Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  When he arrived he discovered that I had rested our lunch basket on top of the cigar lighter, which in those cars was between the two front passenger seats. Being held down it had overheated and started to melt the surrounding plastic. With a comforting calm and what seemed to me great presence of mind, he pulled it out with his gloved hands and threw it in a convenient puddle, and the fire subsided. By this time a crowd had gathered; it was a dramatic departure from the UK.

  I went backwards and forwards with the children on that ferry many times during those two years in Brussels and something always seemed to go wrong. On one occasion another car I was driving, a Rover we had bought new to take out with us, refused to start when the ferry arrived in Belgium. We had to be ignominiously pushed off the boat and I found myself in Zeebrugge docks at 10 o’clock at night with a useless car, a small child and a baby, with no milk for the baby, all the shops shut and very little money. I had never liked that car ever since the gear lever came off in my hand one day when I was driving home with four children from a visit to Antwerp Zoo.

  I had intended merely to spend long enough in Brussels to get established in the house and then to return to London to have the baby at University College Hospital where Sophie had been born. That is not how it worked out. We had been there about ten days when our heavy baggage arrived by road. With typical impatience, I decided to unpack it all by myself, having given the au pair a couple of days off to visit a relative in Holland. After a day spent leaning into tea chests and lifting things out and unwrapping them, by the early evening it was becoming apparent that all was not as it should be with the baby. I had no idea where John was. Having only just arrived in the country, and not expecting to need the services of a hospital, I did not know where it was, or even how to get hold of a doctor. I had not met any of the other wives in UKREP and was really quite isolated. It got to about 4 a.m. I was having regular contractions and just beginning to panic and tell myself that I must get up and do something about the situation, when John arrived home.

  He had been at a meeting of COREPER, the Committee of Permanent Representatives to the European Community, which had been preparing for the first ever European Summit, the meeting of European Prime Ministers to take place in Paris. After the meeting was over, and like all such meetings in those days it had gone on well into the night, John had gone off with Ewen Fergusson, at the time the Head of Chancery at UKREP, to prepare a telegram to the Foreign Office, reporting the conclusions of the meeting. But they had been unable to get it done because Ewen’s secretary, who was to type it up, had lost her cat, and was in tears and inconsolable. She had to be cajoled to come in to the office to take dictation, and that took a long time.

  That cat, a nasty brute called Milly, eventually came to us when its owner went home. She was a cat of advanced murderous tendencies, and used to spend the night killing small furry animals whose corpses she laid out by the front door for our inspection in the morning. Worse, she discovered that on the undeveloped land next to our garden there were baby rabbits and moles and she took to bringing them in alive during dinner parties and biting off their heads under the dining-room table.

  Having arrived home at last, John was able to get hold of a doctor, and at 7 a.m. we drove through a cold, grey, wet November morning to the Edith Cavell Institute, with Sophie who had been dragged out of her bed to go with us. There Harriet was born, three weeks early. The nuns, who were the nurses at the Institute, thought I was a most feckless mother. I had no clothes for the baby. When Sophie was born in hospital in Britain, it was customary for new babies to wear hospital clothes until they left to go home. In Belgium, as I learned, you go into hospital with a full layette of baby clothes. John had to go out as soon as the shops opened and buy a hideously expensive wardrobe of exquisite baby clothes from a fashionable Brussels store next to the hospital.

  Even when the baby had some clothes, the nuns went on disapproving of me. As soon as it became known among the UKREP wives that a new wife had appeared on the scene and not only had she slipped through their well oiled welcoming net, but she had had a baby as well, I was inundated with visitors. There was a Foreign Office wives’ system in operation, which was supposed to pick up each new arrival and welcome her into the bosom of the family. I think it had missed me, probably because I had already been over to Brussels earlier in the summer, while I was still working, for a holiday and to sussout the living arrangements. On that occasion I had been amazed to receive a telephone call from an aggressively cheerful lady who said, ‘Hello, Stella. I am your welcoming wife,’ and offered to take me shopping. I was rather taken aback, as I saw myself as a career woman on her summer holidays not someone in need of welcoming, and I was rather dismissive. However, pinned down in my hospital bed, I was much more vulnerable to this approach, which of course was kindly meant. But I felt very exposed as more and more people, none of whom I knew, poked their heads round the door of my room and came in clutching presents, usually something for the baby and a bottle of champagne for me. After a bit, I began to enter into the spirit of things and my room became like a party. The nuns did not think it at all proper that a new mother should be entertaining so freely from her hospital bed and knocking back champagne with quite such gay abandon and they warned me solemnly about the likely effect on my blood pressure. I was glad to escape from their clutches, and I am sure they were relieved to see me go. I got home quite exhausted by the relentless socialising.

  I enjoyed having the opportunity to be at home with both my daughters for a time, but that was the only thing I did enjoy about Brussels. Once again I had that sense of loss of identity and exclusion from everything that is interesting that you get, or used to get, as a diplomatic wife in a foreign posting. Those mid-1970s years were the beginning of the end for the Foreign Office’s traditional attitude to its wives. The custom had been that Her Majesty’s Government paid for one employee, but acquired the services of two. The wives of diplomats were expected to devote their energies to furthering the interests of the Post and it was made clear that their success or otherwise in doing this would influence the course of their husband’s future career. In return, they had a bigger house to live in and an overall standard of living that was more splendid than they had at home, which might or might not have been what they wanted. They also had, in some places, some difficult living conditions to cope with for themselves and their children.

  Things had changed a little from when I had last been a diplomatic wife in India in the late 1960s. By the mid-70s wives were allowed to work in the country in which they were posted, provided the Head of Mission and the country concerned did not object. But it was not common, and wives were still expected to spend a lot of their time on entertaining and charity and other good works. There was a lot of entertaining to be done in Brussels in the mid-70s. Because it was so near London, ministers, politicians of all shapes and sizes, businessmen, trades unionists and civil servants streamed in, and it seemed to be expected that some sort of hospitality would be laid on for them all. Employing a cook for all these occasions was too expensive, and most of us did quite a lot of the cooking ourselves.

  Looking back, I seem to have been forever standing in my kitchen, listening to the planes coming very low over the house to land at Zaventem airport, curling brandy snaps round the handle of a wooden spoon. I was not the only wife who felt she was being used as an unpaid cook and a lot of muttering went on, though alongside it went a lot of competition and the standard of cuisine to be found at most British diplomatic tables was excellent. It did all rather come to a head though, before the start of the British Presidency in the first half of 1977. Months earlier we wives had all been called together by Lady Maitland, the wife of the Permanent Representative to the EEC, our boss, and told that it was expected that during the Presidency we would feed our guests traditional British dishes. For those who did not know what these were, a recipe list was available.

  Most of us had by then become rather expert at continental Eur
opean cookery, using some of the wonderful ingredients available at supermarkets like Rob in Brussels, and we did not much relish having to revert to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I recruited my mother, who happened to be staying with us, to cook apple pie for one particular dinner party during that period. I had never learned how to make pastry as well as she could.

  For me being in Brussels was a disorientating sensation. I had by then come to regard myself as a career woman, and here I was, definitely classified as ‘a wife’, though I had graduated from a First Secretary wife (as in Delhi) to a Counsellor wife. I suppose it is rather ironic that though I spent nearly two years at the heart of the European Community during a very important period for Britain, my most abiding memory is how to make brandy snaps. Living in Brussels was nothing like as exciting as Delhi had been. It was not like living in the capital city of any other country; I, at least, had no real sense of what country I was in. For one thing, I hardly ever met a Belgian to talk to socially. All the people who came to our house were either British or other Europeans, very rarely Belgians. The only exception to this was when, very briefly, Sophie went to a Flemish primary school in the commune.

  We lived in Wezembeek, at the time a small Flemish village built around a church, with a few modern houses on its outskirts, one of which was our home. There was a fashionable theory going around among the wives that it was good for small children to go to non-English-language schools; they would quickly pick up the language concerned, the theory went, and become deeply cosmopolitan, and that would be a good thing in later life. That is certainly not how it worked for Sophie. At just about four, she was already a nervous child – ‘genetic,’ I would say; ‘early upbringing,’ my mother would counter – but whatever the reason, she was. Coming to Brussels was exciting for her, and having me around at home was great and she loved it when the new baby arrived. Then she was put into a school where she could not understand a word anyone said to her. It was not a good experience. She did indeed learn a collection of Flemish words, and sang along with the best in a performance of some, to me, totally incomprehensible song at the school parents’ day. She was adept at interpreting ‘Vicky the Viking’ on Flemish TV in the evenings, but she hated that school and as it was her first school, I think it coloured her attitude to institutions for the rest of her life – and she very soon forgot the Flemish.

  I look back on my time in Brussels with no pleasure at all, in fact I have tried for the most part to block it out from my memory altogether. John and I had drifted far apart by then, so I was glad when it came time for me to return to London and take up my career again. He stayed on in Brussels to finish his posting.

  12

  MY FIRST TASK on returning to London in July 1976 was to find a nanny. I was determined that, with two children and me on my own, we would have someone living in with us. So I acquired a copy of The Lady, the magazine I have always turned to in times of domestic crisis (though never at any other time), put in an advertisement and waited to see what turned up. Choosing domestic help has always seemed to me much more difficult than any other personnel decision. My first choice seemed a delightful young woman. She had all the right references; her previous employer spoke very highly of her, though perhaps I should have taken more notice of the fact that she had employed her to look after horses not children. She came and worked, apparently satisfactorily, for three or four days and then suddenly disappeared with no explanation. When I found a half-smoked joint rolled up in some towels put out for the washing, I was rather glad she had gone, though as by then I had gone back to work, it was extremely awkward to be left stranded. I was even more glad when I went round to the address she had given me to try to get the door key back, and found it was a squat in Dalston, where a very shifty-looking man with dreadlocks, peering at me through a crack in the door, denied all knowledge of her. We never saw her or the door key again.

  We had more luck the second time and Jane stayed with us until Harriet went to school. But she was only the first of a long succession of nannies and au pairs whose lives became intertwined with ours over the next few years.

  Dealing with nannies I first met the phenomenon, which I later encountered at work when I began to be in charge of groups of people, of the way people remorselessly unburden their anxieties onto the one in charge as soon as they get the chance. As the one in charge, it is your responsibility to be always positive, cheerful and supportive. As soon as I opened the door in the evening, the au pairs in particular would tell me all the disasters that had happened during the day. My only defence was to develop the habit, which I kept until I retired, of ringing up home before I left work, so that I had a chance to get used to whatever had happened and I knew that when I arrived at the front door there would be no nasty surprises. I might even have thought of a solution to the problem, but at least I could ensure the kettle was on or the gin and tonic poured out, so that things would start to look better. On the other hand, I rarely ring home when I am abroad. Male colleagues are always telephoning home and reporting on what the weather is doing, or how their football team is faring. I never want to know what’s going on, because I know I can’t do anything about it, and if there is a major disaster I know someone will tell me about it before long.

  One evening, when I made my telephone call before leaving work, I was told that a swarm of bees had invaded the house and what were they to do? I had no answer to that one except to advise them to go to my sister-in-law who lived round the corner. I did consult a colleague at work who knew about bees and I tried ringing around various Bee numbers that I found in the Yellow Pages before I left work, but I could not arouse anyone’s interest. When I arrived, there were indeed bees everywhere, crawling up the insides of the windows, walking down the stairs, all over the beds. I hoovered them all up in the vacuum cleaner, which was probably quite the wrong thing to do, but it did eventually solve the problem.

  On another occasion the house was burgled while the children were being collected from school. They had all arrived home to find they couldn’t open the door, because the burglars had climbed in and out of an upstairs window at the back and had put the bolts on the front door so they would not be disturbed at their burgling. I got back to find a confused huddle of assorted adults and children at the front door, unable to understand why they couldn’t get in.

  We were frequently burgled during that period. It was one of the prices you paid for living in Islington, and our locks and bolts got ever more complicated. Once, after the days of nannies and au pairs, when Sophie was just old enough to look after herself and Harriet during the holidays, the telephone rang on my desk at work. It was Sophie who whispered, ‘Mum. I think there’s a burglar in the house.’ She had been sitting in her bedroom on the top floor painting a picture, having left the door into the garden open, when she had looked up and seen a large young man in the doorway clutching my jewellery box (not much left in it to steal by then). Thankfully, when he saw her he rushed off down the stairs, muttering, ‘Sorry, wrong house,’ but they were afraid he was still there. In those days I was not well known and had no special security and those were the sort of telephone calls that put some strain on the working mother’s principle of compartmentalisation. I rang up the police from the office and by the time I had rushed home the excitement was all over.

  Exactly the same sort of unburdening that the nannies and au pairs practised used to happen at work, for example when I got back after being away on leave. On my first day back, each of the section heads would come in to tell me what had been going on and as the morning wore on, I felt that I had sunk further and further down in my chair as one after the other unburdened their problems and worries onto me, and they would go out looking taller than when they came in.

  When I went back to work, in the summer of 1976, after being away for nearly two years, things seemed to be changing. More young people had been recruited, there were more women officers and the place seemed to have a livelier feel to it. By this stage I was committ
ed to working. It looked as though I was likely to be dependent on myself alone in my old age, as John’s pension situation was no nearer resolution, so I thought that I’d better knuckle down and get myself as good a career as I could manage. It did now seem possible that there might be a decent career for me in MI5, the way things were going.

  On my return I was put into a section which was working to counter the activities of the Soviet intelligence officers and their Warsaw Pact allies in the UK – the ‘residencies’, as the groups of intelligence officers living here in various guises were called. As an officer, I was in charge of a small team of people responsible for a group of East European residencies. Another team across the corridor dealt with the rest of the East Europeans and in a long room round the corner a much larger team was looking at the Soviet residencies. My team was a mixed bunch, all women, one was the daughter of a diplomat, one had a degree in astronomy and one had left school at sixteen and had worked her way up after joining as a clerk. We worked in yet another run-down building, now demolished, at the corner of Warren Street and Euston Road. In its day it had been at the cutting edge of design, we were told, in that the heating came from pipes in the ceilings. Perhaps because hot air rises, the heating never seemed to work. I spent the winter of 1976–7 and the following one, working there wrapped in a blanket and clutching a hot water bottle to keep warm.

  In the 1960s, the Soviet Union and their East European allies had been allowed to build up their diplomatic and commercial representation in London practically unchecked. Among all those people had been a large number of officers of their civilian and military intelligence services, present in Britain for the sole purpose of spying on us and our allies and spreading propaganda and disruption. In April 1971, the government, acting on advice from MI5 and the Foreign Office, had expelled from the country 105 Soviet intelligence officers in what was known as Operation Foot, which effectively damaged the Soviet intelligence operation in this country for some time. In the five years or so since Operation Foot, Soviet intelligence officers had begun to creep back into some of their old positions in the embassy and the trade delegation, and into some new ones in other Soviet organisations too. The Warsaw Pact countries’ intelligence services were also well represented in London under various covers.