Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  The French family was very kind to me, considering how useless I must have been. I knew nothing about children at all, I could not cook, my French was schoolgirl O Level, and I had never been away from home totally alone in my life. The family lived on one of the main roads out of Paris, avenue General LeClerc, at Antony, in a house which to me with my English provincial ideas of comfort, seemed bleak and almost bare of furniture, but which I would probably now regard as elegant. It was a 19th-century house, with wooden floors and tall shuttered windows and double doors between the rooms. The doctor was a charming, sophisticated but to me, at least, rather remote figure. He had been a supporter of de Gaulle and the family had, so I understood, lost many of their possessions, looted as the German Army left Paris in 1944. Compared to what au pairs are required to do nowadays, my job was not onerous. Madame did not work, so I was left alone with the children only when she went out. I found them terrifying, particularly the oldest boy, who had murderous tendencies and spent his time trying to hit his sisters on the head by launching the heavy wooden seat of a garden swing straight at them.

  There were lots of surprises for me during the weeks I spent with Doctor and Madame Thouvenal. There was the fig tree in the garden, on which large ripe figs were hanging. I had only seen a fig in pictures, and had certainly not seen one growing on a tree. As a war-time child, I had only recently got used to seeing bananas freely available in the shops, and in the 1950s there was nothing like the variety of fruit on sale that there is today. Another shock was the bathing arrangements. There was no bath that I could use and the only shower was in the cellar, which I knew contained rats. I had seen them in the garden, where I had watched with horror as Madame Marie, who came in to do the washing, lobbed her shoe at one. One day, I was sent out to buy meat for dinner. I was told to go to a certain butcher’s shop and buy two kilos of steak. It was only when I saw the horse’s head above the door that I realised what I was buying. That was yet another shock – until then I did not know that anyone ate horse.

  I was in Paris during July and August, and, homesick, I used to lean out of the window and enviously watch the French families setting off for their holidays. That summer, public transport in Paris went on strike, and the army ran lorries to replace the buses. I was keen to use them, but Madame, knowing a great deal more about the French army than I did, was quite sure they were not safe and was equally sure that my mother would not want me to travel on them. So I was not allowed to go anywhere except by bicycle, which rather restricted my sightseeing and was probably a good deal more dangerous. I remember being whistled at furiously by a gendarme as I bicycled along a motorway near Versailles, not realising that I should have been on the cycle track. ‘Voulezvous être écrasée?’ he bellowed at me. It was a very hot summer, and there is a certain combination of smells, a mixture of petrol fumes, floor polish, French bread and coffee beans which I have occasionally met since, which always reminds me of that summer in Paris in the 1950s.

  Having failed with Cambridge, I chose Edinburgh University, I think, because of a rather romantic attraction to Scottish history and Celticness and also because it was a very long way from home. By then home and family was beginning to seem very restricted and I could not wait to get away. My father had been promoted within the drawing office at Stanton Ironworks and by 1954, when I set off to Edinburgh, he was Chief Draughtsman. He had joined the Rotary Club in Ilkeston and my mother had had a year as President of the Inner Wheel. Their lives had broadened out, there was a bit more money around and they socialised more. We had moved to a larger and better-appointed company house, Glen Maye, in Sandiacre, on the road between Nottingham and Derby. It was still fairly old-fashioned. Stanton Ironworks did not spend a great deal on updating their officials’ houses in those days. There was no heating, except fires, which was not unusual, but it was a particularly cold house in winter and as I poked my head out of bed I could see my breath steaming in the cold air. Even so, it was nothing like as cold as some of the lodgings I later found myself living in in Edinburgh. In the bathroom of one particular flat, when I put my toothbrush in my mouth one morning, I found I was scrubbing away with a small block of ice on a stick.

  In one way, Edinburgh University quite lived up to my romantic expectations. It seemed to me, when I arrived there in 1954, to be still very close to its 16th-century origins. The 18th-century lecture rooms in the Adam Old College on South Bridge were still very much in use and many of the lectures I attended in my first year were held there. Some courses of lectures were hugely popular, such as the Moral Philosophy lectures of Professor John Macmurray, which would attract two or three hundred students. The old tiered wooden benches would be full and people would be sitting on the steps and on the floor. It was the custom for the students to express their appreciation by stamping when a particularly popular lecturer arrived and left. The sound of all those feet drumming on the wooden floor in those ancient lecture rooms, just as they must have done for hundreds of years, made me feel I was part of some on-going historical process and this I enjoyed.

  One part of the 18th century that was still alive was the election of the Rector, accompanied by the battle of the fish-heads. I remember well the Rectorial election of 1957, when James Robertson Justice, the actor, was elected. The fish-head battle, in which supporters of one candidate hurled fish-heads and other portions of fishes’ anatomy at each other across the Old Quad, was particularly enthusiastic that year. The Old Quad was awash with foul-smelling water and slimy pop-eyed heads were whistling through the air and slopping around for hours. I don’t think any side ever claimed victory in those battles. The whole satisfaction came from the mess of the fight. The actual election was a much more sober affair, conducted elsewhere by the usual democratic means of crosses on ballot papers.

  The fish-heads and the lectures were not the only 18th-century aspects to my life in Edinburgh. The living arrangements had a touch of that century from time to time too. I have mentioned the frozen toothbrush I wielded in the flat in Learmonth Gardens in my second year. That was in fact quite a civilised place because it did have a bathroom. In my third year I moved into a flat in a block of tenements just off the Royal Mile overlooking Arthur’s Seat, called Prince Albert Buildings, now demolished, presumably regarded as not fit for human habitation. Ours had no bathroom or hot water, though it did at least have a lavatory. We used to go for our baths to the public bath-house where you got a cubicle with a deep, old-fashioned bath in it and lashings of hot water for just a few pence. The only problem with the bath-house was that the walls of the cubicles were made of pine boards and some of them had holes poked through, so that bathers on the men’s side could peer through at the naked ladies in the baths on the other side of the board. We became quite adept at bunging up the holes with soap. As far as I remember there was no time limit on how long you could stay and I managed to get through large parts of Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa sitting in my lovely deep hot bath, with the holes in the wall suitably plugged. Later, I did quite a lot of my exam preparation in the bath-house. It was a very cosy place to work and provided there was no queue, no one seemed to bother.

  I must have had an extremely retentive memory in those days. At Scottish universities, Honours students had to take a number of subjects outside their Honours course in their first and second years. I was advised to take Latin, amongst others, in my first year. It was Latin which had been my Waterloo at A level and I failed it again in my first year at Edinburgh. I did not seem able to get to grips with the grammar and I decided that the only way I was going to pass was to achieve such immensely high marks in the set books and the Roman History components that they couldn’t fail me on the rest. So I sat down and to all intents and purposes learned off by heart the translations of the set texts, chunks of Livy and Virgil, which you could buy in James Thin’s university bookshop. If someone showed me a few lines, I could recite the translation word by word, without actually being able to translate the Latin for myself: an esoteric s
kill which I have lost now.

  Alongside my enjoyment of the tradition went a strong feeling that the whole Arts faculty was frozen in the past. Those Moral Philosophy lectures had been being delivered for years in exactly the same form and style. If you couldn’t be bothered getting out of bed in time to go to the lectures, you could buy, in the Student Union, the notes taken at the same lectures years ago by some enterprising student who had reportedly got a First on the basis of them. Our English Literature course ended at T.S. Eliot, and ‘the novel’ came to an end with Hardy. But what we actually read for pleasure was Lucky Jim and what got us talking was Look Back in Anger, and the other writings of the ‘angry young men’. I resolved the problem in my third and fourth years by going right back into the past and focusing on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English.

  I found life at university enjoyable and on the whole unstressed. I was not an intellectual and was more concerned with enjoying myself than acquiring knowledge, though I did want to end up with a decent degree. Coming from the English higher education system, I had already done the first year’s English for A level, so this caused me no bother at all. The Scottish system of outside subjects and yearly exams did force me to do some work, even in my first and second years, but on the whole life during those first two years was pretty much devoted to pleasing myself and having fun. We had fairly innocent amusements in those days. As it was Scotland, there was a lot of partying and quite heavy drinking. There was a constant search for ways to get drunk cheaply and quickly, in which strange combinations of beer or, very popular, Merry-down cider and spirits figured frequently. But there were no drugs around, or at least I never came across any, and in the early 1950s it was not even automatically expected that you and your boyfriend would sleep together.

  In the first term of my third year, I was struck down with glandular fever, the result, I always thought, of a walking holiday in Belgium and Luxembourg in the late summer of 1956 with Jean Hardy. We had slept in some damp and insalubrious places and eaten and drunk some odd things obtained from farms by the wayside. The European Community had not got its grip on Luxembourg in those days and it was still quite rustic. Of course the glandular fever may have originated in the tenement flat in Prince Albert Buildings, which I was sharing with my Highland friend Isolyn. There was only one bed, so I slept on a very dubious-looking sofa, in which anything might have been lurking. Anyway, I fell sick and had to go home for a term.

  I was at home and feeling very ill during October 1956 when the world seemed to be lurching from one international crisis to another. In bed I listened avidly to radio accounts of the invasion of the Canal Zone and then of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Although my friends at Edinburgh were not particularly politically active, they were all involved in demonstrations and protests, and they kept me in touch with what was going on. I was quite well enough to be very frustrated at missing it all. At home, my father was sure the world was slipping back into war again and he used to come up to my bedroom when he came home from work and sit on my bed going on at length about the iniquities of Colonel Nasser and Mr Khrushchev. The fact that my brother was away doing National Service in the Tank Corps in Germany did not make the household any more cheerful. As far as we were concerned he would be at the forefront of resistance when the Russian forces swept into the West across the German plains. But we did reflect that at least for the moment he was better placed than the sons of some of my parents’ friends who were doing their National Service in Cyprus, and were sending home hair-raising accounts of camping in orchards while EOKA terrorists attacked them in the night from the trees.

  I had had my chance to protest earlier that year when Bulganin and Khrushchev, the Soviet Russian leaders, paid a visit to Edinburgh as part of their tour of the UK in 1956. It was supposed to be a ‘friendship’ trip, but there wasn’t much friendliness in our welcome. I can’t remember what aspect of their visit in particular we were protesting about but I was in the jeering crowd, carrying a banner bearing the immortal slogan ‘Bulge and Krush Go Home’. It had no effect at all, of course, and they went on to finish their tour, clearly quite unmoved by my protests.

  In my last year at Edinburgh I met John Rimington again. His parents had moved up to Edinburgh when his father had become Finance Director of the Scottish Coal Board. They were living in Fairmilehead and he had gone up to Cambridge. I was at a dance at the Students’ Union with my then boyfriend, a large Scottish geology student called Fergus, and we were dancing to Jimmy Shand and his Band, when John suddenly showed up. He was at a territorial army camp just outside Edinburgh and with several of the young officers had gatecrashed the Union dance to see what female talent was on offer, when he saw me. Fergus, and he, who were at opposite ends of the spectrum, physically, intellectually and in every other way, took an instant dislike to each other. That chance encounter led to my renewing my friendship with John. I went to have supper at his parents’ house and we kept in touch when he went back to Cambridge.

  It was not until the Christmas of 1957, when I was at home for the holidays and working for my finals, that I started to give any serious thought to what I was going to do next. Most of my female friends at Edinburgh were automatically drifting into teaching, largely because they could not think of anything else to do, but I was determined that I would not do that. Teaching seemed to me to be the end of all interesting life; I was still hankering after something a bit out of the ordinary. I had been to the Careers Advisory Service but they had come up with no suggestions that made any impression on me. I don’t think I made much impression on them either. Even in those days I was quite good at reading upside down, and I could read the notes the interviewer was making on her pad. She wrote down ‘Ill-made face’ and I felt so insulted that I would not have taken any advice from her, even if it had been worth taking. In fact she made only one suggestion that appealed to me at all, which was the British Council’s Voluntary Service Overseas Scheme (VSO). There were interviews taking place in an Edinburgh hotel for posts in Scandinavia – Finland I think it was – and I went along. The interviewer impressed on me that one would be all on one’s own in some remote part of the country, expected to teach English to people who understood none, and very much dependent on one’s own resources. I thought it sounded rather fun, but when, using my upside down reading skills again, I saw that the interviewer had written ‘All nerves’ on his pad as he interviewed me, it was obvious I was not going to be selected, and I wasn’t. If there was a covert recruiter for the intelligence services in the Careers Advisory Office at Edinburgh in those days, and I expect there was, I clearly did not strike them as suitable material and the intelligence services certainly did not enter my mind as possible employers. Indeed, probably the only time I had ever heard of them was when Burgess and Maclean defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, when I can remember my father fulminating about the inefficiencies of MI5 which had let them get away.

  So it was with a certain desperation at Christmas 1957 that I thought about how to earn my living. Teaching seemed to be looming if I could not think of anything else. I certainly had to do something. My parents could not afford to keep me indefinitely and there was no kindly welfare state waiting to welcome me with open arms onto the unemployment register. A degree in English Language and Literature seemed to qualify one for nothing and it did not occur to me to apply to a company or to look at the financial world or the City. In my book, that was what the men did, and I have no recollection of anyone suggesting it to me. The only solution seemed to me to do another course in something but by then I would have already spent four years at university and my father took some persuading that I needed to be supported for another year. After all, I was only a girl, who would probably get married before long, surely four years was long enough. My brother, after two years in the Army doing National Service and three years reading Engineering at Cambridge, had got a very satisfactory job with British Rail. So why did I need yet another year of education?

  Eventually my mothe
r persuaded him that they would never forgive themselves if they denied me a proper chance in life and anyway perhaps I would get a grant for part of it. In the end he agreed, without too much persuasion, and so I went on scouring the handbooks and eventually came up with the idea of taking a postgraduate diploma in the Study of Records and the Administration of Archives, which qualified one for a post in a County Record Office, the Public Record Office or a private archive. The slightly weird combination of courses in the diploma appealed to me. They included mediaeval Latin and French, palaeography, social history and the law of property. Only two universities offered the diploma in those days, London and Liverpool. Thinking it would be the cheapest option, I agreed with my parents to apply to Liverpool and I was accepted, conditional upon my degree, and what’s more the Derbyshire County Council came up with a contribution. My degree was a quite satisfactory 2nd, so in autumn 1958 I set off for Liverpool.