Pippa Latour, a Portrait in "Cool and Lonely Courage"

We are back for our second installment on knitting and espionage with Pippa Latour's memoir, The Last Secret Agent: My Life as a Spy Behind Nazi Lines. First a disclaimer: knitting stands out only as the most normal, ordinary thing in the extraordinary life of Pippa Latour, and it plays a critical, albeit small, part in her life as an Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent. Pippa Latour is above all a survivor--when she died in 2023 at the age of 102, she literally was the last surviving secret agent who served during World War II.

What's perhaps most surprising is how her life before the war perfectly prepared her for being a spy. With a French father and English mother, she grew up in Africa speaking many languages (Swahili, French and English). She was also used to hardship, loss and violence--her father died when she was four months old, killed in an uprising against Western doctors lead by local healers. Her mother died when she was four. Raised by various relatives and friends of her parents, she was shuttled from one home to another, so she constantly had to adapt to new situations. She was used to living in the bush and sleeping outside in a hammock. She knew how to shoot a gun and pilot a plane before her spy training. Those years playing with monkeys in the trees meant she killed it on the ropes courses too. All this prepared her to parachute behind enemy lines, adopt the cover of a 14-year-old French girl selling goat-milk soap for her "grandparents," while she gathered intelligence and transmitted it by Morse code through radios hidden in 27 locations across her territory in France. Yeah. She did that. Most radio transmitters survived six weeks behind enemy lines. Not Pippa Latour.

Major Selwyn Jepson was the British commander who advocated for recruiting women as spies because

"Women have a greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men, who usually want a mate with them. Men don't work alone; their lives tend to be always in company with other men. Women are mostly on their own" (p. 66).

We decided a World War II era cocktail would be a great accompaniment to discussing Pippa's story, so try the delicious "Three Dots and a Dash," which is "V" in Morse code for Victory. It is because of the sacrifices of so many and the "cool and lonely courage" of women like Pippa Latour that we enjoy the lives we have today, and we are profoundly inspired and deeply grateful.