Hooptedoodle #320 - The Unlikely Tale of Malcolm

I've been thinking about sharing the story of Uncle Malcolm for a while. I've been hesitant because it's potentially a little more hazardous than most of the silly yarns you will find here, and also there are some parts of the story of which I wasn't certain. This last point is a recurrent problem with the histories of my mother's family, since the inevitable distortions caused by retelling over the years are supplemented by the entirely deliberate distortions arising from overstating the achievements and importance of various family members, and by misrepresenting a lot of stuff in the interests of the Official Received Family Editions; by mother's family has more skeletons in cupboards than most. Well, of course, I'm guessing here - maybe everyone's family is the same?

Prompted by recent sight of an ancient wedding photo amongst my mum's acccumulated junk (sorry, archives), I decided to have a bash. Now then - Terms & Conditions:

* Some of the family members involved are still alive, and I would not like to upset or libel anyone

* Some of what follows will reflect family traditions and (especially) what I heard from my grandmother, who always preferred embroidered versions in which she emerged blameless and, if possible, martyred yet again

* A lot of this is a matter of public record, though it was a long time ago - if anyone managed to work out, despite the changed names and dates, the historical version of the story, then they would almost certainly be mistaken. If necessary, we may take comfort in the fact that I probably made the whole thing up, to fill a space in my stupid blog.

☐ I have read and accept the Terms & Conditions

Righto - back to some form of beginning. From the mid 1930s on, my maternal grandmother lived in the same house in Liverpool, initially with her four daughters. She and her husband had separated, and the five of them were a close-knit family, one guiding principle of which was the untrustworthy and despicable nature of men. In fact, all the daughters eventually overcame this prejudice long enough to get married, but my Nan and her cat lived on and nurtured their faith. The only one of her sons-in-law that she had any time for at all was Barbara's husband, Les, who had the misfortune (maybe the decency?) to die when he was in his early 40s, and he was thus himself elevated to the role of tragic martyr, for which Nan always had a fondness (having suffered herself, of course).

The youngest of the daughters was Belle (really Anabel). I never really knew her very well - when I was a kiddywink she sometimes used to come to our house to babysit when my parents went to the cinema - she was about 12 years older than me, I think. Her early academic achievements were the pride of the family, and she was certainly a very clever girl, though the factual history, inevitably, was a bit less prestigious than the received version. I subsequently learned that she did not, in fact, win a special scholarship to the best school in Liverpool, though she did sit the exam for it; she eventually left school to go to Art College, and she was expected to become a very successful commercial artist. I rather lost sight of what happened after that, but some years later she was working as an assistant librarian in a Liverpool Council public library, and suddenly there was a huge row (of which I was mostly unaware at the time) and she had to get married in a big hurry to a colleague from work, Malcolm. Which brings us to Malcolm.

Malcolm was a very smart young chap - he was also very tall, and handsome in a slightly beatnik style (big jumpers, longish hair, goatee beard). He and Belle had an impoverished start to their married life - I identify my 11-year-old self in their wedding photo - the next thing I remember is going round to their rather grotty apartment on my bicycle. Malc was always sarcastic and condescending towards me, so mostly I went to visit during my school holidays when he was at work. By this time Belle had one baby and another on the way, and it didn't take long for me to realise that I was a bit of a nuisance, so the visits stopped.

During a short space of time, Malc had a number of jobs - in a later age he would have been seen as possessing ambition and energy, but at the time he was simply regarded as "shiftless" by my Nan - my youthful taste for irony was spiked by the thought that he seemed to do more shifting than most, but no matter.

1. He left the library service, allegedly over some irregularity in the petty cash

2. He worked for a while as a barman in a pub in Liverpool city centre, but left following some (alleged) misunderstanding involving the till receipts.

3. He applied for a job as a news-reader/announcer with Granada TV (Manchester), but did not get the job - his own version of this was that it was felt he was too attractive and charismatic, and this would have impacted upon whether people paid attention to what he was saying. Right.

4. For a little while he did door-to-door selling for a firm who published popular encyclopedias (a period of history commemorated by Nan under the title "Gullible's Travels") - I have no idea why or how this ended.

At this point I lost touch with Belle and Malc, but they appeared to me just once more, when I was home on holiday from university.

Malcolm had taken a bold step. If you were a young man, with decent intelligence but a lack of resolve, and a tad questionable in the honesty department, what would you have tried for, back in the 1960s? Correct - the Diplomatic Service of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Well done - good guess.

Malc sailed the exams, no problems at all, and got a job. To gloat a little, he hired a very large car, bought himself and his family new clothes of a quality such as we very rarely saw in those days, and toured the family members, rubbing our noses in the fact that he was going to work in a glamorous new post in the British Embassy in Brussels. It was, to be fair, quite an exit. I never saw Belle or Malc again. After this time I moved into my own hectic days of professional career and young family, and thoughts of my globetrotting relatives occupied very little of my waking hours. Then, one day, my mum phoned to say that she couldn't say much about it, but Malcolm appeared to be in a lot of trouble, so if any people from the Press contacted me I was to deny all knowledge.

Pardon? The Press?

After some years in Brussels, Malc had been transferred to Khartoum. Apparently the Russians (boo!) had either planted a young female employee in the UK's Khartoum embassy, or else they "acquired" an existing staff member - whatever, this young lady's mission was to get involved with some member of the embassy staff, with a view to blackmail and all that. If they were looking for a vain, senseless prospect as a dupe, it is just possible that Malc may have been visible as far away as Moscow, who knows? It doesn't pay to be sanctimonious - these were real people, and they got themselves into real trouble. It isn't funny - well, maybe a little...

Eventually the sting was made, Malcolm had to meet an intermediary, known as André, in the Blue Nile café in Khartoum [come on - give me a break - if I were making this up I'd have tried a bit harder than that, for goodness' sake. As a side issue, we may discuss how this scene would be filmed, and which actors should play the roles.]

Malc was told that someone would tell his wife and his employers about his indiscretions if he didn't co-operate by handing over some information of strategic value. Next, I imagine, there followed a rather embarrassing conversation, as they came to understand that Malcolm was really a very junior under-secretary, who did not actually know anything very interesting at all. He provided them with some details of the security arrangements in the Brussels office - building access, wiring diagrams, stuff like that, I am told. To make it respectable, they may have paid him some money as well - opinions vary.

Poor old Malcolm fell apart. It seems his wife already knew about his affair, which is a bit humiliating, maybe, and he went to his boss and admitted the whole episode.

Things moved very quickly. He was arrested, and the aforementioned Press made the mistake of knocking on my Nan's door. Barbara was there when the man from the Express turned up: had Nan known that her son-in-law was a communist spy? Before Nan slammed the door in his face, according to Barbara, she suggested that he should go and get himself a decent job, "such as shovelling shit". More seriously, my dad was about 3 years into a senior engineering job with Reactor Group at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (or Ukulele, as they were colloquially known). He was an electrical man, not nuclear, and he worked on power-station projects, not weapons stuff, but his job involved a lot of heavy security anyway. As you might expect, the news of his brother-in-law's adventures went down like the proverbial lead balloon at the Ukulele, and for a while our mooted film project takes on a comedic twist. The Government had his house watched. No - honestly, they did. Presumably this was to see if he received visits from foreign-looking chaps with big furry hats. At first a man (in a trilby hat, with a newspaper) stationed himself nonchalantly on the other side of the street, until he was relieved by another such man. In a quiet suburban street this was ridiculous - the secret service man became a celebrity locally, the kids threw stones and abuse, and at various times mischievous neighbours offered him cups of tea, and on one occasion reported to the police that there was a dodgy-looking character hanging around, obviously up to no good. The surveillance was now switched to pairs of men sitting all day, very conspicuously, in a Ford Zephyr, the only parked car in the street.

Again, it wasn't funny at the time, since my dad could easily have lost his job and his pension. Whatever, the matter was dropped and the surveillance ended (or did it? - maybe they just got better at it - I'll take a peek out of the window now...). Probably a combination of the lack of direct involvement on my dad's part and the obvious ineptitude of the spying effort convinced them to give up.

Malc went to court, and got 10 years in Parkhurst, which was probably the minimum sentence. Typically, he missed out on his last chance for fame, since his trial was pretty cut-and-dried, and there was a much higher-profile and more interesting espionage case on at the time, which pushed Malc's charismatic good looks off the newspapers once and for all. His wife was set up with a good job in London, the kids were placed in a good private boarding school (at the tax payers' expense) and I never really heard any more. My mother lost contact with Belle, which is sad, really, but the problems over my dad's job had damaged things for ever.

Malcolm and Belle have both been dead for some years now - I met up with two of their kids - a son whom I had met when he was a toddler, and a daughter who was born after my time. I met them at Barbara's funeral, in Liverpool, in 2013. My new-found cousins snubbed me pretty severely - there is clearly a lot of heavy baggage there, so I did not persist in establishing any kind of entente. To be fair, Malc and Belle and their children might justifiably have felt that her family did not try very hard to help or stand by them when they really were having desperately bad times. It was nothing to do with me, of course, but maybe that's just another instance of distancing ourselves from a problem. I only have the excuse that I was somewhere else at the time.

Another skeleton in another cupboard, but an unusual one, maybe? As I say, if anyone tracks this story down to its facts then I know nothing about it - my grandmother just told me one of her rambling stories, long ago, and I may even have remembered it imperfectly.