A spy whose stockings saved her life
A Woman Of No Importance Sonia Purnell Virago €28
Sturdy stockings helped one of the Allies’ bravest and most valued spies through the worst hardships of undercover existence in occupied France during World War II. Virginia Hall’s feat in running a network of agents and local resisters was all the more marked because she was hampered by a wooden leg that she called Cuthbert (and disguised with that hosiery). She had lost her limb in a pre-war hunting accident.
The American-born spy could not perform 007-style feats such as jumping off trains to avoid spot checks. But what she lacked in physical agility she made up for in ingenuity, personality and courage.
Rai0sed in Baltimore, Hall found herself in 1940 in London, where she joined the Special Operations Executive, set up by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’, and was despatched to Vichy-run France.
She settled in Lyon where, helped by a brothel madam who provided safe houses and a US diplomat who forwarded messages, she built up circuits of devoted agents, adopting extraordinary subterfuge and overcoming huge dangers to supply them with money, arms and radios.
After the German takeover of all France in 1942, the stakes became higher, as she ran the gauntlet of Nazi security that infiltrated a treacherous priest into her circuits. She switched to the American Office of Strategic Services, before landing a simply boring desk job with the CIA.
Writing about spies is never easy, as the subjects are by nature secretive. While maintaining a useful sense of the ongoing war, Purnell mixes telling detail with narrative verve to convey both the excitements of Hall’s precarious existence and the force of her indomitable spirit.