Inspirational individuals

My 85-year-old neighbour bows to passing magpies, casts spells, and gleefully claims to be ‘a mad old bat’. Eccentric you might say. But she also speaks Mandarin Chinese and sports on her desk a photograph of herself in 1945 carrying a rifle on a hillside above Kunming in southern China where she helped SOE run one of the most successful blackmarket operations of the second world war. So it would be truer to say that she has never cared much for being one of the crowd. Egregious is really the word.

Reading this oral history of the Special Operations Executive, it is clear that being egregious was the one quality that everyone who served in SOE had to possess. Almost all other forms of warfare involved merging individuality into the unit. ‘There was the regimentalness, you know’, one agent remarked of his career as a soldier. ‘I thought it was terrible actually.