Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (77 page)

Furthermore, indispensable though Vera became to F Section, the simple fact was that she joined the organisation as a mere secretary and by the winter of 1944 still held only a junior officer's rank and was both a Jew and a woman. It was perhaps partly because of her “inferior” status that she felt such an overwhelming need to cover up mistakes.

On top of these considerations, Vera had her own exceptional reason for feeling personally insecure. For most of the war her status as an enemy alien meant she was highly vulnerable and could not afford to rock the boat. And then, tucked away somewhere inside British intelligence files, the case of Karen and Fritz Rosenberg was lurking. The consequences for Vera, had details of her mission to the Low Countries ever emerged during the war, would have been grave indeed. Had it become known that she had passed a large sum of money to pay a bribe to the Abwehr, there is little doubt that she would have been ejected from SOE and packed off to someplace where she could do no harm. Whatever she may have suspected about captured wireless operators, whatever she may have thought about Buckmaster's judgements, Vera could not risk losing Buckmaster's support or provoking any investigation into her own past. Her own survival was at stake.

Although after the war Vera remained loyal to Buckmaster, the character of their relationship changed. Her loyalty to him in later years, though still respectful, became almost maternal. Perhaps her indebtedness to him for his protection during her difficult times was such that she instinctively protected him in return when he came under attack for F Section's failings.

There were occasionally small chinks in that loyalty—signs, almost, of rivalry. Asked once about the long hours Buckmaster worked at F Section, Vera scoffed, saying he was “the worst clock-watcher of all.” And she also allowed a difference of opinion to open up with her former boss over Déricourt. She had told me she never trusted Déricourt, and I soon discovered that in older age she had made a point of telling many people the same thing, even giving interviews for TV documentaries on the subject. Yet nobody pressed Vera to explain why, if that was the case, she had not ensured his conviction back in 1948.

While Vera's failure to speak out about errors during the war could be explained, her failure to ensure that evidence against Déricourt was put before the French tribunal in 1948 remained one of the greatest puzzles of all. Déricourt could not be held responsible for anything like all of F Section's failings, but his treachery had clearly hastened many agents to their deaths. The Foreign Office may well have advised former SOE officers in 1948 that this was a French affair and a British presence could stir up sensitivities. But such advice would not have deterred Vera from trying to convict Déricourt. Revenge was never a motivating factor in her “private enterprise,” but she certainly wanted to see justice done. Yet when Déricourt went on trial, Vera stayed away.

“Imagine,” said the French SOE agent Bob Maloubier, giving one credible explanation: “ ‘Antelme, captured on landing.' ‘Damerment, captured on landing.' ‘Lee, captured on landing.' ‘ “Michel,” captured on landing.' ” And his list of agents “captured on landing” went on and on. Twenty-seven SOE agents were named in the Valençay booklet as captured on landing or very soon afterwards. “They would not have wanted to be in court to hear that.”

The next day Valençay was covered by low grey clouds as we all headed off for the service at the SOE memorial, which stands at one end of an avenue of plane trees. At the other end of the avenue are the gates of the Château de Valençay, famous as the home of Talleyrand, Napoleon's foreign minister. The sun was trying to break through, although most people were hovering under trees waiting to see whether it would rain.

Soon everyone was surging around the memorial. There was quite a crowd. Judith Hiller was standing upright, proudly wearing her husband's medals on her royal-blue suit. The SOE adviser was talking to a man who had come down from the embassy and was bemoaning the fact that “on a perdu le soleil.” Examining the list of names on the memorial, I noticed someone was missing. Sonia Olschanesky, captured while working as a courier for F Section and murdered as an F Section “spy” at Natzweiler, was not on the memorial to F Section's dead. Vera had forcefully argued for Sonia's name to be included, I was told, but she was overruled by a committee that decided that, as a local recruit, not commissioned in the British armed forces, Sonia Olschanesky could not be remembered here.

Somewhere in the mêlée I bumped into Prosper's son Anthony Sut-till. He and his brother Francis had recently found more evidence to undermine the theory that their father had made a pact with the Germans. Yet as Anthony knew, the truth about the pact was now unlikely ever to be known, because Vera had taken it with her to her grave.

Just before Vera died, Anthony Suttill travelled down to Winchelsea in the hope of coaxing Vera to tell him, once and for all, everything she knew about his father's case. He took Vera out for lunch at the New Inn, so they could chat about his father in a relaxed atmosphere. They talked about many things, but the subject of Prosper was never raised. “I waited for Vera to say something, but she said nothing about it at all. And for some reason I felt it wasn't up to me to raise it,” Anthony told me.

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I wish to God I had.”

Now a group of French resistance veterans, several in jeans, appeared with fifteen different flags and trumpets. An estimated 200,000 French men and women died in Nazi concentration camps during the war, and more than a million French were deported.

We were all waiting for Pearl. I flicked again through the Valençay booklet, which set out the achievements of the SOE circuits in organising the French resistance. The SOE agents were “messengers of hope” to the resistance. The booklet quoted the words of General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, who wrote in May 1945 that resistance action on D-Day “played a considerable part in our complete and final victory”—words often quoted by those defending the creation of SOE.

Eventually Pearl appeared, still trailing her film crew, who shone a glaring arc light upon her. Tributes were spoken to the dead. Pearl struggled to the podium in front of the memorial, which stands fifteen metres high, a long, graceful, stretched piece of arching metal set amid a bed of flowers.

The traffic stopped, and Valençay was quiet as Pearl laid the wreath. The sun came out. We stood a while. Pearl spoke most movingly of those who had died. And then we moved away.

Back in the shed in Zennor, I had come to take a last look through the remnants of Vera's files. It was another wet and windy day. Phoebe was bedridden with arthritis. Zenna was here visiting with her two small children. But Vera was no longer with us. The urn carrying her ashes had been removed from the windowsill of the conservatory; she must finally have been laid to rest.

There was unlikely to be more to learn here in the shed. I now knew just how systematically Vera had “weeded” her own papers before her death. Mark Seaman, the SOE historian at the Imperial War Museum, had told me he was periodically summoned by Vera in her last years to “go through her files.” This meant watching her pluck papers from brown envelopes, examine them, and say “That's not interesting,” and the paper would go in the bin. “She was a bit of a tease really,” Mark admitted. “She let us all know what she wanted us to know.” I picked up a notebook belonging to Guy Atkins. It was full of aphorisms: “It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”

Here were those photographs again, showing Vera at endless dinners. Vera arranged things in her later years so that she was rarely alone. When she wasn't visiting friends, she entertained and probably partied more in her seventies and eighties than she had since her Romania days. There were many intimate dinners for her favourites at Rutland Gate and countless functions at “the Club.” When Vera finally won her CBE in 1997, she took over the Special Forces Club with a party at happy hour. The delay in granting Vera an honour had raised many eyebrows, as the letters in her CBE file showed. Well-wishers commented on how the award had been “a long time coming” and “was well overdue.” In fact, Vera's chance of securing an honour had been stuck for over fifty years, ever since MI5 had opened a file on her, suspecting her of Communist sympathies. Only in 1995, when the French made Vera a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur, the order's highest rank, did the British finally wake up to the fact that a British gong for Vera was overdue. Even then, Vera's case had been quite hard to “get unstuck,” as one senior official put it.

In her very old age Vera was still busy with SOE affairs, as her cleaner Christine had told me. “She'd sometimes have me stand in front of her desk on a Monday morning and she'd say: ‘Now, dear, I shall be in Paris next Thursday and in London Monday and Tuesday, and so you must redirect the mail and would you type some letters on Tuesday, polish the silver on Wednesday and change the linen on Thursday,' and I almost expected her to say: ‘… and parachute into France on Friday' ” Christine laughed, then said: “She did once look at me and say: ‘Yes, I might have given you a job.'

In the evenings Vera preferred the telephone to the television for company. “When I went to stay,” said Mavis Coulson, widow of John Coulson, whom Vera had known in Romania, “I had to be exactly to her schedule. I do remember the drink hour punctually began at seven. And the phone started to ring thereafter, and all her friends would call and she sparkled on the phone, often breaking into French. You would think that every man was her lover, and it was rather strange and rather sweet really. That was the hour of the day for her.”

Vera had continued to travel widely in later life, and here were the pictures, including snaps of her in Egypt that I had not looked at before. I wondered if she went to Egypt to see Dick's name, inscribed on the Alamein Memorial, erected in memory of Commonwealth servicemen and -women with no known grave. She would have found Dick's name on column 241.

Lying loose in a drawer, I found a newspaper clipping from the Daily Telegraph about Felbrigg Hall, reporting that, after the death of Wynd-ham Ketton-Cremer in 1969, the house was left to the National Trust. There were no heirs.

The most important romantic love of Vera's life was surely Dick Ketton-Cremer, but it had been hard to tell how important Vera was to Dick.

Shortly before she died, Vera visited Ann Eagle (née Rogers), her old friend from Bucharest days, who lived in Norfolk in later life. Out of the blue Vera asked Ann to drive her down to Felbrigg Hall. “I had no idea why she should want to go there. The house was closed when we arrived, so we drove around a little, and then she said: ‘You know, Ann, all this might have been mine.' It was a funny thing to say, but, you know, Vera could be funny like that. So I didn't comment, and we drove back home.”

After obtaining Dick's will, in which he left £500 to Vera, I had found John Ward, one of the named witnesses, hoping he might have heard Dick talk about Vera, but he had not and he thought Vera was probably “just one of many.” “He certainly liked the girls,” said John, a bomber pilot who had shared a tent with Dick in the desert. Was there anyone special? He said not, but then he paused a moment, as if considering whether to tell me something. “There was one he used to talk about. I had the impression he had travelled a lot before the war. I don't know where it was exactly, but somewhere maybe in the Far East. He had a native girl. He used to talk about her.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, just how she used to come and live with him for weeks on end and then go back again to her family. I don't think she was important, though. It was just the sort of thing one did if one was travelling. She was the only one he talked about. I think she was just useful to him at the time.”

I had found many other indications, however, that for Dick Vera was not just “one of many.” He had asked the RAF Standing Committee on Adjustment to inform Vera, albeit privately, should he go missing. He had named her in his final will, although second to another woman. He had kept a photograph of Winchelsea church, probably taken on his visit to meet Vera's mother in July 1939. Most important of all was the unsigned love letter which I first found in the shed here, with its address torn off. A handwriting expert had confirmed that the letter was almost certainly in Dick's hand. “My Sweet, My Lovely, My Darling—Cross out the possessives if you like, but you are—My Darling, My Sweet.

“Please—My love—I love you. Dear Sweet.”

It seemed probable that Dick's love for Vera was sincere, but given her background, it was a love that he, as a Norfolk squire, knew he would never be able to avow. As he wrote to her: “Cross out the possessives if you like.”

Poking around the back of the shed, I spotted a musty old box which somehow I had overlooked entirely on my first visit. I pulled out a thick brown envelope addressed to Guy Atkins and sent from Stuttgart in 1973. When I opened it, I found, much to my surprise, a copy of Siegfried's memoir. This was the same memoir that had been sent to me from another shed in Canada, after the snow melted. Yet all along a copy had been lying here, and neither Zenna, Vera's niece, nor Phoebe, Guy's widow, had known about it.

I noticed that the package was sent to Guy by Aenne Pahl, the Rosenberg cousin in Stuttgart, yet Aenne's own granddaughter, Iris Hilke, had known nothing of the memoir when I had spoken to her in Stuttgart some months before. She had said she had met Uncle Siegfried as a child, and he had told her wonderful tales about Romania—fairy tales, she thought—about “forests full of bears and great balls with ladies in long gowns.” So I had sent her my own copy of the memoir posted from Canada, and only then did she realise that “the fairy tales were true.”