Katherine Mansfield is cast as many things: innovative Modernist writer; friend to the famous cultural names of her time; creative inspiration to generations of writers and artists and, now, literary lifesaver to the most decorated female agent of WWII.
Odette Sansom was French, born Odette Brailly in Amiens in 1912. Her father worked in a bank but two years after her birth, he enlisted in World War I, serving for four years before he was killed during the rescue of two infantry comrades. Like the daughter whom he knew for only a few years, he was decorated, posthumously earning France’s Croix de Guerre avec Palme (military cross) and the Médaille militaire (issued to non-commissioned officers).
The family moved to Saint Saens and eventually settled in Boulogne. Odette’s childhood was bedevilled by malady. She contracted polio, had a period of blindness around the age of 8, and suffered rheumatic fever, which left her weak and partially paralysed.
She and her younger brother spent hours exploring the northern French coast in their school holidays and her detailed knowledge of it was to prove a catalyst in her subsequent career.
She met an Englishman, Roy Sansom, in 1930. He was the son of a family friend and they married a year later. They stayed in Boulogne and their first child, Françoise, was born there in 1932. Odette and Roy then made their home in England, where two more daughters, Lily and Marianne, were born.
As Europe became engulfed in war again, Roy enlisted. London became ravaged by air raids and Odette took herself and her daughters to Somerset, out of harm’s way. In the early stages of the war, the ancient distrust between England and France was assiduously exploited by the German occupying forces, as well as the defeatist Vichy regime. The idea that Great Britain had betrayed or exploited France was fostered.
French by birth, married to an Englishman and with daughters of dual nationalities, Odette made a decision. She would do all she could for her adopted country and her country of birth. It would mean putting herself in harm’s way, but in mid-1942, that was not unknown.
What beckoned her was a request made on the BBC for holiday snaps of the coast of France. Britain’s support for France was, by necessity, underground. Captain Maurice Buckmaster ran the French section of a mysterious entity named SOE – the Special Operations Executive. Fluent in French and with good German, Buckmaster recruited dual nationals who were then trained in what was termed “ungentlemanly warfare”. Agents learned all the skills they needed for espionage and sabotage, and for helping to co-ordinate the growing Resistance armies.
SOE agents would play a pivotal role in D-Day, but before the Allies could land in northern France, detailed planning of exactly where they were to be infiltrated was required. The planning staff wanted to collect thousands of photographs of the pertinent stretch of coast and fit them together so every nook, contour and ledge could be known. Odette immediately responded to the broadcast plea by sending in several of her own photographs. Her war effort had begun.
Odette’s photographs and her letter found their way to the SOE recruiters, who recognised that she had more than just photos and a detailed knowledge of Boulogne to offer them. They needed fluent French-speaking people to co-ordinate, arm and train a secret army of patriotic French for when the time came to expel the occupiers. The work involved keeping in touch with SOE headquarters in London and creating as many problems as possible for the Germans – and it was very dangerous.
Odette initially demurred, citing her three daughters, her lack of interest in politics, her inexperience. She was a mother and a housewife, but as her recruiting officer noted, she was also: “Direct-minded and courageous. God help the Nazis if we can get her near enough to them.”
The SOE must have been convincing. Françoise, Lily and Marianne were enrolled as boarders in a convent in Essex run by the Sisters of Mercy and would stay with relatives during school holidays. Odette’s cover story was that she was joining the forces and might be sent away, possibly as far as Scotland. It was the first time they had been separated – she from them and they from her – and it was to last until after the war.
War work begins
Training for subversive activity was straight from the pages of novels by John Le Carre or Ian Fleming: recruits learned how to pick locks, derail trains, kill people silently, parachute out of planes and land safely, run a mile, dynamite a bridge, use Morse code, swim a river, and forge official documents. Most important was teaching the French how to engineer everyday items such as matchboxes, fountain pens and oilcans that, with adaptations, could be positioned in places where they could do untold damage.
Odette (codename Lise) arrived in Cannes by boat, via Gibraltar. She contacted the commanding officer, Peter Churchill (codename Raoul) and her war work began. The Côte d’Azur has long been known as a sunny place for shady people and the war intensified the shadiness. It was the Unoccupied Zone, supposedly “Free France” but was teeming with German soldiers, Gestapo and Vichy police. Odette and Churchill and their associates operated in the shadows, too.
Odette acted as a courier for “Raoul”, carrying messages to other members of their network and to Resistance groups, transferring money to them, attending parachute drops of arms and supplies, and distributing them after a successful drop. She also found safe houses for other agents.
Being a woman helped her work. Women visit aunts and relatives, tend to the aged and infirm, go shopping, and generally move around a district in a more natural and unobtrusive way than men.
The delivery of weapons by air en masse to SOE agents in France was a fraught business. A flat field of suitable dimensions was required, as was a full moon for visibility. Despite the vagaries of changeable weather, the Cannes group operated with some success, which led to Cannes becoming too hot for them.
In 1943, the operation was moved to Annecy and then to a small place called St Jorioz in the Haute Savoie area. Odette’s role as a field agent abruptly ended when she and Churchill were betrayed by another agent. Captured, they were sent to Fresnes Prison in Paris.
Odette was tortured by the Gestapo in its headquarters on Avenue Foch. First, a red-hot poker was thrust against her spine, then, when that didn’t loosen her tongue, each of her toenails was extracted by metal pincers. Knowing how much the SOE was undermining the stronghold of the Nazis, the Gestapo was determined to find out all about her work and to establish the names and whereabouts of her fellow agents.
“She told me the Gestapo made a fundamental mistake,” recalls her granddaughter, Nicole Miller-Hard, who now lives in the Bay of Plenty. “The chair in which she was forced to sit during the torture sessions faced a window and she could see the sky and the tops of the trees. By concentrating on the beauty of the trees, she could somehow ‘remove’ herself from the ordeal that was taking place. She managed to bear the pain, answering every question with ‘I have nothing to say’.”
After her torture, Odette was sentenced to death on two counts of espionage and eventually sent to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp in Germany. Odette had the quick thinking to pretend that Churchill was the nephew of Winston Churchill, and that they were married. She knew that if the Gestapo could be convinced of this story, it would give her and Churchill some leverage. The Gestapo were completely taken in and the death sentence was not carried out.
At Ravensbrück, she was kept in solitary confinement for nearly a year and suffered from symptoms of tuberculosis but still found solace in nature, as she described to her granddaughter. “Despite Ravensbrück having no trees in it at all, while being moved within the camp one day she picked up a green leaf from the ground and kept it,” Miller-Hard says. “Odette later wrote that ‘the leaf became more and more precious to me. Somewhere in the vast spaces of the sky a wind had risen and … stirred the branches of the tree, lifted the leaf and carried it and laid it gently down on the ground of Ravensbrück to be picked up by hands that had great need of it’.”
The Mansfield connection
A prison guard in the camp gave Odette a copy of the 1938 edition of The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, in English. It was falling apart, so using a contraband needle and thread, she bound it with a German news-paper to ensure its survival. She copied out excerpts from the letters into two other small books, Poesies et Dessins, which had been given to her by a French priest in Fresnes Prison.
Miller-Hard believes her grandmother connected with Mansfield in several ways. “Both Odette and Katherine Mansfield shared the same tragic loss of their younger brothers. They shared the searing pain of lungs infected with the symptoms of TB. They both loved and longed to be among nature.
“We are sure that Katherine’s words provided Odette with a sense of sisterhood and understanding in such barbaric circumstances.”
One of the passages Odette copied reflected her own physical situation: “I feel my love and longing for the external world, I mean the world of nature, has suddenly increased a million times. When I think of the little flowers that grow in grass, and the little streams and places where we can lie and look up at clouds: oh, I simply ache for them … I feel awfully like a little girl who someone has locked up in the dark cupboard, even though it’s daytime. I don’t want to bang at the door or make a noise. But I want you to come with a key you made yourself and let me out …”
Mansfield’s profound response to the natural world is everywhere in her stories and letters. Her prodigious correspondence is a vital part of her literary legacy and is regarded by many as containing some of her best writing. And how Odette came by those letters was extraordinary.
Odette survived – and she survived 14 interrogations without revealing the identities or locations of her fellow agents so they could carry on with their work. She was the first woman to be awarded the George Cross for bravery by the British government and was also awarded the Légion d’honneur by the French government.
Post-war, she testified in war crimes trials and returned to Britain, to her daughters and eventually, grandchildren (one of Miller-Hard’s daughters is named Odette).
Truth following fiction, she did indeed marry Churchill after her first marriage was dissolved post-war. Her marriage to Churchill did not last, and in 1956 she married again, to another former SOE officer, Geoffrey Hallowes. A 1949 biography and a 1950 film, Odette, brought her wider fame.
A short film about her connection with Mansfield by director Anna Cottrell is currently in production as part of a series about the writer. “The Letters of Katherine Mansfield was one of Odette’s most-treasured possessions,” says Miller-Hard. “It survived the war, too, and has only recently been rediscovered by our family. It will be displayed in the permanent exhibition about Odette at the Lord Ashcroft Gallery in the Imperial War Museum.
“Our family also still has Odette’s treasured leaf that came home with her. Miraculously, despite its great age and fragility, the leaf is still tinged a soft green.”
Odette died in Surrey in 1995, aged 82.
Nicola Saker is a Wellington writer and chair of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society.