Rosalys “Osu” Walker, widow of the novelist and Times war correspondent David Walker, survived her husband by half a century and proved a formidable woman in her own right. Born in 1918, the youngest of five, she was named after the fifth handmaiden in Rossetti’s poem The Blessed Damozel.
Her errant father bequeathed little to his daughter. He had met her mother in Peking where he was Chinese Secretary in the British Legation. Fluent in several Chinese dialects, he had served as Lord Jellicoe’s interpreter during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion.
Osu was 7 when her parents separated. Her father moved to London with their son, while the girls remained with their mother in the family home, Kench Hill, a rambling Kentish manor farm. It was an idyllic existence but it came to an end in 1926 when her father was run over by a bus. Kench Hill was sold and the family, in financial straits, dispersed. Osu boarded, first with a vicar and his wife, and then with a family where she shared a governess.
During a cycling holiday in Brittany her mother became seriously ill and Osu was shipped off to East Prussia to join her sister who was teaching English to the children of a count and countess. She returned just before Christmas 1930, to bid farewell to her mother, who died of cancer.
Now an orphan without means, she was sent to a small boarding school in Tunbridge Wells [later to become Benenden] and on leaving, she enrolled at a secretarial college in Piccadilly where she was given a diploma to hasten her departure. She obtained a post with the Sheepbridge Coal and Iron Company, but when her shortcomings as a secretary became clear, she was put in charge of the switchboard, where she caused chaos.
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She took temporary refuge with the family of her old schoolfriend Nancy MacLean. She was still there seven years later and celebrated her 21st birthday with a party hosted by Lady MacLean, wife of the Liberal minister Sir Donald MacLean. His son Donald, who had been at Cambridge when she joined the family, was now at the Foreign Office in Paris and she and Nancy stayed in his flat and were taken to Café Flore to learn how to drink. She soon fell in love with Donald and joined the Communist Party, though she was unsure what it stood for.
In 1941 she was recruited to the FANYs. After signals training she flew to Lisbon where she spent the war coding and decoding telegrams. At weekends she threw herself wholeheartedly into the hectic round of parties, tennis and gambling. It was here that she met her future husband. David Walker was in Lisbon to cover the anticipated German invasion of the Iberian peninsula. They were married in 1943.
They settled in London in the 1950s where Walker wrote books, one of which, Adventure in Diamonds, became the film Operation Amsterdam. He died in 1968 and in 1972 Osu moved to Normandy, buying a cowshed with a wild orchard behind it. There she spent the rest of her days, painting pictures. She held soirées for visitors who brought their own wine and dishes of pasta and salad. In fact, she survived almost entirely on a diet of whisky and cigarettes. She is survived by her son.
Rosalys Walker, free spirit, was born on May 14, 1918. She died on May 13, 2011, aged 92