A Heroine For Our Day: Eileen Nearne, British Spy In WWII France

As we are treated to the daily avalanche of words, sounds, and images lionizing public women like Lady Gaga, MichelleMaBelle, BigSis, Eileen Kagan, Oprah(how can we forget Oprah?)--the depressing list just goes on and on, OS hopes we'll take a moment to remember a very private woman, Eileen Nearne, whose service and sacrifices made it possible for us to live in a world not run by the Nazis.


From the New York Times Obituaries this week:

After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave.

But after the police looked through her possessions, including a Croix de Guerre medal awarded to her by the French government after World War II, the obscurity Ms. Nearne had cultivated for decades began to slip away.

Known to her neighbors as an insistently private woman who loved cats and revealed almost nothing about her past, she has emerged as a heroine in the tortured story of Nazi-occupied France, one of the secret agents who helped prepare the French resistance for the D-Day landings in June 1944.

On Tuesday, the anonymity that Ms. Nearne had cherished in life was denied her in death. A funeral service in Torquay featured a military bugler and piper and an array of uniformed mourners. A red cushion atop her coffin bore her wartime medals. Eulogies celebrated her as one of 39 British women who were parachuted into France as secret agents by the Special Operations Executive, a wartime agency known informally as “Churchill’s secret army,” which recruited more than 14,000 agents to conduct espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines.

The rest of the story is harrowing, as she heroically endured suffering for her nation and for freedom. In real ways, she never recovered from the experience, and her death at age eighty-nine was a release from suffering.

OS sits here, able to live his wonderful life in the US, because English women like Eileen faithfully served during their lifetimes.

It receives so little mention these days, but there is a large quiet slice of British society that has always quietly gone about its business of living with great courage and generosity in the face of daunting odds. It continues quietly today, and as a matter of fact, OS was the direct recipient of some of that grace this morning. Someday, in about five years, OS will be able to tell this remarkable story. For now, only silence will do.

Yes, we've got us a biiig economy problem, but a bigger cultural problem, which has to be tackled before the economy has a chance of turning around.

It's about the culture we choose to build by the lives we lead, and the heroes we emulate.

It's the culture.

It's the culture.

It's the culture.

OS prays daily that the Eileens of this world will prevail over the Lady Gagas. His children's futures depend upon how we choose.