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.
