Great Britain. MI5 - MI5 and Me. A Coronet Among the Spooks

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.

Non-fiction

Coronet Among the Weeds

Coronet Among the Grass

Spies and Stars

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

Fridays 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

Roses Story

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.

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 didnt believe him; I just wasnt 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 mothers nerves even more than usual, he called me into the drawing room.

I didnt 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 didnt 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 couldnt be going to tell me because he definitely didnt know them. I mean parents just didnt, did they they were parents, for heavens sake. They told you off, and moaned about school fees, and generally found you a pain, but they didnt do It. They couldnt. 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 hadnt really believed her because, quite honestly, they didnt 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 didnt like to say that I would rather paint my toenails with poison than go around telling people things they either knew already or maybe didnt 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, its not very nice, is it, MI5? Its 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, youre 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 didnt 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.