5
Half an hour later they arrived in the streets of a village. To Luteyn it ‘looked like a painting … lying asleep in the snow.’1 They were still not certain that they were actually in Switzerland. As the church bell tolled a quarter past five, they heard the tread of heavy boots on the cobbles and darted into a doorway. A uniformed man was walking towards them. His long green overcoat and pointed hat suggested he was a Swiss frontier guard. There was nothing to do but chance it. They stepped out of the shadows and called out that they were British escaped prisoners. The guard lowered his rifle and smiled. The relief was overwhelming and ‘with shouts of joy we flung ourselves upon him, shaking him by the hand and patting his back.’ Then the three of them ‘clasped each other’s hands and danced in the snow, pirouetting and leaping first one way, then the other, so that the whole street echoed with our cheering.’2
When he wrote these words in 1953, Neave stated that the hours that followed were a time of supreme importance for him that he doubted would ever be surpassed. ‘Never in my life, perhaps, will I ever know such a moment of triumph. Without weapons we had pitted our wits against the might of Nazism and cheated the Germans in all their self-conscious arrogance and cruelty.’ Again, in 1969, he described his feat as ‘the great emotional event of my life’.3
It profoundly shaped his political career and the public perception of who he was. The one thing that anyone who had ever heard of Airey Neave knew about him was that he had escaped from Colditz. Even in death, together with his association with Mrs Thatcher, it was presented as his main claim to fame. Indeed, she herself, when paying tribute to her old friend, remarked that people remembered him ‘perhaps most of all for the fact that he got out of Colditz’.
As the first Briton to achieve a ‘home run’ from the Germans’ flagship prison, he attained a celebrity that made up for the disappointments suffered in his conventional military career. In the words of Pat Reid, the castle’s second-most distinguished alumnus, he was ‘the dove we sent out of the ark’.4 The question was, how was he going to make use of it? He would have plenty of time to ponder the problem in the months of inactivity that lay ahead. From the village of Ramsen they were taken to the nearby town of Schaffhausen. Switzerland was neutral and, though Allied escapers were assured a welcome, there were still formalities to be observed. They spent several days under ‘hotel arrest’, which involved sitting in the restaurant, drinking and eating to his heart’s content, and chatting with the locals. He wrote a coded postcard to a Colditz inmate to pass the news of their success. He could not resist writing another to the commandant, showing girls in Swiss traditional costume, with a facetious message informing him that ‘my friend and I have arrived safely for our holiday’ after a pleasant journey. He delayed sending them in order not to spoil the chances of Lieutenants John Hyde-Thomson and H. Donkers, the second Anglo-Dutch escape pair selected by Reid. As it was, they made it out of the castle, only to be arrested at Ulm, where the authorities, having been fooled once, were on maximum alert.
Hotel life was starting to pall by the time Neave and Luteyn were told to pack. They were taken by train to Berne and delivered to their respective legations. This was the parting of the ways and they did not encounter each other again in Switzerland. Luteyn went initially to Curaçao, in the Netherlands West Indies, and ended up rejoining the Dutch forces in Australia. Neave’s army record contains two letters from Luteyn seeking to get in touch with him. The second, dated October 1948 and addressed to the War Office, asks that ‘as I have never heard anything from him since he left Switzerland in May 1942, I wonder if you could help me by sending me his present address so that I can start corresponding again?’ Though Neave kept up with some of his wartime army comrades, as well as with his agents in the escape lines, Luteyn does not seem to have been among them. Intimate though the experience had been, neither had really got to know the other. When Luteyn was asked many years later what sort of man Neave was, he replied that it was ‘hard to say’.5 The fact was they had spoken little during their adventure. Luteyn regarded Neave’s German as weak and that left only English, which for obvious reasons they could not use.
In Berne, Neave was put in the charge of the military attaché, Colonel Henry Cartwright, a veteran World War One escaper, and co-author of Within Four Walls, a book about his exploits which Neave had read and absorbed as a small boy.6 Neave was kitted out in an ‘awful green tweed suit’ and sent for examination by Swiss doctors, one of whom, Dr Albert d’Erlach, was a Red Cross official who had examined him exactly a year before in Colditz.7 In 1945, the War Office was still pursuing Neave for the cost of the consultation. There was nothing wrong with him, but he was ordered to rest for three weeks. He passed it in d’Erlach’s chalet near Gerzensee. He was too preoccupied with all that had happened to read books. Sitting before the fire, looking out at the snow flakes drifting down, he ‘felt a great restlessness. My success in reaching Switzerland was the summit of all my hopes. I had not turned my thoughts to the future in store for me … Nothing could ever equal that matchless moment in the streets of Ramsen. I waited, hoping that the end of my adventure would not bring disillusionment.’
But there was yet more hanging around. He was still under Swiss supervision and spent the next two months in the university town of Fribourg, where he stayed in a hotel under loose police supervision. There he lived a life of ‘mild dissipation’, drinking absinthe, hanging out with Polish officers who were interned in the neighbourhood and chasing girls. This activity carried more than the usual risks. Switzerland was an island of civilisation in a sea of Nazis and Fascists and their stooges. Enemy agents were everywhere, some of them, it was assumed, the convivial females hanging around on the student party circuit.
At last, he received word that he might soon be going home. On 15 April 1942, he was summoned to Berne to see Cartwright, who told him, ‘We’re sending you back first, Neave. MI9 have asked for you.’ He added mysteriously, ‘There is a reason, you know.’8 He and another Army officer, Captain Hugh Woollatt, were to be sent across the Unoccupied Zone of southern France, controlled by the collaborationist Vichy regime, then across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. He knew ‘little or nothing of MI9. Nor could I understand why they should want me back.’ Nonetheless, this was a welcome surprise. There were eight other British escapees cooling their heels in Switzerland. Woollatt had been waiting since September, when he had reached Switzerland after tunnelling out of Oflag V-B at Biberach, near the Swiss border.
Neave’s ignorance of the organisation called MI9 was understandable. They were new boys in the complex world of military intelligence (for which the initials stood) and had struggled to win the blessing of the big players controlling the war effort and to secure a proper staff and budget to pursue their aims. By the spring of 1942, they were firmly in business but the outfit’s existence had yet to become widely known among the prisoners it was primarily designed to help. MI9 officially came into being on 23 December 1939, under the command of Major Norman Crockatt, a handsome, urbane former regular infantry officer, who had won an MC in the previous war and brightened up the corridors of Whitehall by choosing to wear the tartan trews and bonnet of his regiment, the Royal Scots. According to Crockatt, the organisation existed to ‘facilitate escapes of British prisoners of war, thereby getting back service personnel and containing additional enemy manpower on guard duties’. Secondly, it was to aid ‘the return to the United Kingdom of those who succeeded in evading capture in enemy occupied territory’.9 It was further engaged in ‘collecting and distributing information’, ‘assisting in the denial of information to the enemy’ and ‘maintaining the morale of British POWs in enemy camps’.
The team around Crockatt was as diverse and unorthodox as the branch of warfare they were waging demanded. Among them was Christopher Clayton Hutton, an idiosyncratic but forceful character who had once challenged Houdini to escape from a packing case manufactured by his timber merchant uncle. Houdini, having bribed the workmen at the mill to use fake nails, won. ‘Clutty’ was put to work devising escape kits for issue to airmen. They included maps printed on silk handkerchiefs, miniature compasses, benzedrine pills and concentrated food tablets. He also designed uniforms and boots that could be converted to look like civilian attire. Tens of thousands of the kits were issued as standard to aircrew operating over occupied Europe following the fall of France.
Crockatt’s mission was to cultivate a sense of ‘escape-mindedness’ in commanders and those they led. By the beginning of 1940, MI9 lecturers were trying to instil in soldiers, sailors and particularly airmen the notion that escape was not only feasible but a patriotic duty. As already noted, many of those who ended up ‘in the bag’ remained unconvinced by the argument that they could contribute to the war effort by making their captors’ lives as difficult as possible. In the light of post-war analysis, there are reasons to believe they may have been right.
But war creates a climate in which the unorthodox, even the outlandish, gets a more respectful hearing than would ever be the case in peacetime. Crockatt was remarkably effective at inserting into official thinking the doctrine that escape efforts were to be systematically encouraged and supported. Of course, not everyone was convinced. MI9 would find that it was their brethren in the intelligence community who resisted their operations most fiercely. The world of the secret agencies was notorious for its bitchiness, feuding and atmosphere of mutual suspicion. For some at the top of the senior organisation, MI6, the activities of the newcomers had the potential to endanger their own operations. Crockatt and his team would have to tread carefully to come through the minefield of rivalries unscathed.
By the time Neave reached Switzerland, MI9 was beginning to involve itself in prisoner escapes. Cartwright, as well as being a military attaché, was the organisation’s main man in the vital territory of Switzerland. According to the later account he left of this episode, Neave says that Cartwright told him, ‘MI9 have sent orders for you and Hugh Woollatt to cross the Swiss frontier as soon as possible.’10 If they were given a reason for their good fortune, Neave does not reveal it. In his case, perhaps, it was because the organisation was anxious to learn all it could about Colditz from the first Briton to have broken out of it.
Cartwright added that although ‘we have sent one or two people through before … you are still guinea pigs.’ This seems to have been a reference to Lieutenant Michael Duncan and Captain Barry O’Sullivan, who had tunnelled out of Oflag V-B at Biberach on 13/14 September 1941 at the head of a column of about two dozen escapees that included Woollatt himself. Most were recaptured. Duncan and O’Sullivan travelled together across Bavaria, where they separated. According to the official historians of MI9, ‘each knew, from smuggled large-scale maps, exactly where he wanted to go. They crossed into Switzerland in the Schaffhausen salient and were clearly aware of every twist and angle of it at the points they chose to cross; information that must have reached them from maps prepared under Crockatt’s guidance and sent in by Clayton Hutton’s ingenuity.’11 Their plan may also have been helped by information reaching them from Johnny Evans, of Escaping Club fame. This was the route he had taken when he escaped in 1918, and he had returned to the area on walking tours in the 1930s, pausing to record the landscape in sketches.12
Once in Switzerland, Duncan and O’Sullivan were entrusted to Cartwright. He sent them over the border to be picked up by the ‘Pat Line’, an escape chain that had been operating since the fall of France. In the light of this, Cartwright’s suggestion that he and Woollatt were ‘guinea pigs’ seems strange. One explanation could be that in view of the difficulties the network was then facing, the pair’s experiences would prove whether or not the Pat Line was still reliable. The journey was not going to be easy. Since the armistice signed between the Germans and the French in June 1940, the country had been divided into an Occupied and an Unoccupied Zone. The ‘demarcation line’ between them ran roughly east to west across the middle of France, swinging south before the Atlantic, so that the Germans controlled the coastline as far as the Pyrenees. The Vichy government was technically neutral and supposed to control local affairs inside the Unoccupied Zone. Its attitude towards British servicemen who had evaded capture after Dunkirk was correct according to the Geneva Conventions. They were interned, mostly in three forts on or near the Mediterranean coast, in the Gard, at Marseilles and La Turbie, just inland from Monaco.* Conditions varied, reflecting the degree of enthusiasm for collaboration among those who operated it. At Marseilles, officers only had to turn up to roll-call on Monday morning, when they were issued with rations which they sold on the black market, using the proceeds to rent lodgings in the town. They were ‘not quite prisoners, not quite free’.13
The status of escaped prisoners was more problematical and hazardous. It was illegal for aliens of military age to travel through Vichy territory unless they had diplomatic status. Any male caught trying to leapfrog to the Iberian peninsula was liable to be handed over to the Germans. The initial stages of the operation had a cloak-and-dagger quality that reminded Neave of the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim, a bestselling inter-war thriller writer. The set-up felt melodramatic and amateurish. He was to head for Geneva, where a man reading a copy of the Journal de Genève would meet him at the station bookstall. The hotel where he then met up with Woollatt was also a brothel, with an aged procuress manning the front desk. More seriously, the cover story the pair had been given seemed ridiculously flimsy. They were travelling as Czech refugees, making for a reception centre near Marseilles. That neither of them spoke a word of the language and could not even pronounce the names on their forged identity cards did not seem to bother ‘Robert’, the slender Englishman in a pin-striped suit who organised their departure.
The Swiss authorities were in on the plan. Early on the morning of 17 April 1942, Neave and Woollatt were given a police escort to a cemetery on the western edge of town, where they crouched down among the headstones to await sunrise.14 Just before dawn, they vaulted the wall and negotiated a barbed-wire barrier on which Neave ripped a large hole in his trousers. Safely across, they headed for a crossroads with a signpost to Annemasse, the French border town just south of Geneva, where they had been told to wait for an elderly gentleman riding a bike, dressed in blue overalls and beret, with clogs on his feet and a clay pipe clenched upside down in his mouth. Even at this hour, the road was busy with men cycling to work, many of whom fitted the description. Eventually, one dismounted and introduced himself. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am Louis Simon, formerly of the Ritz Hotel, London. Would you care to follow me to the frontier post?’15 Such surreal moments were far from rare in the strange universe of escape and evasion.
From now on, Neave and Woollatt had little choice but to place their trust in each new figure who popped up to help. It required a considerable leap of faith. Neave’s experience of the French had been contradictory. There was the memory of the defeatism shown by many French troops during the fighting at Calais, and the stories of collaboration and fifth columnists. Even in Colditz there had been a shameful episode when some French officers had demanded that the Jews among them be moved to separate quarters. Neave had spoken out vociferously against this betrayal.
The example shown by Louis Simon, and many other men and women like him, was an uplifting antidote to the contempt and bitterness that many British servicemen felt towards their former comrades as a result of their experiences in the Battle of France. Jimmy Langley was one of many evaders and escapers who found ‘every sort of readiness to help … among the poorer sorts of people and every sort of reserve among most of the rich’.16 Many of those who fed, clothed, sheltered and guided the fugitives were women. After Louis had shepherded them through the frontier post at Annemasse, they were handed over to a ‘young, sad-faced French woman’ called ‘Mademoiselle Jeanne’, who led them to the next safe house, a short distance away. As they waited in the kitchen, Neave was struck by her ‘mystic devotion and courage which placed her far above the desires of the world’.17 This was an early encounter with one of the many extraordinary women he was to meet over the next few years. They were uncategorisable: some ‘virginal and fanatical’ like Jeanne; others warm and desirable like Andrée de Jongh, who would loom large in the time to come, to whom Neave, among many others, was passionately devoted. What they shared was a courage and resourcefulness that men of his upbringing did not readily associate with girls.
Before he escaped, women seem to have played little part in Neave’s life, romantically or professionally. In his copious writings there is no mention of pre-war girlfriends, and the studied loucheness of his undergraduate days and early London bachelor life does not seem to have extended to floozies, though he does seem to have had one pre-war liaison, as will be seen later. Whatever his previous view of women, his experiences en route to London left him with a strong regard for female stoicism and resolve. This outlook shaped his approach to his work at MI9, and had its effect many years later on British politics and history.
A variety of helpers handed Neave and Woollatt down the line to the staging post at Marseilles, where they were to pause before crossing the Pyrenees. Alex, a flash young black-marketeer, could not have been more unlike the ascetic Jeanne, yet he was just as trustworthy and patriotic. He and another young resister, Pierre, escorted them on the overnight train west. Pierre’s wife radiated fear when Neave and Woollatt turned up at their door, but she battled against her nerves and served them a meal before departure. Her behaviour won Neave’s sympathy. Bravery came in many forms, and she was ‘courageous in her weakness, seeking to struggle on for the sake of her husband’.18
After some anxious moments at Marseilles, they made contact with their next protector. Louis Nouveau and his circle were the exception to Langley’s observation that a fugitive was unwise to expect help from the wealthy. Before the war he had been a stockbroker in the City of London and his friends were successful local businessmen, two of them of Greek origin and one married to a German communist.
The pair spent the next fortnight with Nouveau and his wife, Renée, in a modern flat on the Quai Rive Neuve overlooking the old port. Though he did not know it, they were in the hands of one of the major escape networks ferrying evaders who had avoided capture through occupied France and into Spain. It was now run by a man known as ‘Pat O’Leary’, who despite his Irish name was a former Belgian army doctor: hence the ‘Pat Line’.
O’Leary had inherited the line, not founded it. It had been built up ad hoc by a small group of unassuming men who had been thrown together by the chaos of war and whose response to it had revealed the gleam of heroism beneath their modest exteriors. The story went back to Marseilles in the summer after the fall of France in 1940. An early arrival was the Reverend Donald Caskie, who had been the minister of the Scots Kirk in Paris, who decided that, in view of the fiery sermons he preached against the evils of Nazism, it was sensible to head south before the Germans reached town. He took over a seamen’s mission at the port, which became an unofficial reception centre for British servicemen who by one means or another had fetched up on the Mediterranean shore.
He was soon in partnership with another Scotsman. Ian Garrow was a captain in the Highland Light Infantry serving as a transport officer with the 51st Highland Division. After the division surrendered at St-Valery-en-Caux on 12 June 1940, he and a group of his men set off westwards, hoping to make it back to Britain via the Channel Islands. After many adventures and several changes of plan, they were arrested near Cahors, in the Unoccupied Zone.19 In October they were moved to Fort St-Jean in the old port at Marseilles.
Like Caskie, he had no experience of clandestine work, but they both turned out to be very good at it. Initially, Garrow was part of a team of British officers at the fort organising escapes. Rather than leave himself, he chose to stay behind and establish an efficient organisation to help others. Under the terms of his parole, he was able to move around reasonably freely. He made friends at the American consulate and among prominent local citizens, including Louis and Renée Nouveau. In June 1941, Garrow teamed up with Albert-Marie Guérisse, a Belgian army doctor. Guérisse had been evacuated to England during Dunkirk and had joined the Royal Navy, serving on a converted merchantman carrying out clandestine work behind enemy lines for the Special Operations Executive. He had taken the cover name ‘Patrick Albert O’Leary’. The first name was bestowed on him by SOE. The rest he borrowed from a French-Canadian friend he had met during a spell at school in England.20
In April 1941, Pat O’Leary had been arrested by the French during an operation to land agents and pick up evaders and escapers on a beach near the Spanish border. He was interned in St Hippolyte-du-Fort, north-west of Nîmes, where security was lax. He was soon in touch with Garrow, who organised his escape. He intended to get back to Britain and SOE, but Garrow was impressed by him and saw him as a lieutenant and possible successor. When Garrow was arrested in October 1941, O’Leary took over. The organisation he inherited was by that stage receiving financial help from MI9 in London and the services of MI6, under the cold eye of its Machiavellian deputy director, Claude Dansey. In 1941 he was 64 years old, with forty years in the spy world behind him. ‘Z’, as he was code-named, was vindictive, arrogant and contemptuous of those he deemed to fall short of his high professional standards – a broad category.
So far, MI6 had not had a good war. Their entire European network had been rolled up in November 1939, when German agents posing as conduits to a dissident group inside the Wehrmacht snatched two key British agents at the town of Venlo, on the Dutch-German border. With the creation of the Special Operations Executive, set up in July 1940 to carry out sabotage operations in occupied Europe and aid local resistance groups, the monopoly MI6 had previously had on undercover work in enemy territory was ended. Dansey deeply resented the encroachment into his domain and seemed to regard SOE as an enemy on a par with the Germans.
His attitude towards the other potential rival, MI9, was more nuanced. The relationship between MI6 and MI9 was imprecisely defined. In the words of the official historians, they were ‘closely bound … sometimes too close for comfort’.21 However things looked on paper, in the end ‘what Dansey wanted done was done, and what he wanted undone was undone.’ What is more, ‘he could have broken Crockatt, or anyone else in MI9, as easily as he blew his own nose.’ Dansey moved in fast to exert control over the infant MI9. In the summer of 1940, he sent a young MI6 officer called Donald Darling to the Iberian peninsula to start re-establishing links between Britain and France, with which there was now no means of communication by land, sea, air or even radio.22 Under his code name ‘Sunday’, Darling was soon in touch with Garrow in Marseilles and sending him money. Henceforth he would play a vital role supporting the escape networks in France and Belgium.
To the eyes of Neave and Woollatt, as they passed the days looking out at the spring sunshine sparkling on the waters of the Mediterranean from the comfort of the Nouveaus’ flat, the Pat Line seemed efficient and reasonably secure. In fact, it was just recovering from the discovery that for months it had been completely compromised by the treachery of one of its most active members. For every story of selflessness that the Pat Line generated, Harold Cole provided a black counterpoint. The few pictures that exist of him show a nondescript figure with a long thin face, a high forehead and a square jutting chin. His hair was sandy and from time to time he wore a moustache. Despite his drab appearance, he was a master manipulator of both men and women. He was born in Marylebone in London in 1911 and, by the time war broke out, he was well known to the police, who held eleven warrants for his arrest. Cole had joined the Royal Engineers and was posted to France, where in the spring of 1940 he deserted after stealing an officer’s uniform and chequebook.23 He was arrested and imprisoned in Lille, but soon after the German attack in the west he broke out and moved in with a woman in the town, taking the name of her husband, who was off fighting for his country. When the war in France ended, Cole re-emerged in an unexpected role. He made contact with British troops stranded in the area and, using the French contacts he had made through his girlfriend, escorted them with local assistance to Paris and across the demarcation line to Marseilles. In the beginning at least, his motives seem to have been altruistic. News of Cole’s good work filtered back to London and he soon won the approval of Claude Dansey. His name also began featuring in intelligence reports reaching Donald Darling in Lisbon. To ‘Sunday’, he seemed ‘the antithesis of the Scarlet Pimpernel, in that he stood out as an Englishman in the very French surroundings in which he operated. Wearing plus fours and a pork pie hat, speaking rudimentary French with a cockney accent, it seemed incredible that he was not questioned and arrested by the Germans.’24
Darling reported his thoughts to London but ‘learned to my surprise that Colonel Dansey [and MI9] thought he had a sporting chance of getting away with it for some time to come.’ Nonetheless, Darling felt Cole was ‘too good to be true’. He pestered London to run checks with the War Office and Scotland Yard. The silence that met his requests seemed ‘tantamount to telling me to mind my own business’. Meanwhile in Marseilles, O’Leary was also growing suspicious. He had given Cole large sums of money to fund operations in Lille and he decided to check on how much of it had reached the intended beneficiaries. According to the story later recounted by Neave, in autumn 1941, while Cole was relaxing in Marseilles, O’Leary travelled to Lille and contacted a man called Duprez, who had given shelter to British airmen and was supposed to have been reimbursed for his costs.25 Duprez denied getting any money from Cole and O’Leary brought him back with him to Marseilles to confront Cole.26 When challenged, Cole denied the charge and insisted Duprez had been paid. After a fight, Cole escaped and returned to northern France, where he offered his services to German military intelligence, the Abwehr. O’Leary tried to warn the line’s agents in the area. But according to the MI9 files, the information Cole handed over resulted in a wave of arrests, including that of his mistress.27 From then on he was a full-time German agent. Neave reckoned that he ‘cost the lives of fifty of the escape organisation’s bravest helpers’.28
It was some time before the scale of his betrayal was pieced together and decisive action taken. In April 1942, just before Neave and Woollatt arrived in Marseilles, O’Leary crossed to Spain and was smuggled into Gibraltar for a summit meeting with Darling and Jimmy Langley of MI9. All addresses and cover names known to Cole were to be abandoned and anyone who encountered him was to shoot him on sight. As Neave pointed out, with communications with London relying on ‘a shaky system of messages in toothpaste tubes brought by couriers over the Pyrenees’, assembling vital information was extremely difficult. A radio link would have alerted everyone to the suspicions about Cole, but at this stage MI9’s activities in the field were not given high priority by the Air Force, and without their help it was impossible to drop wireless operators and sets.
Fortunately for Neave and Woollatt, Cole’s activities had not affected the Pat Line’s Switzerland-to-Marseilles branch. After two weeks in the Nouveaus’ flat, where they had to move about quietly to avoid raising the suspicions of the collaborationist occupants of the flat below, they were told to get ready to leave. An Anglo-French guide called Francis Blanchain took them by train to Toulouse. They stayed for a week while a party of other fugitives – Poles, Frenchmen, Brits and Australians – assembled. A slow train took them to Port Vendres, where they met their guide, a wiry little smuggler who was growing rich through passing people over the mountains. The trek took twenty-four exhausting hours.
On arrival in neutral Spain, there was none of the exhilaration that had gripped them in Switzerland. The regime was unwelcoming and escapees could, if captured, be thrown into gaol. A shifty-seeming local courier took them to the consulate at Barcelona and, on 1 May 1942, two immaculate Foreign Office types drove them in a Bentley to the British embassy in Madrid.
At the beginning of the war, Sir Samuel Hoare, the ambassador, had been anxious to do nothing that would jeopardise his mission’s continued presence in neutral Spain. Donald Darling’s activities had given him particular cause for concern. Since then, things had relaxed. On arrival, they were met by the first secretary, ‘a big man with a welcoming handshake’. This was Michael Creswell, who as ‘Monday’ was a key player in MI9’s Iberian operations and with whom Neave would soon be working. He led them to a large wooden building in the garden where twenty or thirty men were drinking beer and sherry. It was a stirring sight: ‘They came from every Allied nation, all of them tough, hard and determined, all of them ready to fight.’29 After his recent experiences, Neave felt he could hold his head up in such exalted company. The following day, the men boarded a bus and were driven south, bearing papers that identified them as a party of students. At La Línea the Spanish guards did not hide their disbelief but waved them through. In Madrid, he had met ‘Monday’. Now, in Gibraltar, he came face to face with Donald Darling, ‘Sunday’, who interrogated him about his journey. Then he boarded a troopship for Gourock on the Clyde. His life as ‘Saturday’ was about to begin.
* From January 1941, the camp at Fort St-Jean at Marseilles was closed and its internees moved to the other two.