Una
Kroll was eleven when she first met her father. They stopped for lunch on the
way from Brighton to London and he took her outside to play with the
innkeeper’s Angora rabbit. In that pub garden, this stranger uttered words that
sent a chill through her heart, he would not be coming home. There was another
woman. Scarcely comprehending, she buried her face in the white rabbit’s fur
and refused to cry. The lonely little girl already knew how to hide her tears
and she had invented a childish fantasy about her absent father to fend off
unsympathetic classmates. He was an aviator and explorer who had gone missing
in the desert, she told them.
This
was less extraordinary than the truth. Only years later did she discover that
George Hill, her father, was a British spy who had befriended Trotsky at the
time of the Russian Revolution. He had smuggled the Romanian crown jewels out
of the Soviet Union and was involved in a doomed attempt to rescue the Tsar. During
the Second World War he acted as the link between Churchill’s Special
Operations Executive and Stalin’s secret service, the NKVD.
Una’s mother, Hilda
Pediani, had been one of his agents and one of many lovers. He married her so
that Una would be legitimate, but took no part in the child’s upbringing. It was
a rare sympathetic act by a man who was capable of great bravery, but little
compassion.
In this compelling memoir, author Peter Day brings to life the world of twentieth-century espionage through the story of one of Britain’s most remarkable spies.
