Sarah Helm Read online

  So, in the spring of 1941, the overwhelming priority for SOE was still to get British agents on the ground. Only with trained men and women in place could the potential of a civilian insurgency be assessed, and only once those agents had begun to form workable guerrilla cells could arms and supplies be dropped to the French resistance fighters. Vera would, by the end of the war, be playing a vital role in getting those agents behind the lines, but when she first joined, in April of that year, neither she nor most of her colleagues had much idea of what their role would be or how exactly this secret war was to begin.

  When I probed Vera further about why she thought she had been chosen for this clandestine work, she simply said: “One didn't know.” Then she was silent for a minute. Realising I was waiting for more, she added: “Let's leave it at that.”

  I tried asking Vera about her family background as I had heard she was of Romanian origin. “This is of no interest,” she replied. “It is something on which I have closed the book. I have closed the book on many things in life.” Then she got up and offered me a drink.

  But Vera had “closed the book” on her past with such finality that it only made me more intrigued. The details of her life that were on the record at that time were these: Vera Atkins was born on June 15, 1908, somewhere in Romania. She came to live in England sometime in the 1930s. In April 1941 she joined SOE and was soon appointed intelligence officer for F Section. By the end of the war she had become, in the words of a senior colleague, “really the most powerful personality in SOE.”

  Vera never worked in the field but coordinated the preparation of more than four hundred secret agents who were to be dropped into France. She had knowledge of every secret mission, shared in the handling of each agent in the field, and had sole responsibility for the personal affairs of every one of her “friends,” as she called the agents. The majority of these she saw off personally on their missions. She was most intimately associated with the women agents, her “girls.”

  When, after the war, more than a hundred of those agents had not returned, Vera launched and carried out almost single-handedly a search to establish what had become of them. On the first “missing” lists were sixteen women.

  Across the chaos of bombed-out Germany she followed the agents' trails to the concentration camps and helped track down many of the Germans who had captured and killed them. She gave evidence at Nazi war crimes trials, and the French awarded her the Croix de Guerre in 1948 and the Légion d'Honneur in 1995. The British, by contrast, waited until 1997 to honour Vera Atkins, finally making her a Commander of the British Empire.

  As I listened to her, however, I realised just how sparse the known facts about Vera Atkins were. Who was this woman? How could it be that she had reached the age of ninety without anyone knowing more than this about her? I looked around, but the room contained no clues. It seemed unremarkable, quite comfortable but colourless, with a pale-green carpet. At a glance I saw a few recent family photographs and lots of flowers—some in formal vases, some in little pots. The Daily Telegraph, open at the stocks and shares page, lay on a table in front of a very long sofa in faded pink. On the small table by Vera's chair were a magnifying glass, an open letter, a coaster, and an ashtray. But there was not a book to be seen, and only a few bland landscapes on the wall.

  Vera returned with drinks, and I tried once more to probe her. She was extremely well spoken; she articulated her sentences so carefully and her accent was so precisely English that it had, paradoxically, a foreign ring. But for all its clarity, her voice was very hard to hear, because she spoke softly and in such deep tones.

  I raised the question of SOE's most famous disaster, the collapse of the Prosper circuit, and we discussed the women agents. “What did they have in common?” I asked. She considered, and I wondered which of the women were coming to her mind.

  “Bravery. Bravery was what they had in common,” she said. “You might find it in anyone. You just don't know where to look. Their motivations were all different. Many women made good couriers or had worked in coding and had fingers like pianists—they made good radio operators. They might be artists or fashion designers. Why not? They had to be self-reliant, of course. Physical appearance was important. They were all attractive women. It gave them self-confidence.”

  “What about Madeleine?” I asked, mentioning the woman wireless operator whose story I had always found most compelling. Noor Inayat Khan, alias Madeleine, had worked with Prosper, the biggest F Section circuit. Noor, who took the English name Nora when she joined SOE, was the secret agent who played the harp and “could not lie.” “Do you believe today that it was right to have sent her?” I asked.

  Vera thought for a moment. “There were questions about Nora, about her suitability. But she wanted very much to go.”

  She was now twisting a matchbox round and round in her hands, and I strained to catch the words. “I drove with her down to the aerodrome. It was a perfect June day… the smell of the dog roses. Taking the agents to the aerodromes… was very tiring.”

  I asked when she had realised that some of the agents were not coming back. Her thoughts seemed to be moving on, but she was hesitant about whether to give voice to them. She turned and looked me straight in the face. Her expression was now quite blank, almost cold. I was quite sure she wanted me to leave. “I'm really very tired, you know.”

  After a few moments during which I fully expected her to rise and usher me out of the room, Vera suddenly turned and looked at me again. “I went to find them as a private enterprise. I wanted to know. I always thought ‘missing presumed dead' to be such a terrible verdict.” Time suddenly telescoped to nothing; her voice was raised at least an octave, and it was as if she were no longer peering into her past but setting off for Germany after the end of the war to follow the trail of her agents.

  “I remember it was a bitterly cold day when I was collected by Staff Sergeant Fyffe, who drove from Berlin, through the Russian zone, to Bad Oeynhausen in the British zone. When we got there I said: ‘Who is in charge here?' I asked if he would have time to see Squadron Officer Atkins.

  “Somerhough was his name. He had the quickest brain I have ever known. I just blew in that afternoon and told him I had arrived from Berlin by car. He received me, and I explained in a few sentences what I wanted to do. I said: ‘I believe you have the camp commandants of Sach-senhausen and Ravensbrück in your custody. I would like to see them.'

  “He said: ‘They are tough nuts. One has escaped twice, and the other has not yet been interrogated.'

  “I said: ‘I want to see them anyway' Next I had to persuade him to let me work from his HQ. He said there was no room for another officer—especially a woman officer. But I persuaded him. I stayed there until I had traced every agent we had lost.”

  With these words Vera finished as suddenly as she had begun, and turned to indicate that now I really must leave. It was as if she had been waiting to see my interest awakened before calling a halt to our meeting.

  It wasn't until after Vera Atkins's death on June 24, 2000, that I was able to start trying to find out more about her and her “private enterprise.” I began my search in a garden shed in Zennor, Cornwall, that belonged to Phoebe Atkins, her sister-in-law. The shed contained Vera's personal papers.

  It must be said that this was a very classy kind of shed. Vera would have approved of it as a home for her papers. It had a heater, a kettle, and a sofabed, and I was not really alone there as I could see the back of Phoebe's cropped white hair across the lawn as she read at her conservatory table. It was nice to know Vera was with us too. For she hadn't quite gone to her grave: her ashes were sitting on the shelf in Phoebe's conservatory next to a potted plant and a pile of Cornish Liberal Party leaflets.

  It was at Phoebe's invitation that I had gone down to Zennor. She was the widow of the younger of Vera's two brothers, Guy, who died in 1988. Phoebe and Vera were always close, and after Vera died Phoebe took charge of Vera's papers and had them carefully inde
xed. She wanted somebody to “do Vera's life,” as she put it, but she was unsure who the author should be. She had been advised by experts on SOE to select an established historian, somebody with “gravitas.” But Phoebe, aged sixty-nine, who had trained at Camberwell College of Arts before moving to Cornwall to work as a farm labourer, said she was not interested in gravitas. She wanted somebody who would write about “Vera—Vera the woman.”

  I began to trawl through the shed. There were a number of tempting boxes with neat labels such as “Personal Correspondence,” “SOE,” “Female Agents A–Z,” “Male Agents A–Z,” “War Crimes.” Yet as I started to pull out the papers, I was disappointed. Many files were just a collection of newspaper articles. “War Crimes” seemed to be about the erection of memorials. Most of the photographs just showed Vera as an upper-crust Englishwoman, often presiding at dinners or being chummy with the queen mother. There was only one that interested me. It showed Vera as a very young woman, tall and handsome, almost beautiful, standing with another young woman by a newly planted sapling, but where it had been taken, the picture did not say.

  I started looking around for other files, which perhaps had not been indexed and which, I liked to think, might be called “Romania,” “Childhood,” “Family,” “Education,” or even “Diaries.” They did not exist.

  Instead there was a vast amount of material on the various media projects in which Vera had been involved over the years, including a large file called “Controversial Books” that contained letters to and from authors about how they had got the SOE story wrong.

  I came across a promising folder labelled “Vera's Letters.” These were in fact mainly postcards, most of them sent to her mother, so there was no room for Vera to say much, and they were in illegible, tiny, spiky handwriting. Here was one from Munich in February 1946, when, I knew, she had just arrived in the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to start interrogating war criminals. But when I had patiently deciphered every word, I found the card filled with a bland list of places and no information at all: “Dearest Ma, I've been on the move since last Sat: Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Baden Baden (via Heidelberg) then on to Munich. Off to Nuremberg tomorrow. Fondest Love. V.”

  When Vera did write at any length, the result was almost more frustrating than when she kept it short. Her longer pieces of prose—such as a synopsis I found for an autobiography—were so polished, so full of clichés, that I began to suspect that Vera herself would not have been the best person to tell her own story.

  In another bulging box I found nothing but a pile of videos showing Vera's appearances in TV documentaries, and alongside were film scripts for various movies that she had advised on.

  But I didn't want to read others' scripts. By now Vera's personality was fading in front of my eyes, amid a pile of synopses and countless posed photographs. I was beginning to wonder if her life was really of any interest. Worse, I was beginning to wonder how much I liked her.

  Phoebe's little dog, Zilla, was barking at the door to come in. It was raining. I shuffled around a little and looked through some drawers that I had not yet inspected. Here was a whole row of as-yet-unopened files with titles such as “Correspondence on Tracing.” The files contained the original documents relating to Vera's investigation into the disappeared agents.

  I pulled out a flimsy piece of brown paper. It was a statement made by Franz Berg, a crematorium stoker, who had witnessed the killing of women agents in the Natzweiler concentration camp. I knelt on the floor to read. At the end of the statement, I saw that Berg had been interrogated by Squadron Officer Vera Atkins in April 1946.

  There was a tapping on the door. Phoebe was standing there, pointing at her watch. “We're off to the Tinners for lunch,” she said. Her daughter Zenna, aged thirty-six, and her two children had just arrived for a visit.

  I hoped that in the pub Phoebe and Zenna would be able to tell me more about Vera's past than I had so far learned in the shed, but they said they didn't know much at all. “We never talked about the past. With Vera one just didn't,” said Phoebe.

  Zenna said she knew only “the answers to the questions a child might ask” because she had talked to her aunt Vera most when she was growing up. “And Dad was paranoid—he didn't want anyone to know about his past.” As if to illustrate the point, Zenna put a packet of her father's papers on the table. He had written an instruction to Zenna on the envelope. “Deposit these documents in your bank with instructions to be destroyed unopened on your death.”

  What Phoebe and Zenna were able to tell me was this. Vera had two brothers, Guy and Ralph. Guy, the younger, who married Phoebe in 1964, was educated at Oxford and then took a Ph.D. at Prague in 1937. After the war Guy taught African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He had a genius for languages. Ralph, Vera's elder brother, who died in 1964, was manager of an oil company in Istanbul before the war. Later he dabbled in business. Ralph had one son, Ronald, a journalist living in Lewes.

  Zenna and Phoebe passed on whatever tales they had overheard about Vera's parents and about a large house somewhere in Romania, but they didn't seem to know what to believe. The children had a pony and trap and a sleigh in winter “with those curly bits on.” Vera had a boat named after her on an ornamental lake.

  Although Phoebe and Zenna couldn't tell me much, they suggested who might be able to and gave me Vera's address book. They also gave me advice: I should not expect to find information, as such, in the shed. Vera stored most of the information she valued in her head, and even this information she regularly erased. “She could close things down because she had a mental filing system,” said Zenna. “I am the same. Once I have dealt with a problem, I erase it from my mind, then I can't open it up again unless somebody hits the right trigger.”

  But the two of them said I would find clues. For example, Zenna had discovered photographs hidden behind other photographs in Vera's frames. I should watch for “little habits like that.” And she said that although she had few facts to give me, she had heard a mass of stories from Vera as a child. If I ever had a question about Vera, she might be able to help as long as I “pressed the right trigger.” It would be a matter of luck.

  Back in the shed that afternoon I stopped looking for answers and found that this most secretive of women had indeed left clues of a sort. I found love letters. They were more like snippets of love letters; snippets of great happiness. Here was a champagne bottle label in an envelope with a letter, in blue ink on blue notepaper, that said: “My Sweet, My Lovely, My Darling—cross out the possessives if you like, but you are—My Darling, My Sweet.” The top of the notepaper had been carefully cut off.

  There was no signature at the bottom, except for what looked like a dollar sign.

  Even those things that had been so disappointing that morning were now not so. Vera's postcards and letters to her mother seemed more interesting, precisely because they said so very little. And the posed pictures of Vera were more interesting now, when I put them together with other Veras I had begun to find. If I put the picture of her with permed hair, twinset, and pearls next to the one of her in Paris—stylish suit, nipped in at the waist—she was simply not the same woman. And tucked at random in a long, brown envelope, I found Vera on a mountain pony with a line of others on ponies, on the edge of a forest. A distinguished-looking man was having difficulty controlling his horse, and close to him was Vera, with bobbed hair and riding jacket, clearly in control of her mount. I turned the picture to find a date, 1932, and a list of names, including “Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg. German Ambassador to Bucharest and negotiator of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Executed in the anti-Hitler plot 1944.”

  The more I pulled out files and envelopes, the more snipped letters or parts of papers or unidentified photographs would fall out. Books had notes or cuttings tucked in them. It began to feel as if Vera had left a deliberate paper trail for me to find. Rather than write anything down, she preferred what the SOE training schools called the �
�flotsam” method of information dissemination. The flotsam looked like nothing on first examination but in fact had been deliberately placed to lead the interested party down a particular route—in this case, the biographer. For Vera must have known somebody would be “doing her life.”

  So the torn letters, the single page of a diary of her hunt for the missing, the carefully laid photographs that tumbled out before me were not the casual remnants of a life left behind but a series of carefully considered signposts.

  Then as I packed things away, I noticed a card that had fallen to the ground. It had a photograph on the front, of a young woman whom I recognised as Nora Inayat Khan. This was a particularly beautiful picture of Nora. Faded and brown round the edges, it captured her unusual aura of gentleness and strength. It was all in her large, dark eyes.

  Opening up the card, I saw there was writing inside: “To Vera Atkins. With gratitude—a feeling I know Nora would have shared for your enterprise in following in her tracks in the German wilderness of the aftermath.”

  The note was signed by Nora's eldest brother, Vilayat Inayat Khan, and dated 1948. I stared at the picture for some moments. Just lying there as it was on the floor, I could so easily have missed it.

  PART I

  ENGLAND

  1.

  Nora

  Vera Atkins did not, as a rule, take too much notice of the opinions of others. When it was a question of judging the character of a particular agent, especially a woman agent, she liked to make up her own mind in her own time—which was usually within a few moments of their entering the room where she first met them, at Orchard Court.