Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (22 page)

Betty has been heard to ask during this period, ‘Where are your six mistresses now when I could do with them?’

Eddie died on 11 December 1997, the cause of death recorded as heart failure. As a measure of the affection in which Eddie was held, Princess Manijeh in Paris and Princess Shahnaz, the Shah of Iran’s sister, were among the first to call when they heard of Eddie’s death. Betty’s friend Carol Bell also recalls the time, in which she remembers the consolation Betty received not just from royalty, but from hundreds of cards and letters from people all over the world, who had known them over the years. The newspaper obituaries recognised him as a very brave man, but many trotted out the old myths, uncorrected from years of accumulated clippings.

Betty didn’t want a fuss, and so there was a private cremation attended only by close relatives:

We decided to have a very intimate funeral for Eddie with no outside people. The Wades were the only people other than family to attend; he was not only Eddie’s doctor but a good friend. As we were leaving after the funeral, Tom Wade asked me to get out my pad and pen and start writing, so the only thing that I could assume was that he meant about Eddie’s life.

That it would also be the story of her life didn’t really occur to her.
³

The distress from Eddie’s injuries had become more severe as the years passed. He never received compensation for the damage to his back, though he did try for many years to get a pension. Eddie and Betty Chapman were both very annoyed and felt let-down when they saw less deserving cases awarded disability allowance. ‘I can’t understand it,’ said the barrister Sir Lionel Thompson, who was in fine health, and one of their friends. ‘I’ve been practising law since the war and I get a full disability allowance.’

Finally, a token gesture was made:

The year following Eddie’s death, the Ministry of Defence rang up to ask if they could come to see me. I said yes, curious as to what the purpose was. One man came. The ministry had asked him to come and offer their condolences on the death of Eddie. We had tea and we chatted. He said that he didn’t know Eddie but some people that he worked with that knew him talked of what a marvellous person he was, what great things he did and that he had great courage. As he was leaving, we shook hands and said goodbye. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out an envelope in which was a cheque for £2,500. He said it was to help cover the bills. I was very touched at that moment, because this was the one and only time that anyone from this country had made any gesture towards his efforts. We lost so much, everything we ever did got ripped away, but my greatest loss was Eddie, who gambled his life for his country. I had a terrible fit of depression a few years after Eddie died, and I spent three months at University College Hospital. I don’t remember much about it, but I had a very nice doctor who visited me as a friend as well.

Someone suggested that I do a whistle-stop journey of my life, saying it could be fascinating. The past is gone forever, a way of life that is not possible again. I needed to express my past in writing, otherwise my nieces and nephews and grandchildren would never know what my life has been. The process would also benefit me as a sort of therapy.

Betty’s voice joins those of many others in honouring Eddie’s life. Eddie was one of the few people ever to get a whole column by Walter Winchell,
⁴
a writer for the
New York Times
, and Eddie was one of the last to appear on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
in New York, the number one show in America.

In general, the obituaries that appeared world-wide were complimentary about Eddie. Max Arthur, writing in
The Independent
newspaper on 6 January 1998, ended his thus:

Perhaps the greatest accolade for this extraordinary, complex and genial man who made an art-form of deception came from Baron Stefan von Gröning, the German Chapman had reported to while an agent. Although he had been deceived throughout the war, von Gröning attended the wedding of Eddie Chapman’s daughter.

Even the German newspapers ran sympathetic obituaries, although they couldn’t seem to help referring to Eddie as a ‘Gentleman Gangster’.

Looking back, Betty remarks: ‘The Germans didn’t kill Eddie, but the loss of Shenley did.’

She also goes on to say: ‘I believe I received a spirit message from Eddie after his death. On a visit to Queensberry Place in South Kensington, I visited a well-known medium who gave me a message from Eddie, which not only amazed me but made me happy. His message was: ‘Tell her that there is a God.’

13

R
EFLECTIONS

In looking back over nine decades, Betty reflects:

My life has been enriched by so many people from all walks of life, of all colours, creeds and principles (and non-principles!). Africa in the 1950s was probably one of my most hair-raising experiences, but it was wonderful and very interesting. I often think that I have wasted my life. Yet looking back now at my life with Eddie, I cannot believe what I have done and accomplished. So instead of bemoaning a wasted life, I am putting that thought behind me and moving forward to happier thoughts, so that I can leave behind a more cheerful me. I made a commitment to have a child, but the intervening years have been very difficult, being mostly a one-parent family. I now reap the rewards. I have an extended family that brings me more joy than at any other time in my life.

So many people still make an effort to keep in touch, which means a lot to me. And I still meet new wonderful people very often, still today. Uzzi, the nephew of my taxi driver, gave me a note saying, ‘The nation is waiting to hear from Betty Chapman, the wife of Zigzag; what’s next?’

I think very fondly of a lot of people and I have quite a long string of people who keep in touch with me. I’ve made some good friends for life, I feel I really have. B. Graham, my assistant at Kilkea Castle kept in touch with me and wrote me poems until she died. Joan Carlisle was a very special lady and a very special friend to me. We met when we first got to Shenley. She was living in London with her husband and she gave us our twenty-fifth anniversary dinner, she cooked us beef wellington, which she prepared herself. She was a very famous opera singer at the time, singing in Covent Garden Opera House in London. She still calls me and says that she wants to visit, but not when she has to come to London for other reasons; she wants to come for me, and not share me with anything else. She is very special; she was convinced that Eddie saved us from the Germans.

My friend Carol Bell has taken a very active part whilst the books were being written over the past few years. It has taken her over a year to pick up Nick’s book and read it for the second time. The first time she read it was just after it was published in 2007, and she was so full of it that she just couldn’t take it all in.

Jane is the daughter of my very special friend, Stefanie Wareham. For me it was a happy day when I met Jane, who I have worked with over the past few months.
¹
We have achieved more in this short space of time (working on my own memoirs) than I achieved with Nicholas Booth who wrote
ZigZag
, which was the story of my husband’s wartime work. Sadly for me, Jane has now left to live in Paris, which I know will not deter us from communicating. Jane is a very accomplished actress. It would make me so happy if she could become immortalised in my life, which she is helping to document. Barbara Cartland was an old, old friend of mine. [Betty has in her files a number of letters, notes and postcards from Barbara Cartland.] Everyone who was anyone knew Barbara.

The worst part of our life that I’d never want to relive was when we lost our first child, and it caused me to have deep depression that really lasted for some time. If I had to choose bits of my life to live again it would be the time in Iran, and the time in New York. I was in New York with Eddie. I loved the 21 Club in New York, as well as Central Park. We had a friend who lived on the East River in a famous block of flats and he was an enormously wealthy man who used to visit Eddie in Rome. I liked Rome too during the time I spent with Eddie there, that was a good time, but then it really depended how Eddie was behaving. If Eddie was having time out with other women it wasn’t much fun, but if we were having a happy time together and sharing a good relationship, it was hilarious and a magical time.

People like Nicholas Booth have been a big part of the last few years of my life. The writing of the book was a huge thing. Nicholas and his agent Peter Cox came to see me sometimes; I even had a lovely birthday with them. When Ben Macintyre visited me I told him that I was working with Nicholas Booth on the story of Eddie and the war. I already had appointments in my diary for the dates I was meeting Nicholas, a sort of proof really. The book that Ben was writing was unauthorised as far as I was concerned. He has made lots of money from this book as well, of which of course I have not received one penny.
The Times
even published a story by Ben Macintyre, which claimed that von Gröning had deliberately set up Eddie as an assassin, when he offered to bring him into the presence of Adolf Hitler. I know that it was what von Gröning wanted; he had discussed it at length with Eddie, working out how he could kill him. Eddie never actually met Hitler, and thought it was an unworkable idea.

At the time of the work on
ZigZag
I heard news that George, von Gröning’s son, who came to visit us with his dad at Shenley Lodge, had died. It was a terrible tragic death; he was killed by a falling tree. When he was over in England I tried to get George into a medical school here but I couldn’t manage to help him. He studied in Germany and then started his own hospital in Bremen. He had hardly got to grips with that when his days came to an end. It was very saddening for me, he was very young, so I wrote a letter to his mother saying how sad I was and that Eddie was very attached to them and held them in a special place in his heart. He often talked of the times he spent with George’s father. I wish to mention him in my book on our lives because he made such an impact, and von Gröning and Eddie were very fond of each other. He has since died, leaving only his wife and daughter. He used to tell me how Eddie saved his life (by demanding his recall from the Russian front). At a recent birthday I was at a restaurant with a lot of family and I really do remember sitting there thinking how far I have come, and how happy I was. I think it must have been my ninetieth birthday, and just as we were about to leave the band started playing and everyone sang happy birthday to me.

As noted earlier, Betty is a very spiritual person, and is a strong believer in reincarnation:

I’ve come back into this life because I believe in my last life I was wayward, never stayed anywhere very long, I was a drunkard, and I was irresponsible. Now this time, if you take my life, I’ve always been responsible for someone, first of all Eddie, and then our child, then for all of the places I have built and tried to build. I’ve stayed a long time in places – I had Shenley for thirty-one years. I hardly drink, just have the odd drink, and I’ve always been responsible for someone. It’s redressing the balance in a way, I suppose.

I don’t know what Eddie’s was. I can’t speak for him, but I regard him as my cross. It’s karma, the redressing and rebalancing of ourselves that goes on over many lifetimes. This is the way I think, and this is the way I accept it.

There has been evidence in Betty’s life to support this view. As previously mentioned, she received a message through a medium from Eddie after his passing. She also had another spirit message that she failed to recognise as such, but which lent credence to the veracity of Eddie’s message:

One evening two young friends came to visit in Egerton Gardens. One of them was a young pilot called Bobby Ferguson and the other pilot was called Jeffrey Page of the Hadley-Page aviation family. They came to say goodbye because Bobby was going off to South America. We were talking about Geoffrey de Havilland because he had just been killed flying the Swallow. Shortly after this I was at a séance in London and a person came through identifying himself as Geoffrey and he said he had a person with him called Bobby who had been killed in uniform. Eddie and I discussed this, and he said that the only person that we knew called Bobby was Bobby Ferguson, but he was in South America. Some time after, on one of my return trips from Ghana, I was having lunch with a friend who looked across the restaurant at a young girl, and remarked, ‘She’ll be pretty when she grows up.’ I turned to look at her and immediately recognised her as Bobby’s daughter. I straight away went over to her and asked how her father was. She replied that he had been killed flying in South America. I was extremely shocked to hear this.

Unlike Betty, Eddie was never particularly religious. He used to say to me: ‘Who knows the meaning of life? I’m damned if I do. We’ve been put on this Earth and we have all these quaint beliefs.’ Eddie was fatalistic right up to the last. ‘We are taught we are going to be responsible for all our sins,’ he said. ‘If so, I’ll be on trial for the next hundred years!’

Betty is less than happy with the turn the world has taken in recent decades. When recalling her early life, she comments: