17. She Married an Englishman and Moved to London
Growing up in Normandy, Odette spent hours on weekends and holidays walking the coast, breathing in the salt air and watching the ships along the English Channel. During her jaunts along the coast and channel ports, Odette developed a fascination with the sea, and with sailors – especially those with an English accent. So as a teenager, she decided that she would marry an Englishman. Soon as she turned eighteen, she did just that, by marrying Roy Sansom – the British son of a family friend.
The couple lived for a few years in Bolougne, where they had a daughter in 1932, before moving to London, where they had two more girls. As she raised her family in England, war clouds were gathering in 1930s Europe, as Hitler and the Nazis gained control over Germany, and began a program of rearmament and adventurism that destabilized the continent’s fragile peace. Odette’s grandfather’s prediction that another war was bound to break out within twenty or twenty five years of the end of WWI was prescient. Odette did not forget her grandfather’s words, urging her to do her duty when the time came.