My great grandfather passed about a month ago. Last week, I learned he’d left me a small inheritance, just one hulking chest from the attic of his old house. Figures he’d leave the house to my cousin and give me essentially nothing.
There isn’t much in it. It’s mostly a collection of old books and things from his time in the army. He was British, and according to my mother, he was in some kind of special operations unit during World War II. There’s a lot of old photographs, mostly old-fashioned looking people standing in front of old buildings completely whitewashed in sunlight. Some of them are more recent.
When I’d first opened it, his old army uniform had been sitting on top of everything, wrapped around a large, leatherbound journal of some sorts. It’s excruciatingly old. Every page feels like if you touch it too hard it might crumble into ash and blow away. However, they’ve also clearly been touched a lot. Each edge is browned and worn, and a lot of them have fingerprints all over them.
I thought it was a journal, but after reading a bit of it, I realized it was more of a memoir. Everything’s written in past tense, and my great grandfather makes several allusions to a foggy memory about some details. I think it’s the story of how he met my great grandmother, but I can’t be too sure, since it takes place during the war and the woman in the story is never mentioned by name.
I read through the whole thing in about a week. It’s relatively short, but I’m also a student and I work a part-time job, so my spare time was limited. It mentioned one mission by name several times, an Operation Phoenix Fire. I did some research online and couldn’t find anything about it so I contacted a friend of mine who’s interning at a history museum in London.
After some correspondence, she read it and called me one afternoon to tell me to post about it here. I’m not sure how an insomniac subreddit is supposed to help me figure out what my great grandfather was writing about.
She’s still analyzing the physical copy with the help of some of her colleagues, so I only have some of the first bit of it that I managed to write down. From what I can tell, it starts right about when World War II was coming to a close.
Operation Phoenix Fire - 1944
I didn’t enlist early like most of our boys. By the time the war was starting up and Britain was sending her sons off to fight, I was almost twenty-two years old. Due to a horseriding accident at Eton a few months prior, I didn’t pass the physical exam the first try and was forced to wait until I’d healed up. It was late when I was able to, in October of 1940. There was something different about my exam, though, when I finally did pass. Instead of assigning me to a unit, the recruiters had me go off into a side room.
It was there that I first met him. I never knew his name, nor did anyone I ever interacted with thereafter. Tall he was, broad-shouldered, rugged of face. A strange beret adorned his head.
The door closed behind me and this behemoth of a man motioned for me to sit across the table from him. He stared at me in silence for a long moment while the sounds of enlisting continued somewhere in the other room.
“Would you like to be a part of the Special Operations Executive?” he said finally, steepling his hands in front of his face while he talked. “We’re looking for men like you.”
I looked at him confused for a moment. “What kind of man am I?” I asked sheepishly.
In response he sprang out of his chair and paced behind the desk. “Smart,” he exclaimed. “Quick. Capable. Cultured.” He stopped, placed his hands on the back of the chair. “You’re all of these. We’ve had our eye on you for some time.”
My heart was beginning to race within my breast. They had been looking for… me? I almost couldn’t believe it. There was something in the way he spoke that was enticing, inspiring.
“Can you die for your country?” he continued, resuming his pacing. “Can you face the enemy? Can you infiltrate the mind of the enemy, become one of them in order to complete whatever mission your superiors throw at you? Can you face horrors you’ve never imagined?”
The last sentence was drawn out, quieter than the rest, and I had the strangest feeling it wasn’t something to entice the desire to adventure within me. He sounded serious, like I was going to face horrors I’d never imagined.
I sat in silence for a minute, my mouth dry. Moments before I had been impatiently waiting in a stuffy recruitment office, now I’d just been rattled with what seemed the opportunity of a lifetime.
“I would like to be a part of your special operations,” I said finally, standing up and taking off my hat. “I am willing to die for my country.”
Looking at me for a moment, scrutinizing every detail in my face it seemed, he stretched out his hand and I took it. I felt something in his grasp, and when I pulled away I noticed a miniscule envelope now enclosed in my hand.
He leaned in close and murmured in my ear. “Take this and read it alone. Don’t show it to anyone. When you’ve finished reading it, destroy it.”
Pulling away, he smiled broadly, crinkling his rugged cheeks to the side of his face. “You’ll report to the French Embassy in Hyde Park next Tuesday, Private,” he said. “Ten a.m. sharp. I will not be seeing you there.” With those words, he ushered me to the door.
It was well after dinner when I returned home. My parents, it seemed, had already retired to an early evening. My sisters did not appear to be in the house.
Retreating to my father’s empty study, I stoked up a small fire in the fireplace and sat in a wingback chair by the window in order to read my small piece of crucial information. Unfolding the envelope eagerly, I was faced with five words of instruction in gold lettering.
“TELL THE CLERK ‘PHOENIX FIRE’”
I’m copying this off a photo on my phone, and the next pages are somewhat illegible. I’ll have to contact my friend in London to send some more high-quality pictures before I can post more information, but it’ll have to wait for now.
I also asked her to look through any records that the Hyde Park Embassy might have, but she hasn’t returned any of my calls lately, probably busy with the rest of the manuscript. I’ll post more as soon as I can.