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The Secretary – Behind the Book by Deborah Lawrenson

February 28, 2025 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Deborah’s mother Joy

This is the most personal book I have yet written. Perhaps it might go some way to explaining the recurrent theme of secrets and covert operations in several of my previous novels. The Secretary is based on the diary my late mother Joy wrote in Moscow in 1958, a tiny book measuring eight centimetres by twelve that contains 41,000 tightly packed words.

It was the year she turned thirty. The Cold War was very cold indeed. Five years after the death of Stalin, his successor Nikita Khrushchev was testing nuclear weapons and notorious British traitors Burgess and Maclean had defected to Russia, though Kim Philby remained only suspected, a source of frustration on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Moscow, my mother worked at the British Embassy, nominally as PA to the Minister, the second-in-command. It was at the embassy that she met my father, Stan, who was a colleague.

My sister and I grew up with stories of our parents’ romance tailed by the KGB, and the listening devices they prised out of the walls only to find them re-plastered in as if by magic the next day. We knew that if you wanted an argument you should have it in the bathroom with all the taps running.

As a family we moved to a different country every few years. I saw for myself the frightening start of the Cultural Revolution in China: the Red Guards on the steps of the international school I attended, making the nuns who taught us parade in a humiliating circle; and heard the adults discussing escapes and reprisals. It was all there in plain sight. But it was a long time before I really understood what my mother meant when she told me: “I was a lot more than just a secretary.”

The oblique conversations I had with my mother about her career were a thread that ran through our close relationship, though it was only after an intriguing episode when she visited me at Cambridge that I began to make thought-provoking connections. It would be many decades before she took me over to one of the overflowing bookshelves in her upstairs sitting room in Chislehurst and pulled out Keith Jeffery’s The Secret History of MI6, 1909–1949 saying, ‘This one’s interesting, though it doesn’t go up quite far enough. Of course, we never talked about what we did.’

Your relationship with your parents changes for the last time when they die. Their story becomes clearer, from diaries and letters that had remained private during their lifetime. It becomes a family history, and on the way, it recalibrates your own.

So I wanted to write something that encapsulated my mother. It couldn’t be a biography. There was not enough hard evidence; she wasn’t even a footnote in the accounts of momentous times. So much had always been unspoken, even between us. I grew up skating over the surface of half-understood narratives, though maybe that is true of all families. My mother knew all about words, their power and ambiguities. Perhaps it was one of the reasons I became a writer: to show her that I understood and that I too valued the secrets kept between the lines.

Nothing of the fictitious spy story I have written is true. It is entirely imaginary, though based on real details of life in Moscow from her 1958 diary and known events. But in the domestic details, there is a great deal that is absolutely authentic. The diary provides a fascinating insight into how a single young British woman lived day to day in Moscow at that time, from the relentless hard work and socialising to the difficulties of surviving in a state of almost constant tension without privacy. As for Lois’s back story, most of that is Joy’s.

Her family lived in south-east London. They lost almost everything when their house took a direct hit from a wartime bomb, though by the greatest luck they were all out when it fell. She was a scholarship girl at Grey Coat Hospital School in Westminster, and first went to Zell-am-Ziller in the Austrian Tyrol with a student group from Goldsmiths’ College, where for many years she took evening classes in German, becoming impressively fluent. I now treasure, as she did, her framed photograph of Zell complete with a pressed edelweiss that features in the novel.

Some people – perhaps most people – want to seem more than they are. Very few people are content being more than they seem, but my mother was one of them. Despite her beauty, she was self-effacing almost to a fault. She did not court attention and was irritated by those who did. She was analytical and patient, interested in psychology and sociology. Her nature was essentially self-sufficient but she was a romantic, too. She wanted love affairs, foreign travel and fascinating strangers, and above all, she wanted to it all to mean something. She was often disappointed, but she knew there was more somewhere.

In the 1950s most British women who joined the intelligence services were well-connected daughters of the Establishment. Others could be recruited, but they had to put themselves forward, as they wouldn’t be found through the usual channels. ‘I read a beautifully-worded newspaper advertisement,’ she said. ‘It intrigued me and I wanted to see where it led.’ The trail led to an interview and tests. Just after Easter 1955, she signed the Official Secrets Act and took the boat-train to The Hague.

‘Don’t be sad for me,’ she told me during her final weeks. ‘I’ve had a long and interesting life.’ She was very nearly eighty-seven, she had married and had children while travelling and experiencing life in other countries, a woman of her time, and for most of her generation that was about as close as it came to having it all.

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THE SECRETARY

Moscow, 1958. At the height of the Cold War, secretary Lois Vale is on a deep-cover MI6 mission to identify a diplomatic traitor. She can trust only one man: Johann, a German journalist also working covertly for the British secret service. As the trail leads to Vienna and the Black Sea, Lois and Johann begin an affair but as love grows, so does the danger to Lois.

A tense Cold War spy story told from the perspective of a bright, young, working-class woman recruited to MI6 at a time when men were in charge of making history and women were expendable.

“The Secretary is a standout addition to Cold War fiction. Deborah Lawrenson delivers a story that is both thrilling and deeply human, a tribute to unsung heroines who dared to make history from the shadows.” – Poppy Watt

“The Secretary succeeds on multiple levels – as a spy thriller, as historical fiction, and as a character study. Lawrenson’s skill in balancing these elements while maintaining narrative momentum is impressive.” – The Bookish Elf review magazine

“This is sophisticated spy fiction that will appeal to fans of John le Carré and Helen Dunmore, while offering something new through its female perspective and basis in family history. It’s a reminder that some of the most important stories of the Cold War remain waiting to be discovered. “- Maria Ashford

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Deborah Lawrenson spent her childhood moving around the world with diplomatic service parents, from Kuwait to China, Belgium, Luxembourg and Singapore. She worked as a journalist in London and has written eight previous novels, including The Lantern and 300 Days of Sun.