Free The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish by Noreen Riols

were completely idiotic. I
couldn’t make head or tail of them. But I knew they were important, and had a hidden meaning for those listening on the other side.’
    They were important, but occasionally there were
messages personnels
that were neither requests nor instructions. One agent had left for the field a couple of months before his wife was
due to deliver their baby. Naturally he was concerned, so the Section arranged for a message to be sent out for five nights running when the baby came, in the hope that he would hear it. Should it
be a girl, the message was to read, in French of course: ‘Clémentine looks like her grandmother’, and if a boy, ‘Clément looks like his grandfather’. But in
this case, there was not one but two babies – twins – and they arrived early. No one knew what to do. ‘Ask Buck,’ piped up one bright spark. So we did. It might have been
one of his bad days – he did have a lot on his plate. But, for whatever reason, he didn’t seem very interested. ‘Oh, do what you think for the best,’ he said, and turned
away. So the message went out: ‘The two Cléments look like their grandfather.’ The message reached their father. But I’m not sure that it wouldn’t have been kinder to
let the poor man wait until he was safely home to discover the outcome of the happy event. He might not have been all that pleased; he already had two boys!
    Another agent left for the field without either he or his wife even suspecting that she was pregnant. Nowadays, with all these new-fangled devices, women seem to know after about five minutes,
but in that far-off, less ‘technical’ age it was unusual to know for certain for at least two months. When the agent returned from his mission, I saw him racing down the corridor waving
what appeared to be a piece of paper. I didn’t take much notice, thinking he was yet another member of the Crazy Gang exhibiting their usual exuberance. But when he skidded to a stop and
paused for breath, he thrust a photograph of an adorable little girl in my face. She was sitting upright on a cushion, wearing only a vest and a pink ribbon in her hair, looking accusingly at the
camera. She must have been eight or nine months old. I can understand her angry expression. I don’t think I’d have been very happy to have a photograph taken of me wearing only a vest
waved in the air for every passer-by to see. ‘Look what I found waiting for me when I got back,’ he exclaimed proudly, before dashing off to dangle his precious trophy at someone
else.
    The messages certainly sounded odd, and I can easily believe that the enemy was puzzled and could make neither head nor tail of such phrases as: ‘The little white rabbit sends greetings to
his friends and also to Daddy Rabbit’ or ‘The next door’s goat has eaten grandpa’s vest’. Through SOE’s intelligence grapevine we heard that the Germans knew the
messages were important and were desperate to work out what they meant. We also heard that they thought the ‘personal messages’ were broadcast using a very sophisticated code and they
spent hours trying to decode them. But since they were broadcast ‘in clear’, the Germans never succeeded. It’s impossible to decode something which hasn’t been coded in the
first place! They had a meaning only for those who were expecting them.
    On the night on which a drop was to take place the same message was repeated on the nine-fifteen news bulletin to confirm that nothing untoward had happened since the earlier bulletin to prevent
the operation taking place, and that the drop was actually going ahead. Anything could have cropped up in between the two bulletins: weather conditions might have suddenly deteriorated, or HQ might
have received news that the reception committee feared that they were under suspicion and that the drop would fall into enemy hands, or the members of the
réseau
expecting the drop
had been arrested or were in hiding. Should