Odette Sansom | The Unbreakable Spy of WW2

[musique dramatique] Odette Brady was born on the 28th of April 1912 in Amiens, in Northern France.

Her father, Gaston, was a banker and decorated soldier who was killed in 1918, just 30 days before the Armistice.

Odette was six years old.

Her grandparents took her and her brother Louis to lay flowers on Gaston's grave every Sunday, and her grandfather told them another war would come.

And when it did, it would be their duty to serve as their father had.

Odette was plagued by illness during her childhood.

Polio at age seven left her paralyzed for over a year and blind for three and a half years.

Then she was hit by rheumatic fever.

In the hope that the coastal air would do her good, the family moved to Boulogne in 1926, enrolling Odette in a convent school.

Her final school report called her intelligent and full of humor, but obstinate, petulant, and strong-willed.

In the summer of 1930, she met Roy Sansom, the son of a British officer who had been billeted with her family during the First World War.

They married in 1931 and moved to Kensington in England in 1932.

Three daughters followed.

When war was declared in September of 1939, Roy enlisted, leaving Odette with the children in London to endure the Blitz.

Sheltering with her daughters in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of their garden, she came to accept that staying in the city was no longer manageable.

She moved the family to a rented cottage near the village of Redball on the border between Somerset and Devon.

As she planted vegetables, tended chickens, and nursed her ailing mother-in-law in the countryside, news from France grew steadily worse.

She heard via the Red Cross that the Nazis had seized her mother's home and her brother had been wounded.

She felt guilty for enjoying a peaceful life while others were dying for her children's freedom.

Then, in the spring of 1942, the Royal Navy issued a radio appeal asking the public to send personal photographs of the French coastline to assist with invasion planning.

Odette thought responding was the least she could do, so she gathered family photographs of the beaches near Calais and Boulogne and mailed them in.

But she mistakenly addressed the package to the War Office instead of the Admiralty.

She had included a note explaining that her parents were French and that she knew the coastal area well.

Only a week later, a letter arrived calling her to London.

She expected she was just going to collect her photographs.