Leone worked in an intelligence office, and Elena found a position first as a cook at a British government-run kitchen, then as a translator and interpreter at the BBC, and later as an artist at Harrods. On the tenth anniversary of her brother’s death, while at the BBC, she broadcast a memorial honouring his poetic act of protest:

So in the secrecy of the soul’s solitude, when one becomes the master of one’s own life, and then gives it up, one must surely draw great joy. They must be happy to know that from the misery of everyday life they could attain such a poor moment of liberty. They must be sustained by the lightness of spirit, similar to that which gladdened the hearts of the saints. My brother must have died with this supreme lightness of spirit. And he was more fortunate than his companions, who were backstabbed by the murderous fascists.

Elena’s words here draw audibly on the futurist-tinged heroics of Lauro de Bosis’s writing, and like his, they also strike a distinctive tone of public responsibility and perhaps provided models for the forceful tone of Shirley’s writings about the United Nations.