Going Undercover

Author Maggie Ritchie shares how a female artist who once cracked codes at Bletchley Park has inspired her new novel

- DAWN GEDDES

NOVELIST Maggie Ritchie has been fascinated by the written word since she was a child. But it's the Glasgow-based author's love of art that fanned the flames of her latest book, White Raven - a story of love, courage, resilience and betrayal.

“I did an interview for the Daily Mail on a woman called Moira Beaty, who was a contemporary of Joan Eardley,” Maggie explains. “She was opening an exhibition of the Glasgow Girls in Kirkcudbright. She was 91 at the time and she was great — this tiny little old woman who was really sparky and bright. She was still painting at 91 and showed me around her studio.

"She had a box of sketches, and one of them was a charcoal sketch of this really handsome, dramatic-looking guy with a fierce and brooding presence," she adds.

"I commented that it looked like it had been drawn with love, and she just quite breezily said, 'Oh, yes, he was my lover. When I was 18, I was working at Bletchley Park and he was a highly regarded British intelligence officer with Russian roots. He headed the elite anti-Soviet team at the secret home of World War II code breakers'."

Maggie continues, "I was so intrigued by this story. Moira wouldn't tell me much about Bletchley Park, although she did tell me that she was a code breaker with the enigma lot and had broken a really important code. But it was her lover I was really interested in.

"I asked what had happened, and she told me he'd left her to go and be a spy in eastern Europe. She'd been so brokenhearted at the age of just 18 that she'd contemplated suicide. She had a breakdown, went to work in London and then found her way back to art."

The historical author of Paris Kiss and