The Lavender Keeper (11 page)

Lisette’s life was turned on its head. One day she was a waitress wearing a starched apron, the next she was commissioned into the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and smartly attired in black lace-up shoes, grey stockings, a blue-grey skirt, matching belted tunic and peaked cap. She’d been issued with an overcoat, set of underwear and the obligatory gas mask. She’d left behind Captain Jepson and had passed through a series of country houses where she had tackled her training with great verve. She had an impressive collection of bruises and a lightly sprained ankle to prove it.

Wanborough Manor near Guildford was where it began: a glorious, rambling old country house that dated back to Elizabethan times. Here the potential spies were put through their paces and assessed for the next stages of their training, which would qualify them as genuine agents to be deployed overseas. They ranged in age from late teens to middle age and hailed from a bewildering array of backgrounds, careers
and skills, although most were civilians. SOE believed civilian status offered a small measure of protection if the spy were captured. Passing through these doors had been everyone from a bus owner to a barrister. There had even been an acrobat! Men and women trained side by side.

At Wanborough only French was spoken. It mattered little to Lisette, but she was impressed at how well the other people she trained with spoke her language. She could tell, however, which region their teachers had hailed from, and regularly helped to correct minor errors in colloquialism.

Discipline was not overly strict, with the emphasis on strong social interaction, and for good reason. Trainees were encouraged to relax, and were even offered alcohol to test their resolve. Women were employed to flirt with trainees over drinks to discover how much information they could extract from them. The more rigorous training was saved for later, once Special Ops knew which of the recruits had the ideal qualities. Even so, the aspiring agents were not entirely spared the physical workouts. Lisette was not the strongest performer, but she was hardly Wanborough’s weakest. In fact, she surprised herself with her previously untapped stamina.

She would have liked to spend a month training at Wanborough but the war wouldn’t wait. Within ten days she was on her way to the beautiful west coast of Scotland. The rugged country surrounding the region was the ideal location for commando-style instruction. She noticed that there were far fewer recruits for this part of the training, and was thrilled that she’d been considered tough enough for the hardest physical challenges. She learnt how to scale cliffs, how to navigate for hours across impossible terrain until her legs were burning with fatigue, how to move through wooded
areas silently, even how to kill game to eat. She didn’t want to make friends, because she knew they would be scattered far and wide once the training was complete. However, as one of just five it was difficult to remain entirely separate. The camaraderie in their quintet was bright, and this helped considerably during the most arduous tests as they urged each other to carry on.

It was exhausting, physically and mentally, but it was all about survival. Time and again the trainers pushed the group to what Lisette felt was breaking point – and then past it. She endured it all, despite many occasions when collapsing and weeping felt very tempting.

The one thing Lisette really didn’t enjoy learning was killing, fieldcraft and raid tactics. Her trainer – a relentless Scot who never broke a smile and liked nothing more than to yell at his recruits – never gave them his name. ‘Call me Sir’ was his only suggestion. It was at this point that Lisette came unstuck. She had to prove that she could kill a Nazi sentry – in reality, another recruit – silently with her F-S double-edged fighting knife. Being slight in frame, she simply wasn’t tall enough to effectively cut his throat.

‘I can’t reach!’ she moaned when the sentry had swatted her off like a fly for the dozenth time.

‘What do you think Jerry’s going to do when you mince up and bleat like a lost lamb? He’s the one who is going to be slitting your throat, Forester!’ Sir made a slashing motion in the air as he said it. ‘Worse, he’ll just haul your scrawny self off to the Gestapo or perhaps those lovely fellows in the SS for some Nazi torture. Jerry gets very creative, you know. I’ve heard with women spies they like to—’

‘Sir!’ one of the others admonished. His name was Paul.
Lisette hadn’t had much to do with him but rumour had it he worked in a bank.

‘What, Lucas?’

‘You don’t have to talk to her like that,’ Paul said, wiping his glasses that had misted in the rain.

‘I’ll talk to her any way I please,’ Sir said, stabbing a finger just millimetres from Paul’s chest. Lisette noticed, though, that Sir never touched any of them, other than to haul them over the top of a cliff or reposition their arms when holding a gun or blade. Otherwise he relied on his tongue to do all the injury. It was a fine weapon.

‘Paul!’ Lisette said, cutting him an angry glare. ‘Leave it.’ She turned to her torturer. ‘Sir, I can do this.’

‘You’d want to, Forester, or you’re not going anywhere. Now, are you going to kill this man or not?’

‘I am, Sir.’

‘Silently, Forester,’ he warned, flicking a hand at her, and she moved back to the hiding spot behind the tree from where she was supposed to attack.

Sir had taught them a method to use that he said was near failsafe. But on this last try, Lisette decided she’d attempt a new approach. Instead of stealth, she ran at the sentry and leapt onto his back, covering his mouth, exposing his neck and opening his jugular. Of course it all had to be done in a couple of heartbeats and with such fluidity that the sentry barely registered her arrival. Sir actually laughed at the sentry, who was no longer grinning but rubbing his neck.

‘All right, Forester. That was messy, but quick. I’ll give you that.’

‘You told us to get creative, Sir.’

‘I did,’ he replied, nodding.

‘Do I pass?’

He said nothing, but Lisette earned a wink from each of the men in her group. Her fellow female trainee – a towering farmer – clapped her on the back and whispered, ‘Well done.’

And so it went, hours and hours of training that were devoted simply to killing the enemy. By the end of the first week Lisette was privately unhappy that she now had command of myriad ways to kill, both with her bare hands and a variety of weapons, from the obvious to the makeshift. She performed surprisingly well in handling explosives, but admitted that she hoped she would not be faced with having to blow up things. Lisette could only imagine the black mark against her name for such a comment.

Over the space of a second week, while the sun shone, she was holed up indoors at Thame Park in Oxfordshire doing a crash course in signal training. It was really down to business now, and she was a sponge for all the information hurled at her in such huge quantities. It was a relief to take a break from the physical activity, but her greatest challenge was still ahead of her, as she confronted parachute training. Lisette was the first to do it, and was getting the distinct impression she was being rushed through it all. Did they have something in mind for her already?

She found herself at Dunham House in Cheshire for the parachute training. Here, all manner of equipment was available to toughen recruits and train them to make a safe exit from an aircraft at night and to land, silently, avoiding injury by falling and rolling correctly in all-weather conditions. An old fuselage was on hand to assist recruits; ropes and swings helped in training for correct technique. Lisette could sense that one of the wing commanders handling the training
didn’t think she had it in her. But that only goaded her into volunteering first in her group. It was her enthusiasm and determination to prove him wrong that led to her sprained ankle, but while she grimaced under the agony, she never let on just how much it hurt. Binding her leg tightly, she made three more jumps from the aircraft – never once baulking – and a final training jump – this from a balloon, at night.

In the darkness, falling like a stone from the sky and waiting for her parachute to open, Lisette fancied that she felt close to her parents. She could almost hear her father, speaking in German, encouraging her. His gentle, professorial ways, his adoration of her elfin and beautiful Parisian-born mother, and his love of art, history and language, meant that he didn’t fit the stereotypical boisterous, outdoorsy, beer-swilling German at all.

And if Maximilian was all sensitivity, her mother, Sylvie, was all laughter. In fact, Lisette was sure that her father, who was quiet and studious, drew life from Sylvie’s bright flame. It was Sylvie who had been behind the wheel of the car when they died. Lisette knew her parents had been out, perhaps a little tight on champagne as they bid farewell to their beloved France, but she was glad they had died together. Either would be useless without the other. Her parents had been in love – truly in love – and she regretted deeply that she was no longer able to watch them together as they laughed, teased and touched each other with those surreptitious signs of affection – a small smile across the room, a hand on a shoulder briefly, the way her father would hug her mother while Sylvie was cooking. Lisette missed burying herself in the cocoon of her parents’ love.

Lisette was selected for additional training in night-landing
grounds, while others went off to learn about radio messaging or couriering. The whirlwind of activity continued, and nowhere was the training more important than in personal security and clandestine living. She was given a week’s training in how to live within a busy neighbourhood – a nosy one, too – and do her best to disappear. Everything from how she spoke to how she dressed or how often she did her grocery shopping was discussed and rehearsed. The idea was to integrate quickly and seamlessly by being ordinary in every way possible.

Lisette already had valuable experience in living frugally, quietly and alone. She’d left a sizeable chunk of her parents’ money in France, and her lawyers in Britain had sold the family home and put everything into a trust account. The French monies had been transferred into a similar account in France in her birth name of Lisette Foerstner. She hadn’t touched a centime of either.

And still, despite all these natural advantages to help her as a British agent in France, the day-to-day living would be challenging. It was one thing to be French, sound French, even act French; it was quite another to know how to live in France and not be picked as an impostor, especially in a country now riddled with informers, collaborators and generally fearful people. Lisette reminded herself that although it had only been seven years since she’d left France, those were important years through her teens, when she’d let go of being French in order to fit in. British boarding school was hard enough, but to be European, the most important favour one could do oneself was to conform, not complain, not mention the bland, stodgy food or the curiously prudish attitudes.

In the dining room at Dunham Hall Lisette looked at her
breakfast plate and smiled at the two slices of toast, expertly spread with the thinnest of smears of black, gluey Marmite. When she had first been presented with the squat black jar with its bright red-and-yellow label, she hadn’t known what to do with it. The other girls at her boarding school had clearly revelled in her bewilderment.

‘It’s delicious. Try it,’ her closest friend had suggested.

Lisette knifed some onto a slice of toast as someone had yelled, ‘Not so thick!’

It looked terrible and to Lisette it tasted worse. ‘Ugh!’ she said, wincing.

‘You’ll get used to it.’

And she had. Leaving behind her preference for sweet bread and jam for breakfast with a big bowl of coffee, she learnt how to eat porridge that nearly made her sick, drink pots of tea, and she persisted with Marmite until she acquired the taste and could honestly say she enjoyed it.

Now she had to reverse that. In fact, she mustn’t even think of Marmite or porridge again … and especially not tea. She had to think like a Frenchwoman again.

Lisette was finally ready to complete the most important aspect of her training – security – and was to be sent on a bogus mission that stringently tested her readiness to go into the field. Lisette’s first task was to find her way across just under 240 kilometres from Lincoln to London without using public transport. Once in central London her second task was to plant a fake bomb at one of three designated railway stations that, if it were real, would have the potential to seriously disrupt transportation.

Getting to London wasn’t hard. Lisette was able to cadge rides from drivers, including one lorry-load of soldiers on
their way south for dispatch to the Front. She got as far as the outskirts of London with the men, where they dropped her off in Twickenham. Here she paid far more than she should have to buy a passing youth’s bike; it carried her the fourteen kilometres into London with a small cloth bag tied to the back.

Lisette was required to rent a room in a hotel; she made sure it was not so cheap that she would stand out but not too glamorous that undue attention would be paid to her. She’d chosen Victoria Station as her target because she knew its layout well so the nearby Imperial guesthouse was precisely the right place for her stay. Travellers stayed at the Imperial if they were leaving on an early train or arriving on a late one. It saw a multitude of people, from all walks of life, pass through its revolving doors, and a single woman traveller would likely go unnoticed by the weary concierge.

Lisette would pose as Sarah Baudrier, a writer compiling interviews with everyday Londoners as the basis of a series of radio plays for the BBC. Harriet had worked at the BBC and Lisette still had her old BBC pass. With some clever adjustment she’d managed to make it look as though it were hers. She hoped it would gain her a bit more freedom around the security-conscious Victoria Station. It was only when she arrived at the station’s forecourt, however, still bearing the scars of its bombing, that a whole new idea struck Lisette. She’d been standing near the telephone box – as though waiting for someone – using the time to examine her surroundings and consider the practical aspects of her plan, when she’d overheard one of the station’s staff talking to a newspaper seller. Apparently there were going to be long delays to all trains in and out of the station.