Spys and Dissidents I Have Served

Just read Nogbad's wonderings about Burgess and it took me back. We owned a pub in a small Dorset village in the late 1970s. One busy weekday lunchtime a tall elegant man and a male friend sat in a corner drinking a bottle of Chablis and peeling a pint of prawns between them. There was a rumble of interest from my 'old codgers' at the bar. It was Anthony Blunt and a male friend. The news had just broken in the newspapers about his activities. All pretty harmless but later that day we had a visit from the police and then we were interviewed by the Special Branch asking searching questions about the whole episode of lunchtime in the Greyhound and serving a spy! What made this even more awesome at the time was that the wife -- by this time the widow - of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, murdered with a poisonous umbrella dart on Waterloo Bridge, was also a regular in our pub along with her parents. I must have served Markov with a beer or two before he was murdered. We read the local paper with interest that week but there was no mention of Blunt being in the village so the information was probably blocked and he was arrested and charged soon afterwards.