The early months of 1942 were the coldest in northern Europe since 1895. The ground remained frozen solid under a carpet of thick hoar frost, which persisted into the early weeks of March. The scene that would have greeted Landes as he emerged from the London underground and walked along the Embankment would have been a sombre one. The parks by the river’s edge had long ago been dug up for vegetable allotments and air-raid shelters. A leaden Thames, indistinguishable from its mud banks, flowed sullenly under a blanket of freezing fog. The trees lining the north side of the river appeared as a row of ghostly mourners emerging from the mist, their lopped branches raised like stumps in supplication to a vengeful sky. Thin drifts of unswept snow still lay in gutters and along the sheltered edges of buildings.
Set back from the Thames, Whitehall, grimy from two centuries of coal fires, now also bore the pockmarks of the recent blitz. Every window was white-taped against bomb blast and curtained with condensation from the human fug inside; every door was protected by a tunnel of sandbags manned by soldiers with fixed bayonets. The War Office building itself had been hit and some of the great buildings of state had been turned into bombsites, which now sprouted young buddleia bushes, stalwart against the cold, and withered mats of brambles whose tentacles reached out across the rubble, hoping for the spring.
Landes made his way to Whitehall Court and the back entrance to the War Office building, where a sentry barred his way. He showed his orders and was passed on to a reception desk. From there an escort took him down long ill-lit corridors with black-and-white mosaic floors and brown panelling to a large room used only for interviews, whose grimy windows looked out onto the inner courtyard. The space, carpeted in linoleum which peeled back in one corner, was empty of ornament or furniture, save for a bare desk behind which sat a forlorn, out-of-place-looking secretary. Landes produced his letter and was ushered into a second, smaller room. Here seated at a desk facing him was a cadaverous-looking man in the perfectly cut uniform of a British major. A small coal fire glowed bravely in the middle of one wall but made little headway against the entrenched cold of a room which had been inadequately heated all winter.
The major rose, extended his right hand and – waving the other at the upright chair positioned opposite him – said: ‘I am Major Gielgud. Do sit down.’
The interview did not last long, for the major’s speech was terse and his manner brusque in the fashion of these urgent times. ‘We are sending British personnel into France who can speak fluent French and use wireless sets – radio operators who will be able to pass for French people. From the report I have on your skill in wireless communications, and as you have lived in France for so long, you are the perfect man to send, should you be willing to go. There are three ways to send you to France; by parachute, by motor-boat, or by fishing boat from Gibraltar. The danger is you may be caught, in which case you will probably be tortured and sent to a certain death. The fact that you are a Jew is not going to make life easier for you, as I am sure you understand. Will you accept? Yes or no? You have five minutes to think about it.’
Landes thought about it very little, before saying yes.
‘Good,’ said Gielgud, who was the brother of the great actor, John. ‘Then return to your unit. Say nothing to anyone, even your parents, and we will be in touch.’
Some days later Landes received another order: he was to report on 17 March to a flat in Orchard Court, Portman Square, and introduce himself as ‘Robert Lang’.
The door at Orchard Court, a 1930s mansion block, was opened by a man in butler’s uniform, who welcomed him with a butler’s smile. His name was Arthur Parks, and he spoke perfect French, having worked for Barclays Bank in Paris before the war. Parks led the new recruit to a grand room where he was introduced to Captain André Simon, who in peacetime had been a wine merchant. Simon was also brief, informing Landes that he was now formally a member of the Special Operations Executive, with the rank of temporary second lieutenant. He was, henceforth and for the rest of his life, subject to the Official Secrets Act and would receive an initial salary of five guineas a week. Captain Simon then gave Landes £10 with which to buy two khaki shirts and ordered him to report back to Orchard Court with a small overnight bag the following day.
Arriving the next morning at Orchard Court, Landes found he was not alone. He and another nine students, all young men and all of them looking equally uncomfortable in ill-fitting army uniforms, were swiftly introduced to each other using the aliases by which they would be known throughout their period of training. They were a hybrid collection, whose only common feature, as far as Landes could see, was their ability to speak French as a native. Most had dual identities, having been brought up in France as the children of mixed French–British marriages. Some had British parents who had chosen to educate their children in local French schools. One was the son of a well-known Francophone family from Mauritius; he was the first, but by no means last, SOE recruit to come from the tiny British colony.
Introductions over, they were bundled into a small bus and driven out of London, along the A30 through Guildford to the little village of Wanborough, close under the northern flank of the Hog’s Back. Here they turned up a small farm track to a brick-built three-gabled Elizabethan house set about with outhouses, sheds and workers’ cottages.
Wanborough Manor (known by SOE as Special Training School No. 5) was in many ways an odd choice for a spy school. Plainly visible from the road only 200 metres away, and famed for having one of the largest medieval wooden barns in southeast England, it sat right in the middle of the small hamlet of Wanborough. The house had a cellar, used for indoor instruction, a kitchen, a substantial sitting room and a dining room on the ground floor, bedrooms on the top two floors dedicated to staff accommodation and a small church in the grounds, where interdenominational services were held to cater for the needs of SOE’s wide variety of students. Physical training was held on the two lawns, back and front, which during fine weather in the summer months were also employed as occasional outdoor classrooms.
SOE’s trainee agents were not the first unusual visitors to Wanborough. Gladstone’s parliamentary secretary had lived there and the Grand Old Man wrote his resignation speech in the Manor’s study. During Gladstone’s time as prime minister, Queen Victoria had also paid a visit to Wanborough, accompanied by Bismarck. The two marked the occasion by planting two giant sequoias on the front lawn, each adorned with a cast-iron memorial plaque recording the moment. What SOE’s new recruits thought about sitting in the shade of the Iron Chancellor’s memorial tree, while being trained to set Nazi-occupied Europe ‘ablaze’, is not recorded.
There was almost nothing in the hitherto quiet and fastidious life of young Roger Landes that could have prepared him for the next four weeks. Wanborough Manor was a French-speaking microcosm. Its students were cut off from the world, save for carefully vetted letters and occasional accompanied trips over the Hog’s Back to the local pub The Good Intent (Landes drank alcohol only very abstemiously), or to the nearby gravel pit for hand-grenade practice. Landes was woken at dawn every morning from a hard army bed and went straight into PT, followed by a run around the manor house grounds. Then lessons all day, most of them requiring hard physical exertion, which cannot have been made any easier for Landes by his habit (which continued unabated all his life) of smoking sixty cigarettes a day. Soon every muscle of his slight, city-softened body ached. He ate voraciously and without discrimination. And at the end of the day sleep came to him as swift as the click of a camera shutter.
Landes had never held, let alone fired, a gun in his life. But by the end of his four weeks’ intensive training he knew