TINKER, TAILOR, ACTOR, SPIES...

While his father, grandfather and a great uncle were all secret agents, Dugald Bruce Lockhart was deemed 'unsuitable' for M16. Instead, after forging a successful career on stage and screen, he's used their real-life stories as inspiration for his gripping thrillers

- Jane Warren

DUGALD Bruce Lockhart was 14 when his father James took him and his younger brother, Andrew, 13, into their garden in Vienna for a quiet chat. "I was thinking we were a bit old for the birds and the bees," Dugald, now 55, admits today-four decades after the conversation.

In fact, the rites of passage James Bruce Lockhart wanted to discuss had nothing to do with the normal teenage curiosities.

Having hitherto claimed he worked for the Foreign Office, he had now decided it was time to reveal what he really did for a living.

"Dad said, 'You're getting to the age where you might hear friends talking about spooks.

Well boys, I'm in the Secret Intelligence Service, but you can't go talking about it'," recalls Dugald. "Of course, we were very excited and immediately thought he was James Bond."

James Bruce Lockhart's career with the Foreign Office was in fact a cover for his real work with MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, about which despite his admission to his sons - he always remained tight-lipped.

He would only say that he had followed a similar path to that of novelist John Le Carré, who worked undercover for the agency in Bonn and Hamburg during the Cold War.

Dugald continues: "We knew Dad had several passports, and he liked to tease us when we asked, 'What exactly did you do?' "He gave nothing away, really, apart from the time he told us about taking our dog for a walk and pretending to be an American tourist in Greenwich Park to scope out some agents who wanted to meet with him 'alone'.

"It turned out they weren't alone at all.

Good job he had the Hawaiian shirt and our Welsh terrier with him as a disguise..."