by Mark Colvin
Dad stayed on in Vienna when we returned to Britain: these were the last months of Partition and the race was on to shore up Austrian democracy, and to identify Soviet sleepers and potential booby traps, literal or metaphoric, that Moscow might leave behind when it withdrew. That left my mother on her own in London with me, with the job of finding us somewhere to live. It wasn’t easy, given the ingrained sexism of the era. A lawyer told her that, as a married woman, she could not purchase the house she’d decided to buy, even though she was using money she’d raised by selling her own life insurance policy: the only signature that would be valid was her husband’s. It seemed almost as though nothing had changed since Jane Austen’s time: when a woman married, her husband took charge of the finances. It was particularly ridiculous in this case, as my mother was always careful with money, whereas my father seldom was.
Somehow my mother overcame this apparently insuperable obstacle, despite Dad’s absence, and we moved into a nineteenth-century terrace house near the World’s End part of then very unfashionable Chelsea. She always had a good eye, and spent a lot of time in junk shops finding bargain antiques. Though heavily pregnant, she got the nursery ready for the new baby, furnished and decorated the rest of the house, and continued, with the help of a Swiss au pair called Erica, whom I loved with a passion, to look after me.
On 8 December 1955, my father came home, literally just in time for the birth of my sister Zoë. He only stayed a few days—maybe a week—before returning to Vienna to work. He had never attended a birthing class, because they didn’t exist then: hospital rules would never have let him be in the room when Zoë was born, even if he’d asked to be; and I very much doubt that he ever changed our nappies. That was how things were.
My own memories of this time are longer and brighter and clearer than earlier ones, and involve what I think I can describe as conscious thought as well as sense impressions. I recall quite clearly being told Mummy was going to have a baby, and somehow convincing myself that it would emerge, aged the same as me, as another little boy with whom I could play football. I also remember my paternal grandmother Sybil, a terrifyingly bad driver, taking me to the hospital to meet my little sister for the first time, but braking so hard on the way that I hurtled into the windscreen and arrived at my mother’s bedside with an egg-sized bump on my forehead.
At the end of our street was the terminus of the no. 31 bus route, with a café where the drivers would smoke, drink mugs of tea, and eat huge fried English breakfasts. Directly opposite was a little hole-in-the-wall greengrocer’s owned by Ted, a tirelessly cheerful Cockney who flirted with all his women customers, called my mum ‘Annie’, and used to have a raw egg for a snack—I can still see him tilting his head back and cracking it into his mouth. Across the big road, the King’s Road, was Cullens the grocers, smelling of coffee and spices, where you bought flour or rice scooped out of barrels into brown paper bags by men in buff-coloured work coats. There was Timothy White’s the chemist, with strange liquids in blue and deep-red glass jars displayed in the windows. Next to that was a travel agent, through whose windows I gazed covetously at large scale-models of aeroplanes and ocean liners. Round the bend in the King’s Road there was a stationers’, where if you were lucky enough to have a farthing, with its reverse illustration of a wren, a halfpenny, one of those big worn pennies with Queen Victoria’s head on them, or, joy of joys, a twelve-sided threepenny (pronounced ‘thrup’ny’) bit, you could buy paper and crayons and erasers. A little further and you reached MacFisheries, with its open front and big white slab displaying sole and plaice, haddock, cod and flounder, all so fresh you could sometimes imagine you smelled the North Sea.
Then it was on to the newsagents, a shop which I called the Smoking Man, because it was where my dad got his cigarettes. They were called Player’s Navy Cut and they had a picture of a sailor in Royal Navy uniform on the front. My godfather John Villiers, who could make a penny disappear and then re-emerge behind your ear, also used to make a little hole in the sailor’s mouth, roll up a little of the packet’s paper lining into a tiny cigarette, insert it, and then blow smoke into the empty packet so it came out through the little tube. ‘Look, Mark! The sailor’s smoking!’
There was smoke inside the house and out. Some of the Great Smog of 1952, which had killed 4000 Londoners—fortunately that was the winter we were in Oslo—was still around: the Clean Air Act which eventually tamed it was not passed till 1956. I can remember one morning walking to kindergarten with the au pair, putting my arm out straight in front of me, and scarcely being able to see beyond my hand. There was an eeriness about the swish of tyres and the honk of horns from slow-travelling cars you could not even see.
On clear days, though, when you ventured further afield, there was the Thames, a source of endless fascination to a child, with tugs hauling dozens of roped-together barges against the tide, and smaller vessels plying their trade. There were houseboats at Chelsea too in those days, and what small boy has not wondered how it would be to live on a houseboat? You could cross Battersea Bridge and head into Battersea Park, a child’s wonderland. Attractions built for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and still in operation included the Treetop Walk. You climbed a spiral staircase up a tree trunk, then went along a walkway through the branches of the trees that lined the Thames—as you progressed, just out of your reach, were fairyland creatures, and coloured lights at night. I loved the Crazy Golf and something called the Crazy Cottage, with its madly canted walls and floors. There was a paddling pool and a boating pond, and behind the big fence the glorious temptations of Battersea Park Fun Fair: forbidden for this four-year-old, but, I remember thinking, Dad might take me there one day, maybe when I’m five.
For now, though, there was the near-endless fascination of the Guinness Clock, an amazing array of wonderful mechanisms which performed a series of routines every quarter of an hour or so. A shiny golden sun would begin to rotate, and a large parasol would swivel to reveal a park keeper who rose up and rang a bell. Doors opened to reveal a pair of toucans (the Guinness mascot of the time) pecking at a tree. The Mad Hatter emerged from a tower with a fishing rod. He caught a small fish, which was pursued by a larger one, then a bigger one still, then a fourth, the biggest of the lot. And so on. In my memory, I must have sat cross-legged watching that clock a hundred times. These were the days when the company’s main slogan was ‘Guinness Is Good for You’, and my mother had been advised by a doctor, just after I was born, to drink a small bottle of stout every night (she refused), but I’m still not sure what possessed them to create such a magnificent and elaborate advertisement-cum-attraction aimed specifically at children. I loved it. And I don’t mind a drop of the black stuff either, as it happens.
* * *
Some time in early 1956, my father’s Vienna posting was finally, officially, over. He returned to MI6 headquarters to serve, again, under Nicholas Elliott. In the public mind, these were the James Bond years. Ian Fleming’s fourth book, Diamonds Are Forever, had just come out; From Russia with Love was in the pipeline. The Bond image of British intelligence—swashbuckling, daring, glamorous and above all successful—was magnetically attractive to a British public economically crippled by six years of war, whose cities were still pockmarked by bomb craters, and which had hardly begun to come to terms with the fact of its rapidly shrinking Empire. Britain needed its heroes, even if they were imaginary. And that year of all years, in intelligence at least, they certainly were.
Theoretically, my father worked at the Foreign Office, a grand edifice on Whitehall, just down from Number 10 Downing Street. In fact, his workplace until the mid-1960s, along with most London-based SIS officers, was in Broadway Buildings, a shabby maze of offices which could hardly have been less like the fantasy world James Bond inhabited. Situated next to St James’ Park Tube station, Broadway Buildings was notoriously dingy and spartan: it had a creaking lift, lino floors, bare lightbulbs, ancient metal filing cabinets, and a sign outside claiming it was the headqu
arters of the Minimax Fire Extinguisher Company.
Years later, after his retirement, while walking around Westminster, Dad would point it out to me. He did so with some nostalgia, which I think he felt largely because Century House, the Brutalist tower block south of the Thames where SIS moved in 1966, was even worse. He also showed me the little building nearby in Queen Anne’s Gate, joined to Broadway by some sort of secret passage, he said, where ‘C’ had his office and a flat for when he needed to stay overnight. Somewhere under there, he said, was also a sort of bar or club: a secret drinking den for secret people. He liked the general area around Broadway too: it was close to Westminster Abbey, an easy stroll to the National Gallery, and a pleasant walk across St James’ Park and Green Park to his club on Piccadilly.
SIS was then still largely peopled by ‘decent chaps’, either recruited via clubs and the Old School Tie system, or because they’d had a ‘good war’. Gordon Corera, in his SIS history The Art of Betrayal, writes:
The service recruited incestuously from within small circles in the tightknit British elite. Fathers recruited sons, officers married secretaries and they all socialised with each other, partly because it alleviated any security concerns and partly because of the sense of superiority it provided. MI6 was a gentlemen’s club and a gentleman could always be trusted.
But all this had left MI6 profoundly vulnerable to its enemies, as the defections to Moscow of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean and the sacking of Kim Philby had shown. And not only vulnerable but also still full of people who were blind to its own failings. Depending on your point of view, 1956 and 1957 can be seen either as MI6’s nadir, or the start of its revival—the beginning of the end of the service’s nightmare years. It certainly began with disaster, in the shape of the Buster Crabb affair, initiated and directed by Elliott, as London head of station. It was also destined to go catastrophically wrong.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had arrived in Britain for an official visit on board a new cruiser, the Ordzhonikidze. Elliott commissioned Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, a diver with a distinguished war record, to swim under the ship while it was docked in Portsmouth Harbour. But for all Crabb’s wartime heroism, he was now a 47-year-old chain-smoking gambler with depression and a heavy drinking problem: he drank five double whiskies the night before the early morning dive. Crabb was never seen alive again. Years later, a Soviet ex-diver would claim that he had caught Crabb planting something on the ship’s bottom, grappled with him underwater, and cut his throat, but other accounts suggest an encounter with a moving propeller or some other accident.
As Freedom of Information documents confirmed half a century later, a top-secret briefing paper was prepared instructing government spokesmen on how to lie to the media about the whole affair. The cover-up failed, as cover-ups often do: the story leaked, infuriating Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who was already close to concluding that SIS had a tendency to go out of control, and had decided to appoint MI5 head Dick White to replace MI6’s ‘C’, John Sinclair. This in itself was a massive cultural challenge to the organisation my father had entered less than a decade before. For a start, MI6, full of upper-class former Special Operations daredevils, ‘robber barons’, and Empire-builders, looked down on MI5, which was seen as being staffed by ex-policemen and colonial bureaucrats. Even more substantially, the Philby question continued to divide the two services like a chasm.
MI5 had been rightly certain that Philby was a traitor, and was enraged when he was allowed to leave with a large payout, publicly exonerated by the prime minister. In MI6, however, he still had many defenders—admirers, even. As late as 1950, one SIS officer said to Gordon Corera, ‘one new recruit was told that he should “model” himself on Philby, the “star of the service”’. Many of those who had had him on a pedestal in the 1940s could not bring themselves to see him as a pariah even now. I know that my father, certainly in later life, utterly loathed and despised Philby, but his boss at the time, Nicholas Elliott, was among those who could not shed their personal loyalty.
Worse was to come, for Britain and for the SIS, though this time the impetus to disaster was driven at least partly from 10 Downing Street itself. The Suez affair remains one of the key turning points in British postwar decline. And in this case, I know that my father was a minor player, close enough to observe key events at first hand.
In Egypt, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser had led the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 and now, as president, had decided to nationalise the Suez Canal. Oil was the key. More than two-thirds of Western Europe’s oil supply had to pass through Suez at the time, and the cost, if the canal was cut off, of taking it around the Cape of Good Hope and up the west coast of Africa, looked alarming. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, deeply shaped by his political experiences in the interwar years, saw Nasser as a Middle Eastern Mussolini. He took Nasser’s decision not only as a challenge to Britain’s interests, and by extension (because of the canal’s key role in Eastern trade) the Empire, but also, it seems, as a personal affront: some reports suggest that he had felt slighted by Nasser’s behaviour on the one occasion the two men met.
Most accounts portray Eden at this time as physically ill and increasingly mentally unstable. Gordon Corera says Eden made his wishes explicit: ‘One of his ministers recalled Eden calling him up on an unsecure line and saying, “I want Nasser murdered, don’t you understand?” This was the licence to kill.’
I know of my father’s involvement in the Suez affair only because of a conversation we had in 2002, the year before he died. I told him I’d been remembering life in London when I was four, and that one of the things I recalled especially strongly was a postcard he’d sent me from America of a Pan American Boeing Stratocruiser, the luxury airliner of its time. It was a cutaway diagram of the plane, so you could see the pilots behind the great multi-paned dome of the cockpit window, the comfortable chairs in the ‘stateroom’, the ‘berths’ where passengers slept, and the spiral staircase that led up to a comfortable lounge and bar. The memory was reinforced by the fact that on his return, he’d brought me a jigsaw puzzle of the same picture, and I had treasured it.
‘What were you doing on that Stratocruiser to America anyway?’ I’d asked him. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I was the junior member of a delegation that went to Washington to try to bring the CIA on board with SIS’s plans for Suez.’ This was certainly the meeting referred to by the University of Birmingham’s Professor Scott Lucas in a BBC program on the Suez Crisis in 2006. Lucas’ proof of the meeting was a CIA memorandum dated 1 April 1956, covering two days of meetings between CIA representatives and MI6 Deputy Director George Young. It read, in part:
Following emerged as MI6 position. Nasser’s aims are the total destruction of Israel, Egyptian domination of all Arab governments, and elimination of all western positions in the Arab area. In order to realise his ambitions Nasser has accepted full scale collaboration with the Soviets … MI6 asserted that it is now British government view that western interests in the Middle East, particularly oil, must be preserved from Egyptian–Soviet threat at all costs.
Lucas said that to deal with this imminent threat, ‘Young suggested regime change in not one but three Arab countries [Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt], and for the first time he mentioned the possibility of working with a new Middle Eastern partner: Israel.’
This is an extraordinarily aggressive proposal, going far beyond the eventual operation in which the Israelis would invade the Egyptian Sinai, and British and French forces would step in, in a phoney peacekeeping role, to ‘protect’ the canal. The Americans certainly regarded it as wildly over-ambitious, asking, among other things, how Nasser’s toppling could be brought about if Saudi Arabia was in collapse at the time. ‘Use the snip-cocks,’ Young replied, using a vulgar and offensive term for the Israelis.
The Americans told the British delegation that they would consult at a higher level and get back to them, but they never did: the Eisenhower administration’s opposition to the schem
e, Professor Lucas told me directly, was conveyed to Prime Minister Eden via back-channels. My father, on his first visit to America, would have been agape. ‘It was pretty much doomed from the beginning,’ he told me.
Not being in favour of maintaining or increasing British and French interests in the Middle East, and unconvinced that the British plan was well enough conceived, diplomatically or militarily, the USA ultimately remained opposed to the invasion. The Suez Crisis ended in humiliating defeat, the withdrawal of the Anglo-French invasion force, and, within months, the fall of Anthony Eden as prime minister.
It also marked, for many historians, the dividing line in Britain’s postwar pretensions as an Imperial power: the beginning of a belated realisation that the victory against Hitler had left the country too indebted, financially, diplomatically and geopolitically, to maintain its status as a real superpower. It was, as the CIA man in London at the time, Chester Cooper, would later title his book, The Lion’s Last Roar.
Chapter 10
Worlds I’d Never Known
WHATEVER EARTH-SHATTERING EVENTS were going on in the adult world, for me the year I was four was life-changing in another way. It was the year I learned to read. This was the one thing in my entire childhood that seems in retrospect to have been almost completely effortless.
At home, I had a series of books called Ant and Bee, who lived with a Cat and a Dog, and had sequential adventures involving all the other letters of the alphabet. They were small-format books, just right for a child’s hands, and wider than they were high. My parents had read to me at bedtime for as long as I could remember, but Ant and Bee somehow started to make the transition for me from hieroglyphics to letters. At kindergarten I started to take my reading textbooks home. After a few weeks, the teacher asked my mother to stop me because I was about ten books ahead of the rest of the class—it wasn’t a plea to stop me reading, just a suggestion that I stop leapfrogging the class. Fortunately, both my parents were lifelong readers, and books were not just encouraged but showered on me.