Warlight(31)

It was a time when my mother and I were not close. The domestic ease we loved during those weeks before she abandoned my sister and me no longer existed. I could not erase my distrust, given her deceptive departure. It would be much later that I found out that once, or possibly twice, on returning to England to receive new orders, she had cleared her schedule to come and watch me dance, chaotic and Dionysian, at a Bromley jazz club with a girl she did not know, who leapt into and out of my arms.

The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out. But during my late teens when I would stay with my mother at White Paint, I discovered no clues. Until one day I came home early from work, walked into the kitchen, where she, in shirtsleeves, was scrubbing a pot in the sink. She must have assumed she was safely alone. She nearly always wore a blue cardigan. I thought it was used to hide her thinness. Now I saw a row of livid scars like those cut into the bark of a tree by some mechanical gardening tool—ending suddenly, as if innocently, in the rubber gloves she was wearing to protect her hands from dish soap. I was never to know how many other scars there were on her, but here were these slate-red ones down the soft flesh of her arm, evidence from that missing time. It’s nothing, she’d muttered. Just the street of the small daggers…

She said nothing more about how she got those wounds. I did not know at that time that my mother, Rose Williams, after the attack on us had ended all contact with Intelligence. Although the fracas at the Bark Theatre had been quickly hushed up by authorities, there were hints of my mother’s wartime work in the newspapers that gave her a brief but anonymous celebrity. The press had only got hold of her code name, Viola. Depending on their political persuasion, the newspapers referred to the unidentified woman as either an English heroine or a bad example of post-war government intrigue abroad. No connection was ever actually made to my mother. Her anonymity was secure enough that when she returned to White Paint, locals would still refer to the family home as belonging to her late father, who had worked in the Admiralty. The unknown Viola was soon forgotten.



A decade after my mother’s death, I received an invitation to apply to the Foreign Office. My recruitment for such a post seemed initially strange. I participated in several interviews on my first day. One conversation was with an “intelligence collection body,” another with an “intelligence assessment outfit”; both, I was informed, were separate bodies seated at the high table of British Intelligence. No one told me why I had been approached, and there was no one I knew among those who questioned me intricately but seemingly casually. My earlier spotted academic record did not cause them as much concern as I had expected. I assumed that nepotism and my bloodline must have been considered a reliable entrance into a profession that trusted lineage and the possibly inherited quality of secrecy. And they were impressed by my knowledge of languages. They never mentioned my mother during the interviews, and neither did I.

The job I was being offered was to review various files in the archives covering the war and post-war years. Whatever I unearthed during my research and whatever conclusions I might draw were to remain confidential. I was to hand my findings over only to my immediate superior, who would assess them. Each superior had two rubber stamps on his desk. One said Improve, the other Redeemed. If your work was “redeemed,” it would progress to a higher level. Where, I had no idea—my small landscape of work was only in the warren of archives on the second floor of a nameless building close to Hyde Park.

It sounded like drudge work. But accepting a job that included sifting through the details of the war might, I thought, be a way of discovering what my mother had been doing during the period she left us under the guardianship of The Moth. We knew only the stories of her radio broadcasts from the Bird’s Nest on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel during the early stages of the war, or of a night drive to the coast, when she was kept awake by chocolate and the cold night air. We had known no more than that. Perhaps there was now a chance of discovering that missing sequence in her life. It was the possibility of an inheritance. In any case, this was the government job I had enigmatically referred to that afternoon in Mrs. Malakite’s garden while the bees moved uncertainly in their hives and she had forgotten who I was.

I read through mounds of files brought up daily from the archives. They contained mostly reports from men and women who had operated on the periphery of war, about journeys that criss-crossed Europe and later the Middle East, as well as various post-war skirmishes—especially between 1945 and early 1947. I began to realize that an unauthorized and still violent war had continued after the armistice, a time when the rules and negotiations were still half lit and acts of war continued beyond public hearing. On the continent, guerrilla groups and Partisan fighters had emerged from hiding, refusing defeat. Fascist and German supporters were being hunted down by people who had suffered for five or more years. The retaliations and acts of revenge back and forth devastated small villages, leaving further grief in their wake. They were committed by as many sides as there were ethnic groups across the newly liberated map of Europe.

Along with a handful of others, I sifted through the files and dossiers that still remained, assessing what had been successfully achieved against what had perhaps gone wrong, in order to make recommendations as to what might need to be re-archived or now eradicated. This was referred to as The Silent Correction.

We were in fact the second wave of “correction.” I discovered that during the closing stages of the war and with the arrival of peace, a determined, almost apocalyptic censorship had taken place. There had been, after all, myriad operations it was wiser the public never know about, and so the most compromising evidence was, as far as possible, swiftly destroyed—in both Allied and Axis Intelligence headquarters around the globe. A famous example had been the runaway fire in the Baker Street offices of the Special Operations Executive. Such deliberate conflagrations would be worldwide. When the British eventually departed Delhi, “burning officers,” as they called themselves, took on the job of incinerating all compromising records, setting fire to them night and day in the central square of the Red Fort.