Category: Blog

Heil 15 März, or Hail the fifteenth of March, was the cipher key used by SS signal regiments in the field in 1937. The Nazis entered Prague, taking control of Bohemia and Moravia on that day in 1939. Was it a coincidence that this date was already in the mind of the German high command some two years earlier? Who can know for sure? But what we do know is that the Czechoslovakian government had ample warning of the probable invasion of their country because the code was given by a German double-agent to the Czech intelligence service in December 1937.

What came next was the Munich Agreement. The greatest effort to avoid a world war or the greatest betrayal of a sovereign state? It depends whose side you were on. Two men had no illusions about what they thought would happen. One was the Czech president, Edvard Beneš and the other was Churchill. Beneš had been instrumental in negotiating the setting up of Czechoslovakia after the First World War and had been president since 1935. Hitler loathed him and frequently mentioned him in his speeches as the embodiment of cowardice. He challenged the Czech president to hand over the Sudetenland to Germany but Beneš refused. He tried everything in his power to accommodate the Sudeten Germans wishes in order to avoid war but on one subject, the free expression of Nazi doctrine on Czech soil, he would not back down. Many thought that he had offered too many concessions but, as his biographer wrote later, it was beyond the courage of any man to take responsibility for throwing the world into war.

Hitler was never going to be satisfied with anything Beneš offered him in the way of concessions. He needed not just the Sudetenland but the whole of Czechoslovakia and for two reasons: one was a matter of geography. Czechoslovakia jutted deeply into German territory and with its military strength it had been the keystone of the post-war French alliance in the east. And with the German plans of expansion announced in Mein Kampf the country stood in the way. Secondly, by the late 1930s Czechoslovakia had developed heavy industry with an enviable record of workers’ rights including an eight hour day; sickness and employment insurance, government aid for housing and more besides. Hitler would have a ready-made highly skilled work force to boot. A French writer and politician saw this all too clearly in 1938 writing in Époque: ‘Bohemia and Slovakia are a bastion, a great junction that commands all the roads of Europe. With Czechoslovakia under her rule, Germany will be able to encircle Poland and Hungary, and gain an outlet to the reserves of oil and wheat in Rumania and Russia. If Hitler takes Prague, he will, in fact, have become master of Europe.’

Churchill saw this too. He was implacably opposed to appeasement and made no secret of his fear of the dire consequences of Chamberlain’s plans to negotiate with Hitler using Czechoslovakia as a bargaining chip. On 21st September 1938, a full eight days before the Munich Agreement was signed, Churchill wrote: ‘It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced, but also the freedom and the democracy of all nations. The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small nation to the wolves is a fatal delusion.’

After the agreement was signed he was even more gloomy. He stood up in the House of Commons and predicted a terrible fate for Europe. He bemoaned the lack of preparation, particularly in the field of air defence. He said: ‘We have been reduced in those five years from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengeable that we never cared to think about it. We have been reduced from a position where the very word ‘war’ was considered one which would only be used by persons qualifying for a lunatic asylum.’

Czech Intelligence had been feeding the British secret services with information about the build up of Goering’s Luftwaffe for years. They had nurtured two German spies who produced valuable and accurate information from the early nineteen thirties. The first agent, known as A52, was Major Selm. He was deeply in debt and needed large amounts of money to fund his lavish life-style. He turned double agent and for his information on numbers of planes of the various fighter and bomber types, on the nature and training of pilots and their support crews as well as battle tactics he was paid 2 million Czech crowns, worth about £6,000,000 today ($8 million). In 1936 he was rumbled by German counter-espionage, caught and beheaded. The second agent, A54, was even more valuable to the Czechs and the British. His identity was not known by the Allies until a decade after the war but his information was of the highest calibre. It turned out that he was a high-ranking Abwehr officer and a member of the Nazi party who, for unexplained reasons, was disillusioned with the regime and he betrayed many secrets that were highly damaging to Germany, including details about Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

In 1937 A54 gave the head of Czech Intelligence, General František Moravec, the cipher keys Heil 15 März and fifteen months later, at the beginning of March 1939, he appeared in person in Prague to warn Moravec and his team about the proposed invasion. Moravec wrote later how ‘the master spy stood facing me, stiff and erect. We were all standing – almost to attention – as we listed to A54’s report, which made it perfectly clear that in exactly eleven days our country would cease to exist.’ When Moravec warned the Czech Parliament of the impending invasion the following day he was dismissed and told to go and ‘bring us better news in the future’. It was the most humiliating experience of his life.

On the evening of 14 March Moravec and ten of his closest intelligence colleagues flew out of Prague with their most valuable files. The following morning, 15 March 1939, the Germans made their move and, as A54 predicted, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. A tragic anniversary but one to be marked, nonetheless. It is one of many stories told in Our Uninvited Guests.

I celebrate women every day of my writing life. I do it quietly and with respect, humour and awe. I write about ordinary women who do extraordinary things when faced with intractable problems or simply difficult situations. So while I am thrilled with all the fuss being made about International Women’s Day in this significant year marking the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage, I don’t want to lose track of the immense and often dogged bravery of women who are not famous but whose lives are nevertheless impressive.

My current book, which happens to be coming out on 8 March 2018, is not about the Suffragettes or feminists, so it seems to be somewhat out of tune with the current zeitgeist. Or is it? I revisited the stories of women in the book and a few sprang out at me immediately. These are tales of how everyday women rose to the challenge of the times and did things that they did not know they were capable of. Sometimes it was out and out bravery, such as the women who became special agents, at other times it was all about being calm and coping in strained circumstances.

Mrs Bertram, or Madame Bertram as she was known to her French agents, was one such. She secretly housed over a hundred men and women in her modest house in Sussex during the Second World War. She called them the hullabaloos, so named by her two little boys who couldn’t understand the excited babble of conversation that was to be heard in Bignor Manor during the ‘Moon Period’. Those were the two weeks every month when it was light enough for pilots to fly by the light of the moon and drop their precious cargo in France.

This cargo comprised men and women who were working with the French Résistance either as agents, radio operators or couriers. The risks for them were immense. Once in France they had to evade discovery by the Nazis, knowing full well that if they were captured they would be tortured and almost certainly killed. Mrs Bertram provided a safe house for them with comfort, food and friendship. She always managed to find flowers for the bedrooms and cigarettes for the nervous smokers. Her store cupboard was a miracle of minutiae and she prided herself on being able to put her hand on any single thing the agents might want, from hairpins to typewriter ribbons. When returning agents arrived at the house they were given ‘Reception Pie’ which might be a pie or bacon and eggs, but it was delicious and always welcome. When some of them cleaned their muddy boots on the doorstep she would scoop up the mud ‘so that I could offer salad grown on French soil to the next moon’s French’.

It is those little gestures of kindness that move me when I write about women. Another perhaps not exactly ‘ordinary’ woman was Lady Bearsted. When she and her husband moved to Upton House in Warwickshire she noticed that the local midwife was doing her rounds on a bicycle, even in the depths of winter. So Lady Bearsted bought her a car. She could afford to but it strikes me still as thoughtful and practical. She noticed children were walking to school along the road and having to jump on the verges if a car or lorry drove by. So Lady Bearsted paid for a pavement for them. During the war, by which time she was nearly sixty, she ran a mobile canteen in bombed out London.

Suzanne Warren was one of the heroine-types, if they must be type-cast. She was French but she had a strong link to Britain, having spent much of her childhood visiting Clacton-on-Sea. After the fall of France she could not face the idea of sitting idly by as the Germans marched across her country and into the capital, Paris, where she was living with two aunts. So she decided she would do anything she could to undermine them. At first she acted as a courier, helping to get men left behind after Dunkirk out of France via Spain. It as dangerous work and she was part of an organisation that was ultimately betrayed. She was captured by the Germans and severely tortured but she managed to escape and get to the coast where she was picked up and brought to Britain. At the time she appears in my book she was undergoing Special Operations training in the West Highlands and hoped to be flown back into France. Luckily for Suzanne the liberation of Paris and France came before she was sent back but she would have gone. She was brave to the bottom of her boots.

Another woman who was brave in a very different way was Elsie. She was pregnant as a result of a love affair with a married man (she too was married). Naturally enough she was in deep disgrace and her family disowned her. She left home with one suitcase containing her worldly goods and, accompanied by her partner in crime, as she described him, went to Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire where she was giving a serious ticking off by Matron on her arrival. The partner was sent packing and Elsie was taken below stairs where she was given a brown uniform and told she would have to work in the washing and drying rooms until she went into the second stage of labour. The Brownies, so-called because of their uniforms, were not allowed to be seen by the legitimate mothers for fear that their scandal would pollute their pure worlds.

Eventually Elsie went into labour and had a baby girl. She was not allowed to bond with the baby and it was taken away after a week for adoption. After the baby had gone Elsie was sent back down into the kitchens where she was given a blue dress and allowed to wait on the mothers upstairs. She never said anything about her own grief for the baby but she wrote about others:

Most of the girls knew it would be impossible to keep their babies and all they had to look forward to was leaving Brocket heart-broken. Sometimes we got to hear when one of the Brownie babies was going to be collected for adoption. We all congregated at the window which overlooked the back entrance to watch the baby being carried out by the nurse and handed to the adopting parents. How can you hope to ease the pain after the mother had witnessed that? She had loved the baby so much for just a few days and may never have the chance to have another. It was sheer torture for her and we all went to bed very sad and subdued on those nights.

If that doesn’t call for courage, I do not know what does.

For International Women’s Day I say a loud ‘hurrah for brave women’ and then I say it quietly every day of my life even if no one is listening.

Our Uninvited Guests is now on sale in all good bookshops

One of the great joys of being a writer is having the luxury to spend time playing with English. It is a magnificent language – rich, colourful, brimming with borrowed words from all over the linguistic world and infinitely versatile. It can also be exceptionally precise, although it does not have a word for my favourite German expression Griffbereit, a very useful compound noun that means ‘something that is within grabbing reach’, ie a handbag. But I digress. As a writer I have a wealth of words to choose from when describing scenes or people or weather – a favourite topic with me as anyone who knows my work will spot.

When a book appears in first draft it is often rough around the edges and in need of a lot of linguistic brushing up. My writer-friend, Diane Setterfield, author of the best-selling Thirteenth Tale, refers to the process of polishing the language in her books as ‘literising’. It isn’t a word but I know exactly what she means. I read each of my books at least twelve and usually sixteen times between the final draft and the final proof and a lot of literising goes on. This is usually over a period of six to eight months during the process of copy-editing and proof-reading. The copy editor’s job is to make sure that I, the author, have got my facts right, that the narrative makes sense and that I have not left glaring gaps which will confuse or frustrate the reader.

When the copy edited version comes back it has benefited from a fresh pair of eyes and I have had time away from it. During this phase I make some decisions about how much literising is required, whether descriptive pieces are going to add colour to the narrative. Yes, even writing non-fiction I believe you need to introduce scenery in order to give your history a believable backdrop. So with this most recent book, for example, I found myself writing a whole page of description about the magnificent Scottish Highlands west of Fort William where, during the war, young men and women were trained by the Special Operations Executive to be parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to carry out any number of sabotage missions. I had been to the area twelve months before and walked along the white sandy beaches of Morar and watched as a beaded curtain of rain drew across the bay. I needed to convey the immense majesty and power of this magnificent landscape and the effect it had on those who trained in it for the most dangerous jobs of their lives.

Later in the year I met Sir Richard Hyde-Parker and his sister, Lady Camoys, to talk about their family’s ancestral home Melford Hall in Suffolk, which had been burned down by the army in the war during a night of drunken revelry. Sir Richard talked with almost bated breath about his memories of that time. He spoke not of the fire but of sitting close to his parents in the cellar of their house opposite the Hall during air-raids. He spoke with such warmth for this long-lost memory that I found myself searching out the right words to convey this childlike sense of wonder expressed three quarters of a century later by an elderly man. It was a beautiful moment to capture and I spent many hours circling round that paragraph trying to pick the right balance of adjectives, structure and idioms. I hope I succeeded.

When the book has been copy-edited to everyone’s satisfaction it goes to the proof reader whose job it is to spot spelling and grammatical mistakes, repetition and general untidiness in the use of English. I love this process because the changes I make at this stage are small but extremely focussed. I am polishing the book, burnishing it as best I can, so that I can feel confident that the reader will hear my voice in the language. A rule of thumb an editor told me when I wrote my first book was this: ‘If you don’t love what you have written no one who is reading it will like it either.’ It is so true and I tell students this whenever I speak to them about writing. That is not narcissistic or vain but sound advice. Learn to love your words.

Very occasionally I have a disagreement over my use of language with the proof reader. In 2007 I wrote a history of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, celebrating ninety years of their incredible work looking after cemeteries and memorials all over the world. I was staggered to learn that even on Gallipoli, where the peninsula is ravaged by wild winter storms, roses survive. So I wrote: ‘The English rose thrives in all but the harshest of climes.’ The proof reader changed it to: ‘English roses can survive in almost all climates.’ I was outraged. She had taken all the symbolism out of my phraseology. I had to argue my corner fiercely but what I was trying to convey was not that roses are robust but that the corner of England that is forever captured in those beautiful cemeteries is adorned with that most quintessential memory of youth, beauty, femininity: the English Rose. In the end I got my way.

In this most recent book I wanted to keep a paragraph that described the great ice storm of January 1940 ‘when birds froze on the wing and ponies in Wales were entombed in ice’. A proof reader’s pen hovered over that paragraph but I wasn’t having any of it. Nothing could be more desolate than the image of ponies frozen to death in the severe cold. It was so much more descriptive, I felt, than giving the facts and figures of the temperature, wind chill or size of snowdrifts. As I am writing this we are going through an intense cold snap in the UK but let me assure you that no birds are freezing in flight nor are ponies turning to ice.

I have now published over 750,000 words and most of them, for me at least, are in the right order. If you believe me that I read my books up to sixteen times before publication, then that means I have read over 10 million words of my own before I even begin to estimate how many of other people’s words I have read in the course of my research. You have to love this fabulous language of English, don’t you? It has given me a lifetime’s pleasure and I hope, when others read my work, it gives them just a little bit of pleasure too.

Our Uninvited Guests is published by Simon & Schuster on 8 March 2018

If you savour the concept of a British village in the middle of the twentieth century it is all too easy to think of a chocolate-box scene with cottages and houses surrounding a duckpond with a postman cycling by whistling while a farmer drives his sheep to market. So it may come as some surprise to learn that thousands of villages were surrounded by camps occupied by foreign servicemen and women, governments-in-exile and refugees from continental Europe. The majority of the visitors had never been to Britain before and fewer still had set foot in an English village.

In 1944 over a million more American GIs arrived to prepare for the invasion of Europe. Few of them had left America before and by the time they arrived in unfamiliar Britain they had suffered a debilitating troopship crossing of the Atlantic in their convoys, dodging submarines, landing in Northern Ireland before being billeted who only knew where. They were put up in remote country villages where no restaurant had even heard of – let alone served – a hamburger. The lack of showers, central heating and lager led many to feel homesick initially, but some grew to love the pretty countryside and the quirky English ways.

By and large they were welcome guests and had a good reputation among local communities for putting things right if they went wrong. A schoolboy in Dorset said that a neighbour had been delighted when his farm, damaged by American tanks on manoeuvres, was restored within a week. They repaired all the hedges and even helped out with the harvest, towing the old- fashioned binding machines with their jeeps. Another group damaged an ancient gateway leading to a fine manor house but restored it to its former glory in two days. The owners of Peover Hall in Cheshire were not so enthusiastic as the farmer in Devon. The US Third Army was based there and General Patton had his headquarters in the large Georgian wing in the build- up to D- Day. In 1944 a fire was started by a soldier and the house was so badly damaged that the wing was demolished after the war and the house returned to its pre-Georgian dimensions.

The arrival of Americans in such vast numbers had a major impact on life in certain areas of Britain. The fishing village of Fowey in Cornwall had the magnificently named USN AATS B, or the United States Naval Advanced Amphibious Training Sub Base, which trained at Pentewan Beach twelve miles to the west. The officers were billeted at Heligan House and 850 men lived in tents. It was said that in the build- up to D- Day it was possible to walk across the river from Fowey to Polruan on American boats and landing craft, a distance of over 400 metres at high tide. Soldiers charged around the tiny narrow lanes in convoys of jeeps, while the village halls shook to jitter- bugging and children crowded around for sweets and chewing gum, which the Americans seemed to have in unlimited quantities. The citizens of Fowey quickly became used to their new guests with their enthusiasm and energetic attitude towards life. Then one day they woke to find the harbour empty and the Americans gone. They, like all the other GIs spread across the south-west, had left the shores for the beaches of Normandy.

The US 333rd Field Artillery Battalion (FAB) arrived in Britain in February 1944 in preparation for the Ardennes offensive, or the Battle of the Bulge. The soldiers were a black battalion from Alabama, a small number of the 130,000 black soldiers billeted in Britain from 1942 onwards. For many inhabitants of the small Cheshire village of Tattenhall, where the US 333rd FAB were housed, it was the first time they had encountered a black man. Equally, the Cheshire countryside provided a novelty for the southern American soldiers: it was the first time they had ever seen snow. They were billeted in and around a house called the Rookery, hunkered under the commanding ruin of Beeston Castle which is situated on a magnificent rock towering over the Cheshire plain and leading the eye westward to north Wales.

Alabama in 1944 was still a segregated state and the soldiers had to be reassured that it was permissible for them to walk on pavements or go into the same pubs, shops and restaurants as their British hosts. When the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion left Tattenhall in summer sunshine six months after they had arrived in snow, one of the soldiers, Private George Davis, wrote, ‘We have found Paradise’. Tragically, many of the soldiers never returned to Alabama. Some were killed or captured near Antwerp but Davis was one of eleven soldiers who became separated from the rest and was hidden by a sympathetic Dutch farmer, only to be betrayed by a Nazi sympathiser and brutally murdered by the Germans at Wereth.

The British countryside opened its heart to the incoming soldiers but nothing could protect them from the brutality of war. Their stories feature in the final chapter of Our Uninvited Guests.

By the summer of 1940 Britain stood alone on the edge of Europe with nothing to protect her apart from the Channel.

This is an oft stated fact that has become entirely accepted by the majority of people. But is it true? Strictly speaking, yes. Geographically we stand on the edge of Europe and always have done. There is nothing new in that claim. But the implication here when set in the context of the early summer of 1940 is that plucky little Britain with its population of 38 million standing shoulder to shoulder faced the threat of a German invasion entirely alone and with no support from anyone. That is the bit that is not true and it does history a great disservice to ignore the massive contribution made by our friends and allies both that summer and in subsequent springs, summers, autumns and winters that followed.

By the time the Battle of Britain took place, London was host to seven foreign governments-in-exile and the hot-headed French General, Charles de Gaulle, had arrived as well. None of them came empty handed.

The Norwegian government lent the British more than 1,300 vessels from their fleet, the fourth largest and most modern merchant fleet in the world, which sailed with the Atlantic convoys for the whole war. In 1941 a British official declared that the Norwegian merchant fleet was worth ‘more than an army of a million men’. That was an enormously valuable contribution and one that was not without risk. Many Norwegian sailors would lose their lives in the heaving seas of the submarine-ridden North Atlantic. In addition, King Haakon of Norway brought 1400 soldiers, 1,000 sailors and a small number of pilots that grew rapidly over the next few months.

The Belgians donated their substantial gold reserves and over the course of the war shipped 1,375 tons of uranium from their stocks to the USA to fuel the Manhattan project.

The Dutch government and their magnificent Queen Wilhelmina, who was described by Churchill as ‘the only real man among the governments-in-exile in London’ brought six hundred ships from its mercantile fleet and rich resources from the Dutch East Indies.

The Czechs brought brilliant intelligence from inside Nazi Germany. Their main agent, A54 as he was always known, was a high-ranking Abwehr officer who divulged highly valuable secrets until his eventual capture in 1941. He told the Czechs about the build up of Goering’s Luftwaffe, he gave them the code for German wirelesses in 1938. It was a sinister code: Heil 15 März and a week before Prague was invaded (on 15 March 1939) that the Germans had been instructed to round up all intelligence officers and treat them with great harshness. His warnings helped the intelligence services to evacuate to London the night before the invasion. In 1942 two Czech agents carried out the most audacious assassination of the highest ranking Nazi to be murdered: Acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. The agents were trained in Britain and flown to Bohemia by the RAF. Our past is inextricably linked to the former Czechoslovakia.

Charles de Gaulle’s contribution would take longer to materialise but his presence in London cannot be underestimated. Churchill, passionately supportive of the French, gave de Gaulle every encouragement as he gradually built up the Free French army and encouraged the development of the Resistance. Many of the agents were trained in Britain and used safe houses all over the country, including one in Sussex which features in Our Uninvited Guests, to stay while waiting for flights into occupied France.

The Poles brought fighter pilots among a total of 8,000 airmen and 20,000 soldiers as well as hundreds of sailors manning three destroyers, two submarines and a number of smaller vessels. By the end of the war the Polish were the fourth largest Allied Force after Russia, the USA and the British Empire. Critically they also sent an early decoded version of the Enigma machine. Yes. That’s right. Enigma. You know, the one that we make so much of. It was the Poles in 1932 who first worked out how to use the German Enigma machines and they had been reading German messages for the greater part of seven years by the time the war broke out. I’m not saying the coders at Bletchley Park could not have done their work without Polish help but it might not have happened so quickly. We owe the Poles far more than we ever imagine. That is why I have dedicated my new book to them. They might have been Uninvited Guests but they were brilliant guests to have on our side.

Until the entry of the USA into the war, Britain relied extensively on this generous support from its continental allies. We owe them an enormous debt of thanks and that is why they are all mentioned in Our Uninvited Guests.