I had worried a lot about how we were going to manage when the baby was born. It had never been my intention to be a working mother and I was extremely uneasy about the idea. In the early 1970s, it was still regarded as quite unusual for professional women to go straight back to work after having a baby. Those were the days when, in the Foreign Office, women diplomatic staff had to leave when they got married, let alone when they had babies. My mother was much against the idea of my going back to work. She was firmly of the view that a mother’s place was with her baby, at least until the child was old enough to go to school.
She was not the only one – there were lots of people around to add to my sense of guilt by expressing their amazement that I should even consider such a course. Certainly this situation had not arisen before in MI5. I discussed the options with the personnel people in the office and it was made clear to me that if I wanted to come back even at my then grade, I would have to come back full time. And I would be expected to return after three months, if I wanted to be certain that there would be a job for me to come back to. There was no part-time work in those days, except for clerks and typists, and job-sharing had not been invented. It was taken for granted that intelligence staff worked full time or not at all. Inevitably, John’s loss of years of pension affected my own attitude to my career. Although we always hoped that it would be restored, even right up to the time of his retirement, I felt that it was more important than ever for me to go on working to make sure that I had a pension in my own right.
I stayed in the group working on university research until November 1970, when I left to have Sophie, though with all this going on at home, the problems of the possible infiltration of the Civil Service by Russian spies seemed to pale into insignificance, as far as I was concerned. When I left to go on maternity leave, my boss wrote on my annual confidential report: ‘She is a most acceptable, warm-hearted and engaging colleague’, but then he spoiled the sentiment by adding ‘even though she is an upholder of women’s rights.’ I don’t think I was aggressively feminist, but my intention of returning to work after having the baby was incomprehensible to most of my male colleagues in those days and must have seemed like an advanced case of ‘womens’ lib’, a phenomenon both scorned and feared by many men in 1970.
Sophie was born on 30 December 1970. Almost immediately I had to start planning how I was to manage to go back to work, though I certainly did not at all want to do so. I think I would have felt better about it all if I had been able to afford to have someone to live in the house and look after her but on my salary, and with our commitments, that was not possible. With a heavy heart, I started to investigate the prospect of day nurseries for babies, but in Islington at that time they were few and far between and places in them were limited to what were known in the jargon of the times as ‘problem families’. Whatever they were, we obviously were not one of them. I did not know what to do next, but our local health visitor suggested the idea of a child minder who would look after our baby in their house. I had never heard of this – in those days it was not nearly as common as it is now – and did not at all like the sound of it. However, the health visitor put me in touch with the wife of a police officer with a family of her own, who lived in the police flats in Canonbury, not far from our house. I was greatly cheered when I met her and found a friendly, sensible down-to-earth lady who it turned out also looked after the daughter of our doctor.
Nancy looked after Sophie from the time she was three months old until she was four-and-a-half. It was an arrangement that worked very well for the two of them and they developed a warm, happy relationship. For me it provided what I needed at the time, the comfort that my daughter was being well looked after in a secure and caring environment. But I was the one who suffered most from this arrangement and I found it at its most difficult when I first went back to work. I couldn’t escape a sense of guilt every morning as I handed over my baby in her pram to Nancy at the gates of Canonbury School. When Sophie got a bit older, and knew what was going on, she used to cry and cling on when I left her in the morning, as children of that age will. I found it distressing, even though I knew that as soon as I had gone, she cheered up. All this is the currency of many people’s lives nowadays and is not taken as at all unusual. But in the early 1970s, with lots of people ready to tell you it was wrong and that you were risking long-term damage to your child, it was tough. My mother always asserted that Sophie’s rather anxious personality was caused by her early upbringing. I forbore to remind her that my own early childhood experiences had hardly been secure and that I was probably an even more anxious child as a result.
There is never going to be any perfect answer to the dilemma faced by mothers who opt to work full time, whatever their reason for doing so. Even today, though it is not regarded as the strange and unusual thing it was then, and though the support mechanisms are better organised, it is no easier. I am now watching one of my daughters trying to do what I did then, and manage work and a family. And twenty-five years on, it is no easier for her than it was for me. She is still trying to fit being a mother in around the edges of her working life, or to fit working round the edges of being a mother, depending on what the day brings, and my granddaughter is looked after in much the same hand-to-mouth way as she was.
The debate has moved on from stereotyping men’s and women’s roles as worker and homemaker, but we still define everyone in society in terms of what they ‘do’, i.e. their job, and we have not yet managed to come to grips with the relationship between work and home. Though it is much more socially acceptable now for the male parent to share what was traditionally ‘the mother’s role’, that causes its own tensions. It can mean merely that both members of the partnership, instead of just one, are attempting the difficult task of balancing the competing pulls of career and home and feeling dissatisfied with their performance in both. Women are doing well at work and society needs them to. Most neither can nor wish to return to being segregated in their homes, as ‘housewives’. The result is that even nowadays most mothers, particularly when their children are very young, are strongly pulled in two different directions. Of course, it helps if one is strongly committed to one’s work or, to be brutal about it, if one is earning large sums of money and can afford everything of the best in one’s own home, as nowadays some young people can.
I don’t know what the answer to this conundrum is, and neither does anyone else. When I hear of increasing ‘family-friendly’ policies, more ‘rights’ for employees to maternity leave, paternity leave, special leave during the early years of their children’s lives, I worry. Obviously, I would like things to be easier for my daughters and their children than it was for us when they were little and I want those women with the will and the capacity to rise to the top in employment, to be able to do so. But I don’t want young women to become disadvantaged in one way because we have sought to give them more advantages in another. I have seen enough of employers in the public and private sector to know that those employees who take all they are entitled to, even now, are less likely to get on than those who do not. Getting to the top, for a woman in particular, is still a question of having enormous energy, determination and focus.
At that stage, I was neither strongly committed to MI5, nor was I earning large sums of money. I went back to work solely because I felt I had no option, though I would not have admitted this at the time, and if asked I would have talked about the importance of my career. But it was difficult. I would call at Nancy’s on my way home from work and collect Sophie in her pram and later her pushchair. As soon as we got home I would give her tea and a bath, aware that however tired I was I must be lively and jolly as I was cramming all my mothering into these few hours. Those were the days of terry-towelling nappies, disposables were just coming into the shops, and they had to be washed by hand every evening as at first we did not have a washing machine. Luckily, I had and still have a robust constitution and more energy than most people. And I certainly needed it. But in spi
te of that, my memories of those early years of Sophie’s life are primarily of hard work and exhaustion and of relations between John and myself going into severe decline.
It was at this stage of my life that I began to acquire the skill, essential for a working mother, of compartmentalisation. You have to learn to divide your life up into boxes; not to worry about one thing when you are doing something else. It is not easy at first and for me it was not made any easier by concerned friends constantly asking, ‘Don’t you worry about your baby when you’re at work?’ I did at first, very much, but I soon realized that if I were to survive, I would have to learn to put her out of my mind while I was in the office. I did manage to do that in the end, but even years later when I had two children at school, if I drove past a school on my way to a meeting, just when all the children were coming out and being met by their mothers, I would feel a twinge of guilt that I was not there meeting mine and taking them home for tea. I have to admit, though, that however much I enjoyed doing that occasionally, I felt a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment that I also had something else interesting and even important to do.
There is another skill, related to compartmentalisation, which all successful working mothers have to develop to a fine art, which I began to learn at this stage, though I became much more skilled at it later. It is sometimes said that women are better than men at doing several things at once and I think that is probably true, but more than that, you have to develop the skill of keeping your eye on lots of different things at once. Without having time to focus on anything in much detail, you begin to recognise when something is getting out of place in the big picture. You are constantly reviewing things, whether at home or at work, then when you spot something getting out of line, you focus on it at the expense of other things until you have pushed it back into place. It’s what successful senior managers do and hard-pressed working mothers, whatever level they have reached in their profession, do it too or they don’t survive long.
10
WHEN I RETURNED to work in April 1971 there had been a few changes. Much less attention was being paid to what might have gone on at the universities in the 1930s and ’40s. The effort had been redirected onto the re-examination of specific cases and the pursuit of any information which was still unexplored and might produce an undiscovered spy. The Director of Counter-espionage when I arrived back at work was Michael Hanley, a large, gruff, red-faced man, who had a reputation for being abrupt and having a fierce temper. This was perhaps not surprising considering that he had himself fallen prey to the paranoia of the 1960s and ’70s and had been investigated as a possible KGB mole because he appeared to fit the description produced by a defector from the Eastern bloc. I was surprised to be called into his office to be to welcomed back to work and to the counter-espionage branch. His kindly interest was unusual in those days when personal contact between directors and junior staff was rare. He moved on very shortly afterwards to become Deputy Director-General and then in 1972, Director-General. It was he who when Director-General finally managed to get Peter Wright away from the counter-espionage field, and ultimately out of the Service altogether.
My section consisted, as usual, of a number of male officers supported by a collection of female assistant officers. I worked in an office with two men who had been friends in the Colonial Service. They fell firmly into the cynical camp and while they were together, not a great deal of useful work was done. They spent a lot of time in the office telling jokes about their colonial experiences, and took extremely long lunch hours. It was routine for them to return from lunch at about four in the afternoon (they had some ‘arrangement’ with a pub up the road), and then we all settled down to afternoon tea laced with whisky accompanied by peppermints in case the boss called them to a meeting. He rarely did and the days passed quite peacefully, with them occasionally going out to interview someone and me sitting at my desk writing summaries of files and sorting out papers. I used to go home to my baby daughter some evenings rather the worse for wear if the whisky tea had been too well laced. I suppose there was some plan in what we were doing and some strategic direction somewhere, but I certainly did not know what it was – perhaps I was too lowly to be told.
In and out of all this strode the extraordinary figure of Peter Wright. I believe he had at one time been regarded as an effective counter-espionage operator, but by the time I knew him well he was quite clearly a man with an obsession and was regarded by many of the newer arrivals in the Service and even by some of the older hands as quite mad and certainly dangerous. He had briefly been made the Assistant Director of the section I was working in, but according to rumour, he had been so bad at giving any direction or leadership that he had been ‘promoted’ to be a special adviser to the Director.
Counter-espionage work is not a glamorous business, however it has been presented by the spy-story writers. It is hard work. It is all about painstaking and rigorous analysis, the detailed following up of snippets of information and perseverance in the face of disappointment. A bit of luck helps of course. But it is not the quick jumping to conclusions and the twisting of the facts to meet the theory which Peter Wright went in for in those days. He was in fact by then everything which a counter-espionage officer should not be. He was self-important, he had an over-developed imagination and an obsessive personality which had turned to paranoia. And above all he was lazy. By this time his theories of high-level penetration of MI5, which had resulted in his ruthless pursuit of the former Director-General Roger Hollis, were very largely discredited. But he had established a very comfortable corner for himself.
It is hard to explain why he was allowed to stay for so long. As Special Adviser he had the right to pick up anything he liked and drop it when he tired of it. He used to wander around, finding out what everyone was doing, taking cases off people, going off and doing interviews which he never wrote up, and then moving on to something else, while refusing to release files for others to work on. He always implied that he knew more about everything than anyone else, but that what he knew was so secret that he could not possibly tell you what it was. That gave him the right to disagree with everything anyone else thought without challenge. He spent a lot of his time in those days leaning on the bar in the Great Marlborough Street office talking and talking endlessly to whoever would talk to him. That bar and bars in other office premises became the subject of earnest and long-running debate later after excessive drinking was focused on as a major threat to security. The debate was between those who thought in-house bars were inappropriate and those who thought it was better for staff to be encouraged to meet and socialise securely on office premises, where any extreme behaviour would be noticed, rather than in nearby pubs.
Everything with Peter Wright was expressed in nods and winks, designed to make him seem important and all-knowing. I remember sitting through one or two of the lectures he gave occasionally to the newer staff on the subject of the KGB. He was not a good lecturer – he had a monotonous voice and a lisp. He spoke with great conviction about the KGB, about their cunning, their operational effectiveness and their successes. But though I was quite junior, I found him completely unconvincing. We called him the ‘KGB Illegal’, because, with his appearance and his lisp we could imagine that he was really a KGB officer himself, living under a false identity, perhaps like Gordon Lonsdale, the ‘Canadian businessman’ who ran the Portland spy ring in the ’60s and was really the KGB officer, Molody. Maybe, we thought, he had been sent into MI5 to confuse everyone. It was all a joke of course, but as things turned out it was strangely prophetic. Though he did not turn out to be a spy, he caused almost as much trouble then and later as if he had been.
I worked in this section for more than three years and after some time I was asked to accompany the officer I was working with when he went out to do interviews. By then we knew a great deal about Cambridge in the 1930s, but we still did not know exactly how the recruitments of the Ring of Five were done – who put who in touch with whom – an
d we were still trying to satisfy ourselves that there were no more university-recruited spies who had not yet been discovered. It was all a long time ago by then of course. Everyone relevant was getting old and whatever they once knew they had conveniently forgotten and were not prepared to try to remember and there was no sanction we could apply to make them change their mind.
We went to Cambridge one day to interview a don who had tutored Philby and had, we thought, played some part, exactly what is probably still not known, in putting him in touch with the Russians. It was a strange occasion. The old man, sitting in a high-backed chair in a dark old college room, was immensely courteous and gave us tea from china cups, but not surprisingly he had no interest in casting his mind back to the 1930s in order to help us and volunteered nothing. He must have wondered why it had taken us so long to come.
It was during this period that my colleague and I re-interviewed John Cairncross, who wrote about the experience in his autobiography, The Enigma Spy. He had been exposed as a spy for the KGB by Anthony Blunt and had been interviewed by, amongst others, Peter Wright, to whom he had made some limited admissions. At the time we re-interviewed him he was working for the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome and was allowed entry into this country only if he made himself available for interview by us. We met him in the evenings after his day’s work, in some gloomy rooms in the old Ministry of Defence, which were kept specifically for our use. I remember him as a thin, grey, stooping figure, coming in out of a dark night, always wearing a mackintosh. He describes me in his book as ‘a personable young lady in trousers’.
Open Secret Page 14
