Furthermore, the trail Vera had left of her pre-SOE years in England had always made me uneasy. There were long gaps I had not properly filled in. Was she really playing bridge with divorcees in South Kensington all day, as one acquaintance had recalled?
British intelligence was, like the rest of the world, totally unprepared for the German invasion of the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, but sabotage operations—“Scarlet Pimpernel missions,” as one writer put it— were launched. One venture was a spectacular mission to Amsterdam to snatch industrial diamonds from under the Germans' noses. The man involved in the diamond swoop was Montague “Monty” Chidson, the MI6 officer who had once proposed to Vera in Bucharest and who by 1940 was attached to Section D, MI6's special operations department. Any number of Vera's intelligence contacts from her Bucharest days could have drawn her into clandestine work on the eve of war, including Leslie Humphreys himself, the man who eventually recruited her for SOE. Thomas Kendrick, who later sponsored Vera's naturalisation, was back in England in 1939, having been expelled from Vienna by the Germans. And another of Vera's four sponsors, Reginald Pearson, was by 1939 based in Basle, working for yet another “secret show,” known as the Z network, a deniable spying organisation within MI6 run by Claude Dansey, then assistant chief of the secret intelligence service. The Z network had its headquarters in Switzerland in 1939, with agents operating all over Europe.
Vera, as noted on her naturalisation files, had made two trips to Switzerland in early 1939, travelling presumably on her Romanian passport, as her only British identity paper was an Aliens Registration Certificate. I had proof that both trips were ostensibly skiing holidays: a photograph of Vera as Bluebeard during the first trip and pictures of her in the mountains with Dick Ketton-Cremer for the second. Nevertheless, it had always seemed surprising that Vera should have travelled to Switzerland twice on the eve of war. On her Home Office form she was vague about the purpose of the second trip and even vaguer about the dates she was away, saying only that the trip lasted thirty-nine days—a long and costly skiing holiday for a woman short of money.
There was, however, no record on the files of Vera's involvement in any secret work immediately before she joined SOE, I was told. But then I was told, even if she had been involved, there would not be any record. When I wrote to one intelligence source, asking what Vera might have been up to in Belgium or Holland, I received a tantalising reply: “I do not feel the need to unburden myself about Vera's pre-SOE connections. There are secrets, which don't and shouldn't die, and perhaps this is one of them.”
A few months later I was sitting in a house in Woodditton, in Cambridgeshire, with a Belgian lady named Gilberte Brunsdon-Lenaerts. Born Gilberte Lenaerts in Antwerp, she had married a British military officer named Roger Brunsdon and lived in England from 1945. Gilberte had been to Vera's funeral. I had finally found her through the military attaché at the Belgian embassy. She had been until recently president of the Amicale des Anciens Combattants Anglo-Belges.
Gilberte was only nineteen when she first encountered Vera Rosenberg in Antwerp in the winter of 1940–41, she told me. Her father, Jean Lenaerts, worked in the diamond trade and helped Jewish diamond traders escape at the outbreak of war. Gilberte helped her father by delivering messages. Later she became famous as the “heroine on a bicycle” who helped rescue British pilots behind enemy lines.
Vera had come into contact with Gilberte's father through a well-known Antwerp Jewish family. “I went to meet her in the Schule near Pelikaan Straat in the diamond district. Others were there too,” said Gilberte, and then she paused. I could see she was uneasy and trying to think back.
“Now I will stop for a second and tell you a few things,” she said. “What do SOE say about all of this? What does her family say?”
They know nothing of it, I told Gilberte.
“Surely there must be papers. Somebody else must know something,” she said, suddenly worried that she was the only person who knew of this. Then she added: “Personally I think that this Rosenberg person led a double life,” saying “double life” with an anxious sort of lilt.
“What was she doing in Belgium?” I asked.
“That I don't know, dear. I had learned never to ask questions. You say: ‘What is your name and where do you want to go?' and that's it. And, of course, you are always looking out for German infiltrators. That was the time for it, wasn't it—the time to get German infiltrators across?”
“But do you know how Vera had got to you? Where had she come from?”
“She said she had come down from Holland, from Rotterdam, I think, or perhaps Amsterdam. You see, many of them thought parts of Belgium might remain free. And then they got stuck there too. I think her story was just that. That she was caught on tenth May and the Germans, as you know, only took five days to take Holland and in Belgium it took eighteen days. Well, you know, eventually we got our backs to the sea, but just the same we did fight for eighteen days. And it is all very well of them to say now we should have fought longer. Chapeau to the Belgian Army, I say. Chapeau.”
I pointed out that if Vera had “got stuck” in Holland after May 10, it had taken several months before she arrived in Antwerp to seek help. “There are certainly gaps in this lady's story, but it was definitely winter when I saw her. It is always better to get people out when it is winter because of the early curfew, so you can move them across the border.”
“Where did she go next, after she left you?”
“I do not know, dear. You see, they went from one place to another. Organised escape lines had not yet come into existence. Later there was the Comet line and the Ligne Libertas.
“And you have to remember that in that mêlée-mêlée you have Jewish people wanting to leave, and remember the banks were closed, so you start bartering with diamonds. You have to have people who are willing to take you over the border. It costs a lot of money.”
“Did you take Vera Rosenberg somewhere?”
“You know, my dear, I don't recall. She was one of hundreds that passed through my hands. I don't remember all of them.”
“But you do remember Vera Rosenberg?”
“Yes,” she said, but she could not explain quite why. “You know, my dear, there is something wrong here. IIy a quelque chose qui cloche.”
“When you remember her, in Pelikaan Straat, what do you see in your mind's eye?” I asked.
“I had gone on my bicycle to the Schule to investigate who was there. They were all there. They were panicking, but she was not. She came in. She was tall. She seemed in charge. She was most insistent—arrogant— no, there is a better English word for it. She was haughty. You know. And at that point the impression it made on me was: My God! You know. In charge! She did the talking. She gave the impression she was important and that she knew important people in England. Although she was tall, she had flat feet. Now why do I remember that? She had that Jewish walk. I remember that. She was wearing a hat and coat. She said: ‘I must get back. Can you help?'
“Was she with the rest of the group?”
“She was with a man. The man was not English. They spoke German together. They clung together in a way. I am sure there was a man,” said Gilberte, suddenly sounding unsure.
“What nationality did you think she was?”
“I think she spoke to me in French but I thought she was Dutch because she had come from Holland.”
Gilberte paused again to think and twist her rings.
“It has always worried me—no, bothered me, that is the word. Why did I never trust that woman? We had to be extremely careful who we helped.” And then she said: “You know, my dear, my feeling is we are dealing with a double agent here.”
“You mean a German double agent?”
Over recent weeks I had been told first that Vera worked for the CIA, then that she was a Soviet spy, and now somebody was seriously suggesting she was a German agent. My mind returned to Déricourt's bizarre depiction of Vera as “Lucy,” the German agent in B
aker Street.
“You see, it was the time, as I say, wasn't it—to get them to England? And when you have been asked to help somebody like that, you think it might be a German agent, especially if they are not from Belgium but de passage.”
I said the suggestion seemed, on the face of it, preposterous, given all I knew about Vera. For a start, why would she have gone to look for all the missing agents if she was a German spy?
“To make sure they were dead, perhaps. To make sure that those who might have learned something about her were dead. Or to look in the German papers and see what they knew.”
I looked hard at Gilberte, with her thick jet-black hair, darting eyes, and pale complexion. She had seemed quite lucid and had been credible in most respects. And yet, sitting in her tiny black velvet slippers, her black dress drawn high up to her neck, she worried me. The house was neat and dotted with delicate porcelain ornaments. Her suggestion that Vera was a German agent made me doubt some of her story. Was it really my Vera that she had met, or somebody else?
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.
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