The plaintive tune of my secret wartime carols
Mildred Schutz tells Anne Sebba how being in occupied Italy didn’t stop the festive season
‘You are not to say that I was a spy,” Mildred Schutz tells me. Now in her 97th year, Mildred, like so many other women of her generation who signed the Official Secrets Act, has always been remarkably modest about her wartime record. Sent to occupied Italy as part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (the FANYS), she was also working for Winston Churchill’s secretive Special Operations Executive, intended to “set Europe ablaze”. Today, she is one of the last surviving women of wartime SOE.
“I knew that, if we were captured, we’d be shot as traitors. You just hoped it wouldn’t happen,” she recalls calmly, almost 80 years later.
Nineteen-year-old Mildred Buck as she then was, or simply “Buck”, may not have conducted undercover espionage operations, but her job as part of the SOE unit organising the partisans around an Italy not yet free of German Nazis or Italian fascists, required nerves of steel and a cheerful disposition.
Cadet Ensign Buck arrived in Naples in the autumn of 1944 after a 10-day crossing in rough waters dodging U boats, during which she was violently seasick. Once at Monopoli, a coastal town on the heel of Italy, she worked as PA to the officer in charge of handing out weapons to partisans.
“You were always aware that this was dangerous territory,” Mildred tells me with classic understatement. “But war was an everyday way of life and you just hoped it would be over and done with as quickly as possible.”
One of her most enduring memories is the Christmas carol service she and her fellow FANYS organised in December 1944, shortly after her arrival. That winter it was so cold and snowy that she slept in her clothes and heavy coat on top of a thin straw pallet.
“In those freezing conditions and far from home, we needed something to raise our spirits,” Mildred says.
So when somebody found a cellar leading off from an underground tunnel in a damaged derelict building, everyone was excited.
“It was full of rubble, but we girls set about clearing it up and decorating it with greenery, and the men scrounged chairs and planks to put between the chairs. A church
‘I knew that, if captured, we’d be shot. You just hoped it wouldn’t happen’
organist was found who could play a badly out of tune harmonium we discovered,” she recalls. Unsurprisingly, news of the carol service spread like wildfire.
“We managed to get all the carols translated into various us languages, a guages, typed up and then copied opied on an old cylinder-type copying machine with a wind-up d-up handle,” she says.
“There were Poles, , French and other nationalities, es, probably some proGerman Italians, escapees on the run and even German deserters,” says
Mildred. “We knew they were out in the countryside because they would raid our kitchens to get food from our mess. I think nk there was a reluctance ce to capture them and put them in a POW camp p
because then you would have to feed them,” she recalls.
On December 25 1944, the cellar was packed with about a hundred people of different nationalities squashed together belting out Hark the Herald Angels Sing and Silent Night, using different words but a familiar tune. Today Mildred says she can still picture the scene, a room full of you young g men e a and dg girls “all fighting the same war, all hoping to survive… Every time I hear that plaintive tune today I feel a lurch in my tummy.”
She had a box brownie camer camera on which she was allowed to record ce certain scenes, as long a as her pictures did not include precise locations. “Security was very tight and we weren’t allowed to keep diaries. But I can remember that day v very clearly. It started with a girls vs boys netb netball match in the town squa square and was followed by an unappetising lunch of tinned turkey and dehydrated vegetables. But there was always plenty of Italian wine to wash it down.”
Following strict instructions, she never talked to anyone, even her parents, about what she had done in the war; organising and training the disparate groups of partisans, which might include Catholic aristocrats as well as Communist peasants, making sure they were on the Allies’ side.
Mildred now lives in Surrey, not far from where she grew up, with her five children and six grandchildren close by (on her return to the UK after the war she married Reginald Schutz, an accountant at the shipping firm where she worked). As she awaits the call from her GP about a vaccine, Christmas will be a quiet affair, seeing just the one family in her support bubble. She remains bright and optimistic, saying she expects the situation will “sort itself out”.
When I ask for her abiding memory of the wartime Christmas carol service she tells me: “How ridiculous war is. We are all human beings.”