Walters, Anne-Marie Moondrop to Gascony

On a cold, moonlit night in January 1944, Anne-Marie Walters, just 20 years old, parachuted into south-western France to join the Resistance in preparing for the long-awaited Allied invasion. The daughter of a British father and French mother, she was to work as a courier for George Starr, head of the SOE's Wheelwright network. Over the next seven months, Anne-Marie travelled across the region, delivering messages, supplying explosives, organising the escape of downed airmen and receiving parachute drops of weapons and personnel in the middle of the night all while living in constant fear of being caught and tortured by the Gestapo. Then, on the eve of liberation, she was sent on foot across the Pyrenees to Spain to deliver urgent dispatches to London. Anne-Marie Walters wrote Moondrop to Gascony immediately after the war, while the events were still fresh in her memory. It is a story full of adventure, camaraderie and kindness, full of betrayal and horrific atrocities, and full of the often unnoticed bravery of many ordinary French men and women who risked their lives to drive German troops out of France. And throughout it all shines Anne-Marie's quiet bravery, her keen sense of humour and, above all, her pure joie de vivre.