Free Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife by Betty Chapman Page B

that time. We got invited everywhere because we too at that point were considered celebrities as well. To be quite honest we got sick of it sometimes. There came a time when we wished we could be free of the rich and the famous.
    One of the rich and famous they had no desire to be away from was the actor Burl Ives, 11 who starred with Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958):
He came to stay with us in Wilton Place in Belgravia. He was playing at the Café de Paris. He gave us a party there for our wedding anniversary. At the end of the party Eddie was seeing everyone off and Burl closed the door on Eddie, handed him some money and said ‘Go and get yourself a room for the night.’ Then he closed the door on him, leaving me with Burl inside. Of course he didn’t stay out for the night, it was a great uproar, but it was a big laugh, we were all very good chums.
    Of course, Eddie was fond of thinking up practical jokes and pranks himself, as well as his more dangerous escapades:
Whilst Eddie was around, he was always being the joker that he was, and once called up the undertaker and asked him to go to the home of Sir Peter Hodge, a well-known man at that time, and a good friend of ours, and measure up the body and prepare him for the burial! Imagine when the butler opened the door; he nearly fell flat on his face! Of course Peter Hodge was still alive. Eddie was always doing things like that, he was described as a loose cannon.
In the late 1940s Eddie went to Tangier where he bought a Beech aircraft with a group of ex-RAF pilots, including Graham Pearson, to transport lobsters to Spanish restaurants. This story began with Dennis Fox, a badly injured pilot who was in hospital with Eddie after the parachute landing where he hurt his back. Dennis introduced him to Graham Pearson who was also a pilot. They would use the plane for spotting. They would send the plane out to sweep the coast to see if everything was clear, checking for customs. They did some smuggling trips to Casablanca with gold, and some to France.
    During this period between her marriage to Eddie and their departure for Ghana in 1951, among Betty’s properties was a cafe in Battersea, just across the Thames in south London. She recalls: ‘We had a manager who looked after the property. Eddie’s many pals made it a meeting place, and always left the tab for Eddie. I was glad to pass on the restaurant, because I was having so many problems with staff, late hours, lots of travelling to and fro, and all else.’
    She also owned a property in Brighton:
There was a betting shop next door to the furniture warehouse that we owned, and which we rented to a department store in Western Road in Brighton. They kept all of their furnishings stored there. It was a huge warehouse. There was a murder in the betting shop and in order to cover up evidence of the crime the betting shop was set alight. That in turn set fire to the warehouse, and since it was old furniture, it went up like a bomb. The warehouse was completely destroyed, and as it was underinsured I didn’t know what to do. As a consequence, I decided to rebuild it using casual labour. As a consequence, I got a very intense education in building. This served me very well later in life.
    All through this time Eddie remained friendly with many of his security handlers. ‘They all kept in touch with him,’ Betty says, ‘though perhaps it was just to keep tabs on what he was up to.’ Even at that time Betty was still not aware of the whole of Eddie’s wartime activities. Eddie was full of stories, but he never divulged anything of consequence. A good line of chat got him through the war; keeping his mouth shut about important things kept him alive through it.
    Indeed, much of the contact with MI5 wasn’t just for old time’s sake. ‘They tried to use him when they could,’ Betty adds. As previously mentioned, MI5 wanted Eddie to lift some important papers from the Polish Embassy. ‘He cordoned off the