With just one blue cotton dress to her name she pedalled around the countryside selling soap to mostly German soldiers, crossing fields on foot to where she had hidden another bicycle. The Gestapo and SS were everywhere. And to add to the confusion and danger a double agent was working in the area. The SOE operative was friendly and talkative whenever she met German soldiers – "I'd talk so much about anything and everything, trying to be 'helpful' and they'd get sick of me" - and was constantly moving through the countryside where she was transmitting the information so urgently needed by the Allied Command.
"I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk – I had about 2000 I could use. When I used a code I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoe lace which I used to tie my hair up."
Once she was loaded into a truck along with other locals and taken to the police station for questioning. "I can remember being taken to the station and a female soldier made us take our clothes off to see if we were hiding anything. She was looking suspiciously at my hair so I just pulled my lace off and shook my head. That seemed to satisfy her. I tied my hair back up with the lace- it was a nerve-wracking moment."
