Free Spy Princess by Shrabani Basu

stay in while waiting for the boat.
    Noor’s account of how the family left France survives in her personal files. When the family found they had to wait in Le Verdon, Noor and Claire started searching for their evacuated hospital unit, which had been shut down when the Germans approached Paris. The British consul told them that the staff had left for St Nazaire. The girls desperately wanted to carry on working for the Red Cross, but their certificates were with the evacuated staff. On a whim, the sisters decided to dash to St Nazaire and try to track down the Red Cross boat. Despite the pleas of Amina Begum and Vilayat, they insisted on making the 200-mile trip; it was a measure of Noor’s stubbornness that she was prepared to take such risks just to get the certificates.
    The girls travelled through the night through the mass of traffic and finally made it to the docks of St Nazaire, looking for the boat carrying the Red Cross staff and documents. As they were searching the docks a suspicious policeman arrested them on charges of spying. Noor’s passport showed she was born in Moscow and the policeman was taking no chances in wartime. After a night spent in a cell the girls finally convinced the officer that they were innocent and he helped them make enquiries about the ship. Sadly, it had sailed the night before. The ship was contacted by radio and the crew agreed to take the two women on board as Red Cross staff if they could get a boat to drop them off, but Vilayat and their mother were in Le Verdon and so Claire and Noor simply had to go back.
    It was while Noor and Claire were on their mad dash for the Red Cross certificates that they heard the dreaded news of the fall of Paris. The Germans had arrived there on 14 June to find a deserted city with empty streets, closed shops and shuttered houses. Tanks, armoured vehicles and German motorcyclists in heavy leather coats now drove through its grand boulevards. The swastika had swiftly replaced the tricolour. On 16 June the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned and was succeeded by Marshal Henri Pétain, hero of Verdun in the First World War. France had fallen to the Germans. The next day Pétain broadcast from Bordeaux that he intended to ask Hitler for an armistice. The girls heard the news in silence.
    By the terms of the Armistice, Paris and the north of France and the entire Atlantic coast was to be administered by the German military command. A so-called ‘free-zone’ south of the Loire would be administered by the French under Marshal Pétain. His headquarters would be set up in Vichy in the Auvergne. The Vichy regime, sympathetic to the Germans, would administer this area.
    Unsuccessful at tracing their certificates, Claire and Noor headed back for Le Verdon. Meanwhile Vilayat was in a panic because he had been told that the last boat for British subjects was leaving the port in half an hour, yet Noor and Claire had not returned. He knew it would be a scramble to get to the port area from their lodgings at the town centre, and he bought a motorbike to ferry the family to and fro. Just at the point when Vilayat and his mother were giving up and thought they would miss the boat, Noor and Claire returned. They had taken a week to get to St Nazaire and back. Vilayat dashed on his bike to the harbour where the boat – a tiny Belgian vessel called Kasongo – was ready to leave. He explained his desperate situation and the captain agreed to wait till he fetched his family. There was no place for any luggage, however. Vilayat made three trips from the town centre to the boat carrying Noor, Claire and his mother one at a time on the pillion.
    Noor, as usual, was saying her goodbyes. To the people in town who watched them leave she shouted: ‘We shall come back.’ 2
    Barely had they managed to scramble aboard when the ship set sail. A breathless Vilayat looked out on the coast of France. On the harbour stood the abandoned motorbike that he had used to ferry