Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice: The True Story of WWII Special Agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne. Susan Ottaway

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ She had married an Italian and was living in Verona. A telephone call was made to her and she was informed that her aunt had died. Since everyone believed Eileen was alone and unloved, her niece’s reaction to the news was, perhaps, not quite what they had expected: Odile was distraught.

      Over the years Odile had regularly come to England with her family to visit Eileen and had last seen her aunt six months before her death. Eileen Nearne was a very important figure in her niece’s life and Odile was devoted to her. She was not only inconsolable when she learnt the details of her lonely death but also horrified to discover that her aunt had been destined to have a pauper’s funeral, with no one to mourn her loss, and quickly made plans to come to England. After her arrival she took over the funeral arrangements and was able to answer many of the questions about her aunt’s life that had been puzzling the people of Torquay and reporters from around the world. And as she answered them, it soon became clear that almost everything that had been believed about Eileen Nearne was incorrect, and the true story of her amazing life, along with that of her elder sister Jacqueline, who was also an SOE agent, began to unfold.

CHAPTER 1

       Exile

      Eileen Nearne was born at 6 Fulham Road, west London, on 15 March 1921, the youngest of the four children of John and Mariquita Nearne. When her father registered her birth two days later, he gave her name as Eileen Marie. It seems to have been the only time in her life that her middle name was spelt this way, as all other documents refer to her as Eileen Mary – a strange choice, as Mary was also one of her sister’s names. In any case, Eileen was known to all, friends and family alike, as Didi. The name stuck and those who knew her well called her Didi for the rest of her life.

      John Francis Nearne, Didi’s father, was the son of a doctor also named John¹ and so, to avoid confusion, was known as Jack. He was a 23-year-old medical student when he married French-born Mariquita Carmen de Plazaola at Marylebone Register Office on 6 November 1913. Mariquita, then 26 years old, was the daughter of Spanish Count Mariano de Plazaola and his French wife, the Marquise of La Roche de Kerandraon.² By the time Jack and Mariquita’s first child, a boy they named Francis, was born on 16 July 1914, the couple had moved from their London address, 70 Margaret Street, Marylebone, to Brighton.

      With the onset of the First World War in 1914, Jack became a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Mariquita remained at the family home, 32 West Hill Street, a neat Victorian terraced house just a short walk from the beach. It was here that on 27 May 1916, their second child, Jacqueline Françoise Mary Josephine, was born.

      After Jack’s military service ended he gave up being a doctor and became a dispensing chemist. The family left the seaside and returned to London, setting up home at 58 Perham Road in Fulham, another Victorian terraced building, and, on 20 January 1920, their second son, Frederick John, was born. The family was completed the following spring with the arrival of Didi. As the baby of the family Didi was rather spoilt and, according to her own account, she was a very naughty child.³

      In 1923, with Europe still in turmoil as a result of the war, Jack and Mariquita decided to leave England and move to France. Mariquita’s parents owned several houses and apartments there, and offered the family an apartment in Paris, to which they moved with their young family.

      Of all the children Francis, the eldest, was the one who had the most difficulties in adjusting to the move. He was nine years old and had already completed nearly four years of schooling in England. He couldn’t speak French but was sent to a French school in the rue Raynouard, on the right bank of the river Seine, in the hope that he would soon settle down there and learn both his lessons and the language. The school was close to his mother’s birthplace at Auteuil in the capital’s wealthy 16th arrondissement, a pleasant area his mother knew well. But Francis was not happy at school. He found the lessons complicated and difficult and, despite his mother speaking to him in French in an effort to help him, could understand only a few words. It was a good school but Francis did not do at all well and was very disheartened by his lack of progress. A shy, sensitive boy, he found it difficult to make the friends who might have made his assimilation into the French education system a little easier. He had to endure this unhappy situation for a year before his parents took him away. They looked for another school that might suit him better and enrolled him in one in Le Vésinet in the north-west of Paris where, for six months, he received intensive coaching to bring him up to the standard required for a boy of his age. It was an unfortunate start for the poor little lad, and his lack of early success damaged his self-confidence to such an extent that he never really recovered. The feeling of failure was exacerbated when his younger siblings managed to fit in at school with far fewer difficulties than he had had and he was too young to understand that it was because they had been brought to France at an earlier age than he, so their transition to the French way of life was much easier.

      Jacqueline, who was seven years old when she arrived in France, had a much more straightforward time at the exclusive Convent of Les Oiseaux at Verneuil to the north-west of Paris, being only a few months behind her French classmates, who didn’t start school until they were six years old. She also found it less of a problem to speak French and quickly settled in to her new life.

      The two youngest members of the family, Frederick and Didi, had not attended an English school at all, as neither was old enough, and by the time they went to French schools they were both able to speak the language as well as French children, so they didn’t have to make the adjustments their elder siblings had; their education was completely French, from beginning to end.

      Mariquita was determined that all her children should be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. She herself had been educated at a Catholic convent and she intended that both her daughters should have a similar start in life. Didi enjoyed the rituals of the Catholic Church and at a very early age she found a strong faith in God, which stayed with her all her life. Her mother never had to insist that Didi attend church services, as she went willingly without any prompting. Jacqueline once remarked that Didi was the most religious member of the entire family, although they were all believers.

      Didi was never far away from her sister. She hero-worshipped Jacqueline, and wanted to be like her and do whatever she did. It must sometimes have been irritating for Jacqueline to have her little sister trying to tag along wherever she and her friends went, but she was very fond of Didi and didn’t like to turn the little girl away unless she really had to.

      After two years in the French capital the family was on the move again, this time to a terraced house that had been given to Mariquita by her parents, 260 boulevard Saint-Beuve on the seafront at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Francis and Frederick attended the Institution Haffreingue, a Catholic school, while Jacqueline was enrolled at the Ursuline convent in the town, where before long Didi joined her. Didi loved her new home. It was the first time she had lived on the coast and the beginning of her lifelong love of the sea.

      The house in Boulogne was a happy home and the family felt very comfortable there. Jack Nearne had attempted to learn and improve his French but had had little success. The language didn’t come naturally to him and he was not confident about speaking it. Despite living in France for the rest of his life, he couldn’t ever be described as being fluent in either spoken or written French. This rather hampered his employment prospects but, as he was part of a wealthy family following his marriage to Mariquita, it did not seem to be a major problem. His ineptitude with the language gave his children an advantage, as well as amusing them greatly, because it meant that in order to communicate with their father they had to speak fluent English as well as French, a skill that would serve them all well in СКАЧАТЬ