Woman's Hour - Celebrating the bicentenary of her birth: Northern Ballet's Victoria

Episode Date: March 27, 2019

When you go shopping do you use the self-service checkouts? Or when you pop into a fast food place do you order on the touch- screens rather than go to the counter? If so, your transaction is through computers rather than people. This week the Office of National Statistics says that nearly 1.5 million jobs are at risk because of this type of automation and they’re jobs that many women carry out.Victoria, a new ballet being performed at Sadler’s Wells in London, tells the remarkable story of Queen Victoria through the eyes of her youngest child and lifelong companion Beatrice. Choreographer and director, Cathy Marston and dramaturg, Uzma Hameed join Jenni to discuss the challenges of recreating a royal icon onstage, and reveal the true story behind Victoria and Beatrice's unique mother-daughter relationship. Zeenat Aman has often been called Bollywood’s first sex symbol. She starred in numerous films in the 70s and 80s and redefined the archetypal heroine in Indian cinema. In an era when women played secondary characters, largely obedient wives and lovers, she was drawn to more unconventional roles. From the drug-taking hippie in 'Hare Rama Hare Krishna' to the opportunist who leaves her unemployed lover for a millionaire in 'Roti', she was an inspiration for so many other heroines. She tell us about her illustrious career, Bollywood and the UK Asian Film Festival. Last year Gina Haspel became the first female director of the CIA . She talked about how she stood “on the shoulders of heroines who never sought public acclaim” and was “deeply indebted” to women who challenged stereotypes and broke down barriers to make her appointment possible. One of the women she was referring to was Virginia Hall, an American-turned-British spy who became a legend in espionage and guerrilla warfare. Sonia Purnell has spent more than three years finding out more and talks to Jenni about her new book 'A Woman of No Importance' which has already been optioned for a film with Daisy Ridley set to play Virginia.Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Kirsty StarkeyInterviewed Guest: Professor Gina Neff Interviewed Guest: Cathy Marston Interviewed Guest: Uzma Hazeed Interviewed Guest: Zeenat Aman Interviewed Guest: Sonia Purnell

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to Wednesday's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast. It's 200 years since the birth of Queen Victoria, and Northern Ballet has created her story in dance through the eyes of her youngest daughter Beatrice. I'll be talking to the choreographer and director and the drama tag who've put it all together. A woman of no importance, the life of Virginia Hall, described as World War II's most dangerous spy. And here for the UK Asian Film Festival, Zeenat Aman, one of Bollywood's greatest stars. Now time was you went to the supermarket, paid at the checkout and maybe

had a bit of a chat with the woman who ran the till. Or you'd go to a fast food joint and have some communication with the person who bagged up your takeaway. Now you might sort your own groceries through the self-service point or even order your burger and chips through a computerised system. The Office for National Statistics says that nearly 1.5 million jobs are at risk because of this type of automation, and they're jobs that have often been done by women. Professor Gina Neff is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and Department of Sociology. She joined us from Radio Oxford. What range of jobs traditionally done by women are at risk? Well, this report paints a very different picture of the future. The picture we've had has been a robot in a factory or an automated lorry.

And what this report paints is the picture of a customer with an iPad, and I think that has enormous implications for women's work. So what jobs are safe from that kind of automation, and which are the jobs that are really, really at risk? The jobs that are at risk are jobs that have a high degree of routine tasks. And that's where this recent report takes a new method for us to understand what jobs of the future will look like. So there's been a bit of a debate. Should we think about a job or should we think about that percentage of tasks of our work that is routine? All of us have things

that we frankly would rather just get through the day. Paperwork, for example, routine kinds of answers to queries on email. And this report says the higher degree of your job, the greater percentage of your job that involves those kinds of tasks, the greater risk it is. So think about the kinds of jobs that we can computerize. And that's where this report is saying we have risks. Now, for women, that means that the kinds of jobs that have been entry or elementary level skills, and that have been open to people for part-time work and for work without a lot of training are now some of the jobs that are at greatest risk. Also, this report points out that the people who have the best protection from their work are people in their 30s. And that's a time

when a lot of women are taking a break to take care of their families. So that's in part what leads to the conclusion that the future of work, we really need to think about how we can look at better jobs and better jobs for women. Now, we know that technology has always caused loss of some jobs, you know, from the Industrial Revolution through.

But there is an argument that it's also created new jobs. And in this case, you know, young people learning how to do video games, make video games, create apps. Those sort of jobs have been quoted. So how genuinely worried should we be that women will lose a lot of jobs? Well, we can look around to examples in our everyday lives. Companies now have people who help them with their social media, a job that didn't exist 10 years ago. In your own studio, Jenny, I'm sure you've got people who help you get digital information, package parts of stories for the Internet, create different kinds of ways that you broadcast, not simply on radio. The same is true in most industries. So we've seen a growth in particular kinds of jobs.

The kinds of jobs that we can look to the future will be those that have a high degree of human touch. So think caring professions. One of the fastest jobs growing in Silicon Valley, believe it or not, are physical trainers and Zumba instructors. Now, that may seem frivolous on the one hand, but it goes to show that we're spending a lot of our leisure time doing more and more hands-on work with other people. So think coaching, teaching, supporting. All of those jobs have a greater capacity for growth from the data analyzed in this report. Those jobs at risk are those that have a high degree of tasks that really can be shunted off to computerized technologies. So think about

any kind of filing, sorting, automated call centers. And yes, and in your opening example, think about checkout lines. But how concerned should we be about the possibility of robots taking over jobs like cleaning, which a lot of women do to keep their families together, or even caring. Right. I think we're far way out from seeing robots as caring, particularly caring for the elderly. But what we might see are the kinds of jobs that support carers. So a report coming out from my institute soon shows a high percentage of administrative tasks in health care services can be safely automated. Now, that potentially frees up a lot of capacity to provide more care for the same price. In a study that I did of nurses, we see a huge amount of labor that has to

go into making automated systems. So the nurses had to learn how to not only trick the system into giving them the information that they wanted, even though it was automated, but how to communicate that to the other care professionals and their teams so that they would pay attention to it and listen to it and make advice and decisions based on it. And that was communication work. That's where we're going to see new kinds of tasks emerge. I call these robot translators. So these will be people who connect the automated systems

to the everyday decision-making that's going to be required for the future. But how much will there be a loss then of the kind of jobs that, let's say, fit around childcare and give a regular income without necessarily offering much job satisfaction? This is where I think we need to have multiple levels of conversations to solve a problem. We can't simply rely on a job strategy that says that people will be able to easily insert into the workforce and jobs that support caring and help them support their families. So that the future of work may be that we become much more task-oriented rather than complete employment relationship-oriented. And for both in the UK, the US, in Europe our social benefit to the idea that we become able to take on particular kinds of tasks that work around our schedules, that then looks very

different than our traditional nine to five kind of employment. Professor Gina Neff, thank you very much indeed for being with us. And we would, of course, like to hear from you. If you have been or are likely to be replaced by a robot or by any kind of automation, do let us know. You can contact us on Twitter or, of course, by email through the Women's Hour website. Now, 200 years ago, a baby was born who would become Queen of England and govern an ever-expanding British Empire. Her name was Victoria, and Northern Ballet has created a full-length work to tell her story. Much of it is well known. She married Albert, had nine children, was widowed young, and had a close relationship with a man called John Brown. And she wrote prolific diaries which were edited and rewritten after her death by her youngest daughter Beatrice.

Well the ballet story is told through her and is touring the country. It's at Sadler's Wells in London until Saturday. Uzma Hamid is the dramaturg and Cathy Marston, the choreographer and director. Cathy, why did you decide to tell the Queen's story from the perspective of Beatrice? Well, when Uzma and I started researching the ballet, there was obviously an enormous amount of material that we could use. And I sort of tongue in cheek say it's essentially 100 years of world history that you could cover. And we wanted to find a very specific way in because there is no way that you can say this is Victoria. We didn't want to claim that we knew that the answer to that question, who is Victoria, because there are many, many perspectives on that. So I was looking for, I guess, a route in that connected to me somehow.

And in the research that we did, I came across this nugget, this little myth. We don't even know if it's true. But apparently on the night that Albert died, Victoria was obviously devastated and in her grief went to the bedroom of her youngest child, Princess Beatrice, who was four went across Europe and to Russia in these sort of royal marriages, creating what was quite a massive dynasty in the end, Beatrice was kept very close to her mother throughout her life. And this relationship just was of enormous interest to me, especially when I found out that Beatrice then rewrote Victoria's diaries.

Now, Osmo, you actually show her tearing bits out of her mother's diaries. She clearly considers too racy. In fact, at one point, there was a good laugh last night at that. Why did she burn the Who knows? Who knows? instructions that she was to take charge of the diaries and prepare them for publication. And she felt that she was acting in accordance with her mother's wishes in presenting Victoria in a way that wouldn't compromise her public image for posterity. So she edited out, we think, a lot of material about John Brown, anything sort of sexy and racy, as you mentioned, and probably bits and pieces where Victoria might have been, not at her best, a bit bitchy about the servants maybe, or, you know, perhaps not reflected in the best light. Now, there has been a mixed interpretation of Victoria's relationship

with the ghillie, John Brown. Where's the evidence for your portrayal, which is really quite hot frankly I read and I can't remember which book this was in but it I think it was a letter that John Brown wrote to someone in which he talked about Victoria taking him to Frogmore where Albert was at rest and he talked about the sympathy that he felt for Victoria and how his heart went out to her seeing her still in such mourning about the loss of Albert so this this little moment stuck with me and there are several rumors and you know they who knows some people say that there was a secret marriage between Albert and sorry not between Albert, between Victoria and John Brown.

Some people even say they had a child together, which I find a ludicrous thought. But nevertheless, there were these rumours. And so we imagined this scene in which John Brown is taken to meet, in inverted commas, Albert. And that seemed to me an incredibly intimate scene where Victoria is really opening her heart to John Brown and there is evidence that she wrote how much she loved John. And she was also buried, I believe, with his mother's ring. She had some secret instructions which only her personal physician, Dr Reid, was allowed to open about certain things that she wanted to go in her coffin with her and one of these was John Brown's mother's ring and I think there is I think I'm right in saying that there

is a consensus that there was some kind of commitment that they made to each other while it may not have been a marriage and it probably wasn't a sexually consummated relationship but that there was a deep affection and and the physical relationship not necessarily sexual but he carried her everywhere she loved to be carried there's one anecdote about her him massaging her calf and she famously wrote several times in one of her books about his legs how wonderful his legs were as far as Beatrice is concerned we do see Victoria trying to prevent her daughter's marriage when she's met a man and she's fallen in love. How much of a life did Beatrice have beyond being her mother's companion? Well, she did actually escape at one point. She did somehow manage to get married

in a brief moment where Victoria had her back turned, which in the ballet is actually when Victoria has her back turned. And she married Henry of Battenberg. But they were only allowed to marry on condition that Henry would give up his military commission and that the couple would live with Victoria. And of course, you know, he was an active, vigorous young man. And he soon got bored and asked for permission to go off to war where he died. So there really is only, I think, a 10 year marriage between Beatrice and Lico, as he was known, and then she's back with mum. Not only that, but then after Victoria dies, of course, she spends the next 35 years editing these diaries. But I think what we came to realise was that

from Beatrice's point of view, that extra 35 years almost validated all those years of service, because far from feeling resentful by the end of it that she had been somehow co-opted and monopolised into this role of dutiful daughter. She brought love to it and she found meaning in it and she came to view her life in a different way and to see that she had been somehow blessed to be singled out to have this role of taking Victoria's memory into the future. Cathy, I know you adapted Jane Eyre for Northern Ballet. How different a task was that from trying to put

the birth of nine children, the empire, the Industrial Revolution? So much happened in this ballet. I mean, it's enormously different taking a single novel and adapting it when it already has a sort of dramatic form in its own right to taking a life and a long life at that, full of content and bringing it into some sort of dramatic shape. And obviously there are, you know, the period of time in which she gave birth to nine children. We felt that that was important to include in the ballet. That seemed to be of particular importance in our approach when Beatrice was the last of those children.

But obviously, how are you going to portray that? And the way we've done it is in a five-minute scene. Yeah, she gives birth quite quickly. She gives birth nine times, and it gets faster and faster. And it's been so interesting to see and read and hear about people's reactions to that scene. I have two children, so I've been through that experience twice. And, you know,

there are the wonderful things about it and not so wonderful things about it. And Victoria, it's quite well known that she didn't like being pregnant. She wanted to be at work. She didn't particularly like young children and babies. And so she's pulled in many directions because she wants to please Albert, who wants to develop this family. So she's trying and she wants to be in bed with Albert, quite honestly. Even at the end, when the doctor's advising her, really, you should have no more. She says, but what about, you know, together with a choreographer, a director and a composer, obviously, because the music is very important. I know you managed to write it in a week and the post-it notes were helpful. Oh, yes.

How did you use post-it notes? This is my very low-tech but very interesting, I think, way of helping choreographers to create ballets. I think it's really important when you're addressing a big subject not to try to A, fit everything in, or B, to sort of go, right, let's go chronologically, but to actually find a way, as Cathy said, of identifying the things that really speak to you.

And when you're reading, we read a lot, we read a lot of kind of big tomes about Victoria. And as you're reading about her life, certain things spring out at you that maybe are good theatrical moments or that, as you say, speak to us on a personal level about mothers and daughters, or might be a wonderful symbolic moment. So there's a very famous picture of Victoria and Beatrice

in which they're both dressed in black, and they both look about the same age. They both look old and matronly, and they're both widowed. And so I won't spoil it for people who are coming to see the ballet, but there is a moment which is based on that particular photograph. So to collect these ideas on Post-it notes, and from there to try and find a way of structuring it and putting it all together so that what you get becomes very it's very much a personal response rather than

something more theoretical well usma hamid and kathy master i'm gonna have to stop you there i know you could talk about all day long if i were to allow you to do so but thank you very much i really enjoyed it last night i I saw it last night. And Victoria's on a UK tour until the 1st of June. It's at Sadler's Wells in London until this Saturday, the 30th of March. And then there's going to be a nationwide screening, yes? Yes. On Tuesday, the 25th of June.

Well done, both of you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, still to come in today's programme, a woman of no importance. The biography of Virginia Hall, described as World War II's most dangerous spy, and the serial, another story in the Anika Stranded series. Don't forget, if you miss the live programme, you can always catch up.

All you have to do is download the BBC Sounds app, you search for Woman's Hour, and you'll find all our episodes. And you may have missed yesterday a very interesting conversation with Helen Clark, who was the former Prime Minister of New Zealand. Now this evening, the UK Asian Film Festival, the longest running outside India, will have a gala opening in London. And one of the stars who will be opening it is Zeenal Aman. She's often known as Bollywood's first sex symbol, beginning her career in the 70s and 80s, and is said to have

redefined the archetypal heroine in Indian cinema, no longer playing obedient wives and lovers who were often secondary to the story, but playing more unconventional women, such as a hippie who openly took drugs in a film like Hari Rama, Hari Krishna. And even though she, like so many of Bollywood stars, never sang in her films, it's this music with which she's strongly associated. Zina, I know you were the first Indian woman to win Miss Asia Pacific. I think that was in 1970. What impact did that beauty pageant have on launching your career in film? Quite a lot, actually, because a lot of doors opened. I had

signed a film because I was a working model at the time before I went for the pageant. I had signed a film before I went, but after winning the international title, I got better offers. I was introduced to Devanand, who made Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, where, as you mentioned, I played the role of a drug addict who dies of an overdose, which was a highly unlikely character to play. But people liked the film, and they made me into a star. How do you view beauty pageants now, all these years on? Personally, I think it's a great platform for women in terms of it's not just about

the presentation of your physicality, but there are also a lot of opportunities forthcoming for women to express themselves, to express what they want to do with their lives, with their future, with their career, and with the aspect of being involved with philanthropy and possibly helping people who are less fortunate than themselves. So it's very nice that this gets inculcated with young women early in their lives.

I know a lot of young women from our country who still continue this philanthropy because we've got very beautiful women in India, and a lot of them have won many international contests. How concerned were you, and mentioned that playing the drug addict about playing a role like that or a prostitute or an unfaithful wife who were not familiar characters in the cinema in India when the audiences might not have accepted them? I really didn't give it a second thought at all, honestly, because I was not that familiar with Hindi cinema, which was very criminal for me being the daughter of a very successful writer in mainstream Indian cinema. But I was not acquainted with it.

So I just went in and did what I wanted to do and made decisions from the choices that were given to me. Because Indian cinema at that time was, they were very clear. There was either black or white. You were either the very, very good leading lady or the very, very bad vamp. So with the characters that I played and got accepted in, I became either the good bad girl or the bad good girl or the good bad girl who had a reason to be bad because she was basically good. So a lot of parts were written for me and a lot of these films went on to be very, very successful. How do you respond to being described as Bollywood's first sex symbol? You know, it took a while to get my head around it.

But I guess it's, you know, it's all about the packaging and the presentation. And I think that I was quite comfortable in my skin, having studied in Southern California. And a lot of my films projected me wearing Western clothes or in a bikini. And it was a bit unusual at the time. So, but it was, it was aesthetic and natural. And I assume that in a country like India, which is basically a very traditional and conventional society, the tag of six symbol was a foregone conclusion. You are famous for one of the first screen kisses in Bollywood. I think it was in 1978. Am I right?

I'm not sure that it was the first, but yes, but it was in a film by Raj Kapoor. How much of a moment did it feel to you when you did it? I've always been a director's actor. So it was really about connecting with my director, taking the position, taking the light. It was about a woman who had a half-burned face. She was half-covered and, you know, just leaning against a tree. And, you know, my co-star, Shashi Kapoor, just came in and gently, there was a gentle interaction.

So there was no big hullabaloo for me, actually. Now, the festival that you're there to open really tonight is being described as championing South Asian feminist films. That's in the publicity. How keen are you to be perceived as a feminist pioneer? You see, I was told that it was about revolution. And, you know, in hindsight, people look at the parts that I played and what I did with my career in about 80 feature films as a main female protagonist, as revolutionising

the impact of the female artist in Indian cinema. So in that sense, I'm very happy to be here, to participate in this event. And I'm looking forward to seeing some of the films that will be projected. I know it's a platform that gives women, you know, the opportunity to display their talent and their skill within the film framework. So I'm very happy to be here for that. Would you call yourself feminist? Yes, I do believe in women having equal rights across the board. Absolutely. Interestingly, the Women's Minister, Mangeetka Gandhi, has proposed some investigation of claims of harassment since the Me Too movement took hold worldwide. How different do you reckon it is now from when you were a young film star? The Me Too movement in India is fairly recent.

I think it was very important to bring a certain awareness into Indian society, which is generally a patriarchal society and considered quite misogynist. So it was very important to bring this awareness, especially where young women don't have equal opportunity of education. And there are a lot of very poor people and women's rights are not fully realised. So I think it's wonderful that all these... What was it like for you as a young film star? Did you suffer harassment?

Very honestly, my first major film was a huge success. So, no, not really, because I had very reputable producers wanting me to work with them. And, yes, I had success as my blanket of protection, so to speak. Well, Zina Dharaman, thank you very much indeed for being with us. Enjoy all the films that you're going to see at the festival. And the UK Asian Film Festival runs until the 4th of May, right across the UK in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester and Leicester.

And thank you very much indeed for being with us this morning. Thank you for having me here. Thank you. Now, a year ago, Gina Haspel became the first female director of the CIA and said how grateful she was to the heroines on whose shoulders she stood, who had never sought public acclaim. One of the women to whom she may have been referring was Virginia Hall, who's the subject of a new biography called A Woman of No Importance. She was American and became a spy for Britain during the Second World War.

The Gestapo described her as the most dangerous of all Allied spies and said we must find and destroy her. Well, Sonia Parnell is the author. Sonia, why a woman of no importance? Well, before the Second World War, she had wanted to be an ambassador, been her lifelong dream, and she'd been continually rejected,

initially because she's a woman. No women had been ambassadors before in America. And then after she lost her leg in a hunting accident because she was disabled. She'd been dismissed as a woman of no importance whatsoever. But in fact, she went on to become a very important woman indeed. So how did that accident happen? I think she was 27 when she had her leg amputated. She was out hunting. She was a great sort of adventurous tomboy type who loved country sports, loved riding, hunting. She was out shooting with a party of friends in Turkey, had an accident. She tripped the safety catch, wasn't on her gun,

it got caught in her coat. She grabbed it and shot herself in the foot. Gangrene, I'm afraid, set in and she nearly died two or three times. There was no other way of saving her apart from cutting off her leg. So what sort of personality drove a woman who'd been through that to go on fighting and become one of the spies most feared by the Nazis. It's extraordinary, isn't it? In a way, I think perhaps her accident spurred her on. As I said, she was adventurous before then, but that gave her extraordinary steel.

What she didn't want to do was just to be resigned to a quiet, narrow life at home. She wanted to be out there to make a difference. She had to prove that there was a reason that her life had been saved, that there was a way that she could still make herself useful. Well, I mean, some of us wouldn't think of becoming a spy to do that, but she did. And she went into, on a mission, they gave her a 50-50 chance of survival, but she still went. But how was she recruited into the SOE? I mean this young American woman who'd had a very close relationship with her father suddenly is

recruited. Well first of all she ended up driving ambulances for the French army on the front line under intense bombardment and machine gun fire. She got through that. She was wanting to go to Britain to volunteer, to do anything she could to fight fascism, even though America wasn't in the war at that point. An extraordinary sliding doors moment. She was noticed by an undercover British agent in a railway station in Spain. She told him a little about what she'd done so far

and that she wanted to do more. He slipped a phone number into her hand and said, when you get to London, call this friend of mine. In Spain, she told him a little about what she'd done so far and that she wanted to do more. He slipped a phone number into her hand and said, when you get to London, call this friend of mine and he might be able to find something for you to do. Through that tiny, extraordinary slither of chance, she ended up doing this role. So who did she recruit to work with her when she was on her spying mission? So she arrived in France. There was no reception committee. She had to set up her own network pretty much from scratch. One of the first people she recruited, unbelievably, was the local brothel madam, an extraordinarily sexy, glamorous woman by the name of Germaine Gouin in her 30s who went on to

do extraordinary heroic things and also brought in the local VD doctor, Dr. Rousset. And these two became her chief lieutenants. So not exactly the most likely spies either. So how did they operate? Well, they set up safe houses. They looked after escapees. They found prisoners of war who'd managed to escape. They got downed pilots into safe houses and then out into Spain. Slowly, slowly, they put these networks together of railwaymen, government officials, all sorts of people who could help in any way, find food, find fuel. And they set up a nucleus, a network that was the nucleus, really, of the future

secret army. And Germaine, with her sex workers, or prostitutes, as they called them then, they would spy on the German clients. So when they drug the German clients, and when they were asleep, they would photograph important documents in their uniforms and send all this intelligence to Virginia, who would send it back to London. Extraordinary thing. So why did the Gestapo describe her as the most dangerous of all Allied spies? Because she was in the field for so long she always managed to elude capture. She changed her name constantly. The way that she looked, her fieldcraft was superb. The CIA even now use a lot of the fieldcraft that she pioneered at that point in their operations to this very day. So she managed to elude them. She also managed to break all sorts of agents out of jails and these spectacular operations that remarkably we've never heard of.

She later on, she went on to sabotage ambush missions. She blew up bridges. She attacked German convoys, all without ever being captured. It's almost one of the most extraordinary wartime tales. And the fact that she survived is really quite extraordinary. She was nearly three years behind enemy lines. That's a very, very long time. And the Germans particularly hated women spies, didn't they? And if they

captured them, there seems to be evidence that they tortured them more viciously than men. I'm afraid that that's true. What they did, I won't describe on radio, it's too appalling. But the torture was extremely vicious and would include, if they could, if they was a local woman, would include their children. I mean, they were barbaric. Virginia knew about this. She knew the price of capture. And slowly the Germans pieced together a picture of her. So they knew her as the limping lady.

They knew after a while that she had a false leg. And so she had to be very careful in the way that she walked to try and disguise her limb, take really, really long strides to try and disguise that. But she still operated right under their noses and managed to escape them. It's extraordinary. Why is so little known about her? Well, I think it's strange, isn't it?

I mean, she has been known, her existence has been known, but her full story has never really been told before. And I think for various reasons. After the war, she wanted to go on being a secret agent. So she was one of the first women to join the CIA. And so she didn't want people talking about her. So she never trumpeted her own operations she also didn't really fit into kind of the traditional conventional female feminine narrative that took hold after the war in the 50s particularly when everything was very conservative people quite resented her men at the CIA in particular resented the fact that she'd done so much during the war, almost always more than they had. So it was a kind of way of keeping her quiet. It didn't really fit into this narrative. And I have to say, it took me three years to find out about her. I mean, intense kind of detective work, drawing together all these elements of what she did, because she operated in so many different places under so many different disguises. And she employed Hollywood makeup artists at one point

to teach her how to draw wrinkles on her face that would make her appear much older than she really was. She went to extraordinary lengths. In fact, when I was researching the book, it was a bit like we were playing cat and mouse ourselves. So she was quite elusive, even with me. Now, she died in 1982. How did she spend her life after the war?

I mean, you said she worked in the CIA, but she did marry eventually, didn't she? She did. She found great happiness with a guy who was quite a lot younger than her and a very different personality. She was this formidable, phenomenal, badass woman. He was kind of cheeky, laughing, rather fun guy.

And they complemented each other very well. But the problem was that her mother didn't approve of him. So this extraordinary spy still didn't want to upset her mother. So for a long time, they pretended they weren't together and didn't marry for a long time just to keep Barbara, her mother, happy. So it's funny how far we all go, perhaps, to keep our parents happy, even though we are the extraordinary war heroes in her case. I was talking to Sonia Purnell about the legacy of Virginia Hall. Now, earlier, we discussed the rise of automation and the impact it could have on

women and jobs. Geoffrey Hawkes on Twitter said it's one thing to go through an automated checkout at a supermarket but who would choose to be cared for by a robot rather than a human when in old age or infirmity. India emailed to say I'm part of a group that has set up a food cooperative. We've taken the profit and machines out of the system and replaced with people, interaction, and people tasks. The till is run by humans. The scales are calculated by people. The jars and other containers are filled by people. Sometimes children also do the calculations. Sometimes there's human error and a person contacts us and we calculate the error and reimburse with an apology using the voice.

Shopping is a part of a human community. And then MyCon email said, That interaction at the checkout at the local M&S, soon to close, and with whom she is now on first-name terms, or taxi drivers upon whom she is dependent. Will the future offer driverless taxis? Now, tomorrow, do join me, if you can, when we'll be discussing maths anxiety,

because there's new research from Cambridge University to show that it really does exist. If you remember going into a panic when you were at school, or maybe even now, if you have to work out some mathematical problem, or if your child has the same difficulty, do let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

You can send us a tweet, or indeed you can send us a tweet or indeed you can send us an email through the woman's hour website join me tomorrow if you can bye-bye you know the way late at night in bed in the dark your tired mind can wander and strange thoughts float like balloons escaping into the sky? Well, Bunk Bed is a podcast where Peter Curran and Patrick Marber find the nearest faraway place from the hurly-burly of daily life, where tired minds can wander. Why don't you come along and eavesdrop and see if you like it?

You can subscribe to Bunk Bed on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know it heard of.