Chapters (38)
- Cover
- Also by Philip Kerr
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
“In nineteen thirty-eight, I got back to London from Paris and joined Section D of MI6, before joining MI5, who sent me back to the BBC and while there, I interviewed Mr. Winston Churchill, in September nineteen thirty-eight. This was, of course, the time of the Munich crisis, which upset me greatly and resulted in my subsequent resignation from the BBC. Anyway, I had a Ford V8 of which I was inordinately fond, and one morning I drove down to Westerham and Churchill’s house at Chartwell. I told him I was in some despair about what had happened and he showed me a letter from Prague, signed by Edvard Beneš, which ran as follows: ‘My dear Mr. Churchill, I am writing to you for your advice and perhaps your assistance regarding my unhappy country.’ Churchill looked at me and said, what advice, what assistance should I offer, Mr. Burgess? I am an old man, without power, and without party; what help can I give? And I said, don’t be so downhearted, sir, offer him your eloquence; awaken people in this country with your speeches. He was rather pleased by that, I think. We then shared a bit of mutual hatred about Neville Chamberlain. Having finished discussing Munich, he then presented me with a book of his speeches, which he inscribed for me and which I still have. You and I know that war is inevitable, he added; if I am returned to power—and it seems likely that I shall be—and you need a job, come and see me, present this book, and I will make sure that you are suitably employed. I then went outside to my car and drove home. But it’s an interesting story, I think—certainly of interest to listeners to The Week in Westminster, which is the show I used to produce for the BBC. The point of me telling this story now is to demonstrate to any listeners I might have that while I may be a Communist and allegedly a traitor, I am still enough of a patriotic Englishman to admire an old Tory grandee like Winston Churchill.
“From the BBC I went to the news department of the Foreign Office, and after the war I became an assistant to Hector McNeil, the current secretary of state for Scotland, who was then a junior minister in the F.O. and who sometimes stood in for Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, which meant there were lots of MI6 papers that came my way.