The Solito

It remains a mystery as to why I was recruited in the first place. Also beyond my understanding is how the building I was taken to came to get its name. What’s more, I am not allowed to divulge what kind of work I was groomed for – though I’m certain now there are oaths I shall break. I call that place of dismal toil the Solito, and for my own safety apply noms de guerre to the Englishmen – trite in all ways, manner, deportment, everything – who ran it, and led me to this. Whether actively or passively I cannot say, but women were forbidden. Women formed no part of the Solito, in the plans that were hatched.

Of course, I was very young. No one with experience, or knowledge of the world – or not in their right mind – would have accepted the Solito proposal. I must have been desperate, because I did. I had grown up in a small, rapidly expanding village, whose major road servicing it also ran through our two nearest towns. Its sweep south was towards the coast, Hastings and St Leonards, and in its north direction connected that whole southeast region with Greater London. I lived with my widowed mother – or stepmother – in a modest semi, whose rear garden backed onto woodlands. That pleasant hinterland consisted mostly of newly planted chestnut trees, with a dotting of oaks, sycamores, ferns. There was even a bamboo grove. The land, apparently, was owned by a water company.

The job I did before recruitment into the Solito was revising catalogue entries for a mail-order firm. The bus I caught each morning got me to work at ten to nine, in one of those two towns I mentioned above, O—. O— had once had a spa and pump rooms on a rivalry with Bath, and in its fashionable quarters boasted Regency frontages, and a spiral of iron stairways plunging into basement properties. The back streets, narrow, winding, hilly, were peppered with character pubs, and there were remnants of a once thriving fish market. The wider geography was parks and boating lakes left by the Victorians, while at the town centre was a cinema, an opera house now in use as a bingo hall, and a performing venue – music, theatre, amateur dramatics. A steep hill separated an antiquated shopping centre at the foot of O— from a later one angular in its modernity – it had boutiques and a shoe emporium, and a plain brick building for the wholesale distribution of frozen foods.

My letter of induction arrived not on the mat at home, but through the internal mail at the office, which made me think it must have been one of my bosses who had put my name forward. My line manager – who was first up in a long chain – was a tousle-haired Scot with a youthful figure and boyish appearance, who all day sat with his feet up and knew everything going on in other departments, but, as I understood immediately, at a level of gossip only. He seemed to know what was in the letter even before I opened it. He said I should feel it an honour, as not many were called to the Solito. The building that bore that name was on the banks of the Thames, of ramshackle ancient London brick, with barred windows and a corrugated iron roof, in a cobbled yard sharing space with a man with a printing press and another mending cars. The latter always showed himself in a blue overall smeared with handprints. The work I was told was of national importance. Reports from the Solito – or from its agents in the field – were sent off to a think tank (title withheld), where the personnel were either Oxbridge or LSE. ‘So you begin to see, A—’ (A— is my codename), ‘how highly we value you.’ As I have said, I was young, and this all happened decades ago, and I was completely taken in.

It was all so incongruous, not that I questioned much of it at the time. I was now part of a training scheme where grey, portly men in business suits turned up at the Solito daily. Theirs was a huge acreage of clunky, pre-war desks in dingy little offices, where sitting down to their blotters and telephones they got on unassumingly with their work – work of national importance. My training was through graphic cartoon books, with eccentric characters placed in tricky if comic scenarios. For example, the workplace these characters inhabited was usually represented by the kind of picture you saw on their office wall, routinely a chart of sales figures. Those figures were astronomically up, or conversely followed a line falling through the frame. Home was shown as an armchair, with a man in slippers, trying to read the evening paper, and a put-upon wife haranguing him over something. Not the kind of thing a tabloid gets away with now, for its tea-break jokes page. For a start the move to a market economy places interdicts on the discussion of any trend in the wrong direction. As for women tied to domesticity – well….

The plain reality was, it was through the captions, page to page, that the student was led – in this case me – through each narrative and the specifics of its instruction, so that without much personal supervision I learned what my job would be once I had left the Solito. 

So what was that job? Amazingly my first and only assignment was back in the town of O—, though I was barred from a return to my stepmother and work with the mail-order firm. O— it now transpired – that genteel, sleepy little spa town – was a hotbed of radicalism, with a half-dozen of its activists under constant surveillance. G— was one of those half dozen, and it was my job to befriend him, and establish whether or not he had got not one, but two pieces of information vital to national security. Finding out was essential to the protection of important institutions, the Solito included. Even now, I didn’t suspect it was all so unlikely, when with each new focus in the blueprint I was given the whole thing was more and more fantastic. Don’t forget I was young, impressionable.

My cover was as sales rep in the creative industries, with a roving brief to stock-take in High Street shops where sheet music and manuscript paper were sold – or sometimes it was backstreets, and sometimes the goods were books, records, cassette tapes. Somewhere in that town of O— it was believed my subject G— was instrumental in the planned infiltration of a tech laboratory developing a new kind of encryption key, with the use of prime numbers of enormous magnitude. I was not told what powers that key would give to anyone who possessed it, but at the Solito that cartoon training I had received cited several instances of the kind of subversive actions it was our job to prevent, with codes and keys central to the signalling process prior to an assassination, or the launch of a missile with a nuclear warhead, or the unleashing of terror attacks on central banks or on government departments, not to say the palaces and other real estate under ownership of Europe’s royal elites.

It was winter. My first observation of G— was of a man ten years or so older than me, of slim build, with long sandy hair, in blue jeans and an Afghan coat. I should have known why my cover had been designed the way it was, and not as something else, when that first and last quarry of mine walked into a record shop, and was there for nearly an hour. I struggled to keep warm, shifting foot to foot on the other side of the street, and retreated finally into a café, where I kept up scrutiny from a table under the window. Endless lukewarm coffee and a slice of cheesecake. He came out with two or three LPs under his arm, and walked as far as I followed to a tree-lined residential street, where at one in a row of tall Victorian houses – all had soaring gables – he stopped and glanced back, and probably knew I had tailed him. He let himself in through the front gate, and at the side of the house climbed an iron stair to a flat on the uppermost floor, where a light went on. I bumped into him a few days later, when he showed signs of recognition. I later had an invitation to an outdoor fireworks display, where he was also present. I was alone. In an unforced friendly way he commented on the Roman candles and a Catherine wheel.

Incidents like these multiplied, and came to a head in that same café I had spied on him from. I sat down at his table. He did not object when I asked if the spare seat was free, which I had pulled out ready to sit. His drink was lemon tea in a tall glass in an ornate metal holder, but it had gone cold and he showed no inclination to finish it. I noted he was hard at work on the Times crossword, but as I looked closely he put it aside, and without prompting told me he knew what I was up to. I feigned surprise, astonishment. ‘You’re one of these Solito people, aren’t you? Honestly, what propaganda have they fed you?’ I asked him to explain. He recalled in minutest detail what training went on there, though I still professed ignorance. I gave him no sign that I had understood, but by what he said I now couldn’t tell if it was the Solito subverting the state and its citizens, or if it was him, G—, and others like him, out to overturn the status quo.

‘Haven’t they, haven’t you, got better things to do?’ He did not hide his irritation, and got up, and put on his coat, and with a dramatic flourish swept out of the café, leaving his folded copy of today’s Times on the table.

I reported back to the Solito. It was very suspicious, I said, because I had looked at that crossword and the last clue he’d ‘solved’: ‘A broken thread in our relations’. It required ten letters down, and the solution was, according to him, ‘filibuster’. Why, I was asked, was that suspicious (as a kind of test of competence). I was adamant the solution didn’t fit the clue, so it must have been a coded message left behind for one of his oppos, reluctant to visit the café, delayed perhaps because of my presence. I was told to think again. Furthermore I was reassigned to the middling town of O—, where I was installed in that flat my victim G— had now vacated. A year went by, with no further instruction from the Solito. I began to suspect that someone from there – a naïf like myself – would be sent to spy on me. But now almost another fifty years have gone by, and I’m still waiting.

@petercowlam