Charlotte Philby's latest work of historical fiction tells the story of her grandfather, Kim Philby, the notorious double-agent in the ‘Cambridge Five’ spy ring.
Edith and Kim is her fourth novel and tells the linked stories of her grandfather and Edith Tudor-Hart, the Vienna-born photographer and Communist agent who recommended Kim Philby for recruitment by the KGB.
Philby's father was a child when her grandfather defected. He tracked him down in Moscow years later, and as a five-year-old, Charlotte went on a family visit to Kim in Russia.
Photo: supplied
She says initially she didn't want to write about Kim Philby because she didn't want to define herself through his life.
But after years of having other people project versions of her grandfather, the time has come to reclaim the story.
“I stumbled upon a picture of Edith Tudor-Hart and the particular image … was a self-portrait taken in 1936 and she's holding a cigarette. It's in black and white and she's looking away from the camera and she has this incredibly compelling look. This sort of unknowable quality and as if she's quite a haunted figure,” Philby tells Kathryn Ryan.
“And when I saw that image together with the reference by Anthony Blunt and to her as ‘the grandmother of the Cambridge spies’ and I realised that I didn't actually know who this woman was, and yet she actually played such a pivotal part in Kim’s life.
“I knew that I wanted to help bring her back into the center of the narrative.”
Growing up as a Jewish Austrian in the 1930s, when the rise of Fascism was a serious threat, Edith’s idealism seemed to be steeped into her and she felt she had to change the world or at least try, Philby says.
“I think that truly it was in her heart [to seek change against the injustices she saw] and that allowed her to sort of carry through with such conviction through moments where I - and I'm definitely not alone in this - wonder how she continued to feel aligned to the cause, when we see moments such as the Nazi-Soviet Pact and then of course Stalin’s purges, which wouldn't have been unknown to her in London where she was at the time.
“So I guess the central question of the book for me, and the reason that I'm so endlessly fascinated by Edith and by the other Cambridge spies, and particularly my grandfather for personal reasons, is not how someone gets involved when they're young and naive and idealistic against the backdrop of Fascism in the 1930s, but how one continues that dedication when a regime, like Stalin’s, takes power.”
Kim Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union. Photo: Mathieu Polak/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
At the age of 21, Kim was helping people out of Vienna, through the sewers to Czechoslovakia, where he was lodging with the parents of Litzi Friedman, who was Edith’s best friend.
“She was Jewish, and he married her in the same weeks that Edith married a Brit and they all moved to London together to help save Edith and Litzi from a terrible future, if they had a future at all in Austria.
“I do think that when it comes to how he got involved in terms of being a double agent that was part, he said himself, of [wanting to be] in an elite club, but he did see himself as an outsider who obviously benefited from also being an insider.
“There's that famous quote that I have in the book ‘to betray, you must first belong’, and I don't think neither he nor Edith really felt they ever belonged.”
The KGB ID card of British double agent Kim Philby is displayed at the exhibition 90 years of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service in Moscow, on December 22, 2010. Photo: NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images
Through intelligence documents, Philby saw how Edith held all parts of her life in the balance – as a talented photographer who trained at the Bauhaus, a single mother to a disabled child, and a committed spy and Communist.
“Kim famously said that he was two people. He was a political person and he was a private person and if pushed to choose, then the political would come first.
“But for Edith, I don't believe she felt she had that choice and I think that's partly because she didn't have the wealth, she didn't have the status that he had, and she obviously didn't the virtue of having a wife at home to do the work.”
Although the files show she was doggedly followed after having attended a Communist rally in London, she never seemed to be taken that seriously as a threat, Philby says.
“I've actually included [the intelligence documents in the book] exactly as they're written, mistakes and all.
“We wonder why it took so long for the Cambridge spies to be caught, and sometimes I read these files and the way in which they misunderstood her and made very basic errors made me think maybe it's not so strange that they took so long to be caught."
High-ranking member of British intelligence and double agent Kim Philby (1912-1988) pictured while being interviewed by Daily Express correspondent Roy Blackman on 15 November, 1967 Photo: Express / Stringer / Getty Images
People have often depicted Philby after he fled to Moscow in the ‘60s as either a “dejected, drunken figure” or “living the life of Riley”, but his letters to Charlotte and her parents during that period show a witty, scathing, thoughtful and caring father, she says.
“He was a wonderful writer and I was able to lift part of the letters verbatim and then reimagine parts of them, edit them to imagine that they were written to Edith and then actually make parts up entirely.”
One of the driving forces in writing this book was trying to understand how her late father must have felt after finding out about her grandfather’s double life at the age 19.
“I'll never quite know, but I do know that having seen second hand around Kim's funeral, how our phones were tapped and we were taunted by paparazzi, things were written about my family in the press that were patently untrue and very hurtful and the way that my father and siblings were cast as sort of co-conspirators was an awful thing to experience.
“That's a generation removed and at a very young age, so I can only imagine how it would have been for him at the time when that name was not a good thing to have. He actually lost his job as a war photographer in Vietnam for The Sunday Times because of his name.”
Once her father passed through the ‘Iron Curtain’, he went on to have adventures with Kim which sparked a bond that was “beyond the legacy that otherwise he would have been left with”, Philby says.
“They both had a very sort of wicked sense of humor and enjoyed playing chess and drinking and reading and doing the Times crossword.
“I can picture how it must have been and I can see how it would have meant so much to my father to have reclaimed that bit of his father for himself, but it must have been a tainted experience.”
Having completed the story, Philby says she feels she has purged herself of all the questions and she can hit reset on her creative space.
