It happened in the afternoon when we attended the lecture in Leconfield House, with the title ‘Economic Anarchy, Civic Unrest’. The meeting was well attended. By an unspoken convention, whenever we had a distinguished visitor, the seating arranged itself by status. Right up in the front were various grand figures from the fifth floor. Three rows back was Harry Tapp, sitting with Millie Trimingham. Two rows behind them was Max, talking to a man I’d never seen before. Then there were the packed ranks of women below assistant desk officer status. And finally, Shirley and I, the naughty girls, had the back row to ourselves. I, at least, had a notebook at the ready.
The Director General came forward to introduce the visiting speaker, a brigadier, as someone with long experience in counter-insurgency, who was now in a consultative role with the Service. From scattered parts of the room there was applause for a military man. He spoke with a trace of the clipped manner we associate now with old British movies and 1940s wireless commentaries. There were still a few around among our seniors who exuded that flinty seriousness derived from their experience of a prolonged and total war.
But the brigadier also had a taste for the occasional flowery phrase. He said he was aware that there was a good number of ex-servicemen in the room and he hoped they would forgive him for stating facts well known to them but not to others. And the first of those facts was this – our soldiers were fighting a war, but no politician had the courage to give it that name. Men sent in to keep apart factions divided by obscure and ancient sectarian hatred found themselves attacked by both sides. Rules of engagement were such that trained soldiers were not allowed to respond in the way they knew best. Nineteen-year-old squaddies from Northumberland or Surrey, who may once have thought their mission was to come and protect the Catholic minority from the Protestant ascendancy, lay bleeding their lives, their futures, into the gutters of Belfast and Derry while Catholic children and teenage yobs taunted them and cheered. These men were being felled by sniper fire, often from tower blocks, and generally by IRA gunmen working under cover of coordinated riot or street disturbance. As for last year’s Bloody Sunday, the Paras were under intolerable pressure from those same well-tried tactics – Derry hooligans backed up by sniper fire. The Widgery Report last April, produced with commendable speed, had confirmed the facts. That said, it was clearly an operational error to have an aggressive and highly motivated outfit like the Paras policing a civil-rights march. It should have been the task of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Even the Royal Anglians would have been a calmer influence.
But it was done, and the net effect of killing thirteen civilians on that day was to endear both wings of the IRA to the world. Money, arms and recruits were as rivers of honey in spate. Sentimental and ignorant Americans, many of Protestant rather than Catholic descent, were feeding the fires with their foolish dollars donated to the Republican cause through fundraisers like NORAID. Not until the United States had its own terrorist attacks would it even begin to understand. To right the tragedy of Derry’s wasted lives, the Official IRA slaughtered five cleaning ladies, a gardener and a Catholic priest in Aldershot, while the Provisionals murdered mothers and children in Belfast’s Abercorn restaurant, some of them Catholics. And during the national strike our boys confronted ugly Protestant mobs, spurred on by the Ulster Vanguard, as nasty a bunch as one could hope to meet. Then the ceasefire, and when that failed, utter savagery dispensed to the Ulster public by psychopathic gun and bomb toters of both persuasions, and thousands of armed robberies and indiscriminate nail bombings, knee cappings, punishment beatings, five thousand seriously injured, several hundred killed by loyalist and Republican militias, and quite a few by the British army – though not, of course, intentionally. Such were the tallies for 1972.
The brigadier sighed theatrically. He was a big man, with eyes too small for the bony mass of his head. Neither a lifetime of spit and polish nor his tailored dark suit and breast pocket handkerchief could contain the shaggy, shambling six-foot-three bulk of him. He appeared ready to dispatch a score of psychopaths with his own bare hands. Now, he told us, the Provisional IRA had organised itself into cells on the mainland in classic terrorist style. After eighteen months of lethal attacks, the word was they were about to get worse. The pretence of going for purely military assets had long been dropped. The game was terror. As in Northern Ireland, children, shoppers, ordinary working men were all suitable targets. Bombs in department stores and pubs would have even more impact in the context of the widely anticipated social breakdown brought on by industrial decline, high unemployment, rising inflation and an energy crisis.
It was to our collective dishonour that we had failed to expose the terrorist cells or disrupt their lines of supply. And this was to be his main point – there was one overriding reason for our failure, which was the lack of coordinated intelligence. Too many agencies, too many bureaucracies defending their corners, too many points of demarcation, insufficient centralised control.
The only sound was a creak of chairs and whispers, and I saw in front of me a restrained movement of heads tilting or turning minimally, of shoulders canting slightly towards a neighbour. The brigadier had touched upon a common complaint in Leconfield House. Even I had heard some of it, from Max. No flow of information across the borders of the jealous empires. But was our visitor going to tell the room what it wanted to hear, was he on our side? He was. He said MI6 was operating where it was not supposed to be, in Belfast and Londonderry, in the United Kingdom. With its remit of foreign intelligence, Six had a historical claim which dated back before Partition and was now irrelevant. This was a domestic issue. The territory therefore belonged to Five. Army Intelligence was over-staffed, mired in procedural antecedents. The RUC Special Branch, which considered itself the owner of the turf, was clumsy, under-resourced and, more to the point, part of the problem – a Protestant fiefdom. And who else could have made such a mess of internment in ’71?
Five had been right to keep its distance from the dubious interrogation techniques, torture in anyone’s book. Now it was doing its best in a crowded field. But even if each agency was staffed by geniuses and paragons of efficiency, four in collaboration could never defeat the monolithic entity of the Provisional IRA, one of the most formidable terrorist groups the world had ever known. Northern Ireland was a vital concern of domestic security. The Service must get a grip and advance its claim through the Whitehall corridors, suborn the other players to its will, become the rightful inheritor of the estate, and move in on the root of the problem.
There was no applause, partly because the brigadier’s tone was close to exhortation, and that sort of thing didn’t go down well here. And everyone knew that an assault on Whitehall’s corridors would hardly be enough. I didn’t take notes during the discussion between the brigadier and the Director General. From the question session I recorded only one of the questions, or ran a couple together as representative of the general drift. They came from the ex-colonial officers – one in particular I remember was Jack MacGregor, who had a dry, gingerish look and the tightly swallowed vowels of a South African, though he originally came from Surrey. He and some of his colleagues were particularly interested in the proper response to social breakdown. What would be the role of the Service? And what about the army? Could we stand aside and watch public order break down in the event that the government couldn’t hold the line?
The Director General answered – curtly and with excessive politeness. The Service was accountable to the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Home Secretary, the army to the Ministry of Defence, and that was how it would remain. The emergency powers were sufficient to meet any threat and were something of a challenge to democracy in themselves.
A few minutes later, the question returned in a more pointed form from another ex-colonial. Suppose at the next general election a Labour government was returned. And suppose its left wing made common cause with radical union elements and one saw a direct threat to parliamentary democracy. Surely some form of co
ntingency planning would be in order.
I wrote down the DG’s exact words. ‘I rather think I’ve made the position perfectly clear. Restoring democracy, as it’s called, is what the army and security services might do in Paraguay. Not here.’
I thought the DG was embarrassed to have what he would have thought of as ranchers and tea planters reveal their colours before an outsider, who was nodding gravely.
It was at this point that Shirley startled the room by calling out from her back-row seat next to mine, ‘These berks want to stage a coup!’
There was a collective gasp and all heads turned to look at us. She had broken several rules at a stroke. She had spoken unbidden by the Director General, and had used a dubious word like ‘berk’, whose provenance as rhyming slang some must have known. She had thereby insulted decorum and two desk officers far senior to herself. She had been uncouth in front of a visitor. And, she was lowly, and she was a woman. And, worst of all, she was probably right. None of that would have mattered to me but for the fact that Shirley sat nonchalantly before the collective glare, while I blushed, and the more I blushed the more certain everyone was that I was the one who had spoken. Aware of what they were thinking, I blushed even more, until my neck was hot. Their eyes were no longer fixed on us, but on me. I wanted to crawl under my chair. My shame rose in my throat for the crime I had not committed. I fiddled with my notebook – those notes I had hoped would earn me respect – and lowered my eyes, stared at my knees and so provided yet more evidence of my guilt.
The Director General brought the occasion back to its formal proprieties by thanking the brigadier. There was applause, the brigadier and the DG left the room and people stood to go, and turned to look at me again.
Suddenly Max was right in front of me. He said quietly, ‘Serena, that wasn’t a good idea.’
I turned to appeal to Shirley but she was in the crowd going out through the door. I don’t know how I came by such a masochistic code of honour that prevented me from insisting I wasn’t the one who had called out. And yet I was sure that by now the DG would be asking for my name, and someone like Harry Tapp would be telling him.
Later, when I caught up with Shirley and confronted her, she told me the whole thing was trivial and hilarious. I shouldn’t worry, she told me. It would do me no harm for people to think I had a mind of my own. But I knew that the opposite was true. It would do me a lot of harm. People at our level were not supposed to have minds of their own. This was my first black mark, and it was not the last.
6
I was expecting a reprimand, but instead my moment came – I was sent out of the building on a secret mission, and Shirley went with me. We received our instructions one morning from a desk officer called Tim Le Prevost. I’d seen him about the place but he’d never spoken to us before. We were summoned to his office and invited to listen carefully. He was a small-lipped tightly buttoned chap with narrow shoulders and a rigid expression, almost certainly ex-army. A van was parked in a locked garage off a Mayfair street half a mile away. We were to drive to an address in Fulham. It was a safe house, of course, and in the brown envelope he tossed across his desk were various keys. In the back of the van we would find cleaning materials, a Hoover and vinyl aprons, which we were to put on before we set off. Our cover was that we worked for a firm called Springklene.
When we arrived at our destination we were to give the place ‘a damned good going over’, which would include changing the sheets on all the beds and cleaning the windows. Clean linen had already been delivered. One of the mattresses on a single bed needed to be turned. It should have been replaced long ago. The lavatories and bath needed particular attention. The rotten food in the fridge was to be disposed of. All ashtrays were to be emptied. Le Prevost enunciated these homely details with much distaste. Before the day was out, we were to go to a small supermarket on the Fulham Road and buy basic provisions and three meals a day for two persons for three days. A separate trip was to be made to an off-licence, where we should buy four bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label. We were to settle for nothing else. Here was another envelope with fifty pounds in fivers. He wanted receipts and change. We were to remember to triple lock the front door on our way out with the three Banhams. Above all, we should never in our lives mention this address, not even to colleagues in this building.
‘Or,’ Le Prevost said, with a twist of his little mouth, ‘do I mean especially?’
We were dismissed and when were out of the building, heading along Curzon Street, it was Shirley, not me, who was scathing.
‘Our cover,’ she kept saying in a loud whisper. ‘Our bloody cover. Cleaning ladies pretending to be cleaning ladies!’
It was an insult, of course, though less of one then than it would be now. I didn’t say the obvious, that the Service could hardly bring in outside cleaners to a safe house, any more than it could call on our male colleagues – they were not only too grand, but they would have made a terrible job. I surprised myself with my stoicism. I think I must have absorbed the general spirit of camaraderie and cheerful devotion to duty among the women. I was becoming like my mother. She had the Bishop, I had the Service. Like her I had my own strong-minded inclination to obey. I did worry, however, whether this was the job that Max had said was right up my street. If it was, I’d never talk to him again.
We found the garage and put on our aprons. Shirley, wedged in tight behind the wheel, was still muttering mutinously as we pulled out into Piccadilly. The van was pre-war – it had spoked wheels and a running board and must have been among the last of the sit-up-and-beg contraptions on the road. The name of our firm was written on the sides in art deco lettering. The ‘k’ of ‘Springklene’ was done up as a gleeful housemaid wielding a feather duster. I thought we looked far too conspicuous. Shirley drove with surprising confidence, swinging us at speed round Hyde Park Corner and demonstrating a flashy technique with the gear stick, known, she told me, as double declutching, necessary on such an ancient crate.
The flat occupied the ground floor of a Georgian house in a quiet side street and was grander than I expected. All the windows were barred. Once we were in with our mops, fluids and buckets, we made a tour. The squalor was even more depressing than Le Prevost had implied and was of the obvious male sort, right down to a once-sodden cigar stub on the edge of the bath, and a foot-high pile of The Times, with some copies roughly quartered, moonlighting as lavatory paper. The sitting room had an abandoned late-night air – drawn curtains, empty bottles of vodka and scotch, heaped ashtrays, four glasses. There were three bedrooms, the smallest of which had a single bed. On its mattress, which was stripped, was a wide patch of dried blood, just where a head might rest. Shirley was loudly disgusted, I was rather thrilled. Someone had been intensively interrogated. Those Registry files were connected to real fates.
As we went round taking in the mess, she continued to complain and exclaim, and clearly wanted me to join in. I tried, but my heart wasn’t in it. If my small part in the war against the totalitarian mind was bagging up decaying food and scraping down hardened bathtub scum, then I was for it. It was only a little duller than typing up a memo.
It turned out that I had a better understanding of the work involved – odd, considering my cosseted childhood with nanny and daily. I suggested we did the filthiest stuff first, lavatories, bathroom, kitchen, clearing the rubbish, then we could start on the surfaces, then the floors and finally the beds. But before all else, we turned the mattress, for Shirley’s sake. There was a radio in the sitting room and we decided that it would be consistent with our cover to have pop music playing. We went at it for two hours, then I took one of the fivers and went out to buy the wherewithal for a tea break. On the way back I used some change to feed the parking meter. When I returned to the house, Shirley was perched on the edge of one of the double beds, writing in her little pink book. We sat in the kitchen, drank tea, smoked and ate chocolate biscuits. The radio was playing, there was fresh air and sunlight through the open w
indows and Shirley was restored to a good mood and told me a surprising story about herself while she finished off all the biscuits.
Her English teacher at the Ilford comprehensive, a force in her life the way certain teachers can be, was a Labour councillor, probably ex-Communist Party, and it was through him that she found herself at the age of sixteen on an exchange with German students. That is, she went to communist East Germany with a school group, to a village an hour’s bus ride from Leipzig.
‘I thought it was going to be shit. Everyone said it would be. Serena, it was fucking paradise.’
‘The GDR?’
She lodged with a family on the edge of the village. The house was an ugly, cramped two-bedroom bungalow but there was a half-acre of orchard and a stream, and not far away a forest big enough to get lost in. The father was a TV engineer, the mother a doctor, and there were two little girls under five years who fell in love with the lodger and used to climb into her bed early in the morning. The sun always shone in East Germany – it was April, and by chance there was a heatwave. There were expeditions into the forest to hunt for morels, there were friendly neighbours, everyone encouraged her German, someone had a guitar and knew some Dylan songs, there was a good-looking boy with three fingers on one hand who was keen on her. He took her to Leipzig one afternoon to see a serious football match.
‘No one had much. But they had enough. At the end of ten days I thought, no, this really works, this is better than Ilford.’
‘Maybe everywhere is. Especially in the countryside. Shirley, you could have had a good experience just outside Dorking.’