Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (65 page)

The codicil began as follows:

“I Richard Thomas Wyndham Ketton-Cremer of Felbrigg Hall Roughton Norfolk England on this date 5 July 1940 at Maaton Baguish Western Desert Egypt make the following bequests and legacies extra and above those previously made.

“I
HEREBY BEQUEATH
the sum of £1000 (One thousand pounds) to”—and here the page turned—“Mrs. Billie Pelmyra Gordon née Rhoads, American citizen, present address c/o American Consulate Fun-chal Madeira or might be traced at St. Cloud Florida USA with much love and in memory of an association no less delightful because it could not be final I hereby bequeath to Miss Vera Atkins of “Magazine” Winchelsea Sussex (Rumanian citizen) the sum of 500 pounds with love & in memory of a delightful friendship I hereby bequeath to Mrs. Theodora Greaves now of 4 Walsingham Terrace, Hove, Sussex the sum of £300 with love and in gratitude for much friendship and worldly advice …” and so on.

The will contained sparse punctuation, and it was hard to say, at first, if the phrase “with much love and in memory of an association no less delightful because it could not be final” applied to Billie or to Vera. At first I liked to think it applied to Vera, but on reflection I decided, reluctantly, that it belonged with the £1000 Dick left to Billie. Vera got the lesser sum of £500 and “love and memory of a delightful friendship.”

I read on through the rest of the codicil, which included a series of bequests: Dick left his horse Jester to the local rector; his autocycle to the Felbrigg chauffeur; a sum to the Norfolk and Norwich Aeronautical Club; and his Ford car, Fluff, to a friend.

The document was witnessed by Pilot Officer John Ward of 113 Squadron RAF and was signed on July 10, 1940.

The will was a further indication that Vera was important to Dick. But precisely how important she was remained ambiguous.

•

Shortly after Vera returned from Germany for the last time, she disappeared on her own to Wales for many weeks. She went to stay in a remote cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast and saw nobody there apart from a local farmer who helped her carry her suitcase up a track to the house. “I always thought she had gone there to be alone after all that happened, and to mourn,” said Mary Williams, Guy's girlfriend, who remembered his sister's disappearance at that time. There were suddenly so many for Vera to mourn.

Then, in May, Vera's mother died. It had not been expected. Hilda Atkins was cremated and then interned at a small family ceremony in the Jewish cemetery at Golders Green, north London. Ralph, in a letter to his “dear baby sister” on June 8, 1947, said: “It is frightful to think that our dear mother is no more, she was our rallying point and stand-by in our troubles. I always had the feeling that she sensed if one of us had something on his mind without even telling her about it … It doesn't seem so very long since we were all at Crasna. What a lot of things have happened since then.”

Whatever yearnings Vera or her brothers still had for their childhood home, Crasna—along with all of Romania and eastern Europe—were now disappearing behind the Iron Curtain. A friend who had lived with the Rosenbergs at Crasna wrote to Vera from Australia after the war saying the news from Crasna was “very sad” and that he was sending food parcels to “the Flondors,” the Rosenbergs' former neighbours there.

Ralph was himself nearly stranded behind the Iron Curtain. The letter he wrote to Vera about their mother's death was sent from Bucharest, where he had returned in 1946 in the hope of working normally again in the oil business. Now the Communist clampdown was beginning to tighten, and he was desperate to get out. Exit permits were already hard to come by, and he had not even been able to leave to attend his mother's funeral.

After her stay in Pembrokeshire Vera returned to London, where she eventually found work in one of the many new postwar bodies set up to
foster international understanding, established by UNESCO, the United Nations' education and culture body. Her new employer, the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges, arranged student exchanges throughout the world. The post of office manager, which Vera took up in October 1948, was secured for her by Francis Cammaerts, the former Jockey circuit organiser, who became the bureau's first director. The post was perhaps not the topflight one Vera might have hoped for after the war, but she was soon promoted and became head of the organisation in 1952 when Cammaerts left. And Vera still had a time-consuming job to do for SOE.

Whatever Leslie Humphreys might have ruled, Vera, along with Maurice Buckmaster, had already begun to claim “the honour and glory” for F Section, and they had no intention of ceasing now. Their promotion drive had started well before the end of the war, when Buckmaster began composing citations for as many F Section agents as possible. Then, no sooner were surviving agents back from the field in 1945 than they were persuaded by Vera and “Buck,” as so many now called him, to go immediately on lecture tours, even to the United States.

The fact that by 1946 SOE had been shut down and its files closed was no impediment to Vera and Buckmaster s publicity efforts. Vera carried all the information needed (and more than was in the files) in her head. Authors, screenplay writers, and later TV producers contacted Buckmaster first about their projects, and Buckmaster then passed enquiries on to Vera. “Miss Atkins's memory is so much better than mine,” he always said.

Stories about glamorous SOE agents were therefore rarely out of the newspapers in the immediate postwar years, and Vera and Buckmaster worked as a duo, just as they had during the war. Their success was measured in the cuttings that I found spilling out of Vera's files.

Odette Sansom, the tortured heroine, who had escaped from Ravens-brück and become the first woman to receive a George Cross, was the darling of the press, along with Peter Churchill, her organiser, who was arrested with her. When, in 1947, Odette left her first husband and married Churchill, a media fairy tale came true. The biography of Odette by
Jerrard Tickell was published in 1949 and was publicised by a series of sensational articles about SOE in the Sunday Express entitled “Set Europe Ablaze.”

‘I am not sure,' said a German spy chief, ‘whom we shall hang first when we get to London. Winston Churchill or Colonel Buckmaster,' read a caption on a picture of Buckmaster.

Vera's personal copy of Tickell's book contained the author's handwritten inscription, acknowledging just how much he owed to his prime source of information. “For Vera Atkins”:

“Onlie begetter,” midwife, vamp.
Doubling Will Hews with Mrs. Gamp,
Invisible as Mrs Harris,
In Baker Street, Berlin and Paris,
For each part, in each latitude,
Accept an author's gratitude.

There were many SOE stories to be told. The Daily Herald ran a series called “The Commando Girls” that told of Pearl Witherington's “adventures with the maquis.” The poignant tragedy of Violette Szabo's daughter, little Tania, continued to capture imaginations. In another article in the Sunday Express, Violette's last escorting officer was quoted as saying that, as Violette departed from the field: “She zipped up her flying suit, adjusted her parachute, shook her hair loose and climbed laughing into the aircraft.” The quote obviously came from Vera.

Vera had cut out numerous pictures of Violette's daughter, whose little dresses were weighed down by more and more of her mother's medals as the years went on.

From Vera's letters it was clear that some of those projected into the limelight did not always welcome it. Yvonne Baseden received a call from Vera one day in the mid-1950s asking if she would agree to appear on This Is Your Life with Eamonn Andrews. Yvonne, who had not yet fully recovered from the trauma of her imprisonment at Ravensbrück, detested the very idea but was persuaded by Vera.

Pearl Witherington at first declined to go on a lecture tour that Vera had organised. “Only if you absolutely insist, Vera, will I go,” she wrote. Pearl had already been embroiled in controversy over her civilian MBE. The FANYs who survived the war found they were caught in yet another legal loophole. Having agreed to join a civilian organisation, to get around the bar on women in the military bearing arms, these same women were now told that as mere FANYs they could receive only civilian awards. “There was nothing civil about what I did,” protested Pearl, who in the weeks before D-Day had taken command of a group of at least a thousand resistance fighters. She sent her civilian award straight back.

These were busy times for Vera. Soon promoted within the bureau, she also moved from Nell Gwynne House, where she had lived since 1940, to a small but airy new apartment on the top floor of a stucco-fronted terrace in Rutland Gate, just off Knightsbridge, which was convenient to the Special Forces Club, as well as Harrods.

After the book about Odette came the film, with Anna Neagle as Odette, Trevor Howard as Peter Churchill, Marius Goring as their captor Hugo Bleicher, and Maurice Buckmaster as himself. Vera now found herself rushing up and down to Ealing film studios with Buckmaster for rehearsals, checking screenplays, and briefing reporters. In her files was a letter to Vera from J. Arthur Rank saying photographs were enclosed, and here they were: Vera standing in a svelte suit with the film's stars. Vera had also preserved a note to “My dear Vera” from Neagle herself.

The film, Odette, opened amid great acclaim in 1950, with the king and queen, as well as Vera and Buck, in the audience. “The Queen and the Heroine,” said one headline describing how Odette arrived at the opening “wearing evening crinoline of black lace and champagne lace underskirt.” “I'm quite ordinary,” said Odette as she faced the press.

Buckmaster by now had also published his own book on SOE, Specially Employed, and later came They Fought Alone. If more proof were needed that SOE's most important country section had been headed by a man who struggled to distinguish fact from fantasy, these books provided
it. As Buckmaster himself candidly admitted inside Vera's personal copy: “Dedicated to Vera who knows more accurately than I do how, when and why these events occurred (I might also add ‘whether').”

Then the publicity started to backfire. On August 3, 1949, Vera had received to her flat a petite young woman with short, cropped auburn hair and a plain but pleasant face. Jean Overton Fuller wanted to research the life of Nora Inayat Khan. From the moment Jean began writing, Vera lost control over the SOE story.

During the war Jean had lived in Bloomsbury a few doors away from where Nora's family had then lived, and the two young women became closely acquainted. One day in May 1943 Nora told Jean she was “going on foreign service” and then vanished. Nora's brother Vilayat never seemed to have been told for sure what had happened. Jean read the citation for Nora's George Cross in the newspapers in 1949 and decided to find out more. She had never heard of SOE but was referred through the War Office to a Colonel Buckmaster, who said he was not sure he could remember Nora and referred Jean straight to “Miss Atkins.”

Jean Overton Fuller was cultivated and determined. She had also had a deep distrust of official secrecy ever since learning that her father's death in 1914, during the attack on Tanga, German East Africa, was an “official secret.” She gave an account of her first meeting with “Miss Atkins” in a preface to one of her books: “She said she did not know if the names of the schools in which my friend had trained had yet been taken off the security list. Nor could she tell me anything about the people Nora had been sent out to work with, who were, in any case dead.” Vera did, however, offer Jean suggestions about people she could talk to, and among them was John “Bob” Starr. He was, of course, a perfect contact because he could describe Nora's bravery at Avenue Foch, but as Vera well knew, he was embittered and very likely to reveal the damaging secrets of the “radio game.” So Vera warned Jean that should Starr “begin to spin some sort of story in which he is perfectly justified and the Section seems to have done everything wrong,” she should not believe him.

For some months Vera continued to help Jean as she pursued her research, and the couple dined together to talk about Nora. When Madeleine was published in 1952, Vera was generally pleased with the
book, which revealed few damaging secrets, saying nothing about Nora's radio being played back. Vera had some small objections to the way she herself was portrayed, and she invited Jean to “talk over” these points with her, but by and large she considered the book “a very striking portrait of Nora” that “exposes her character as a live and lovely compound of intelligence and warmth, timidity and courage, simplicity and love of truth.”

Jean replied gratefully but evidently did not take up Vera's invitation to “talk over” the book, so Vera wrote a letter inviting Jean to dinner. In another note, preserved by Vera, Jean replied that she could not go on the day suggested by Vera and proposed a meeting at her own flat a week later. “I would like to prepare a little dinner—nothing terribly elegant but I will try to make something tasty to eat.”

In a further little note that Vera had kept, Jean wished Vera well after she had been ill over Christmas. Jean wrote: “I do hope you are feeling better now, as it must be miserable to spend Christmas in hospital.” The two women seemed to have become quite close.

Well before Jean's next book, The Starr Affair, however, Vera and Jean's friendship had irretrievably broken down. Early in her research for Madeleine Jean had spoken to Starr at length not only about Nora but about the way the Germans had captured the British radios and fooled London by playing them back. She found Starr “credible” and wrote: “I realised I had stumbled upon an inconvenient secret.” Vera had either been astonishingly naive in believing Jean would not pursue what Starr told her, or she was deceiving herself even then about the seriousness of what Starr knew. In any event, Jean now immediately widened her investigation. Tracking down all surviving witnesses to Nora's captivity, she found they were not all dead, as Vera had told her, and she even found Ernest Vogt, the interpreter at Avenue Foch, who had played a large part in interrogating Nora. When Jean told Vera she had found Vogt, she expected her to be pleased, but Vera advised her in the strongest terms to stay away from him. The idea that Jean should talk to one of Nora's German captors clearly horrified Vera, though Jean could not understand why.