Housewife, 1946 (Speldham/Lyon) 


On the first Saturday in September 1946, the village of 
Speldham, in the English county of Kent, held its annual 
Flower Show. Through wars civil and global, uprisings feudal 
and baronial, revolutions industrial and agricultural, 
Speldham had always held its flower show on the first Saturday 
in September. Throughout history, the bodies of the fallen 
have been but blood and bone to flowers.

In 1939, when everyone said the war would not last out the 
summer, Susan Strake's pansies were judged grand champion. She 
hadn't entered her pansies, or anything, since 1939 but, 
remarkably, the seeds from those great pansies had survived 
and were viable. Remarkably, Susan Strake had also survived, 
and was viable, to a point.

"Uh oh, Mrs. Strake must be back," she heard someone say as 
she left the tent. "Nobody but Susan can grow pansies like 
that."

She set out to walk the three miles back to the cottage. It 
was such a beautiful late summer's Saturday there might never 
have been a war at all. Walking was recuperation. She was 
gradually regaining her strength. On such a day she felt 
almost recovered.

The Official Secrets Act forbade any discussion of who she had 
been, what she had done, and what had been done to her. Few 
knew everything. Not a soul in Speldham, except her husband, 
Eddie, knew anything, and Eddie knew very little. He knew she 
had been parachuted into France at Christmas, 1942. He knew 
she had been linked to the French Resistance. He knew that in 
1944 she had been caught, interrogated, imprisoned, scheduled 
for execution. But that was all he knew, and all he ever would 
know.

A motorbike snarled towards her on the narrow road, beyond the 
bend, not yet visible. Instinctively she plunged into the 
ditch. She rolled, twisting her bad knee. The bike roared 
past. She lifted her face from the dirt. Despite the pain in 
her knee, she started to laugh softly. You idiot, she told 
herself. It was 1946 and this was Speldham. Striped Weasel was 
no more, lost in the drifting smoke of a war that was over. 
She was Mrs. Edward Strake, and she grew huge pansies, just 
like her father and his father before him.   

She stood up, thankful the ditch was dry. She dusted herself 
down, noting the weeping graze on her elbow. She resumed her 
long walk, hobbling now. But it was easy pain. She knew all 
about the degrees of pain. That rotten knee, slammed with an 
iron bar in 1944. Would it ever get better? 

Striped Weasel. "Can't I have another?" she'd asked when the 
code names were assigned at the passing out of the training 
school. "I've always disliked weasels."

"No, you jolly well can't," Colonel Scott-Brownlow had said, 
pretending to be cross about it. Good old Brown Scotty. Dead 
now. Most of the men in Striped Weasel's war were dead.

Brave Jacques, her "husband" in Lyon, was dead. He was a bear 
of a man, stubborn, a passionate Communist, unwavering in his 
hatred of Fascism. She remembered the briefing in London 
clearly, the sharp shock of the duty she was required to 
undertake.

"His wife?"

"His real wife died last week," the intelligence officer told 
her blandly. "You look something like her, your French is 
immaculate, and you know Lyon. Simply, you will replace her. 
That is the important task we have assigned to you. His 
restaurant is frequented by German officers, and it is a 
unique opportunity we must not squander."

Susan Strake, Striped Weasel, became Sophie Houllier, the 
restaurant owner's wife. Jacques was a large man, in many 
respects larger than life. He was unlike any man she'd known. 
His grief was palpable, but he bore it stoically and treated 
her with courtesy. To maintain the facade, they slept in the 
same room and the same bed. Jacques put a barrier of pillows 
between them. On the third night, she took hold of the 
pillows, one by one, and threw them to the corner of the room.

"If we are to convince the Gestapo we are man and wife," she 
said, drawing her nightgown over her head, "then first we must 
convince ourselves."

"Madame, I believed you to be married," said Jacques, eyeing 
her body in the moonlight streaming through the window.

"Yes, to you," she replied, snuggling to him. "I am Sophie."

Susan Strake continued to hobble home to the cottage she 
shared with Eddie, the husband she married in Speldham's tall-
spired Church of St. Mark in 1938. Dear Eddie. He had passed 
through the war without firing a shot in anger. His only 
overseas posting was to the transport depot in Alexandria once 
it was safely British. His talent had been logistics. Hers had 
been that her mother was French and she was foolish and daring 
enough to volunteer her language skills to the war effort.

The knee was a bother. Would it ever come right? She was, she 
realised with sudden surprise, twenty-eight. She suspected she 
had lived too many lives to be only twenty-eight.   

A spy cannot always be a spy, always on the razor's edge. A 
woman cannot live like that. Left to her own devices in Lyon, 
her environment diluted her purpose, and she took the shape of 
what she pretended to be. She became Sophie Houllier, wife of 
Jacques, and she helped him run their flourishing restaurant. 
Sometimes she was Striped Weasel, crouched behind the piled-up 
wine barrels in the cellar, sending and receiving coded 
messages. Three times she hid British airmen in that makeshift 
hideaway in the cellar, waiting for the escape network to get 
them home through nearby Switzerland. But mostly she was 
Sophie Houllier. The name became automatic to her. She could 
never forget Striped Weasel, but the identity of Susan Strake 
was useless and dangerous, and it disappeared.

She came to love Jacques Houllier, after a fashion. She 
admired his artfulness, the way he courted the German officers 
he hated so unequivocally. All the information came from 
Jacques. She, as Striped Weasel, merely passed it on to 
England. Troop movements, promotions and transfers, new 
weapons and equipment, and especially how the officers viewed 
the progress of the war. The feedback from London was good. 
They liked what they were getting, and they always wanted 
more.

She was in awe of the unshakeable belief Jacques held for his 
cause. He was a man of great passion, holding high hopes for a 
new socialist order for France after the war. She called him, 
with affection, Le Taureau -- The Bull.

Jacques was thirty-nine, a heavy man too fond of the food in 
his restaurant. He didn't approach sex timidly -- he tore at 
it single-mindedly, relentlessly. At first she found it 
disconcerting to be humped so purposefully, but she warmed to 
it in time. It was part of who he was. At odd and surprising 
times, some of them decidedly inconvenient, Jacques would 
swoop on her from behind, one hand curling around to scoop up 
her breasts, the other impatiently tugging up the back of her 
dress. Susan Strake was certainly not accustomed to being 
taken from behind at whim, bent over a desk or a table, but 
Sophie Houllier took to it like a duck to water. Whoever she 
was and whatever mask she was wearing, she had never been so 
greedily desired as she was by Jacques, her lusty bull.

Something else. For all of his directness, he was a man of 
great tenderness. He cried openly at times for the former 
Sophie, but his attentions to the new Sophie were never less 
than genuinely ardent and stunningly flattering. He introduced 
her to oral sex. Not that he knew he was introducing her or 
that she said he was. It was part of who he was. He just did it.

On the second night after she took down the barricade of 
pillows and played Sophie to his Jacques, he plunged his head 
between her legs. What was he doing? Surely not that. Oh, my 
goodness. He was.

Some days later, when he extracted his short, thick penis from 
his trousers while she was on her knees fetching an earring 
from under a cupboard, she completed the oral sex circle, 
receiving and giving. He just walked right up and thrust it at 
her mouth. She opened and it went in. Oh, my goodness. 

Susan Strake hobbled home to her cottage outside Speldham, 
home to Eddie, who was probably out in the back shed, working 
on the restoration of his beloved steam engine. Oral sex, eh? 
Eddie knew nothing about oral sex. A mischievous urge took 
her. When she got home after this long walk, she would go 
straight to the shed, take down his trousers, and put his 
penis in her mouth. She knew how to do it very well. Jacques 
had given her plenty of practice.

She stopped in the middle of the road and howled with 
laughter, because nothing could be more inconceivable. It was 
absurdly hilarious. Jacques was Jacques, and Eddie was Eddie. 

Ah, poor Jacques. She resumed her long walk. On a bright and 
sunny morning in late August 1944, she stood in the courtyard 
of the Hotel Terminus while Oberssturmführer Klaus Barbie, the 
Butcher of Lyon, put a pistol to Jacques' head.

"Now, madame," Barbie said, almost pleasantly, in his elegant 
French. "You talk or he dies."

Jacques, fearing she might bend, took matters in his own hands 
and spat in Barbie's face. A shot rang out and Jacques tumbled 
to the ground. Barbie shot him four more times in the body.

Barbie looked at her shrewdly with his pale blue eyes. "So, 
madame," he mused. "You really do have something to hide."

They were betrayed, as many were betrayed in Lyon by a 
Resistance that was anything but united in its purpose. The 
Gaullists and Mother Church hated the Communists more than 
they hated the Germans. It was after 8pm and dinner was in 
full swing. She did not hear the trucks outside but she saw 
the uniforms spilling into the restaurant. Not officers 
looking for tables, but soldiers with rifles and submachine 
guns. And Klaus Barbie, dressed in a grey suit.

Soldiers held her arms. All the staff were seized. Klaus 
Barbie turned to address the hushed restaurant. "Ladies and 
gentlemen," he said, much amused, especially at the discomfort 
of the Army officers. "I regret that your pudding will not be 
served tonight."

It was well after midnight before she was summoned. She sat 
under armed guard in the well-appointed foyer of Barbie's 
luxurious suite at the Hotel Terminus, which she knew full 
well served as Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, and watched with 
growing horror as the men and women who worked at the 
restaurant were dragged past her, beaten and semi-conscious. 
She suspected it was deliberate.

In Barbie's rooms, Gestapo officers in uniform lounged on 
sofas. Barbie tossed her papers down on the surface of his 
desk. "Who are you, madame?" he asked politely.

"My name is Sophie Houllier," she said.

Barbie held up his hand. "Please," he said. "Sophie Houllier 
nee Vasges, I am reliably informed by a member of your staff, 
died in December 1942. A quick check of the city records shows 
she was born in 1906. You, madame, are neither dead nor 
thirty-eight."

Chill dread settled in her bones. Surely the Gestapo would 
find the radio transmission equipment in the cellar. But she 
had been trained for this moment. Her duty was obstinately 
clear.

"I am Sophie Houllier," she said.

Barbie came around the side of the desk and stood directly 
facing her, staring into her eyes. "Madame," he said, "I think 
you need a bath."

She was held by Gestapo men and stripped naked. Barbie studied 
her body. "You are no more thirty-eight than I am Winston 
Churchill," he said. "I'd say 25, not a day older."

They led her into an adjoining bathroom. The tub was large, 
fashionable, and three-quarters filled with cold water. Her 
hands and feet were tied behind her body, a thick pole of wood 
was inserted through the bindings, and two strong men lifted 
and suspended her above the bath.

"In," said Barbie, smoking a cigarette. 

They lowered the pole and she plunged face first into the cold 
water. Bound and suspended, she could only struggle 
ineffectually. Her lungs were bursting. When she could hold 
out no longer, she opened her mouth and prepared to drown. She 
was certain of death one way or another at the hands of the 
Gestapo. Drowning was not so unattractive in the 
circumstances.

But at the last possible moment she was hoisted out, streaming 
water, coughing, spluttering, gagging.

"Your name, madame?" asked Barbie.

"Sophie. . .Houllier. . ."

"In," said Barbie musically, tapping his cigarette case.

She dropped back into the water.

She did not know she was alive until she woke. She was naked, 
wet, cold, and lying on the bathroom floor. Barbie was not 
there, but a man in black Gestapo uniform was standing over 
her, masturbating. He grinned at her, jetted sperm on her 
body, tucked his penis away, left her, and locked the door 
behind him. 

She expected to die before dawn, but she didn't. Two men came 
to get her, watched her dress, and took her down into the 
courtyard where she watched as Jacques died, executed by Klaus 
Barbie. 

The Gestapo chief tapped her in the chest with a rigid finger. 
"You will talk, madame," he said. "We will resume our 
discussions soon." He smiled disarmingly. "I am looking 
forward to it."

Then she was bundled into the back of a truck and taken to a 
prison cell on the other side of the city.

Luck. Klaus Barbie did not summon her. He was taken suddenly 
ill and hastened to Germany for treatment. His underlings were 
not so dedicated, and the war was not going well for the 
Germans in Europe. The radio at the restaurant was not found. 
She endured the cell and the beatings for five weeks. She 
never talked. It was easier to hold her tongue after Barbie 
went away. His henchmen didn't have his cold intelligence. 
They beat her mechanically, their attention on the advance of 
the Allied forces through France.

After five weeks the Germans fled, and Lyon was liberated by 
combined American and French forces. She spent two months in a 
military hospital near Paris before she was allowed to travel 
by transport aircraft to London. She was debriefed for three 
days somewhere in Surrey, and allowed to find her own way back 
to Speldham. 

Striped Weasel's war was over. 

In 1946, returning from the annual flower show, Susan Strake 
hobbled down the lane to the gate of her cottage. Eddie was 
not in his shed but she could see he had been there from the 
grease on his hands.

"My word," said Eddie, taking in her dusty dress, her graze, 
and her limp. "You're looking a bit rough, old girl. I think 
you need a bath. Shall I run one for you?"

She laughed helplessly. What a dear, innocent man he was.

He stood looking at her, concerned, recognising the hysterical 
edge to her laughter. Then he stepped up and took her in his 
arms.

"One of these days you should tell me about it," he said.

"It takes more than a bath to make me talk," she murmured into 
his shoulder.

ENDS