Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (23 page)

Southgate said he asked Starr one day why he was doing all this. “If I don't do it, somebody else will, and in doing it I am gathering very valuable information which may come in useful sometime,” Starr
explained. “At one time Starr told me that the material [arms and explosives] received by the Germans through the mistake of London not realising that if a man did not send out his true check there was some very good reason for it amounted to tons,” said Southgate. “Most of these grounds were in Normandy, where in the months of June several of our organisations were in German hands and had been receiving British material for months and months. I was amazed at HQ Gestapo to see the quantities of British food, guns, ammunition, explosives that they had at their disposal.”

Southgate had said he did not think ill of Starr's “cooperation” with the Germans because he told him he intended to make use of all the information he was gathering as soon as he got the chance. And Starr had twice tried to escape, the second time from Avenue Foch “with a girl and a French officer.” Peulevé's impression was that Starr thought he was being cleverer than the Gestapo and didn't give any secrets away. But, Peulevé added: “His presence was unfortunate in that it may have been used to give confidence to newly arrested agents that they would be well treated, and in fact Starr was used by the Germans as a living example of the way in which they would keep their word.”

Many did appear to believe that Kieffer would keep his word. Kief-fer had let it be known that he had secured the authority of Berlin that the F Section agents should not be killed. And even now those who had returned from the camps did not believe that he really expected or knew that they had been sent to concentration camps. But one person who had evidently never trusted Kieffer, and had scorned all German approaches to her from the start, was Nora Inayat Khan, as Vera had heard in detail from Starr.

Starr said Nora had arrived at Avenue Foch one day in early October and had never shown any desire to engage in conversation with him up on the fifth floor and said nothing except: “Good night. Good morning.” One day, Starr said, Nora had tried to get out onto the bathroom win-dowsill. Ernest, as her interrogator, had had to coax her back in. Starr did not think it was an escape attempt but an attempt to commit suicide. There had been a lot of fuss at the time, and Starr had taken pity on her and slipped a note into her cell, telling her not to worry and that if she
wished to communicate with him, she could do so by means of written messages placed in certain spots in the lavatory.

It was by this means that they had plotted their escape. Teaming up with a French prisoner, Léon Faye, the head of an important resistance network, Starr and Faye removed the bars from the windows of their cells, and by using face cream and face powder provided by Nora, who was allowed such things by Kieffer, they made plaster to hide the damage done to the walls. Starr got onto the roof with the Frenchman by trailing a blanket and using a cord, but unfortunately Nora could not remove her bars until two hours later. She eventually appeared on the roof, and they started on their way down to the street, but suddenly there was an air-raid alert and all the cells were inspected. All three were caught by Kieffer's men and brought before him.

According to Starr's account, Kieffer was fuming with rage at the escape attempt. It was as if he had been badly let down by his prisoners. He told them he would shoot them on the spot, but then, after a short discussion with them, he relented. Instead he said that, if the three of them gave their “word of honour” not to escape again, they would be spared and could return to their cells. Starr gave his word of honour and went back to his cell, but Nora refused to do so, as did Faye. Still in a fury, Kieffer ordered the two of them to be taken to prisons in Germany, Starr said.

Starr believed that Kieffer sent Nora to an ordinary German prison simply to stop her trying to escape again. He was sure Kieffer would not have sent her to a concentration camp.

When Vera had debriefed Starr for the last time, in the late summer of 1945, she remained extremely wary of him, and both she and Buckmas-ter decided that they should keep their distance from him. Starr would be made to feel most forcefully that he had let his comrades down. However, Vera did give some credence to certain points that Starr had made. She was inclined to trust his view of Kieffer, believing that perhaps the German had intended that Nora should be fairly treated.

In a comment on her debriefing she wrote: “Bob Starr said Madeleine
had shown extreme bravery and great courage and was therefore respected by the Germans. He does not think that she was in any way ill-treated after her attempt to escape. But he does not know where she was moved.” She also stated: “The time has not yet come to give up hope of those who have not yet returned.”

PART II

ROMANIA

9.
Confidantes

V
era told me she had closed the book on her Romanian past when I met her in Winchelsea, and since her death I had been unable to prise it open. Her papers gave few clues about her family's story before the war. Her colleagues knew nothing of her origins; nor did her own close family.

“Of course, Vera had the great art of selecting within the family people whom she found compatible and sticking to them, and not being sidetracked by people for whom she might feel sorry but actually had nothing in common with,” commented Janet Atkins, wife of one of Vera's cousins, writing to Phoebe Atkins just after Vera's death. “I remember her once uttering that sentiment. I was always intrigued to know where her family came from in Romania and where they were educated, but one never really liked to ask. And she did not volunteer any scenes from childhood. I would think a biographer might have quite a difficult time finding out about her youth.”

More distant relatives—particularly those who lived abroad—I hoped, might yet tell me more. A cousin in Canada possessed a Rosenberg family memoir, written by Vera's uncle Siegfried, but the document was lying in a garden shed in Quebec, buried under several feet of snow. While waiting for the Canadian thaw, I could only seek out more clues, some of which had been squirrelled away by Vera herself, in the fading memories of her most trusted friends.

Though Vera never spoke of her past in the normal way, I found she had sometimes passed on confidences, usually very late at night, in almost inaudible tones, to listeners who remembered them as little more than tales.

Vera's favourite confidante in later years was probably Barbara Worcester. Vera often used to travel down to stay with her at her cottage in Martinstown, near Dorchester, taking the cross-country train known as the Little Sprinter. Vera never learned to drive; she liked to be driven or to travel by train.

“You could tell Vera had grown up in the countryside as she loved wild flowers,” said Barbara, taking me up her narrow garden path so we could smell the scent of the Peloponnese. Vera and Barbara often used to wander up this path, admiring the plants. “This is my Mediterranean bit,” she said, pointing to a bed of herbs and grasses. The daughter of an explorer, Barbara liked to travel and bring things back to preserve: a chipped tile of a bird; a ceramic bowl full of stones and shells “with a dash of bleach in to keep them from going fuzzy.” Vera met Barbara through her ex-husband, David Worcester, who worked with Vera in Germany investigating war crimes.

“She loved dogs and horses. But she particularly noticed flowers,” said Barbara, who liked to pamper Vera on her visits. “I always used to take her breakfast in bed. She liked a glass of very cold water first ‘to get the system going.' If I overdid the butter on her toast Vera would take her knife and scrape it off. She said: ‘You must always make an effort— you must never give up.' She wasn't beautiful, but she was stylish. She had no bosom or waist—all of a piece really. And she was just as likely to turn up in a Crimplene dress she had found in Oxfam as anything expensive. She never wore trousers—ever.”

Barbara had heard people say that Vera was cold, but she had never found her so. “I think she just kept it all inside her, in case she showed too much. She was always very controlled. You know, she had a rule— never to smoke or drink when she was on her own, otherwise she knew she would either die of lung cancer or become an alcoholic.”

On her visits Vera liked to mingle with the Dorset “nobs.” “We once bumped into the local hunt, and I remember she was most impressed.

She told me: ‘Now, Barbara, these are the kind of people you should know.' She couldn't see what frauds they were. I think Vera wanted so much to be English, but she always got her Englishness a little wrong. She was surprisingly naive in a certain way.”

Vera also mixed well with Barbara's real friends—writers, travellers, retired spies, and even former F Section agents—all of whom gathered in Barbara's tiny sitting room, books packed under the very low beams.

But mostly, when Vera came to stay, Barbara preferred to be alone with her and listen. After dinner Vera would settle amid the scatter cushions by the log fire and talk for hours. “After a while the voice was just a low rumble.” What sort of things had she heard? I asked. “I got the impression there had been many men,” Barbara replied.

From others I had heard gossip about Vera's relationships. Some speculated that Maurice Buckmaster might have been a lover. He certainly had a love affair early in the war, but he divorced his first wife for Anna Melford Stevenson, the wife of a prominent lawyer, and not for Vera. Some I had spoken to wondered about Vera's sexuality, and one confidante heard her talk of a blissful summer in the company of another young woman.

But the lovers Barbara got to hear about were always men, all of them from Vera's very distant past. Early in her life there had been a White Russian prince named Wittgenstein. “She told me he gave her a complete set of diamonds and amethysts: earrings, a necklace and a tiara. But Vera refused to take them from him. She only kept the earrings.” I wondered if Barbara ever saw the earrings. “No, never. Vera always wore clip-on, paste earrings. But she had wonderful rings. And she wore an amber necklace that came right down to her navel.

“And I often used to hear about the German ambassador whom Vera knew in Bucharest, Von der Schulenburg. He was certainly an admirer and would drive Vera around in his car. She used to tell him she would not get in the car if the swastika was flying. So he would say: ‘For you, Vera, it will not be unfurled.'

A woman colleague from SOE days told me she always felt “uncomfortable” with Vera, but Barbara said: “She never made me feel uncomfortable. She was certainly very protective towards me, particularly since
David left me. And I suppose I felt sorry for her too. I felt sorry for her having sent those girls out there, and for her having to worry about whether it was right. It must have been terrible looking for them. I think it always haunted her. She told me once that one of the witnesses she went to look for, she found in a bloodstained apron in a butcher's shop.”

During several late-night conversations Barbara had heard pieces of one particular tale that, she felt sure, was an account of Vera's first true love. “He was an English pilot. She met him on a marvellous journey that began with a trip to Alexandria. For her twenty-first birthday present Vera's father gave her a first-class ticket on a steamer to travel to Alexandria, as well as a red vanity case with a twenty-pound note tied to the handle. I had the impression Vera was very close to her father.”

It was sometime on that trip or soon after it, said Barbara, that Vera had met the pilot.

“The ship was so smart it had crêpe de Chine sheets in pastel colours which were changed each night; Vera liked yellow the best.” She sailed back from Alexandria via Smyrna, where her brother, Ralph, was en poste as a manager with an oil company, said Barbara. “I think it was there, or perhaps earlier on the trip, that she met this young pilot and they fell in love.” Vera told her friend that she and the pilot had arranged to meet again—in Budapest, Barbara thought, though it might have been somewhere else. “In any case he was killed and they never met again.”

Vera had never given a name, and Barbara had not asked. “All I remember was that he was English and he was a pilot. I had the feeling that he was the most important. She often mentioned him.”

Alice Hyde, a neighbour of Vera's in Winchelsea, was another confidante who used to hear tales from Vera's distant past. “Often if she was alone she would ask me over, and we would get something out of the freezer and eat. Then we would sit, and she would talk and talk for hours.

“She would talk sometimes of Romania and of her childhood, but it was always so hard to hear. As she talked her voice dropped several octaves. I remember one story that came up often. It seemed to go on and on for hours and involved a long and terrible journey that all ended in
Canada. I think the story was about some great tragedy that Vera had been involved in, and at the end the people in Canada said to Vera: ‘You must not worry. We will always remember you. You have been very brave. To us you will always be a heroine.'

Alice apologised for not remembering more. “I think she only talked to me about it because she knew my hearing was poor and I was rather muddled. She knew her secrets were safe with me and that I would never be able to pass them on.”

Christine Franklin, who also lived in Winchelsea, had, like others, collected Vera's squirrelled-away secrets, but Christine's collection was of a different kind. For many years she had been Vera's cleaner, though from the very beginning she had evidently been far more than that. Sitting on her living-room floor, cross-legged in jeans and a T-shirt, and with long, blond hair and pink lipstick, she told me about her interview. “Miss Atkins called me in first, and I sat on the chair next to her, and she lit up a cigarette and put it up in the air and looked at me. I said I had good references, and she blew out the smoke and said: ‘I don't think I need other people's views. I am a good judge of character.' ” Christine laughed.