Travelling with a Spy

Have you ever wondered what a real spy looks like? Have you ever wondered what a real spy looks like? I don’t mean any of that James Bond fantasy stuff, but a genuine, bona fide spy.

The one I met by chance could not have been farther removed from an Ian Flemming character than you would ever have thought possible.

I was on a flight back to the UK after having celebrated my seventy-fifth birthday on the island of Sicily with three family members. The seats were arranged in banks of three and I was seated across the aisle from the rest of the party. And so, it came about that I found myself next to two ladies who, I guessed were not too far behind me in years. 

Once we had taken off, we began to converse. 

‘Where in the UK are you from?’ I asked the lady on my right. 

‘Cheltenham’, came her reply.

‘Oh! I attended teacher training college there,’ I said.

Thus began a conversation about this charming Cotswold town.

All very innocuous, I hear you say, but what has this got to do with spies?

‘What line of work were you in?’ was my next question.

‘I was a spy,’ the innocent looking lady replied. 

I tried to imagine her passing furtively through the backstreets of some foreign city with a top-secret document secreted about her person seeking the pre-arranged dead letter box. Alternatively, what if she, in her younger days, was a Mata Hari figure who seduced men into divulging national intelligence?

Of course, the truth was much less exciting or titillating. It transpired that the lady had graduated from an Oxbridge University with a first-class-honours degree in Russian. She was then recruited as an interpreter at the Russian Section at GCHQ, the national intelligence gathering centre for the United Kingdom. Much of her work involved obtaining information relating to Russian Military activities.

This brief encounter spawned a short story after I had returned home.

Had my travelling companion plied a different trade, would the possibilities for creative writing been as rich? That I do not know, but every encounter offers potential for a story. Can you think of a recent encounter or one from years ago that still sticks in your mind? Get writing!