Doris Lessing’s MI5 file: was she a threat to the state?

The security services set out to ensnare Lessing. But they weren’t sure where she lived, why she went to Communist party meetings or even whether her nickname was Tigger or Trigger. Lara Feigel interrogates the secret archives

“^‘A communist must consider himself a dead man on leave,” Anton tells Martha in Doris Lessing’s 1958 autobiographical novel, A Ripple from the Storm. “A communist is hated, despised, feared and hunted by the capitalists of the world. A communist must be prepared to give up everything: his family, his wife, his children, at a word from the party.”

The scene takes place during the second world war, and Anton is the leader of Southern Rhodesia’s small communist group. He and Martha are accurate depictions of Gottfried and Doris Lessing. Gottfried was a Russian-born German refugee who would soon convince Doris that it was her revolutionary duty to marry him. She had already given up a husband and two children to devote herself to communism and create a free world in which her estranged children could grow up.

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