Husband's Death Reveals A Secret He'd Kept For Over 64 Years
When your marriage lasts decades, they say you can communicate without even speaking. You know the small stuff, like how your spouse takes their tea, and could probably recite their morning routine down to their after toothbrushing sighs. After a lifetime together, you'd think you'd know every secret swirling around in your partner's head, but do you really?
One woman from Trowbridge, Wilshire, laid her best friend to rest after spending her life by his side. It was only after packing up some dusty old paperwork that she stopped to read what her husband had written...and discovered he'd been lying for the entirety of their marriage. His biggest secret left her second guessing every moment she held dear.
Audrey and her husband Glyndwr, Glyn for short, had a marriage for the ages. In their 64 trips around the sun together, the couple shared everything from laughs to comfortable silences, and so much more in between.
After decades of raising children and building their lives, they slid into their golden years, hand in hand. Through sickness and in health is what they vowed to each other, and even Glyn’s Parkinson’s disease diagnosis couldn’t shake their union.
But their wedded bliss ended with Audrey at her husband’s beside in January of 2015, when Glyn passed away at age 83 from Parkinson’s. With a heavy heart, Audrey started the exhaustive process of grieving her best friend.
Once the rituals of death had passed, and all the neighbors stopped bringing by spare casseroles to share a hot meal’s worth of sympathies, Audrey was left alone in the house she shared with Glyn, filled with evidence of their marriage.
One day, Audrey cleared out Glyn’s old paperwork that she had no use for anymore. Before retirement, her husband was a civil engineer. She’d never involved herself in his work, but curiosity mixed with longing made her glance through the documents before they met the trash can.
At first, skimming the page of words scrawled in Glyn’s familiar handwriting brought Audrey a pang of comfort. As she read through the sentences though, the context of her husband’s writings made absolutely no sense for that of a civil engineer.
Reading through page after page, Audrey said her stomach churned as she discovered the man she thought she’d known best of anyone in the world had concealed a staggering secret. Glyn wasn’t only a civil engineer.
As he detailed in his writings, when Glen was 13, word somehow reached government officials that he possessed a photographic memory. Representatives from British Intelligence approached the teen for recruitment in 1944, presenting with him with a choice.
From the word "go," Glyn was sucked into the sensitive world of classified operations. He wrote about an official he’d known simply as Captain, who ushered him through his first assignment, a project he named Operation X-X, or double-cross.
Since he was still a minor, Glyn’s father had to grant permission for his son to become an official covert agent. The Captain met with his father, who consented, then kept and died with his son’s secret. He was the only other person aware of his spy identity.
As part of Operation Double Cross, Glyn and many others engaged in various counter-espionage measures against the Nazis. Whether that meant feeding false facts to captured Nazi soldiers or planting agents in with the enemy, British intelligence flooded the Germans with disinformation.
Glyn specifically mentioned in his writings times when he crawled through the damp darkness of concrete pipes to infiltrate the walls of prisons. Then, once inside, he’d tell lies to German POWs before crawling out the way he came.
Throughout the next several decades, when the Captain came calling, Glyn would hang up his civil engineering hat and dive back into his work as a spy. Simultaneous to his espionage duties, Glyn met, fell in love, and married Audrey.
Finding out about her husband’s secret life hurt and confused Audrey. She admitted, “I was completely oblivious. I have so many questions now that will never get answered. Why did I not know?”
It led to reflection on Audrey’s part to see if she could pinpoint moments where her husband’s veneer had cracked. Glyn mostly worked from home while she went to her job as a home economics teacher. If he was sneaking off on covert missions, Audrey never noticed.
In their happy marriage, Glyn and Audrey welcomed two children. Yet no hints of his governmental duties leaked to any of his loved ones. He’d be off assisting in the capture of enemy spies and still make it home for a quiet dinner with the family.
The toll that concealment had on their relationship wasn’t lost on Glyn. He addressed it in his writings, saying specifically how his spy career impacted Audrey, “I look back now and think about what sort of life she must have had and how she put up with me.”
Despite the whiplash the realization gave Audrey, she held onto the notion that Glyn wrote out his story so that one day his words would be read. Even if he hadn’t specifically confided in her before passing, she'd found out the truth through his voice on the page.
In 2019, Audrey published Glyn’s writings as a book titled Operation XX And Me: Did I Have A Choice? She hoped others would enjoy stepping into the shoes of a real-life spy, and to create a lasting legacy for the husband who had to stay silent.
Glyn was one of many men and women who risked their lives in an entirely thankless position. Their triumphs only came to light years after they helped change the course of history, but that isn't exactly unfamiliar territory for those serving undercover.
For instance, though most were never taught her name in AP History class, Krystyna Skarbek's impact on the world can't be understated. Without her courageous — and anonymous — efforts, the planet would be a very different place.
By 1944, she was known as Winston Churchill's "favorite spy." Not only that, but she was widely believed to be the inspiration behind Vesper Lynd, James Bond's love interest from Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale!
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