Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5

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The nuns at that convent school must have been better at teaching than I have allowed. At the age of twelve, without too much difficulty, I was accepted at Nottingham Girls’ High School, one of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust group of schools and then the best girls’ day school in the area. At the beginning, this was the only thing that worked out well about the move to the Midlands. There was no place for my brother, then fifteen, at Nottingham High School, the much older and rather grander boys’ school, neighbour of the girls’ school in Arboretum Street. He had to go to Ilkeston Grammar School, which was considerably less academically distinguished. As he was very clever, much more so than I, that was a disappointment to my mother, though eventually he did very well there.

We found ourselves living in a house which belonged to Stanton Ironworks, a small Edwardian semi in Longfield Lane, on top of a hill just outside Ilkeston, which overlooked the valley in which the Ironworks lay. The view was the best thing about it; you couldn’t quite see the works from the house, but when the wind was in a certain direction, you could smell the sulphurous odour of the coke ovens, or ‘Duckhams’ as they were called, after the manufacturer, Messrs Woodall-Duckhams. ‘Duckhams is strong today,’ people would remark, in the same way as you might say ‘Turned out wet again,’ in other parts of the country. The house itself was gloomy and old-fashioned. I remember coming home from school on my first day and finding my mother close to tears after a day spent scrubbing the red-tiled floor of the kitchen. She had made no headway at all, because it was damp. As well as the damp tiled floor, that room had a black iron stove in the fireplace, with little baking ovens, and in the scullery there was a low stone sink with an open drain beneath it. It was the authentic version of what the kitchen designers try to reproduce nowadays, and it was extremely uncomfortable. The milkman brought the milk in a can, and poured it out into a jug, which we had to have ready for him. There was no refrigerator. To my mother, who had lost her new suburban house in London, with all the family capital tied up in it, to the controlled tenant, it was all deeply unsatisfactory. But there was no chance whatsoever in the circumstances of their buying anything else, so she had to put up with it.

We stayed in that house until I was about eighteen and it did not improve. In fact for Mother it got worse, as her only sister, my Auntie Lilian, to whom she was very close, came there to die when she developed cancer. That was a very grim period. I had been very fond of Auntie Lilian, with whom we had shared our wartime experiences in Wallasey. After my grandmother’s death she had continued to live in the big flat in Church Street which they had shared and where we had stayed during the bombing. She came to stay with us often and always at Christmas, when it was her job to set the table for Christmas dinner and I often went to stay with her on my own. I loved going there; she had kept my grandmother’s furniture, which dated from the time when their lives had been rather grander – brass bedsteads, a big mahogany table and chairs and a heavy mahogany sideboard with fantastic carvings on it. My brother and I used to look at the carvings through a magnifying glass to frighten ourselves when we were young. She also had a piano stool, with a green top that spun round and round; we used to play Wallasey buses with that. My brother had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the stops on all the local bus routes, and he would be the driver with the piano-stool wheel, while I was the conductor, ringing the little brass bell. My mother used that same bell to ring for attention when she got very old. There was one other particularly marvellous thing in that flat, which was an old knife-cleaner. You put the knives in slots at the top and some grey powder in another slot and then you wound a wheel round and round as fast as you could and there was a satisfying grinding noise and the knives came out shiny. I saw a similar one in an antique shop not long ago. When things from your childhood start appearing in antique shops, you know time is beginning to run out for you. It is the same sort of shock you get when you learn that children are studying the period of your childhood as history.

Auntie Lilian worked on the telephone switchboard in the warehouse of a firm called J. Langdon and Sons in Duke Street, Liverpool, crossing the Mersey on the ferry-boat from Seacombe every day. It was a job well beneath her capacity, for she was intelligent and well educated, but she was a casualty of her times, and of their curious family history. She had not been brought up to work, but found herself having to do so. Although I was so fond of her, I feel ashamed to remember that I found myself almost unable to go in to the bedroom to see her when she lay dying in our house. We had only three bedrooms and Brian had to sleep downstairs so Lilian could have his room. She was next door to me and I could hear her drumming on the wall when the pain got very bad.

My mother’s gloom about the move to the Midlands was not helped by my arriving home on my first day and announcing that I hated my new school and I would never settle down there. It must have been the last thing she wanted to hear at the end of a frustrating day spent scrubbing an intractable floor. I found Nottingham Girls’ High School a bit of a shock after the cosiness of the convent. Apart from anything else, I had exchanged my bike ride along quiet roads for a journey which involved a walk down the hill, a trolley bus ride, and then a seven-mile bus journey into Nottingham. It is a sign of the big social changes that have taken place since then that I was despatched on that journey quite alone at the age of twelve with as far as I know no particular anxiety on the part of my parents. I can only once remember anything alarming happening. It was on one return journey when I must have been about thirteen, that a man came and sat next to me on the top deck of the bus. He put his hand on my thigh and all through the journey he stroked it, gradually pulling up the side of my skirt. I was far too scared to say anything to him or to get up and change seats, but he can’t have been too determined as he had not succeeded in reaching my bare leg before it was time for me to get off the bus. When I got up, though, I realised that my skirt was all crushed where he had been folding it into his hand. I was too embarrassed ever to mention this to anyone.

It was a big change for me to go from a small school in large grounds to a large school with no grounds. The school was a series of houses in a then run-down street in a city and it was a most impractical arrangement. It had grown gradually by acquiring more and more houses, not all of which had been joined together, so the girls had to go out in the open air, come rain come shine, as they went from one lesson to another. On the other side of the street was a row of houses which have now been knocked down to let the school extend over the road. A few years ago, when I gave away the prizes at the school speech day, I told the girls that when I was at the school, I had whiled away my time during boring history lessons by gazing out of the classroom window into the windows of the houses across the road, and watching people having their tea. ‘I was a spy at school, says MI5 boss,’ announced the Nottingham Evening Post.

In fact there was not a great deal of time to be bored at that school. There were some fiercely efficient teachers there, like Miss Pretty who taught History. She drummed information into us by a combination of sheer strength of personality and fear. She would regularly announce at the end of the lesson, ‘Test tomorrow,’ and we knew we had to go home and learn up everything that had gone before. She never forgot. The next day she would come striding across from the staff-room in her sensible lace-up shoes and mid-calf tweed skirt and as she swept into the classroom she would be already saying, ‘First question: What was the date of the Drei Kaiserbund?’ She was not the only terrifying teacher in that school.

Miss Todd was equally efficient at dinning Latin and French into us. We learned from those teachers largely I think through fear of their scorn should we fail. The younger teachers could not match their power, though we much preferred their lessons.

I soon settled down and learned to operate in the bigger pond of that school. In the late 1940s, Nottingham Girls’ High School was providing an extremely sound and traditional education for girls from all social classes. Although it was a fee-paying school, the fees were small, something like £12 per term, a sum my parents could afford without too much difficulty. But it also provided a considerable number of free places for those whose families could not afford the fees and the result was a group of girls from very mixed backgrounds.

One of my closest friends was Jean Hardy, a girl whose father had disappeared fighting in the Far East, and was later found to have died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Her mother had been left, not knowing for years whether her husband was alive or dead, to bring up their two daughters with very little money in a prefabricated house in Nottingham. Both girls went to the High School and Jean’s time there totally changed her life, opening up opportunities and giving her contacts which she could never otherwise have had. My education seems to me superior in every way to the education my daughters received at similar schools in London in the 1980s. We came away with an ability to spell, a sound understanding of grammar, helped by a grounding in Latin, French and German, a certain facility in mental arithmetic, although mathematics was never my strong suit, an outline knowledge of the history of Britain and Europe and of English literature, including, as far as I am concerned, a store of quotations which once learned have never been forgotten. They seem to have acquired very little of this.

What the school did not provide was any focus on what the girls were going to do with their lives. There was no career information offered and no thought of choosing a university course with a career in mind. The teachers thought that their responsibilities began and ended with getting us with credit through the public examinations, and encouraging the brighter of their charges to go on to university and then getting them in. They made it very clear to us, too, that the only subjects worth taking at university were the academic ones – English, History, the Sciences or Mathematics for example. Jean Hardy, who was a bright girl, deeply upset the teachers by announcing that she wished to take Sociology, and although she successfully obtained a place at Bedford College, she was regarded as having in some way let the school down.

What all this focus on university and nothing beyond really indicated was that we all, even the girls, thought, subconsciously if not overtly, that any career we did have was not going to last. It would be only a temporary interlude until we got married, when we would stay at home to look after our husbands and children. So the important thing was the education, not what you did with it. Nobody, least of all the teachers, would have admitted that, but I am sure that is how it was. Others, even less enlightened, thought that it was not worth sending girls to university at all. I can remember one of my father’s friends saying to my parents in my hearing, ‘Surely you are not going to send that girl to university. She will only get married and that will be a complete waste.’ Of course, adults were always asking us what we wanted to be, as they always do of children, but when that question was asked of a girl, it was never meant seriously. I had no idea how to answer the question, partly because I knew it was not serious and partly because the only thing I knew at that stage was that I wanted to do or be something out of the ordinary and exciting. So I used to reply that I was going to be an airline pilot, which was something women could not do in those days, so the conversation was effectively brought to an end. Not surprisingly, as a result of all this, girls did feel that most of the focus was on the boys and they were taken less seriously. If there were a limited amount of money to be spent, it would be spent on the boy, because he would eventually have to be the breadwinner for his family. To do my parents credit, I personally never felt that I was denied anything that mattered to me because I was only a girl, but I know some girls did.

Today the focus has changed. It is expected that girls will have long-term careers.

Career advice or ‘counselling’ as all advice seems to be called nowadays, is offered from the age of fourteen. But now I am afraid that the sort of schools I went to may have swung too far the other way, almost to the point of making girls feel inadequate if they decide that they would prefer to spend more time looking after their homes and family. I know how hard it is to cope with a full-time job and small children, particularly in circumstances where there is not enough money to pay for qualified child-care at home. It is difficult, and even the toughest and most determined can wilt under the strain. Not everyone can cope, though many have no choice. But if schools like the one I attended are not quite careful and subtle about the message they give to their pupils, they may make a generation of young women feel that they are inadequate failures, if they are not both high-flying career women and successful wives and mothers.

I grew to enjoy my time at Nottingham Girls’ High School, where at first I was always in the top few in the class. But by the time I was about sixteen, I began to make less effort and to cease to conform. The terrifying but excellent teachers passed out of my life, and we were in the hands of young women who had just left university, and did not have the power to force learning. I easily got bored and when things started to become more difficult I was not prepared to make the effort. My attitude to school changed and school’s attitude to me changed too. From being quite highly thought of by the teachers, I began to be regarded as something of a rebel, though as rebels often do, I kept a large group of friends. When I reached the sixth form, and elections for Head Girl were held – the election was by voting by the sixth form and the teachers – though I believe I was the choice of the girls, I was blackballed by the teachers. Teachers in girls’ schools in those days did not have a great deal of time for those who did not conform. All this ended by my failing one of my three A Level subjects, Latin, and having to stay at school for another year to re-sit. It was decided that the only person who would teach me enough Latin to get me through was Miss Todd, one of the old school, so I fell back into the hands of the real teachers again and of course passed easily the second time round. What they did, those female teachers of the old school, was subtly to imply respect for the ability of those they were teaching, so that in some way a partnership was formed, neither side of which could let the other down. It was very effective. As I had stayed on for a third year, it was decided that I would sit the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams, and I applied to Newnham. I was called for interview but when I got there I felt very much a fish out of water, wearing the wrong clothes, from the wrong background and quite unable to deal with the sharp and rather patronising female dons. They sat so cosily on their sofas, quizzing me about an interesting theory I had put forward about some poet in my essay, that I had in fact lifted lock stock and barrel from a book one of them had written.

It was during my journeys on the bus to school that I met John Rimington whom I was later to marry. His father was a Coal Board official and they lived in a Coal Board house called ‘The Grange’, in Trowell, that gloomy village between Ilkeston and Nottingham which surprised the world in 1951 by being pronounced ‘Festival Village’ for the Festival of Britain.

Whoever chose it must have been suffering from an excess of political correctness. Confused foreign tourists used to arrive there looking for what they thought was going to be some thatched cottage idyll only to find themselves contemplating the main road to Nottingham, passing through a ribbon development of redbrick semis which did not even have a pub.

‘The Grange’ seemed to me extremely grand. It was a brick-built detached house in its own quite sizeable garden. Its drawbacks were that it was just beside the railway line, and it suffered even more than we did from ‘Duckhams’ as the wind was more frequently in their direction than ours. John and I met on the bus when we were sixteen and both just entering the sixth form of our respective schools – he was at Nottingham High School. I thought him rather quaint and old-fashioned. He used to write verse in a perfect, neat handwriting in a black stiff-backed notebook and would occasionally send me letters, equally beautifully written. Our acquaintance was reinforced at the dancing classes, at which the sixth formers of the two schools were allowed to meet and fraternise.

On our side, Miss Pretty presided to make quite sure there was no hanky-panky. I think she terrified the boys even more than she did us. She made very sure that we were all dressed in a seemly manner – we were allowed not to wear school uniform. Her standards were severe and unwavering. I remember once wearing what I regarded as a rather fetching scarf tied round the neck of my jumper. This did not meet Miss Pretty’s exacting standards.

‘Have you got a sore throat, Stella?’ she asked.

‘No Miss Pretty.’

‘Then take off that silly scarf.’

So ended my fashion statement.

John’s and my acquaintance did not get much beyond the dancing classes and occasional visits to each other’s houses for tea during our school days. He got a scholarship to Cambridge and went off to do his National Service and, after successfully completing my A Levels, I got a place at Edinburgh University and set off there in October 1954 to read English. I never expected to see him again.