Recognition 60 Years on for a Young Heroine of the French Resistance

A woman living anonymously among her neighbours in Scotland is to be awarded France's highest honour for her heroism during the second world war.

Marguerite Garden, 77, will be presented with the Légion d'Honneur in Edinburgh this year in recognition of her role in the resistance.

From the age of 14 she risked her life daily, arranging escape routes for local men and spying for MI6 in the occupied village of Plomodiern in Brittany.

With her father, who also has the award, she secreted British airmen in her home and relayed information to British intelligence agents.

She became involved in the resistance when her father took her to help prepare a lobster boat that was being used to help local men escape.

"I got to know the people who were preparing it," she says. "So later on, when my father wasn't around, they trusted me enough to come to me and ask me to help. I was only about 14 or 15, but I was very grown up for my age."

Mrs Garden, who lives in Lanark, has many anecdotes of her life in the resistance. On one perilous occasion she was helping to conceal airmen waiting to escape to Britain upstairs in the family home while a German slept unaware in a bedroom.

"What better cover than to have the Wehrmacht in the house?" she says.

From the house MI6 agents sent information to England. Some of it came from Marguerite. "I remember one day I saw an enormous mast on a farm," she says. "It was fantastic information, because this mast was being used to send messages to the German submarines. "The submarines were destroying the British fleet. It was life and death for the people in England to stop the submarines acting. Two days later, the RAF came and the farm was bombed.

"It was a great thing to happen, because the Germans couldn't get any information to their submarines. An important communication route had been shut down."

Mrs Garden would scour the coastline for mines, to ensure that British maps were accurate, and take messages and parcels between her network and Paris. "There was no reason to suspect me," she says. "I was a young girl travelling to my school. I was never arrested."

Her father was not so lucky. One day she opened the door to be confronted by the German secret police.

"They smelled of the Gestapo, of Turkish cigarettes," she says. "My father had learned what was happening and didn't come home, so my mother told them that he had left us and they accepted that."

After the war she met a Scottish holidaymaker, James Garden, while studying in Paris. They fell in love and moved to Scotland, where they had seven children. Mrs Garden learned of her award yesterday. "I didn't do all of the things I did for awards," she says. "But when I think about the Légion d'Honneur, I just burst into tears."