Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (21 page)

Parri’s hotel was burnt to the ground, but she went back. She was very brave to do so. She went to claim the ashes, as it were, of the hotel and whatever she had left. She went back and settled into the life that was expected of her, and the contrast from the life she had is amazing.

Parri eventually got back her property in Iran. She had a network of very able supporters, and if she couldn’t deal with the Mullahs, then no one could. She was very tough, and very well able to deal with anything and anyone that came her way. She wound up running a travel agency.

‘Well, all right,’ I thought. ‘All of this has blown up in my face, but I still have Shenley … or so I thought.’

12

E
DDIE’S LAST BATTLE

T
owards the end of the 1980s Betty decided for a number of reasons to retire from the health farm. She decided to sell up and invest in some other business. However, the decline in the property market meant that this was difficult. The building was valued at £1 million. In 1991 she agreed a sale to a Mr Landau, who contracted it on to his company. He opened a school in the building. He failed to complete one year later and, after litigation, and on the insistence of banks involved in the financing, Betty transferred the property to the school and took security over the assets. In 1993, amid great controversy, the bank appointed receivers and sold the property and business for just sufficient money to discharge the debt to the banks, leaving nothing for Betty. The property had been taken from her without a penny being paid. Betty tells the story:

Each time, whenever I went somewhere, something seemed to come along and negate it. When I thought about what happened to all the other ventures, I never thought about anything happening to Shenley. When I bought Shenley, at the time I bought it, it was a good proposition. I got the money and look what I sold it for, even though I didn’t get paid. I had the right track and ideas to go on, but alas.

My last client at Shenley was Colonel Gaddafi of Libya’s lady friend, a member of the von Trapp family. And as Shenley was closing, the manservant of Suzie von Trapp told me how much Suzie wanted to stay at Shenley; Gaddafi had recommended it to her. I said that she couldn’t because we were closing. Anyhow, she pleaded so much that I decided I would take her. She and Eddie became very close when she came, they used to sit on her bed together and talk for hours and hours and hours. She was very small and very pretty, and she came to recuperate after she had a nose job done. Goodness knows why, as she was perfect already. She was very interesting and would always send for us, her ‘special friends’ whenever she had a cocktail party in London.

Finally, I’d had enough of Shenley; my family thought that I best have a break from the business. Shenley Lodge represented a very demanding time for me, both physically and mentally. Finally, I decided to sell Shenley, with an agent’s help. A friend of the agent, a headmaster of a school, said that he would help me as he wanted to be involved in it. It was his idea to build a school there. They worked out that it would be very profitable to keep it rather than sell it on. I would live there and make money but not take any part in running it. I was happy with that. It took about eighteen months for a school to be built inside. They would come and present to me the various things that they were doing. I was involved in many ways with all of it as I had to get permission for it to be changed into a school. The school was to be called Manor Lodge School, as it still is today, a private school, with a few boarders. We built a computer room and it was called The Chapman Computer Room. The mayor of St Albans came and laid the foundation stone for the school. It was a nice school, a uniform school. I was actually living on the premises, in my own quarters, when the kids arrived for the school. I took part in their fetes and took an interest in all they did. They were aged from 11 to 16. I think they liked me because I took part. They knew I’d had a long history with Shenley. I also got on well with the teachers.

When the agent hadn’t completed the sale in 1992, I commenced litigation against them as I hadn’t seen any money. Lots of banks were involved. It was supposed to be sold for £1 million but I never got the money. The parents took over Shenley and ran it as a charity. Those million pounds got swallowed up somewhere and I have never seen a penny since. There was a lot of bribery between the banks and the lawyers. One bank bribed the man who bought it from me, who hadn’t paid me, but he was selling it on. They said that if he would agree to give up fighting with the bank, the case would be dropped. It was a very long, complicated legal process, but the result of it is that I lost everything.

In the end the man that bought it agreed to make a confession that he and the bank were in league together. He confessed to my accountants. Whilst the process was going on, I was given £1,000 a month to get myself somewhere to live. The bank gave a letter of promise to me around October deferring to the following April. The bank asked my agent not to join me in an action against them, so he dropped it, leaving me high and dry. At the time when the case to settle Shenley Lodge was heard, an illegal staff member of the company that represented me in the sale of Shenley was at a hearing in the court. A friend of mine who had just come into my life, Carol Bell, came with me to the hearing, and had a conversation with a lady sitting behind us in the court. She told Carol that a senior member of the company had told her to mess me around because at my age, with luck, ‘I would die and the case would die with me.’

After all of the legal shenanigans Betty received a final slap in the face. After the buyout of the school by the parents and teachers, which left Betty out in the cold and penniless, the school held a party to celebrate its ‘rescue’. A newspaper reported:

While celebrations are being held at a Shenley school saved from closure, the pensioner who lost the £725,000 she invested in it lies ill in bed. Her accountant, who spoke to
The Times
on her behalf, said she has become ill through the stress of the past few weeks.
¹

Betty also lost the £1 million of the actual sale price.

In 1991, as the Shenley upheaval was still going on, Eddie went to live in the Canary Islands. Betty says:

My son-in-law bought a house there. Eddie wasn’t well because of his injured spine, so he went to stay there to recuperate in a holiday home that had been rented for us. I frequently went out to stay, but I had to continue taking care of the Shenley situation. The Canary Islands are really beautiful, and my daughter and my son-in-law had a lovely house there. Eddie stayed there alone for some time. By this time they had four children, and I was a very proud grandmother. I have to say that they were incredibly good children with me. My daughter would sometimes go away and I would take care of the children. They would all go on holiday to their house in the Canary Islands.

When they lived in England afterwards, they had a helicopter for a short period. My son-in-law used to come along in it on a Sunday morning and we’d pootle off for coffee or lunch somewhere, like Devon. One day we had taken off from somewhere and I heard, ‘Hold on to Grandma!’ The door had flown open, so my grandchildren held onto me.

In one of life’s strange coincidences, a Norwegian woman who lived in a flat next door to Eddie’s Canary Island lodging got into conversation with him one day. As they were speaking, they realised that they both knew Dagmar Lahlum, his Norwegian wartime girlfriend. Eddie made contact with Dagmar, and they entered into a polite correspondence. It was later revealed that Dagmar had suffered greatly from ostracising after the war for ‘collaborating’ with the Germans. One writer on Eddie’s life seemed to suggest that this was largely down to Eddie not making it plain to the woman’s accusers that he was a British agent all along. For unknown reasons of her own, Dagmar never revealed to them that she was with the Norwegian Resistance the whole time – as she revealed to Eddie when they were together.

The Canaries was where a BBC documentary about Eddie was filmed, finally shown in 2012. In it he is shown driving a sports car provided by the BBC (a fact that was not mentioned in the televised documentary), and which appears to show him living in luxury. Nothing could be further from the truth. With Shenley tied up in legal wrangling, Eddie’s subsistence in the Canaries was provided by his daughter and son-in-law. Betty recalls:

After Shenley, first we lived in Radlett (about 10 miles from Shenley) and we moved around from place to place, until I settled in Chesham (about 25 miles north-west of London) when Eddie was taken very ill. I missed Shenley because I had spent a huge portion of time there – about thirty years. Eddie became progressively frail and couldn’t walk. He ended up in a nursing home.

The loss of Shenley and the obliteration of all they had worked for hit Eddie very hard. His health began a noticeable decline, as Betty remembers: ‘He would come down the stairs at night and sit quietly, obviously confused. “Why on earth are they keeping me in this prison? Why?” He thought he was back in prison in Jersey.’

Eventually Betty, ageing herself and suffering from the loss of Shenley as well, was forced to get Eddie into a nursing home:

He suffered greatly from neglect in the nursing home where he spent most of his final years. The worst experience of my whole life was spending weeks at the Lattimer Wing in Amersham for elderly persons. I have never seen such indifference to people’s needs, amounting to cruelty. I considered that he was totally neglected. His room was filthy, not having been cleaned since he went there. When I arrived one Sunday he was covered with a filthy wet towel soaked in soup, and when we said we required a dry one, we were told to wait. He was also sitting on a wet cushion, obviously not able to go to the toilet. Another day I went there to find him saturated in urine. It’s not surprising since every time he needed to go to the toilet and I asked for a commode, I was told there was no one available at the moment, and he would have to wait. Often they didn’t come at all, or were so long in coming that one obviously couldn’t contain one’s self any longer.

Eddie became progressively frail and couldn’t walk. Getting him in and out of a chair was a problem, and when he needed to use the toilet, he was often told that no one was available to help him, and that he would just have to wait as they were busy. Whatever you asked for, they were always busy. I wanted to wheel him into the garden for some air and I was always told there was no wheelchair available and no one was available to move him into the chair. He was nearly always cold, and nearly always sitting without pyjama bottoms with no one and nothing coming to take care of him. I felt hopeless and considered his position hopeless. At least on one occasion I managed to get help to get Eddie into a wheelchair to take him outside for a walk. Eddie escaped in the wheelchair down the ramp. He ‘got away from the Germans’, but nearly came a cropper when the chair almost tipped over. I said to him, ‘You may have got away from the Germans, but you can’t get away from me!’

I couldn’t understand why Eddie was given very hot drinks for him to pick up and try to drink. It never registered on the staff that the drinks were very hot. If you complained you were treated with disdain. I was amazed to see them bring him a dirty dish with nothing but a spoonful of jelly or jam resting on it. I can only assume it was someone’s leftover. Why bring him one spoonful of something in a dirty dish? It was brought by the same lady who had been so aggressive to me earlier on, and I felt I couldn’t face another blast from her, especially as I worried about how they would treat Eddie when I was not there. In other words, they would take their annoyance with me out on him. It was a constant concern of mine.

At the time, Betty wrote:

I will not stand by any longer and see the appalling indignity my husband is suffering. If I don’t get adequate help at once I’ll alert the press, and ask: ‘Is this the way to treat our war heroes?’ There are days Eddie has suffered with his spine as a direct result of his landing in this country by parachute. I want him to die with dignity and I demand it for what he has done.

Fortunately, Eddie’s last days were spent in a private, but state-funded, nursing home in Bricket Wood in St Albans. His companion in the home was Cliff Richard’s mother. ‘She was a bit batty and used to tell us how she needed to go and pick the children up from school. She just loved having tea and talking with Eddie.’ But, Eddie being the ever-active Eddie, he had to sleep on a mattress on the floor as he kept falling out of bed and injuring himself. He was bedridden and often in pain, but Eddie’s undying charisma could still hold an audience. ‘He’d sit wearing a baseball cap, waiting for his friends to gather … On other occasions, he would lie in bed, telling his stories.’
²

‘The last month of Eddie’s life was emotional. A lot of thoughts went through Betty’s mind such as: ‘As you sow, so you shall reap’; ‘nothing is achieved without inspiration’; ‘be the person you want to become’. She says, ‘I wanted to help my daughter have a good quality of life. I wanted to move away from my sad environment, and write a book about mine and Eddie’s life; I wanted to get justice for the law suit, the loss of a million pounds.’

The last words spoken to me by Eddie I shall remember vividly forever, ‘I love you’, spoken to me whilst sitting on his bed in the nursing home a few days before he passed on. I was sitting up in the window and in my mind this was his farewell to me. I remember thinking this is the last thing I will hear from him. The same day I had discovered burns made on his body and was told by the nurse it was from thrashing about on the carpet during the night. I will never forget this feeling of desolation, how I was not there to help him through such a time of torment. I hate having to say that, but I need to. In fact, so many of Eddie’s words will remain forever in my mind. Eddie’s favourite quotes: ‘I shall go but I shall always come back’, and ‘Never resist temptation’. (He never did!) And, with a smile, ‘We’ve had 500 fights and I’ve never won one!’? That is not really true; he still won the battles with me to the end. After all, if he could fool the German high command, he could easily fool me! When introducing me to anyone I had not met before he’d say, ‘This is my wife Betty who has lived through six of my mistresses, haven’t you darling?’