Working for the Soviets

In London my first job after arriving broke in July 1963 was as a plongeur, washing up in a Bayswater pub. At this point in life it seemed to me that I would have far better trained as a plumber or electrician, useful and portable skills, than spent four years and more studying economics at a provincial university. But this was mistaken—it soon emerged that even that was a marketable asset, and could lead to far better things than life as a plumber or sparky. For example, it got me a part-time job as a librarian at the City Literary Institute, which was a WEA-like body where adult students could attend lectures on literary and cultural subjects and also language courses.

Issuing books and checking returns is pretty boring, but there was plenty of time to browse, and the most memorable of discoveries was Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, which had a quote on the cover from Brendan Behan, “Just the book to give your sister if she’s a large, boozy girl”. That’s for me, I thought, and plunged in, acquiring a long-lasting enthusiasm for O’Brien’s writing.

Then I moved to a higher-paid job with the Institution of Heating and Ventilating Engineers, off Sloane Square, near Chelsea. I also supplemented my income by reviewing books on related subjects for their journal and flogging off the review copies to a specialist bookshop, thus acquiring a theoretical knowledge of things like ducted air-conditioning and small bore water heating systems which stood me in good stead many years later by mystifying my future wife, an East German-qualified draftsman who worked on such recondite matters.

After a few months of this I saw an advertisement in the Economist for an economist to work in the Moscow Narodny Bank, which I soon discovered to be a Soviet-owned bank operating in the City. Why not have a go, said my curiosity. While I detested the Communist Party, I was still very curious about the USSR (though well aware of its bloody history), and sympathetic to Marxism in a general sense, though of course rejecting Marxist economics in favour of Wicksellian economics and social-democracy and a sympathy for permanent-protest-style Sydney libertarian anarchism. I wrote in and was interviewed by an ambitious young man who was in charge of the bank’s economic department, and after a while was offered the job. I was never asked about my politics and I have no idea what checks if any they carried out on me.

(In my ASIO file there is a fantastic account dated May 1973 of my having been recruited by a Soviet agent outside the British Museum reading room at a then huge salary. According to this agent I lasted only nine months and was sacked. This is pure nonsense, and I am afraid only demonstrates how sloppy ASIO was about its informants. The salient feature of my ASIO file is the incompetence and stupidity of its agents, who had little respect for accuracy. Indeed not long after my return to Australia they spent a lot of time trying to find out where I was living, and then put me under photographic surveillance—all the time my name was appearing almost daily in the Financial Review. They never thought to ring up someone to ask.)

Thus began four years of secure employment and advancement to, eventually, Manager of the Economic Department. The MNB grew out of a co-operative bank founded in 1911, that is, well before the Revolution, to finance international trade mainly in dairy products on the Pacific side of the old Russia. After the Revolution it was taken over by ARCOS, the federation of co-operatives, and then became jointly owned by the State Bank of the USSR (Gosbank) and the Bank for Foreign Trade (Vneshtorgbank). Thus the MNB was totally Soviet-owned, but established in London under English law as a bank. Its board was totally comprised of Soviet banking apparatchiks on their way up, with a chairman, at that time an ageing party hack (nicknamed Baran, or the Sheep, by his contemptuous Russian juniors), a deputy and directors who also had supervision of the various departments of the bank.

Most of the departmental heads were English, but mine in the Economic Department for a year or so was clearly a good operator (he later became head of the Vozkhod Bank in Switzerland) but totally naive and ignorant of Western banking. Once he came back after celebrating a new loan the MNB had negotiated with a City bank, and when I asked about the terms it became clear that he did not know about compound interest. With an apparently low nominal interest rate, it was clear that the Russians had been taken to the cleaners by the English.

There were several of these banks, the one later headed and established by this man, the Russo-Iran Bank, and the Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord. The last was headed by a French communist aristocrat, and it later emerged that it played an important part in channelling funds from the French state to the French Communist Party by way of the couple of bodgy construction firms which the party owned and which overcharged on building contracts. That, incidentally, was one of the reasons why whenever the PCF was in government it tried to grab the ministry of public works.

Later on, in the 1970s, the MNB tried to grow by establishing a branch in Singapore which was totally amateurish, and proposed to lend money to Sid Londish for his Woolloomooloo project, which was backed by then New South Wales Premier Bob Askin. I rang Slava to ask him if he knew what he was doing—“Oh, it’s perfectly OK. Sir Askin told us so.” It made no difference when he was gently informed that Askin was a crook. They later made another bad loan to a West Australian project. I never heard whether Slava ended up in Siberia—but he came, I believe, from a powerful nomenklatura family.

Around Christmas 1974 I was in London for a couple of months and went to have a drink with a few old friends from the bank, including the Deputy General Manager, at the wine bar across the lane. I was expounding on the stupidity of Russian banks getting involved in Australian matters when they knew so little about the political background. He suddenly went white and dashed out. It was only subsequently that I discovered that this was just at the time when Tirath Khemlani had approached the MNB while he was trying to raise money in the murky Loans Affair. The letter rejecting his advances was signed by the GM, Cyril Dicks, but was probably written by my mate the DGM. They were lucky.

The Economic Department of the MNB was engaged mainly in writing country reports for the management when visits and deals were being set up, in following developments in international trade, money and foreign exchange markets, gold markets and production, and publishing a quarterly journal on such matters. Although once I was asked to do some market research relating to a draft Five-Year Plan. As well it did regular digests of foreign trade deals and news, especially East–West trade, and published the only really comprehensive statistics on this in that they included what the Germans called “intra-German trade”, meaning trade between West and East Germany. There was not a great deal of attention given to the affairs of the USSR (although there was a fair flow of official information from there), but rather more to the puppet regimes (the “people’s democracies”) of Eastern Europe. I of course took a great deal of interest on my own account. The MNB was an active operator in foreign exchange and money markets, particularly the eurodollar market, then at its peak.

I was fascinated by the operations of the money market and foreign exchange operators, and became friendly with the head dealer, a very traditional Englishman who was if anything a classical Tory. He allowed me to spend a good deal of time in the operating departments getting to understand what went on; when we talked about it he once remarked how interesting it was to have someone explaining to him what he did. Like most first-rate dealers he was a natural who never thought about why he did what he did. He was highly esteemed in the City.

The role of the Russians in the bank (there were a couple of trainees as well as the directors) seemed pretty innocuous. I saw no evidence of any espionage—I think it was thought important to keep the bank clean. The centre for espionage seemed to be in the Soviet trade delegation at Highgate. I was on friendly terms with one of the younger Russians at the bank (Alexei), and invited him and his wife one evening to dinner at Christiane Keane’s. The wife was supposed to be a secretary at the trade delegation—she just happened to have a doctorate in aeronautical engineering. Alexei himself I was pretty sure was KGB, but intelligent and sophisticated. He early on realised that I was no comm, but was politically sophisticated enough not to say stupid things, as some of the English employees did. When drinking with him one night, with a good deal of vodka taken, I asked him straight out what he thought about the English Communist Party employees at the bank. “Quislings,” he said contemptuously. It was clear that the Russians, who were (and are) intensely patriotic, had no respect for anyone who would betray his own country, even for their benefit.

Only a minority of the MNB employees were comms. The MNB had obviously in the past been much more political, that is close to the CPGB, before I arrived. There was a residue of old comms, but the newer appointees seemed in general apolitical. Cyril Dicks the GM was I think an old comm, but to me he appeared merely as a bureaucratic Pom. I had little to do with him, and disliked what I saw of him. Nevertheless he must have been fairly astute. There were a number scattered around the place, but the only ones I had much to do with were in the Ec Dept with me.

There was Brigitte Nicholson—a very typical old-fashioned Prussian I thought, known amongst some of the English staff as “Madam Ah So!” She was about fifty, with close-cropped iron-grey hair, very upright, with a classic German accent. She used to read all the German papers, like Handelsblatt, from which we took foreign trade items for the weekly press roundup (which was produced in English and Russian). I became friends with her accidentally during a general discussion which got around to population issues and I mentioned the well-known English population biologist R.R. Kuczynski, who had been a professor at the London School of Economics, referring to him in complimentary terms (I had read an anthology he had edited on population issues). She bridled prettily, and announced that he was her father.

Then she told me about her brother Jurgen in East Berlin, whose work I also knew, but fortunately I did not tell her how little I esteemed his propaganda-laden work; and her sister Marguerite (also in East Berlin) who was editing new editions of some of the works of Francois Quesnay, the leading figure of the eighteenth-century French Physiocrats (agricultural fundamentalists) who was one of the first in the history of economics to identify the “circular flow” of goods and services throughout the economy. In this, of course, he was treated as a predecessor of Karl Marx and his “C–M–C” model of the circulation of money against commodities. Since I was very interested in Quesnay, and my friend Peter Groenewegen was at the LSE about then writing his PhD on the economics of the period, I was able through Brigitte to get copies of some of her sister’s editions for him. She did not mention another member of the family, also resident in England, her sister Ruth. This one later became famous as having been a spy for the Russians and a contact of Klaus Fuchs, and was known as “Sonya”. The whole family were apparently comms and had come to England in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. Far from being grateful for this asylum they (or at least Robert’s children) gave their loyalties to the Soviet Union even at the expense of their host country.

Brigitte married a local comm who had fought (or at least was involved) in the Spanish Civil War. No children. She lived in Hampstead, where I was invited one evening to meet some of her friends, who were clearly all comms also. I never knew what she thought about my politics—she never asked me directly—but she knew that I knew a good deal about Marxism, the Soviet Union, and left-wing politics generally. She never went further in trying to recruit me. (But one day she told me about a kids’ movement run by the English party in competition with the brownies, called the “woodcraft folk”. One reason why there are so many hereditary comms—what the Yanks call “red diaper babies”—still around.)

Her brother Jurgen’s works, which continued to flow, got more and more preposterous in their crudeness and their attacks on capitalism and its supposed tendency to cause increasing “immiserisation” of the working class. Only many years later when I came to read Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography Interesting Times (2002) (Hobsbawm being a distinguished social and economic historian, as well as an excellent jazz critic, who remains a loyal Stalinist to date) did I discover that Jurgen Kuczynski, the fawning lackey of the East German dictatorship, was also its richest citizen. “By a paradox not uncharacteristic of Berlin,” Hobsbawm writes:

the ‘Grunewaldviertel’ had been originally developed by a millionaire member of a local Jewish family that prided itself on a long left-wing tradition, going back to an avidly book-collecting ancestor converted to revolution in 1848 Paris—he had bought a first edition of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto there … Since the family still owned the Grunewaldviertel he [Jurgen] was probably the richest citizen of East Berlin, which enabled him to extend the [gigantic family] library and to offer an annual prize of 100,000 (Eastern) Deutschmarks for promising work by young East German scholars in economic history which, thanks to his support, flourished in East Germany.[pp. 45-46]

I don’t know how much of the family wealth Brigitte shared (she could not have acquired the largish Hampstead house from her earnings and those of her husband, a commo organiser in the British railways), but she also liked to write pieces for East German and Russian newspapers and magazines for payment in East marks and roubles. The few I saw which referred to Britain showed little reflection of realities of life in Britain.

Gretel was another old comm who had married a Spanish Civil War veteran. She had a secretarial role. Gretel was about forty, solidly built. Though she too was a communist, she was anything but dedicated or humourless. She was Austrian and hated all Germans, especially the Prussians (and did not like Brigitte). She visited East Germany on one occasion—I think that, divorced, she had a boyfriend who was proposing to marry her. But she came back with no illusions about the East German regime or its general squalor. Her father, she told me, had been the equivalent of clerk of the Austrian parliament, and she too had escaped to Britain as a child in the 1930s, before Anschluss. She rather fancied me and was always inviting me to dinner.

Then there was Louisa Adolfeevna, who had been born well before the Revolution, whose father was a German engineer who had settled in Russia, marrying a Russian. She was a sweet-natured old woman, who was fond of bringing bagels into the office and insisting that everyone should have some. Again, I got on very well with her and she wanted to give me a bundle of old Tsarist railway bonds, ornate certificates which were considered worthless since the Bolsheviks had repudiated all foreign debts. I was reluctant to accept them—they would have been only for decorative purposes —and was rather glad I had not when the successor Russian regime after the collapse of communism decided to honour them at a considerable discount to their original value. By then of course I was long back in Australia but would have felt obliged to offer Louisa, who however was by then almost certainly long dead, or her relatives something for them. Her main function was to translate the weekly press digests and the quarterly foreign exchange and gold publication into Russian.

And Antonio, a Portuguese comm who had been given a job of some kind—I was never very clear what he was supposed to do—as a kind of support while he wrote books and agitated against the Salazar regime. He was a pleasant, charming bloke, quite handsome; I never knew what became of him when the Salazar regime collapsed. I believe he went back to Portugal.

Michael Y was another English comm who was employed as an economist. He was lower middle-class, and thanks to the grammar school system had managed to get into Cambridge, where he had graduated in economics. We got on quite well, though he was remarkably naive in many ways. Not just ideologically—I introduced him to the joys of eating oysters, which he had never encountered before. He was a smallish, rather boring man, a typical Pom despite his education and politics. He lived somewhere on the suburban rail system and invited me to dinner one night at his place. There he was with his wife and sister, whom I was placed beside in what was a clear attempt at matchmaking. It seems that I was prospective husband material. I was appalled when he produced a couple of bottles of wine with dinner, and then after pouring out an extra glass for me from the second bottle corked it up and put it away in the cupboard. I could not wait to get away, and got down to the pub next to the railway station only to find they had just called last orders. I nearly wept.

Most important of all from my point of view was Galina. She arrived when I was in what was to be my last year at the bank. I had finished my Master’s at the LSE and though by now well paid was getting itchy feet. Galina was Russian, married to a Cuban diplomat in London, and was working as one of the Russian secretaries (along with Louisa) in the Ec Dept. Small, blonde, attractive, soft-spoken—and, as I realised later, a lot more sophisticated than me, we were fairly early on drawn to each other. She began bringing me the occasional present of a bottle of Cuban rum (and would have brought Havana cigars if I had been a smoker), but on general principle (I was her nominal superior as manager of the Ec Dept) and not getting work entangled with emotional life, I kept it on a pretty distant basis.

She told me a fair bit about her life history—like many Soviet girls she married early to a drunken sot who took to bashing her. She had been a student of chemistry at a Moscow university, and used when it was not too cold to go to a park to study. Because the textbook was so big and unwieldy she cut it up into sections so she could carry the one currently of attention in her purse. For this crime against socialist property she was expelled from the Komsomol, and either withdrew or was tossed out of university. She made her way to Hungary, learned Hungarian and did a literature degree in Budapest. She was an excellent linguist; her English and I later learned her Spanish were extremely good, and when I left her in Havana she had begun to study Arabic.

My stumbling attempts in foreign languages were often ludicrous—Christiane once said when speaking French I sounded like a Burgundy peasant—and once on the Varadero beach outside Havana, Galina and I were being pestered by a boy of about twelve who wanted attention and “chiclets”; I began to curse him in the filthiest Spanish words I knew, and Galina started to giggle. When the kid finally went away I asked her what she was laughing at. “You got the intonation totally wrong,” she said. “It sounded as if you were making love to him.”

After Hungary she went to Cuba, where she worked mainly as a translator and subtitler in Russian for ICAIC, the state film studio (where my friend Harry Reade, the only Australian to fight against the Yanks in the Bay of Pigs invasion, worked when he was in Cuba, at much the same time—but neither knew the other; though he too got mixed up with a Russian girl and it ended in tears. He would never talk about it when we were back in Oz). There she met her husband, an up-and-coming apparatchik in the Cuban foreign affairs bureaucracy, and accompanied him to London. When I left the bank at the end of 1967 Galina had already left—she was in Hungary, and thence went back to Cuba. But at the beginning of November 1968 she contacted me at the OECD and said she would be in London for a few days around the 11th. I went to London and we met. She had to go back to Cuba. Thereafter we corresponded until I went to Cuba to see her in the summer of 1970. When I had to go back to London after this we parted for good. I have had no contact with her since.

There was another Russian who worked in the Ec Dept, Marina, to whom I was strongly attracted. She was of an emigré family and had been brought up in Brazil, and was fluent in English, French and Portuguese as well as Russian. She was an excellent example of the nonsense indulged in by many scholars of James Joyce—she had written a thesis for her degree at university in Rio de Janeiro about Ulysses which made much of the fact that the first letter of the book (“Stately plump Buck Mulligan …”) was the same as the last (“Yes, I said, yes.”) and had convinced herself that this indicated a circular structure. She had of course got it totally confused with Finnegans Wake. No argument, not even pointing to the fact that the Odyssey clearly is not circular, could induce her to abandon this nonsense. But we got on very well.

She lived with a boyfriend, Gennady Z, who hoped to become a conductor—but in the meantime lived on her. Gennady’s brother Harry was a would-be film-maker, married to a rather beautiful and very stupid blonde Brazilian, Flavia, with a small child. There was also some kind of relationship with an English girl, Sophie, very pretty and often wearing in those days of miniskirts one of the shortest imaginable. When I was in Paris at the OECD Harry and Flavia were there; he set about borrowing fairly considerable sums of money from me which of course I never got back. Only years later when I was talking to Marina in London (married miserably to an Englishman who was paying to send her son by I don’t know whom to a public school) did I learn that I had been expected to become Flavia’s lover in exchange for these “loans”. Harry once took me along to a party at someone’s flat in the Marais where I found myself for a few memorable moments sitting beside the beautiful Catherine Deneuve on a bed. But of course so were half a dozen other people, all with the intention of remaining fully clad.

Gennady eventually ended up in jail for smuggling antiquities from the Middle East. This was shortly after the last time I saw him, when I was applying for a resident visa at the French consulate in London in 1986. He did not see me. But I saw him trying to sweeten the official with whom he was dealing with the gift of a box of Havanas. This group was my first real contact with the kind of rootless cosmopolitans (not Jews) of considerable talent and some intellect living in effect as conmen. They were impressive, charming and useless. Poor Marina.

And what of the Soviet citizens at the bank? There were no really close relationships between them and the local staff. Mainly the former socialised amongst the Soviet community in London—there were few evidences of surveillance by British intelligence, though undoubtedly it happened, and few of supervision by KGB and other politicals amongst them. But few of them discussed such issues, and it was of course not the kind of subject one could raise without mutual confidence. Nor did I ever hear of scandals concerning relations with local staff, though it is impossible to imagine that there was never any hanky-panky with female staffers.

They never really understood England or the English—often being laughably out of touch. My favourite example was the time one of the younger secretaries began wearing shorter and shorter skirts, as was becoming fashionable. The chairman, even then well into his sixties and thus a product of the Soviets’ self- and war-inflicted famines and shortages, noticed her skirts and asked her mother (a pretty rough East Ender) to come to see him, when he delicately broached the subject. Perhaps, he said, they had difficulty in obtaining dress materials, was fabric in short supply or too expensive? Would it help if the bank gave her an advance on her salary, or perhaps a supplement? “No,” the mother snorted. “I keep trying to make the little slut cover up and stop showing everything she’s got. Can’t you make her?”

Nor did they have a clue how nekulturny (uncultured) their employees were. One time the great violinist David Oistrakh was visiting London, and as a special treat at some function for the bank staff the Russians asked him (presumably for a large fee in spendable pounds sterling) to perform. Most of the staff stood around, bored and chattering, ignoring the efforts of one of the great musicians of the world. Nor were they terribly interested when the Russians brought in to meet the staff the funny little man who was the world’s first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. And the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution left all but the party members cold.

Some of the directors I never met at all. One of them whom I did get on with came back from Moscow in the early 1980s as deputy chairman. I was about to go back to Australia from some trip and thought of going back via the USSR, which up to then I had never visited, so I thought of him for help in getting a quick visa and dropped in to visit him. He was very amiable, and when I raised the visa issue he did not just refuse. Instead he said to me, “Well, yes, I could get you a quick visa [normally it took weeks or months]. But let me explain what it would cost.” And he went on to give me a sketch of the system I had only ever read about in texts on the Soviet economy of how the system of reciprocal favours and “fixing” went on in non-market transactions. In effect the cost to him in obligations undertaken of getting a visa would be very high, and of course I would be in no position to reciprocate. But he offered to go ahead nevertheless. Since it was just a whim, I quickly excused him from any such effort, and we parted still on friendly terms.

I could not help thinking, observing the way the Russians worked and behaved, that there were two races living intermingled. On the one hand there are the warm, human Russians, full of emotion and passion, the kind of person who it is a privilege to have as a friend, often drinking far too much and given to bouts of self-condemnation for their own “worthlessness” when in their cups. On the other hand there are the grey-faced bureaucrats, the jailers and executioners, like mini-Stalins always plotting and manoeuvring, narrow-minded and mean in their behaviour. They really are like two different species. Of course the nineteenth-century Russian novelists often describe such types, but they disappeared from post-revolutionary literature. Apparatchiks were either socialist heroes or agents of their exiled comrade Trotsky.

I once asked Alexei how they could read Dostoevsky in Russian schools and not draw twentieth-century parallels. He commented that indeed the reading of Dostoevsky was discouraged. The Russians were not incurious, and I discovered that Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle had been read by some of them, and privately they agreed that he was up there with the great nineteenth-century novelists. It was prior to the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. It was from Galina, too, that I first heard the gossip, later confirmed, that Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don was largely stolen from an another writer.

I learned a bit about the Russian bureaucratic style from dealing with my immediate Russian boss and a few others. They seemed to believe that correspondence should not be dealt with promptly, even if there was no special burden of work. They liked to let it mature on their desks. Thus even a perfectly straightforward letter that I would draft for signature would be left for a couple of weeks before going out unchanged. I suppose if there are incentives by way of reciprocal favours for expediting work then there is no reason to do so without such incentives.

But they were very flexible as far as I was concerned, and strongly in favour of education for all. I hated getting up in the morning in the dark of winter, but didn’t mind working late or at home. When they realised that I worked quite hard and never missed a deadline they stopped worrying about my turning up at ten instead of nine in the morning, and they were quite happy about occasional disappearances during the day when I would go to seminars at the LSE. I certainly never made any secret of what I was doing in that respect. They were also impressed that I was always reading. But I was a bit laxer when it came to studying Russian. There was a Russian lady called Lydia (I don’t know what her other connections were) who used to come in as a Russian teacher, usually with a small class of three or four. She seemed totally apolitical and was fascinated by the history of London. My lack of talent for languages was not helped by a lack of application, but I did learn a fair amount of elementary Russian and staggered through some of Lermontov’s stories, including “Taman”.

I finished my Master’s at the LSE in June 1967. By then I was pretty fed up with the bank, and the excuse to make a break came at the end of the year. So I resigned—happily this left me free to join the “revolution” in Paris in May 1968, and also to apply for a job at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris where, on the strength of my degree and references from the LSE, as well as my knowledge and experience of the money and capital markets of London, I was appointed.

I remained on good personal terms with people at the bank. Not long after I moved to Paris they took on my alcoholic best mate Parker, who had been working at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research and was very unhappy there, as an economist in the Ec Dept—it seemed the Russians thought he would provide a hotline to all the information I presumably would access through the OECD. They told him he could ring me from the office whenever he liked. I discovered that I was held in pretty high esteem by the Russians. I often wondered what MI5 or whoever it was would have bugged the bank’s phones thought about these conversations, which usually consisted of gossip from Parker about who he had been talking to in the pub last night and who was getting off with who. We rarely discussed economic issues and there was never any thought of my passing over information, even when I had access to the minutes of closed meetings, particularly the highly secretive Working Party 3 which dealt with the critical, at that time, monetary and balance-of-payments issues between the major members.

I dropped into the bank while Parker was there several times when I came over from Paris and spoke to various of the Russians, particularly Z, who had arrived in London after my departure. He was of marked Asian appearance (possibly of Korean origin) and the other “Great” Russians referred to him amongst themselves as “Kitaiski”, the Chink. (The Russians are terrible racists.) The question arose whether I might return to the bank as economic adviser. Z was keen on this, and suggested a high salary; he was also perceptive enough to say that an open book purchase account at, say, Blackwell’s would be part of the package. It was very tempting but it is always a bad idea to retrace one’s steps. Anyway, the idea petered out. Perhaps the other Russians were not as keen on it as was Z. And Parker in the meantime was experiencing continued mental deterioration and an exacerbation of his tendency to paranoia. Even Brigitte Nicholson remarked to me that he was seeing anticommunists under the bed. So he did not last long there.

At the time I worked at the MNB it was at the top of King William Street EC4. The monument to the Great Fire of 1666 was just across the road, and the nearest tube station was Monument, while other close-by stations were Cannon Street and Bank. It was a couple of minutes from the Bank of England. So in lunchtime and after hours wandering I got to know the City of London pretty well. It was still quite a fascinating area, with lots of odd laneways and in particular the covered Leadenhall market.

There was a pub there which made it possible to study the sluicing habits of the City quite closely—and it brought home the idiocy of Britain’s then drinking hours. The pubs closed at 3 p.m., so most people seemed to think it necessary to stay until time was called. If the pubs had stayed open all afternoon I am sure many people would have got back to work earlier. As it was they stayed to the last minute, and then staggered back to their offices where they were pretty useless for the rest of the day. Naturally they knocked off precisely on time and rushed off to get their commuter trains from Cannon Street to Surrey or wherever. So the working day for a lot of City types was about 9 a.m. to 12.30 or 1 p.m. There were many who were more conscientious, of course.

There was a fair mix of restaurants, wine bars and pubs around the City. One of my favourite was an old chophouse called The George and Vulture in a laneway which has since disappeared; this was a really Dickensian establishment with ancient waiters serving excellent steaks or chops along with good English beer (it did exist) in silver tankards; to follow you could have obscenities like spotted dick or bread or other nursery puddings, or, better, you could dig away at the centre of a large round of Stilton in perfect condition. You could also get good claret. A similarly Dickensian establishment was Sweeting’s, a fish restaurant down near St Paul’s, where I tasted superb Scottish smoked salmon for the first time in my life, as also dressed crab with properly handmade mayonnaise. In the lane behind the MNB parallel to Cannon Street was a winebar, a branch of Fleet Street’s infamous El Vino’s (the one frequented by Rumpole in the television series). This provided much of my early education in French wines, served good brown-bread-and-butter smoked salmon sandwiches, and provided the first bottle of real champagne I ever drank, Louis Roederer.

There were plenty of upmarket restaurants, mostly in the roast beef and claret style, where I was occasionally invited by people from other banks or by stockbrokers. They were very boring lunches. One memorable dinner, however, was some City function attended by the chairman of the MNB with other prominent bankers. As his offsider I was placed high up in the table rankings, well above the representative of the Reserve Bank of Australia, somewhere below the salt. Since he remembered me well from my undergraduate days there he was somewhat chagrined.

There were few links between my life in the MNB and my life outside it. One or two of the Russians saw me on television participating in anti-Vietnam War demos in Trafalgar Square. I was quietly warned that such public behaviour was not expected of MNB employees. They didn’t really care what one did (or thought), so long as it was discreet. A bit later the Hampstead & Highgate Express ran a photo of me giving blood for the Vietcong at a kind of collective “bleed-in” in the area (organised by upper-class comms like Brigitte).

And of course there was the time Alexei and his wife came to dinner at Chris’s place in Elgin Crescent. This was partly to reassure the Russians, who were a bit worried about the fact that I was unmarried, and there had never been a hint of my getting involved with any of the girls at the bank. They must have been beginning to think I might be some kind of poofter—something they were very down on. The evening was slightly marred by Parker turning up after dinner (I had told him he could) pretty drunk as usual at such a time. The Russians had brought the usual bottle of (duty-free) vodka. We were sitting in front of the fire having a glass, and Parker reached for the bottle and filled up a half-pint mug. Even the Russians’ jaws dropped. I firmly took the mug away from him and poured three-quarters of it back into the bottle.