This is the beginning of The Spy Game by Georgina Harding, a book that held my attention from page one when I opened the parcel one morning at coffee time and, with the luxury of time which I now possess, read straight through in three hours.
"On a freezing morning in 1961, eight year old Anna's mother disappears into fog. A kiss that barely touches Anna's cheek, a rumble of exhaust and a blurred wave through an icy windscreen, and her mother is gone"
The same day that Anna's mother disappears a spy case breaks in the news. This is the unmasking of the Krogers, an ordinary suburban couple who turned out to be master spies passing on information to the Russians. They were 'sleepers', ordinary people, who were not what they appeared, vanishing from one place and turning up in another furnished with a new identity.
Anna's brother Peter, who is obsessed by stories of the Cold War and of the Second World War, thinks their mother has not been killed in a car crash as they have been told, but is still alive working under cover. Their mother had been German and her father married her at the end of the Second World War and her childhood and former life is unknown to them, lending credence to the possibility that his theory could be true. They start to watch their father and the neighbours, Anna reluctantly, to find proof to bolster this theory. Even when Peter is away at boarding school, Anna is under strict instructions to watch and make notes and report to Peter when he is home for the holidays. At one stage, on learning that the Krogers had a transmitter in the back of their radiogram, Peter dismantles theirs. Of course, he finds nothing and when he puts it back together it will not work.
One day when they are out the two of them see a woman at a bus stop who looks just like their mother, she wears her hair in the same style and also has a coat similar to one owned by her and this fuels Peter's obsession even more.
I remember the Kroger case and how shocking it was at the time. They were such ordinary people, difficult to imagine they were members of a spy ring and the papers were full of conspiracy theories and hints that there were others. We had already had Burgess and MacLean, and in 1963 Kim Philby, the 'Third Man' was uncovered when he escaped to Soviet Russia. Rumours abounded of further high up involvement and it was not until years later that we discovered that Anthony Blunt, in charge of the Queen's pictures was also a spy but this had been kept quiet (Alan Bennett later wrote a wonderful play about this as he did about Guy Burgess), so it is easy to forget the atmosphere of paranoia that prevailed at the time, making Peter's ideas not as far fetched as they might seem. The war had only ended some 17 years earlier and this is something that must be remembered when reading this book in 2009, it was still close and its effects were still being felt.
This was a most intriguing and fascinating story and can leave the reader in two minds. At first, I realised that Peter was making up these stories in order not to have to face the reality of his mother's death in a car crash, but then I read on and began to wonder, could he be right? When Anna grows up and is an adult with a family of her own, she determines to research her mother's background and travels to Germany to do so. What she finds there is extremely surprising and unexpected.
I won't go on any further as I do not want to give any of the plot away, but I thought this was a marvellous story, eminently readable and I now wish to read Georgina Harding's first novel, The Solitude of Thomas Cave, about which I know nothing. If it is as good as this one, I am in for a treat.
Bloomsbury have details of this book and an excerpt from it on their website - click on the link below to have a read:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/WhatsNew/details.aspx?id=57
and then, of course, you must order it...
