Goodbye to Berlin

For a year or two in the Sixties, I would regularly stop off on my way home at the W. H. Smith by Earls Court station. Catering for so many well placed commuters, it was a reliable showcase of current literary taste while tending to skimp slightly on the Barbara Cartland end of the market. In 1968 they gave a decent showing to The Naked Civil Servant by local reprobate Quentin Crisp; but that was nothing compared with the previous year’s razzmatazz display of Adam Diment’s much-hyped first book, The Dolly Dolly Spy.

Ah – the great spy craze! Who now remembers it in its full flowering during the chilly depths of the Cold War, or the earnest speculation about exactly how grittily realistic the genre was? For teenage fantasists the adventures of James Bond seemed to have the true ring of authenticity. Those of us in our worldly-wise twenties were more easily convinced by the grimmer worlds of le Carré and Len Deighton. We were unable to cross Cambridge Circus or Holborn without glancing up to wonder which of those unremarkable façades concealed the tatty warren of top-security offices and communications rooms variously known as ‘Control’ or ‘Central’ or simply ‘No. 78’. Somewhere up on the third floor, beneath that soot-grimed frieze of late Victorian acanthus leaves, ‘M’ or ‘Henderson’ or the ‘Inner Circle’ were masterminding the country’s destiny. They were the brains controlling the fingers in Westminster – the politicians who, poor dears, fondly imagined they alone were pulling the realpolitikal strings. We who had been to ivy-clad universities also knew about ‘That Don’ who would ask certain promising third-year students (always ex-public school) to his room and ply them with sherry while wondering whether they had ever thought about serving their country intelligently rather than joining the nine-to-five rat race. As we now know, such recruitment was by no means a fantasy. We can also surmise that beneath the hedonistic surface of what was soon to become the Swinging Sixties, establishment Britain was actually fairly paranoid. Not only had its confidence in a previous generation of Oxbridgers been badly shaken by the sundry embarrassing defections and unmaskings of home-grown traitors like Blake, Philby, Maclean and Burgess. The country’s declining status as a world power since the Suez débâcle, amid the dismantling of the remnants of Empire, had apparently also made international scheming and derring-do more, rather than less, vital. Inevitably, much of the spy fiction of the period was heavily Berlin-oriented. The division of the city made stories about divided loyalties come naturally – indeed, altogether too easily. In le Carré’s and Deighton’s novels, Checkpoint Charlie acted as a sort of ground zero, where either at the beginning or the end of the story nondescript men in trilbies and belted raincoats were hustled away in army jeeps or battered Mercedes. I was an aficionado of these books, but recently rereading some of them I was struck not only by how outdated they now seem, but also by how intolerably dull the heavyweight, ‘literary’ end of the genre can be. By the mid-Sixties I had spent a year teaching in pre-Gaddafi Libya, and when reading spy-fiction of the period I already felt my instinctive identification with British interests much diminished. By the time I had been through south-east Asia in the early Seventies and come to rest in Egypt for a year in 1976, it had been dealt a death blow. I soon felt very much at home in Egypt. These were people who had been walked over for centuries by the Great Powers, just as they had been for millennia by assorted pharaohs and Roman legionaries, and still they doggedly went on with their lives, eating pink pickled turnip off barrows lit at night by hurricane lamps and cracking ebulliently obscene political jokes – in my time mostly about the Russians, still an active presence in their land, but also about Jehan Sadat and her soon-to-be-late husband. One day in the bookshop of the American University in Cairo I found Joseph Hone’s novel The Private Sector (1971) and, seeing it was a spy novel set not in Berlin but in Cairo, took it home and read it practically at a sitting. It concerned a man in his early twenties named Marlow who goes there in 1957 – the year after Suez – as a British Council teacher in an Egyptian school. Unlike the cool professionals in other books, he has spying thrust upon him. Sacked within months for carrying on an affair with a girl named Bridget, he is recruited by some old lags at the British Consulate to provide them with low-grade information such as bus timetables and local gossip. Bit by bit Marlow becomes more compromised, especially when Egyptian Military Intelligence tell him they know all about his activities, and what an advantage it would be if he doubled and worked for them – unless of course he prefers to be arrested? He agrees, marries Bridget, discovers she is also an agent, eventually breaks with her and makes it back to London where, for a decade, he works as a low-grade officer in that building in Holborn. Then in 1967 he is dispatched back to Cairo to search for a former British friend who has disappeared, and thereafter things go badly wrong for him and his former allies. What I particularly liked were Hone’s descriptions of Cairo and of Egyptians in general. In the 1957 section, almost all the Brits have left in the aftermath of Suez, including the ambassador (the embassy is closed). Those left behind are long-termers who are thoroughly at home. These are not the sort of Raj-era expats who gave themselves airs in the Gezira Club, secretly despising the locals and the climate and dreaming only of a rose-girt cottage in the Cotswolds. Hone’s stay-behinds are genuinely uprooted from British soil and couldn’t live anywhere but Egypt. They don’t whinge when the khamsin winds turn the sky yellow and load the air with grit. Their identification with their homeland’s political interests seems pretty faint. The point here is that Marlow the narrator is not British but Irish, like his author, although for the story’s convenience he has to have dual nationality, having been born in London. Hone had himself taught in Egypt (but in dull and provincial Suez rather than Cairo) in exactly this period – the young Irish writer properly abroad for the first time. Consequently his narrative is free of those contemporary British (or Anglo-American) assumptions that tended to make foreign settings risible, disagreeable or downright threatening. Hone’s 1967 Cairo is hardly different from the one I remember less than a decade later: fascinating and disconcerting by turns, the daily felicities much outweighing occasional discomfort and exasperation. And as always, the less contact one had with one’s fellow countrymen the higher one’s spirits. Marlow eventually discovers how badly he has been betrayed by his own side. The global schemers in Holborn are willing to sacrifice him by sending him back to Egypt with a sliver of microfilm hidden, unbeknown to him, in his passport. The document on the microfilm purports to be a memorandum from the Israeli Ministry of Defence, outlining an imminent attack on Syria that Colonel Nasser and his Egyptian forces will be unable to ignore. This is, of course, an ingenious fake; but Hone pretends its outcome is the Six Day War of June 1967. The war took place after the point at which the novel ends and was an utter disaster for Egypt, whose army was largely wiped out in the Sinai Desert. The idea that the British secret services might sacrifice an agent and precipitate a war that Egypt was bound to lose – all as revenge for Britain’s humiliation over Suez – is splendidly cynical. It is a plot twist an English author might not have proposed, even in this genre. It wasn’t true; but I had no difficulty believing it. Rereading The Private Sector gave me pangs of homesickness for Cairo. I had a sudden craving for the coarse flat baladi bread, greyish-brown and delicious when hot from a particular oven I usedto patronize in the warren of back streets behind Abdin Palace. It also made me reflect on my own half-lifetime spent living abroad. Marlow’s thoughts about the expectations of his ex-wife Bridget and the other long-term Cairo expatriates give an idea of the melancholy accuracy of Hone’s style, remarkable for a first novel. How very different this book was from the rest of the genre piled high in W. H. Smith! Nothing dolly about it at all:

Their dreams of elsewhere, of rain, ploughed fields, sloes in the hedgerow or London Transport, were as unreal as mine would have been for sun and coral, and clear blue water. The known years spent in a landscape never tie us to it, the marked calendar from which we can stand back and reflect or think of change; we are bound to a place by the unconscious minutes and seconds lost there, which is not measurable time or experience, and from which there is no release.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © James Hamilton-Paterson 2011