This interview from 2021 has been republished following the death of Jane Birkin at the age of 76
Every day this summer, Jane Birkin has taken a walk along the “treacherous” Brittany coast around which her father sailed by night during the Second World War. As a navigator in a clandestine naval unit, Lt-Cdr David Birkin’s job, she tells me, was “taking British spies across the Channel to France and bringing home stranded airmen and escaped POWs”.
She knows precisely how dangerous that must have been, because she’s been out in a small boat to sail in his wake many times and admits: “Every summer, I’ve got myself caught out. These waters have such terrible currents, you know. Awful. When I walk through the wind on grey days like today, I think of these men, sitting waiting in their boats in the cold and the dark, not able to light a cigarette in case the Germans saw the glow.”
Dividing her time between Paris and a small village in Brittany, the 74-year-old singer, actress and fashion icon has lived in France since 1969. That was the year in which Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, her lover at the time, caused a scandal by releasing the suggestive song Je t’aime… moi non plus. By that point, she had already married (aged 18) and divorced John Barry, the Oscar-winning film composer, given birth to her first child (Kate Barry) and stripped off in Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic.
Today, she tells me that “my decision to go to France – not Spain or Italy – was driven by my father’s huge admiration for the French Resistance members he’d known during the war. I knew he had won the Distinguished Service Cross. But, because he was bound by the Official Secrets Act, I didn’t have a complete idea of what they had all done together until later on… of why he admired the Bretons without limits.”
This month, the full story of David Birkin’s war work is revealed in Tim Spicer’s A Dangerous Enterprise. The book gives a gripping account of the 15th Motor Gun Boat Flotilla, the most highly decorated Royal Navy unit of the Second World War. At its height in 1944, it consisted of four boats – among them a converted paddle steamer, the Westward Ho, and a luxury yacht, the Kiloran – crewed by 125 men, and commanded directly by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
“Finding the Birkin archive was the most thrilling moment in my research,” Spicer tells me. Jane and her brother, the director Andrew Birkin, were able to show him “all his papers and hours of taped interviews with their father”.
Born in 1914, the son of a First World War veteran who ran a lacemaking business in Nottingham, David Birkin spent much of his youth in hospital after a “bungled sinus operation” when he was 17. He’d endured 34 operations on his lungs and eyes by 1939, leaving him with double vision, a bleeding lung and chronic headaches. But, determined to join his brothers in the fight against Hitler, Birkin trained as a telegraphist and “with a bit of cunning and connivance from the medical board” was passed fit to join the Navy’s Wireless School in 1941.
“By any standards he was unfit for military service,” Spicer tells me. “He also suffered from violent seasickness.” But in January 1942, Birkin was summoned to London and recruited to join the 15th MGBF. “He was pretty well connected,” Spicer says. “He knew people like [the Minister of Information] Brendan Bracken and Mountbatten. There’s nothing tangible to suggest that they did anything other than perhaps mention him to the right people. It’s pure speculation. But it’s a fact that he knew them and it’s a fact he got into a very secret organisation.”
With no real sailing experience and only a correspondence course in navigation under his belt, Birkin had a steep learning curve ahead of him. “His job was to guide those boats across the Channel on moonless nights,” Spicer says. “There was no GPS or radar. It was all charts and pencils. In spite of his physical complications, Birkin was extraordinarily good at it. He was both a brilliant mathematician and an accomplished artist. This was a perfect combination of skills for the old-fashioned method of navigation called dead reckoning.” Spicer’s book includes Birkin’s sketches of all the rocks around the French coast, showing how they appeared at different times and tides. “He could visualise the routes and identify lone rocks,” Spicer says. “He picked it all up very quickly.”
“My father was brave,” Jane tells me. “I never saw fear in him as a child. He was very calm. Perhaps he learnt that because he had to be brave when people were counting on him. And if you’re frightfully seasick, as he was, you have to dominate yourself to such a great degree.”
David Birkin was also a great storyteller, bringing to life the people with whom he worked, including Guy Hamilton, who went on to direct four James Bond films. Spicer tells me that the opening scene of Goldfinger (1964) – in which 007 climbs out of the sea in a diving suit, blows up a heroin factory, then strips off the diving suit to reveal a dinner jacket – was based on a 1940 mission. A motor gunboat had ferried SIS agent Peter Tazelaar across to Holland dressed to party under his drysuit. The SIS correctly theorised that the Germans would pay no attention to a man staggering along the shore, stinking of booze in full evening dress, and Tazelaar was able to make contact with the Dutch Resistance.
“The flotilla guys were brave,” Spicer says. “But the stress on the Resistance people hiding agents and running escape lines was relentless. Our guys could come home and shrug off the night’s fear and excitement. Birkin had a luxurious hotel room to recover in, whereas the poor old Frenchies had to climb back up the cliffs and lie awake waiting for the Gestapo’s tap on the door that could come at any moment. And often did.”
Jane invited Spicer out to Brittany to meet survivors. “We walked the route the Resistance took while pretending to collect seaweed,” he tells me. “You can still sit in the square and see the café from which they operated. I could picture them bent over the radio with the lookout in the trees looking for the German detector vans.”
One man Birkin knows in Brittany was captured and tortured. Others were sent to concentration camps. “I was with a local friend yesterday whose father used to hide people above his garage,” she tells me. “He was 13 or 14 at the time so he remembers very well. Lots of the older people involved have died. I wish I had taped and filmed all the people I knew from the Bonaparte beaches. My father was always very clear that whatever he did was easy. He left a country where everybody was with him. People here were hiding airmen in their attics while their neighbours were counting the number of eggshells in the dustbin, ready to inform on them.”
David Birkin told his daughter a story that haunts her “about a woman whose husband was working with my father. She was pregnant. The Germans were very nice to her as the months went by. But when she went into labour, they tied her legs together and asked her to tell them where her husband was. She and the baby died.”
Many locals “didn’t talk about what happened during those years”, Birkin tells me. “Sometimes, there were divisions within families. It was so complicated. A few of them in my village have gone to see the mayor to ask about naming a street after a 19-year-old girl who was horribly tortured and didn’t give any names away. And yet many people here don’t know about it.”
Birkin asked survivors how they went on living with the neighbours who had turned them in. “They told me that they just crossed over the road. In the same way that Serge’s [Russian Jewish] parents did when they were turned in by the concierge [of their Paris apartment] and had to go into hiding for four years. Well, it’s amazing that they came back to the area and did talk to people. They focused on being thankful to the good people who did help them, and took extraordinary personal risks to do it.”
She lingers on “that terrifying sense of people closing in on you. It is so difficult to judge what you would do in those impossible circumstances, if people were going to take it out on your family… This is what many people in Afghanistan will be feeling today.”
Birkin speaks in cut-glass, RP tones – her voice a time capsule reminder that she hasn’t lived in Britain since the 1960s, although she is planning to make Lancashire hotpot for dinner, she tells me. Thanks to an arresting new documentary, Jane by Charlotte, made by her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, she has been looking back on life with her own family.
On camera, Birkin reveals that she saw her second daughter as “unknown territory” as a child. “When you were 14,” she tells Charlotte, “I was dying to see you naked. I asked to see your breasts.” Gainsbourg casually replies that she asked her own daughter the same, and got a refusal. Together, the pair are shown visiting the home of Charlotte’s famous father, Serge. The film also alludes – less directly – to Birkin’s recent experience of cancer, and the death of her eldest daughter, Kate Barry, who fell from her Paris balcony in 2013 after struggling with addiction and depression since her teenage years.
Birkin didn’t find it easy to make Charlotte’s film. “I started and I wanted to stop. I didn’t know what she wanted to get at. I didn’t like the questions. So we took a year or two off. Then we met in New York and I realised she wasn’t getting at anything. She needed answers to certain questions… I hope she got the answers she wanted.”
Although Jane and Charlotte have always been close, Birkin tells me that she didn’t enjoy such an intimate relationship with her own mother, the actress Judy Campbell, who “wasn’t one for newborn babies – milk and nappies and all that. I think they were with a lot of nannies who made my parents feel uncomfortable and made my mother feel inadequate. You have to give people confidence that they’re doing it right. You tell people they’re getting it wrong and they’ll step back.” So she sat on her father’s knee? “No. Neither of them were like that, and that’s all right. There’s nothing worse than making people do things when they feel uncomfortable.”
Looking at her parents’ wedding photos, Birkin says: “They were so luminous, him in his eyepatch and her in that pillbox hat. They were so glamorous… I felt diluted. I had to break away.” Her parents took her back in after her “cold, unsuitable” marriage to John Barry ended. But she says she had to go to France to escape their shadow. “I felt free in Paris. I think Charlotte felt the same about going to New York for seven years after Kate died. She said she was able to be funny with taxi drivers and things, in a way she couldn’t do here, where everybody knows who her dad was. There are some divine people… We all need to escape the idea that we can never be as bright as they were.”
She also tells me that David Birkin was “a jealous man” who struggled with his wife’s celebrity. “She was so beautiful. And she had her own war stories. She was on stage in London, singing A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square as the bombs fell all around… It must have been incredibly exhilarating.”
It didn’t help that David encouraged Jane’s career in a way that he never did for Judy. “He thought everything I did with movies and songwriting was so funny and attractive. He came on location with me when I was filming Death on the Nile and thought it was a hoot. Mother was very stoic about it. She said she wouldn’t put herself between me and the sun. My relationship with her finally blossomed in the decade after he died. It was a treasured time.”
Birkin has often said that women improve with age. “I think women should never feel over the hill. Just look at Helen Mirren! She gives one hope every day. Just more and more beautiful, more attractive, more fascinating to look at with every year that passes. I don’t know how she does it but I’m glad she does!” Today, Birkin tells me that despite being fixed in the public imagination as a 1960s fashion plate, she was happiest in her 40s and 50s. “I cut off my hair,” she says. “I really learnt to love singing, making films. I had great friends. I look at my daughters now and I think they must be having the time of their lives!”
Was Jane’s devotion to David at the root of her relationships with older men? “I don’t think so,” she says, “because my father was still alive, thank God. John Barry never really took my parents on board. But they got on so well with Serge. He loved spoiling my mother – treating her to Cartier bracelets and taking her to Maxim’s just for the pudding. He was a great friend to my father and they often took a nap at the same time – their eyes closing like a pair of old owls! When my father was in hospital, Serge took his watch off and put it on my father’s wrist. It was so lovely to feel the affection all round, after I had been so pig-headed in trying to get away from them.”
After the war, David Birkin was offered a job by the SIS, but declined. He chose a quieter life as a dairy farmer in Berkshire, then worked as a probation officer. “He was passionate about justice,” his daughter says, “and he worked against the death penalty. That was why his war work suited him so well. He was a pacifist at heart, and was proud that he was saving lives, not taking them.”
David Birkin died in 1991. Jane and her mother scattered his ashes from a boat off the Brittany coast. “It was very moving,” she tells me. “We took his old friend from the Resistance, Job Mainguy, with us. I finally said: ‘Adieu, Daddy.’”
A Dangerous Enterprise by Tim Spicer (Barbreck, £18.99) is out now
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