The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [10]
And, as her pregnancy progressed, Else gradually realized that he never would. For Tommy was rarely in the family home in Nordby long enough to make the relationship feel like a true marriage. He didn’t want to feel married, and craved the freedom he used to enjoy. The idea of being a parent at such a young age didn’t thrill him either. Only the war captured his imagination; and to get involved in that war he needed to be out and about. Back at the house, his father Christian did little to help ease the family tension: ‘My father liked Else because she flirted with him. My mother disliked Else intensely for the same reason.’
But it was Else’s father, Carl Jensen, who had created many of the problems they now faced, for he had forced Tommy to go through with the wedding in the first place. Jensen, a good-looking salesman of newspaper advertising space, was never going to give Sneum an inch once he realized the young couple were sleeping together. ‘He was a fucking shit,’ his son-in-law said, still bitter half a century later. Jensen had reacted with horror when a tearful Else had told him, the day after the invasion, that Tommy was already talking about trying to escape to England so that he could fight against the occupiers. Confronting Sneum hours later, Jensen warned him that he wasn’t about to allow a flashy flight lieutenant to leave his daughter in the lurch and make a break for the bright lights of London.
Sneum recalled:
Else and I were engaged early in 1940. I had proposed to her partly because she was a very good-looking girl and I made the mistake of treating her like a trophy. Then I had gone off the idea of marrying her, because I could see we wouldn’t get on and I had realized she wasn’t the woman for me. But when my future father-in-law found out that the engagement was off, and that I’d said I was going to England, he made a hell of a lot of trouble. He and his wife said they would denounce me to the Germans and reveal my plans if I didn’t marry their daughter, because I had taken away her innocence.
‘Her virginity?’ I asked.
‘Oh Christ, yes!’ responded Tommy enthusiastically. ‘Anyway, Else’s father told me this: “I don’t like you. I think you’ve led my daughter astray and I don’t want you in my family. But you’ve compromised her and now you’re going to make a respectable woman out of her. If you don’t ... well, the consequences for you don’t bear thinking about.” So I married his daughter,’ concluded Tommy simply.
There were some advantages to this arrangement, though. At least the marriage would briefly take Tommy’s mind off the humiliation of having been a member of an armed service that had refused to fight. It also gave him some cover because the Germans would be less likely to suspect a newly married man of planning to escape to England.
Jensen probably thought he had won the battle of wills with his son-in-law through basic blackmail. Sneum knew differently: ‘The wedding didn’t make any difference. I had made up my mind to go to England and I didn’t think I would ever be back, so it was all the same to me. Otherwise, I would never have married Else, because we were getting tired of each other. It was her family who put enormous, stupid pressure on us both.’
Even as Else had made her way down those Radhus steps on April 17, her new husband had been distracted—although, unusually for him, not by another beautiful woman. He noticed uniformed Germans in the Radhuspladsen, moving confidently among the wedding guests, as though this were their own capital. The cheers for the bride were almost drowned out by Nazi propaganda as Danes sat silently on benches and listened dutifully. Tommy hated what he saw. The Radhus, with its 350-foot