Memory of Secret Interviews

When we think of interviews, we think of a situation where someone has fancied a particular job and has applied for it. 

How about an interview for a job you have never applied for and you don’t even know what the job is? 

This was the situation in which I found myself after having been requested to attend a meeting with some rather important looking gentlemen who spoke with, what seemed to me,  extremely exaggerated upper class accents. 

There were four of them. They announced the fact that they were from the government. They simply wanted to meet me and chat about the things I did. Any hopes of a relaxed chat went out of the window as they pounded me with all sorts of questions about what I was interested in apart from Theoretical Physics. 

I loved climbing mountains but I had abandoned this in favour of rowing for the college in heads and regattas which also seemed fun to me. My climbing partner later lost his life on the North face of the Eiger. But then the questions went on to my life before this. 

Let’s face it. I was what, we now call, a nerd at school. But, as I could run fast and jump further than anyone else, I was the school athletics captain but not very committed to competition. One afternoon, I met our commandant who asked me why I was not competing in our match with another school that day. Very alarmed, I said that I had appointed some younger athletes to take my place as they were so keen to take part. Much to my amazement, he simply said, “Such leadership!”. Later on, my report pronounced me a “leader of men” but he was a real leader.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1356052/Col-A-W-Kiggell.html

I even won the Wavell prize for initiative, much to the annoyance of the Sandhurst set, but my “initiative” included joining the choir to avoid church parade and joining the band to avoid marching into meals and standing still for over an hour during the Saturday Trooping the Colour. I can remember joining a rugby team playing a nice Canterbury public school where a fellow nerd showed me round their wonderful facilities for music. I even led survival courses simply to escape the boredom of school and eat enormous SAS rations on top of a mountain somewhere. I also became a marksman because the school actually paid me money for this! 

It was amazing that I managed to maintain some sort of intellectual intercourse with these four men for almost two hours. I was slightly acquainted with their accents as they were similar to some officers including the adjutant, headmaster and commandant at school. In fact I rather enjoyed talking about nothing for such a long time. 

What happened next was not so nice. I only learned what was going on from my doctor in London. He was a Jewish doctor, also with our surname Winter, who had escaped from Germany. My mother had looked after his family while he qualified again in Edinburgh. He was incredibly grateful for this help and showed it for the rest of his life. He became a very well known private practitioner with a large Rolls Royce car, wearing a beautiful morning suit complete with a fresh rose in his button hole each day. If I or my sisters had the slightest cough or sign of illness, he would appear immediately with presents for us all and give advice and treatment. We loved him. 

He had told my mother about some men who had approached him one day and started asking questions about me. I explained that I had given nobody permission to do this and had never even mentioned anybody as a reference. He said that he had told them “I am happy to help the government in any way” because he was so grateful to have been given refuge at the most desperate time of his life. He described the men as looking a little mysterious wearing trench coats. Although they said they were from the government, they gave him no evidence of their real identity.  

Incidentally, it is interesting that, because my mother’s side of the family had a very well known Jewish surname, many people in Israel were convinced that I was Jewish. In the light of my regard for my wonderful doctor, I was very happy about that. 

Back at the ranch, I was surprised to receive another visit from a mysterious four. But there was a difference. One of them had an accent similar to my own. 

Unfortunately I was rather sensitive about my accent which upper class accented Monty Python would, with their usual utter disdain of the working class, refer to it as a “West of Neasden” accent. 

In fact, my only real rebellion against authority at the Duke of York’s Royal Military School was when I walked out of a class where we were being taught how to “speak proper English”. I can even remember the astonished look of the teacher and the actual word we were being taught to pronounce. It was “sand” which we were supposed to pronounce as “send”. In retrospect, it seems a pretty silly action but it does illustrate my sensitivity. My favourite accent is still the old Essex accent which was spoken by my mothers side of the family. 

As usual, I had no idea what this person with my accent sitting some way from the middle of the table actually did. He told me how much he was enjoying working for the “service” but he did not give any details of exactly what this “service” actually was. The head honcho did clarify things a little by indicating that it was something like the “foreign service”. This really scared me because I was really terrible when it came to remembering foreign and classical languages. Although I had taken a Italian course run by the university in Siena and acted as an interpreter for the British contribution to the “Italia Sessantuno”, I had almost immediately forgotten everything soon afterwards. 

The only explanation I was able to elucidate from this  illustrious gathering was a comment blurted out by my similarly accented friend, “There’s opera in Japan!” 

Did this mean that they already had an assignment for me? That was improbable. I assumed that this person was already working in Japan. Unfortunately I was definitely not a person who could sit through a whole performance of kabuki, so his comment was not any incentive for me. 

Seeing that I was not particularly enthralled by the “foreign” service, they even mentioned positions available in other services where I could start by being an assistant to a minister. I simply did not understand this although I later learned a little of government from watching “Yes, Minister”. 

I never really understood what these meetings were about although, many years later, I began to guess what was going on back then. When I started my Theoretical Physics research, I began to receive Russian Atmospheric Physics papers, which I never really understood, to comment on. I was even directed to a safe house in the middle of the Welsh mountains where I was able to discuss with a very frightened Russian the meaning of a single word used in the middle of some mathematics in one of the papers. My friend, who gave me a lift on the back of his motor bike, even remembers the word to this day! 

So, always faithful and patriotic, I did my best to serve in my way. Perhaps I even helped the USA a tiny bit in the “space race”?