George Palmer

Her mother spoke both Italian and Slovene because her mother was born on the border between Italy and Slovenia back then.

And she was educated by German nuns in a German convent in

in Alexandria so she spoke German fluently and she was taught English so she had those five languages which she spoke fluently which made her an ideal person for intelligence gathering from all the correspondence and messages that were going backwards and forwards to and from prisoners of war

Definitely, definitely not.

No, no.

Dad was a bit of a non-conformist, like...

the rest of the family, I'm afraid.

And although I'm sure he was very, very good at his job, he was never part of the British establishment.

He wasn't born into the establishment.

He was born in Cyprus.

His father was Greek Cypriot.

His mother was English.

And they met when Dad's father, my grandfather, went to Edinburgh to study at Edinburgh University to study chemistry.

They met there and married and then came back to Cyprus to live where dad was brought up in a household where he spoke Greek to his father and English to his mother because his mother refused to learn Greek.

And that was not by any means an ideal conventional background for British military establishment.

Right.

Well, firstly, they were sick of the war, as everybody was.

And they could see that Europe was going to be a mess and it was going to be quite hard.

My father did not have a university education.

His family was too poor to send him to university.