Secret Duties of a Signals Interceptor

Working with Bletchley Park, the SDS and the OSS

Jenny Nater

• Editorial: Pen & Sword Aviation
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473887145
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military Biographies

This WWII memoir recounts a woman's experience translating top-secret German communications for British intelligence. Like many British women on the homefront of World War II, Jenny Nater discovered an unexpected way to put her talents to use. She served as a bilingual wireless operator in the top-secret Special Duties service at Dover, intercepting traffic from German surface craft in the English Channel and reporting it back to Bletchley Park. In this memoir, Nater discusses this important work, as well as the life-changing relationships she made in that time—most notably with a Coastal Force Command Lieutenant who would be tragically lost. She also describes working in Germany for America's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). It was during this time that she met her husband, a Mosquito pilot and member of the Caterpillar Club whose spy missions over occupied Europe are also described here in full. This memoir add an important layer to our understanding of allied intelligence practices during this conflict. They also tell the story of one woman's very private war, and the opportunities, sacrifices, and victories it encompassed.

Chapter 1

Early Days

I n 1925, the first time I crossed the Atlantic, I was with my mother. It was memorable for several reasons. The first was the wonderful thrill of being asked by our dining room steward if I would like to meet the captain’s ‘tiger’, to which I eagerly replied ‘Yes please’. On most days, I was on deck running up to the bows and revelling in the weather when it was wild and windy. I often ate my hearty meals nearly alone in the dining room and never felt the slightest sea sickness. At last the day came when I was to meet the ‘captain’s tiger’, and I was accompanied up to the captain’s cabin by our dining room steward. There, on a mantelpiece that could have graced any formal sitting room, twined carefully around the vases and family photographs, was a magnificent Persian tabby cat. Somewhat disappointed I took him to be the ‘tiger’, but was soon disabused of this idea and told that the captain’s personal steward was in fact called his ‘tiger’.

Another of my pleasures on these Atlantic crossings was watching my beautiful and elegant mother dress for dinner. I particularly remember one dress of pale green silk appliquéd with pink flowers under a tulle overskirt. For the traditional fancy-dress farewell dinner she always wore a Nefertiti costume, and it is true that she did have a strong resemblance to the famous bust of Nefertiti in the Berlin Neues Museum. She was a sort of magical figure to me, an emerald and silver goddess to whom I wrote poems well into my teenage years.

She had a real talent for acting and for dress design, and an uncanny way of predicting what the latest fashion from Paris would be. She made her own clothes until well into her eighties, and made my wedding dress and trousseau when I married in 1946.

I loved these transatlantic crossings then, and on the consecutive summer trips from 1925 to 1928 to visit my maternal grandparents. It was the crew on these liners with whom I spent the most time. One, a very patient, kind and friendly deckhand who never seemed to mind my tagging along behind him as he went about his tasks, the deck stewards who let me ‘help’ them, and the members of the ship’s orchestra who fiddled away for thé dansants – and late into the night after I was in my bunk. The only unfortunate encounter I had on one of the trips, when I was 6 years old, was with the man in charge of the gym and swimming-pool where I used to spend many hours swimming, climbing the bars and riding the mechanical horse. He was always very welcoming and helped me onto the horse, but one day he put his hand inside my panties and I fled. I told my mother, who did not know what action to take. However, on the last day when all the passengers were disembarking they had to walk down a long flight of stairs to the gangplank, and the ships crew would traditionally line the staircase on either side. One was expected to tip them all. My mother walked pointedly past the man in charge of the gym.

Story has it that on the first crossing in 1925 while my mother was having dinner, the stewardess came to turn down the sheets, and found me hanging head first out of the porthole, singing at the top of my voice. She apparently seized my ankles and pulled me into the cabin. I do have a sort of recollection of banging my hands on the side of the ship and seeing the water being cut apart below me. I suppose this is true – if not all of it, at least in part.

The summer before we left the States I stayed in my grandmother’s house in Riverside, Connecticut. The beach at the yacht club was a paradise, as was my grandmother’s garden. I, and my cousins Geoff and Hucko, played all day long together. At the beach they were both equipped with water wings, but my father wanted me to learn to swim and have no fear of the water as young as possible, so I never wore them. One day, when we were playing on the beach, the boys decided to go for a swim. We all ran onto the big flat rock which jutted out into the bay and from which the grown-ups would dive into the sea. Geoff and Hucko leapt in off the rock, and I followed. I sank like a stone, and came to the surface at least twice. The third time I saw my cousin Hucko, exactly my age, gazing at me in a puzzled way. I grasped him, and as we clung together a row-boat came round the corner of the rock. This incident unfortunately scared me off the ocean and swimming for several years. These summer trips to the US were only wonderful times – a light at the end of the tunnel during the long months of boarding school.

My first memory of London is of a flat, I have been told opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I and my mother lived above a famous ‘fine goods and grocery shop’. I slept upstairs in the duplex, and on waking early in the mornings would go down to the kitchen for a handful of raisins and cooking salt. This liking for salt had started at my grandmother’s house in Connecticut, which was by the sea on the Sound. I would walk around the large clapboard building rubbing my wetted fingers along the top of the boards and licking off the salt. One morning in London, after my foray into the kitchen, I returned upstairs to my room and, to my delight, there was a large dragonfly sitting on my pillow. I rushed downstairs and found the help and told her in great excitement that there was a ‘big bug’ on my pillow. She gave a screech of horror and ran to inform my mother that there were bed bugs in the flat, and that one was on my pillow no less. So much for the different languages, American and English.

My other recollection of the flat is of being very ill with jaundice. I could not keep anything down, not even water, and the smell of mother’s face powder or perfume made me sick immediately. My mother later caught it from me and was also very ill, with lasting effects on her liver. She later learned from a doctor to take the juice of a lemon every morning ‘to give her liver a kick’. She did so until the end of her life at 106 years old.

As I convalesced, my father would come to visit. I can only assume that they were not living together at this time. I have a vivid memory of, what seemed to me, my first meal since my illness, fed to me by my father out of an antique American silver porringer as I sat at his feet in front of a gas fire. It was rice with chicken gravy – delicious. I can still see his face as I looked up at him and he fed me – I realise now, most tenderly.

Whether it was before or after this I do not know, but during the time of the General Strike in 1926, my parents were still, or once more, living together. They were in a flat in Lincoln’s Inn lent to them by Johnnie Rothenstein (Sir John K M Rothenstein). They had met several members of the so-called Bloomsbury Group, and apparently after a day of driving buses or trains, such worthies as Evelyn Waugh, Ford Maddox-Ford, Douglas Goldring and others would turn up for copious drinks at ‘the Americans’ (all of whom were believed to be rich and hospitable). I have been told that Ford Maddox-Ford described my mother in one of his books as a ‘feather headed American beauty’ - there is no-one more snobbish than an intellectual snob.

Two close American friends of my FitzGerald grandfather’s, Mr Henry Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges department store, and R D Blumenfeld, Editor of the Daily Express from 1902-1932 took my mother under their wings. She wrote small articles for the female readers of RDB’s newspaper for a while – and one rather different result of these friendships was that I had carte blanche at the American ice cream counter in Selfridges. It was in 1926 that the Blackbirds Revue, an American all black group of musicians came to London from New York. The cast were extremely popular and led a fairly hectic, racy life among the social set of the time. Since my father had a good voice, and quite a repertoire of Negro spirituals and songs, he too had a certain success.

At that time my future step-mother (Joyce Fagan) a friend of Evelyn Waugh’s, met my father, fell in love with him and wrote a letter telling him of her love. As his marriage to my mother was breaking up, and my father had approached Walter de la Mare asking for his daughter Jeanne’s hand in marriage, the situation must have been complicated to say the least. I suppose it was because of these facts that my parents decided to send me to a boarding school. I was only 5 years old and came from a very different environment. The experience was not a happy one. I attended various English boarding schools from then on until I was 17 years old. Sometime in the summer of 1925 we had gone to look at the school my parents had chosen for me. It was in Hampshire, called Wickham House, and was run by a medical doctor and his wife called Kinnear. The school was primarily for the children of British couples serving overseas, in the Middle East, China, India, Africa and Burma etc. Many of them spent all year at Wickham, even the holidays. The day we visited we had lunch around a big table and as we ate, I felt a very painful series of pinches on my bare legs and I started to cry. I was unable to tell anyone what ailed me. A small boy of about my age had crawled under the table and was tormenting me. The whole place, Doctor Kinnear and his wife, the other children, all terrified me. Here started what was to be my first experience of being away from home and family.

That autumn began my twelve-year stint in English boarding schools, but Wickham was only for three years. One of the few pleasant memories of the place was the yearly fair run by real gypsies. Swing boats, coconut shies, and best of all, the roundabout – gaily painted horses, polished twisted brass poles and the lovely hurdy-gurdy. I was allowed as many rides on this as I was years old – so being 8 years old was a great milestone.

However, most memories of Wickham House were not happy. The Kinnears had a 5 year old daughter called Evelyn, and we were supposed to play together. I was an ideal subject for teasing – my American accent, my easy tears, my fear of the dark and my enviable collection of fairy tales beautifully illustrated by Arthur Rackham, all led to meanness and envy. If we quarrelled I was always blamed, even when it was Evelyn’s fault. Once when playing the ‘fishing game’ for instance – a cardboard pond and two fishing lines with magnets on the end to catch the magnetic fish – we both caught the same prize. She hit me with her fishing line, magnet first, and I was sent to bed on bread and water. My first experience of injustice. Being in the big brass bed in the daytime (with enough sunlight coming through the drawn curtains to light the two brass balls at the end of the bed) had me paralysed with fear. The big-eyed lion at the end of the bed, (as I conceived it to be) was going to eat me up.

We went on long, and sometimes lovely walks every day, but preparing for them was torture. We wore boots, and on top of them, leather gaiters, which were done up with a button hook, at least fifteen to twenty buttons on each leg. Quite beyond my inexperienced fingers. It always ended in tears, and my having to run on fat legs after the disappearing ‘crocodile’. But I do remember the thick clumps of damp, sweet honey-smelling primroses I was allowed to pick in the spring, the marsh marigolds, or kingcups, down by the river, and the occasional sight of an otter. Once, climbing a bank, I disturbed an adder, and watched her glide away from the root I had grasped to help me up. I began to develop an intense interest in nature, and plants and flowers in particular, which has remained one of my major joys all through my life.

The school routine and rules were completely alien to me. I still suffered from croup, though much less intensely. The easy way to stop my struggling for breath, and my wheezing, was to allow me to suck a boiled sweet or fruit drop. This, the school decided was simply a ruse to get a sweet out of regimen. We were allowed only one boiled sweet after lunch, and so it was refused me. We sat for our meals at long tables on backless benches, packed close together so as to prevent us from sticking our elbows out, and we learnt to clip them firmly to our sides. Every day, breakfast was porridge with black treacle or molasses, except on Sundays when we were given a ‘treat’ of fresh rolls with the soft centres removed and a spoonful of golden syrup in the middle. The molasses made me gag, though I loved porridge with salt and milk. After several shaming breakfasts of gagging and being sick, my parents got permission for me to eat my porridge with salt and eschew the molasses.

At the age of 6 or 7, I decided I loved a small, curly haired boy of my age, who played the piano. Miraculous. I danced around behind him kissing the top of his head until he shooed me off in no uncertain manner. I then decided I must ‘kill myself for love’ and, having heard that celandines were poisonous, I picked some, put them in an empty bottle with a little water, and hid the bottle behind the school room bookcase. I checked the bottle every day, and when the liquid looked green and slimy, I decided that it was time to drink it. It had absolutely no effect whatsoever on my obviously cast iron digestion.

My young unhappiness and the strangeness of the surroundings must have affected me deeply, because I was not good at my lessons. My parents were informed, in all seriousness, that I was a little mentally deficient. I must have been about 7 when I contracted whooping cough and mastoiditis. I was very ill, and remember in my fevered state, only wanting my parents.

In 1928, my parent’s divorce, which had taken three years in the English courts, became final. My years from 5 to 8 had been fraught with fears of abandonment and uncertainty. I well remember the day they came down to see me and we went off in my father’s convertible AC car. They stopped in a country lane, and tried to explain that they were separating. I wept copiously and asked who I would be living with. I assume the more I wept and blew my nose into my father’s handkerchief the harder it was for them. I finally leant forward, and for some unknown reason, wiped the face of the clock on the dashboard; of course I smeared it with snots and tears. My mother’s control snapped and she upbraided me soundly, only making my weeping worse.

During the following years my mother and I lived in a series of rented flats and houses in England. In term time my mother lived (or rather PG’d as she would put it) with friends and acquaintances as a paying guest. One year she rented a cottage in Shere in Surrey. Before I was enrolled in my new school, I went for my lessons to a Miss Hulk who lived in a small, one room, wooden hut, little better than a shack it appeared to me. She was an excellent teacher, a very kind woman, and I had her exclusive attention. However, since she was unable to teach me French, I went once a week across the common, about three quarters of a mile, to a friend’s house. Groups of older village boys would sometimes pursue me throwing dried cow-pats at my terrified fleeing back. This purgatory probably put me off French lessons for many years to come.

We can’t have lived in Shere for more than eight or ten months. Our cottage was very pretty, old and thatched, with a nice garden. My favourite playmates were the younger village boys. We would go on long walks, play in the stream, catch tadpoles and go bird’s-nesting. We once had a near disastrous encounter with a furious swan, from whom, I am ashamed to say, we had stolen an egg. Some days, when summer visitors were exploring the area, I would wait at the bottom of the lane by the ford, and ‘guide’ them across for a three-penny bit, or even sixpence. I never told my mother about these adventures.

Very often she went to London for the day, and I was footloose and fancyfree. I was 8 or 9 years old when I decided one afternoon to cook her supper, and have all the oil lamps and candles lit when she got home, (potentially pretty dangerous). Before lighting them, I made scrambled eggs. While they dried out on the stove, I waited, peering out of the bedroom window for my mother’s return. We did have some good times together. Gigi could always make me laugh. She was a great story teller. We had picnics in the fields and woods which, in spring, were full of wild lilies-of-the-valley. My passion for wild flowers never left me and was a big part of my life. My mother had absolutely no sense of direction and I would take great pride in leading her home again.

At the end of the summer I was sent to my second boarding school in Bramley, Surrey. I do not remember much about it, except that I was lonely. I made a graveyard for all the dead mice, insects and invertebrates I found. I planted a garden around them and spent my free time there every day.

It must have been in 1930 that I was sent to a school in North Foreland. At this age, and until 1933, I made more lasting friendships. One of my fellow students was Gogo Schiaparelli who seemed a very glamorous person to all of us. This had nothing to do with the fact that her mother was Schiaparelli of the fashion world, but rather, that she spoke with an Italian accent, her underclothes were different from ours, her hair was curly and cut in a fashionable way, and most of all she walked with a slight but very graceful limp, having had polio as a young child. On half-term weekends my mother and Signora Schiaparelli, would descend from the train together in a cloud of sartorial glory. By now Gigi had rented a flat in Chelsea, and although on a dollar allowance from her parents, she was also working for a dress shop in Sloane Square. In the holidays she limited her social life so that she could be with me. She had several admirers at this time, all of whom I regarded with deep suspicion. She later told me that some of them would telephone when term time had begun again and inquire if the ‘ogre’ was back in school.

In 1933 she married again. Her new husband, Geoffrey Marler, was a New Zealander. He was eight or ten years her junior, a very charming and sweetnatured man. I admit that I felt threatened by the marriage, in the sense that I did not know where I would be living or with whom. The wedding was in London in the Savoy Chapel. I was given two days off from school to attend the ceremony. They left for New Zealand shortly afterwards. It had been arranged that I should go and live with my father and step-mother until such time as they could send for me. It was a difficult period in my life and I am sure equally difficult for my father and Joyce, my step-mother. She made it clear to me that after supper in the evenings I should stay in my room as she and my father wanted ‘to be alone together’. At this time I grew very fond of my two little half-brothers Mick and Jim, and played the role of big sister quite enthusiastically.

My mother’s marriage turned out to be rather disastrous. She later told me how, en-route to New Zealand, Geoff, laughing wildly, suddenly seized her by the wrists and hung her over the ship’s side. Luckily a doctor on board saw what was happening and came up to Geoff and said quietly ‘Let’s bring her in Geoff ’. As soon as she was safely on the deck Geoff fell down in a fit. Apparently, when he was younger, he had done quite a lot of stunt flying. On one occasion he crashed the plane, and a piece of metal lodged in his skull pressing on his brain. His parents, who knew of his condition, did not tell my mother and it seems Geoff was unaware of his problem. In those days, an attempt to remove the fragment from his skull was considered very dangerous, and his parents did not give their permission for such an operation. Gigi also discovered that they had little or no money, and that they were to live with her in-laws, so there was little chance of sending for me to join them. I missed my mother terribly and still have some of the rather desperate letters I wrote to her at the time.

In 1936 she asked my grandmother to send her enough money for her to return to England from New Zealand to be with m...

Índice

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Biography
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 Early Days
• Chapter 2 New Experiences
• Chapter 3 The War and an Important Decision
• Chapter 4 Dover
• Chapter 5 A Long Time To Hope
• Chapter 6 Heavy News and a Move
• Chapter 7 Post War Germany
• Chapter 8 Jean
• Acknowledgements
• Plate section