CHRIS Bridge is best known locally as the outspoken head who turned Huntington School into one of the best performing secondaries in Yorkshire.

Since he retired a few years ago, however, the 67-year-old’s life has gone in an entirely different direction.

He’s battled back from cancer, for a start. Three years ago, he had an operation to remove his prostate. Since then, he’s undergone gruelling radiotherapy and hormone therapy.

It is still too early to say he’s all clear, he admits. But at the moment, tests seem to indicate the disease has gone.

Undeterred by his fight with prostate cancer, the former headteacher has also been penning his first novel.

Back Behind Enemy Lines tells the story of Anna, a young British woman who, during the war, parachuted into France behind enemy lines as a Special Operations agent working with French resistance groups.

Fast forward 60 years, and Anna is now a frail old woman whose family just want her to die so they can sell her house.

There were two reasons why he wanted to write the story says Chris, who lives with his wife Sheila at Wintringham, near Malton.

York Press:

First, he believes the story of the women of the Special Operations Executive, who parachuted into occupied France to work with the resistance, deserves to be told.

“They were staggeringly brave,” he says. “These agents had no idea who was waiting on the ground. Several were arrested on landing and taken to concentration camps. Not all French people were working for the allies. If you were unlucky you might end up in the hands of the Milice, thuggish French nationalists recruited by the Germans.”

In the book Anna parachutes into Normandy in 1944, ahead of the D-Day landings. There’s a vivid description of her flight over the Channel. “She had lost her real name over the Channel. She would be Marie Claire from now on, Marie-Claire Cardon. She was now a French national, wearing scratchy French knickers, her hair cut short and combed back in a French style, even her three fillings redone by a French dentist, using French amalgam... her mouth still felt sore from the drilling.” Over France, she sits in a Halifax bomber preparing to jump.

Clutching the cold metal of the hatch, terrified at the frozen air rushing past just below, she plucks up courage to launch herself into space, just before the dispatcher can give her a helping push.

“She shifted forward, holding onto the cold metal of the hatch edges which numbed her fingers,” Chris writes in the book. “She mustn’t overbalance. She heard counting. She recognised at the same time that the dispatcher didn’t trust her to jump, that he was getting ready to give her a push, so they didn’t have to risk another run.

“She’d make absolutely sure that wasn’t necessary...She ducked her head and rolled quickly out into the silence...”

Girls like her would have had only one or two practice drops to prepare, says Chris: so their courage cannot be underestimated.

During the course of his research, he himself got to crawl around inside a Halifax at the Yorkshire Air Museum. “I couldn’t have jumped out!” he says.

Posing as a French woman, Anna meets up with resistance fighters, and falls in love with Pierre. But he’s not all he claims to be.

When she finds that a Gestapo officer is onto her, Anna has to make some terrifying decisions to survive - and to ensure the impending Normandy invasions remain a secret...

Back in Britain after the war, shattered by her experiences, she makes an unhappy marriage.

And years later, it is the children of that loveless marriage who want to put her in a home, so that they can sell her house.

Which brings Chris to the second reason for writing his book: the shameful way we treat older people. It is an issue close to his heart. His own aunt hurt herself badly falling down the stairs at her home.

She broke her hip, and spent the rest of her life in a home.

Chris still feels bad about that. “She hated it,” she says.

Worried that his own mother would injure herself in a similar way, he also arranged for her to go into a home. “I didn’t want her to fall downstairs,” he says.

“But I hadn’t worked out that she was quite happy to take that risk.”

In his novel, Anna finally achieves a kind of redemption.

“With the help of two younger friends, she returns to France to confront the ghosts of her past.

But too often, Chris says, we treat older people as just a burden, and deny them the respect and independence that their lives and experience deserve.

“It’s quite difficult,” he acknowledges. “People want to make sure you are fine. But often you don’t have freedom at that age.”

By contrasting Anna’s treatment as an older woman with her courage as a young spy operating behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France, it is a point he makes very powerfully...

l Back Behind Enemy Lines by Chris Bridge is published by Peach, priced £8.99 paperback, £3.50 e-book.