MI5 and Me Read online

  She frowned and indicated with the revolver that I should leave.

  ‘Go and find your father and ask him if this dreadful thing is loaded or not,’ she repeated. ‘And if so does he want to unload it, or does he want me to put it back for some luckless person to find it?’

  It wasn’t difficult to leave the guest room, but as I went downstairs I have to say I found it in me to feel very sorry for my mother. I could see her point of view. There obviously was no social life that she could count on, what with spies and spooks, and dinner parties for what she called ‘bogeys’ where she wasn’t wanted. It was hard for her. She was sacrificing a lot for her country, for the fight against communism. Even so, sidling into the drawing room to find my father and ask him if the revolver he had absentmindedly left in a drawer was loaded, was not the easiest thing to do.

  ‘Psst?’

  He looked at me.

  ‘Psst to you too,’ he said briefly.

  ‘No, really, psst, you know proper psst, not pretend psst,’ I whispered to him.

  It was a noise I used to make when I was little to alert him to my grandmother coming to the front door. It had always worked like magic. At the thought of the imminent arrival of his mother-in-law my father, who never, ever moved fast, could suddenly sprint faster than the speed of sound.

  ‘Up the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire,’ I said, jerking my head towards the stairs.

  ‘What are you talking about, Lottie?’

  He was beginning to look ruffled.

  ‘I am talking about the toy you left in the side drawer in the guest room, Daddy,’ I said, winking and blinking in a way that I hoped he was used to with his spooks. ‘Someone has found it and is playing with it, and she thinks it might be loaded, which toy guns shouldn’t be, she thinks.’

  Once again my father demonstrated just how fast he could move when it was necessary.

  I followed him upstairs, but very slowly, to allow for harsh words and maybe a gunshot or two.

  ‘You must not worry about this sort of thing, my dear,’ I heard my father saying. ‘Of course the gun is loaded, but the catch is on, so there’s no need for concern. As long as the safety catch is on, nothing can happen. Stand away, dear.’

  Following this there was the sound of a catch being put on, and my mother making the kind of noise that women tend to make when they see a mouse.

  I could stand it no longer and fled to my room where I lay down on my bed and wished that communists would behave themselves so that my mother could have a social life and my father needn’t go around with knuckledusters pulling his suits out of shape, and swordsticks that fell apart at the wrong moment, and guns that popped up in awkward places.

  I should have liked it if my life could have returned to what nice people would call normal, but now I was part of the inner circle that surrounded my father, I had a feeling that it was not going to be possible.

  Life in the Section was as normal as blueberry pie compared to life at our house. I envied all the other girls the fact that their fathers did not go about cloaked in secrecy. Their fathers did things like go to the City and earn pots of money while my father went about preventing Britain from descending into anarchy. Their fathers bought Jaguar cars, and went to their tailors for smart suits, whereas, my father explained to me, for his work he must not look anything out of the ordinary. He must wear off-the-peg suits and drive a dull car, so as not to be noticed more than the next man. It was a sacrifice for him, as he readily now acknowledged, because as he said he liked what he called ‘flash’ things, and being a great admirer of the Romans, he told me that there was nothing he would have liked more than to wear a toga and gold arm-bands, but that was just not possible, given his line of work.

  ‘A great deal of my work takes me to places where some sort of smart alec would be noticed immediately,’ he told me the following week when we were having lunch together in what my mother called ‘his bogey hotel’. It was the place where he always conducted business outside the Office. The waiters greeted him as a long-lost friend, which was a bit unusual, I thought, until I realised that judging from their accents they must all of them hail from behind the Iron Curtain. ‘It is very hard on your mother, I know, going around in a nondescript motor car with a man in a dingy mackintosh, but she understands that sacrifices must be made.’

  I tried to look cheerful about the sacrifices that must be made by my mother, all the while thinking that it was a bit much. Maybe married men should not work in MI5? Maybe they should only have bachelors working there.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, we have quite a few bachelors,’ my father told me shortly. ‘And quite a few friends of Dorothy too.’

  ‘Does she work in my Section?’ I asked in a low voice.

  ‘You should know who works in your Section, Lottie. And anyway, that’s not what a friend of Dorothy’s means. But that is not why you are here.’

  He paused to light a cigarette.

  ‘The reason you are here is so that I can run through a few things with you. First of all …’ He took off his glasses and looked grimly serious, and seriously grim, both at the same time, which he was very good at.

  Looking at him, I felt almost as nervous as I had before showing my security pass three times and going in to see Head of Section.

  ‘First of all,’ he went on, ‘you must never, ever acknowledge me when I am out.’

  I nodded, and then thinking that I should make a contribution, said, ‘Is it because of your suits?’

  He breathed in and out very slowly, just as my mother always seemed to do when talking to me. I seemed to have that effect on them.

  ‘The suits do come into it,’ he acknowledged. ‘You have probably noticed that today, for instance, I am in Savile Row suiting, and that is because I am being me, here with you, whereas if I were out and about on business, I would be in off-the-peg, and even a shabby mackintosh.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Actually I hadn’t noticed at all. In fact not noticing my father had become something of a habit ever since I once rushed up to him, thinking he was waiting to collect me from the school train, and quite unable to believe that he was, had greeted him enthusiastically, only to be pushed away and told ‘I am not your father’, which had the effect of making me believe I was adopted, only to be told by my mother – to my intense disappointment – that I was not.

  ‘That was just your father’s idea of a joke,’ she said vaguely, adding, ‘he can be very funny like that.’

  I knew he was not being funny now, so as we left his bogey hotel I practised not knowing him. As he walked away I imagined that he was someone else, but it was difficult because he was walking very slowly, and smoking, and hailing a taxi, and I thought he was probably going back home to change into a shabby mackintosh and that seemed a pity because he looked really rather smart over lunch, and I would have liked him to have been driving off in an equally smart Jaguar car like other girls’ fathers did, but he was determined on winning the battle against communism, and making sure that people could do what they wanted, unlike communists who seemed to spend the whole time sending people to Siberia for writing poems.

  ‘Did you have a nice lunch?’ the Dragon wanted to know later when I went up for dictation.

  I nodded, but I know I looked evasive, because she stared at me.

  ‘Lunch with your father must be fun,’ she went on. ‘He is always joking and laughing in his Section, his secretary told me. He is the life and soul of it.’

  It was my turn to stare at the Dragon.

  So I was right. My father could only laugh and joke with spies and spooks and agents, and such like, people like the Grahams and those people in the drawing room. I remembered laughter coming up from the dining room during his ‘bogey dinner’, and my mother saying: ‘That’s another thing. I’m never allowed to know what they’re laughing at. Really it is too hard.’

  Of course it was, but not as hard as being sent to Siberia for writing a poem.

  A BU
NGLARY

  My mother was looking at me so intently that I feared I had put on the wrong shoes, or forgotten that I mustn’t wear false eyelashes any more, no matter what.

  ‘I wish that you were not caught up in all this,’ she said in a matter-of-fact way. ‘It is bad enough that you are at home, and rather in the habit of getting under everyone’s feet. But now you are coming home with secrets and facts that I don’t want you to talk about, and you probably couldn’t talk about anyway, even if you wanted. This means that there are not just bogeys in the drawing room all the time, but now my own daughter is one too. If only you had been able to get another sort of job, but you would keep on being sacked, and that is just hopeless. If you are sacked too many times people start to think there is something wrong with you, and let’s face it, Lottie, there must be if you couldn’t even hold down a job in a coffee bar on a Sunday evening. You only lasted three hours at the Italiano, and besides its not being remotely suitable, it was even less suitable once you had been there.’

  Some weeks before a friend had found me a job for a few hours a week in a coffee bar in Knightsbridge. Just newly opened, it had something called a Gaggia coffee machine. Everyone else seemed to work it all right. In fact it was generally considered to be quite simple – that is until I moved in on it, and it became a coffee version of the Dragon on a bad day, spitting frothy milk – not that the Dragon did that, but sometimes it seemed that she very well might – and pouring black coffee too fast into a cup that was too small.

  ‘That was a bit too much for me, I admit,’ I agreed. ‘I am not handy. In fact, if you were going to be calling me anything, you would call me unhandy. More than that – you would call me cack-handed.’

  ‘And I don’t think we want that sort of language, thank you,’ my mother said, trying to look offended when we both knew perfectly well that having been in the Wrens during the war, she knew several bad words.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ I asked, making a rather lame attempt at being sensitive and friendly.

  My mother sat down suddenly, which was awkward because she was sitting between me and my bedroom door and I was longing to escape so that I could go to the kitchen and make myself a hot drink.

  ‘Your father has gone out on a burglary,’ she confessed, suddenly, ‘and it does not bode well. I am really rather afraid for him. If he gets caught by the police, it could be a little embarrassing.’

  I stared at her.

  My father’s life seemed altogether colourful enough without his having to turn to burglary.

  ‘Have the bills mounted up that much?’ I asked in what I hoped was a tender and tactful way.

  ‘Oh, no – this has nothing to do with bills,’ she said, tetchily. ‘No, no, this is to do with information stored in other people’s private houses, address books and so on, things that would be of no interest to anyone except your father. Not that he is nosy,’ she added quickly. ‘No, this is because he needs to know what they know, even though it is probably useless, but that is what spying is all about.’

  ‘Has he done this before, this burglary business?’

  ‘Oh, yes, many times, but this is different.’ She looked at me. ‘The thing is – he has often gone burgling before, but this time the house he is breaking into belongs to friends of ours.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘But you can’t break into friends’ houses. It just isn’t on,’ I protested.

  ‘Exactly how I feel,’ my mother agreed. ‘But it seems that they may have pretty dreadful links with people behind the Iron Curtain or somewhere like that, and they may be very, very clever at pretending to be the kind of people we are – when they’re not at all.’

  I knew at once what she was not saying and probably wouldn’t dare to say, even to me.

  ‘I don’t know how anyone gets from A to B when it comes to security,’ she went on. ‘I mean, potentially everyone is a double agent, and now it seems it can only be proved by breaking into people’s lovely homes and going through their things. I mean it is the most awful notion, but what can you do about it?’

  ‘Would you like a cup of hot chocolate?’ I asked because it was usually my answer to everything.

  ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ she said, and we went downstairs to the kitchen and made hot chocolate, only to be disturbed a very little later by my father and another man, returning really rather noisily and not at all like I imagined burglars should.

  ‘We almost got caught, my dear, just as you said we might be,’ my father announced triumphantly as we came upstairs and met them in the drawing room.

  ‘Luckily Roger here had the presence of mind to call the police.’

  As my mother stared at them my father explained.

  ‘We broke in all right. The skeleton keys worked perfectly, and we took some snaps, but then you-know-who came back much earlier than expected because they found the opera tedious and left in the interval – so Roger sprang to the telephone and called 999, while I explained that we had been passing the house when we realised the front door was ajar and there were people inside intent on burglary.’

  He started to laugh.

  ‘They were so grateful. Really they were. Particularly, they said, since nothing had been taken, thank goodness.’

  I tried to laugh and my mother tried to laugh, and we went to bed only too thankful that nothing more had happened.

  But my feeling of relief did not last long. The following day Arabella told me I had been appointed to Security Codes and Safes.

  We all had our individual codes to our individual safes, but the main safe had them all. He was Top Top Safe, so very safe.

  ‘It’s a two-week rota,’ she explained. ‘You just have to be the first in and the last out. Quite simple, nothing to it, we’ve all done it, and you’ll get the hang of it in a second.’

  I couldn’t agree with her. Memories of the Gaggia machine came back to me, the faces of the customers as they surveyed hot milk instead of coffee, and coffee instead of tea, this coupled with the face of the proprietor when I told him that I had waived any payments from the customers because I felt so bad about it all – the memories were not at all reassuring. The proprietor had not been pleased, but he was not a member of MI5; he had merely entrusted me with his Gaggia machine, and the result had been spillage of a high order, but not war with Russia. Now I was being entrusted with security files, and codes for all the cabinets, the final one that only I could know being changed every week and being Top Secret, which was the highest rating.

  Arabella ran through the whole process for me several times.

  ‘The main safe clicks in the same way that your personal safe clicks each way you turn it,’ she said, using her helpful voice. ‘You know, turn it to the right, click, turn it twice to the left, click, click, and so on. Well, it is the same principle with the main safe. You will be given a code and none of us will know it, click, click, click, and all our codes will be in there, and the same for the door, click, click, click.’

  I wished to goodness she would stop clicking at me, I was beginning to find it unnerving, a bit like being faced with a clucking hen, but with no nice egg in prospect.

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone will be later than you tonight,’ she added, ‘because I suspect the Dragon will be up to her usual tricks and you will have to redo a whole lot of work, so it won’t be too much bother for you to stay on.’

  It seemed to me that there was nothing quieter at evening-tide than MI5.

  Of course I did indeed have a whole lot of work to redo, but the sound of the old Underwood I was typing on was like a hammer banging in my head. I stopped every now and then, wondering what I would do if the Section were broken into.

  Supposing a Russian armed to the teeth, and knowing that I was my father’s daughter, had prior knowledge of my being in charge of Section Codes and broke in and demanded the Big Code for the central safe?

  I wished that I had my father’s knuckleduster, but then I realised that it would be far
too big for my hand and wished for his swordstick instead. I could run someone through all right … but then I set to wondering if I really could.

  Maybe the gun would be better? But would it be worth it? Killing a man intent on trying to find out about communists might be a bit of a waste of time since he was one himself. This thought made me relax. I would not be responsible for ending someone’s life, but I might ask him to sit down and would make him a nice cup of tea on the sound principle that this was the British way.

  I glanced at my watch. It was late all right, and no one else was in the Section. I must now do this very simple thing. I must shut up my safe as I always did, and go to the main safe, remembering the secret code, click, click, click it in, and then go home satisfied that I had done my duty to Her Majesty’s government, Great Britain and democracy.

  I said goodnight in a cheerful manner to the policeman on the door, and sashayed down the street to the bus stop, filled with the confidence of a person who has done a job well. As luck would have it fortune smiled on me. A number nine came trundling up.

  The bus conductor sang tunefully. I sat in my favourite seat watching London on a spring evening from the top deck, and thought of all the things that I would do when I reached home. I would go quietly to my room, taking with me something to eat, which I would wheedle out of Mrs Graham, and then I would lie down on my bed and read one of my favourite books.

  Everything was fine until I reached home. It was just as I was putting my key in the lock that I realised I had shut the main safe, but had I remembered to shut my own? I simply couldn’t recall doing so.

  I stood on the pavement outside the house, trying and trying to recall the wretched sequence of events, until I decided there was nothing else to be done except to go back. If I couldn’t remember whether I had closed my own safe, perhaps I hadn’t even closed the main safe? I hurried back down the front steps to the road and started to run. No good waiting for the bus – by the time it arrived the dreaded masked Russian raider of my imagination could have purloined the secrets of the whole Section. I took a taxi back to MI5. Once there I sprang out of the cab and rushed inside.