Len Deighton - Charity

It wasn’t just the characters; I also kept a file index for the places in the story. As with the people, photographs and my own sketches supplemented the on-going material. The Hennig Hotel goes through several changes in the Samson years and its origin, as family residence in the early years of the 20 thcentury, was described in Winter. The furniture and furnishings of the Berlin home and office of Frank Harrington had pages of notes devoted to them. So did Dicky Cruyer’s home, changing frequently to the dictates of fashion, and more records were kept describing the offices and safe houses used by the SIS in London.

One reader told me that the Bernard Samson books were a social chronicle of the final years of the communist empire seen from London, Berlin and Warsaw. I had never thought of them in that way and that certainly was never my primary intention. Only here and there have I touched upon the historical background. I didn’t want the books to become a political record so did not refer to such events as the travels and speeches of people such as President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev, all of whom played a vital part in the eventual fall of Russia’s communist empire, and thus in the lives of my characters.

But history cannot be denied and finally the rumour mills proved right. The daily sequence of hints and tips we all received constantly, from both sides, came to fruition step by step. With no warning from the expensive intelligence organizations of the West, the Wall went down as it had gone up; in a muddled scramble of incompetence and confusion. But with that fine sense of proportion with which all apparatchiks are equipped, the Stasi, the Grepo, the East German politicians and all those who had manned the murder machines of the DDR got their pensions guaranteed in Western marks. In England and America people winked at me and said I’d forecast the most unexpected development. But few Germans hailed me as a prophet; they had seen what was coming and those who were surprised said I was lucky.

Just as with the collapse of communism in Poland, Germany’s intellectuals and academics who had energetically supported the repressive regime to the very end, were the first to declare themselves the victors in a struggle for freedom and democracy. And because substantial numbers of these people spoke English, the news reporters and historians who flooded in to tell the story of freedom’s triumph gave them the role of heroes. The story of the Church, its valour, sacrifices and triumphs, was belittled by these belligerent secularists.

It was Russia’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, (who remained a dedicated communist) who had the last word on the subject; ‘If there is one man responsible for the collapse of communism it is Pope John Paul II.’

Len Deighton, 2011

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