Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (5 page)

The Germans were about to launch their missile assault on London. A few days after D-Day, the Germans began launching their pilotless flying bombs, the V–1s, at London.
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Eddie was to supply the Nazis with information about the fall of their V–1s. Along with another agent, he gave the Germans false information to suggest that the missiles were overshooting their target, thus leading the Germans to shorten their range and, as a result, dropping many of the bombs harmlessly in the farmlands short of London. It was arguably Eddie’s most important contribution to the war effort, one that undoubtedly saved a great many civilian lives. But it was also the same parachute landing that damaged Eddie’s back, and left him with a lifetime of pain. Furthermore, it led him indirectly into the Profumo Affair two decades later (see Chapter 7).

Ironically, Betty lost two homes to the very V–1s that Eddie was trying to divert. She recalls:

The first home I lost was when I was living out in the country, renting a cottage in Hampshire, near Fleet. Actually the cottage I had rented was near a field where they were building tank traps. That’s where I had a little dog, a spaniel called Spitfire. He used to like male company and so he always used to visit the tank traps; the soldiers used to bring him back and they knew that they’d get a cup of tea.

The fact that the soldiers were able to sit and have a chat with a beautiful, upmarket blonde seems to have escaped her innocent recollection. She continues:

One day I was supposed to go to London but I didn’t want to take Spitfire and I just couldn’t leave him alone. The house in London I was heading off to was my previous address where I had to collect something. But in the end, I didn’t go. That night the whole of the house was flattened by a buzz bomb. I would have been there should I have gone like I needed to. That house was at 28 Nevern Square in Earls Court.
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That particular square was where I had earlier done my fire watching. Firefighting was hazardous. There were always firefighters on the go. Over a period the chances of getting killed were pretty good, because there were so many incendiaries. A bit later I moved into number 48 Nevern Square and I was visiting with a friend in nearby Gloucester Road when a buzz bomb passed near us and exploded. I joked that it couldn’t possibly be my new home – and it was!! So in a short space of time I had lost two homes in the same square. Both those houses belonged to the same man. That day, the only person in the house was the housekeeper who got buried under all the rubble for eight hours, but fortunately she survived. Duncan Sandy, the son-in-law of Winston Churchill, announced too soon that the V–1s and V–2s had been crushed, and so masses of people who had evacuated came back to London. This infuriated Eddie as he was given information that there were more waves of V–1s and V–2s coming, he was very cross with him.

Betty had another near miss around that time – this time with a serial killer. It came about because of her friendship with another famous wartime pilot, Geoffrey Page, who had been shot down and badly burned. He was being treated by the famous Sir Archibald McIndoe, with whom Betty had become acquainted.
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He, in turn, introduced her to ‘Colonel Armstrong’ (the alias of Neville Heath), who was supposed to be an officer from the Fleet Air Arm. His story was that he was flying airplanes from South Africa to London, that he was married, and that his wife had been killed while taking him to the airport in Johannesburg. With a shudder, Betty relates:

He proposed to me and said that I could be a mother to his child. When I went out with him he used to take me to the Eight Bells in Chelsea. He always wanted to come into my flat and have a goodnight drink but something stopped me from ever allowing him up. One night he came to meet me with his fingers strapped up and I asked what happened. He told me he’d got into a fight the previous night with some Americans. I soon discovered that the night before in Notting Hill (west London) he had bitten off the breasts of a girl, and impaled her on a riding crop. His fingers had been injured in the struggle with her as she fought for her life. A policeman friend of mine later told me about this. By the time I had found out, he had left for Bournemouth, on the south coast. He’d asked me to go with him, but I wouldn’t go. In Bournemouth, he met up with several Wrens, women from the military, and he murdered another woman. I was terrified because I thought: ‘He is at large and loose and might come looking for me.’ You think, ‘Suppose he comes and I can’t get rid of him? If I can’t hide I could probably end up the same way.’ Anyhow, he was found eventually.

Heath was convincing enough to fool a man like Sir Archibald, so Betty can certainly be forgiven for being taken in. She says:

Bear in mind that the introduction came from someone I knew very well and was well respected. Obviously he had been taken in as well. The police interviewed me in regard of this man. I knew some of the police because the social club where I was the secretary and where I met Eddie was right across the street from a police station. It was such a shocking experience and the effects continued on. I think it was one of the things which recommended Eddie to me, because I felt safe with him. He would have killed anyone who touched me. I always said had I known what Heath’s real name was then I could have prevented the Wren being murdered. I never saw him again; he got caught and was charged (and hanged) under his real name.

Coincidentally, McIndoe was treating the wife of another double agent, one to whom Eddie was supposed to pass a transmitter. She had been badly burned by one of the buzz bombs Eddie was valiantly trying to divert.

As 1944 passed into 1945, the buzz bomb and V–1 menace receded. So too did MI5’s use for Eddie – although when it became obvious that the Free Polish government in London was not going to get back to Poland because the Soviets were installing their own communist government, Eddie was ‘engaged’ to break into the safe in the Polish Embassy in order to retrieve documents.

Meanwhile, the lure of London nightlife increasingly occupied his attention. He later remarked, ‘every plush club in town had a good customer’. Soon enough, though, his thoughts turned to the young woman he had so abruptly departed from in Jersey years before. He later wrote, ‘Uppermost in my mind was the desire to find Betty, my girl whom I had last seen when I dived through a hotel window before my arrest in Jersey.’ He engaged detectives to find her, but they drew a blank.

Lunching with his detectives at Berkeley Hotel, they reported their lack of success to Eddie. One of the detectives asked him, ‘Is there anyone here who resembles her?’

Eddie pointed to a blonde with her back to him at the far end of the crowded dining room. ‘That girl looks like her from the back,’ Eddie said. Then, she turned slightly. ‘Jesus! It is Betty!’

Eddie walked over and tapped her on the shoulder.

Betty takes up the story:

Peter used to phone me every night at six o’clock and tell me he was all right. One day he was shot down and Peter asked a fellow officer to call me so that I didn’t panic. He rang me and asked where we should meet to tell me of the news. He had been shot out of the sky but was okay. We met in the Berkeley Hotel in Mayfair. Here I was, sitting once again in a long restaurant room with my back to the entrance, six years later.

It was a rainy day, and suddenly someone taps me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hello’. I couldn’t believe it – there was Eddie! I dropped my cup of coffee into my lap!

Just as her last moments with Eddie six years earlier had been punctuated with the sound of shattering crockery, so too were her first moments of reunion, as the cup rolled off her lap and shattered on the floor.

‘Where did you spring from?’ I asked. It was all I could think of to say. He was supposed to be dead! He said, ‘over there’, pointing at the back of the place. He was having lunch with a detective who he had engaged to find me, Doughy Baker. Eddie had looked around, got up, walked over to my table and tapped me on the shoulder … whereupon I nearly collapsed! He said ‘I’m staying at Grosvenor House, Park Lane, call me.’ I didn’t think I would, but I did call him. And that’s where it all began … again.

3

R
OUND AND
ROUND SHE GOES

B
etty ruefully comments that: ‘Little did I know when I met Eddie that he would become my cross to bear for the rest of my life.’ On Eddie’s return, there was a song he used to sing to her in German, ‘You are my heart’s delight and where you are I long to be.’ This was all very romantic, but by this time Peter Powell and Geoffrey de Havilland, Jr. were firmly in her life.

Betty recalls:

I did see Peter a few more times, but it was never the same. One time I went to a celebration with Peter and when I got back I was confronted by Eddie. He wasn’t actually living with me then but he had a key to my apartment and I didn’t expect him to be there! He was furious when I got home and he ripped all of my clothes off and locked me out of the apartment. This was a very upmarket building with several lords and ladies living there. There I was stark naked in the corridor, and I had to go and ask the rather stuffy porter to help me back in to my place. Eventually Eddie let me in, but not before the porter, Jeffs, had taken in the whole scene! It was hard to tell who was the more embarrassed, me or the porter.

De Havilland didn’t escape Eddie’s jealousy either. One day he came to tea at Betty’s, and Eddie turned up unexpectedly. Because he was insanely jealous, she locked Geoffrey in the wardrobe. Eddie managed to find him. A punch-up ensued. But as was often the case, once Eddie’s jealousy expended itself, he and Geoffrey became good friends. ‘In later years if I ever retaliated for his infidelities by forming any sort of relationship, especially with males, he would become friends with them and that was the end. If they happened to be younger than me he would tell them my age, hoping to put them off.’

Just over a year later, de Havilland was to fly a prototype jet called the Swallow, which had been built to attempt to break the sound barrier for the first time. ‘Eddie and I went up to Hyde Park to watch because he was going to fly over London,’ Betty remembers. Just a short time before take-off, de Havilland had rung Betty. Her recollection of his last words is poignant, ‘You know, Bets,’ he said, ‘I am getting too old for this game.’ Minutes after passing over Hyde Park he was dead. As his aircraft accelerated, aerodynamic forces (unknown at the time) caused enormous vibrations in the aircraft, which then broke up over the Thames Estuary, killing de Havilland. Betty was the last person to speak to him. A friend who was staying with her and Eddie brought in the newspaper the next morning, and just handed it to her. The news about his crash was on the front page. It was the first she had heard about the accident.

Before Eddie married Betty she was also taken out from time to time by Jack Barclay, who owned the Rolls-Royce dealership on Berkeley Square. Jack Barclay used to send her enormous bunches of flowers from a florist right next to the Brompton Oratory. Eddie takes up the story:

I stood this for about four or five weeks and every day these bouquets were coming and what I used to do I would open the front window and fire them out into the middle of the street. We were right opposite the Brompton Church. Anyway I would wait until there was a wedding and I would fire these bouquets at the weddings. All the shopkeepers used to wait for the weddings and come out to watch. One day I caught his [Barclay’s] car outside so I went behind it and I rammed it right up the back. I smashed the back right in. He jumped in his car and put his foot on the accelerator and every time he stopped I went right into the back of it. Then I rang him up and said ‘Listen you dirty little bastard, if I ever catch you again near my girlfriend I will come round with a rusty nail and scratch every Rolls-Royce in your showroom.’ The intercom was turned on in Jack Barclay’s office, and everyone in the dealership heard it! And ever afterwards his friends would say ‘How is rusty nail?’

Betty had another encounter with a serial killer at around that time:

I had a little dog, a little poodle called Peppy. I had been living in Queensgate [another expensive London area]. I booked into a hotel because I wanted to avoid Eddie. We’d been having battles and a friend of mine was over from America. I had had an operation on both my feet and couldn’t walk properly, and my American friend wanted to help. It caused a lot of friction with Eddie so I wanted to stay away for the night. I stayed in the South Kensington Hotel, and during the night my little poodle piddled on my bed. The next day the hotel told me that I had to leave or get rid of the dog. I took Peppy for a walk to think about what to do, and as I walked out of the door I met this man who asked if he could give me a lift. I said ‘No, thank you.’ He had very startling, piercing eyes, and very dark hair. He asked me for a drink and I brushed him off. When I came back after my walk he was still there; he’d followed me around. I had to leave the hotel because of Peppy. I didn’t know this at the time but this man was John George Haigh, and he had been charged with killing several women and putting them in an acid bath! He was very persistent but I am glad I didn’t go and have a drink with him!

John George Haigh, commonly known as the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’, was an English serial killer during the 1940s. He claimed to have killed nine people, although he was convicted of the murders of six. He used acid as (he believed) a foolproof method of body disposal – dissolving their bodies in concentrated sulphuric acid. He then forged papers in order to sell their possessions and collect substantial sums of money. He was hanged on 10 August 1949. Betty had another run-in with a potential killer: