TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

“Never disclose anything over the telephone!” said Pamela Fane of Ashmansworth with urgent advice to her daughter. Even in those days you never knew who might be listening. That was before we all became entangled in the web. How prophetic her words sound today when we seem to disclose everything over the phone, with the world listening!

Ellie Fane’s well-researched and enjoyable book about her mother, A Cold Finger Came Down from Above, explains why Pamela was so concerned. She had spent a long career in counter-espionage, listening in to telephone calls, and she knew all about it. She started in Bermuda during the war, intercepting transatlantic traffic, then went to Egypt protecting our Eighth Army against spies during the desert campaign against Rommel.

She enjoyed that war work because it was against a foreign enemy. The real stress came back in London where not only did she hear the Cambridge spies Philby, Burgess and Maclean betraying this country, but she then had her boss ordering her to forget all about it. She found she was working surrounded by traitors.

She was gagged by the Official Secrets Act; otherwise we could have talked about those heroic days when we met at village functions, instead of just exchanging gossip in “polite, meaningless words” (to borrow from Yeats).

There was one aspect of Pamela’s early life she did mention: the King decided there should be a Girl Guide troop at Buckingham Palace so that his teenage daughter, Elizabeth, who had suddenly become next in line to the throne, could have some experience of self-reliance, teamwork and danger. Pamela, still at school, was roped in as one of the troop, and she and Elizabeth plunged eagerly into girl guiding round the Palace, the garden, and out at Windsor. Pamela also had a good voice, and for many years afterwards sang with the princesses in the Palace Madrigal Choir.

It goes without saying that Pamela needed no Official Secrets Act to refrain from gossip about the princess’s teenage years. And she must surely be credited with helping the Queen develop that re-assuring dependability shown through times of great uncertainty, described so well by our visiting poet, Philip Larkin:

“In times when nothing stood

but worsened, or grew strange,

there was one constant good:

she did not change.”

 

Agricola, December 2025