A World of My Own (4 page)

I felt myself under suspicion of treachery. The general reached me on his rounds and coldly extended two fingers. He said he was going to read us
a list of people in the organization who had proved unsatisfactory.

As a deliberate act of defiance I began to walk away, but I saw that my mistress remained talking to one of my colleagues. It seemed strange to me that the general was going to speak in her presence. I suspected that he had assumed she was my wife and had been thoroughly vetted.

A woman stopped me. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Shopping.’

I saw the woman looking with suspicion at my mistress’s face. She was probably wondering whether I could afford such a mistress on my salary. She said, ‘We’ve received a message from Egypt. They want you there because of your knowledge of Cairo.’

‘That’s absurd,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything of Cairo. I’ve only stopped off there once between planes.’ I felt convinced when I looked at her that M.I.6 were planning to have me murdered there.

I decided to ask for political asylum in Turkey and I went to the immigration authorities. They refused to help me, but I told them to think again, and I showed them evidence I had of a bribe of five hundred pounds which had been taken by the head of their service.

All seemed to settle down and I was sent on to a French tropical town as an M.I.6 officer to join another
officer. A senior officer whom I will call M had just come on another tour of inspection. I rather unkindly described him to my colleague as an obvious Secret Service type—‘a cross between a foxy businessman and a major.’

As usual much of one’s work consisted of giving an impression of work, and M was suitably impressed. We spent most of our time in the hotel. Someone there raised a hand in greeting. This gave me an opportunity. I told M, ‘He’s in the colonial administration. I knew him in Saigon.’

‘Was he one of our agents?’

‘I think he was.’

I went on to say that he might be useful for getting details of constructions in the town.

‘Are the French building the place up?’ he asked and I suggested we should take an evening drive together and see something of the European quarter, which was called Jiwena.

On another occasion I was packing my things with the help of L, a friend in the same secret organization. I pointed out that I must take some very light clothes because I would be going nearly straight on from the States to Samoa on my mission. ‘You’ll have time for a shopping spree,’ L said. I was proud
at being given the mission and excited. At the air terminal I went up to the ticket counter and showed my ticket. ‘Philadelphia 8.’ I thought I saw a look of pity on the air hostess’s face. Two men came up to me and asked for a lift to the airport. I sensed danger but I had no excuse to refuse them, and anyway I wanted to accept the challenge. They left the building with me, one walking on each side. Of what followed I have no memory.

In January 1980 Kim Philby came to see me secretly in London. He was not as I remembered him—he was furtive and sharp-featured, and I was disappointed. He brought me an essay which he had written for the
Spectator
and I could honestly praise it. He had come from Havana by an English boat and I asked him whether he wasn’t afraid of being arrested on the boat—but he gave me vaguely to understand that he was safe now. All the same, when he came to leave he readily accepted my offer to walk in front of him. There was one man in particular he had seen come out of a room into the corridor who was dangerous.

With another man I was spying in Germany, dressed in the uniform of a German officer. We were very
light-hearted about the whole affair and to escape we took a train that would cross the Swiss frontier. Nor were we very perturbed when a beautiful young woman demanded our papers. My companion, who was of a higher rank, said that our papers were packed in our luggage, and she accepted the excuse, only marking our tickets in pencil with the numeral 75. Another moment of difficulty came at the frontier, where we had to show our passports—and we had none. The chief passport officer was a pompous fellow less manageable than the girl; however, his rather ugly middle-aged wife proved to be on our side, and the dominating partner. She simply told him that the passports had already been examined.

My brother Raymond and I were carrying out espionage against the Nazis in Hamburg. We were together in a hotel on the seventh floor when we received a message from one of the employees—the police had come to the hotel suspecting that something was going on there but he had discouraged this search. None the less we felt it was time to leave, but before we could do anything two rough and brutal police entered demanding our papers. I was uncertain of Raymond’s cover story so I fumbled
and pretended to search, for I knew our British passports would give everything away, while I waited to hear what he had to say. Perhaps it was Raymond who thought of the ruse we employed, of snatching their guns, clubbing them, and shutting the bodies in a cupboard. Then we left.

Our only hope was to escape by plane, but if we took an ordinary passenger plane they would want to see our papers. However, private planes were to be had at the airfield for a price, and Raymond knew whom to contact. So as not to be seen, we dived hastily past the open door of a room full of men talking—obvious government employees. In the room beyond, one small twisted figure with a bent and paralysed hand—like that of my friend John Hayward, who died the other day—was reading. We got quietly into chairs so as to give an effect of normality like that in the other room. Raymond spoke of our wish to hire a plane, but for a long time the man paid no attention. Then suddenly there was action. He led us at a run past an airport gateway to a helicopter. One of his men swung the propeller too soon and was reprimanded. I climbed in first. Raymond followed, then our pilot with the twisted hand. We rose vertically and I saw the city spread below us—we were safe.

For politeness’ sake I prefer to make no distinction between these two categories, for statesmen can also be politicians. In the Common World I have met a number of leading statesmen and with one exception (President Diem) I have liked them all—Ho Chi Minh, Daniel Ortega, Allende, Fidel Castro, President Mitterrand, and Gorbachev especially, but few of these appear in the World of My Own.

When I encountered him first, in 1964, the Wilsons had just finished dinner and the Prime Minister was relaxing at his ease on a brass bedstead. He spoke to me, as I thought, with an absurd hustings-air, about his intention of cleaning the slums up with one blow. I tried to prick his political manner.

‘How will you house all the inhabitants?’ I asked him. ‘If this were the tropics perhaps you could put them into tents, but it is England and winter is approaching.’

‘I shall lodge them temporarily in public buildings—town halls and the like.’

‘Do you think they will be content? Now they have one lavatory between several families. Under your plan they will have one lavatory for hundreds.’

I don’t remember his reply.

I have only a fleeting memory of de Gaulle, who during the Second World War in the Common World lived for a while in Berkhamsted, which was my birth place.

I was cutting up the bread ration and came to him with his share. ‘Crust or crumb,
mon général?
’ I asked him, but looking at the bread I saw how little was left of either. ‘Better both,’ I told him, and gave him all that was left.

In the Common World I always felt a certain affection for Khrushchev in spite of his invasion of Hungary. In the Cuban crisis I felt he had made a favourable bargain with John F. Kennedy—no further invasion in return for no defensive nuclear weapons for Cuba, which in any case would have reached no farther than Miami. I liked the way he had slapped the table with his shoe at a meeting of the United Nations. Perhaps I was influenced in my affection by the meetings I had with him in My Own World in 1964 and 1965.

My first meeting with him was at the Savoy, with a group of Russians including Mr Tchaikovsky, whom I had met in the Common World in Moscow when he was editor of
Foreign Literature
magazine. Khrushchev looked cheerful, healthy, and relaxed, and he was only amused when two of his party disputed noisily. We talked together about the method of financing films in England and the bad influence of the distributors. I said that this was one difficulty the Russians did not suffer, but Khrushchev told me that films in Russia were often delayed for six months as a result of overspending and then waiting
for bureaucratic permission to increase the budget. He was very cordial and invited me to lunch the next day.

On the next occasion (for of the lunch I remember nothing) I sat next to him at dinner and he spoke no word to me until near the end, when he remarked that I had left a lot of my chicken uneaten. ‘So much the better for the workers in the kitchen,’ I said. ‘Surely a Marxist believes in charity.’

‘Not in Vatican charity,’ he replied with a smile.

Perhaps he had that exchange in mind when we found ourselves sitting together again at dinner. It was a Friday and he glanced at my plate. I was eating beef. He commented with a smile, ‘Meat on a Friday? I thought you were a Catholic.’

At our last meeting he was personally dealing with visas for the Soviet Union. He noticed that my profession was listed as ‘writer’, and he expressed the hope that I would write about his country. I noticed how very clear and blue his eyes were, and when I rejoined my friends I told them, ‘When you see him close, he has a beautiful face, the face of a saint.’

My view of him, I found, was not universally shared in Moscow. One day I was in a crowd outside the
Kremlin. A podium had been raised and they were waiting for the leaders to appear. From another podium a young man began to address the crowd. He made fun of Khrushchev and mimed some anecdote of an international gathering at which Khrushchev had pulled roubles from his pocket and scattered them to show their uselessness.