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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by RICHARD FIELD on behalf of MARY SINCLAIR has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I fell in love with
a German spy!

By Mary Sinclair
(as related to Richard Field)

In 1938, after I’d been teaching for a year, my friend Ruth and I decided to go on holiday together to a Methodist Holiday Home in Penmaenmawr in Wales.
On our first night there, we went down for our evening meal and I noticed a particularly handsome, blond, tanned youth sitting there. Interesting!
After the Sunday service we all set off up the Sychnant Pass and I managed to walk much of the way with the young man I’d spotted the night before.
I found his name was Mira. He said he was a Czech student, training to be a bomber pilot, and was in England to improve his English (which was already good). He carried a most sophisticated camera (nothing like my box Brownie!) and he surprised me by wanting to take pictures of almost everything he saw - every stream, waterfall, bridge and hill.
In the following days, we went on various outings. By this time Mira and I were always together and on one trip to Snowden it was sheer bliss to climb to the summit together. From there, the air was crystal clear. The land lay like a map with Anglesey, Bardsey peninsular, Cardigan Bay with all the rivers and inlets showing up clearly. Mira took lots more photographs from every angle — and even one or two of me. I was on cloud nine!
As the days passed, we swam, climbed mountains, played beach cricket — and then it was Friday, the day of the tennis tournament. Mira was my partner — and we won! We were given small silver plated egg cups as our trophies.
Then, all too quickly, the week was over. I was returning to London where I taught, and Mira was going first to Pembroke and then on to London. So we arranged to meet the following Monday evening and go to Lyon’s Corner House in the Strand.
Just about this time the news came through that the Germans had invaded Czech Sudetanland and Mr Chamberlain was flying to Munich to meet Hitler. Mira had to leave hurriedly. Although he didn’t explain, I assumed he had been recalled to join his bomber unit.
Back home in Poppleton for a half-term holiday, my father asked me about the romance which he assumed had come to an end. I told him why Mira had had to go home so suddenly.
‘My dear child’, he said quietly, ‘did it never occur to you that that handsome youth, pretending to be a Czech and armed with a sophisticated camera, and staying in humble places near to very strategic places like Ayr, Snowdonia, Pembroke, close to where our fleet was at anchor in Milford Haven, was very suspect indeed.
‘Your lover boy was certainly a member of the Hitler Nazi Youth. They came over in droves to Britain this summer, photographing every nook and inlet in our coast.
I’m afraid, my dear, you fell in love with a German spy!’
Many months later in the summer of 1940, when I walked the lovely lanes of Kent with my London evacuees, we saw German bombers clouding the skies on their way to attack our airfields, or to bomb the London Docks, and I wondered if Mira was up there, or whether he had already been shot down by our fearless Spitfire pilots, and I pondered on the futility of war.
I still have my egg cup — no longer very shiny, but each time I use it I remember a week long ago when we were carefree and young — and me perhaps more than a little naive!

END

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