8. Getting to Work
Odette’s first main task was to arrange room and board for the radio operator, Rabinovitch, who had no ration card – a necessity at the time. She had a near puritanical attitudes towards the black market, and a general revulsion towards what she saw as an environment of frippery and fluff on the Cote d’Azur, which she thought was unseemly given the seriousness and hardships of wartime. Nonetheless, she made a go of it, and carried out her early assignments. Then things got immeasurably worse barely a week after her arrival, on November 11th, 1942.
That day the Germans, reacting to the Allied landings in North Africa, invaded and occupied the nominally independent rump France, in which Odette and the SPINDLE network operated. The new conditions worsened the network’s internal strife. Odette was kept busy with her secret courier work between the SOE and various Resistance elements, while the SPINDLE network descended into chaos. That led to sloppy security work, which almost got Odette and Peter Churchill captured by the Germans, during a failed attempt to arrange a clandestine night time airplane landing.