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Churchill instructed those, like me, tasked with the work across the English Channel to go forth and "set Europe ablaze." Sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines, and passing intelligence to Mother England, required courage, resilience, and resourcefulness from those of us who agreed to these dangerous jobs. By working with local Resistance forces, we boosted their morale through our presence on the ground. They were, rightly, wondering when and how this dreadful war would ever end.

In France, with new identities and forged papers, we SOE agents covered hundreds of miles on foot, by bike, or on trains, all the time under the constant threat of arrest by the Gestapo should our identity be blown or the work we were undertaking be discovered. It was an exhausting task, with the ongoing threat of possibly being betrayed by double agents and traitors. It was hard to trust anyone.

It was also not glamorous; don't think of me or my fellow agents as 007 types. Our job was to disappear—to fit in and not be noticed. Taking the job certainly didn't win you any friends in high places either; quite the opposite, in fact. There was plenty of tension between SOE and England's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, now known as MI6), which the Foreign Office had to deal with. The SIS viewed SOE with some suspicion. I did not know it at the time, but Sir Stewart Menzies, head of the SIS, argued on many an occasion that SOE agents were "amateur, dangerous, and bogus," saying that we would disrupt their own intelligence-gathering operations by blowing up bridges and factories. The SIS preferred to work quietly through influential channels and individuals, whereas SOE's way of operating was more grassroots. We also often backed anti-establishment organizations, such as the communists; I could only ever really trust communists in France. I also learned after the war that Bomber Command and SOE did not always see eye to eye.

Although all these vested interests brought massive internal political pressure to bear on the fledgling organization, SOE had Churchill as its ally; "Churchill's Secret Army" not only survived, but thrived, throughout World War II. There was also resistance to our existence across in France. General de Gaulle was never keen to recognize our significance, and we definitely felt that on the ground there. Looking back, it was a strange and solitary existence I found myself in throughout 1944. I could only ever rely on myself—from the top echelons of the British establishment to the people on the ground with me in France, and everyone in between, I trusted very few people. That became ingrained in me in my early twenties as a survival instinct.

*  *  *

Fast-forward sixty years to me in my eighties in New Zealand, where I have lived quietly for many years, keeping my head down about all that stuff. The discovery of this period of my life was a revelation to my sons, and I have to say it caused some discord. If I am honest, I think there was some resentment that their mother had actively chosen not to take them into her confidence. When confronted about that decision, I was at pains to explain that as much as I personally didn't want to talk about it, there was also something bigger behind this. I signed an oath not to disclose anything about my war service with SOE. That pledge was something I knew I must honor, and that meant not telling a living soul—not even my family. I was subject to the rules of the Official Secrets Act, and that was not something I wanted to test. The stories were known only to me and the handful of trusted people I shared that hellish existence with. I had never wanted to revisit them. I had buried them. The flashbacks that had caused me to wake up in a sweat had by then become few and far between.

After the war, I simply disappeared. Given that I'd excelled at not being noticed as a spy in wartime, it was not so difficult to fade into an anonymous postwar existence. Besides which, the whole thing had been utterly exhausting, both mentally and physically, and I was completely fed up with double agents and collaborators and trying to figure out who I could trust. I had been fighting my own war within a war—there I was in France, and I couldn't even trust the French unless they were communists. If I say that to people now, they don't really get it, but it was the truth.

After the war ended, I was ready to move on with my life and vowed I would never step foot back in France after I left there in October 1944. And I never have. I have been asked more than once if I would go back, and the answer has always been a resolute no.

While I was silent about my experience, it seems that others were not. I heard about people wanting medals for this and that, things they did in the war; people saying things that were not right; people writing things that were not right. I would simply think "Poppycock—there's  more  poppycock coming out!" If people are going to write things, they must tell the truth—and the truth is not pretty; it's not good.

This book tells the truth about my war. I'm the last living female special operative from F Section, and I need to record what happened before I die. I would like to leave my story behind so that, perhaps, young women in particular might know what it was like for me back then.