As London knew, the average life expectancy for a wireless operator in this treacherous climate was six weeks. Within ten days of Noor’s arrival in Paris the network she was meant to work with had fallen into German hands and was in complete disarray. In early July hundreds of French agents were rounded up and arrested as the Germans infiltrated the circuits. Noor and two others remained at large, one of whom was a former businessman called France Antelme, in his mid-forties, who it seems was captivated by Nora. The pair tried to warn others and hide while the Germans were torturing those agents they had captured in the hope of locating their comrades. One of those captured was Francis Suttill, a half-French lawyer known as Prosper, who was forced to stand for days on end with no food, water or sleep. Infuriated when he would not talk, his captors beat him mercilessly and broke his arm. Although other agents were told by London to escape across the Pyrenees or return by the August moon when a Lysander pick-up could be arranged, Noor was advised to stay in Paris, simply to lie low for a while and not transmit to London even though she desperately wanted to do her duty. Buckmaster saw her as being of key importance if F Section was to have any chance of recovering after this disaster. When Antelme returned home in late July he reported that he had done what he could to orientate Noor and before leaving had placed her in contact with Déricourt, who needed a wireless operator. But Antelme was clearly unsettled and anxious that he had left her in grave danger. When London finally heard from Noor in August and September there was good news and bad. Her morale seemed high, but she was ignoring basic security by sending out messages en clair when they should have been encoded. They did not then know that she was contravening another important security regulation by copying into a notebook all the messages she had sent as an SOE operative. She thanked Miss Atkins for the little bird brooch, which she said had brought her luck. F Section concluded that she had settled into the job, and when later they ordered her to return to London she refused to do so until satisfied that Atkins had found a replacement for her, which she never did.
One of the people Noor stayed with that summer while the Germans were on her tail was a friend of the Marié family from Versailles, a woman who was later caught and deported, although Jacqueline Marié, a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl when war broke out, did not realize who Noor was until she heard about her after the war. Jacqueline herself, stirred by an automatic instinct to resist, now began making anti-German drawings, using tracing paper, which she and her elder brother Pierre delivered to what they hoped were reliable houses in the neighbourhood. But she soon started distributing more sophisticated resistance leaflets, including the news-sheets Le Courrier de l’Air, Témoignage Chrétien and some issues of Défense de la France, the newspaper of one of the most important resistance organizations, which had its own clandestine publishing press. ‘It was unacceptable to live in an occupied country,’ she says very simply. Her whole family, scarred by memories of her grandfather who had been deported to Germany in the previous war and who never recovered, was involved in some form of resistance.
‘One of the most frightening things was emerging from the Métro with a bag full of anti-Nazi leaflets and finding either French or German police waiting at the exit. Sometimes there were alerts at Métro stations as papers were searched lasting for two hours, so then we would walk through tunnels, which had no light in them at all, and leave by a different exit. But often only one station in three was open so you’d keep on walking. That was normal life for a Parisian resister. Everyone was doing it,’ she shrugs, making light of the daily terror. Returning home from the centre of Paris to Versailles, where she sometimes distributed leaflets at the nearby Renault factory, she remembers having to take elaborate routes and sneak into buildings or hide in a lobby if the Germans were doing the rounds or if she had missed the curfew. ‘At least you heard them approaching as their hobnailed boots made a noise on the cobbled streets of Versailles,’ Jacqueline recalled.
Mme Marié, her mother, was involved in one of the most dangerous jobs of all, hiding young people in the family apartment and allowing them to use it for transmitting. ‘We never discussed our work even though we knew what the other was doing, nor did my mother ever try to stop me doing this work,’ she says. ‘I did feel fear.’ In addition to distributing leaflets, Jacqueline’s job was to find constantly changing places for radio transmissions as the Germans roamed around in lorries with antennae trying to find them.
Geneviève de Gaulle was, like Jacqueline, a young girl with an elder brother when she first joined a resistance group the day they heard Marshal Pétain’s ‘cowardly surrender’ from Bordeaux on 17 June 1940. ‘There are moments in life which are completely unacceptable and the invasion of our country by the Nazis was one. My father Xavier [General de Gaulle’s elder brother] had made me read Mein Kampf, so I knew Hitler’s doctrine. I had a great need to do something, so I went to the nearest bridge, over the River Vilaine in Brittany, and pulled down a Nazi flag,’ she explained.
It was, like Vivou Chevrillon’s attempted violin-playing at Compiègne, or the tearing down of propaganda posters by the newly married Jacqueline D’Alincourt who went out as soon as curfew ended each morning with her three teenage sisters, a small act of resistance on its own but one which soon led to others. In addition, Geneviève was spurred on by the knowledge that her brother Roger, who had crossed the Spanish frontier, had managed to join the Free French Forces of her uncle. She had grown up in a family who identified themselves as strongly Dreyfusard; in addition, having lost her mother when she was four, she had learned to fend for herself from an early age. Wanting to do something as active as her brother, she returned to Paris from Brittany and wrote articles for La Défense de la France, usually under the pseudonym Galliard, but she used a variety of false names. She also helped people to escape, mostly would-be fighters who wished to join her uncle in London, through either Spain or Brittany, sometimes travelling to the border with them. She was constantly on the look-out for small pieces of information about German troops or equipment and was also used for delivering packages or false papers.