Hi folks! First off, I want to thank everyone who entered the draw for the three copies of Mercutio last month. I wish I could have mailed books to all of you. I’ll delete the entry form and its info now that the books have been mailed out.

If you’re in Ottawa on June 16th, come by Perfect Books at 7 p.m. for the launch of Venue 13 by David Jón Fuller, for which I’ll be the host. I’m looking forward to it!

I’m working on my novella, and pondering my next steps, and having a lot of very navel-gazey thoughts about art and publishing which I will spare you, at least until they’re less half-baked.

Since tomorrow’s the anniversary of D-Day, I thought instead I’d devote the newsletter to an excerpt from my 2024 novel The Tapestry of Time, which hinges on the events of Operation Overlord in northern France in June 1944. A key section of the novel is about the training of agents for the Special Operations Executive, and it draws very heavily on the real history of those agents. The Jacqueline in the section below is my little tribute to Yvonne Rudellat (code name Jacqueline) who really was a grandmother in her 40s deemed too old for parachute training, but not too old to be the first female SOE agent sent to France, where she was captured at a roadblock after picking up two Canadian agents. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

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The code names helped, a little. It was inconceivable that Ivy Sharp could garrote a man, but Juliet might. As Juliet, she learned to return the fighting teacher’s gaze when he talked about gouging out an enemy’s eyeballs with her thumbs. She was soon too sore and exhausted to imagine that life could be anything other than crawling through the mud, cleaning and reloading weapons, or hitting things or people. She felt beaten, in every way.

Ivy had been to Scotland before, on the family visits to Great Aunt Kathleen, but this training school was in the Highlands, near the sea, miles from Glasgow. It was cold, and terrifying, climbing cliff faces suspended from ropes. Her feet slipped and her callouses bled. She had no visions, and there was surely nothing in her exhausted doodles at the end of the day that could be of any use to the war effort. She was simply in the lower end of the acceptable students. She had never been the cleverest one in a room, or the most talented, or the prettiest. But she had always been determined.

They learned how to wade through streams without making a sound, and how to mix explosives and hide them. They gave her earplugs, but that didn’t prevent the ringing from the explosions and the gunshots. Ivy was slow with weapons, always afraid she would make a mistake and kill someone. On the courses, when cardboard figures popped up to left and right, she was always quick to respond, and she made a little guessing game out of it, the way she used to do with her sisters about traffic signals. But she wasn’t very accurate, and she found it hard to pull the trigger twice, quickly, and keep moving.

Jacqueline, though, was the best shot of the group.

‘I’ve already worked as a saboteur, in the Resistance,’ Jacqueline confided in her one day, after Ivy had marvelled at how well she took to the training. ‘I think that’s why they sent me here. They couldn’t very well say they only intend to use women as secretaries and flirts when I’ve already – well . . . .’

She smiled at Ivy, and Ivy tried to look like someone who could take all this in her stride. She remembered Mr Yardley saying, For now, the main thing is just to learn what you can do.

And truth be told, she could do a lot more than she ever would have suspected.

One day, near the end of the course, they had to climb two separate firemen’s ladders up the side of a cliff. 

As they watched the first of their colleagues struggle, Jacqueline said, ‘I think you should go before me. Because if I see you succeed, that will help me, but if you see me fall, it’ll just make it harder for you.’

Ivy said, ‘We’ll make it, all of us.’

‘Unlikely. Some of us will be on our way to the School of Forgetting.’

A chill ran through Ivy. ‘Where is that?’

‘Nobody knows. Another posh house miles away from anywhere, I’d assume. But it has to exist, somewhere. Think about it. Not everyone passes the training; we know that. So where do the failures go? They can’t just send us back to our homes and families. We know too much, now. Codes, techniques, who the instructors are. No, if someone’s not reliable enough to drop into France, they’re not reliable enough to drop into King’s Lynn or Swindon either.’

‘Then what do they do with us?’ Ivy’s voice sounded high and childlike.

‘They send us somewhere else, and give us something to keep us useful. Washing dishes. I don’t know. Maybe they have techniques for erasing or confusing our memories. Maybe they just lock us in until the war ends.’

They both made it up the ladders, but three of the men did not.

Those three were gone by the final day, when the recruits were told that they would be driven down to Manchester for parachute training.

‘All except Jacqueline,’ said a young man with slick, wavy blond hair whom none of them had ever seen before. He held a clipboard. ‘You’re to go straight to finishing school.’

Jacqueline looked puzzled, and said, ‘But when will I do my parachute training?’

‘You’re to go to France by boat,’ said the young officer. ‘We’re not in the business of dropping grandmothers out of aeroplanes.’

Finishing school was at a place called Beaulieu, on the southern coast of England, across the Solent from the Isle of Wight. When Ivy had survived her parachute training, she went there too, on her own because she’d been slow and was between groups.

Her only instruction was to dress in civilian clothing. When the black Austin Seven – a different one this time, without the smell of cleaning fluid – drew up at the railway station, she had a very strong feeling she should not get inside. For a moment, she kept her feet planted to the platform, clutching her small bag like a woebegone schoolgirl, before deciding she was being silly. She reminded herself that she had been trained to kill, that it was wartime, that one didn’t abandon one’s post and go home because of a sick feeling on a cloudy day.

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