Open Secret

11

Changes for women were not the only changes taking place in MI5 in the 1970s. The new requirement to tackle terrorism, which started early in the decade, was beginning to bring about what were to be profound changes in culture and methods of working. But I did not realise any of this until later, because by the middle of 1974, John had been offered another posting abroad. This time he was to go to be Counsellor (Social and Regional Affairs) in the UK Representation to the EEC in Brussels, as part of the British team which was to ‘renegotiate’ the Treaty of Rome. My second baby was due in November, and I decided to stay on in London when he left for Brussels in July and continue working until October and then go out to join him.

With my new officer status secured, and a rather firmer grip on the career ladder, I was not anxious to leave and throw away what I had worked hard to achieve. Having got the bit between my teeth by then, I hoped that the Service might be prepared to offer me some work while we were in Brussels so that I could continue my career. Several possibilities occurred to me. There were security adviser posts in the EEC and in NATO, which were often filled by MI5 officers, or maybe I could be seconded to work for another department in Brussels for the duration. I went off to see my personnel officer, this time a somewhat more open-minded man than before, to put these ideas to him. But even he was amazed that I should be thinking of such a thing. He told me firmly that those security posts were for experienced officers (I took him to mean men) and I would not be regarded as suitable. As for secondment to another department, he did not think that was a sensible idea. I went away, firmly put in my place. Yet again I was asking for too much, and the imagination of those in charge could not or would not stretch to include what I wanted. I was told that I could have up to two years special leave to accompany John on his posting abroad. My pension would be frozen and I could pick up where I left off when, and if, I returned. I really do not think they expected to see me again.

Though I was anxious not to lose my position on the career ladder, I was not sorry to be leaving London. The previous winter had been particularly grim. We were having modernisation work done on the house, including an improved central heating system and a much needed damp course, which meant that we had had to evacuate the kitchen and live in the bedrooms, cooking on a camping stove. All this was made worse by the fact that the lights kept going out at irregular times, as Mr Heath slugged it out with the unions and the country struggled with the three-day week. At the office we were all issued with candles, which we stuck in our in-trays, and with a printed warning not to use the lifts.

Of course, as I now know, the industrial disruption in 1973 and 1974 meant far more than candles in the in-tray to some of my colleagues working in a different part of the Service, though the operation of the ‘need-to-know’ rule meant that, at the time, the rest of us knew nothing of what they were doing. The Communist Party of Great Britain then, as later when I was involved at the time of the second great miners’ strike, had a large so-called ‘industrial department’, which was focused on achieving influence at executive level in the key unions, with the objective of controlling their policies. My colleagues then, as I later, had the difficult task of deciding what aspects of the industrial unrest were properly their concern and should be investigated, assessed and reported to ministers and what were not. Making these distinctions is not straightforward and lays open to suspicion and criticism those who are responsible for deciding them.

I left London behind with no regrets. By that time the IRA had launched a bombing campaign on the mainland which had come close to home with bombs in high-profile locations including Oxford Street and it was difficult to avoid a feeling that civilised life was coming to an end. The renegotiation in Brussels, in which John was involved, was by that time in full swing and the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC was due the following June. A ‘No’ vote would probably have meant that we would have returned straight home. As it was, we stayed in Brussels, thankfully somewhat insulated from strikes, bombs and the inflation which began to rage its way upwards in Britain.

Sophie and I left London to live in Brussels at the beginning of November 1974, accompanied by the eighteen-year-old daughter of a colleague of mine in the Service, who was to be our au pair. I remember the journey well. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, driving a desperately overloaded Sunbeam Rapier car. We were travelling on the Dover to Zeebrugge ferry. As we were waiting on the dockside to board the ferry, all of a sudden smoke and a strong smell of burning filled the car. We grabbed Sophie out of the back, where she was sitting on a pile of luggage and I yelled to a policeman that we were on fire. I thought the car was about to blow up at any minute, and he greatly annoyed me by pausing to call into his radio, ‘Car on fire on Dock No. 2,’ before coming over to help us.

When he arrived he discovered that I had rested our lunch basket on top of the cigar lighter, which in those cars was between the two front passenger seats. Being held down it had overheated and started to melt the surrounding plastic. With a comforting calm and what seemed to me great presence of mind, he pulled it out with his gloved hands and threw it in a convenient puddle, and the fire subsided. By this time a crowd had gathered; it was a dramatic departure from the UK.

I went backwards and forwards with the children on that ferry many times during those two years in Brussels and something always seemed to go wrong. On one occasion another car I was driving, a Rover we had bought new to take out with us, refused to start when the ferry arrived in Belgium. We had to be ignominiously pushed off the boat and I found myself in Zeebrugge docks at 10 o’clock at night with a useless car, a small child and a baby, with no milk for the baby, all the shops shut and very little money. I had never liked that car ever since the gear lever came off in my hand one day when I was driving home with four children from a visit to Antwerp Zoo.

I had intended merely to spend long enough in Brussels to get established in the house and then to return to London to have the baby at University College Hospital where Sophie had been born. That is not how it worked out. We had been there about ten days when our heavy baggage arrived by road. With typical impatience, I decided to unpack it all by myself, having given the au pair a couple of days off to visit a relative in Holland. After a day spent leaning into tea chests and lifting things out and unwrapping them, by the early evening it was becoming apparent that all was not as it should be with the baby. I had no idea where John was. Having only just arrived in the country, and not expecting to need the services of a hospital, I did not know where it was, or even how to get hold of a doctor. I had not met any of the other wives in UKREP and was really quite isolated. It got to about 4 a.m. I was having regular contractions and just beginning to panic and tell myself that I must get up and do something about the situation, when John arrived home.

He had been at a meeting of COREPER, the Committee of Permanent Representatives to the European Community, which had been preparing for the first ever European Summit, the meeting of European Prime Ministers to take place in Paris. After the meeting was over, and like all such meetings in those days it had gone on well into the night, John had gone off with Ewen Fergusson, at the time the Head of Chancery at UKREP, to prepare a telegram to the Foreign Office, reporting the conclusions of the meeting. But they had been unable to get it done because Ewen’s secretary, who was to type it up, had lost her cat, and was in tears and inconsolable. She had to be cajoled to come in to the office to take dictation, and that took a long time.

That cat, a nasty brute called Milly, eventually came to us when its owner went home. She was a cat of advanced murderous tendencies, and used to spend the night killing small furry animals whose corpses she laid out by the front door for our inspection in the morning. Worse, she discovered that on the undeveloped land next to our garden there were baby rabbits and moles and she took to bringing them in alive during dinner parties and biting off their heads under the dining-room table.

Having arrived home at last, John was able to get hold of a doctor, and at 7 a.m. we drove through a cold, grey, wet November morning to the Edith Cavell Institute, with Sophie who had been dragged out of her bed to go with us. There Harriet was born, three weeks early. The nuns, who were the nurses at the Institute, thought I was a most feckless mother. I had no clothes for the baby. When Sophie was born in hospital in Britain, it was customary for new babies to wear hospital clothes until they left to go home. In Belgium, as I learned, you go into hospital with a full layette of baby clothes. John had to go out as soon as the shops opened and buy a hideously expensive wardrobe of exquisite baby clothes from a fashionable Brussels store next to the hospital.

Even when the baby had some clothes, the nuns went on disapproving of me. As soon as it became known among the UKREP wives that a new wife had appeared on the scene and not only had she slipped through their well oiled welcoming net, but she had had a baby as well, I was inundated with visitors. There was a Foreign Office wives’ system in operation, which was supposed to pick up each new arrival and welcome her into the bosom of the family. I think it had missed me, probably because I had already been over to Brussels earlier in the summer, while I was still working, for a holiday and to sussout the living arrangements.

On that occasion I had been amazed to receive a telephone call from an aggressively cheerful lady who said, ‘Hello, Stella. I am your welcoming wife,’ and offered to take me shopping. I was rather taken aback, as I saw myself as a career woman on her summer holidays not someone in need of welcoming, and I was rather dismissive. However, pinned down in my hospital bed, I was much more vulnerable to this approach, which of course was kindly meant. But I felt very exposed as more and more people, none of whom I knew, poked their heads round the door of my room and came in clutching presents, usually something for the baby and a bottle of champagne for me. After a bit, I began to enter into the spirit of things and my room became like a party. The nuns did not think it at all proper that a new mother should be entertaining so freely from her hospital bed and knocking back champagne with quite such gay abandon and they warned me solemnly about the likely effect on my blood pressure. I was glad to escape from their clutches, and I am sure they were relieved to see me go. I got home quite exhausted by the relentless socialising.

I enjoyed having the opportunity to be at home with both my daughters for a time, but that was the only thing I did enjoy about Brussels. Once again I had that sense of loss of identity and exclusion from everything that is interesting that you get, or used to get, as a diplomatic wife in a foreign posting. Those mid-1970s years were the beginning of the end for the Foreign Office’s traditional attitude to its wives. The custom had been that Her Majesty’s Government paid for one employee, but acquired the services of two. The wives of diplomats were expected to devote their energies to furthering the interests of the Post and it was made clear that their success or otherwise in doing this would influence the course of their husband’s future career. In return, they had a bigger house to live in and an overall standard of living that was more splendid than they had at home, which might or might not have been what they wanted. They also had, in some places, some difficult living conditions to cope with for themselves and their children.

Things had changed a little from when I had last been a diplomatic wife in India in the late 1960s. By the mid-70s wives were allowed to work in the country in which they were posted, provided the Head of Mission and the country concerned did not object. But it was not common, and wives were still expected to spend a lot of their time on entertaining and charity and other good works. There was a lot of entertaining to be done in Brussels in the mid-70s. Because it was so near London, ministers, politicians of all shapes and sizes, businessmen, trades unionists and civil servants streamed in, and it seemed to be expected that some sort of hospitality would be laid on for them all. Employing a cook for all these occasions was too expensive, and most of us did quite a lot of the cooking ourselves.

Looking back, I seem to have been forever standing in my kitchen, listening to the planes coming very low over the house to land at Zaventem airport, curling brandy snaps round the handle of a wooden spoon. I was not the only wife who felt she was being used as an unpaid cook and a lot of muttering went on, though alongside it went a lot of competition and the standard of cuisine to be found at most British diplomatic tables was excellent. It did all rather come to a head though, before the start of the British Presidency in the first half of 1977. Months earlier we wives had all been called together by Lady Maitland, the wife of the Permanent Representative to the EEC, our boss, and told that it was expected that during the Presidency we would feed our guests traditional British dishes. For those who did not know what these were, a recipe list was available.

Most of us had by then become rather expert at continental European cookery, using some of the wonderful ingredients available at supermarkets like Rob in Brussels, and we did not much relish having to revert to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I recruited my mother, who happened to be staying with us, to cook apple pie for one particular dinner party during that period. I had never learned how to make pastry as well as she could.

For me being in Brussels was a disorientating sensation. I had by then come to regard myself as a career woman, and here I was, definitely classified as ‘a wife’, though I had graduated from a First Secretary wife (as in Delhi) to a Counsellor wife. I suppose it is rather ironic that though I spent nearly two years at the heart of the European Community during a very important period for Britain, my most abiding memory is how to make brandy snaps.

Living in Brussels was nothing like as exciting as Delhi had been. It was not like living in the capital city of any other country; I, at least, had no real sense of what country I was in. For one thing, I hardly ever met a Belgian to talk to socially. All the people who came to our house were either British or other Europeans, very rarely Belgians. The only exception to this was when, very briefly, Sophie went to a Flemish primary school in the commune.

We lived in Wezembeek, at the time a small Flemish village built around a church, with a few modern houses on its outskirts, one of which was our home. There was a fashionable theory going around among the wives that it was good for small children to go to non-English-language schools; they would quickly pick up the language concerned, the theory went, and become deeply cosmopolitan, and that would be a good thing in later life.

That is certainly not how it worked for Sophie. At just about four, she was already a nervous child – ‘genetic,’ I would say; ‘early upbringing,’ my mother would counter – but whatever the reason, she was. Coming to Brussels was exciting for her, and having me around at home was great and she loved it when the new baby arrived. Then she was put into a school where she could not understand a word anyone said to her. It was not a good experience. She did indeed learn a collection of Flemish words, and sang along with the best in a performance of some, to me, totally incomprehensible song at the school parents’ day. She was adept at interpreting ‘Vicky the Viking’ on Flemish TV in the evenings, but she hated that school and as it was her first school, I think it coloured her attitude to institutions for the rest of her life – and she very soon forgot the Flemish.

I look back on my tune in Brussels with no pleasure at all, in fact I have tried for the most part to block it out from my memory altogether. John and I had drifted far apart by then, so I was glad when it came time for me to return to London and take up my career again. He stayed on in Brussels to finish his posting.