – a word that smacked too much of the Gestapo. There I found many hush-hush preparations going on and I was ordered to brush up my French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and finally joined Section 52 of the Field Security Corps on board the Polish ship Sobiesky at Liverpool. We sailed for Scapa Flow on 20 August, where there were some of the Royal Marines, an independent company, and some Free French soldiers.

The ship steamed south, the weather became hotter and life aboard the Polish ship increasingly difficult because we were living in the airless stifling afterhold with the Royal Marines. The smell of dozens of sweaty soldiers became overpowering, and we looked forward to our brief hours on deck. Still the mystery of our voyage was maintained.

Finally our officer, Captain C. P. Henzell, called the section together and told us that we were part of a force going to take over Dakar and that he hoped this would be done without violence. We were to form part of the fifth wave and would use landing craft to do specific jobs.

‘Sergeant Robbie, Corporal Heslop and a sergeant from the Independent company will have a difficult job,’ Henzell said. ‘You’re to kidnap the Governor of Dakar, a chap called Boisson, and bring him back in one piece. Here are maps of the city and all the news we have been able to get on his habits. So study them and make your own plans for getting him out. We want him.’

We put into Freetown for final storing to be made by ourselves and other ships, and steamed off again towards Dakar. This was it.

‘Attention all troops. General de Gaulle has sent repeated signals to the Governor of Dakar to parley but they have been ignored. He is now sending envoys ashore. That’s all for now.’ The loudspeakers of the Sobiesky clicked off. So things did not look too good. We waited, and the ship steamed around offshore.

‘Attention all troops. General de Gaulle’s envoys have been fired on. The situation is tensing up. Prepare for possible immediate action. That’s all.’ Click, and the speakers went off again.

We still steamed round waiting. Two French planes came snooping, and suddenly they swooped on the rest of the ships and dropped bombs. No damage.

Click again. ‘Attention all troops. It has been decided to call off the engagement. Action stations are now cancelled. That’s all. We are heading back to Freetown.’

It was an anti-climax. But Robbie and I were secretly rather glad, for everything seemed to have been such chaos that our chances of getting the Governor – just three against who knows how many guards – were slim.

When we got back to Freetown I was made a sergeant and the section was put on port control. My job was to board ships 3 miles offshore to vet the officers, crews, and cargoes. It was now that I first became involved with Intelligence and found the importance of the small snippets of news passed on to me by the merchant seamen I talked with. Some of the neutral ships gave me information on enemy warships they had met, and others would pass on information about morale in the neutral ports, all of which was transmitted to London.

My job was now becoming routine and rather tedious. As usual in wartime most of the time was spent waiting for something to happen. Nothing much did. We went up country to follow and check a tip-off that a member of the African Frontier Forces was preaching mutiny, but we found it was a pack of lies made up by a man whose girlfriend had been taken over by the alleged agent provocateur.

I was relieved when we left for England at the end of January 1941. Perhaps something exciting might come my way yet. But in Britain, although promised a place in an officer training unit, I was again put on port control – this time in the Isle of Wight. The only thing I remember about that part of my war was the day the Intelligence Corps – as the Field Security Corps had now been named – tried to capture a man who loved to cut telephone wires, especially if they were new ones. We set a trap. New wire was stretched along from the HQ, and listening posts were set up at intervals, one of which was manned by me. I waited in a hole in a thicket with a pair of earphones which would tell me the instant anything touched the sparkling new copper. I could not move, as the earphone leads were too short, and I was forced to watch in just one direction. As soon as I settled down on that warm evening a Wren and a soldier, hand in hand, strolled into a clear patch of grass not 30 feet from my observation post. I only hope that they are as happy now as they were then. Admittedly they did not teach me much, and soon dusk spared my blushes and the falling dew sent them on their way. The wire-cutter did not strike that night, but the police caught him a few days later.

Finally I was called to a selection board. They wanted to know what unit I would like to join if I became an officer, and seemed surprised when I said the Intelligence Corps, even though I had been working in it for two years. But they passed me, and sent me to Bulford Camp, and then to Dunbar in Scotland.

Halfway through this course some officers from the War Office came up to interview those cadets who had asked to join the Intelligence Corps. I was most upset when they turned me down and was thinking ‘just like the bloody army, teach you to do one thing and just as you’re some use, put you into something fresh’.

But as this group left, one of them took me aside and told me that he thought the War Office had something up its sleeve for me, although he could not tell me what it was.

Well this set my imagination going, and for days I was tensed up waiting for some word which, mercifully, came in a brief note telling me to report to Room 055A at the War Office.

I was shown into a room where there was a Major in uniform, a girl, and a man in civilian clothes. The Major shook me by the hand, offered me a cigarette and showed me to a seat. No army officer at an interview had ever been this friendly before. He asked me some routine questions, the answers to which he must have known, but I supposed he was weighing me up. Then came a string of other questions.

‘Have you ever flown?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Do you think you would like jumping from an aeroplane by parachute?’

‘I don’t really know, sir – I don’t think I’d mind.’

He paused here and lit another cigarette.

‘How would you like to be dropped by parachute into France?’

I could hardly speak for sudden excitement. At last, at last. I finally managed to say that I would like it very much.

‘Are you courageous?’ was the next question.

‘I don’t know, sir. I suppose about the same as everyone else.’

‘Well we think you have the sort of nervous courage needed for the work we want you to do,’ and the Major grinned. It really was a friendly interview.

‘I have got to say this. You realise that if you are dropped and caught, things will be most unpleasant for you – torture, prison, unpleasant death. This is a volunteer job and I know you want to do it. But go away and think about it a little more, and then let me know your decision. If you decide not to go ahead we shall understand, and that decision will not affect your army career.’

I knew that I wanted to go and that thinking about it would only whet my appetite even more, but I agreed to let him know shortly. I walked down Whitehall in a bit of a daze. As the first wave of exhilaration passed, I put myself on trial. Would I be brave enough to drop and operate in France? Could I stand torture if I was caught? But my fear of pain was linked with a much more important consideration; how long would it be before I betrayed my friends and our secrets? That was the important thing, and that was the background fear that I sensed through all the months ahead. Would I break? We were to be taught, before I went to France, that forty-eight hours was enough. Last out for forty-eight hours and this gives the other agents the opportunity of getting clear and closing down operations which one might talk about. At the end of forty-eight hours one could talk. But two days is a hell of a long time if the best brains in the Gestapo are at work on a man’s body: the pulled fingernails, electric shocks, the damaged testicles, the raw edge of a nerve in a broken tooth, the kidney beatings.

I walked out of Whitehall into a telephone box, called a girl I knew and asked her to lunch. She was pretty and we were young, and the Châteauneuf-du-Pape over the meal brought just the right frame of mind.

‘You are on good form today, Richard,’ she said, as the brandy arrived. ‘What’s put you in such a good temper?’

‘Well, darling…’ and suddenly I stopped, mouth open. I had been about to tell her the job I was going to do; I was bursting to tell someone. This was my first lesson. Keep your mouth shut, Heslop, and do not drink too much wine – it makes you expansive.

For a week I curbed my impatience to write to the Major. Then I simply dropped him a note saying: ‘I would like the job.’

He wrote back: ‘I think you might like to know that, following our recent conversation, I am asking to have you on attachment as from 28 November 1942. You will get orders through regular channels in due course.’

A few days later I passed out from the OCTU head of the class, much to my amazement and, I think, to the amazement of many others there. For I was an old man in terms of cadets. So many of them were straight from school and in their late teens or early twenties. But I was the best there, and that gave me an added sense of confidence. The end of term seven-day leave completed my sense of wellbeing.

When it ended I was sent to a most unmilitary sounding address – 2 Orchard Court, in London, a block of modern flats with a large entrance hall, thick carpets, and uniformed porters. I took the lift, as I had been told, to the third floor and rang the bell. The door was opened by a slightly bald, middle-aged man, with a gold tooth that flashed in the artificial light. He spoke to me in English, with a foreign accent. He quickly showed me into a room with no carpets and a desk, two chairs, two full-length mirrors and the inevitable blackout boards as the only furnishings. On the desk was a blotter, a dirty inkpot, a pen, and some scraps of paper on which someone had been doodling. This was part of Special Operations Executive, hub of a spy, sabotage, and intelligence ring, which ranged from North Cape down to the Balkans, and I hoped that the bareness of the room did not mean that SOE was operating on a shoestring.

Eventually an officer in uniform came in, who told me, without preamble, that I was going on a preliminary course, and that if, at the end of it, I wanted to back out, that was all right with him. The course, he said, would also give them – the mysterious ‘them’ of whom I was to hear so much in the next months – a chance to size me up. But he thought I should be dropped in France after my training if I wanted to be. And, as from then, I was to be known as Raymond Hamilton and not Richard Heslop. He shook hands and left. I have often wondered what would have happened if I had decided at the end of my preliminary training that I did not want to go on, for by then I was in possession of all sorts of secrets that were valuable to our enemies. It was not until a couple of years ago that I learned that those men or women who decided to pull out, or who failed the preliminary course, had been sent off to the north of Scotland by SOE. There they carried out some war work, but were virtual prisoners for some months, until all the knowledge they had gained was old hat and of no future importance to anyone.

My conducting officer was André Simon, son of the gourmet of the same name. He became known to us as the Blue Draught, because, dressed in RAF uniform, he would breeze into a room, make a hurried statement, and then breeze out. He explained that his job was to look after me and the rest of the would-be British agents on the course. He would watch every one of us to see what sort of agents we might make, and report to SOE when the course was over.

He then took me to see my ‘classmates’, Vladimir, Ely, Auguste, Albert, Henri, Jean, Marie, Peter, Roland, Antoine and Guy. One was to become my firm friend and was to die within too short a span of months. They were of all ages, some in uniform, some in scruffy civilian clothes, but none of them had that sinister look that spies are supposed to be born with. They were just an ordinary bunch of people you might meet any day on the seafront, or having a beer at any bar.

We were then taken by train to Guildford, bundled into a 30 cwt army truck, and driven for an hour through the night to Wanborough Manor, a medium-sized country house with wooded grounds, set in an area cleared of all civilians so the budding agents could carry on their training without risk of discovery. We were met on the doorstep by the Commandant, a very proper soldier who was a major in the Coldstream Guards, and he set out to make our motley bunch feel at home. Our dormitory beds were comfortable, and there was always hot water. Regrettably we did not heed the Government’s orders to run only 5 inches of water into the bath to save fuel. We wallowed in a few feet of it. We also devoured mountains of food, the best I had eaten for a long time. It was luxury to me, the atmosphere was friendly and everyone leaned over backwards to be helpful and kind. However, we had to work hard for our hot water and full stomachs. There were courses in map reading and sabotage, Morse sending and receiving, unarmed combat, and weapons training.

All the subjects were first explained by lecturers, and then came the practical. For instance, we were introduced to plastic explosive, and told the best way of carrying it was to put it in one’s trouser pockets, as the body warmth would soften it, and make it easier to mould round the object to be destroyed. I learned it could be dropped, kicked, and heated without anything happening. That was reassuring.

We learned, too, about how to place detonators in the plastic to set off a charge. Detonators, unlike plastic, are very temperamental and have to be handled carefully. Some of them, made of fulminate of mercury, could not be carried in the hand because the heat of the body exploded them. Many hands and fingers have been blown off through incautious handling, and most agents or saboteurs kept detonators in their caps or hats, as this way they kept cool and were not likely to go off if you bumped into something in the dark. Others kept them in breast pockets, but I was always fearful that I would knock my chest against a tree or post, and that would be the end of Heslop. It was stressed that it was unwise to run when you carried them, because if you tripped and fell…

In the grounds of Wanborough I learned to set charges to destroy railway tracks. I was taught how to secure two pieces of plastic to a line, fix the detonator, a time fuse for, say, ten minutes’ delay, and then walk away unhurriedly. I fixed my first plastic, a two pound ‘split’ charge which I shaped to fit in the ‘T’ of a rail, smoothed it over so it could not be seen except by very close inspection, crimped the fuse, and knew that I had a couple of minutes to get clear. I was tempted to run, for two minutes does not sound long when a damn great ‘bang’ is due. But I remembered to walk away calmly.

‘Never run away from a charge, you might trip up after a step or two and knock yourself out. Then you’ll go up with the target. That is not the object of the exercise,’ the explosives expert told us.

My charge went off with a very satisfactory bang, and I went back to examine the effect of plastic on railway lines. I found the steel cut through as cleanly as a blunt knife going through wartime margarine. There was a gap of several inches in the line, which was quite sufficient to derail a train or engine. There were different instructions on blowing bridges, dams, or transformers, and we went through the lot, using plastic or amatol – a powder explosive that has to be tamped down before it works properly.

I worked very hard at Wanborough and thoroughly enjoyed the course. I knew I wanted to continue and be sent to France, but I did not know until later in the war that I nearly did not pass. That was when I was at Orchard Court and was left for a few minutes alone in a room where I had been talking to one of the chiefs. He had my personal file open on his desk and when he walked into another room the opportunity was too good to miss. So I flipped through and found a chit from Wanborough which read: ‘This man is disappointing, and has not borne out the high promise which one was led to expect.’

I have often wondered why this report was put in by the Commandant, and there are three possible reasons, I think. One of the skills we were taught at Wanborough was how to creep, undetected in the daytime, past guards. The Commandant and his staff would stand on a slight rise and shout at the men they spotted, who then got to their feet to be told where they went wrong. I managed, when it was my turn, to creep around the back of them, and the first the Commandant knew of me was when I threw a dummy grenade from a few feet behind him and shouted: ‘You’re dead.’ He did not like that very much.

Then I was not a talker, and the Commandant was a very friendly man who wanted to get to know his men. After my time in the Field Security, I was acutely conscious of the seemingly innocent question of an interrogator, so I would volunteer no information to the friendly Commandant. He probably thought I was a typical, wartime-only-officer – rude and tactless.

There was also one subject at which I was completely useless – radio. I just could not get the hang of sending or receiving Morse. Perhaps I felt it was too mechanical a job, even if a vital one. I became all thumbs when I had to sit down and tap out messages. The Commandant may have had that in mind when he wrote his report.

At the end of the fourteen-day course, despite the report, I was asked if I wanted to continue, and I said I did. From then on everything was geared to my future operations on enemy soil. ‘Learn the lessons well,’ I was told, ‘for your life, and the lives of others, depend on them.’ It had not really struck me that lives depended on the use of correct methods in the field. From then on I listened, and remembered. It was no longer a wartime game.

The next step was Arisaig, on the west coast of Inverness-shire, in Scotland – a most beautiful stretch of country, rugged, rocky, and filled with small ravines and small streams. Here SOE had set up another school. Groups of future agents were given instructions to blow up certain targets, and I was told I must take five men and blow up an old engine in daylight. I was given a map reference and told to brief my party. From the map we devised a scheme where one couple would approach the target from one direction, two more from another, and I and my companion from a third. We had to plot our course beforehand so that we could keep out of sight of the ‘enemy guards’, a part played by the instructors, always vigilant, and ready to advise us where we went wrong.

We split up the following morning after I had made a recce of the area – for however well one can map read, the actual terrain always looks very different. Then we set off on a 7- or 8-mile clamber through the Inverness-shire countryside. After 2 or 3 miles I slipped, fell, cracked the tibia in my left leg, and collected a fine gash to go with it. But my companion and I on that January day in 1942 pressed on, keeping in the cover of small ravines, out of sight of obvious high points where a watcher might be. We slipped round the back of the engine, and slapped our explosives in place. There was a loud ‘crump’, and we were very happy. We were the first couple on the target.

My leg hurt, and later I was taken to hospital. The next day I was standing in the hospital lobby when the matron came hustling in, asked, in scandalised tone, if I was ‘her tibia’, and insisted on me being carried off to bed, where everyone called me ‘Major’ and took X-rays which did not show any great damage. I was there four weeks, and great was the surprise when I dressed to leave and they discovered I was a humble subaltern, and nothing as grand as a major.

Shortly afterwards SOE sent me down to Beaulieu, in Hampshire, for what was probably the most important part of an agent’s training. For it was here that one was taught how to survive, how to communicate, and how to take on a false identity. Up to this time I had been Raymond Hamilton and apart from the change of name I had no cover story to remember. If challenged, when I was wearing uniform or civvies, all I had to do was produce my service identity card in the name of Heslop, and that was that. If anyone still doubted me, I did not have to worry, because I could quite happily describe my earlier life, my parents, my jobs and so on.

At Beaulieu I was trained to take on false identities by making up a name, and fabricating a life to cover the new name. Having manufactured a new identity, I would be interrogated by an expert to see what holes he could find in my story. And at first it was quite easy to be caught out. For instance, I might be asked the date of my birth and give a false date. Later in the conversation the question would be slipped in again, and this time, by reflex, I would give the proper date. The mistake would be pointed out, and I was told that a similar slip in France would lead to torture and death in a very short time. It was important to remember the details – survival depended on remembering, and it is surprising how many details you have to remember to stay alive.

We were sent on an exercise to Bournemouth to test out our training on passing messages, remembering code introductions, and using methods to make certain one was not being followed. It was a simple exercise really, but important. I was told that my headquarters would be a small hotel and that I would have to walk through the town to deliver a message to a man in another hotel. The first thing I said to him had to be the phrase which would identify myself correctly, and I had to memorise the actual message. He would identify himself by using another introductory phrase, and if I did not get the correct reply, then I must walk away. I saw my man and, to avoid being followed, used all the tricks that later were to become second nature to me. When I came out of my hotel I walked a little way down the street, suddenly fumbled in my pocket as though I had forgotten something, and then turned round quickly and returned to the hotel. That enabled me to see who was on both pavements and walking towards me. The next time I came out I checked to see that none of these people was still about. It was essential to re-enter the hotel, otherwise you tipped off the trained follower that you were suspicious.

Other methods we were taught were simple and effective. For instance, if you knew you were being followed, you kept your eye open for a bus and hopped on it at the last moment, which normally meant the follower would not have a chance to catch up. Just to make certain, you hopped off and caught a bus going in another direction. Or you could walk into a busy store like, say, Selfridges, take a lift up three flights, walk up two more, take a lift down four, and then walk out a back door. That got rid of most people. Another trick was to choose a gentlemen’s lavatory with an exit and an entry. You would walk in the normal way, wait a couple of minutes and then walk out the same way you went in. Simple but effective.

Back in Beaulieu we were shown how to write messages in invisible inks and how to search people properly. We were told that collaborators would leave a Maquis or village to pass information to the Germans, and that some of them did not write messages on paper but on their bodies. Women have been known to write messages in some quite interesting parts of their anatomies. Later, in France, a girl courier I used blushingly told a story against herself. She had to travel by rail from one town to another to bring a verbal message to me. During the journey she went to the toilet and found that, like so many trains in wartime France, the lavatory was in a disgusting state. For hygiene’s sake she spread newspaper on the toilet seat, and when she stood up found that the heat of her body had moistened the printers’ ink enough for her bottom to reproduce the newspaper she sat on. She tried hard to remove the ‘message’ but could not, and spent the rest of the journey feeling very anxious. She thought that if she was thoroughly searched – as sometimes happened on trains – the Germans might believe she was carrying secret messages on her bottom. She got through all right, and the first thing she did was to have a bath.

We were also taught at Beaulieu how to survive in the open. Our instructor in this art had been a royal gamekeeper at Sandringham, and he showed us how to poach birds and fish, how to build shelters of branches and leaves, and passed on all the lore of the countryside that had come to him through the years. He always said at the end of his lecture that he would not be sympathetic to anyone he caught after the war pinching the King’s pheasants at Sandringham.

My last exercise, almost a passing out examination, was to Nottingham. I was told that I must go there in civvies, without any identity cards, get into a forbidden zone, garner what information I could, and return to Beaulieu. I invented a cover story, set off, and, without any trouble at all, evaded guards at the factory where I was to ferret out production details and so on.

Survival was the basis of all our training at Beaulieu. We were told: ‘Keep your mouth shut and do not discuss any matters affecting your job. If you go into a public place, like a restaurant or bar, don’t stay completely dumb, because that will attract the sort of attention you don’t want.’ We were taught to take a quick look round just in case there were Gestapo about or Germans, or Miliciens, the French equivalent of the Gestapo, and then to pick a table facing the door, or the foyer, so we could see what was going on, and who came and went. It was also necessary to sit with our backs to a wall – so that no one could creep up and shoot from behind. Even now, twenty years after, I still find myself doing it. Escape routes, in case of trouble, were also important. A window, the waiters’ entrance to the kitchens, or some similar door, must be marked mentally within seconds of entering a strange building. We always had to have identity cards with us in case there was a sudden check in a bar or hotel. Without them you drew attention to yourself, and had to accompany a policeman to your house or hotel to pick them up. If you had to do that it gave away more information – namely the place where you lived.

At Beaulieu they showed us that pipes normally had tiny flaws in them which were stopped up with putty, or something like it. A tiny message could be hidden in a small hole in a pipe and then cemented in. We were taught to search clothing carefully, to take out linings of suits or dresses, even cut open the heels of shoes, because all these were popular hiding places.

Cover stories had to be repeated at least once a week, and I did this the whole time I was in France, so that I never had any trouble remembering small details.

It was important, too, to have ready a simple excuse for being in a particular place at a particular time, for it was easy to dry up during a snap police check, so that you could not explain where you were going, or why.

When I passed Beaulieu’s last course André Simon sent for me and said he had no hesitation in telling ‘them’ that I was fully trained as an agent. I would shortly be sent as an ‘organiser’ to France.

This delighted me because, in my view, it was the most interesting assignment of them all. An organiser was a man who chose his own agents, couriers and commanders, was responsible for maintaining contact with London and for arranging that arms and stores were safely delivered by the RAF. It was the plum job. I left Beaulieu, stayed in London, and was in and out of Orchard Court several times a day, making the preparations for the drop into France. I found out that SOE3 – despite the bare room in which I was first interviewed – was certainly not run on a shoestring. Everything I needed I got: I was fitted with two good suits cut in the French style, with padded shoulders, and I lived up to my school time nickname of ‘The Square Man’ when I was wearing them. I wore them regularly on trips to London so that they would not look too new when I arrived in France. The labels of a well-known French tailor were sewn in, and I memorised the name of the tailor and the place where I was supposed to have bought them.

My French wardrobe was complete down to pants, vests, socks, shoes, ties, razor blades, pocketknife, fountain pen, and pencil. I was given French matches and lighter, cigarettes, and cigarette papers – essential for the smoker, for in France at that time you never threw away a dog-end. They were all stored away in a little box and re-rolled later.

Every article had to be reasonably well worn for new clothes would look suspicious as they were only available through the black market. I did not want to provoke police attention when I arrived in France because I looked like a dandy. I memorised a cover story, a new identity, and all the little details of my former fictitious life. My name was René Garrat, the son of a timber dealer, and I came from the port of Dakar. Dakar I chose because I remembered many details of the briefing for the raid that never took place – names of streets, hotels and the like. I chose the timber trade because I spent some time before the war in Siam working in the teak business. I repeated to myself details of where I was born, where the family lived, where I went to school, what jobs I had, the names of former bosses, the addresses of the firms, places I had been on holidays and stories to explain the scars on my body, like the crack on the leg I got in Scotland. An SOE interrogator spent hours with me in Orchard Court trying to fault my background. In the end I felt I had been Garrat all my life.

One morning an anxious girl secretary came in and said to my briefing officer: ‘I’m a little worried about Raymond here. I’ve got all his forms but he can’t produce a birth certificate – he says he has never had one. What shall I do, we must have it.’

The officer asked me to explain. That was easy. I had been born in Cierp in the Pyrenees, high up in the mountains. The local Mayor entered me in his register, but because I was British he did not send a copy to the central register in Paris as he should have done. A few years later an avalanche swept most of the hamlet away, including all the records and Le Mairie as well.

‘So you see,’ I told the officer, ‘officially I don’t exist, I’ve never been born.’

He laughed, and the secretary walked away muttering: ‘Doesn’t exist, ridiculous – quite ridiculous.’