At the height of the Cold War in 1958, my parents met in Moscow. They were both working at the British Embassy and their rollercoaster romance was complicated by KGB shadows and rarely being totally alone, even in the apartments they called home. My sister and I grew up with their tales of being tailed through streets and parks, and digging listening devices out of the walls; how they would go out the next day leaving a mess of wires hanging out of the plaster and return to find everything restored as if nothing had happened. And we knew from a young age that if you wanted to have an argument, it was best to go into the bathroom and run all the taps.

The Secretary is inspired by the diary my late mother Joy wrote in Moscow that year: a tiny book measuring eight centimetres by twelve that contains 41,000 tightly packed words. It was found after their deaths in a small cache of diaries that had survived their clearance of all unwanted possessions from house and attic, supposedly before they got too old to do it, and I rationalised that she had meant us to see them. “I was a lot more than just a secretary,” she used to say, when I had no idea what she meant. In her final years she admitted to me that she had been MI6, though by then I had long had my suspicions.

Joy turned thirty in 1958. 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 the Soviet Union. Their influential protector Kim Philby remained only suspected as a KGB asset, a source of frustration on both sides of the Atlantic.

The diary contains some intriguing names that feature in histories of the intelligence services, some well-known and others whose mention gives us an insight into how information was gathered in those days. In addition to her role as PA to the Minister, Joy writes of typing lengthy reports for “Harry Rigby”. It didn’t take long to discover that this was Australian academic Professor T H Rigby, who became one of the West’s most eminent Sovietologists, and was posted to the Moscow embassy as an adviser to MI6.

I should make it clear that although my mother told me many stories about living in Moscow at that time, she resolutely never told me anything of her actual work, and nor did I ask. The Official Secrets Act had been signed and that was that. But there’s plenty of authentic detail in her diary about her everyday life: how the work was relentless and exhausting; the merry-go-round of diplomatic parties; the tricky personal relationships in a closed community under constant low-level threat. This is perhaps the closest it comes to office matters:

Saturday, June 14, 1958

Panic stations this morning with a lengthy Khrushchev letter to go out; four of us worked on it & it was ready in time; home late, only to dash out again on the Kremlin visit. Only I turned up & we had no guide; the museum & churches were quite interesting, but oh so tiring – and the Gruesome Twosome weren’t receiving after 4.

The Gruesome Twosome refers, of course, to Lenin and Stalin, in a nice example of my mother’s dry humour. In 1958 they were still on display side by side in the Mausoleum. Stalin’s body was removed in 1961 with the Khrushchev Thaw and de-Stalinization process.

Women like my mother made a valuable contribution while appearing to most people as inconsequential. The role of secretary was perfect to hide in plain sight. They worked hard, not only at their cover job, but at any tasks they did covertly. At that time, all information was valuable, from train timetables to road layouts, as maps of Moscow’s streets were non-existent.

They had to give up their careers on marriage, a Foreign Office rule that stayed in place until 1972. It was the service or marriage and a family. So my mother became a dedicated diplomatic wife, supporting my father in his postings across the world for the next twenty-six years, from Kuwait, to China at the outbreak of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, to Belgium and Luxembourg, and Singapore. And she would smile enigmatically when young men at embassy parties occasionally behaved dismissively towards her, and keep her secrets to herself.  

Deborah Lawrenson is a journalist and novelist, and the author of The Secretary.