A secret women kept for a long time: We're good at keeping secrets
Don't take it from me: this is official MI5 guidance. Or at least it was in 1945, when Charles Henry Maxwell Knight – the spymaster thought to have inspired 'M' in the James Bond books – recommended that the secret services should employ more women.
'It is frequently alleged that women are less discreet than men,' he wrote, in a memo currently on display in an exhibition about the history of MI5. 'My own experience has been very much to the contrary. During the present war, M.S. [a section of MI5] has investigated probably hundreds of 'loose talk' [cases]. In by far the greater proportion of these, the offenders were men.'
Maxwell Knight had a theory about why men were so prone to blabbing. 'Indiscretions are committed from conceit,' he proposed. The fragile male ego is too easily tempted by the feeling of importance that comes with revealing a juicy secret. 'A man's conceit will often lead him to indiscretion, in an endeavour to build himself up among his fellow men.'
That has the ring of truth about it, although I don't believe it's an especially male weakness. The currency of gossip is nowhere more powerful than among teenage girls. Indeed, my own theory is that women are better at keeping secrets because we start young and get lots of practice. Whether for innate or cultural reasons, girls tend from an early age to have more intense, confiding friendships than boys do. Sharing secrets is an exercise in trust. When it goes wrong – as it often does, because keeping a secret is hard – the ensuing maelstrom of rumour, ridicule, fury and shame gives everyone concerned a hard lesson in the importance of discretion.
It may take multiple betrayals – by you, as well as of you – but eventually you learn to master temptation. I have found that keeping a secret is like giving up smoking: whenever a craving strikes, just wait five minutes and it will pass. Each craving is weaker than the last, until eventually the longing to tell dissipates altogether. My head is stuffed with secrets that once seemed impossible to contain, but are now old and boring and covered in dust.
It used to be thought that men were more discreet than women, because they tended to talk less. But being taciturn is not at all the same as being trustworthy. Precisely because of all the gossiping and confiding we do, women develop the mental muscles required to keep the important things to ourselves. We are good at winkling out secrets, but also at storing them.
It's a neat coincidence that Maxwell Knight's memo went on display in the same week as the death of Charlotte 'Betty' Webb. Just 18 when she ditched a domestic science course to work as a secret codebreaker at Bletchley Park, Webb decoded German messages revealing the start of the Holocaust, and was later seconded to America to help decipher Japanese military code.
For 30 years after the war, Webb didn't tell a soul what she had done. She worked as a school secretary, and resisted the promptings of conceit. It was, she admitted, a huge relief when the government lifted the omertà on Bletchley Park and she was finally able to talk about it. Alas, by then her parents were dead – and 'my husband wasn't particularly interested'.
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