As OUR fame spread in the world of the Secret Service, more and more visitors, both British and American, asked to be shown over MB with its studios, record library, intelligence files, and newspaper and radio news rooms. Some of them, like General `Wild Bill' Donovan of O.S.S., even sat in on our morning conference and listened as Clifton Child and his intelligence officers produced their suggestions for news items and I directed how each item should be written and angled.

But mostly my guests were satisfied with a brisk look around, a brief audition of the various stations and the inevitable conference in my office where we discussed at length how their organisation could help mine and what we, in return, could do for them.

When they had gone I often found myself smiling wryly at the thought of what an odd impression we must have made on them. For a more weirdly assorted group it would have been hard to find anywhere in Britain at that time. German refugees, German prisoners, Balkan beauties, Italians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, British girl secretaries, British and American editors and executives, all jostled each other in the passages of MB talking their different languages and their assorted varieties of English. Each of them dressed as the fancy took him or her.

On one occasion a functionary of the Court of Admiralty met me and my team at a local cinema bringing us a canister containing German films found on a German boat taken in prize. I wanted to show the film to my team to give them an idea of German war-time life as seen through the eyes of Dr. Goebbels's cinema studios. As the men and girls tumbled out of the buses and into the cinema the Law Courts official contem plated us with the severe and disapproving stare of a churchwarden regarding a bunch of tipsy Teddy boys. " You're something to do with the Ministry of Information I suppose?" he said when the last of my gang of wild Bohemians had disappeared inside the vestibule.

" Oh no, not M. of L" I said quite truthfully, and then I added wickedly, "as a matter of fact we are Foreign Officediplomats you know!" He looked me over in dumbfounded amazement. And indeed I must have appeared an odd species of diplomat in shapeless grey flannels, khaki shirt open at the neck, my old suede jacket from the Spanish war, and a beard. The beard I had grown, not as a disguise, as has been said by some of the post-war German magazine writers elaborating their bits of tittle-tattle about the mysterious boss of the Soldatensender, nor even, as still others have said, to impress and terrify the members of my team. The simple truth is that I had found it hard to get razor blades. Once a week therefore, on my regular trip to London, I called at the barber's shop in the basement of Bush House. A cheerful little Whitechapel barber named Iky tended my beard. He called it `our beard' and treated it as though it was a piece of ornamental box hedge at Hampton Court. Each week he tried to cut it into a fresh shape.

" A spade beard today, sir?" he would ask, while the other barbers crowded in close to listen to him. "Or shall we continue with the Trotsky you're wearing now, sir, with perhaps just a shade more deviation to the left? No? Then how would it be to try something like this one I found on this tin?" And he produced an empty tin of Skipper's Sardines with a picture on it of a beard-fringed Skipper.

My team had expanded so rapidly that we had been forced to requisition extra houses in the village of Aspley Guise. The Germans alone now occupied seven houses and as soon as new prisoners came in from Normandy-we would have to take over yet another `desirable residence'.

The villagers were much intrigued by the mysterious foreigncrs who strolled around their narrow lanes and village streets. No one knew who or what they were. Our men were forbidden t o enter the local pubs, and the housekeepers and servants of our houses were all sworn to silence under the Official Secrets Act.

In my house, R.A.G., we lived well enough. Much better, in fact, than most people in Britain. And we did so although we adhered strictly to the war-time rationing regulations. From Woburn Park we used to get venison, which was unrationed and unwanted, thanks to the obtuse refusal of the average Briton to eat this delicacy with which he is unacquainted. Our own chickens laid eggs for us, fed on pellets for which we had given up our egg coupons. Vegetables were grown in our grounds by the gardener, father of my highly efficient housekeeper and cook, Freda Maddy. The team collected mushrooms when out on their walks in the fields, and Isabel, to whom I had given Can expensive Paris education' in the culinary arts-as artist Peter Rose Pulham used to say-taught Mrs. Maddy the finer points of French cuisine. Moreover, my wine cellar was still well stocked, thanks to my wine merchant friend John Hill of Hedges & Butler.

Somehow the story of R.A.G. dinners of mushrooms cooked in wine got around, and soon there was ugly talk of `foreigners living in luxury while Britons starved'. It even got to the ears of my old colleague John Gordon of the Sunday Express. He sent a reporter to investigate `the scandal'. The report was not published until after the war,* when the security ban forbidding any mention of our existence had been lifted.

" `Fat-of-the-land' Life of German P-O-Ws. Mushrooms cooked in wine." said the headline, nicely calculated to excite the indignation of John Gordon's Scottish-Canadian master on grounds both of patriotism and thrift. The dispatch fully lived up to the headlines.

" The German prisoners who did broadcasting and propaganda work for Britain in civilian clothes had a good war here. ... This alien propaganda corps, which included women, were lodged in big 20 to 14-roomed houses standing in their own grounds ... the men were all dressed in lounge suits or sports clothes ... villagers told how the foreign contingent lived on the fat of the land. In one week last year 434 pints of milk were delivered to the houses where the Germans and others were lodged.

" I was told how Continental delicacies were bought from Bedford for their table, how the best produce of a local fruit (arm was allocated to them, how sometimes they dined off mushrooms cooked in wine......

How this piece would have rejoiced the victims of our 'Diplomat Rations' Campaign! `Der Chef' could not have done better.

* Sunday Express, February 17th, 1946.

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