Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (69 page)

I wanted to be absolutely sure too that she had been at Vera's funeral and not somebody else's. Had she kept the order of service? I asked. She had not. Did she recall somebody giving her a lift to the station? “No, my dear. I went by car. I almost always had a driver who drove me to these things.”

If she had gone to Winchelsea by car, obviously she would not have needed a lift to the station and could not have been Judith Hiller's “Belgian lady.” And yet she insisted she was there. How had she heard about the funeral?

“As secretary of the Amicale, I was often called upon to go to these things,” she said. “And after all, you see, I had met Vera Rosenberg again after the war. So I wanted to go and pay my respects.”

“How did you meet her after the war?” I asked, intrigued again.

“She called me on the telephone. I was living in London by then. She must have got my number through the embassy or the diamond club. I think she said she had gone to some trouble to find me. She said we could meet for a chat. She suggested Fullers in Regent Street. It was a little teahouse on the corner opposite a bank. It was quite small and discreet. And many years later she called again. That time we met in Fortnum & Mason.” Gilberte had just named two of Vera's favourite meeting places.

“Why had she wanted to meet you?”

“I never knew. Both times I went away wondering what it had all
been about. But now I think she was meeting me to sound me out—to see if I ever talked, or said something indiscreet. Of course I hadn't. And she was relieved.”

I asked Gilberte to tell me more about the meetings, to see if she could describe Vera.

The first meeting must have been in the late months of 1946, said Gilberte, who remembered telling Vera she would be noticeably pregnant. Her son was born in January 1947.

“How would you recognise her?”

“She said she would wear a flower. And she came wearing a flower. She was quite different from how I remembered her—very English, in a twinset and pearls. She was more English than the English, really. She was very careful how she spoke. She was artificial in her speech, with her posh accent, you know. You know what I mean, dear, she had that particular way of enunciating.”

“What did you talk about?”

“I didn't ask questions. I said only, ‘Did you get back safely?' She said yes. She had lost touch with the man. She told me she was doing research, she had been in Germany. I didn't ask what research. She mentioned her mother, I think. Her mother was elderly and had ‘not settled' well. That was the expression she used: ‘not settled.' They were living in a small flat in Chelsea, she said.

“I asked her if she had settled down now in England—you know, married or anything—but she did not reply. She said something about a brother in America—but that might have been the second time.”

I told Gilberte that Vera's brother Guy was in America in the 1960s, then asked: “Did you talk about Antwerp at all?”

“She asked me if I was still in touch with my old friends, that sort of thing. But just in general.” Gilberte stopped to consider. “You know, dear, she was always cagey.”

I had heard the word “cagey” to describe Vera probably more than any other.

“That is the word I would use about her—cagey. La vie cachée. We are talking about a woman with a double life.”

I wondered why Vera had called her, just at that time in 1946.

Gilberte said she too had always wondered about that. “I think she might have seen this,” she said, then felt around in an envelope and pulled out a cutting from the Evening Standard that showed a picture of Gilberte as a young girl and told the story of how she had helped British pilots. Gilberte had just been awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre. The story appeared in September 1946. “I think she saw that and saw I was in England and thought she must get to me to see what I was saying, what I was like, if I knew anything.”

I asked how the second meeting came about.

“It was many, many years later—in the sixties or seventies. Perhaps something was happening that made her worried. And she would have seen my name with the Amicale perhaps, laying wreaths and so on.”

This time they arranged to meet by the Jermyn Street entrance to Fortnum & Mason, so they could not miss each other.

“What did you talk about this time?”

“Oh again, this and that. I think she was living near Harrods by then. She asked me again if I was still in touch. I said my father had died. Perhaps that was what she had wanted to know. Perhaps she wanted to know something from my father, or if he was still alive. I didn't hear from her again.”

“Did you ever call her?”

“No, dear. I didn't ask for her number.”

Then I got out my photographs to see whether Gilberte recognised Vera.

She looked at one or two of Vera in later life and nodded. And then she looked at others. I had brought a variety of photographs: Vera in France, Vera in uniform in Germany, at memorials in England, on her eightieth birthday.

“You see how she is a chameleon,” said Gilberte, holding up the picture of Vera at the opening of Carve Her Name with Pride. “In this she is Voilà, you know, ‘Here I am.' ” And then she held up a picture of Vera with a stiff perm in a tweed suit. “This was more how she was when I saw her the second time in London.”

Gilberte put the pictures down, looking more anxious than ever. The more she was sure that my Vera was also her Vera, the more she became
agitated. “You know, my dear,” she said plaintively, “this woman had a hidden life, of that I am now sure. I have been saying it a lot, I know, but I have a feeling in the back of my neck. It is a silly thing. But it is the silly things, you see. How can I call it?—‘fishy' I do not believe my mind has gone. I don't think I would have made a mistake. At my age you are careful what you say. Mais il y a quelque chose qui cloche dans la vie de cette dame. It is an instinct, you know. I feel it. And she was very shrewd. You will never find out because she has destroyed everything. Do you have to write this book? Is it really necessary?”

Soon after seeing Gilberte, I called Judith Hiller to say I had found her Belgian lady—at least, I thought I might have found her.

Delighted, Judith asked what I had learned. I said she was charming and had told a fascinating story. “What was the name of her road in Kensington?” asked Judith. I said she lived in Cambridgeshire but had recently moved from London. She used to live in St. John's Wood. I said I thought Judith might have confused the two. “I never confuse anything with Kensington,” came the reply. “Did she recall my taking her to the station?”

“No,” I said, “she seemed to think she came by car.” I realised that I had found a Belgian lady but the wrong one. Either Gilberte had made her story up, or there was a second mystery Belgian lady at Vera's funeral who had also helped her “escape” and who I would also now have to try to find.

I started my enquiries again. This time I began by asking Vera's family and friends to rack their brains for any mention of Antwerp, or Belgium or Holland in any conversation with Vera. Then I went back to Winchelsea, thinking the clue to finding the second Belgian (or Dutch) lady might still lie at the funeral scene. Canon Basil O'Farrell, who conducted the service, had checked his records, and there was no list of mourners and no plate for donations either. If mourners wished to make a donation, they could give money to Vera's favourite charity, the Sue Ryder Foundation, and they were requested to do so through the funeral directors.

Two years later it seemed unlikely that the funeral directors would still have the list of donors, but I called Ellis Bros., in Rye, just in case. A helpful woman said she would get out the file, and within a moment she had found the list of donors. She read them out for me. There was a woman on the list who lived in Kensington, West London. Hers was a name I had never heard before.

When I knocked on the door of the woman's Kensington home, a man came to the door in a grey tweed jacket with a poppy pinned to a lapel. Yes, he was the husband of the person I was looking for, and, yes, she had been to Vera Atkins's funeral. His wife was Dutch. But she wasn't in.

“And I should just warn you of something,” he said. “My wife's memory is sometimes confused, especially when it concerns the war. You might learn something from her, but some of what she will tell you will be a jumble.”

But her memory had become confused only in recent years, he added. She had known Vera Atkins well before that.

So they were definitely old acquaintances—that was not a confusion?

“No, that was not a confusion,” he said. He himself remembered going to dinner with his wife at Vera's flat sometime in the 1950s. “Rutland Gate, wasn't it?” he asked. She had made quite an impression, and he remembered in particular how adept she was at cooking in a tiny kitchen while entertaining her guests at the same time.

“Was she a lesbian?” he asked. “She didn't marry, did she?”

I told him I wanted to ask his wife about the story she had told to Judith Hiller: about helping Vera escape from Holland during the war. He said he himself had been a naval officer and had never been involved in anything clandestine. But his wife had certainly been in Holland during the war.

“So might it be true?” I said.

“Well, this is my dilemma,” he sighed. “Some of the things she says turn out to be true. I could give you lots of examples of where she has been right. There are lots of grey areas. You will have to judge for yourself. At least she keeps a good house, so I can't complain.”

A few days later I returned to Kensington for my meeting with the second mystery “Belgian lady” who had been at Vera's funeral, and whom I now knew to be Dutch. An elderly woman came to the door with very light-grey hair folded in a turnip-shaped bun on top of her head. She was called Beatrice, and she was carefully dressed in a tweed pleated skirt, brown suede pumps, and a maroon cardigan. She offered coffee. She appeared very alert, and the room was immaculate, though rather dark. I explained why I had come. She seemed willing to help and began talking.

She told me she was born in The Hague and grew up in Holland. She met Vera Atkins in Amsterdam early in the war, when she was working in Amsterdam as a social worker, looking after the children of prostitutes. The story so far was clear. How did she come into contact with Vera?

Beatrice said she had had contacts with a man in the Amsterdam National Bank. The man was Vera's brother, and he said his sister was about to be deported and needed help. Beatrice now became hard to follow. Neither of Vera's brothers ever worked at the Amsterdam National Bank. Yet Beatrice talked a lot about “the man at the bank” in sentences that did not seem to join up in sequence. There was a lot of garbled matter. She seemed to be saying that she had been told to go and find Vera Atkins. It would be hard to identify her. So she was told to go to the red-light district, where she would have to recognise her. She would be undercover and posing as a prostitute.

What exactly did Beatrice mean? Her answer was hard to follow, but I think she was telling me that she had been told Vera Atkins would be sitting in the window, posing as a prostitute, in one of the brothels in the red-light district. That was where Beatrice had been told to go and find her. There would be a sign, she said.

I tried not to give up. Beatrice had moved on now and was talking about being on a train. All the time I tried to pick out names, places, facts that might be relevant and discard the jumble around them. It was as if Beatrice's thoughts had been through a tumble dryer and everything had got tangled up.

Among the web of sentences was talk of Princess Alexandra and President Trudeau; Maurice Buckmaster seemed to be tangled in there too. Then suddenly I caught a flash of Judith Hiller's account and tried to
hold on to it. There was a crowd of people who were being deported to some sort of camp for Jews at a village near Apeldoorn. Beatrice went to the station in Amsterdam and got on a train with these people and managed to persuade the Germans on the train that she lived near the village and that Vera lived there too, so they both managed to get away from the others, and Beatrice took Vera to a family of Jehovah's Witnesses who also lived in the village near Apeldoorn. The family sheltered Jews. She said Vera then hid in a barn, and later Vera showed her a photograph of herself working in the hay barn at the farm in the village.

“Trudeau would know everything,” she said, and then the thoughts got tangled again. Audrey Hepburn was in the barn too.

“Whose barn was it?” I asked.

It was a barn owned by Beatrice's family. Her family lived in the village, she said, and showed me a photograph of the barn with its name on it. “It was a place where a lot people hid,” she said. Vera had never talked about this, I told her.

Beatrice then said: “Ah, but there were two Veras. I know now that there were two Veras. The other one was a proper English lady.” And now she was wondering if “our Vera” was perhaps really “a tart.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of the way she used to walk up and down Knightsbridge.”

“How do you know she did that?”

“I used to see her.” Then Beatrice said that Vera was a “very shrewd woman.”

I asked if she saw Vera again after the war, and she said she did. She first bumped into her at the Sloane Square tube station and then saw her a lot in the 1950s but less in recent years.

“You must have felt close to her to go to the funeral,” I said.

“We had shared experiences. But there were two Veras. I know that now. I realised that ten minutes ago. Sometimes there were three.” Then she said: “It's a bit jumpy for you, isn't it? It's hard for you to follow,” as if she were reading my mind.

Beatrice got a map out and started finding places on it, as if to provide reassurance that she was not mad. She pointed out the village near Apeldoorn. Then she looked in the Dutch telephone directory and found
the name of the family of Jehovah's Witnesses and gave me the telephone number, suggesting I call them. I said I would.

Now, as I got up to leave, Beatrice was talking about how people get too concerned with the marmalade and the details of life. Her husband talked so much about the marmalade.