A Woman of No Importance Read online

  The American consul, Perry George, cabled Washington to ask for a senior official to inform Mrs. Hall about Virginia’s accident “as tactfully as possible.” As Virginia feared, Barbara was inconsolable at receiving the devastating news about her daughter. Soon the tragedy was reported in the press, but the consequent public sympathy did little to help Barbara, paralyzed with fear that she could still lose her youngest child. Not until January 6 did she receive word from Izmir that Virginia was now considered out of danger. The American doctor finally returned to Istanbul, relieved that his patient had made it.

  Eleven days later, alarm bells rang again. A new infection had set in that appears to have been sepsis, a potentially lethal poisoning of the blood. Frantically battling for Virginia’s life once more, the local doctors injected mysterious serums into her knee to try to save it, all the while consulting the Americans in Istanbul by phone every hour. Even today, with modern medicine, her condition would have been critical; back then her chances were exceedingly slim. The daily pain of having the pus-soaked bandages on her stump changed by the nurses was almost unbearable, and often her heart raced uncontrollably.

  One night, delirious from the infection coursing through her body, Virginia was galvanized by what she would describe as a vision. Although her remaining family were thousands of miles away back home, Virginia’s late father appeared at her bedside bearing a simple message. Ned told her that she must not give up and that “it was her duty to survive,” but that if she genuinely could not bear her pain, he would come back for her. Although not religious in any formal sense, Virginia truly believed that Ned had spoken to her. His words remained with her as a powerful force, and she talked often over the years about how he had urged her to fight to live.5 And so she waged the first, but not the last, great battle for her life, practically alone, save for a ghost. If she were spared after such appalling suffering, she felt she could surely endure anything else life threw at her. She would not let her great mistake get in her way, for her father’s sake.

  Virginia did indeed miraculously pull through and the consul, who devotedly visited her in the hospital every day, came away astonished by her resilience. She was eventually transferred to a more modern hospital in Istanbul for convalescence. Throughout the long, slow weeks of her recovery, she determined that she would not be treated as an invalid. In May 1934, she insisted, against her doctors’ and employer’s advice, on returning to work in the consulate the day after her discharge from the hospital. It was a terrible decision. The local doctors could supply only the most rudimentary and ill-fitting wooden leg, so she was reliant on crutches; after months lying in bed, even walking the shortest distance was exhausting. There was little follow-up medical attention back in Smyrna and the pain from her wound was still crushing. For once she felt bereft so far from home and the result was a swift physical and emotional breakdown. “This is a situation which I foresaw and tried to avoid, but Miss Hall did not understand the difficulties that were before her,” Consul Perry cabled the State Department in Washington. “The experiment has been painful for us all.”6

  Within a few days, Virginia was on a ship back to the United States, and a month later, on June 21, she arrived in New York where her family met her at the pier and watched her limp gingerly toward them. She was admitted to the hospital for a series of what were called “repair operations,” almost certainly involving the cutting away of more of her leg to avoid flesh-eating infections, and to be fitted with a new prosthetic. Although modern by 1930s standards, it was clunky and held in place by leather straps and corsetry around her waist.7 In hot weather the leather chafed her skin and the stump blistered and bled. Despite being hollow, the painted wooden leg with an aluminium foot weighed in at a hefty eight pounds. Simply getting around was a test of endurance, and her beloved field sports were surely now out of reach. Pain would be her unceasing companion for the rest of her days.

  Over the summer months at Boxhorn Farm, Virginia taught herself to walk again, still battling niggling infections and the constant specter of depression. She enjoyed sitting on the veranda and helping to feed the sheep, horses, and goats. But by November 1934, she was itching to return to work and secured a new posting in Europe, this time in Venice, where she hoped conditions would be “better” than in Turkey, a country that held such bad memories she intended never to visit again.

  She did not ask for—and was not granted—special dispensation regarding her workload. Only the occasional flashes of a temper, often the mark of someone facing intolerable frustrations, hinted to outsiders as to her anguish. She tried to disguise her disability with long strides, although even in the flat-heeled shoes she was now obliged to wear a rolling gait became more apparent when she was tired. Going up and down steps remained a particular challenge—and consequently Venice, as she was to discover, could scarcely have been less suitable for a new amputee.

  La Serenissima was a walking city. Virginia gazed with horror at its slippery cobbled passages and the 400 humpbacked bridges, many with steps, over the city’s 177 canals. She quickly devised an ingenious solution: her own gondola emblazoned with a splendid golden lion would be her carriage. A devoted local man, Angelo, would help her row and catch her when the “sea was rough,” making her “foothold precarious.”8 She was developing a knack for recruiting people who would go out of their way to help her in adversity, smitten by her charm and obvious courage.

  Virginia set up home in a historic palazzo with a sweeping view over the Grand Canal from her apartment balcony. She started entertaining again, making good use of the Hall family’s fine china and silver. She also invited her mother over to stay for several months in the early days when she still felt she might need some extra help, particularly as her stump “suffered greatly” in the sticky Venetian heat. Perhaps it was in part their renewed disagreements over Virginia’s decision to work once again so far away from home that made life with her anxious mother in attendance uncomfortable. In any case, it seems that Barbara, however much the two women genuinely loved each other, was never to travel to see her daughter in Europe again.

  Despite these trials, Virginia once again impressed her superiors at the American consulate, where the staff dealt with the visas, passports, and repatriations of American tourists as well as customs arrangements for businessmen. Desperate to prove her worth, she was soon handling the more complex or delicate tasks typically the preserve of career diplomats rather than clerks, and even standing in for the vice consul when he was away. Keeping busy, she discovered, was the best way to keep her darkest thoughts at bay. The consul noted that Virginia rarely took a day off, even on weekends, and never allowed her disability to get in the way of her work. Now assuming she would never marry, her career meant more than ever and she took pains to keep abreast of political developments. Horrified by the tide of fascism rising all around her, she yearned to be involved in the diplomatic efforts to stop it.

  This was a time of mass unemployment and grinding poverty when only the dictators seizing power across Europe seemed to offer hope. Hitler, until quite recently the butt of complacent laughter by commentators who said he would come to nothing, was now chancellor of Germany and worshipped by millions; Virginia’s host country, Italy, was effectively a one-party fascist state under Mussolini, upheld by gangs of Blackshirt thugs known as squadristi; Stalin ruled by murderous diktat in Russia. Such extremism (on the left and right) seemed to be on the march everywhere, on the back of propaganda, sloganeering, and ruthless media manipulation.

  In what became known as the decade of lies, truth and trust were falling victim to fear, racism, and hatred. Virginia found herself in a ringside seat as the increasingly fragile ideal of democracy failed to find champions with alternative answers. A rare exception was her home country, where President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal offered programs of emergency relief combined with the creation of properly paid jobs in giant public works projects. Virginia was a natural Roosevelt suppo
rter and had been taught at Barnard by one of his chief advisers, Professor Raymond Moley. But to her frustration, America, still wary of getting involved in what it saw as interminable European squabbles, was shutting its eyes to menacing developments in the the rest of the world. However aesthetically glorious her surroundings, against such a global backdrop her clerical work in Venice felt like a stifling irrelevance.

  In late 1936, Virginia decided to have another crack at becoming a diplomat. With her five years’ overseas service as a State Department clerk, she was no longer required to take the written exam and an interview would suffice. Confident that this would play to her strengths at last, she sailed back to the United States in January 1937 to pursue her application with the blessing of her bosses in Venice and a feeling of optimism. Now thirty and having served in three different legations, she had much to offer in local political knowledge. But her application was rejected out of hand, this time citing an obscure rule barring amputees from diplomacy. Initially she thought it merely a temporary hurdle, and demanded a series of meetings at the State Department to prove that her work was in no way affected. It was a valiant but doomed campaign, and she returned to Venice with her spirits crushed and a growing contempt for rules and their enforcers.

  Secretary of State Cordell Hull had issued the verdict himself, but Virginia’s supporters, many keen Democrats like the Halls themselves, were not content to let his treatment of her pass without a fight. After a number of months and a flurry of correspondence between various powerful family friends, one of them, Colonel E. M. House, took it upon himself to lobby his old friend in the Oval Office. Virginia, he told Roosevelt, was a “gentlewoman of great intelligence” and a “credit to our country,” who was the victim of an “injustice.” Despite her injury she lived an active life, including rowing, swimming, and horse-riding, and had “kept up her work,” but had been told that she could never progress to the diplomatic corps. On February 4, 1938, Roosevelt asked for a briefing from Hull, who appears to have taken umbrage at this special lobbying on her behalf. Virginia’s disability hampered her performance, the president was told, and she was not up to the demands of a diplomatic position. Hull, apparently ignoring the glowing reports from the consulate in Venice, agreed she might make a “fine career girl,”9 but only by remaining in the clerical grades. FDR had overcome his own semiparalysis from polio to reach the highest office of all. Yet, with some irony, he saw no reason to pursue the matter further.

  In what seems to have been a deliberate punishment for her impudence, Virginia was soon after ordered to leave Venice against her wishes and to report for duty at the American legation in Tallinn, the far-flung capital of the increasingly authoritarian Baltic state of Estonia. When she requested to route through Paris—only slightly out of her way—so that she could seek urgent repairs to her prosthetic leg, she was curtly instructed that her costs would not be reimbursed. It was equally insulting that her successor in Venice—a man—was granted vice-consul status and higher pay. Increasingly living up to her rebellious reputation, Virginia decided to travel under her own steam to the French capital and pick up again with old friends.

  Few in Paris, even if they perhaps wondered why she always wore thick stockings in the spring sunshine, knew that she had suffered an accident. They certainly had no idea that the special hosiery helped to disguise the prosthetic and cushion her stump to minimize pain and bleeding. Although she described herself as Episcopalian, Virginia’s mother’s family hailed from the stoic traditions of the Pennsylvania Dutch, descendants of early German settlers linked to the Amish. She had been brought up never to discuss money, feelings, or health, and to hold back a little from the crowd. Keeping her problems—and her secrets—secret thus came naturally. She may not have been married to an indifferent husband, but a different form of silent suffering was now part of her life.

  Virginia arrived in Tallinn at the end of June, and started work at the same two-thousand-dollar salary, never having had a pay raise during seven years of service. The one compensation was the hunting bounty on offer in the vast, virgin forests of Estonia, and Virginia wasted no time in securing licenses to shoot capercaillie, grouse, and pheasant. She determined that her accident would not deprive her of the sport of firing a gun, despite the challenging, marshy terrain. The low-grade work, however, bored her. She was answering the phone and filing papers while Europe was spinning toward war, and was watching with horror as the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain met Hitler in Munich in September 1938 and talked of “peace for our time.” In Estonia, Virginia found a similar story to much of the rest of Europe: a nationalist fever had taken hold there too. Political parties were banned, the press was censored, and potentially foreign names were recharacterized to sound Estonian. Fearful of the future, all hopes of promotion dashed, pigeonholed as a disabled woman of no importance, she resigned from the State Department in March 1939. For all her ambition at the start, her career had proved little more faithful or rewarding than the old-fashioned marriage she had once spurned.

  After seven years of living under the shadow of fascism, she decided she could do more to wake up the public back home to what she saw as its “false thinking,” “corruption,” and “terrible deceptions” by selling articles to American newspapers. She had, of course, studied the press at the Akademie in Vienna, but writing was never really her forte. It is doubtful whether she was very successful or her voice heard. No published articles from this time have been found, although her passport proves that she stayed on in Tallinn for some months. Writing was, frankly, never going to satisfy her for long. She wanted to act, not just report. How could she break through the constrictions of her life to do something really worthwhile? How could she beat the depression that still haunted her and prove that her survival against the odds had been for a reason?

  On September 1, 1939, Germany launched a sudden and brutal attack on Poland, and two days later Britain and France responded with a declaration of war. It was well known that Estonia’s neighbor Russia had similar expansionist designs, and at the end of October Virginia decided to leave on a last-minute ship to London before it was too late. She had in any case already had another idea. She would abandon her typewriter and volunteer for the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army—but when she turned up at the recruitment office the sergeants took one look at her passport and declared that foreigners were not welcome. It was yet another rejection.

  Most in her position might well have opted to give up and return to the safety of the United States—but for Virginia such a move would have been an unthinkable admission of failure. She sailed back to Paris and with gritty persistence finally tracked down the one active role she could take up to help the fight against fascism. To avoid a row she deliberately kept it from her mother when she signed up in February 1940 with the French 9th Artillery Regiment to drive ambulances for the Service de Santé des Armées. She had no medical skills but did have a driver’s license, and the service was one of the few military corps open to women volunteers—and also to foreigners. To her joy, they snapped her up (perhaps unaware of her disability) and gave her an intensive course in first aid. Finally, she had the chance to play her part.

  On May 6, after her induction course, Virginia reported for duty just outside Metz on France’s northeastern border, close to the Maginot Line of concrete fortifications built as a supposedly impregnable barrier to future German aggression. There was little to do in those last days of what became known as the Phony War. Soldiers lolled around at loose ends and their guns remained idle. As gently as she could, she took the chance to break the news of her new role to Barbara, insisting that while she was “weary and grubby” she was “well taken care of” in a cottage “with plenty of good food.”10 Her mother was hardly taken in. She told a reporter from the Baltimore Sun researching a story headlined MARYLAND WOMAN IS DRIVING AMBULANCE FOR FRENCH ARMY11 that Virginia’s words were “well-intentioned but
they afford me little consolation, for in her characteristic manner she is trying to make things sound better for me.” Why was her daughter, she asked herself, running away from a comfortable life at home toward more hardship, more guns, and more horror?

  That was the last that was heard from Virginia for some time. On May 10 the Germans mounted a deadly attack, simply bypassing the whole of the Maginot Line to burst into France via the undefended wooded highlands of the Belgian Ardennes. Panzer divisions swarmed over the border, catching complacent elderly French generals by surprise and scattering their ill-prepared troops, some of whom Virginia had spotted from her ambulance. The French were locked in an outdated defensive mentality, sitting behind walls and sending messages to each other by carrier pigeon. They had little chance against the devastating brilliance of the Nazi forces with their frightening speed, flamethrowers, and lightning waves of aerial bombardment. The negligent apathy—and in some cases venality—of the old French elite allowed a world power to descend into a subject people in just six weeks. The politicians and military had, as one French patriot of the time put it, fooled their people with a “hallucination of strength and invulnerabilty” that when tested by the Germans rapidly turned out to be a “criminal deception.”12 Official posters had repeatedly boasted: “We shall win the war because we are the strongest!” No one in the French government or High Command had ventured the possibility of collapse, until it came.

  Within little more than a fortnight, the remnants of the French and Belgian armies and large numbers of British troops were cut off by the German advance and waiting to be evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk. It seemed as if nothing could stop Hitler sweeping victoriously across the whole of Europe. Virginia was dismayed to witness most of her ambulance unit panicking and abandoning the dying where they lay. But then many of their officers—as well as civilian leaders such as mayors and councillors—had also given up on their responsibilities and fled. Even the French government abandoned the capital on June 10, escaping south to Bordeaux, where it too soon collapsed in disarray.