Her name was Hazel Smith, but everyone called her Jicky. Whether it was a cover name or affectation, she never said, but it was also the name of her favourite perfume from the historic French perfume house, Guerlain, established in Paris in 1800. Born into a well-to-do family, she grew-up in Hertfordshire, enjoying the privileged life of a magnificent country house and domestic servants. In Paris, Jicky worked for the British Embassy in those tumultuous days leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War, operating as an undercover agent playing an important role in the intelligence community for the SIS (MI6). After war broke out, Jicky displayed extraordinary courage and suffered for her loyalty to the cause. At one point she was captured and tortured by the Nazis; she was pregnant at the time. Her partner was a member of the French resistance but she did not betray him, or her country. Among her tasks, she used her previous education in graphology to decipher the personality of subjects under surveillance by means of handwriting analysis. One of her professors was a disciple of Jung, who trained her in the techniques of psychoanalysis for divining truth and lies. She was even an expert in homing pigeons, the unit known as MI14. After the war, she moved to a small town in Italy taking her secrets with her, and her undiminished passion for life. This is her story. AUTHOR: Nicoletta Maggi, an Italian journalist, is currently a press officer in the press office of the parliamentary groups working at the Italian Parliament in Rome. She is also a sworn interpreter in court for English and German. In 2019 she published L'Angelo di Churchill, a historical account of a female British secret agent who worked in France during the Second World War before retiring to Italy and working in an antique shop in Numana, where Nicoletta Maggi comes from. Nicoletta has a blog in Italian, www.nicolettamaggi.co.uk where she writes about art, culture and history. 30 b/w illustrations
