The Mouse That Roared

Nancy_Wake

They couldn’t catch her.

The White Mouse

Beneath her immaculate red fingernails, fur coats and love for gin and tonic, Ms Wake was a courageous and ruthless warrior.  General Dwight Eisenhower once said Wake alone was worth five army divisions.  “I have only one thing to say: I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn’t kill more,” Ms Wake famously said of her wartime exploits.

With a roar that makes both her name and nickname seem quaintly ironic this is Nancy at 89: “Somebody once asked me, ‘Have you ever been afraid?’ … Hah! I’ve never been afraid in my life.”

Nancy Grace Augusta Wake, Crafter Artisan, (30 August 1912 – 7 August 2011) served as a British agent during the later part of World War II. She became a leading figure in the maquis groups of the French Resistance and was one of the Allies’ most decorated servicewomen of the war. After the fall of France in 1940, she became a courier for the French Resistance and later joined the escape network of Captain Ian Garrow. By 1943, Wake was the Gestapo’s most wanted person, with a 5 million-franc price on her head.

After reaching Britain, Wake joined the Special Operations Executive. On the night of 29–30 April 1944, Wake was parachuted into the Auvergne, becoming a liaison between London and the local maquis group headed by Captain Henri Tardivat in the Forest of Tronçais. From April 1944 until the liberation of France, her 7,000+ maquisards fought 22,000 SS soldiers, causing 1,400 casualties, while taking only 100 themselves. [Wikipedia,revised]

 Nancy Wake’s interview

She was much younger than her brothers and sisters, and strongly independent. Born in New Zealand.

“I was a loner and I had a good imagination.”

She was a rebel, in particular shunning her mother’s strict religious beliefs.  Wake was raised without affection by her embittered mother after her father had walked out on them.

“I adored my father,” Wake recently told the Sunday Times, sitting on her bar stool with a walking stick in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. “He was very good-looking. But he was a bastard. He went to New Zealand to make a movie about the Maoris, and he never came back. He sold our house from under us and we were kicked out.”

In 1928, at the age of 16, Nancy commenced work as a nurse. In 1932, she inherited some money and immediately used it to travel to London, then mainland Europe to train and work as a journalist. One of her early assignments was to interview Adolph Hitler. In the same year, she visited Vienna and witnessed the impact of the Nazi regime first hand. She later recounted:

“The stormtroopers had tied the Jewish people up to massive wheels. They were rolling the wheels along, and the stormtroopers were whipping the Jews. I stood there and thought, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do about it, but if I can do anything one day, I’ll do it.’ And I always had that picture in my mind, all through the war.”

Slowly but surely Nancy drew herself into the fight. In 1940 she joined the embryonic resistance movement as a courier, smuggling messages and food to underground groups in Southern France. She also bought an ambulance and used it to help refugees fleeing the German advance.

As the beautiful wife of a wealthy businessman, she had an ability to travel in a way that few others could contemplate. She obtained false papers that allowed her to stay and work in the Vichy zone in occupied France. She became deeply involved in helping to spirit a thousand or more escaped prisoners of war and downed Allied fliers out of France. Although she was judged to be unruly, her exuberant spirits and physical daring were thought “good for morale”.

Like all the Artisans, Crafters are people who love action, and who know instinctively that their activities are more enjoyable, and more effective, if done impulsively, spontaneously, subject to no schedules or standards but their own. [Please Understand Me II]

By 1942, the Gestapo had become aware of an unidentified agent that was proving to be a significant thorn in their side. They code named the agent ‘the white mouse‘  because the agent kept slipping between the cracks and avoiding capture and they listed her as number one on their wanted list, attracting a five million franc reward.

When the underground network was betrayed that same year, she decided to flee Marseille.

Escape was not easy. She made six attempts to get out of France by crossing the Pyrenees into Spain. On one of these attempts she was captured by the French Milice (Vichy militia) in Toulouse and interrogated for four days. She held out, refusing to give the Milice any information, and with the help of the legendary ‘Scarlet Pimpernel of WWII’, Patrick O’Leary, tricked her captors into releasing her.

Wake’s dramatic life story and her feisty, courageous personality made her the ideal subject for documentaries and dramatisations. She tells her own story with interviews, reconstructions, stills and film footage in Nancy Wake – Code Name: The White Mouse.

In 1987 a television mini-series was made about her life. However the subject was irritated by historical liberties that were taken with her life story, such as showing her having an affair while working for the Resistance in Auvergne:

“What do you think my bosses in England would have thought, all those thousands of pounds to train me and for me to go and have an affair. Really! The mini-series was well-acted but in parts it was extremely stupid. At one stage they had me cooking eggs and bacon to feed the men. For goodness sake did the Allies parachute me into France to fry eggs and bacon for the men? There wasn’t an egg to be had for love nor money, and even if there had been why would I be frying it when I had men to do that sort of thing?”

Nancy Wake’s comrade Henri Tardivat perhaps best characterised the guerrilla chieftain: “She is the most feminine woman I know, until the fighting starts. Then, she is like five men.”

openquoteFreedom is the only thing worth living for. While I was doing that work I used to think it didn’t matter if I died, because without freedom there was no point in living.closedquote — Nancy Wake

Other examples of Crafter Artisans include:  Karen FinermanClarissa ShieldsChelsea BakerLarry BirdKatherine HepburnBruce LeeJay-ZMickey RourkeLisa PresleyTatum and Ryan O’Neal and Michael Jordan.

The Broken Mirror of Fac-tion

For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing,
whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold,
as twere, the mirror up to nature,
to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image,
and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
Hamlet: Act 3, Scene 2

The Mirror of Fic-tion

He had written a play that won him the Pulitizer Prize in Fiction.

Yet, the broken mirror of reality, bedeviled him and beguiled him.

She had become one of the most famous actresses of the age.

Yet, the broken mirror of reality, bedeviled her and beguiled her.

Make-believe and Playing are simpler than Reality.  And they can serve as a safe haven for the Four Temperaments.

What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson 
Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away

“She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence.” — Arthur Miller. 

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Saturation Dynasty

superman vs batman

Batman vs. Superman filmed it’s first scene in East L.A. this weekend featuring fictional football teams Gotham City University vs. Metropolis State University:

Seventeen-time Emmy award winning HBO series Boardwalk Empire airs S4 E7 tonight and it seems it is still time to continue riding the “good TV show” bandwagon.  The critically acclaimed bootlegging drama picked up five primetime statues this year alone including Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Drama Series.

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Tomorrow is Now

She was dying and angry, but she worked on her manuscript.

With passion because she had something to say before she died.

She wasn’t happy with Jack and his party.

But she understood to a large degree, politics — since her husband had been in most powerful position for twelve years, and she had been described as the “First Lady of the World.”

“It is today when we must create the world of the future.” 

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The young Eleanor Roosevelt seemed a most unlikely candidate for fame; there was certainly nothing about Eleanor that suggested that an American President would some day honor her with the title, “First Lady of the World.” Eleanor Roosevelt lived for almost seven decades, and her ascendancy was slow and measured. She never led men in battle, and like almost all Idealists, she abhorred strife of any kind and hated war. [Presidential Temperament]

She was not martyred to a cause, she did not inspire crowds with her speech, she never wore the badge of any high office.  But she a had voice.  And she used it.

Her last book was Tomorrow is Now, published after her death, was recently rereleased with new forward by Bill Clinton.

tomorrow-is-now-cover-art

Eleanor Roosevelt, Counselor Idealist, knew she was dying when she began this book. Yet she so wanted to complete it that she endured dangerously high fevers, tremors and persistent fatigue, a raw throat, and bleeding gums to dictate the first draft. Although she eventually yielded to family and friends who pressed her to “slow down” and cancel appointments and public appearances, Eleanor kept working on Tomorrow Is Now— even when she grew too weak to hold a teacup and her voice dropped to a whisper. She would apologize to Elinore Denniston, whom her agent had sent to take her dictation, for how much harder it made Denniston’s work— especially on those days when Eleanor’s voice was so faint that it was almost inaudible. Yet Eleanor continually struggled to make herself heard, pushing herself so hard.

She could have dedicated her last energies to an anthology of her most important works or she could have delegated the task to a trusted confidant to complete after her death. But she did not. She chose to start and finish this book because, as she told Denniston, “I have something that I want terribly to say.”

Eleanor Roosevelt had always had the need to inform people of what she thought was the truth.  Like her fellow Counselor Idealists Aung San Suu Kyi and Mohandas K Gandhi, she was insistent in her beliefs — she contended to her dying days.  When she was First Lady there were many death threats against her because of her radical and contentious views.  Passion was on both sides, many people loved her, and many people hated her.

Counselor Idealists are Diplomatic Contenders.

“… Contending entails competition. Thus to contend with another’s work one must hold one’s groundhang onto one’s position, stick to one’s intention, tend to one’s business, stay the course, in a word, be tenacious. It is not so much that one is bent on overtaking or outdoing others, as it is having one’s way. Contenders will have their way if at all possible.” Personology, page 77.

Blessed with vivid imaginations, Counselors are often seen as the most poetical of all the types, and in fact they use a lot of poetic imagery in their everyday language. Their great talent for language-both written and spoken-is usually directed toward communicating with people in a personalized way. Counselors are highly intuitive and can recognize another’s emotions or intentions – good or evil – even before that person is aware of them. Counselors themselves can seldom tell how they came to read others’ feelings so keenly. This extreme sensitivity to others could very well be the basis of the Counselor’s remarkable ability to experience a whole array of psychic phenomena. [Please Understand Me II]

openquoteGreat minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.closedquote  — Eleanor Roosevelt

Other examples of Counselor Idealists include: Milton EricksonTed SorensenAung San Suu KyiVaclav HavelCarl JungEleanor Roosevelt[excerpted from Presential Temperament], Mohandas Gandhi

Princely Entailment

Entailment –

1.a. The act of entailing, especially property.
  b. The state of being entailed.
2. An entailed estate.
3. A predetermined order of succession, as to an estate or to an office.
4. Something transmitted as if by unalterable inheritance.

princewilliam 2_edited-3

What, we might ask, is this thing called “temperament,” and what relation does it have to character and personality? There are two sides to personality, one of which is temperament and the other character. Temperament is a configuration of inclinations, while character is a configuration of habits. Character is disposition, temperament pre-disposition. Thus, for example, foxes are predisposed — born — to raid hen houses, beavers to dam up streams, dolphins to affiliate in close-knit schools, and owls to hunt alone in the dark. Each type of creature, unless arrested in its maturation by an unfavorable environment, develops the habit appropriate to its temperament: stealing chickens, building dams, nurturing companions, or hunting at night. [Please Understand Me II]

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Native Province

homeland 1

Eight-time Emmy award-winning Showtime series Homeland premiered Season 3 this week and it’s just about time to hop on the “good TV show” bandwagon.  This year at the Emmy’s Homeland picked up Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Henry Bromell) and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series (Claire Danes).  Though last year it took some backlash for exploring controversial Islamophobia and American Foreign Policy related concepts.

http://www.sho.com/sho/homeland/home

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