Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (32 page)

Two months later Vera was in Switzerland again, this time, according to her Home Office papers, “for thirty-nine days.” Given the turmoil in Europe by the spring of 1939, such a long trip abroad seemed surprising. In March came the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, which appeared to be the cause of a rare exclamation from Hilda. “Goodness how sad,” she wrote in her diary on March 11, just before the invasion; then “Vera rang from mountains.” She was evidently skiing again.

In fact, I already had photographs of Vera on this second trip to Switzerland. They were the pictures rescued from a bin by Christine Franklin, Vera's cleaner, and showed Vera in the mountains, blissfully happy with Dick Ketton-Cremer. At first it had been hard to tell when or where those photographs were taken. But in one of the photos Christine had shown me, a second, unidentified man (who presumably had taken most of the pictures) was shading his face with a copy of Life. On the front cover was the actress Tallulah Bankhead, the magazine's cover girl in March 1939.

In the first half of 1939 Vera had evidently spent a great deal of time with Dick Ketton-Cremer. In July, just after Dick had joined up, she even took this eligible Norfolk aristocrat to meet her mother at Winchelsea. For Vera to bring a young man to meet her mother was obviously an event of some significance, as Mary Williams, who was also in Winchelsea at the time, with Guy, was able to observe. “Vera's friend was an airman and was in uniform. He was tall and fair, I believe, and quite quiet. Vera was evidently anxious about introducing him to her mother, I remember. It was obvious that he was important or she would not have brought him down.

“It was a gorgeous weekend, and we all went for blissful walks. We all stayed in the pub in Winchelsea, and I also remember Wilfred [Guy] was very rude to Vera's friend at breakfast. He refused to acknowledge him in any way.”

Mary did not see Vera's airman again, and Vera never spoke further of him. However, Mary did hear, quite coincidentally, after the war, that Vera had been engaged and that her fiancé had been killed. I asked how she heard. Did Vera tell her?

“Neither Vera nor anyone in the family spoke of it. I never saw an engagement ring. But I heard in an odd kind of way. I happened to know somebody who had worked with Vera during the war, and Vera told her. I met this person later, and she said to me: ‘Isn't it terrible about Vera's fiancé? She was engaged to an airman and he has been killed.' I assumed it must have been the man she brought to Winchelsea. When I asked Wilfred if Vera had been engaged, he said: ‘Rubbish! If she were, I would have known about it.' Far from ever expressing a wish that Vera should marry, I thought Wilfred was quite glad to have an unattached sister. There was a bond between Wilfred and Vera.”

Mary's recollections of Vera's “engagement” to Dick were contradictory, just as all my other discoveries so far about this relationship had been. After Christine Franklin had first shown me photographs of the couple, and the letter from the RAF Standing Committee, which dealt with personal effects, notifying Vera that Dick was missing, I applied to see his RAF casualty file. Given that an RAF committee had informed Vera when he went missing, I presumed Dick had officially named her along with his next of kin as someone to be notified; this would certainly have proved the seriousness of the relationship. The casualty file, however, showed that Dick had named only his brother Wyndham and his local vicar in Norfolk. There was no reference here to Vera. RAF experts, however, cautioned that this might not, after all, prove anything.

It was not uncommon, I was told, for servicemen anticipating death to conceal the identities of certain loved ones from the official files, perhaps fearing disapproval from family or friends. If discretion were needed, directions of a more private nature could be left by a serviceman or -woman in a letter with personal effects, asking for a person who was important to be privately notified should they die. Perhaps Dick, for reasons of his own, had been unwilling to make public his relationship with Vera, even in the event of his death.

I tried to find Dick's relatives to learn more. There were none to ask.

Dick's brother, Wyndham, a noted scholar and the last “squire” of Felbrigg Hall, the family home, died in 1968 and had never married. A friend and former neighbour of the Ketton-Cremers, Lady Wilhelmine Harrod, however, gave me some indication of why Dick's relationship with Vera might have had to be kept secret.

The Norfolk landed gentry, she suggested, were a particularly insular group, and she implied that it would have been unusual for somebody outside the county—particularly a foreigner—to have married into such a family. Dick's brother and their mother, Emily, also were wary of any claims on Dick's inheritance. It had been tacitly understood that Dick would inherit Felbrigg one day, as his elder brother could not produce an heir, owing to illness in his youth.

And there had been many women in Dick's life. “He was good-looking and athletic—all the things his older brother wasn't,” said Lady Wilhelmine. “Women were attracted to him.” Dick's mother doted on both her boys but despaired of Dick's womanising and his constant travelling. If there had been any serious relationship between Dick and a woman he had met abroad, Emily Ketton-Cremer certainly would have disapproved. “The mother would have been the problem in this case,” said Lady Wilhelmine. When I pressed her as to why, she considered for some moments and said: “I just feel it instinctively to have been so.”

Then I visited Felbrigg Hall, hoping to find more clues there. Now owned by the National Trust, the house lies two miles inland from Cromer, on the north Norfolk coast, its imposing mullioned facade looking out over rich, wooded parkland. On the wet December day when I visited, the house was closed, but two volunteer guides, Joan Chapman and Mari Chalk, offered to show me around. Everywhere were large bulging shapes under white dustsheets.

From a drawer in the west corridor, Mari pulled Dick's old firearms certificate, dance cards, and other records of his social life. Here also were his flying goggles, found in a desk in the cabinet room, off another corridor, and a membership card of the Norfolk and Norwich Aeronautical Club. Joan found postcards Dick had sent to his mother when he was skiing, and I looked carefully at these. They were postmarked 1939, but there was no clue as to whom he was with.

We entered the morning room, which was completely dark. Electricity was not allowed, explained Joan, and she threw open shutters to let in some drizzly light, revealing portraits all around. Dick's photograph albums were here, in another desk drawer, and she got them out. There were numerous pictures of Dick cradling cats, donkeys, and dogs. Now Dick was in the mountains skiing again. And again I looked hard for Vera. “Curling with Nancy and Phil.” “Self on luge.” Vera wasn't here.

On another page Dick was off on tour on the Continent with “Fluff,” his Ford. There had been attempts to get him to work in the City, Joan and Mari had heard, but he preferred to travel. Here was Dick standing on a steamship with two smiling girls, and in Bali in multicoloured shorts. And here was a picture of his plane, which appeared to have landed on the lawn at Felbrigg. Dick was sitting astride it, clutching a glamorous, dark-haired girl. But there was not one photograph of Vera. It was as if she had been blotted out.

Then just as I was giving up, I turned another page and saw a picture of a familiar-looking church. Underneath it somebody had written, “Winchelsea Church.” There was no explanation as to why a picture of Winchelsea church should be stuck here amid more pictures of Dick and Fluff, Dick skiing, and Dick with more glamorous girls.

Before I left Felbrigg, Joan and Mari led me to the very top of the house. They carried torches and seemed quite excited about what we were going to see next. We climbed up and up and then stopped on a half landing under the eaves. Joan pushed at a wooden door, which opened inwards onto blackness. She shone a torch on shapes piled up—leather suitcases and old trunks. These were Dick's trunks, she said; from his travels. I climbed into the attic room with Joan, her torch picking up labels in the darkness.

She read out the names of places on the labels: Marseille, Bali, Shanghai, Alexandria. I asked her to pull out the trunk with the Alexandria label. According to her friend Barbara Worcester, Vera first met her “English pilot” when she went on the travels that began with her twenty-first birthday present from her father—the trip to Alexandria. Barbara thought the pilot was Vera's true love.

The trunk was dragged out, sending up more clouds of dust. “Dollar
Steamships,” said the sticker; “SS President Van Buren.” And there was a picture of a large white luxury cruise ship with tall funnels bearing dollar signs. “Mr. Ketton-Cremer. Cabin to Alexandria, 4 July,” it read, but the year was hard to make out. We all took turns to guess what it was— either 1930 or 1935, we thought, although it could have been any of the years in between.

We forced open the thick steel hinges of the trunk, but there was nothing inside. The light had faded now and we could look at nothing more. On leaving I took a copy of Dick's handwriting to compare with the love letter I had found among Vera's papers in the shed in Zennor, the one with no signature, the address snipped off and just a curious dollar sign at the bottom: “My Sweet, my Lovely, my Darling.”

Vera was still in Winchelsea when war was declared on September 3, 1939. “Owing to her nationality,” as she told her Home Office immigration interviewer, she had been rejected for work with the Land Army, the British Red Cross, and Postal Censorship, but at least in Winchelsea she was able to “do her bit” by helping care for children evacuated from the East End of London. In a rare expression of sentiment, Vera later described in great detail the deprivation of the poor, malnourished evacuees, saying “nothing the war produced subsequently could equal the shock of seeing those children.” The words seemed inappropriate, given the horrors that the war later produced for her.

By June 1940, with German forces just across the Channel, Vera had moved back to London to live with her mother in a small two-room apartment in Nell Gwynne House, a block of well-appointed flats in Sloane Avenue. The local Air Raid Precautions group, which met in the basement, was already practising for the Blitz and accepted Vera as a member. A woman named Pat Holbeton, also in the Chelsea ARP, remembered meeting Vera in her boiler suit as they patrolled the streets. “She was always very cagey,” said Pat, “and I never really knew anything about her.” Pat was a friend of Elizabeth Norman, the SOE secretary at whose bridge party Vera had appeared in February 1941 when Pat had taken her along to make up a four.

It was at about the time that she joined the Chelsea ARP, Vera told her immigration officer, that she was approached by SOE. The interviewer wrote: “Miss Atkins heard that a friend of the family, a Major Humphreys, had put forward her name for a post in the War Office for certain special confidential work. She was interviewed in March 1941 and appointed immediately.”

Major Humphreys was Leslie Humphreys, “the Hump,” whom Vera had known in Bucharest and for whom she had already worked gathering intelligence. Nothing in her papers suggested she had maintained contact in England with the “spy gents,” but evidently she had. At the outbreak of war Humphreys was working in a new department within MI6, Section D, which had begun to plan for sabotage operations behind enemy lines. By the summer of 1940 Section D had been absorbed into the newly formed SOE, and Humphreys was the first head of SOE's French Section.

The invitation to an interview for “special confidential work” engineered by Humphreys marked an extraordinary turn of events in Vera's life. Since arriving in England, she had been treated as an alien and had been refused any form of regular employment or war service. Now she was to be interviewed for a job at the heart of Britain's newest and most secret of organisations, the Special Operations Executive.

Vera had kept a copy of the letter. Sent from “Inter Services Research Bureau, 64 Baker Street, London W1,” and addressed to “Dear Miss Atkins,” it read: “Could you please get in touch with me as soon as possible, as I would like you to come and see an officer here as I think we have found a vacancy for you?” The letter was signed by a Mrs. Stanier, a popular woman nicknamed Naps, who was in charge of SOE's secretarial staff.

Yet Vera's own account of the job offer made out it was a matter of no great interest: “I received an anodyne little letter out of the blue telling me to come for an interview. I went to see a woman I did not much like. She would not say exactly what it was one would be doing. I said I would give it a month and if I liked it I would stay.”

PART III

GERMANY

14.
A Woman in Blue

M
ajor Anghais Fyffe left Bad Oeynhausen at eight a.m. on Saturday, December 1, 1945, to be in Berlin on time to meet Vera in the Hotel am Zoo at two p.m. For Major Fyffe, Vera's sudden arrival in Germany had come at an inconvenient moment—he had been up all night dancing “Strip the Willow” at the St. Andrew's Night dance in the officers' mess.

The town of Bad Oeynhausen, a sprawling nineteenth-century health resort in Westphalia, had been taken over by the British lock, stock, and barrel within weeks of the German surrender in May 1945 and was now the headquarters of the British Army of the Rhine.

At the centre of the British-occupied zone of Germany, Bad Oeynhausen had emerged from the war untouched by bombs and had a large supply of spacious villas and hotels from which the residents were expelled to make way for five thousand British soldiers, intelligence staff, and civilians. A barbed-wire fence was strung around the British-requisitioned area, and only Germans working for British forces—as cooks, labourers, or translators—were allowed in. The policy of “non-fraternisation” imposed a ban on contact with the Germans, and most of the new occupants of Bad Oeynhausen hardly noticed those on the other side of the fence as they went about transforming this most Germanic of spa towns into a model British military encampment. British Army signs went up on all buildings, and hotels were transformed into messes. On
Sundays the church was filled with khaki instead of frock coats. Everywhere soldiers walked briskly along walkways, although when the writer Stephen Spender arrived here one day at teatime, he found nobody around. The Germans beyond the fence “do not look at one,” he noted, “or if they do, it is without expression. It is like watching them behind a glass screen.”