Papa Spy

by Jimmy Burns

  Most of Richey’s correspondence with Ann has not survived, but on 11 October 1943, soon after receiving a letter from her, he wrote to his parents while sailing towards the Falklands on board HMS Carnarvon. His letter expresses admiration for her, in contrast to the disdain he felt for others in her aristocratic social circle.

  ‘Ann seems to be working very hard. I think some of the fair ladies one sees so much in The Tatler etc would do well to emulate her a bit. Her address is Military Hospital, Shenley, near St. Albans. At least it will be by the time you get this. She was at Glamis recovering from being very ill when she wrote, but was due to go back to hospital in a day or two. Talking of The Tatler few things annoy me more now than to see pictures of young Lord this and that and the other at some nightspot with a bottle of champagne on the table and a Guards uniform on. Some of them are on leave and all that but I always have the impression that a lot of them have been there since September 3rd 1939.’

  When Burns arrived in London that spring of 1941, nearly a year had passed since Michael’s older brother Paul, a pilot with the RAF’s Number 1 Squadron, had been drawn into the increasingly violent air battles preceding the fall of France. Between 10 and 19 May 1940, with the squadron confronted by the full might of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg invasion of France and the Low countries, he was shot down twice. He baled out once, and later crash-landed after sustaining a serious bullet wound to the neck. After a long period of rehabilitation during which he served as fighter operations sector commander, in the spring of 1941, Richey was declared fit and posted back to operational flying with 609 squadron at Biggin Hill. He spent the next four months flying a total of fifty-three missions across the Channel.

  Knowing of Richey’s heroic exploits, Burns felt deeply humbled by the fact that a letter Paul wrote to him about this time barely mentioned his extraordinary deeds, but was instead a note of gratitude. Paul said he wanted to thanks Burns for the continued use of his sports car and to apologise for only belatedly sorting out the insurance cover.

  Burns heard separately that Mike Richey was at sea again after surviving the sinking of his minesweeper the previous November. In the intervening months, while his brother Paul wrote a journal about his own experiences, Mike penned a no less graphic account of his own scrape with death.

  He wrote: ‘I remember the disposition of everything, its exact character, as clearly as though the eight or nine months’ work we had done in the ship had been a prelude to its destruction and to the overthrow of the small society that had lived within it. I believe that a clear realization of the look of things just before something happens is quite common. In any case, it has stuck in my mind …’

  His account reads like a chronicle of a death foretold, the transformation of a ‘little ship’ from homely fishing vessel to protector of a military convoy, underlying the improvisation and endemic fragility of the Allied war effort. Mike would almost certainly have been killed had he been on watch or sleeping on his bunk below deck at the moment the ship hit a mine. Instead he was sitting on a bench huddled over a small stove, contemplating his shipmates with an almost biblical sense of God’s presence among them.

  ‘They were no longer a man on watch or a man in his bunk, but they were Peter, Alec, Horace and Tom, with excited, innocent gleams in their eyes, and you felt the unity of the crew which cut across the boundaries of environment, upbringing, and occupation …’

  When the mine explodes, Richey describes the ensuing devastation as he struggles to escape through the narrow cabin hatchway. He watches the young cook, ‘whimpering, his face covered with blood and burns’, his lieutenant floating near him, and then the little bows with the boat’s name on them going down. ‘The craft looked gallant enough and pathetic, being sunk like this after what it had done. It was something personal, like seeing a man drown.’

  Afterwards, when the survivors, himself included, were taken to hospital, Mike describes how he had limped up and down shouting, before sobbing like a child. Weeks later, he called in an old favour and submitted an early draft of his account to Lewis Ricci at the MoI. It was Ricci, a retired paymaster captain of the Royal Navy, who at the outbreak of war had secured Mike’s recruitment after Burns had convinced him that minesweeping was compatible with his pacifist principles. Ricci read the draft and found it deeply moving but he was no more successful than Burns in having it cleared for publication by the MoI. Senior officials argued against authorisation on the grounds that publication would risk lowering morale.

  Burns remained undeterred, however. He was convinced that Mike’s writing would raise awareness not just of the sacrifice of British seamen but also the critical importance of protecting Allied convoys across the Atlantic, a message worth conveying to the American people. He encouraged Mike to hand his draft to their mutual friend the author Barbara Wall, née Lucas, who in turn passed it on to her sister, Sylvia Lucas, a literary agent in New York. The result was that ‘Sunk by a Mine: A Survivor’s Story’ was published on 11 May 1941 in the New York Times Magazine, later winning the Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for literature.

  The Richeys were not the only ones from Burns’s group of Catholic friends whom war was in the process of dispersing. A pattern of displacement and separation had set in which would last until well after Hitler had been defeated. A year had passed since Greene had published The Power and the Glory, a venture he owed to his Catholic publishing contacts. Burns had subsequently suggested that Greene write the biography of Father Damien, the Belgian leper colony priest who died from the disease, but this time nothing came of the idea. Instead Burns, on returning to London, discovered that Greene was close to joining MI6 and taking a posting in Sierra Leone after severing his links with the MoI. ‘The MoI asked me to return the other day which gave me an opening for a cheery raspberry,’ Greene wrote to Mary Pritchett in March 1941. While separated by geography and officially working for different departments, Burns and Greene were destined to move in similar intelligence circles in subsequent years. They were both drawn unwittingly into a world of deception and betrayal.

  During the Second World War, Sierra Leone came within the orbit of Kim Philby’s Iberian section, just as Madrid, Lisbon and Tangier did, with both Greene and Burns having to become involved in work that troubled their Catholic consciences. In his memoirs, Ways of Escape, Greene tells how he found himself abandoning an interrogation of a young Scandinavian seaman from Buenos Aires suspected of being a German spy. ‘It was a form of dirty work for which I had not been engaged,’ Greene reflected. Similarly, as the war progressed, Burns felt increasingly uncomfortable with the thought that one of the Spanish journalists posted to London, Luis Calvo, had ended up being humiliated at the hands of MI5 interrogators in a London detention camp.

  But Burns still counted on as many friends as enemies within the British Establishment. Over at the BBC, Harman Grisewood had leap-frogged from a relatively obscure post in Broadcasting House to a strategically key role as deputy head of the European Division in Bush House at a time when another Catholic, Ivone Kirkpatrick, a senior Foreign Office official, was promoted to the post of Director-General. ‘Two Catholics,’ Kirkpatrick warned Grisewood; ‘some people will make trouble.’

  But the expected protest never materialised. Instead Kirkpatrick and Grisewood forged an effective team while maintaining the loyalty and cooperation of other BBC staff. The partnership secured key allies for the policy being pursued by the British embassy in Madrid, an alliance Burns and his friend from debutante days, Grisewood, consolidated over several meetings at the Garrick Club.

  Of the original coterie of friends, only the painter and poet David Jones continued to resist, diverting his creative energies away from what smacked of government service. And, unlike the poets Spender and Auden, he did not escape from the war by moving to America. Jones shared Burns’s nostalgia for the life that had existed in London during the 1930s, as did Evelyn Waugh, and the bonds of faith-based friendship that struggled to survive.

  O
f the impact war had on such bonds, Burns would later write: ‘There was realism in our own consciences, making for an independence of spirit, born of a dependence on God. That was the ultimate lesson of those years, ringing freedom from fear. Such a growth was like that of plants, best brought up in the dark. Call them hyacinth days. We were curiously happy when everything exploded.’

  Jones knew that Burns’s relationship with Ann Bowes-Lyon had ended and dissuaded him from trying to win her back. He wrote Burns another letter as he was planning his trip to London. ‘I am sorry, dear Tom, about all this Ann thing. It’s a bloody awful world, and these personal things are so intricate and chancy – and far worse to bear than these old stupid bombs … She appears to have made up her mind about this chap – and that being so – well, one has to take it so.’

  Jones encouraged Burns not to cancel coming to London on leave, stressing how much he longed to meet up again and take up where they had left off, old friends bonding again over matters that endure. Jones wrote: ‘As you say, you and I are mates, and I do hope we can scrape through these nasty years and have a nice breather afterwards somehow or other. I don’t feel we shall be changed much, I don’t think anything changes chaps really – jolly tough types, the human species.’

  While Burns later alerted the Foreign Office and other government departments that he was coming to London, a letter to Jones detailing the date and time of his arrival never reached him. So Burns arrived at his house in Glebe Place unannounced. Given the bomb damage suffered by the neighbourhood, Burns was relieved to find number 3 still standing. He found Jones where he had last left him, in the sitting room, with Prudence Pelham, the artist’s model and platonic lover.

  Pelham’s husband, the RAF pilot Guy Branch, had been killed in action and she was showing the early symptoms of the degenerative disease that would kill her after the war. Virtually bankrupt after unsuccessfully suing the Air Ministry for compensation, she was as delighted to see Burns as Jones was. It felt like a homecoming, however short-lived it turned out to be.

  After Pelham had retired to bed, the two old friends stayed up drinking a great deal of whisky and reminiscing about old times. Burns’s dark tabby cat Tim had followed the cleaner, Ethel, to another house. Jones had drawn Tim for posterity, and this image of him now occupied one side of the room, much as he had always done in reality, and they laughed, imagining him twirling his tail before diving off the sofa. It was the surest sign that Burns had begun to put the memory of Ann behind him. But nothing else could really stay the same. The only certainty was that the war would bring more destruction and death before it ended.

  The next day Burns loaded his books and various items of furniture into a van and drove to a storage depot further north of the river he judged safer than Chelsea. Jones, for his part, reluctantly agreed to move himself, Prudence and his paintings to an artist’s studio he had been lent in Onslow Square, in South Kensington. He was unconvinced by Burns’s assurance that life would become cheaper and safer. Burns had taken heart from the fact that, in the early months of 1941, the air raids on London had virtually ceased. A tense interlude prevailed without any major German air strikes. Parliament now returned to its traditional home in the House of Commons, and Churchill began using Number 10 Downing Street rather more often than his underground cabinet rooms to conduct government business. But such ‘normality’ proved short-lived. The Luftwaffe resumed its bombing with a vengeance, first on the ports around Britain and then on London, again. There were two heavy raids on the capital on 16 and 17 April, just after Burns had returned to Madrid. There was a third, much heavier raid on 10 May, the anniversary of Churchill becoming prime minister, during which a bomb hit the depot in which Burns had recently stored his books and other possessions, destroying everything.

  9

  Black Arts

  Hours after bidding his latest farewell to his London friends, Burns found himself bobbing about in a dinghy in Southampton Water, waiting to be ferried to a flying boat that was due to take off as soon as the all-clear sounded.

  The flying boat belonged to the old Imperial Airways fleet which had been taken over by BOAC in 1940. Its route was London to Cairo via Lisbon and Gibraltar. It was one of two passenger services operating between the UK and the Iberian Peninsula. The other involved a squadron of DC3s that were operated by KLM out of Heston.

  Neither these planes, nor those flown by Lufthansa from Madrid to Berlin or the transatlantic Pan Am Clippers to Spain, were attacked by fighters of either side in the first two years of the war. Nevertheless, by 1941 pilots knew they were running greater risks and their routes were becoming circuitous.

  The flight Burns took from Southampton flew several hundred miles out into the Atlantic before landing in Lisbon, some seven and half hours later. From there Burns took the overnight train to Madrid. The Spanish capital, as spring turned to summer in 1941, had been badly affected by an outbreak of typhoid, as had many parts of Spain, a reminder of the poor hygiene and diet that persisted in a country recently ravaged by civil war and denied normal trade by a partial embargo imposed by the Allies and the corruption of local officials and middle men who benefited from it.

  Nevertheless, for those lucky enough to be employed by the British embassy in Madrid life seemed peaceful, the weather seductive, with a working day that accommodated a long lunch and siesta and no shortage of decent provisions. The food was brought up in unidentified vans direct from Gibraltar or across the border from Lisbon.

  ‘I am installed at present in a luxurious hotel (which I can neither pronounce nor remember exactly its whereabouts!) … everything is extremely expensive and I was wise to get stocked up with some “extras” in Lisbon where the exchange is better … office hours here follow the Spanish custom – 10–2 and then 4.00 till 8.30. I shall get ravenous until I get used to it’, wrote Rosemary Say, a recent young embassy recruit from the Ministry of Economic Warfare in a letter to her parents.

  By the second year of the war, Burns was himself living in some comfort. He had settled into a large apartment in Calle Serrano, Madrid’s smartest street, lined with fashionable shops and cafés, that cut through, as it does today, one of Madrid’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. Its balcony caught the fresh breeze coming down from the Sierra in the early morning and the sunlight in the early evening.

  In addition to a full-time maid, cook and team of messenger boys, and a car, Burns had acquired a vivacious black spaniel he named Juerga – which in Spain means a ‘riotous time’. Most evenings Burns went out for dinner, to a private party or a nightclub where he showed off his tango and rumba. As it did for other spies, the Pasapoga became a favourite haunt, its large, ornate ballroom usually so packed that it was easy to lose oneself in the crowd.

  As a single, good-looking diplomat, Burns found himself even more in demand than when he and Evelyn Waugh had mixed with the bright young things in the hedonistic pre-war London days. In the British embassy, young female recruits – employed in activities ranging from administrative secretarial tasks to transmitting top-secret coded messages, the so-called ‘cipher girls’ – outnumbered the male members of staff.

  Far from home, in a relatively relaxed posting, with the added frisson of feeling that one was part of a covert mission against Nazi Germany – all this ensured that embassy life in wartime Spain was characterised by fleeting affairs and marriage break-ups due to the infidelity of one partner or the other.

  ‘Poor Peter, it would never have worked,’ one of the embassy secretaries confided to her friend Rosemary. The unidentified lover was one of several the letter writer maintained both before and after getting married while posted in Madrid. ‘I felt (I feel) so much for him but it isn’t the kind of emotion, or the calm friendly relationship, on which to base a permanent relationship. Domesticity would have killed it in two months … But I still derive much comfort from feeling he is in Madrid and not too far away and I can see him sometimes.’

  War service in Spain included time off for tr
avel and leisure within a country that, unlike most of the rest of Europe, was no longer a battle ground. Rosemary Say combined her secret work for the embassy with travel across Spain. Her letters home reflected the excitement of an English girl finding Spain and its culture different from anything she had experienced before – and loving it.

  Nonetheless the menace of Nazi Germany often seemed to be close at hand, however apparently idyllic the setting. Her boyfriends included a Spanish bullfighter and a Dutch POW escapee.

  After visiting Barcelona, Rosemary wrote to her parents about a group of German Nazis she had come across during a romantic weekend she had spent at a villa on the Costa Brava. ‘It seemed unreal to be suddenly on a sandy beach, with a very bright blue Mediterranean (lovely and warm) and the mountains coming right down to the water … I went on a very riotous flamenco party, and managed to restrain my partner from hitting a particularly blond version of the “chosen race” fair and square – it is extremely difficult to “share” small restaurants and cafés with these people as they are always nauseatingly aggressive.’

  Rosemary worked from a separate building to Burns but the two moved in similar social circles. They remained good colleagues for most of the war without becoming emotionally attached. It was not always thus for the press attaché. As he tried to put his infatuation with Ann Bowes-Lyon behind him, Burns engaged in a number of short-lived relationships, his girlfriends ranging from bluestocking personal assistants from the Home Counties to aristocratic Madrileñas. If Burns still longed for true love, the spy in him played havoc with his emotions, his job a continuing juggling act between diplomacy, deception and subterfuge and his apparent philandering a subject of obsessive interest to those who wished to undermine him.