MI5 and Me
This book is dedicated to Alexandra Pringle who not only encouraged it from the start, but was its guardian angel reading each chapter as I finished it and responding with the kind of words authors treasure. Without her this might never have been written.
ALSO BY CHARLOTTE BINGHAM
Non-fiction
Coronet Among the Weeds
Coronet Among the Grass
Novels
Lucinda
The Business
In Sunshine or in Shadow
Stardust
Nanny
Change of Heart
Grand Affair
Love Song
The Kissing Garden
Country Wedding
The Blue Note
The Love Knot
Summertime
Distant Music
The Magic Hour
Friday’s Girl
Out of the Blue
In Distant Fields
The White Marriage
Goodnight Sweetheart
The Enchanted
The Land of Summer
The Daisy Club
Love Quartet
Belgravia
Country Life
At Home
By Invitation
Nightingale Saga
To Hear a Nightingale
The Nightingale Sings
Debutantes Saga
Debutantes
The Season
The Bexham Trilogy
The Chestnut Tree
The Wind Off the Sea
The Moon at Midnight
Eden Saga
Daughters of Eden
The House of Flowers
Mums on the Run Series
Mums on the Run
A Dip Before Breakfast
WITH TERENCE BRADY
Victoria Series
Victoria
Victoria and Company
Honestly Series
No, Honestly
Yes, Honestly
Upstairs, Downstairs Series
Rose’s Story
CONTENTS
Also by Charlotte Bingham
The Facts of Life
Bearding the Dragon
A Credit to the Section
The Fastest Gun in W8
A Bunglary
The Security Films
Hearts of Oak
Mater Hari
The Running Buffet
Smokin’ Fish
Why
Interrogations
Friends, Romans, and Coppers
P.S.
About the Author
‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.’
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
The action of this book takes place in England in the 1950s.
THE FACTS OF LIFE
It seems to me now that everyone who came to our house in those days was a spy.
I had always thought my father did something really boring at the War Office because that was what he told me, and since he went around looking vague and rather bored and wearing clothes that seemed to go with the job, I believed him. No, actually, I didn’t believe him; I just wasn’t interested in anything he was doing, only what I was doing, or rather – what I was not doing. Then one ghastly rainy day, when I was getting on my mother’s nerves even more than usual, he called me into the drawing room.
I didn’t realise then that my father frightened everyone, not just me. This particular day his face wore the expression of someone who was about to tell me something I didn’t want to know, so I tried to look young and vulnerable, but I saw he was going to tell me anyway.
As I stood there in dreadful silence waiting, a horrid thought came into my mind, a thought more frightening even than my father. He might be going to tell me the Facts of Life, but following that I quickly reassured myself that he couldn’t be going to tell me because he definitely didn’t know them. I mean parents just didn’t, did they – they were parents, for heaven’s sake. They told you off, and moaned about school fees, and generally found you a pain, but they didn’t do It. They couldn’t. Apart from anything else, it would mean stubbing out their cigarettes, or putting their drinks down.
The room was still filled with an Awful Silence so I looked about me wondering if he had found out about my overdraft, or the fact that I had been late in from the local coffee bar the previous night.
‘I think you should know,’ he said, drawing on his cigarette in his oddly elegant way, and speaking just as slowly as he always did, ‘I think you should know,’ he repeated, ‘certain facts.’
I thought I was about to pass out with the horror of what was to come. Some months before he had already given me a long and very serious talk about the internal combustion engine; this might be going to be even worse. My stomach now actually resembled the internal combustion engine on a cold morning. However I knew not to interrupt his silences, or even his long pauses. Punishment came instantly if you did, in the form of his lowering his voice even more, and speaking even more slowly, which always made the backs of my knees ache with a kind of mixture of fear and impatience, rather like going down in a lift that was actually meant to be going up.
‘The facts are rather delicate,’ he continued, ‘and you must promise not to pass them on.’
I stared at him. My best friend had already told me some Facts, on Bognor beach the previous summer, but of course I hadn’t really believed her because, quite honestly, they didn’t seem very nice, and certainly not the sort of things that people should be doing in their spare time. I actually said to her: ‘If you believe that, you will believe anything.’
Now I stared at my father wondering whether to tell him what she knew, to save him trouble, and then wondering if that would matter, or count as ‘passing them on’.
I was in such a state by now if I could have excused myself I would have done, but my father was not someone who encouraged people excusing themselves.
‘The facts are these. Your mother knows them, and since you are of an age, now you are eighteen, she thinks you should know them too – but you must remember that from here on your lips are sealed, and you cannot tell anyone else.’
I didn’t like to say that I would rather paint my toenails with poison than go around telling people things they either knew already or maybe didn’t want to know, so I just resumed my young and innocent expression, which worked wonderfully well on other people; but my father was not other people, and as usual it had no effect, only seeming to make him look out of the window – probably trying to find something more interesting to look at than me and the drawing room.
‘I work for MI5,’ he announced.
‘Oh, dear,’ I said.
He returned his gaze to me. I had abandoned my young and innocent expression and swapped it in for startled daughter.
‘What do you mean “oh, dear”?’ he asked in an even more chilly tone.
‘Well, it’s not very nice, is it, MI5? It’s full of people spying.’
He breathed in slowly, and out even more slowly. It was a sound that signified a thought that I knew must have occurred to him rather too often over my eighteen years of existence. Why, oh, why, God of all that is merciful, did you have to send me this daughter?
‘As a matter of fact,’ he conceded after a few seconds, ‘you’re right, MI5 is not very nice, and the reason it is not very nice is quite simple: we have to fight communism, and communism is not at all nice, and what is more we have to win, or we shall lose the very thing we have fought for during the war – our freedom.’
This was stern and strong stuff all right,
but much as I didn’t like the idea of having a father who was a spy, at least it was better than the Facts of Life, and all those rather horrid things that a friend had told me on Bognor Beach.
‘However, now you know, and you are sworn to secrecy, I must get on to the next subject, which is you.’
This was much better. I liked the idea of his changing the subject and getting on to me.
‘It is time you got a proper job instead of drifting about in coffee bars and working for all sorts of people who your mother tells me she could never ask to dinner. So, I have made some enquiries and decided that the best place for you to work at a steady worthwhile job is – MI5.’
I stared at him in unbridled horror, there was no other way to describe the expression on my face. My expression was a hundred times worse than the way I’d looked on Bognor Beach the previous summer.
‘What’s the matter?’ my father asked.
‘I am not really suited to that kind of work,’ I said, and realising that the young and innocent face hadn’t worked, managed a slight sob in my voice.
‘I think you are,’ he said, with finality. ‘And since you are a minor until you are twenty-one, there really is no point in arguing about it. I will get in touch with my people and they will make an appointment for you to go and see them. It is about time you settled down to doing something serious, patriotic, and worthwhile, Lottie. Time to grow up. You are in danger of becoming a lightweight.’
I nodded silently and turned to leave the room. I liked being a lightweight, but of course I couldn’t tell him that. Outside the sun was shining, but it might as well have been raining misery. Life as I had known it was about to be over. Life as I would like it to be was definitely not even on the horizon.
I turned back to face him.
‘Of course, I don’t suppose my typing and shorthand are up to their standards,’ I said, suddenly feeling a great deal more cheerful.
‘Don’t worry, they’ll soon shape you up,’ came the reply.
I went upstairs to my room, and sat on the bed. It would be three years before I would be able to do as I wanted, before I reached that magical age of twenty-one when I could take up underwater diving, become a trapeze artist or a Great Painter. Then I brightened up. Maybe I would die before MI5 could shape me up? There was always that.
*
Quite an obvious thing to point out, but as it happened I didn’t die. I did do my best to get pneumonia by standing in front of my bedroom window in a very thin nightdress and breathing in the cold night air for hours, but that didn’t work. It is an unwritten law of the gods that if you are looking forward to something with all your heart and soul, you get ill, but if you try to be ill the gods just laugh at you and all you get is cold and bored.
Alas, my father must have tipped off the War Office to where I lived, same address as him – because in not a very short space of time the dreaded letter arrived inviting me to an interview.
I caught one of the vanishing number nines, as our local bus was called, and made my way to a very chic Mayfair address: the kind of house that used to be occupied by grand families for the summer season, when hunting stopped, and racing started. Disappointingly there were no cloaks or daggers hanging outside the front door, but inside the lift was rickety and old, and full of people at whom I tried not to stare, imagining they must all be spies, spooks or agents.
‘You got our letter and the temporary pass all right?’ asked the pleasant lady from behind her desk.
‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise, would I?’ I asked brightly.
She gave a cold smile and I felt her unstated thought was, We won’t be having any more of that kind of cheek once you have signed the Official Secrets Act.
Signing the Official Secrets Act turned out to involve answering a lot of questions that my father had told me the night before I could ignore if I wanted, because I was under his protection.
‘Do you attend fashionable night clubs?’
I stared happily at that one. It could get me out of signing the wretched thing, get me out of being a part of the world of agents, spies and spooks that probably did go bump in the night. I wrote: ‘I am a frequent visitor to night clubs, including the Blue Angel, and other clubs.’ This took up more space than it should, which I hoped might also count against me.
I then put ‘yes’ beside all sorts of other questions that might portray me in an unsuitable light. By the time I’d finished ticking all the right boxes with all the wrong answers, I was convinced that the lady behind the desk would point to the door and invite me to leave. I might still be a minor, but there was nothing to stop me from being the wrong kind of minor. I felt almost gleeful as I handed her back my form.
She didn’t even glance at it. I stared at her, appalled. What kind of organisation would take on someone like me? From the answers I had given, I was convinced I must be practically criminal. Certainly totally unsuitable to work for MI5.
But the truth was that she was not interested in anything except my shorthand and typing.
‘I see that you have good speeds,’ she said, staring approvingly at some of the references they had sent for. ‘The Bullion Club has given you a very good reference. I didn’t know it was still going, I used to go there with my brother, years ago. Bit of a clip joint, but excellent jazz.’
It was my turn to stare. She didn’t look the type that would like jazz.
‘I expect your father has explained everything to you? We will place you in a Section to work for a person of our choice, someone we think would suit you, and you would suit them. So, now all there is to do is get your security pass, and ask you to come back here at nine-thirty on Monday. I do hope you have a good weekend.’
Have a good weekend? How could I? I was about to become a sensible person with a proper job. Surely nothing could be worse? What was there now for me to look forward to? Nothing, except filing cabinets, shorthand and typing, and spooks in lifts wearing brown suits and matching shoes.
My mother was waiting for me when I got home. She looked at me in a baleful way. I always thought she could have got a university degree in baleful looks if she had wanted.
‘Of course you can’t go round dressed like that, and wearing two pairs of false eyelashes, if you’re going to the Office,’ she announced. ‘No one can take shorthand properly through two pairs of eyelashes. I think we had better go shopping.’
My heart sank. Going shopping with my mother meant that she made friends with everyone in the dress department except me.
*
‘Now that does suit you … doesn’t that suit her?’
I stared at myself in the dressing mirror. It was a suit all right, but the idea that it suited me was ridiculous. And then, with a feeling of dread, I realised something as the sales lady and my mother stood pulling at the skirt and tugging at the jacket. They were right.
The suit did suit me, it suited the me I was about to become: dull, grey, and conventional. Three years of being dull, grey, and conventional stretched ahead of me. Not so much a prison sentence, more like a life sentence.
It was time to put on a nightdress and stand in front of the open window again, hoping for pneumonia.
BEARDING THE DRAGON
Without my double false eyelashes I felt quite naked, which meant that when I was introduced to the Dragon to whom I had been appointed to work, my confidence was not at its highest.
I had sailed through security downstairs with my swanky MI5 pass, imagining that since the policemen on duty were so friendly, everyone else would be too, because my mother had a theory she often aired that if the doorman at a company was charming then so too would be the managing director. It was doubtless a sound theory in Civvy Street, but as the Dragon barked out her orders at me, I quickly realised that it might not be one that worked at MI5.
‘No nail varnish in future, please, it only gets chipped on the typewriter keys and will make you look tarty.’
I wished yet again I were somewhere else with double
pneumonia, or rather recovering from it.
‘Oh, and I don’t care for your makeup, young lady, and if those are false eyelashes you’re wearing, take them off immediately.’
She leaned forward and for one awful moment I thought she was going to pull at my lashes.
‘Actually they’re mine,’ I said, and pushed my chair away from her just in case she felt even tempted.
‘Take a memo, please.’
And so started the first of a cascade of memos to do with people with strange names, who appeared to have attracted the wrong sort of attention to themselves. Every memo must be attached to a Personal File, and all to be typed up before lunch. I walked back down to the main room where all the secretaries worked, convinced I had probably made a hash of most of the memos. Entering the big room where it was rather obvious that only typewriters born on or before 1911 were permitted, I passed a tall, dark-haired girl also clutching files.
‘Oh, you poor thing, you’ve got Dragon Dewsbury. She chews up secretaries for breakfast – a single comma out of place and she arranges for you to be shot at dawn. Meet you downstairs at one. Lunch at Fenwick’s will cheer you up no end.’ She stopped. ‘I’m Arabella, by the way.’
‘Lottie,’ I said, trying to free a hand to shake hers with, and failing.
By the time lunchtime came I knew why the Dragon had earned her terrible reputation. It was true: one comma out of place meant that the whole memo had to be retyped, and since everything had to be backed up by triplicates of carbon paper, Fenwick’s seemed to me not a shop but a heavenly haven, filled with enviably smart girls not tricked out in sensible grey, and not looking forward to an afternoon spent working for a dragon.
‘The Dragon lost her fiancé in the war, and has never been nice to anyone since. Apparently.’ Arabella paused, a forkful of salad waiting to be placed in her cupid’s-bow mouth. ‘The last girl who worked for her became so desperate she ran off with a married man who lives in Yorkshire – but that comes to the same thing really. Even so, you can see just how desperate she was.’
I gazed past Arabella for a few seconds. I imagined living in sin with a married man in Yorkshire where summer came and went in August, leaving the rest of the year to be cold and wet. I imagined eternally walking the moors, a wellie-booted reincarnation of Cathy from Wuthering Heights, lunch at Fenwick’s an all-too-distant memory.
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