Andrée's War (3 page)

Courage, sangfroid and confidence were passed on from grandmother to mother to daughter, and on 29 August 1920 Yvonne gave birth to Andrée, in Ville d'Avray near Versailles. Present at her birth was Mary Murphy, her mother's Scottish governess and a British citizen.

Andrée enjoyed a happy and carefree childhood; at two years old she was introduced to her brother, Alain, and five years later to her sister, Yvette, followed shortly after by another sister, Claude.

In 1930, in search of the sun, the Griotterays left Paris for the south of France. In Cannes, Edmond launched a new antique shop and an interior decorating business, along with a company specialising in the production of Provençal furniture. A year later the family moved to Nice and bought a house on the seafront on the Promenade des Anglais – to this day one of a few private houses still standing among the high-rise hotels and apartment blocks. In the 1930s, when the Côte d'Azur was still an exclusive destination, there was no road between the Griotterays' house and the beach and Andrée often described how her father ‘encouraged' her and her brother to walk straight out of their house onto the beach at 6.30 a.m. every day between May and October to swim in the sea.

At eleven, Andrée was registered as a pupil at the Lycée de Nice pour Filles where, over the next three years, she was to study German, among other subjects, English not being available on the curriculum. So important was the study and knowledge of German in her parents' eyes that extra private lessons were conducted after school and in the school holidays. After the invasion of France in 1939, Andrée never acknowledged knowing the language and it was only when reading her childhood diaries that I became aware of my mother's command of the language.

For the Griotteray children, life in the south of France centred around family. When the heavy, dry heat of summer arrived, they would move up to the Belgian coast for the summer months, stopping in Paris on the way, where Edmond conducted intense architectural and history of art lessons. The influence of their Belgian grandparents was very strong and through them the children gained an in-depth knowledge of Brussels and the Belgian coastline.

It was around this time that Andrée started to write a diary, which she kept right through the 1930s and 40s.

In 1936 the Griotteray family moved back to Paris and then, three weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Andrée left for England, where she stayed for over a year to learn English, living in Bournemouth with friends her mother had made on her visits to England during the First World War. As a young sixteen-year-old, nothing could have prepared her for how different English country living was from what she had been used to in the south of France, Paris and Belgium, but she soon amassed a group of English friends who invited her to stay with their families around the country. As her language skills developed, her confidence and independence grew and she found herself working in a pre-preparatory school as a French assistant, shocked by how the British could send their children away at such a young age.

Before her departure for England, Edmond and Yvonne gave Andrée a special handmade suitcase as a birthday gift. The case was made of soft brown kid leather with thick, dark stitching on every side. A thick leather handle was attached by a pair of tiny silver plates screwed into the leather. At the centre of the plates a silver lock had been carefully fixed. It had a
thick silk lining, made from silk which had belonged to her Swiss grandmother. That lining was to prove invaluable.

While Andrée spent a year in England, gradually falling in love with the country, her fourteen-year-old brother Alain had been sent to Germany for three months during his school holidays to perfect his German. His Hitler Youth host greeted him by saying, ‘Have no doubt about this. In time we will invade and conquer France.'

In 1938, with the hostilities between England, France and Germany gathering pace, Edmond and Yvonne decided their daughter should return home. Not quite eighteen years old and back in Paris, Andrée began her career as a sales assistant in a small antique shop. In the evenings she attended a secretarial course. Shortly before Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia, her Belgian uncle and aunt, Auguste and Léa, invited their niece on a two-week touring holiday of Germany. Andrée's diaries include extensive descriptions of the country and its people, and an awareness of the Nazi Party's dominance over the German population. The experience left a lasting impression on Andrée and her cousin.

Reggie Harland (one of Andrée's English friends, later to become Air Marshal Sir Reginald Harland KBE, CB) visited Andrée in Paris with his aunt, Toddy. Just as Reggie and his family had introduced Andrée to hunt balls, meets, the English countryside and cocktail parties, Andrée showed Reggie the sights of Paris – elegant living, beautiful clothes and good food. Reggie's visit would be her last contact with any of her English friends for the next five years. She was to be cut off from an important and influential part of her youth and in her diary she later describes with sadness both her English and French friends being called up to go to war.

The Griotteray children retained close lifelong ties to Belgium, the land of their grandparents, as well as their native France. But Andrée's travels as a teenager had sparked a deep love of another country: Britain.

 

*
According to Griotteray family documents, including Andrée's birth certificate, Labori was always spelled with an ‘e' at the end, though this does not correspond with what has been written about the Dreyfus affair.

^†
On 13 January 1898, Zola published an article in the newspaper
L'Aurore
, accusing the French government of anti-Semitism in their campaign against Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who was infamously accused and convicted of treason, stripped of his rank and service medals and sent to Devil's Island to serve out his sentence. Zola, meanwhile, was prosecuted for criminal libel. The Dreyfus Affair ultimately resulted in the resignation of the Home Secretary (the Minister of the Interior) and almost brought down the French government.

*
I still remember to this day the warm smile on the model's face looking down at me when I stayed at my grandparents' flat near the Quai d'Orsay as a small child. The colour and texture of the marble stood out against the dark decor, and seemed almost to glow at night.

A
s tensions in the run-up to the Second World War began to heighten, day-to-day living in Paris continued relatively unchanged for families such as the Griotterays, living in the centre of the city, but heated political debates and chatter in the cafés, in the bars and on the streets of the capital were ever present among a population keen to discuss French rearmament, the strength of the military, the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the ‘Anschluss' (occupation) of Austria.

On 14 January 1939, Andrée describes in her diary attending
le bal du cercle militaire
:

Papa invited me to join him at the officers' ball at the Colisée. The President, Monsieur Lebrun, attended as did Monsieur Campinchi, the Naval Minister. The Bigards joined us and some excellent champagne and canapés were served. I wore a pale-blue silk dress which Maman had just had made for me.

In September 1938, Andrée was back in Paris and working in an antiques shop close to her home in the rue Godot de Mauray near the Place de l'Opéra. The owners, friends of her parents, had an interesting collection of antique French furniture which was exhibited in their ground-floor gallery and Andrée was responsible for helping to run the shop and deal with clients showing an interest in the collection.

As an attractive, outgoing eighteen-year-old, Andrée soon developed a circle of friends with whom she could easily meet up and have fun. Her brother Alain, despite being two years younger, had always been a soulmate and their group also included Margit Ehrart and Jean Barbier, whom they
had met in a café on the boulevard des Capucines. Serge Bigard, the Jewish son of two of Andrée and Alain's parents' closest friends, was another. Engaging and fun-loving, Serge was as generous as anyone could be and, to everyone's amusement, every year on his birthday he gave his mother an enormous bouquet of flowers to thank her for giving birth to him. His easygoing personality and great charm led him to forge close friendships with all those he met, but in 1942, after escaping the Nazi persecution in Paris, he moved into the Free Zone and no one heard from him or his parents again.

Andrée's glamorous half-sister, Renée, had a huge influence on her early life. She was Edmond's illegitimate daughter from a previous relationship, and was fifteen years older than Andrée. Edmond had recognised her as his child and she regularly visited the Griotteray family. As a leading actress on the French stage, she was greeted enthusiastically wherever she went and chaperoned her younger half-sister through the artistic society of Paris, inviting her for tea, cocktails and dinner at the capital's leading hotels, restaurants and bars. Her husband Steve Passeur (whose real name was Étienne Morin; Steve Passeur was his professional name) was one of France's leading playwrights, and through the couple Andrée and her family attended many of the major plays of the period, often meeting the authors, producers and playwrights as well.

15 January 1939
Steve and Renée invited us to l'Opéra Comique. Fanny Heldy was playing Louise. She was ‘très chic'.

Renée was then one of the most stunningly attractive and beautifully dressed women in Paris, renowned for her vivacious personality. In 2012, seventy years after last meeting Renée, one of Andrée's friends still remembered her as ‘quite stunning, so beautifully dressed, so immaculate in every way'.

In 1939, Steve Passeur's most successful play,
Je vivrai un grand amour
, was staged in Paris for the first time. Renée played the lead role and performances were selling out each night. It was during the preparations for the staging of this play that Alain, then nearly seventeen, became friendly
with François Clerc, a young man from the Bordeaux region of France, who at nineteen already held a pilot's licence and had started a small removal business moving theatre props around the capital. He moved with such speed that one moment he was there and seconds later he had disappeared from sight. His political views dovetailed with Alain's and the boys became close friends. Later he was recruited into the Resistance and would take over the leadership of the group when Alain escaped France and headed for Morocco in 1943.
*

Andrée was looking for a challenging, well-paid job and on 19 May 1939 recorded in her diary:

Today I am having lunch with Renée. She might be able to help find me an interesting job.

On 20 May she noted her conversation with Renée:

Renée came around to tea this afternoon and told me that she had arranged for us to meet a close friend of hers, Roger Langeron, who is the Head of Police at Police Headquarters in Paris. She told me we were to meet him tomorrow and that I was to make sure I looked attractive and that I was elegantly dressed. She said that Langeron wanted to meet me and described him as a thoroughly decent, straightforward chap who has an aristocratic manner about him, thoroughly charming and not too old! I wonder?!

On the day of the interview, Renée invited her younger sister to lunch. Stepping from the Place Vendôme into The Ritz, Andrée felt buoyed up with confidence as she and Renée made their way into one of the most elegant dining rooms in Paris. Renée complimented Andrée on what she was wearing and the way she had done her hair, although she could not resist having a dig at the British sense of dress by saying: ‘I was seriously worried you might have lost your dress sense while you were living in England, but no,
you are as elegant as you ever were and being eighteen months older you have developed a quiet yet sophisticated air which will be noticed by all those you meet.'

They enjoyed an excellent lunch, during which Renée continued to build up her sister's confidence with a stream of compliments, before leaving The Ritz to make their way to Police Headquarters, an imposing grey building lying alongside the Seine on the Left Bank, near Notre Dame. As they approached the building, Andrée found it difficult to dismiss her thoughts about the procedures and events which took place within the confines of the building, a venue which over the years had housed some of the most notorious criminals in France. It was an austere, soulless government building with long, endless corridors, police cells and police interview rooms, and crowded with large numbers of uniformed police officers with loaded guns attached to their hips.

They smiled at the duty officer by the gate, who immediately recognised Renée, and minutes later the two young women were sitting in the office of one of the most powerful men in Paris.

Préfet Langeron was a tall, imposing man in his forties with the forceful personality that often accompanies great power and authority. As Renée knew, he was looking for people he could trust. He spoke kindly to Andrée: ‘I understand from Renée you are interested in working at Police Headquarters. We need someone to help out in the Passport and ID Department and I like to take on people I know personally. I will follow your career carefully and do anything I can to help its progress. I hope you will decide to come and join us.'

Andrée, whose initial shyness and quiet behaviour had now disappeared, eagerly and graciously accepted her new appointment.
*
As the two women left the building, walking through the flower market and making their way home, Renée told Andrée how pleased she was with the outcome of the meeting. She knew that Langeron would like her younger sister, and she felt confident that Andrée would prove herself to be a loyal member of staff.
But she also wanted Andrée to be fully aware of what she was doing, and warned her that Langeron was not universally popular. ‘As you may know, he is renowned for searching and rounding up many active members of the Communist Party and his zeal for this has earned him many political enemies.'