Deborah Burrows

I have a soft spot for a good mystery.  My first three books ­ A Stranger in my Street, Taking a Chance and A Time of Secrets were all ‘whodunnits’ set in WW2.

Which is why I was delighted to attend the inaugural Capital Crime Writing Festival in London last week.

The first session I went to was “The Influence of Agatha Christie”. Like many authors, I remember reading an Agatha Christie as my first ‘grown-up’ book.

Listening to the panel reminded me of a time in WWII when the Queen of Crime was suspected of using one of her books to send coded messages to the Nazis.

It relates to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes, which is one of my favourite museums.

During WWII a small group of code breakers at Bletchley Park developed techniques for decrypting messages coded using electrical cipher machines that the Germans considered ‘unbreakable’. The flood of high-grade military intelligence deciphered by Bletchley Park was code-named Ultra.

The messages included information about German spies in the UK, which led to the capture of every German spy in the country. Most became double agents under the British Double-Cross Operation and were used to disseminate false intelligence to the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence).

It is estimated that the codebreakers at Bletchley Park shortened the war in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Europe by between 2 and 4 years and may even have altered its outcome.

It was crucial that the enemy remained wholly unaware of the work being done at Bletchley Park. 

At the same time that the Bletchley Park codebreakers rushed to break the German Enigma code, Agatha Christie was writing her first spy thriller.

In N or M, which was published in 1941, the daring detective pair, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, are recruited by British Military Intelligence to discover the identity of a German spy. An important character in the book is Major Bletchley, an annoying retired Indian army major, who professes to have inside knowledge of the war. 

Like all Christie’s books it was a best-seller, but it caused consternation in MI5. Was Christie sending a message in the novel, letting the enemy know that not just the fictional Tommy and Tuppence, but also MI5 were unmasking German agents? Was she divulging that “Bletchley” was significant in this?

Or was it all just a strange coincidence?

Agatha Christie was ‘the Queen of Crime’. If MI5 agents or the police went to interrogate Christie about her choice of character name, it might bring damaging publicity.

MI5’s Chief Cryptographer at Bletchley Park was Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, who was a close friend of Agatha Christie. MI5 had a word with him about it. Although he considered it laughable that Christie knew anything at all about what was going on at Bletchley Park, he agreed to talk to her. 

He did so in a very British manner. Over tea and scones at his home in Buckinghamshire, Knox asked Christie in a light-hearted manner how she arrived at the names of the characters in her books. Major Bletchley, for instance, in her latest novel.

Christie gave an innocent explanation. She had been stuck at Bletchley Railway Station, on her way by train from Oxford to London. Annoyed at the long delay, she took revenge by giving the name Bletchley to one of her least loveable characters.

Knox reported back to MI5, who were apparently reassured by this explanation.

And yet…

In the 1940s the route of the (now defunct) “Varsity Line” between Oxford and Cambridge went through Bletchley. But Christie said she was on her way to London. Why would she go to Bletchley when there was a direct Oxford-London line she could have taken?

She may have had no choice. German bombings meant the UK railway service was in a parlous state at that time. Diversions and long delays for non-military transport were common and very irksome to travellers. Christie’s explanation for using “Bletchley” may be the simple truth.

But there is another, very interesting facet to the story.  During the Second World War, and when she was writing N or M, Christie lived at the Isokon building in Hampstead, an avant-garde 1930s apartment building.

I have visited the Isokon, in which reinforced concrete was used in British domestic architecture for the first time. It was designed for well-heeled tenants who wanted a minimalist lifestyle with few possessions and who didn’t like cooking. The apartments had no kitchen, but food could be ordered from a general kitchen on the ground floor.

The tenants it attracted included around twenty-five Soviet Russian spies, who lived there between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s.

In fact, one of Christie’s neighbours was Arnold Deutsch, the controller of the infamous spy group of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald McLean and Anthony Blunt.

The Isokon is not a large building and Christie must have known her neighbours. Was it co-incidence that while living there, she first tried her hand at a spy novel? Or did Christie overhear something in the Isokon that provided the seed for her spy story? 

Was it coincidence that she should give a character in that novel the name of the top-secret establishment where British codebreakers led by her close friend were deciphering Nazi messages, including those relating to German spies in Britain? Had Dilly Knox himself innocently mentioned Bletchley Park in Christie’s hearing? Or was the railway station story the truth. Or was it a mixture of the two?

J.R.R Tolkien is quoted as saying that a story:

grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.

J.R.R. Tolkien

I’m sure Christie herself had no idea how, but the name “Bletchley” allied to the idea of German spies slipped into the leaf-mould of Agatha Christie’s mind and took root there.

The book I am writing at the moment is about the ‘Resistance Girls’ of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) an organisation set up in WW2 by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by sending agents into occupied Europe to organise resistance groups and engage in sabotage against the Nazis. 

The Allies sent more than four hundred agents into occupied France, of which 39 were women. The ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ as they became known, were trained in sabotage, small arms, radio and telegraph communication and unarmed combat. SOE agents were also required to be fluent in French so they could fit seamlessly into French society.

All the agents knew the risks and were told that they had no more than a 50% chance of survival in occupied France.

The women agents were mostly couriers or wireless operators, although some, such as NZ/Australia’s Nancy Wake, America’s Virginia Hall and British Pearl Witherington led maquis (guerrilla) groups of up to 7,500 strong and were personally involved in attacks on bridges, railway lines, and German convoys.  They also underwent extensive training in resisting interrogation and how to evade capture. Sadly, sixteen women did not survive the war: thirteen were executed at Ravensbruck, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau or Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camps.

The stories of the SEO’s “irregular” women are stories of courage, daring and sacrifice and it is an honour to write about them, even if in a (slightly) fictionalised account.  

I find it difficult to write about places I’ve not been to, walked around and got to know a little. I need to know how the air feels, the strength of the sun, how light reflects off the houses, the scents, the terrain, the trees, flowers – the general ambiance.

And so, in April we spent 9 days in south west France, where my heroine will be sent to work as a courier in 1943. We stayed mainly in a small town called Castillon de Bataille, which overlooks the Dordogne River. I wandered around taking masses of photos of little alleyways and rooftops, to figure out how my heroine could avoid German patrols, and where her ‘safe houses’ might be. 

Our home was Chez Castillon, a tall house that is a Writers’ Retreat. There were nine guests, either (like me) writing and sightseeing, or taking a writing course. Janey and Mickey who run the place are both actors, although Janey now spends her time writing. Janey served up three delicious meals a day and we had Bordeaux wine every lunch and dinner. It was fab. 

Castillon de Bataille is in the middle of the Bordeaux wine country. The town’s claim to fame dates from 1453, as it is where the last battle of the Hundred Years war was fought.

In WW2 it was called Castillon sur Dordogne and was on the frontier between occupied and Vichy France and Chez Castillon was a hospital for German officers. There is a plaque on this bridge that marks the former demarcation line.

I’m going to blow up that bridge! … in the book…

One day we visited the medieval town of Saint-Emilion, and rode the little bus around the Chateaux. And so, the first scene of the new book takes place just outside Saint-Emilion and in another scene there will be a chase through scrub and through steep, narrow cobbled streets.

But I’m not sure if I’ll include this: when Castillon was liberated, as in the rest of France, ‘collaborateurs horizontales’ (women who’d been too friendly to the German soldiers) were rounded up, their heads were shaved and they were painted with tar. The women from Castillon were put on show on this balcony which overlooks the main square.

They got off better than those at a village down the road, where they were shot… according to our host, Mickey.

We finished the holiday in beautiful Bordeaux, where I again scoped out scenes for the novel. Unsurprisingly, I came back full of ideas for the new books.

Recently we celebrated Father’s Day in the UK. In Australia it is celebrated on the first Sunday in September. 

I have one memory only of a Father’s Day spent with my father. That year it was also his birthday and I remember telling people in our street about this amazing coincidence.

It was Sunday 1 September 1963 and I was four and a half years old. My handsome war hero father with the Errol Flynn moustache had just turned 42.

Seventeen days later he was dead.

His experiences during the war as one of the 2nd Independent Company (later the 2/2nd Commando Squadron) had caused in part his fatal heart attack.

The story of the 2/2nd is a compelling one. When the Japanese invaded Timor in February 1942 the commandos were wholly cut off from supplies and support from Australia and massively outnumbered, but they continued to fight.

Little known but great in spirit are the men of Timor. They alone did not surrender.

Winston Churchill

I have Dad’s war diary, which gives me a tangible link to the events.

My father, Jefferson Williams, was nineteen when he joined the Australian Army on 21 May 1941. While still in army training camp he was intrigued by a call for soldiers to join a secret group.

It was voluntary to join and its
secretness aroused my curiosity and I joined. We were not told anything other
than we were to receive special training.

The special training took place at the Guerrilla Warfare Camp in Victoria. Dad spoke of forced marches in the mountains, wading through swift rivers with a full pack held above his head. He learned unarmed combat, sharp-shooting and living off the land. All these skills later allowed him and his mates to survive against the odds.

Timor lies only around 400 nautical miles from the Australian coast. Fearing the Japanese advance, Pacific Command sent the 2/2nd to Timor on 8 December 1941 as part of “Sparrow Force”.

Singapore fell on 15 February 1942. The commandos grimly prepared for Japanese invasion by burying stores of ammunition and other equipment at secret dumps and walking barefoot to toughen their feet against the day their boots gave out.

Four days later, 6,000 Japanese troops landed on east and west Timor.

The following day, Dad wrote in his diary:

This morning looking out to sea, we behold 4 ships. So far, their identity is unknown.

Then:

They were Japanese ships. 2 Destroyers and 2 transports.

At 1400 hours:

The Japs have taken Dilli. There are 5,000 Japs in Dilli ... This morning ...  14 men of 7 section and two others went into Dilli in the utility truck.  The worst is feared for these men, also Pinocchio, the motor bike mechanic [who] passed us bound for Dilli.  He is gone, I think. We are back in the mountains. ... “A” Platoon is, or was, down on the aerodrome. I wonder what has become of them. There are some Japs in the hills looking for us. They will have a job getting us.

That last sentence was quite the understatement.

Some days later Dad wrote:

The 16 men who went into Dilli by truck were tied up and machine gunned. 2 escaped. One is nearly dead and the other wounded but OK.

The massacre of the men on the utility truck was one reason why the 2/2nd never considered surrender. All the other Australian forces on the island did surrender (after brave and intense fighting), although some of the 2/40th joined the 2/2nd in the hills.

Numbering around 300, the Australians faced a force of 6,000 Japanese. But morale was high, they had a large reserve of ammunition and they were specially trained for commando-style operations. Without realising it, these “men of Timor” had become the only Australian force still in action in enemy territory after the Japanese conquest of south-east Asia.

Australia thought they were all dead or captured. Eventually, they cobbled together a wireless transmitter (“Winnie the War Winner”) on the back of a kerosene tin and on 19/20 April 1942 they radioed Northern Force HQ in Darwin.

At first it was thought to be a Japanese ruse. HQ asked questions: could Captain Parker provide the street number of his house – “yes, 94”; could Jack Sargeant give his wife’s name – “yes, Kathleen”. Then:

• “Sparrow Force, what is your situation?“
• “Force intact. Still fighting. Badly need boots, quinine, money, and Tommy-gun ammunition.“

The news that the 2/2nd was intact and still fighting the Japanese was tremendously valuable, both strategically and in terms of morale for Australia. It arrived at the country’s darkest hour, after Japanese victories in Malaya, the Philippines, Rabaul and the Dutch East Indies. The small band of ill and war-weary men became overnight heroes.

More importantly, they received supplies by parachute and boat. 

Today we were issued with the first lot of comforts which are very few, but very nice. I received 1 tooth brush, cake soap, handkerchief, 1 ounce tobacco, 1 pkt papers, and some shaving soap. As we were out of everything, I also received a pair of boots. All these things were dropped by parachute.

Sailors who delivered supplies at first assumed the gaunt, haggard, bearded men dressed in rags were local mountain tribesmen, not Australian soldiers.

These men drove the Japanese forces to desperation by inflicting damage on them wherever and whenever they could.

General MacArthur ordered the 2/2nd to remain on Timor and continue the campaign of ‘harassment and sabotage’ against the Japanese. Despite battle-wounds, malaria, beri beri, dystentery and other tropical ailments, they did so.

The natives around Dilli say we are Lubic (Gods) and we come up out of the ground, kill Japs and then disappear back into the ground. It must seem like that, as in the last 6 raids, not one Jap has seen an Australian. The natives say that the Japs are pretty scared of the Australians.

On 1 September 1942, Dad turned 21.

We now have prices on our heads. A private is worth $50, 2IC $500, Major Spence and the Colonel $5,000. $1.00 is worth 1/8, so we are pretty valuable. The Japanese are offering this to the Timor natives for each Australian they capture, dead or alive.

By November 1942, the 2/2nd, reinforced with the 2/4th Independent Company from Australia, numbered only 700 men, and yet were able to tie down over 30,000 Japanese soldiers.

But when the Japanese began exacting savage retribution on any Timorese who helped them, the situation became untenable. In late December 1942, the commandos were ordered home.

The Timor commandos played a crucial role in the war, by tying up thousands of seasoned Japanese troops while the battle for Kokoda hung in the balance.

By the end of the war, the 2/2nd had been in contact with the enemy longer than any other unit in the Australian Army.

As my father said to renowned documentary film maker, Damian Parer, who filmed Men of Timor in November 1942:

There’s no doubt we’ve got the pick of Australia in this bunch. It’s not just because I’m one of them myself.

jefferson williams

The second Sunday in May is ‘Mothers’ Day’ in Australia. My darling mother died on 28 August 2011, at the ‘ripe old age’ of 91 years. I still miss her.

Mum spent her childhood in the Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie.

She always said that Kalgoorlie bred special people. They certainly had to be hardy. Founded in 1889 it became known as Western Australia’s “Golden Mile”, “the world’s richest square mile of earth”.

During the 1890s, the area boomed, with a population exceeding 200,000, mainly prospectors chasing gold.  The area gained a notorious reputation for being a “wild west” with bandits and prostitutes. 

It was around this time that my mother’s family arrived from Goulburn in New South Wales and set about making Kalgoorlie their home.  Mum’s grandfather, Richard Everett, was a builder who brought six of his children aged 10 to 23 with him to the frontier town, including Louisa, my grandmother. As they were teetotal Methodists, I think it is fair to say they would have had a culture shock.

Although the first electric trams ran in 1902, it wasn’t until 1903 that the ‘golden pipeline’ was completed, pumping 23,000 kilolitres (5,100,000 gallons) of water per day from Perth.

My grandfather, James Eastwood, was an accountant from England who met the Everett family in Perth when they were on their way to Kalgoorlie. He fell hard for Louisa, threw over his job and followed her to Kalgoorlie. 

James and Louisa married in 1903. The house James built for his bride wasn’t fancy but has lasted for over a century and is still occupied. 

My mother was born in 1920, very much the youngest of five sisters, after her father returned from WW1. When she was only eighteen months old James died. With no widow’s pension Louisa took in a lodger and returned to dressmaking.

Despite having little money, Mum had a happy childhood, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. Her adored “little Grannie”, Archina Everett (4’ 11” tall) came to live with them for the last 10 years of her life, after becoming blind with glaucoma. Archina was an old-school Scottish Presbyterian and to Mum’s amusement, insisted on calling Kathleen, Mum’s older sister, “Katherine”. Why? “Because “Kathleen’s too Irish”.

On Sunday afternoons one of Mum’s two uncles, Wilfred and Victor (who had a carrier’s business) would take Archina out for a “jaunt” in a horse and sulky. Grandma’s “going out” outfit was a long black sateen dress, little black boots (she was born with a club foot) and a black cloche hat trimmed with black lace.

As Mum’s cousins were Methodist, she always gate-crashed the Methodist Sunday School picnic, which apparently had the best games and cakes of all the Sunday school picnics.

Aunt Edie’s Sunday “teas” for the whole extended family were spectacular. Cold meats and salads, fruit salad, jelly and ice cream and all varieties of scones and cakes would be laid out on a large table on their side verandah. After tea, there would be sing-songs around the pianola. 

Mum (who was always called Monnie, not Mona) was a bright child and was put up a grade at North Kalgoorlie Primary School. A tiny girl, with skinny legs encased in the black stockings, her nickname was “Minnie Mouse”, which she hated. But she had many friends and an active social life, attending parties, sports events and ballet dancing, as often recorded in the local newspaper, The Kalgoorlie Miner.

Below is the Kalgoorlie Mum knew in 1930.

The family’s fortunes revived when Louisa inherited James’ share of his mother’s Isle of Man estate. One of her first actions was to send Mum on a Young Australia League trip around Australia:

In late 1939 (shortly after the start of World War II), Mum sat for the Commonwealth Typists’ Examination (in English, Arithmatic, Typewriting (178 wpm) and Shorthand (191 wpm). She came top of the State, just as her sister Marjorie had done fifteen years earlier. She was offered a job in a Government department in Perth, and left Kalgoorlie with her mother and sister Jean. (The other sisters had all left home and married by then.)

For a while during the war they lived in Megalong Road, Nedlands, a house that features in one of my books, A Stranger in my Street. It’s where Meg Eaton is living with her mother and sister when she discovers a body in the air raid shelter of a neighbour’s house…

Last night I walked back from a gorgeously funny production of Love’s Labours Lost at Wadham College. The moon was almost full (a bomber’s moon) and it seemed to be stuck in the towers of All Souls College.

Oxford is amazingly romantic at night. The day trippers have left and it is the haunt of students, Oxonians, the homeless (and hoards of teenaged foreign language students).

Romantic . . . and ghostly.

So (rather than do what I should be doing and finish my latest novel) I thought I’d share some of Oxford’s most famous ghost stories.

Wadham College

We go to the College every year to see Shakespeare performed in the lovely gardens. I’ve never seen the resident ghost, but here’s the story:

Wadham’s ghost has been observed over the years by witnesses of veracity: one head porter and two scouts. Apparently they’ve observed a white figure in robes – possibly a priest – walking from the chapel door, across first quad and into the hall, across the hall to vanish just in front of High Table. I understand that this part of the college was built over the site of an old Augustinian Priory.

And the former Head-Steward, Mr Maurice Howes, apparently complained on a regular basis of hearing footsteps late at night from his office. They seemed to enter the hall, but never left it.

Queen’s Lane

My favourite place at night is spooky Queen’s Lane, where the cavaliers rode through on their way to do battle with Cromwell’s army. Sometimes, when it is deserted, particularly on a windy autumn evening, you can hear the ghostly hoofbeats…

St John’s College

Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, was beheaded in 1645, after being impeached by the Long Parliament .

(The Long Parliament lasted from 1640 until 1660, and passed, among other acts, the first Habeas Corpus Act – which as a lawyer gets me quite excited, because a Writ of Habeas Corpus provides that the Crown must “certify the true cause” of imprisonment. It’s one of the fundamentals of English and Australian criminal law).

Here’s a particularly horrible depiction of his execution 

Some say he pulls his head from his neck and rolls it at people, others say he kicks it along the floor with a candle in his hand. And apparently he drifts 20mm above the ground, because the pavement has worn down since his death.

Now those who read Harry Potter will recognise the similarity to Nearly Headless Nick. But Laud looks nothing like John Cleese. In fact, I don’t think the Archbishop looks like the ghostly sort, myself. I certainly don’t see him playing football with his head. (I’ve always seen  him as an honourable man, on the wrong side of history.)

Merton College

Merton College library has the ghost of poor Colonel Francis Windebank, shot in 1645 by his own side.

It’s a sad story. He was a young, newly married colonel in the Royalist army in the Civil War and was appointed governor of Bletchingdon Park, near Oxford. In April 1645 he invited his young wife and friends for a ball at the house to raise their spirits (not the ghostly kind). A Parliamentarian spy may have been present, as during the ball the house came under attack by Cromwell’s forces.

The house was well protected, and probably could have withstood the attack, but Windebank surrendered immediately. It is likely that he did so  in order to protect the lives of his wife and friends.

He went to explain to the King in Oxford (where the King had his headquarters). His excuses were not accepted and he was tried by a Royalist court-martial for failing to protect Bletchingdon Park. They took just three hours to find him guilty and sentence him to death by firing squad.

His execution took place against the length of town wall abutting Merton College. Windebank bared his chest to the muskets and exclaimed “God Save the King.”

Windebank’s ghost haunts the site of his execution at Dead Man’s Walk, which abuts Merton College. He’s a well known Oxford ghost, and is thought to haunt because of his lingering feeling of injustice at being executed for what he considered a chivalrous action.

It is also said that he walks around on his knees. Rational thinkers (?) say that it is more likely that he is walking on the original (lower) ground level of the seventeenth century.

I couldn’t find a picture of poor Francis, but here’s a generic Royalist Cavalier, so if you’re wandering along Dead Man’s Walk, you’ll know what to look for: 

University College

The wonderfully named Obediah Walker (the ghost who walks – get it!) was the Catholic Master of University College.

He tried to follow James I into exile in France but was captured and imprisoned for ten years. When released he was a broken man and his ghost supposedly haunts Staircase VIII (where the Master’s residence used to be). I could find no photograph of Obediah, but here is the place where Walker walks…

Christ Church College

Oxford was a Royalist stronghold during the English Civil War. The King made the Christ Church College Deanery his palace and held Parliament in its Great Hall.

The spirit of King Charles I has been known to appear in the grounds of Christ Church College  and in the Great Hall, sometimes with his head, sometimes without.

Apparently he also appears in the Bodleian Library. While in Oxford, the King was denied leave to take books from the Bodleian in 1645. He has been seen at night running around in the upper reading room pulling books from the shelves reading one line and placing them back in an endless game of fortune telling, again sometimes with and sometimes without his head.

And that is NOT why I always do my study in the Lower Reading Room.

Magpie Lane

The former bank that stands on the corner of Magpie Lane (now the Quad) is reputedly haunted by the ghost of Prudence, who died of a broken heart when her Cavalier lover ran away.

I’ve walked down that little lane many times, but Dear Prudence has never come out to play (you have to be a Beatles fan to get it!)