Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (4 page)

At the same time, Betty, believing him dead, was on the Isle of Man learning all she could about the hotel business, which she loved. Betty remarks: ‘it served me in good stead for what my life was to become’. Indeed it did. She was later to start the first (and hugely successful) health farm in Britain, and came to own a castle in Ireland, among her numerous other ventures.

I went to the Isle of Man, and I had the marvellous romance in some ways on the Isle of Man. He was a brigadier and in those days he was a big shot and he was just nuts about me. We used to have such fun, and get up to lots of tricks. For a brigadier, to me he wasn’t that old and the man who owned the hotel was also keen about me, so it was very awkward to keep those two apart.

I loved sport; that is to say, I always loved the sport in which my current love was involved. The Isle of Man was quite an exciting thing in a way because of the TT racing
¹
and we also used to go horse riding. I was out riding one morning on top of a hill with an elderly character called Sandy Powell. He just went ‘titch, titch’ and my horse bolted. Watching was a famous ladies’ band leader called Ivy Benson, and she later remarked that I looked like the man on the flying trapeze. I thought, ‘my god if it goes left it will go into the sea off a high cliff’, and there was also an electric railway that went through the centre of the island. Well, fortunately it turned right and went back to the stables, but meanwhile it had thrown me and was dragging me by my ankle. Fortunately someone stopped it, but by then my ankle was broken. I felt I was lucky just to get away with no more than that.

Unlike the Nazis who believed that women should stay home to produce the next generation of German soldiers, Britain went on a ‘total war’ footing almost from the start. When Betty returned to London – just in time for the Blitz – she immediately went into war work. During the war, London buzzed with the energy of soldiers, sailors and airmen of many nations living life to the full while they still could. Now back in London, Betty was part of this frantic whirl, and was drawn into the glamorous and exciting world of aviators and test pilots. Still unaware that Eddie was alive, she had fallen madly in love with a man who she charmingly describes as ‘a Spitfire pilot’, Peter Powell. He was, in fact, a great deal more than ‘a Spitfire pilot’. For more than a year before the United States entered the Second World War some of its young men went through Canada to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF) to fight Germany alongside the British – in violation of the American neutrality acts. Initially somewhat disorganised, eventually in 1941 the British decided to organise three squadrons of Americans, the so-called Eagle Squadrons. One of these was the legendary 121 Squadron, and its first commander was Squadron Leader Peter Powell.

Betty recalls:

I met Peter Powell in a pub in Mayfair where military and air force people met.
²
I thought he was a nice young man and I was attracted to him at once. I did not realise how famous he was when I met him but soon found out. We met regularly; he visited me in London and took me out to pubs and to meet his friends. Ben Bowrings was a friend of mine and Peter’s who also flew Spitfires. His wife Zena and I would count them coming back after a raid and if one was missing we were in a state until we knew they were both okay. We would meet at a local (pub) after a sortie and it was often a meeting of relief and sadness: relief at having Ben and Peter with us, but sorrow if one of the boys was missing. I can still remember the highs and lows of those days.

As all of this was taking place, Eddie was undergoing espionage and sabotage training in France. After the war, Betty learned about Eddie’s exploits while he was in France, and takes up the story:

When Eddie was training to be a spy in the
Dienststelle
(
WASt
), he had a caretaker, a friend, whose name was Tomas. He was German but had been partly educated in England. Although Eddie spoke German before going there, he had to perfect it. Eddie enjoyed his training, he thought a lot of it was fun, highly dangerous but fun – but Eddie loved anything that was dangerous! He described Morse code as ‘black art’. After the war we received a case of wine from Tomas, out of the blue, when we were living at Shenley Lodge. That was a nice thought. On one occasion Eddie got bored during his training and he took off alone, which was forbidden. He went to a local bordello, where he met a girl and he spent the day with her. When Baron von Gröning (Eddie’s commanding officer and overseer of the
Dienststelle,
later a life-long friend of the Chapmans) found out he was missing, he was disturbed; he was always worried about Eddie anyway, taking a special interest in him – and never being totally certain whether Eddie was a British agent or not. He sent out three members from the
Dienststelle
to find him, which they did, and Eddie invited them to have a drink with him! The upshot was that they all returned legless. They had ordered two bottles of cognac and a bottle of liquor! One by one they were very sick. Von Gröning was happy with the outcome: they got back safely but were punished with a giant hangover.

Among the other things that Eddie got up to during his training was that he would go into the dining room in the morning, go up to the portrait of Hitler and shake his fists at it rather than raising his arm in salute. For some reason, the Germans thought this was hilarious. Only Eddie could have got away with it.

After a long period of training, the day came for him to put his training into practice. Eddie was parachuted into Cambridgeshire in eastern England at 2 a.m. on 20 December 1942. He knocked on the front door of a nearby farmhouse to say that he was an airman who had just landed and needed help. The farmer then got in touch with the police. Eddie was picked up and immediately asked to be put in touch with British Intelligence. He was handed over to them at Latchmere House, Ham Common, where they kept espionage suspects. Terence Young was recalled from the Middle East to identify him. Soon after, British Intelligence interviewed Eddie and he told them everything, just as he had planned to. Finally, after much interrogation and doubts on the part of his interrogators, they came to an agreement that he would be of use to them. He was accepted by the Double Cross Committee under the command of John C. Masterman, as a double agent.

Eddie’s mission for the Germans was to blow up the de Havilland factory in Hertfordshire, where the Mosquito bomber had been built. He divulged all of this in full to his MI5 interrogators.
³
An illusionist called Jasper Maskelyne was called in to make the factory look as though it had been sabotaged, and a German reconnaissance aircraft was allowed through to take pictures of the ‘damage’.
⁴
Even the local British civilians believed that the site had been bombed; it was even in the newspaper. This fake sabotage was carried out on 29 January. Eddie’s ‘destruction’ of the factory was so elaborately faked that the Germans were completely taken in. Before returning to France with the blessing of British Intelligence to continue his espionage activities against the Nazis, it is quite likely that he and Betty passed within a short distance of each other in London. It is probably just as well that they did not meet at that point in time, as it would have compromised Eddie’s position as a double agent, an increasingly valuable one as the war progressed.

At the same time as Eddie’s intelligence activities were taking place, Betty was busily involved in the war effort, driving an ambulance and working in a factory making war materials – small parts for aircraft: ‘It was during the war and everyone was supposed to work to further the war effort so I got allocated the job. I was the inspector at the end of the bench. Everyone was working too hard and the atmosphere was very competitive with everyone trying to do more than the next person.’

This was far from the end of Betty’s input into the war effort:

At night I used to go up on the roof with all the soldiers and put out the fires started by incendiary bombs on the roof with buckets of water. I was very scared but as it always happened very quickly there was never time to worry about it. You just had to get on with it. There were explosive bombs falling around but they were never near enough to us to cause us harm. There were boys and men there helping, but they had to do the heavy manual work of carrying buckets of water up the stairs or ladders and pass them up to us on the roof.

As dangerous as this was, Betty had an even closer call:

I was on the way home in a taxi when the bombs started falling. I jumped out of the taxi and ended up flat on the ground on my knees as the bombs were exploding around me. The taxi driver had meanwhile done a runner and was nowhere to be seen.

Among the prestigious and attractive aviators she met during the war was Geoffrey de Havilland, Jr., son of the famous aircraft designer and English pioneer aviator of the same name. They were soon going out together. Betty recalls an event that might have been a practical joke … but may not have been. ‘Somebody bought a box of kippers and let them go bad. Then he (or possibly she) posted them to Geoffrey. Those things today wouldn’t be funny.’ He became de Havilland’s chief test pilot and made the maiden flights of both the ‘wooden wonder’ Mosquito and the jet-propelled Vampire. The film
The Sound Barrier
was based on the incident described by Betty in Chapter 3. Ironically, it was the de Havilland factory that Eddie was parachuted into by the Germans to blow up in 1942. Betty also knew the famous night-fighter pilot John Cunningham, dubbed ‘Cat’s Eyes Cunningham’ by the press.
⁵
Yet Betty knew that Cunningham hated that name: it was just wartime propaganda.

It was around this same time that she met a casting director who became infatuated with her and wanted to launch her into films – another irony of Betty’s life, since she and Eddie had represented themselves as ‘film people’ at the time of his arrest in Jersey. She appeared in a few films in small parts: with Sir Laurence Olivier in a tram scene; as a nun in
Come Us This Day
, with Valerie Hobson; as a land girl in some of the comedy films made at Riverside Studios. She soon realised that her future did not lie in that direction but, as she remarked, ‘It was all money.’

One night during the war Betty was asked to go out with friends to a cocktail bar. One of them was Major Billy Moss, who wrote
Ill Met by Moonlight
:
⁶

They said afterwards we were going for dinner with some friends so I should be prepared. We went to a club called the Spiders’ Web on the Kingston bypass. It was a very nice place with a cabaret. When we got there who should be there but the young Duke of Kent, who was then 18. He was a friend of my friends and we were there to celebrate his 18th birthday. A friend of his mother, a countess, came along to see that we all behaved ourselves. One thing I remember very clearly was when the cabaret came on and the young duke was trying to be someone special, someone asked him what he thought of the cabaret and he said ‘fucking awful’. I said that was the first time I had heard a duke swear! All in all, it was a lovely evening out.

Reflecting on her love life during that time, she reminisces:

When it came to romance I was definitely born under an unlucky star. I loved and lost so often. I either found the ones who were unavailable but desirable, or available but undesirable. I was fortunate not to lose my life to two well-known murderers. One was Colonel Jimmy Armstrong, whose real name was Neville Heath, and the other was John George Haigh, the ‘acid bath killer’ (see Chapter 3).

In March 1943 Eddie went back to France via Portugal, with instructions from the Germans to blow up the ship that transported him, via a bomb concealed in a lump of coal. This he reported to the ship’s captain, who was aware of Eddie’s identity. The bomb was later disposed of safely. He stayed in Portugal for some time and was interrogated by the Gestapo. Maintaining that he had important information about the British, he insisted that he would only pass it to von Gröning, who was by now on the Russian front. Eddie was adamant, and eventually von Gröning was recalled. In later years, von Gröning always asserted that his recall from Russia saved his life. It was probably true. The Germans awarded Eddie the Iron Cross for ‘blowing up’ the de Havilland factory.

Eddie was eventually sent on to Oslo, Norway. While there he had a romance with a local beauty who, it eventually transpired, was herself an intelligence officer working against the Nazis. Many idyllic months passed, with Eddie sailing with his new girlfriend, doing relatively little for the Germans – a bit of retraining in Morse – and a great deal of highly risky intelligence gathering for the British. Making the sort of promises to each other that people in wartime often do, he was parted from his lover and sent to Berlin. He would never see her again.

At a high-level meeting in Berlin on the eve of the D-Day landings (June 1944), it was decided that Eddie must parachute into England again, which was thought safer than arriving by boat, once again to land near Cambridge. This meeting was at such a high level, and was so secret, that the doors were locked and strict instructions given that they should not be disturbed. Senior officers of all the military forces were present, and the meeting went on through the night. When they emerged from the room messengers were waiting outside, having been denied access, and relayed the information that the Allied invasion had begun.