MI5 and Me

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Something with Work in it – yes, that always goes down well.’

  ‘Always,’ I agreed, a little helplessly, because I was now well out of my depth. ‘How about the Working Man’s Party? ’Specially since Hal isn’t working at the moment. It will give him motivation, and actors like that, they like motivation. I read about it last week in an interview with Marlon Brando.’

  My father drew slowly on his pipe once more; finally he nodded.

  ‘That could be a good name for it, Lottie,’ he agreed. ‘The Working Man’s Party says what it is, and it sounds a cut above the Communist Party, which is difficult to identify with, if you think about it. Yes, the Working Man’s Party could appeal to anyone, and everyone – even women.’

  ‘You will have to have an organ, won’t you?’ I suggested with sudden authority. ‘A newspaper, say, or a pamphlet. All political parties need those. Somewhere the members can air their extreme views, and feel better for it.’

  ‘And the newspaper should be full of the sounds of strife going unrewarded,’ my father agreed. ‘In fact, that’s what we’ll call it – their paper – we’ll call it Strife. Strife is always good. So, we have Working Man, and Strife. This has the makings of a grand plan. We’re almost there. Now we just have to put it to Hal.’

  I thought nothing would come of it, or that it would be like the Steerforth Notion, something that came and went without too much incident, but I was proved dreadfully wrong. I was to discover that when my father made a plan, he carried it through with almost alarming precision. He might not be the best burglar in the world, but he was always pleased if he could bring off something surprising, and judging from the gleam in his eye and the spring in his step, starting his own political party was to his way of thinking the undercover plan to beat all undercover plans.

  He must have talked Hal into it because over the next weeks there were more low mutterings around the house than usual, and Mrs Graham was in a better mood because Hal now arose from his bed at a normal hour, which meant she could make it before teatime and that always pleased her, but that was before she opened her newspaper and read about him.

  ‘I am very surprised at your father allowing this man to lodge here, Miss Lottie,’ she told me, tapping the newspaper.

  I read with fascination that Henry Flanagan, a member of the Flanagan acting dynasty, was heading a new political organisation called the Working Man’s Party.

  ‘I don’t know what he knows about working,’ Mrs Graham added with sudden astringency. ‘He doesn’t even make his own bed.’

  Now it was there in print, I couldn’t help feeling shocked. Hal of all people was being touted as the kind of person who would have a file in the Section, or worse – his file would be in a special place, one where you had to show your pass three times before – in years yet to come – you could open it wearing special white gloves.

  ‘I expect it is just a passing phase,’ I said. ‘He’s out of work so he has to think of something to do, so he’s gone political.’

  Mrs Graham made a ‘humph’ noise, but then a determined look came into her eyes.

  ‘From now on,’ she announced, ‘the leader of the Working Man’s Party can make his own bed.’

  My mother was no less dubious.

  ‘I hope this isn’t one of your father’s schemes,’ she muttered. ‘He will have them, and Hal has been hanging around the house for so long he might have felt he should think up something for him. Oh, well, just so long as Hal doesn’t bring any Working Men back here, we should be all right.’

  I became anxious to see how Hal would take his newfound fame. He took to it at once. I could hear my father rehearsing him in his rousing speeches that, following the example of Bernard Shaw, were to be made on street corners. Strife too was to be handed out, a pamphlet that my father wrote with great zeal, making constant use of the word decadent. Profiteering came into it too quite a lot, as well as capitalism, naturally. It was what he called ‘strong stuff’.

  Melville remained his usual charming self, singing and playing whenever the moment presented itself, but I noticed that he and Hal rarely talked now. There was more than a chasm between them: there was a whole world. Melville was not the kind of man to voice an opinion but he could certainly show his aversion.

  ‘Of course nothing is going to come of it,’ my mother announced as Hal, battered and blown by his street-corner orations, fell into Dingley Dell clutching some shredded copies of Strife.

  ‘So you keep saying, dear lady,’ he boomed. ‘Meanwhile perhaps your delightful daughter would be good enough to fetch me some sticking plaster, some hot water, and a large whisky.’

  My mother knew where her patriotic duty lay, and she sent me to fetch what was required, while Hal, on good dramatic form, groaned so much and so loudly that he could have been heard in Moscow.

  ‘The great British public when roused turns into a fearsome beast,’ he announced. ‘I am fast coming to the realisation that the average working man does not like to be appealed to. He wants to be left alone to form his own ideas, and quite frankly I don’t blame him.’

  My mother nodded. She thought the same as the average working man, and I could see that she was hoping Hal’s political flurry was now coming to a shuddering halt.

  And so it might have done had not my father decided to bring Melville into the picture, and Melville decided that the whole idea needed opening out, and Hal preaching on street corners was not enough. They should have meetings.

  ‘Not here, surely?’ my mother asked in some desperation.

  ‘Just to start with,’ my father said, at his most nonchalant. ‘One or two supporters for Hal, but nothing to write home about.’

  And he lit his pipe and walked off.

  ‘He’s been reading too many of those Maigret novels in French again,’ my mother said, looking irritated. ‘You can always tell from what he’s smoking. If it’s John Buchan novels then he sticks to cigarettes. If it’s Sherlock Holmes or Maigret, then out comes the pipe.’

  ‘What about cigars?’ I asked, although I had never seen him smoke one.

  ‘That would be the Bible,’ she said shortly. ‘And he only reads that in bed.’

  She sat down suddenly on a kitchen chair, which was only appropriate since we were in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh dear, Lottie, what am I to do? Your father wants me to entertain supporters of this Working Man’s Party, but I daren’t ask Mrs Graham – she won’t even make Melville’s bed now … won’t go in either lodger’s room. She says she sees them both as enemies of decent people. Their rooms are beginning to look like something from the war.’

  I could see her predicament.

  ‘Well, how about a running buffet?’ I asked brightly. ‘They always go down well with a mix of people.’

  My mother thought for a minute.

  ‘It’s a long time since I cooked, Lottie, as you know, but a running buffet does sound a good idea. I could get out my old recipe books and make a lot of different dishes and then, as you say, people could help themselves, couldn’t they?’

  When I told Arabella she looked at me strangely.

  ‘How long since your mother cooked?’ she asked.

  I thought for a minute.

  ‘She always does cheese on toast on Sunday night. My father sometimes does conjuring tricks then to cheer up my grandmother, and it’s Mrs Graham’s evening off – not that she likes to take it because she says it makes more work because my mother leaves cheese everywhere.’

  ‘Well, you can only hope,’ Arabella said with some finality. ‘Frankly, if her cooking is anything like Rosalie’s, the running buffet is going to live up to its name – people will be running from it.’

  ‘We don’t want that,’ I said, with some feeling. ‘We want it to be a success.’

  ‘Why isn’t Mrs Graham doing the cooking?’

  ‘She’s on holiday for a day or two,’ I said, too hastily.

  Of course Arabella didn’t believe me, but since we both
knew that there was all too much in our lives about which we could never speak, and since I had no idea whether or not she knew that her mother was a double agent and the luxurious flat they lived in paid for by the Office, further conversation was at an end.

  Invitations to the running buffet must have been sent out pretty quickly because my mother was soon having to cater for a great many more people than she would have wished. But for once she could not complain as my father pointed out that she had always wanted to have a busy social life and now she had one.

  ‘Yes, but not this sort of social life. For the life of me, I never wanted to entertain a whole lot of working men whom I have never met before. It is hardly ideal, and I only hope that there will be some women too.’

  The evening of the buffet arrived and my mother called me down to help with the food.

  ‘It’s all in there,’ she said, nodding nervously towards the dining room as if there was a large dead animal laid out on the table. ‘Just go and check everything, Lottie, would you? I think I have covered all eventualities’

  I stared at the buffet. Remembering Arabella’s words, I turned for the door. This was indeed an assembly of food to run from. Then I turned back. I could not hurt my mother’s feelings. She had done her best. She had even made labels on cocktail sticks so that people knew what they were eating, which would probably be most alarming but it was too late to say anything.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked, looking both anxious and vulnerable.

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that is a jolly good running buffet. Well done.’

  She looked so happy at that.

  ‘I was suddenly inspired,’ she told me in a confidential tone, ‘because I remembered the wartime recipes of Marguerite Patten, and all the rest of them. Brilliant recipes, everything disguised to look and taste like the real thing. I even remembered rhubarb jelly, and although it came out looking a bit grey, it certainly has the authentic wartime taste. You must try the snow foam made without egg, and rissoles made with marrow – add a dollop of mustard and you are in heaven. These wartime cooks were so inventive. They had to be.’

  The Working Man’s supporters looked exactly as anyone would expect, all seeming as if they had come straight from work, which I found oddly reassuring, yet at the same time I felt guilty because after all they were supporting my invention, and my invention was just a put up job to help Hal get lots of publicity so theatre managements would take him on for his shock value, and everyone could feel happy that they had done their bit to support the theatre and defeat communism too – although how that bit came into it, I wasn’t quite sure.

  Happily my father’s drinks cupboard, unlike the buffet, was not in wartime mode. He dished out what he called a decent drink to all comers, and they were soon in a very jolly state, and what with Melville playing the piano and Hal singing ‘The Red Flag’, as well as lots of beer-drinking songs too, the whole evening had started off better than could have been hoped. My mother had persuaded me to wear a black dress and borrow one of Mrs Graham’s white half-aprons, which seemed like a nice touch until I realised – all too late – that as far as working men were concerned waitresses and maids were fair game, so it was a case of duck and weave to avoid their attentions.

  Finally everyone went downstairs to serve themselves at the buffet table. The moment they went in a terrible silence fell. My mother looked across at me, all anxiety.

  ‘Come on, everyone, tuck in,’ I said, in my usual Girl Guide over-bright way.

  They took their plates like prisoners about to help themselves to thin gruel.

  ‘All wartime recipes,’ my mother announced, spooning rissoles on to their plates. ‘Such clever people those wartime radio cooks, weren’t they?’

  Well, I don’t know whether they were just being polite, but at her words those would-be supporters of the Working Man’s Party looked quite differently at the buffet, and in a moment they were happily helping themselves. It seemed that as soon as they read the labels on the cocktail sticks memories came flooding back, and whether it was the rissoles or the runny rhubarb jelly, the eggless snow pudding or the kipper pâté made without kipper, the buffet became a centrepiece of enjoyment. Conversation around it became almost as noisy as the singing had been.

  ‘What happens now?’ I asked my father when everyone had gone. ‘Do they have to sign things and make vows of allegiance to Hal?’

  My father frowned. He was quite tired from helping my mother and me wash up, which was not something he was used to.

  ‘It all depends on how things go on the streets,’ he said. ‘Movements like these depend on the street, and on enthusiasm from the ground upwards.’ He lit a cigarette, from which I gathered he must have finished with Maigret and gone back to The Thirty-Nine Steps. ‘The thing is, Hal is getting a lot of bad publicity, and that is very good, just what is needed. All the right-wing papers are very suspicious of anyone who shows enthusiasm for the working man, as they always have been. As far as the right wing is concerned, the Working Man’s Party must be bad news because they are never sure whether the Working Man is actually on their side or not. They live in fear of the Working Man the way the Army live in fear of their own men, because most officers can’t wire a plug or change a washer in a tap. I know I can’t, but I’m not right-wing or left-wing. I simply don’t want the communists taking over and making our lives less British.’

  I knew my father must be one over the eight because he didn’t usually talk like that, so I went to bed feeling rather thoughtful. The evening had been a great success, but was that what was wanted? Shouldn’t all the Working Men have sat down and parleyed politics rather than reminiscing about the war on account of my mother’s food?

  As things were life in the Section was toddling along at such a slow pace that I had started to wonder if there were any communists left in England, because none of the files were very fat, and Commander Steerforth’s dictation was slower than ever, and in contrast to the files he was beginning to put on so much weight from my supplying him with cakes.

  I didn’t dare ask Hal how things were going because he might tell me the truth, and I was in no mood to hear it, so I asked Melville, who was now on side with Hal as they knew but couldn’t say that they were both spooks. Melville had even attended the buffet, posing as a supporter of the new political movement.

  ‘The Party was going fine until that night,’ he told me gravely while adjusting his immaculate Garrick Club tie and pulling his white shirt cuffs down to exactly the required Savile Row level, exposing gold cufflinks. ‘But then, everything changed.’

  I stared at him, imagining all those poor people going home with tummy aches.

  ‘What happened after that? To make it all change.’

  Melville looked grave.

  ‘Well, I was sent to canvass them, which I duly did. That is, I took their telephone numbers and addresses before they left and then I followed up. It was amazing.’ He shook his head. ‘It was the buffet, Lottie. They were all so impressed your mother had made such an effort for them that they changed their minds about joining a new political movement. It was all the wartime memories – put them off party politics completely. We were united then, with everyone pulling their weight. Political squabbles are just shabby in comparison. So that, I am afraid, is that.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, Lottie, that there are some things more important than politics, such as making people the right food, and your mother has proved it. She is a brilliant woman, and I have told her so. Brilliant.’

  I must say, for once in my life I was lost for words. Normally I can think of something, but then I simply couldn’t.

  ‘So, if the movement has been a bit of a damp squib, what will Hal do?’ I finally asked.

  Melville looked surprised that I didn’t know.

  ‘Hasn’t anyone told you? He has had any number of offers to star in any number of plays; we might even be in one together – if my dates fit. No, Hal is right
up there now, and of course before too long he will have an in-depth interview in the Sunday Express in which he will announce that he has reformed his ways, as a consequence of which everyone will crowd the theatres to see him because – quite simply – he is now properly famous.’

  I sighed with some relief. There were happy endings after all.

  And then I thought of something.

  ‘What about Dame Lily, has she got any work?’

  ‘The Bard has come to her rescue, as always,’ Melville said, moving towards the drawing-room piano because, as he had told me, he became restless if he was in the room with a piano and wasn’t playing it. ‘Dame Lily has been offered the Nurse in R and J.’

  I went to my father’s drink cupboard, and as Melville played I sipped my young wine, and suddenly felt older.

  SMOKIN’ FISH

  Now that Hal was in work, and everyone at Dingley Dell well satisfied that they had done their best to help him while still maintaining the fight against communism, the house settled down to a routine. In line with my father’s new policy of defeating communist infiltration in entertainment, our visitors were mainly actors and what he called show business types, coming and going. Some vaguely countrified types also came and went, as well as my brother, who was stationed abroad in the army and so only occasionally visited. It was a happy atmosphere, and after all the strain of the previous weeks and months, everything seemed set fair.

  Such was not the case in our Section, however. Commander Steerforth was if anything more gloomy, and even Rosalie was showing signs of strain. The truth was there was very little work to do. Yes, there was work but it was not showing any results. We were all feeling a bit like out-of-work actors who have memorised their roles and are word perfect but have nowhere to demonstrate their skills because suddenly there’s no show.

  It was Arabella who put it best.

  ‘We are simply not trapping enough communist agents or people selling secrets to foreigners, and that is the truth of it. We type reports, we file them, but what do we have to show for it? Not a double agent in sight at the moment. Of course, we know there are some creepy intellectuals hiding behind respectable posts and using Top Secret material to help the Commies, but we are not flushing them out. We have nothing to show for all this shorthand and typewriter bashing.’