Jude Dobson helped Pippa Latour tell her story of intrigue and espionage in The Last Secret Agent. Dobson is appearing at the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival.
Jude Dobson helped Pippa Latour tell her story of intrigue and espionage in The Last Secret Agent. Dobson is appearing at the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival.
To celebrate the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival, we’ve teamed up with some New Zealand publishers to showcase some of the authors who will be on stage over the festival weekend.
This extract is from The Last Secret Agent: The Untold Story of My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi EnemyLines by Pippa Latour with Jude Dobson.
Dobson will appear in the event The Last Secret Agent on Friday, May 16, at 4pm.
Jude Dobson. Photo / Neil Gussey
Life on the road for Katia and me meant living rough. We were never seen together during the day, but aimed to meet at the end of every other day at an agreed place on the map, somewhere secluded. On the other days I was on my own as she would be meeting Lise to exchange information. We slept in forests, which were abundant in Normandy. It was the cusp of summer, so thankfully we were not often cold. At night we would travel to stay close to the German army — when they moved, we moved, and when the sun was up, so were we. Our lives were ruled by the rise and fall of the sun. And curfews.
Food was scarce. During the day, we separately scavenged what we could on our travels and brought our mutual offerings together for our once-a-day meal at the end of it. I left the cooking to Katia. She carried a pot and something to sit it on, and would get a fire going with twigs and sticks we gathered. We would get water from a well at a local farm and then add our ingredients to said pot. The Germans who were billeted at the farms often ate peas, and the discarded pods would usually be in a cardboard box at the back of the house ready to go to the pigs. When getting the water, we would swipe a handful of them as the basis of our boil-up. Turnips were not too difficult to find, either, so they often went in. If we were lucky, we might find some mushrooms or wild onions to give it some flavour.
A portrait of Pippa Latour circa 1942.
I thought I was destined to become a full-time vegetarian, but one night Katia announced that she had caught a squirrel. They were cheeky little things and Katia had managed to get close enough to one to deal to it with a piece of wood. She took the
innards out and then smoked it fur and all, although the fur did burn off a bit. As an animal lover I felt sorry for the squirrel, but I have to say it tasted good. A few weeks later, skinnier than we had been as we were steadily losing weight — by the time I left France, I would only weigh 5 stone 4 lbs (34 kilograms) — we visited a farmhouse where Katia knew the people in the Resistance there. It was a safe option for us. They asked if we would like to eat with them and it was an instant yes: the smell of cooking was lovely.
‘Have you eaten squirrel before?’ enquired the woman.
‘Oh yes,’ we both said, having eaten a few by then. We tucked into the squirrel stew, grateful for the hot meal and their compassion in sharing with us what meagre food they had themselves.
As we left later that evening, they told us that it was actually rat stew but they had thought they shouldn’t tell us before we ate it. It turns out that rat tastes okay.
Finding the sets without the notes did prove to be no trouble — my excellent memory served me correctly. We also navigated checkpoints with no concerns. The authenticity of my papers was never doubted, I could answer any questions about what I was doing, and the Morse key I had hidden up inside the springs under my bike seat was never discovered. So far, so good.
A teenage Pippa Latour in Nairobi, Kenya.
The Resistance workers on the ground created an arms depot in the Forêt de Pail, to the north-east of Bais, and located a new airdrop site nearby. Its location was passed on to London so that the drops could continue. The messages I sent were quick, to avoid detection by the dreaded German direction finders. If they picked up any activity, they would use triangulation to narrow the transmissions down to a certain area. To get it narrowed down further would entail an on-foot search by the Gestapo. This was why we had to transmit from multiple, changing places and keep messages short — you needed to transmit and then shut down quickly, hide the set and leave the area. Your location could be traced within about twenty minutes, and everyone in the area would then be searched. You did not want to be there when they went looking.
The environment I was cycling through showed the awful ravages of war. While some 80 days of fighting were yet to come between D-Day and the liberation of Paris, this period before D-Day had already seen a lot of damage done to the people and the landscape of Normandy. From the start of 1944, the aerial bombardment from the Allies on the northern coasts of France and Belgium was aimed at disrupting communication lines, damaging the transport infrastructure and weakening the German positions in preparation for the D-Day landings. The Allies carried out identical bombardment missions in Germany as well, so as not to arouse suspicion about Normandy being the chosen location for an invasion.
Jude Dobson helped Pippa Latour tell her story of intrigue and espionage in The Last Secret Agent. Dobson is appearing at the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival.
While the targeted bombing of strategic road and rail junctions would make it difficult for Germany to get reinforcements to the front line, a lot of those road and rail targets were in French villages and cities. Bombing was not always a precise art, either, and the powers that be felt that any lack of quality could be helped by increasing the quantity. Collateral damage also occurred due to Allied pilots dealing with cloud and flying at high altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft fire from the ground. Bombs could not be left in the aircraft as that would make landing back in England dangerous. Although ‘spare’ bombs were often used for secondary sites, some were dropped in areas as deserted as possible, but still, sadly, would hit civilian homes.
In April 1944, even British prime minister Winston Churchill expressed his concern at the collateral damage caused by bombing raids along the northern coast of France in preparation for Operation Overlord (the name for the D-Day military operation). But this was war. From the air they could not see what I could see on the ground — which was ugly. The people of Normandy were paying a huge price for the liberty that they so greatly wanted. My presence in the area would also add to their woes.
Extracted from The Last Secret Agent: The Untold Story of My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Enemy Lines by Pippa Latour with Jude Dobson. Published by Allen & Unwin Aotearoa NZ. Out now. Jude Dobson will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival May 13-18. For more information and tickets, visit writersfestival.co.nz.
