In 1962, 19-year-old troublemaker Charlotte Bingham went to work for MI5 after discovering her father, the seventh Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook, was a spy. (John Bingham once supervised David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, and reportedly served as partial inspiration for le Carré’s most famous character, George Smiley.) In the following exclusive excerpt from Charlotte Bingham’s comic memoir, she starts her first day at work as an MI5 typist and learns how to use spycraft to defeat her office enemies.
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Without my double false eyelashes I felt quite naked, which meant that when I was introduced to the Dragon to whom I had been appointed to work, my confidence was not at its highest.
I had sailed through security downstairs with my swanky MI5 pass, imagining that since the policemen on duty were so friendly, everyone else would be too, because my mother had a theory she often aired that if the doorman at a company was charming then so too would be the managing director. It was doubtless a sound theory in Civvy Street, but as the Dragon barked out her orders at me, I quickly realised that it might not be one that worked at MI5.
‘No nail varnish in future, please, it only gets chipped on the typewriter keys and will make you look tarty.’
I wished yet again I were somewhere else with double pneumonia, or rather recovering from it.
‘Oh, and I don’t care for your makeup, young lady, and if those are false eyelashes you’re wearing, take them off immediately.’
She leaned forward and for one awful moment I thought she was going to pull at my lashes.
‘Actually they’re mine,’ I said, and pushed my chair away from her just in case she felt even tempted.
‘Take a memo, please.’
And so started the first of a cascade of memos to do with people with strange names, who appeared to have attracted the wrong sort of attention to themselves. Every memo must be attached to a Personal File, and all to be typed up before lunch. I walked back down to the main room where all the secretaries worked, convinced I had probably made a hash of most of the memos. Entering the big room where it was rather obvious that only typewriters born on or before 1911 were permitted, I passed a tall, dark-haired girl also clutching files.
‘Oh, you poor thing, you’ve got Dragon Dewsbury. She chews up secretaries for breakfast—a single comma out of place and she arranges for you to be shot at dawn. Meet you downstairs at one. Lunch at Fenwick’s will cheer you up no end.’ She stopped. ‘I’m Arabella, by the way.’
‘Lottie,’ I said, trying to free a hand to shake hers with, and failing.
By the time lunchtime came I knew why the Dragon had earned her terrible reputation. It was true: one comma out of place meant that the whole memo had to be retyped, and since everything had to be backed up by triplicates of carbon paper, Fenwick’s seemed to me not a shop but a heavenly haven, filled with enviably smart girls not tricked out in sensible grey, and not looking forward to an afternoon spent working for a dragon.
‘The Dragon lost her fiancé in the war, and has never been nice to anyone since. Apparently.’ Arabella paused, a forkful of salad waiting to be placed in her cupid’s-bow mouth. ‘The last girl who worked for her became so desperate she ran off with a married man who lives in Yorkshire—but that comes to the same thing really. Even so, you can see just how desperate she was.’
I gazed past Arabella for a few seconds. I imagined living in sin with a married man in Yorkshire where summer came and went in August, leaving the rest of the year to be cold and wet. I imagined eternally walking the moors, a wellie-booted reincarnation of Cathy from Wuthering Heights, lunch at Fenwick’s an all-too-distant memory.
‘What’s your one like, is she a dragon too?’ I asked.
Arabella gave me a look that told me at once I had asked a pathetic question.
‘You are the first in and first out, new girl, that’s why you got the Dragon. It’s a short straw, a trial. If you can last a week with the Dragon, you can last a century with anyone else. Of course, there is a trick to it. The trick is to get her to move you out, but it’s no good just doing rotten shorthand, because that means you won’t get a reference. But there is something else you can do.’
Yes, but what? I wanted to know, and Arabella could see that without my asking. She sat back, knowing she had my complete attention.
‘It was after the first hideous weeks in the Dragon’s cave that I realised the way to slay her was to do what MI5 do to enemy agents.’ Arabella looked suddenly proud. ‘They find out their weaknesses, and then pursue them to the nth degree. The agents don’t even know they’re doing it. It’s a bit like guerrilla warfare: so difficult to see where the enemy is coming from.’ Her expression changed from one of pride to quiet glee. ‘To begin at the beginning then. The Dragon can’t stand the smell of garlic, but unlike with chipped nail varnish she can’t tell you off about it. She hates the theatre, and actors—especially Richard Burton. In fact, she doesn’t like Welsh people at all, and rugby football is next to sin in her view. She thinks television is an invention of the devil, and any mention of anyone on it—especially Sylvia Peters who did the Coronation—makes her go purple with fury. She thinks the Queen quite wrong to have appeared on it, and suspects that it was the Duke of Norfolk who talked her into it, because he is a Roman Catholic, and they are the source of all evil, past and present. She hates them, even more than she hates spiders.’
I was lost in admiration for Arabella. Well, who wouldn’t be? The cleverness of her—to use the same techniques on the Dragon as MI5 used on enemy agents. What a fantastic coup.I was lost in admiration for Arabella. Well, who wouldn’t be? The cleverness of her—to use the same techniques on the Dragon as MI5 used on enemy agents. What a fantastic coup.
‘Anything more?’ I asked hopefully, trying not to sound too enthusiastic.
‘Oh, yes, one more thing. But you need to keep this one up your sleeve.’ Arabella took a strawberry mousse from beside her place and centred it in front of her with the same elegant care I now realised that she did everything. ‘In one name …’ she looked at me ‘… Noël Coward.’
I breathed in and out, slowly and happily. I loved Noël Coward with a passion. I could sing every song he ever wrote. I knew the first act of Private Lives off by heart, as well I should, since I had the LP recording of the Master playing Elyot and Gertrude Lawrence playing Amanda.
‘This is wonderful. I know more about Noël Coward than anyone else does except his mother. So when should I start?’ I asked, after a suitably long pause during which we finished our strawberry mousse.
Arabella put her head on one side, a habit I would soon recognise as being a signal for action.
‘I think you should wait a day or two, and then start with the garlic. Do you have anything to do with the menus at home?’
I looked past her again. My mother was not someone who would encourage garlic. My father’s taste in food was strictly English.
‘I expect I can do something … perhaps. I’m not really allowed in the kitchen, not since I turned off the oven at Christmas.’ As Arabella looked at me, I realised that further explanation was required. ‘It had the turkey in it.’
‘Harrods food hall has garlic now, but it is very expensive. You can go there, or to Covent Garden Market. If I still had some I would give it to you, but I used it all up on my mother’s poodle.’
I already knew enough about Arabella not to ask her for an explanation as to why her mother’s poodle had needed the same treatment as the Dragon. Arabella had about her a Gandhi-like aura. Her beautiful blue eyes had a gaze that seemed to be seeing something beyond what was happening at that moment. I instinctively knew she would not have wanted me to question her further. As the French say, she was not the one who would kiss—she was the one who would extend her cheek.
We returned to our Section, as I had learned that the large room organised for the secretaries was called. On the way we passed the files store. Arabella stopped in front of the goodly ladies who sat there, knitting and talking, surrounded by buff-coloured volumes, which were, I imagined, bulging with secret information. Of course it was not enough that Arabella knew everyone’s name, she also knew about their knitting, which garment was for which child, or friend, and just how difficult it was to do cable stitching when people would come and ask for a PF or an SF.
‘I don’t know how they even get through a jumper let alone a cardigan,’ she said, shaking her head as she went back to the desk that she had somehow managed to have placed opposite mine, our typewriters back to back, our telephones beside us, always on the alert for a call from our bosses.
My telephone rang. It was the Dragon, of course, wanting to dictate and spitting fire because she had just discovered a comma out of place.
Arabella nodded to me as I replaced the receiver.
‘Just think garlic,’ she said. ‘It helps a lot.’
I did think garlic; I thought it so hard that by the time the Dragon had finished dictating at a wilfully terrifying speed, I was imagining myself breathing it all over her. That helped no end.
Back at home, it was a different matter. My mother heard my alarm clock going off at an ungodly hour and wanted to know why I was getting up at five in the morning when I didn’t have to leave for the Office until eight-thirty. She found it deeply disturbing, as if I had taken up a new religion. She refused to let me leave. Going into London’s Mayfair alone at such an hour was dangerous apparently. It was as bad as going out late at night. My father too did not find it in the least congenial. I lied to them that I wanted to go and sketch trees and bushes in Green Park before it got too crowded, but my father used his ‘I know you’re lying to me’ voice, and I had to go into the garden and sketch a tree to prove that I wasn’t. It was very chilly sitting on a sketching stool out there at that hour, and, worse than that, boring since there were only two very London trees and one bush.
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‘Your parents sound a bit like the Dragon.’
Arabella and I were back in Fenwick’s lunching, and I was feeling a flop. She must have had a sixth sense because she rummaged in her handbag and brought out a bulb of garlic.
‘I had to go to Harrods for my mother’s nail-varnish order, so I bought you this. Can’t have too much, I say.’
I felt touched, and to prove it I paid for both our lunches, but not before I had explained to Arabella that my parents were very, very strict, and there was nothing I could do about it until I was twenty-one, and not a minor any more.
‘I’m lucky, I only have a mother. She sleeps a lot.’ Arabella looked at me; her gaze was level. ‘She sleeps with men. That’s why I have to go to Harrods for her—she’s always running out of makeup and stockings. She only goes to Hardy Amies for her clothes, and never Norman Hartnell because he made the Queen’s wedding dress too heavy. Besides, Hardy Amies was very brave in the war, running around France spying. I know because my boss told me.’ She paused, her eyes searching mine. ‘Why do you think your parents are so strict?’
I frowned. It was difficult to explain.
‘They’re nice people,’ I offered. ‘But I don’t think they ever liked children much. I think they had them because they thought they should, which is a bit like everything else that you think you should do: it never turns out to be much fun.’
Arabella considered this.
‘My mother doesn’t like children either. I once invited one home to tea, a child, a little girl belonging to our daily, and my mother kept moaning so much about her, as if she was a wild boar about to charge about the flat and break everything, that I had to take her to Fuller’s Tea Room. Actually we had a whale of a time, and the cake was much better than anything we had at home, so it was just as well. I still take Doreen to tea there on Saturdays sometimes, but not on a regular basis, because that would lead to disappointment if I couldn’t do it.’ She stood up. ‘Time to get back to dear Rosalie Browning. Such a sweetie. Do you know, for my sake, she dictates so slowly I practically fall asleep between sentences, but I daren’t tell her. It would break her heart if she knew—she’s that sort, always thinking of the other person—which is probably why she’s never married.’
As I looked at her, wanting a bit more of Arabella’s wisdom, she added, ‘Men never marry nice women, they find them dull. Besides, Rosalie only really likes dogs. When she retires she is going to have dozens.’
Once back in the section I went to the loo and, summoning up my courage, carefully chewed a clove of garlic. A short pause later, filled with spite towards the Dragon, I carefully chewed two more.
Upstairs, after dictation, I leaned over her on pretext of seeing something—like a spider. One of those ‘ooh, look’ moments that children do when they want to pinch someone’s biscuit. As I leaned over her I breathed hard over the Dragon. I waited for her to look sickened, or something, but she didn’t.
‘There is no spider,’ she said in the furious tones that seemed to come so naturally to her. ‘I think you need glasses as well as better shorthand.’
In a sudden moment of inspiration, and to make up for what I saw as the failure of the garlic, I assumed a devout expression and crossed myself.
‘Thank God for that. I was sure I saw a spider as big as a tarantula,’ I said in a pious voice.
The Dragon started breathing fire.
‘There’s no need to bring religion into it,’ she said.
‘Bless you,’ I said, turning away and using an absent tone. ‘And bless St Francis too for keeping the spider away from you.’
I could feel the Dragon staring after me, so much so that I thought I felt it all the way down the stairs until I arrived back at my desk.
‘You’re not looking happy,’ Arabella stated.
I told her about the failure of the garlic.
‘Give me the bulb,’ she said calmly.
I fished into my handbag and fetched it out.
‘There are three cloves missing,’ she stated. ‘Three cloves. Not one but three.’
‘Yes,’ I said, proud of my own courage. ‘I chewed three.’
Arabella shook her head slowly.
‘Don’t you know the story about the Parisian model who couldn’t give up garlic?’ she asked in a kindly tone.
Of course I didn’t know the story about the Parisian model who couldn’t give up garlic.
‘There had been nothing but complaints from clients at the Salon, where orders for clothes were given after she’d modelled them. She must give up garlic or lose her job, she was told. She returned home and, realising she could never give up using garlic, cooked roast lamb using, by way of rebellion, a dozen cloves of it. She ate the lamb, resigned herself to losing her job, and returned to the Salon. She modelled clothes all day for the richest of their clients—no complaints. She could not understand it until one of the seamstresses told her: masses of garlic, no smell; one little tiny piece and you stink.’
I returned home that night determined to give the garlic another trial. Just a little on my food every night, and the Dragon would be writing a memo to the Head of Section and I would be on my way to someone new. The idea of not having to take dictation from her was heaven on a biscuit, with or without garlic.
However what seemed simple on the number nine bus—top deck, front seat—was far from being so once I reached home. My mother was giving a dinner party for ten, and Mr and Mrs Graham were helping. They lived out, but came in to help about the place, and they were absolute dears, of course, always saying things like ‘oh, Miss Lottie, you are such a wag’, which sounded vaguely Shakespearean, but pleased me no end, because I am so egotistical. I never really questioned them as to what exactly a ‘wag’ was—and tonight was no exception since the guests were about to arrive.
Mr Graham was sent upstairs in his best suit to open the door and take coats, which he loved to do, and Mrs Graham was downstairs looking after the cooking.
‘Gracious, this all looks so tempting, Mrs Graham,’ I said, the halved clove of garlic in my pocket beginning to feel quite warm. My plan had been to lace one of the dishes, but Mrs Graham was hovering with intent.
‘Your father says I am a wonderful cook,’ she said with some satisfaction before she turned to look at me. ‘I see from the placings that you’re sitting between two of your father’s business friends—that will be nice for you.’ She gave me a look. ‘Especially now you have a nice new regular job at the War Office.’
She gave me another look, and my heart sank. Never say that Mrs Graham knew about my father’s work? Surely not? Were the Grahams too a part of the ahem, ahem, that must never be talked about? Did she know that I had signed the Official Secrets Act, which was now coming to seem to me far worse than knowing things that were sometimes talked about on Bognor Beach?
The clove of garlic was still in my pocket. It was beginning to feel like a hand grenade.
The clove of garlic was still in my pocket. It was beginning to feel like a hand grenade.‘You’ll have to go and change, Miss Lottie. You know your father likes everything to be on the dot. He does not like us kept waiting on account of the last bus home. He is every inch a gentleman, every inch. And patriotic too, from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. My Stanley thinks he should be Prime Minister, he thinks that much of him.’
My father was always a feature of my conversations with the Grahams, and always would be. He was their hero, and when he was with them he became almost skittish, losing all his forbidding demeanour, laughing and joking with them in a way that he never did once he left the basement kitchen and went back upstairs to the drawing room. I had often noticed this. A while back, in an effort to get him to laugh, I had tried remembering jokes to tell him, and funny stories about things that had happened to me—or at least I thought they were funny—but they always fell rather flat, and for one reason or another, like it or lump it, it was only the Grahams who brought out his fun side.
As I ran upstairs to change I realised that my plan to lace one of the dinner dishes would have failed anyway, because the aroma of garlic floating about roast pheasant or spotted dick would have been sure to cause comment.
I rather dreaded dinners at home because I had to be so young at them. If I was with my friends in a coffee bar, or at Fenwick’s having lunch, I could be old and wise for my years, but once among my father’s and mother’s friends, I had to become the kind of young woman-person they wanted me to be. Someone it had been worthwhile winning the war for. Even as I tried to sound girlish and nice, I always had a horrid feeling I was hardly worth winning a hockey match for. It was just a fact, and now that I knew it was perfectly possible that ‘business friends’ meant something quite other, I felt even more nervous and useless.
So there I was poised behind the drawing-room door, pinning on my best smile, when the first of my father’s business friends arrived. I stared at them. They looked like business friends, they wore businessmen’s suits, and they certainly talked like businessmen, but now I knew that, what with one thing and another, what with what I knew, and probably what they knew, they were quite likely to be agents. This notion had been somewhat enhanced by my father saying in a casual way after I had started working at MI5, ‘A great many of the people who come to the house help me, but don’t let that worry you.’
I had accepted this with something close to equanimity, until I realised that so many different people came to the house, they might all be agents, spies, or what Arabella called ‘spooks’.
Dinner was a headache. First of all, although I had washed my hands and done what I could, the smell of garlic from my right hand was all too pervasive. When the man seated to the right of me sneezed, I was sure that it was not due to the white pepper he was liberally dusting his food with, but my garlic hand. ‘The smell of the devil’, Mrs Graham always called it, and no doubt he would think the same. I thought I should distract him with amusing conversation, and I think I managed to, because he laughed a lot, and since I couldn’t tell him I worked at MI5, I told him all about the dreadful jobs I had done up until now, always hoping that he wouldn’t ask the inevitable question.
‘So what do you do now?’
I stared at him. I would have given a million pounds to say to him ‘I work at MI5’, and see him laugh and not believe me, but since I couldn’t, I said, ‘I work in a typing pool,’ which was true.
His face fell.
‘Someone as amusing as you should not work in a typing pool,’ he said. ‘I—I shall have a word with your father about this.’
‘Oh, no, don’t do that,’ I pleaded with him. ‘I haven’t paid off my overdraft yet.’
‘When you have, let me know and I will help you,’ he said warmly, and as I left the table with the other ladies to join my mother at coffee, he turned and kissed my right hand.
It must have been the white pepper, but he truly didn’t blench.
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Adapted from MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among The Spooks by Charlotte Bingham © 2018 by Charlotte Bingham. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Books. All rights reserved.
