Open Secret

5

That move to London firmly put an end to any idyllic quality my life might have had up to then. In those early-60s days London was still a rather grim place to live. The last of the great smogs was in progress as I arrived and I saw everything through a thick yellow haze which left my eyes sore and watering and a line of grime round my nose where I had breathed in the filthy air. There were still huge bomb craters in the City of London, full of buddleia bushes and campion in the summer, but they were rapidly being filled in with great shoe-box buildings, which seemed ugly and out of proportion even in those days. Millbank Tower was being built and a huge crane with ‘Mowlem’ picked out in lights towered over Millbank and Pimlico where John lived. Swinging London had not happened, and our idea of an evening out was to take ourselves, very occasionally, to what we thought of as a posh restaurant. It was usually Au Père de Nico in Chelsea, where we could dine for less than £4 if we were careful. One evening, celebrating John’s first promotion, we went to Leoni’s in Soho and found ourselves sitting at the next table to Dr Beeching, who was at the time responsible for closing down half the country’s railway system. We watched with awe as he and his companion ate their way through what seemed to us an immensely lavish meal. He demolished his food very quickly with the same avidity with which he was dismembering the railways.

All the problems experienced by anyone coming to live and work in London began for me at that time. The first, of course, was where I was to live. John was sharing a flat in St George’s Square in Pimlico and there was no room for me. In any case, my parents would not have approved of my sharing accommodation with him before we were married. At the beginning of the 1960s that was still regarded by people from my sort of background as rather risqué. So I had to find something else, and my first recourse was to the YWCA in Tottenham Court Road, where I stayed for a few weeks. Meanwhile, I trawled the flat agencies of Kensington and Westminster, and was shown some places which to me, straight from my double-fronted Georgian house in its large garden in Worcester, seemed totally unfit for human habitation. I went round with an agent recommended by the Commonwealth Relations Office and became quite depressed by the seemingly endless supply of squalid rooms, described as ‘one room flats’, made out of badly partitioned floors of decrepit houses in Victoria and Pimlico. Some had people in bed in them, who were clearly not meant to be there. Some of these were obviously prostitutes. To me, the provincial girl come to town, it was all quite a shock. Over the years I have watched most of those same houses being gentrified to be lived in in something like the style for which they were originally built. The squalid rooms still exist of course, but now they are mostly further out of the centre of the town.

I wanted none of that style of living; it would have been too much like going back to Prince Albert Buildings, an experience I did not wish to repeat. I would obviously have to share, if I was to find anywhere I wanted to live. So one day I found myself being interviewed by Ann and Susan who had a flat in Roland Gardens off the Old Brompton Road in South Kensington. It was like a palace compared with some of the places I had seen. The fact that anyone who wanted to go to the bathroom had to walk through what would be my bedroom was, admittedly, a bit of a disadvantage, but not enough to put me off. I moved in.

We were a very odd household. I was the naive provincial girl and they were the sophisticates who knew what it was all about. The disadvantage of the sleeping arrangements soon became apparent to me when I found that Susan worked in the evenings at the Establishment Club, Peter Cook’s immensely popular theatre revue club in Greek Street.

Susan used to come home at about 3 a.m., walk rather noisily through my bedroom and take a bath, invariably waking me up. She also used occasionally to purloin her employers’ cutlery, and my kitchen cutlery drawer to this day contains some of the Establishment Club’s knives and forks, which have gone round the world with me. One night she smuggled John and me in past the long queue waiting in the street and we joined the fascinated audience watching the youthful cast (I have no idea who they were but they are probably all famous now) anarchically and enthusiastically sending up various aspects of ’60s society and politics.

After a year or so, Ann got married and Susan started a relationship with a waiter at the club who moved in with us and occupied the bedroom off the bathroom. Then it was I who was walking through his bedroom to go to the bathroom, often while he was in bed with Susan. It was all very ’60s but by then I was used to London ways and took it in my stride. Ultimately they moved out too, and when John and I married in March 1963 we lived in the flat as our first home.

The India Office Library had become part of the Commonwealth Relations Office when the India Office was disbanded after Independence in 1947 but in spirit and appearance it still was the India Office. It occupied its original rooms in the old India Office building, the St James’s Park end of what is now the Foreign Office. The furniture in the Reading Room was 19th-century and the old East India Company clock, ticking loudly, presided over everything. The books were stored in Victorian cast-iron bookshelves on rails, which when pulled rolled out with loud creakings and groanings. The office I shared with a colleague had a coal fire, banked up for us every hour or so by a brown-coated ‘paperkeeper’, Mr Brewster.

The paperkeepers were the porters, who were responsible for getting the books and manuscripts from the shelves when they were wanted by readers or the staff and bringing them to us. But these were no ordinary porters. Mr Brewster wrote down our requirements in a beautiful copperplate handwriting, which seemed entirely in keeping with our surroundings.

The fire made our office a very cosy place; it kept our kettle constantly on the boil and we were able to make toast whenever we felt peckish. There were leather button-backed chairs for our visitors, and we sat at high desks on tall stools, like Bob Cratchit.

The Library’s rooms, high up overlooking King Charles Street, at the Clive Steps end, have now been modernised by the Foreign Office; the old furniture has gone and they have lost their charm. The Library itself moved, just after I left, to a grim 1960s glass block in Blackfriars Road and lost most of its character in the process. Now it is housed in the new British Library. In those days it was a hive of activity, frequented by students, researchers and writers of many nationalities. Many of the most notable writers on India and the East India Company shared our room with us as they worked on the manuscript collections. There were others, like old Dr Ghosh, a Bengali poet who had fallen on hard times and lived in an uncomfortable room in Belsize Park, who came to the Library every day. To him the Library, and in particular our office with its cosy fire, was a sort of haven, particularly on winter’s days.

The manuscript collections were extensive, and included the private papers of many of the Governors General, Viceroys and Secretaries of State for India, as well as more personal papers, letters and diaries of British men and women who had served, lived and frequently died in India over the long period of British involvement there. On another floor were the official papers of the India Office itself, the India Office Records, which were separately kept, and were also available to be consulted by readers. They included a series called ‘Political Papers’, which contained the official records of the ‘Great Game’, the intelligence operations in India, and presumably recorded what was really going on on the North-West Frontier, as 19th-century Britain battled it out with Russia for influence in that part of the world. I was not allowed to see this series, which was kept separately and was only available in part and then only to selected persons.

The Library included a fine collection of Indian miniatures, and paintings and drawings of all types and periods connected with India, which was the responsibility of Mildred Archer, who with her husband W.G. Archer, who was in charge of the equivalent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, were the acknowledged experts in the field.

There were collections of books and manuscripts in the indigenous languages of the subcontinent, as well as Persian and Tibetan and a huge collection of printed books on every aspect of India. Many of the staff of the India Office Library and Records were scholars in their own right, experts in the languages they worked with. Miss Thompson, the Tibetan expert, occupied the office next door to ours, a room lined with glass-fronted cupboards containing manuscripts written in Tibetan on strips of palm leaf. A strange oriental odour used occasionally to waft out from under her door, and I imagined her puffing at a hookah with her eyes fixed on distant Himalayan heights. But in fact the smell came from the oil with which she would occasionally anoint the palm leaves to stop them cracking.

I felt extremely lucky to have landed that job. I knew nothing about India when I started, but it was there that my life-long interest in and love for India began. And I enjoyed working right at the centre of things, next door to Downing Street and free to wander around the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Foreign Office. That building, which has now been so splendidly restored, was very run down in those days. The glass-covered courtyard, the Durbar Court, was full of wooden huts and packing cases, and some of the offices had been crudely divided up with cheap and nasty partitioning which cut most unsympathetically into the elegant cornices round the ceilings. Many years later I thought of its former condition when as head of MI5 I found myself attending the Foreign Secretary’s grand dinners for the Diplomatic Service in an elegantly restored Durbar Court.

I walked to work every morning from St James’s Park Underground Station, across the park and up the Clive Steps. In those days that end of Downing Street was open and members of the public could walk along, right past No. 10. On some mornings I would find myself following through the park an odd-looking old man with a white beard, who wore a skull-cap and carried a mat and a black book. I followed him once into Downing Street and realised that every morning he knelt down and prayed outside No. 10. It was quite comforting to know that someone was taking the governing of the country so seriously.

I was working in King Charles Street through the period of political intrigue and scandal in 1962 and ’63, towards the end of the Macmillan government. We used to sit in our office next door to Downing Street, wondering what on earth went on in there. What were these orgies that the newspapers told us they were all indulging in and who could the ‘headless man’ in the photographs be? What was the relationship between Christine Keeler and Stephen Ward and the sinister Russian Naval Attaché, Ivanov? Like half the nation, I found it all fascinating. So much so that, on the morning of the publication of the Denning Report into the Profumo Affair, I deviated from my normal journey to work to call in at a bookshop in Charing Cross Road, where I waited in a queue to buy one hot off the press. I have read the Denning Report on several occasions since and often remembered that morning in 1963.

I married John Rimington on 16 March 1963 at Blidworth Parish Church in Nottinghamshire. My father had just retired, and he and my mother had built themselves a bungalow for their retirement at Ravenshead, opposite the gates of Newstead Abbey. Though this is now a small housing estate, in 1963 there were very few houses there and the field opposite their house was full of larks, which sang loudly on the morning of my wedding. I was immensely nervous. I was not good at formal occasions in those days or at being on show, and I reacted, as I always had on the day of exams, by being sick. It took a strong brandy and lots of encouragement from my mother to get me to the altar at all. I later found out that the car in which John was being driven to the church by his best man had almost expired going up Blidworth Hill, so he nearly did not get there either. Perhaps it was an omen that all would not be straightforward. John and I had been friends since we were sixteen and had kept in touch with each other with only a short break between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, though our relationship had been rather an off-and-on business. We had been engaged for over a year, though that had also had its ons and offs. Some of our friends must have wondered whether we would ever make it to the altar, and indeed whether it would not be better if we didn’t. For someone like me, who had always thought they wanted excitement in their life, marrying a childhood friend was an extraordinarily safe thing. I think we both had considerable doubts about whether it was the right thing, though I had never doubted that I wanted to marry, and at the age of twenty-seven I thought it was about time to do it. I certainly needed the security and the social reinforcement that comes through being part of a couple. I had no confidence at all that if I stayed on my own I would be able to travel or to see and do exciting things or to move in interesting social circles and I thought that John, who seemed to have the prospect of a glittering career in the Civil Service, would be able to achieve all that for both of us. I assumed, as women did in those days, that my job would be to back him up and go with him wherever he went. I took it for granted that my career was less important than his, and indeed that it was merely a temporary affair until we decided that I would stop work. I did not resent that assumption at all, indeed it seemed to me quite appropriate.

The first few months of married life were very difficult. For a year or so, I had been suffering from a recurrence of the claustrophobia which I had suffered quite acutely in my teenage years and which now made it very difficult for me to travel to work on the Underground. I had to sit or stand close to the door or I would start to sweat and gasp and feel faint. If the train stopped for any length of time in the tunnel, I found it very difficult indeed to keep control. To make matters worse, I began to suffer for the first time from severe migraines, with partial blindness and zigzag lines disturbing my vision. I am convinced now that this was caused by the newly-invented birth-control pills which I was taking, which, they tell us now, contained huge levels of oestrogen and were probably slowly poisoning me. I started to get curious brown splodges on my face and a moustache-like brown line above my top lip. All in all I felt extremely unwell and it was not a happy beginning to my married life. I think John began to feel that he had married a rather feeble invalid.

We were living in the flat in Roland Gardens, which I had first moved into when I came to London. We were constantly concerned by the thought that we would never, as far as we could see, be able to afford to buy a house of our own. We had no capital and no prospect of acquiring any. In fact, at the time we got married, and before counting the wedding presents, I was the proud possessor of £25, a plastic washing-up bowl, a small carpet, a basket chair and a few ornaments. John did not have much more. How we were going to turn that into the deposit for a house on our two rather meagre public service salaries, was something we constantly discussed. One thing we were clear about was that we did not want to live in the South London suburbs, like many of our friends. We were determined to stay in central London if we could and every weekend we would go for walks around areas where we thought we might like to live, sussing out what was going on in the housing market.

We kept returning to Islington, which in the early 1960s had what the estate agents described as great potential. The Victoria Line had not yet been built, though it was planned.

A few houses had been done up, but there were many more which had not, and there were opportunities to buy houses with protected tenants occupying a floor or a basement, which we thought might be affordable. We were very attracted to a tall, decrepit Georgian house, with a long, thin garden running down to Liverpool Road, which was going remarkably cheaply, and another in more down-market Dalston, which we thought we might just about be able to afford, if we borrowed what seemed to us an enormous sum. By then John had been promoted to Principal on the salary of £1960 per annum and we were feeling rather better off.

He went out and bought a case of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to celebrate. He put it on top of the cupboard in the hall and we started having wine with our dinner on Saturday evenings.

But it was difficult to feel particularly confident in the early ’60s; the world seemed a very insecure place. In 1961, as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded, we wondered with the rest of the world whether we were about to be plunged into nuclear war, and the following year I looked out of our bedroom window and saw that the flag on the El Salvador Embassy across the road was flying at half mast. I wondered casually whether some Latin American statesman had died. It was only later in the day that I learned of the murder of President Kennedy.

All our ideas of settling down in London were wiped out at the beginning of 1965, when John turned up unexpectedly at the India Office Library to tell me that he had been offered a foreign posting. By a curious coincidence it was to the British High Commission in New Delhi as First Secretary (Economic) to deal with financial aid to India. As far as I was concerned, the answer to the offer was Yes. I was in no doubt at all that I would go to India; this was just the sort of adventure that I had been waiting for.