Special Guest Blogger: Noor Inayat Khan

So, I’m dead. Now, don’t look so shocked. It happened in 1944, and unless I’d discovered some truly revolutionary ancient Indian skin-care secret involving actual immortality, I’d be roughly a hundred and twelve years old by now. Trust me, being a ghost is much better for the posture, you’d be surprised how much those heavy wireless radios weigh on a girl’s spine.
I was a peace loving Sufi, a musician and a writer of children’s stories about gentle bunnies. Naturally, the British government looked at me and thought, there’s the woman we should send to occupied France to blow things up. Logic was not exactly the Allied Forces' strongest suit in 1943.
My life started with a bit of a geographical identity crisis. I was born in the Kremlin because my father, a Sufi teacher and musician, was visiting Russia. In 1914, just as the world decided to start its first round of global fisticuffs and we fled to Britain and then to France.
Being a pacifist in the middle of a World War is like being a vegan at a barbecue, eventually, someone is going to try to shove a hot dog in your face. My brother Vilayat and I sat down and decided that even though we hated violence, we couldn’t sit around while the world turned into a giant, goose-stepping nightmare. So, back to England we went.
I joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and trained as a wireless operator, which was essentially the 1940s version of being IT support and  the Special Operations Executive (SOE) eventually scouted me. My training reports were colorful. My instructors wrote that I was clumsy, unsuitable and scared of weapons and they wasn't wrong. I was terrified but apparently, the SOE was running low on people who could speak fluent French and tap out Morse code at 20 words per minute, so they gave me a fake passport, a cyanide pill and a one-way ticket to a dark field in Angers.
I was the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France and I was given the code name Madeleine and I arrived, lugging a B2 wireless set in a suitcase that weighed about 30 pounds. Do you know how hard it is to look like a nonchalant Parisian chic lady while carrying what feels like a box of bricks?
Within weeks, the Prosper resistance network I was supposed to work with was decimated. Everyone was being arrested and I was the only one left with a radio. I was basically the only person in Paris provide the Wi-Fi for the Resistance.
For three months, I played a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek by changing my hair color and changing apartments while travelling all over Paris with my suitcase of doom. I was sending messages about arms drops and sabotage operations, all while the Gestapo was driving around in vans with direction-finding gear trying to triangulate my position and then i got caught but not by a brilliant piece of German counter-intelligence but being betrayed for 100,000 francs by the sister of my circuit leader. Apparently, she was jealous because she thought I was getting too much attention.
They sent me to Dacha Pforzheim prison which wasn't the five-star resort the brochures didn't promise where I was kept in chains because they thought the girl who used to play the harp and write about  kittens was dangerous.
I was taken to the wall and they shot me through the back of the neck and though I was given me the George Cross posthumously, though it’s a bit hard to pin it on a spirit. I also have a statue in Gordon Square, London which is very strange to have pigeons sitting on your head for eternity, but if it helps people remember that a timid Sufi writer helped bring down the Third Reich, I can live with a bit of bird poop.