The crowd gathering at St Margaret’s Church in Westminster Abbey hoisted their umbrellas and turned up their collars as autumn rain fell from grey skies on to the streets around. They had come to bid farewell to one of their own. Some had come, in spirit, from Broadway, barely a hundred yards to the north where Daphne Park had begun her career in her beloved Secret Service; others from Century House just over the river where she had risen through the ranks; a few came to remember her from Vauxhall Cross further west down the river where her successors continued their work for the country she had served. Eliza Manningham-Buller was there towards the front while the chiefs of MI6 sat separately – Scarlett close to her, McColl a few rows behind him, Sawers over the aisle, his security detail discreetly, and perhaps unnecessarily, eyeing the assembled marquises, field marshals, foreign secretaries and assorted great and good of a fading British establishment. At one side, immobile and weathered, sat Anthony Cavendish who, like Daphne Park, had walked the streets of Vienna after the war. Addressing them was the man who had sat in a tent with Gadaffi a few years before. In the pews listening was the man who had helped deliver Gordievsky from Moscow. Old habits dying hard, others preferred the dimmer recesses of the church, their stories still unspoken.
Shergy’s ghost hung over them, his name invoked in the address as the guiding mentor of the young Daphne Park and of many others who had gathered and still others absent. The smiles were instinctive, but also perhaps wistful, as the story was told of the search in her flat a few months earlier for the gun she had somehow mislaid and the surprise when it turned out to be a pearl-handled revolver personally built by the armourer of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. There was a colourful account of the African upbringing of a child of Empire and the story of her passing secret messages to her Ambassador in Moscow in the 1950s on the dance-floor – the safest place if one wished not to be overheard and the only time he could not get away, Park had explained. There was a reference to her fascination with the riddle of power but also with the most ordinary of people. A stillness of remembrance, coloured by loss, settled over the congregation and eyes gazed into the middle distance as the final words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s epic poem ‘Ulysses’ were read, calling forth one last adventure:
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.