Mary Alison was born in Northumberland and like many Northumbrians had determination and great reserves of strength; she was to need both.
In the early 1920s she took a job as a salaried-companion to a family in Hungary. When that came to an end she decided to stay on, living in Budapest, supplementing her private income by teaching English. She had many Hungarian friends and moved in political and diplomatic circles so it was not surprising she married an Hungarian diplomat, Baron Jenö Miske.
Jerrard Tickell’s account of her life is opaque about what happened to her in the war, when she accompanied her husband on diplomatic postings to Trieste, Munich and Istanbul. His book was published in 1958, “Miss May” was very much alive and “the Red Army has long arms”, so his reticence is understandable.
She became separated from her husband. In 1946 she hitched a lift on an Air Force ‘plane to Vienna to find him. He had committed suicide so she was determined to visit his grave at his estate in Hungary and lay flowers on his grave. Her plans went awry when she was arrested by the Russian secret police. The bulk of the book describes the nine years she spent in Russian gulags. It wasn’t a picnic; when you think things cannot get worse they do, but her Northumbrian grit got her through it, albeit with serious psychological scars.
The Russians accused her of being a British spy during the war, something she stoutly denied. I suppose they knew she had been arrested in Hungary as an SOE agent but had been sent back to England in 1943 in a spy-swap. She became known as “Miss May” by a fellow prisoner who couldn’t pronounce Mary. Russia has had an economic renaissance but Mary Alison’s treatment would be similar today. I said she was a tough old bird. She died aged eighty-six and is buried in Chiswick Old Cemetery, St Nicholas’s.
