MI5 and Me Read online

  ‘Good thinking, Lottie,’ he said. ‘That’s the kind of thinking that won us the war.’

  I returned to the Section feeling I had really come on. I had done my bit to keep the Great in Britain. Arabella was waiting to take me to lunch, not to Fenwick’s, where we might be overheard, but to a bench in Green Park where we ate sandwiches.

  ‘So what is the new lodger like?’ she asked.

  I stared ahead of me, knowing that she would really enjoy what I had to tell her.

  ‘He’s an actor,’ I said. ‘Not exactly a famous actor – more a sort of well-known one. Quite handsome actually, and charming, and going to stay at Dingley Dell for a few weeks, if not months. Of course my mother is thrilled. She really does love actors, because they make her laugh, and she doesn’t have to take the ladies out to powder their noses after dinner if there’s an actor there. She says that’s because actors “come off it”, which is nice for her because she likes people who do that. I mean, some of the bogeys she knows are definitely on the stuffy side of things.’

  But Arabella wasn’t listening to my explanation. She was sitting cross-legged on the bench, like a fakir on a bed of nails, but not feeling anything. This was Arabella in deep, deep thought.

  ‘Now, we have here a definite development in the thinking of MI5,’ she announced. ‘If Dingley Dell is going to be the base for actors who are lodging, the thinking must be that entertainments are being used as a powerful tool to convert decent people into rabid communists. They must be afraid of propaganda, of minds being subtly turned by plays and films. After all, some people I know have parents who have never allowed them to go to the cinema or the theatre, in case their minds become diseased by sex. Yes, that’s it, Lottie – there are doubts abroad. They are afraid that instead of watching Passport to Pimlico, honest folk will start to become fascinated by films such as I Was a Slave to Capitalism and other X-rated filth.’

  I looked at her. She was beginning to make me feel as if I was playing Watson to her Sherlock Homes, and I said as much, but Arabella was not in the least interested, too fascinated by her theories of infiltration by communists into film, and even television, although no one admitted to watching it.

  ‘What sort of type is this actor?’

  I considered for a moment.

  ‘Very nice, charming, I told you – oh, and a Roman Catholic.’

  This pleased Arabella no end.

  ‘Well, there you are. You see, that is the thinking now: only Roman Catholicism can beat world communism on account of the Papists having so many babies. All victories depend on numbers; one of my mother’s lovers told me that. You just need more people in your army than in the other army, and if you have – you win.’

  It was time to go back to our Section. We walked on towards the building and once we had shown our passes, and were back up in the Section, I said to her, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. Poor Commander Steerforth …’ I lowered my voice. ‘He found out that somehow, before she left, Laetitia lost twenty-eight security films that were bound for Africa and they just can’t be found. Not that they sound much good, quite frankly, but even so, they were Top Secret.’

  Arabella looked vague, and I knew that was because she was still thinking about subversion through film and television.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, before she left to get married, Laetitia lost twenty-eight security films.’

  This time Arabella heard me. She looked at me across her typewriter and shook her head.

  ‘She didn’t lose them,’ she said. ‘She never lost them. She chucked them down the lift shaft. She thought they were stupid.’

  I stared at her. If this was true then Commander Steerforth was out of the woods. No one in MI5 would dream of looking for security films down the lift shaft. It was bad enough getting into the lift.

  ‘Well, that’s all right,’ I said happily. ‘As long as they’re down the lift shaft, no harm done.’

  To which Arabella readily agreed.

  HEARTS OF OAK

  Pretty soon after MI5 had taken the decision to infiltrate show business everything started to change at Dingley Dell.

  I felt mildly excited by the arrival of the first actor, and since I had feigned his religion before the Dragon so often, I felt I might be in tune with him – not that we met often. We wouldn’t since I left early in the morning for MI5 and he slept in after his performance in the West End. He was appearing in an American musical comedy, actually one of my father’s current favourites. Sometimes the thought did occur to me that my father might have recruited him so he could get to see the show as many times as he wished. My mother said he had seen it seven times already.

  ‘And now he’s asked the lodger to Sunday lunch, I don’t suppose we will hear the end of it,’ she moaned. ‘You know your father and musicals. He can never get enough of them, and the worst of it is he will hum the tunes all the way home in the taxi. Heaven only knows what will happen now he has a musical-comedy star resident in the house: it will be all hell to pay. Why he couldn’t have recruited some nice actor from, say, that production of King Lear at Stratford-upon-Avon, I don’t know.’

  ‘Probably because there are no really good tunes in King Lear.’

  ‘Don’t be facetious, Lottie. Just go downstairs and find out what Mrs Graham is doing to the Sunday roast and tell her not to.’

  My mother closed her eyes in genuine anguish.

  ‘Oh, lord, listen to that. They’ve started singing, and after only one gin and tonic. Whatever next?’

  She turned back into the drawing room with the expression of someone who was about to be tortured.

  I must say, I couldn’t blame her. My father was not naturally musical – he just loved musicals – and unfortunately his singing was more of a dog’s howl than a tuneful tenor, as I observed when I went back into the drawing room. Dear Melville Ashcombe did not seem to mind at all – or, if he did, was polite enough not to show it, happily playing and singing numbers from his show, while my mother sat staring ahead of her with a fixed smile.

  Actually it was rather a jolly scene and one to which I soon found myself looking forward. It made such a change at Dingley Dell to hear the piano and singing rather than the low mutterings of my father’s spooks. Mrs Graham, in the basement busy overcooking the beef, was cheered by it too.

  ‘Nice to see your father relaxing for once,’ she said, several times, before turning up the oven.

  He did seem to have changed a great deal since Melville’s arrival. It wasn’t just the singing and humming of show numbers around the house; the fact was, whether he liked it or not, he had to act differently around actors.

  ‘It’s shaking him up a bit, this new push into theatre and film,’ my mother had muttered, once or twice. ‘He was always a bit of a stickler, as I think perhaps you know.’

  On our first Sunday lunch with Melville I was reminded of this. Our actor friend, all geniality and good humour, had finished his lunch very quickly, in fact rather more quickly than the rest of us.

  ‘It’s all that singing and dancing you’ve been doing,’ Mrs Graham told him, as she hurried in to serve him again. ‘It must turn your insides into a crater afterwards. Starving is what you must be.’

  Well, the second helping was all right, until Melville looked around for some gravy. Naturally my father passed it to him.

  Melville beamed.

  ‘Thank you, Heart of Oak,’ he said.

  The whole table stared at him, even Arabella who had been invited to even out the numbers.

  ‘What was that you said? I didn’t quite catch it.’

  Melville managed to beam while attacking two roast potatoes and half a cow in one go.

  Arabella looked across at me. She might be new to Dingley Dell but even so she realised at once from the tone that was being used – as well as my father asking a question twice – that something was up. It all signalled that he was on high alert.

  Melville was oblivious. He just carried on
beaming, and once the roast potatoes had been disposed of, obligingly repeated what he had just said.

  ‘I said “thank you”.’

  ‘No, the other bit.’

  ‘I just said – ah, yes – I just said, “Thank you, Heart of Oak.”’

  My father stared at him. He had a way of staring that would make any wild beast in the jungle instantly turn tail and run.

  Not Melville, who just nodded happily, while his gaze remained steady, and his eyes reflected nothing but good humour.

  This made my father stare harder in a way that might have disconcerted someone else. He was more used to people calling him ‘sir’. ‘Heart of Oak’ was not at all what he was used to. But for once his hard stare fell flat. Both Arabella and I could see that. Well, it would do, because actors love people staring at them. In fact, they get quite upset if people don’t stare at them. So my father’s reproving look was a waste of time. It might work on normal spooks but not on actor-spooks.

  ‘They’re very different, actors, you know,’ my father stated, thoughtfully, a few days later. ‘They’re not conventional, but they’re very loyal and warm-hearted. I have a feeling they will be a great asset to the Office, even if they do have some funny expressions they come out with.’

  Since I was working at MI5 I couldn’t help being curious about what possible use someone like Melville Ashcombe would be to them.

  ‘They will be able to tell us what is in the pipeline, what is being planned. We will find out what kind of communist-based propaganda is going to be pushed at the general public – and, more than that, we will know who is doing it. This is most important for maintaining moral standards. A country can lose its way overnight after seeing the wrong play or film. We learned that from the war. The film about Nelson, with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh – it did the world of good. And the Hollywood film with that red-haired actress – not Rita Hayworth, the other one – well, it did more to bring America into the war than any of Churchill’s speeches, and we all know it. Powerful stuff, film, very powerful stuff – and don’t let anyone go telling you any different.’

  But of course Melville was not the only actor being adopted as a lodger at Dingley Dell. There was another one in the offing, and like all would-be stars he made a delayed entrance, his tour of England in a new play taking up all his time.

  *

  Meanwhile at MI5, or rather in my Section, Commander Steerforth had recovered from the loss of the security films, to such an extent that now he seemed quite light-hearted and not at all interested in anything except the cakes I brought him from the canteen.

  ‘You know, you really are the best cake-chooser,’ he would say happily, and having scoffed a plateful, would sigh and look at me sadly. ‘I suppose we ought to do some work.’ He looked vague. ‘Not that there is much to do now after the loss of the films.’ He whispered the last word. ‘The thing about that is,’ he went on, ‘this desk was meant to be dealing with the reaction from the other end. You know …’ He spelled out the word ‘Africa’ while at the same time writing it in the air. ‘On receiving the ahems, our job was to instruct and see the whole thing through via memos and so on, but there is none of that now, due to the ahems never having arrived. Or, indeed, as we now surmise, never having gone.’

  I was dying to tell him about the very famous star who was coming to stay with us for a few months, and about Melville Ashcombe calling my father ‘Heart of Oak’ and playing the piano and singing with him, because I knew my boss would like that kind of thing, being naval and used to all the goings on below decks.

  ‘You like films, don’t you, Commander Steerforth?’ I asked in order to cheer him up.

  ‘Yes, I do, very much so – particularly with Vivien Leigh in them. I would go and see anything she was in, anything at all. And I like some of the male leads too. The actors you posted up on the section cabinets, I like their films very much, but not as much as I like Vivien Leigh’s.’

  ‘And you like the theatre too, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I would see anything Henry Flanagan is in, for instance. He is such a fine actor. I hear he has just been touring a new play with Dame Lily Farjeon. That should be a winner, Henry Flanagan and Dame Lily – she is still a stunner. The two of them will make sparks fly, I should think. Mind you, they will need the play. The play’s the thing, as we both know.’

  This was too much of a test of my ability to keep my mouth shut. Any minute now I knew I would be tempted to tell him that Henry Flanagan was coming to live with us, that he was going to become an actor-spook, maybe even working in tandem with Melville Ashcombe. Sometimes I imagined them together, a darkly dressed duo darting into doorways as they saw a well-known Trotskyist they were following coming out of a coffee bar.

  But tempted though I was to blurt out my Henry Flanagan news to Commander Steerforth, I knew to do so would mean that he was ‘blown’, and might not be able to work for my father any more. This was another golden rule that could never be broken. No spook could tell a fellow that he was a spook. He had to keep his spookiness to himself. No one had yet even told Melville Ashcombe that Henry Flanagan was coming to lodge with us, and neither of them would know of each other’s role in the fight against communism. If I told Commander Steerforth my actor-spook news, I would never know the excitement of having the famous Henry Flanagan stay in the room next to mine. No person in the Section should ever talk to a colleague about their work, which was why Arabella’s following the love life of a well-known lady on the intercept phones was such a daring thing to do – but then, Arabella was daring, and all the more so because she did not know it.

  ‘I hope Mrs Graham can cope with two actors, not just one,’ my mother said, looking worried, on the day of the expected arrival of Henry Flanagan. ‘It is quite a burden, you know, two actors in one house, but your father assures me that Henry is quite house-trained and that it will just need a small adjustment and everything will continue on as smoothly as it always has. I only hope he is right. Not that I have heard anything contrary about Henry Flanagan.’

  My mother might not have heard anything but from the moment he erupted from his taxi into Dingley Dell, the whole of Kensington must have heard him. He did not shout, he did not raise his voice, he just boomed – effortlessly.

  ‘My dear lady,’ he said, brushing Mrs Graham’s white cotton cleaning glove with his lips. ‘What a perfect delight to come and stay at your enchanting villa.’

  At first Mrs Graham looked uncertain and then a little indignant, as if being mistaken for my mother was a vague insult.

  ‘I think you had better speak to Madam, sir,’ she said, quickly rubbing the back of her cleaning glove with a duster as if Henry Flanagan had been wearing lipstick and left a mark. ‘Madam is in the drawing room, writing letters.’

  ‘How very Sheridan,’ Henry said, breathing in happily. ‘Or do I mean how very Noël Coward? No, Sheridan, I would say. Yes, definitely Sheridan.’

  Since Commander Steerforth had advised me to stay at home due to his office being painted, I was hanging about the hall pretending to be doing nothing.

  The sight of Henry Flanagan was almost as impressive in its way as the sound of him. He was hugely tall, and wore the sort of clothes that I would soon grow to recognise as actor-laddie clothes. They had a hint of the olden days about them – in his case a three-piece suit, very respectable, but the shirt not closed at the collar with a tie but with a silk scarf in a bow, the whole covered with a large cape, which hung from a metal clasp. Melville’s appearance always reassured, his whole look very much that of the gentleman actor. Until he said things like ‘Heart of Oak’, or waved his handkerchief about in the air when greeting someone, you would never really be able to distinguish him from any other member of the Garrick Club. Henry Flanagan’s appearance, on the other hand, just bellowed ‘actor-laddie’.

  ‘My dear lady.’ This time he was addressing not Mrs Graham, but my mother, and perhaps put off by Mrs Graham’s cleaning glove, he did n
ot kiss my mother’s hand but kissed his fingers to her.

  ‘Ah, Mr Flanagan. You have arrived safely fresh from your tour, I see,’ my mother observed. ‘You came by train?’

  ‘I flew, dear lady, on the wings of hope as all we actors must, I think. And please, call me Hal, as in Prince.’

  ‘Very well, Hal,’ my mother agreed, in the tone of someone who felt she had been forced to cross some unseen boundary she might not otherwise have breached. ‘Shall we ask Mrs Graham to show you to your room?’

  ‘I can show him,’ I volunteered.

  ‘And who is this pretty young person hovering here?’

  ‘Oh, that – that’s our daughter, Lottie.’

  My mother looked uneasy as if I might be about to say the wrong thing, as if I might not be able to handle this huge presence in our house.

  ‘What a pleasure, young lady. Hal Flanagan at your feet with the rest of London, I am sure.’

  I tried to smile and failed because I was already in love with Hal Flanagan – not in the conventional sense but the unconventional. He was everything I always hoped a star actor might be. He was tall, immensely good-looking and well muscled, filling out his suiting and his cloak in a way that suggested he needed only a sword to flourish. Added to which he had a great presence, absolutely dominating the drawing room, which was not small. He was just what an actor should be. He did not disappoint.

  My mother called Mrs Graham, who arrived looking wary, and without gloves.

  ‘I do love a maid,’ Hal murmured to me, his eyes full of appreciation of Mrs Graham’s neat appearance. ‘Especially when they wear pretty aprons like that.’

  ‘Don’t call Mrs Graham a maid,’ I warned him. ‘She wouldn’t like that, really she wouldn’t. She is a daily housekeeper.’

  ‘She has won me already,’ he said happily. ‘So correct, so starchy, it gets the heart quickening.’

  ‘She is married,’ I told him as I led the way up the stairs. ‘Mr Graham helps here too.’

  ‘She can play Mrs Hudson to my Sherlock Holmes any day,’ Hal boomed before stopping in his tracks on seeing someone coming down the stairs towards him.