I first met Melita Norwood in 1997. I didn't know that she had been a spy, and like most people who knew or met her I found her a pleasant enough old lady with distinctly leftwing views. At eighty-five she was still an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, for over twenty years, a fully paid-up member of the British Communist Party. Born before the Russian Revolution of 1917, she had spent over thirty-nine years in the service of the KGB and Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution. She had invited me to Sunday lunch to talk about her father, Alexander Sirnis, a Latvian disciple of the Russian novelist Leo N. Tolstoy. During the First World War Alexander had been responsible for the publication of the authorized English edition of Tolstoy's Diaries along with Dr C. T. Hagberg Wright of the London Library.

It was a frugal lunch, fish fingers and greens from her allotment washed down by tea served in Che Guevara mugs. My interest in her father went back to research undertaken at the Universities of Birmingham and Greenwich into the history of the Russian political émigré community in Britain during the twentieth century. Melita had kept several files on Alexander's activities and on other Russians living on the south coast of England in the early years of the twentieth century. It was interesting material. Although on a first reading these files appeared to have very little to do with espionage, apart from the occasional mention of Russians who I knew had been involved in the world of secrets and espionage, they acquired greater significance once she began to talk about her spying career. In fact, I found it amusing that she should have known such figures, and when questioned on them she would laugh and say things like, ‘Oh, so and so. He was a bit of a devil.’

At the time I was teaching at Trinity & All Saints College, Leeds, and would travel by coach to London once a month to enjoy a Sunday lunch of fish fingers and greens (or the occasional kipper) and go through Melita Norwood's papers. They were enjoyable outings. Melita Norwood had a good sense of humour, and kept up with current affairs. Her favourite television personality was the presenter Jeremy Paxman, and she rarely missed an edition of Newsnight.