Was he or was he not? Who knows? Who cares? Well, not me particularly, but it is interesting. Then there’s the matter on which I shall say nothing, nothing at all...

In a previous entry, I promised to conclude a - rather long-winded - account about why I think it more likely that my father, who I had so far thought was a BBC journalist helping out with MI6 now and again, was actually a full-time spook. Not that it matters and he died almost 30 years ago, but a number of things an aunt told me on a trip to Germany in May cast a rather different light upon what I knew.

Briefly, my father served in the Army Intelligence Corps during World War II, and then worked for the British Military Government in Germany for a few years, probably until a few months before I was born in 1949.

By the time I was born, he had joined the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park, Caversham near Reading, which, he told me, entailed the BBC monitoring radio (and, I suppose, later TV) stations from around the world. I

often wondered why the BBC should bother doing that and when, as a young lad, I asked him, he told me that the BBC could thus hear about news they might otherwise have missed and could put it in it’s own bulletins.

I’ve since discovered it, or possibly just part of it, was a division of the CIA known by the somewhat innocuous name Open Source Enterprise. In 1959, he was appointed as the BBC’s representative in Berlin (note, there was also a BBC correspondent who, for some of the four years we lived in Berlin was Charles Wheeler. Wheeler a more liberal-minded chap and my father rather further to the right apparently did not get on very well).

In Berlin, he was part of the BBC’s German Service, a department which existed for 60 years from 1939. It was in Berlin that he, by his own account and in response various questions I put to him in the last few years of his life, ‘helped out the security services’. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it might account for Charles Wheeler’s antipathy. Wheeler was a hack to his core and most certainly would not have agreed with a journalist working hand-in-glove with his country’s government, if only for the very practical reason that it would cast doubt on his integrity as an honest journalist, and even though that integrity might be wholly unsullied, even the possibility that a journalist was not entirely independent could be damaging.

Incidentally, and as I have pointed out in the blog before, when I talk here of a ‘journalist’, I do mean the professional man or woman who reports on news and sometime provides analysis as opposed to the guy or gal thinking up puns for captions to pictures of vegetables that look like celebrities - or celebrities that look like politicians if you like. This second kind of hack might be beavering away on Tunnels & Tunnelling, a very useful publication which now has an online presence for those with a keen interests in, well tunnels and tunnelling.

The first kind of journalist is one the public - ‘civilians’ - imagines you are when they discover you ‘are a journalist’ and assume you spend your days hob-nobbing with politicians and high-end businessmen and are generally ‘in the know’. In fact, the other sort, those who staff Trout & Salmon, for example, are equally justified in calling themselves journalists. It’s just their work is not quite as apparently sexy as that of the first kind. Me, I’ve never called myself ‘a journalist’, I always said I worked for newspapers. Nothing hard news about me, dear friends.

. . .

I mentioned in the entry I link to above a guy called August Löning, a distant relative and strong anti-Nazi by virtue of the fact that he was a supporter of Der Stahlhelm, a rival far-right group which was mainly distinguished from the National Socialists by the fact that it wanted to ‘bring back the Kaiser’ and the Nazis didn’t. Onkel August as I, part of the ‘extended family’ - and boy can Germans extend families, although I must admit I rather like it - called him was a founder member of the German CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) and served as a member of the stare parliament of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). But Onkel August was also part of a secret government in waiting set up by - well, partly by the British security services - which was destined to take over in the event of a Soviet invasion. That, at least, is what my father informed me.

Several years ago, Irmgard, one of August Löning’s daughters told me that a few times every year throughout the 1950s a mysterious Englishman would visit her father in Lathen, the village about 12 miles from the Dutch border in which he lived, and when he arrived, they secreted themselves somewhere quietly and everyone else was told not to disturb them. Irmgard said she couldn’t remember his name. But on my recent trip to Germany her younger sister Helma, who I had lunch with, could remember who it was: my father.

Was she sure? I asked her. Because her sister Irmgard, I told her, who knew my father just as well as she did, would certainly have remembered it was my father. She was certain, Helma said. My father visited her father - August Löning - regularly throughout the 1950s. And then, she added, as we ate, there was ‘the radio transmitter in das Alte Wehrhaus’.

August Löning had owned das Alte Wehrhaus (the old weir house) on the river Ems since a new weir had been built further down the river. We spent many holidays there when we lived in Berlin, and it was also where a radio transmitter was kept. There’s obviously nothing particularly unusual about having a radio transmiter as part of plans to be ready to put in place a provisional German government if the Soviets ever invaded West Germany (as it was then), but it did take me a little by surprise when Helma told me. She said her brother Heinrich had been trained to use if as and when.

The question I am asking myself is why would a member BBC monitoring service, by his own admission, help to set up a provisional German government and, furthermore, make regular visits to see August Löning throughout the 1950s? But if he were a serving member of the security services, it would make a lot more sense.

That possibility also made me ponder on something else which has in the past struck me as odd. My father, who once later in life described himself as a ‘right-wing radical’ when I asked him what his politics were, also once told me he had campaigned for the then Liberal Party during the general election of either 1950 or 1951.

Now, anyone meeting my father would never have put him down as a liberal, but it is always possible that he, then 27/28. was a tad more idealistic at the time and, well, thought Britain could do with a Liberal Party government and it was worth campaigning to get one elected. It has since dawned on me that the security services might also very much like to have an inside man among the Liberals, given the number of Communist sympathisers out and about and the steadily deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union. But that is just surmise.

So there you have it. I can still not say with any certainty what my father was - a BBC man who ‘helped out’ or a spook with a BBC cover. To be frank it doesn’t matter either way, but when Helma insisted it had been my father who had arrived regularly throughout the 1950s, I did get to thinking again.

A few years ago I discussed some of this with my sister, and we decided to ask MI6 straight out. So almost four years ago, on November 1, 2014, I wrote them a letter explaining who I was and who my father was, and asking whether my father had been a member of their staff. I didn’t get a reply for several months, but then I did get a response from MI6. It was bland in the extreme.

It purported to be from a suburban street somewhere in South London and was extremely short. I know it was from MI6 because I had addressed my letter - I got the address from the MI6 website - to ‘General Inquiry, MI6, PO Box 1300, London SE1 1BD’. I think I still have it somewhere though I can’t say where as when I put stuff away

for ‘safekeeping’, I invariably forget where it is (but at least it is still safe). I can only remember the gist of the very short reply, but it was along the lines of ‘such matters are never discussed’ and it advised me to get in touch with The National Archives in Kew, South-West London, to see if they had any info on my dear old dad. Nowhere in the letter was there any mention of the ‘security services’, ‘MI6’ or ‘MI5’.

Oh, and here’s tip: if anyone in Britain (or in your own country) volunteers the information that they are working or once worked for the security services, you know one thing for certain: they are not or did not, and are just total bullshitters. Spooks don’t talk or brag. It’s not in their nature, and an ability to keep quiet is one of the traits which makes them attractive as potential agents. For the record, I am not and have never been a member of the security services.

Former colleagues might not that I am far to outspoken, indiscrete (or indiscreet - subs please check, as I can’t be arsed), noisy and tactless to be considered spook material. But then I would have thought that having a reputation as a loudmouth might well be excellent cover. If it worked for the Scarlett Pimpernel . . .

 . . .

There is another matter I should dearly like to write about, but wisdom - yes, wisdom - advises against it. As I confessed to a friend a week or two ago, rather shamefacedly I must admit, I might not be much wiser than I was, but I have learned to listen to small voice inside me that occasionally counsels ‘nah, wouldn’t do that, or at least not yet’. So, zilch, dear friends, zilch on the matter.

So THAT’S what displacement activity is! Well! I must ring all my friends and tell them, though I can’t do it quite yet as I really, really must get on with sorting out that hairbrush. And then there’s the bloody bog roll roller – sticking again. So I might not manage to ring around to later today or maybe tomorrow

Well, it’s been ten weeks since my new life started and I’m slowly getting used to it, although it hasn’t quite gone to plan. But that is no bad thing as surely being intent on sticking to a plan, however noble that plan, is arguably the antithesis of relaxing, and boy do I intend to relax. It’s just that my idea of relaxing is not simply cracking open a bottle of Rioja on the stroke of noon and settling in to watch flat-racing on the gogglebox

Writing was the essence of that plan, and that part of it I have adhered to, though not quite to the timetable I had mentally set for myself. And nor have I yet begun my next project properly, though I have done some work on it.

An application I have been using and found to be very useful is Scapple, though there are others like it and it is available for both Macs and Windows, so a file can be saved to, say, Google Drive or Microsoft’s One Drive, and then work on pretty much anywhere on a desktop of laptop if you have the app installed and access to the internet (to download the file, obviously, then upload it again with any changes you have made ready for you next session.

The idea is not original, merely one which has been transferred to the digital realm: you jot down – I suppose that should be ‘jot’ down a series of ideas and thoughts on what you want to write, I suppose you are brainstorming yourself, and then connect them in any way you choose. It is useful, if only because it can give you a slightly better overview of what you have in mind and helps you marshal your thoughts better. Here is a screenshot of it, with work I have already done. It is just a jpeg of a screenshot and I hope to God you can’t read any of the notes:

A few weeks ago, I was at my sister’s in Germany for my niece/goddaughter’s wedding, and when I came back I didn’t quite feel the same as I had when I went out. I was conscious again of having projects and feeling obliged to do something. Well, I did and do, but that slightly irritated me.

My original plan to be out of bed at dawn, down in my shed (picture at the bottom now that I have a new table and have rearranged the furniture a little to make it more amenable and be tipping away on my keyboard as though there were not tomorrow. Incidentally, I can’t think why I had the desk where it was before, and anyway, I no longer have that desk, but shan’t go into why not as it has caused something of a slight rift between me and my stepmother who more or less implied I was trying to con her out of it if not steal it outright. That hurt, although her friend and neighbour Jill suggests she might slowly be getting a little dementia. Who knows, but that is by the by).

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but I am, at least, putting in about four hours, even if it means I am going to bed a little later than I expected. My last post here touched upon the slightly mysterious suspicion that my father was not, as he had always assured me, a BBC man who just occasionally helped out MI6, but that it might, just might, have been the other way around. The last post was the first part, and I promised a second, but that will have to wait, as I have something else on the go.

. . .

I read a novel, which had been one of my set texts at college, and which is regarded as ‘a masterpiece’ and the writer ‘a genius’. So when I read it and increasingly thought ‘what’s all the fuss about, this isn’t all that brilliant’, I was a little bemused and embarrassed even. I mean who was I to judge that a man regarded as one of the world’s great writers was maybe not all he was cracked up to be, at least going by the novel I was reading.

In fact, I was so bemused and embarrassed by my apostasy, but on the other hand so sure that that was really what I felt, that as soon as I had finished the novel, I began reading it again. But even on two readings I can honestly say I am not at all convinced.

So that is the ‘something else I have on the go’ and I am doing quite a bit of work on it. I shall post it all here when it is finished. And once finished, I really shall get down to the main thing.

The other thing which I have finally been able to do is get into learning to play the guitar a damn sight better than I have so far. And even though I say so myself, the lessons – with a Paul Berrington in Padstow – are paying off. Some might feel what we do – scales, modes, arpeggios and musical theory – is all a bit dry, but I’m having none of it. For one thing my playing is because more flexible, or rather my fingers are becoming more flexible and my playing, by and by, more fluent. It really is early days yet as far as being as good as I want to be, but I feel I’m slowly getting there.

Other things on the horizon are another swift trip Bratislava to be measured for my new tooth which will be combined the night before I fly out – just for the say, by the way – with a drink and perhaps a meal with an old friend.

I have, though, discovered what ‘displacement activity’ is. I thought I knew, although I have never before used the word, and when I came to settle in to write this entry, it occurred to me. So I looked it up and it is spot on for what I want to describe.

Quite simply my day runs like this: I wake up, often quite early, turn over and and sometimes manage to go to sleep again. I finally get up between 9.30 and 10 and then, in theory there is nothing to hold me back. But it is then when I discover all kinds of things to do except shift across here to my shed and get stuck in. At 10.30 there’s coffee to be made, online newspapers to be read, perhaps I might go into town to buy something, then there’s time to be passed deciding what to buy when I go into town (today it was a guitar stand – Paul would be proud as using one means thereis far less chance of you guitar crashing over and getting damaged).

Then, at some point there is my stepmother to be visited down the lane – a duty I am increasingly putting off as after that incident with the table I am not all that keen on seeing her. And then, of course, it it lunchtime, and although I don’t eat lunch, I do tend to drink another pot of coffee. Finally, I might shift over to where I am sitting now and start. And the very odd thing is once I start, I wonder what all the fuss was about. But now I know: displacement activity.

But all in all, it’s rather pleasant. I would urged everyone to retire, whatever age you are. The only downside is that sooner or later retirement ends in death. But then so does life itself, so it ain’t that serious.

Pip, pip.