well this was a wild ride from start to finish
I’ve wanted to read The White Mouse, Nancy Wake’s autobiography about her time in the French Resistance, for years, but it’s long out of print and there were no ebooks to be found. But apparently that is no longer the case: there is a Kindle version, and it is glorious.
Yeah, this pretty much captures the spirit of the book.
The first two great loves of Nancy’s life were, apparently, her dog and a gorgeous Yugoslavian woman named Stephanie.
Nancy invites Stephanie to move in with her after witnessing Stephanie’s extremely dramatic breakup with her husband, and then proceeds to namedrop like crazy for several paragraphs, including a bit about the time a famous actor invited them to see him play the lead in The Trial of Oscar WIlde. None of this is subtle.
Nancy does eventually meet and marry a dude who she seems to love quite a bit, but not as much as she loves describing the elaborate meal they served at their wedding. This is like CS Lewis level food description.
Basically she goes into more detail about food than she does about most of the military operations she was involved in.
Later, after she jumps from a moving train and runs for it while being machine-gunned at, Nancy spends a paragraph describing the jewelry that had been in the handbag she dropped, in detail. She was still very upset about losing it at the time she wrote her autobiography, forty years later. Nancy’s determination to Look Her Best is genuinely impressive.
This bit takes place after she crossed the Pyrenees on foot and has been wearing the same clothes for like a month. She does this specifically because two of the women who crossed the Pyrenees with her have been pissing her off and she wants them to look extra worn and bedraggled by comparison. I love her.
Eventually Nancy makes it to England, joins the SOE and starts training to be parachuted into France where she’ll join up with the Resistance. First, though, she has to embarrass the shit out of some dudes.
Nancy finds time to pull three separate pranks with those condoms before she’s done training. Nancy does not fuck around.
Nancy had more fun at SOE training than the entire cast of Animal House had in the entire runtime of Animal House. I LOVE HER.
Once Nancy gets to France she is briefly stranded without a radio operator, but he does turn up eventually. Every single story about this dude in the entire book is incredible.
I mean, there was a war on. You might die tomorrow. Nancy understands.
Nancy also brought two silk nightgowns (one pink and one blue) with her to Occupied France and made a point of changing out of her battledress every night before going to sleep. At one point Nancy risks capture because she needs a new set of clothes for a mission (ones that don’t look like they’ve had WWII fought in them) and a tailor in a nearby village has promised her a custom-made outfit so she needs to get to the fitting.
There is a real person named Donald Darling. I am so glad.
For the record, Nancy punched a waiter in Paris after the war because he was disparaging about the English in front of her friend. It was awesome.
Nancy’s spirits do get low for a while after the war, though, especially since her husband died in a prison camp while she was in England and she didn’t find out until after the liberation of Paris. It’s okay, though:
Nancy seems like the kind of person who makes other people even more awesome by her mere presence, like her Resistance commander buddy:
Basically, Nancy has lived a LIFE. This sums her up pretty well, I think:
