Airey Neave (1916–1979)

Fact is once again stronger than fiction. I ploughed my way through 500 pages of Kristin Hannah's bloated and overrated novel about two sisters in the French Resistance, The Nightingale, only to find out that the least credible character in the novel, Isabelle, is based on the real life Belgian resistance heroine Andrée de Jongh. After reading former MI9 agent Airey Neave's swift and delightful biography of de Jongh and the agents of the Comet Line, I also realised that Hannah has somehow managed to crib heavily from the life of 'Dédée' (Andrée's code name), down to her idolism of Edith Cavell and working with her father, while somehow stripping her fictional account of any credibility or character. Quite an achievement!

Derivative novels aside, I wish I had read about Andrée de Jongh in the first place. Her story, even told in that breathless 1950s style ("They were a strange pair: the great, powerful, illiterate man of the mountains, with his reverence for cognac and his indifference to fatigue and danger, and the quiet, tenacious Dédée") is far more exciting than the purple prose of a novel - when the Comet Line is infiltrated - twice - and the agents are at risk of arrest, my heart was in my throat! There were also a couple of amusing anecdotes which I would have enjoyed reading about in a story, such as 'Operation Water Closet', where men being lead to safety were passed through the men's toilets at a station to avoid detection. No wonder that the men rescued by the Line felt that 'they were in the hands of some Scarlet Pimpernel organisation'!

Andrée de Jongh was only 24 when she first bravely escorted a downed Scottish airman over the Pyrenees to safety in Spain, and by the time she was arrested and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1943, she and countless other agents had saved the lives of nearly two hundred men, and the incredible feats of the Comet Line continued in her name until the end of the war. She was fearless and determined, a tomboy who 'shone at a moment of challenge and then receded to a modest corner', not a Hollywood cliche. Incredibly, she survived the war, living to the ripe old age of 90, and her story is almost too fantastic to be true, but still more credible than the insultingly trite spin on her life in The Nightingale! I recommend reading about real life accounts of bravery instead.… (more)