On the road from St. Jean de Luz to Bayonne is a village called Anglet. A narrow lane leads to a drab, grey villa with a view of the distant mountains and below them the sparkling blue of the bay of St. Jean de Luz. It was to this inconspicuous place that Dédée came when she returned from the British consulate in Bilbao. It was here that, with Arnold Deppé, she had brought Miss Richards and the ten Belgians six weeks before. Here, too, she had rested in the warm southern weather before she set out on her first march over the Pyrenees. Three weeks had passed before she found herself once more in the shabby sweep of drive in front of the villa.
She knocked on the door. It was opened by a slight, round-faced woman who wore a striped dress and sandals. Her auburn hair was cut short. She had prominent, fierce grey eyes tinged with green. Her age was difficult to guess. She looked, at the most, thirty-five. As she stood at the door, no one could have doubted that here was a strong and vital character. Her name was Elvire De Greef, alias Tante Go. Her strange pseudonym derived from the original password used by visitors to the villa at Anglet and recalled a lamented pet dog called ‘Gogo’.
‘Gogo est mort.’
Tante Go, a Belgian like Dédée, had worked before the War in the offices of a well-known Belgian newspaper. Her husband, Fernand, had been in business in Brussels. They had lived with their two children, Freddy and Janine, at the villa at Anglet since the summer of 1940. When the Germans invaded Belgium, they set out with their children for Bordeaux to take ship to England to serve the Allies. But in the scrimmage which followed the collapse of the French, there was no room for them. For days they wandered disconsolately in search of shelter. At length they found the empty villa and became its tenants. They lived there all the war and gave magnificent service to the Comet Line.
Tante Go, as she was known from Brussels to Bilbao, was the driving force of this courageous family. Early in 1941 Arnold Deppé had come to the villa as a messenger from Dédée and her father. He had known the De Greefs in happier days in Belgium. He now besought them to help him find a guide who would take young men, who wished to escape to England, over the Pyrenees.
Tante Go was delighted. She was bored by life at the villa. Freddy and Janine, aged eighteen and seventeen, were able to continue their studies in Bayonne. Her husband, Fernand, had become interpreter to the German headquarters at Anglet. She therefore pledged her aid, and immediately took charge of operations in the Spanish frontier zone. With Arnold, she searched in the underworld of St. Jean de Luz and Ciboure and found the smuggler, Thomas, who later guided Dédée on her first journey to Bilbao at an exorbitant price.
When Arnold returned to Belgium to report to Dédée and bring down Miss Richards and the ten Belgians, Tante Go busied herself with finding ‘safe’ houses where parties could shelter before they crossed to Spain. She was vigorous and brave, a great organiser. In a short time, a marshalling point for fugitives had been established in the neighbourhood of Anglet, where Tante Go, bicycling furiously from house to house, recruited new helpers every day.
Tante Go and her husband and children were well qualified for underground warfare. Fernand De Greef, tall and dark and yo
