The Spy Game
Georgina Harding
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0747597081
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'If you were a sleeper, how long do you think it would take before you forgot who you really were? If you were living undercover for years and years. Which person would be you?' On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna's mother disappears into the fog. A kiss that barely touches Anna's cheek, a rumble of exhaust and a blurred wave through an icy windscreen, and her mother is gone. Looking back, Anna will wish that she could have paid more attention to the facts of that day. The adult world shrouds the loss in silence, tidies the issue of death away along with the things that her mother left behind. And her memories will drift and settle like the fog that covers the car. That same morning a spy case breaks in the news - the case of the Krogers, apparently ordinary people who were not who they said they were; people who had disappeared in one place and reappeared in another with other identities, leading other lives. Obsessed by stories of the Cold War, and of the Second World War which is still a fresh and painful memory for the adults about them, Anna's brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was a spy working undercover and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort between fact and fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how do you know who a person was once she is dead? The Spy Game is a beautifully wrought novel about loss, history, memory and imagination, and the way in which we shape these to construct our own identities. It is a painful and tender reminder of the importance of understanding the past and, in turn, the importance of letting go.
The Poor in England 1700-1850: An Economy of Makeshifts
Places like New Zealand and Canada were thinly populated and a little behind the times, and kept to the old values that reminded you how good it was to be British. It was only when they were gone, when the police had taken them away, the evening of that same Saturday in January when the other three were arrested at Waterloo, that the things they left behind revealed who they really were. Their house was a bungalow on a suburban street in Ruislip, a house of such a common design, with its.
The scent of the bare Christmas tree that he had just brought in and propped up against the stairs. I ran into his arms. I could smell the forest on him, dark and green and soft underfoot. Building a card house brings the mind to a fine point. Concentration complete, brain to fingertips. Tongue to lips. Control. The card is crisp and clean between my fingers. I am standing a nine of diamonds against a four of clubs. I work on the floor. I know from experience that the rug before the fireplace.
The implication that he had been two-timing Bunty was the sort of thing people would have expected of spies, even if he was fifty-five and balding and had been living until recently in a caravan. On returning to Waterloo Road Harry and Bunty crossed to the corner by the Old Vic. There a man walked swiftly to them and they shook hands. Gordon Lonsdale, as he called himself (real name K. T. Molody) was dark and stocky, with a style and spark to him that the others lacked. His manners too had.
Another name. I might as well go now. And yet it is so hard to go; some compulsion, the old paranoia, edging back, all the looking for things that weren't there. The gaps. The wordlessness. So I stay and browse the files for a while longer, just turning the pages, turning through at random. Grey pages, heavy black type. So many names. Each name a person, a family history. So many Frenzels, Hermanns, Hoffmanns. Seven columns of Hoffmanns. What if my mother's name were Hoffmann; which of four.
Have a crispness to them. They will soon be so handled, in this city of checkpoints and checks and coupons and passes, that they will begin to acquire the texture of cloth. Her steps sound on the stairs. From above comes a hum of English voices, a sound that she follows from the landing and along the corridor to the open door of the office. She is standing in the room a moment before anyone notices her. There is time to take in the strange normality of the scene, the orderly activity, the rustle.