I Can't Begin to Tell You (49 page)

Some years ago I wrote a novel about the SOE and I was lucky enough to get to know Noreen Riols, whose friendship I treasure and whose own book on her experiences in the SOE,
The Secret Ministry of Ag and Fish
, provided both a remarkable and poignant insight into secret wartime work and a source of inspiration. Seven other books also became bibles: Leo Marks’s brilliant and haunting
Between Silk and Cyanide
, H. J. Giskes’s
London Calling North Pole
, Virginia Nicholson’s
Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives During the Second World War
, Knud J. V. Jespersen’s
No Small Achievement: SOE and the Danish Resistance, 1940–1945
, Christine Sutherland’s
Monica: Heroine of the Danish Resistance
, Cyril Cunningham’s
Beaulieu: The Finishing School for Secret Agents
and Flemming Muus’s
The Spark and the Flame
. I have taken and made use of material and scenarios from all seven. In addition, David Lampe’s
Hitler’s Savage Canary
, John Oram Thomas’s
The Giant Killers
, Bernard O’Connor’s
RAF Tempsford
and Sinclair McKay’s
The Secret Listeners
yielded riveting details with which to work.

Any errors are mine but I would like to emphasize that this is a novel and for complete factual accuracy I would refer anyone to primary sources and historical texts.

Many people are owed a thank you. First, as always, Mark Lucas, who said, ‘Why don’t you look at Denmark?’ Anne Ponsonby, who generously told me her stories of listening during the war. Thank you to my brilliant publisher, Louise Moore, to my editors Sam Humphries and Celine Kelly, to Clare Parkinson for her skilled copy-editing – all of whom are owed a deep debt – plus the rest of the Penguin crack team. Gratitude in spades to David Wilson, who drove me to Tempsford airfield and invited me to watch Noreen being filmed in Orchard Court, to Liz Jensen, who talked to me
about Denmark and opened up contacts, to Helen Dunmore who sent me valuable material, and to Isabelle Grey and Fanny Blake, who were both ever-open doors and rocks.

Thank you also to Marika Cobbold, Annabel Markova, Belinda Taylor and other friends (they know who they are) who put up with the novelist in labour, plus a big thank you to Judith Murray.

Last but not least, thank you to Benjamin, Adam and Eleanor.

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First published 2014

Copyright © Elizabeth Buchan, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Jacket images: Girl © Laurence Winram/Trevillion Images; Soldier © Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Train © Bert Hardy/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

All rights reserved

The extract on
page 148
, taken from G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician’s Apology
, 1940, is reproduced by kind permission of Cambridge University Press.

ISBN: 978-0-718-17892-5