After 60 years had gone by, Marguerite Garden did not expect the call from the consul general. ”I am pleased to inform you that you have been awarded the Légion d’Honneur,” he said. She fell into the nearest chair. ”Then I could see everyone from that time like photographs in front of me. It was so strange, a trick of the mind, all my friends who were killed and those who survived came back to me one by one.”
Another life has passed since Marguerite Garden, now 77, was Marguerite Vourc’h, a schoolgirl in the French resistance. She sits in her Victorian home in Lanark with her history spread out before her. On top of the 1940s postcards, yellowed photographs and maps is a letter confirming she is to receive France’s highest honour later this year for her heroism in the second world war.
Marguerite’s story begins in August 1940, when Germany’s invasion of France reached the village of Plomodiern, in Brittany. ”I was at school in Paris and it took me three days to get home, but when I got there and saw the Germans in their uniforms I knew we had to fight them.”
In those early days, the resistance was barely organised. Her father, Antoine, was the local doctor and could move around more freely than the other villagers. He sought out sympathisers while Marguerite, in faux innocence, established where the feelings of her friends’ families lay. And then her brother, Jean, returned injured from the war. With an informal group of resistors already set up helping airmen escape, Jean had no trouble hiding in the village. While in hiding he made contact with four friends and the group decided to head for Britain disguised as sailors. There they were trained.
”They came back with radios and arms,” says Marguerite. ”By that time a commandant was living in our house. They laughed and said what could be safer than having the radio looked after by the Wehrmacht. But my mother called the priest and he hid it under his coat and took it away.”
With a radio and trained operator now in place, the resistance could begin spying for MI6. Almost immediately, Marguerite showed her potential. For days on end she would cycle round the local coastline, gathering information. She relayed intelligence on soldiers, boats and mines. No one took a 14-year-old schoolgirl on holiday for a spy. One day she spotted a tower in a local field. ”I asked the farmer, ‘What on earth is that for?’ He thought I was just a nosy girl and he said it was for talking to the submarines,” she says. ”That was my advantage – they would talk freely in front of me because I was a child.”
She cycled straight to the radio operator, Alaterre. He radioed back to England. This was before the Enigma codes were cracked, when British ships were sitting ducks in the Atlantic. Marguerite’s information was priceless. Within three days, an RAF squadron had bombed the telecommunication’s mast.
During term time, Marguerite studied in Paris, but at half-term and holidays she would spy for the British. ”That was the most difficult thing,” she says. ”I could not have real friends. I could not say too much about the war in case I gave myself away. And I was always worried about what was happening at home.”
School also provided perfect cover for espionage. When she returned to Paris, hidden in her suitcase would be folders bulging with military information. ”I would take it to an apartment in Paris. I never wanted to know anything about the lady I gave it to. If the Germans found me with it, they would have tortured me; the less I knew, the better.”
As the war progressed, Marguerite would help allied airmen escape to Britain by hiding them in lobster boats. She would pass on information on German ship positions – which Madame Le Roux, a family friend, duped from the harbourmaster – to be radioed back to Britain.
When Madame Le Roux was arrested in Marguerite’s family home the Germans at first failed to make any connection. ”But a month later I opened the door to the Gestapo. I can still smell them; they smelled of Turkish cigarettes.” Sensing the danger, her father had already escaped. Marguerite’s mother told the Gestapo he had left them. Marguerite and her mother were safe but alone.
Then, out of the blue, a friend of her brother arrived at the door. His codename was Raoll and he would revitalise the resistance in Brittany. ”He was very brave – perhaps too brave,” says Marguerite.
The war was approaching a denouement. The allies needed all the airmen they could get, training them was lengthy and costly, and there were many hiding out in France. Marguerite and Raoll knew where at least 40 were – and planned to get them home. In a coded message broadcast on the BBC, Raoll was told to collect 125,000F. ”On the way back he was recognised by a German double agent and he was shot. It was like losing a brother,” says Marguerite.
Raoll’s death meant Marguerite and her mother had to find a place to hide 40 allied airmen and a way to feed them. They approached the local priest again and he agreed to hide them in his church. They hid there for days, while the resistance waited for a chance to get them home.
”It was very difficult just finding food for them,” she says. ”When we did eventually get them away I was so relieved, it was so dangerous and worrying for them and us.”
The successful escape of the airmen, however, was to be the undoing of Marguerite and her mother. When the men arrived in Britain, another coded message was broadcast on the BBC. It said the fourth son of a doctor of Brittany has arrived. It was too obviously a reference to Marguerite’s family. The Germans worked out what was happening.
”I was away at school and my mother was away, too. Our friends managed to get word to her not to come back home,” says Marguerite. ”But it was very bad for my little sisters. The Gestapo would not believe mother would not come home and they would wake them up in the middle of the night with guns to their heads. They were very young and very frightened.”
Marguerite and her mother hid in a run-down apartment in Paris. ”We were so hungry,” she says. ”We could not go out and queue for things as someone might have seen us.”
A few months later Paris was liberated. ”I went to the Arc de Triomphe and there was an American in a tank. I said, in English, I helped American airmen. He was so happy, he brought out a carton of Philip Morris. The cigarettes smelt of honey; they were like gold. When he left I was surrounded by greedy people. I said to them, ‘Did you help American airmen?’ The ring opened up and they let me go.”
After the war Marguerite met a Scottish tourist in Paris, fell in love and moved to Scotland, where she had seven children. She sits in the conservatory now, history in front of her, grandchildren’s pictures behind. ”It wasn’t bravery, it was necessity,” she says. ”It was sad and frightening. But there was something about those days, maybe it was the adrenaline. I have never been so alive.” — Â