A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

Author:Sonia Purnell
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

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Baker Street was overjoyed to hear from her. They sent congratulations on her release, but to her dismay administrative hitches meant that it was more than a month before Virginia made it to Lisbon and nearly two before she could rejoin them in London. In the meantime, she had to lie low. There was little she could do in a city regarded as a vipers’ nest of spies, however, to prevent Lisbon’s security chiefs from informing the Abwehr that she had taken the BOAC Clipper flight to London on January 19, 1943. On her arrival in England she was picked up in a polished Humber limousine, and driven up to London and through the arch to the entrance of Orchard Court. She climbed the two flights of stairs to Number 6, where Park opened the door exclaiming, “Oh, comme ça fait plaisir,” before the gangly figure of Maurice Buckmaster hove into view, enveloped in a cloud of pipe smoke.16

He, Bodington, and F Section’s new key player, Intelligence Officer Vera Atkins (who by extraordinary coincidence had met Virginia before through their mutual State Department friend Elbridge Durbrow) gave her a rapturous reception. Their exceptional American had survived longer in the field than any other agent. She had avoided capture by the Germans and impeccably maintained her cover as a journalist. She had set up vast networks, rescued numerous officers, provided top-grade intelligence, and kept the SOE flag flying through all the tumult. She had almost alone laid the foundations of discipline and hope for the great Resistance battles that were to come. She had even crossed the Pyrenees in the winter snows with a wooden leg. Against all the odds, F Section’s high-risk gamble had paid off and a legend had been born (within the tight confines of SOE at least). Indeed, an official report found that there was “no doubt” that any progress in France would have been “impossible”17 without her.

Virginia’s return was not an entirely comfortable landing, however. Many agents on their homecoming from a country overrun by Nazis found the atmosphere in England strangely complacent even though only two days earlier another huge air raid in London had left whole streets in piles of rubble. Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Casablanca to discuss their war plans and to issue a rousing declaration that they would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from the Germans. Yet after the febrile daily fight for survival in France, Virginia’s return to headquarters was almost inevitably an anticlimax. Of course, she finally had the time to recover properly physically and to take Cuthbert to the specialist prosthetic unit at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton to be fixed and the rivets redone. William Simpson accompanied her as he was having a false hand fitted, and as they talked he marveled at what she had achieved. “For the life of me I cannot conceive how it was possible,” he exclaimed about her escape over the Pyrenees. Yet she was “a picture of health and abounding good spirits.

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