Between Silk and Cyanide

by Leo Marks

  I gave up trying to swell the contents of the agents’ ditty-box and turned for inspiration to Father’s catalogue, Marks & Co.’s equivalent of a WOK. He was offering a first edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy at a price which would have cheered its author and a set of Gould’s Birds of Europe in crushed levant at a few hundred a crush. The choicest item of all – a seventh-century illuminated bestiary – had been given an entire page to itself despite the national paper shortage. Those most likely to prevent the beast Goering from acquiring it were far too engrossed in their coding to know that their maintenance man was watching them.

  It was like studying a compendium of sabotage talents. Helberg was the wireless operator. His WT instructor, who was convinced that praise was synonymous with careless talk, had said of him, ‘He’s the best man I’ve ever trained. He should be teaching me.’ Haugland was an expert at silent killing. Poulson and Kjelstrup could map-read without maps. For months they’d all been on toughening-up courses which I wouldn’t even wish on our director of Signals. The rigours of coding might well be a bore to them but could scarcely be a hardship.

  I realised too late that all four had begun to slow down as if they’d been caught at the same traffic light. Worse still, they were looking across the room at me as if I were the improvised message they were supposed to be working on.

  Improbable though it seemed that the Grouse could be put off by a mouse-glare, that’s what had happened. It always did when agents caught me monitoring them, but I’d hoped that just this once I’d be able to mount a benevolent surveillance without inducing the indecipherables I was there to prevent.

  First the briefcase, and now this. What mistake was I going to make next?

  I picked up my pencil. It felt like a spade; and a poem for the ditty-box dug itself out of me:

  Have you never known

  A glass-bottomed day

  When your minutes can be seen

  Flowing beneath you

  In every direction

  But the one you mean?

  Have you never known

  A winterproof night

  When wrong feels right

  When the heart’s chill

  Is a matter of will

  And mother’s pride

  Is safe inside

  An envelope of ice

  And doesn’t even hear

  A cock crow thrice?

  Whichever agent used this as his poem-code (it was ultimately Bodington) would be told to spell ‘glass-bottomed’ as two words. If he were caught, he could try spelling it as one. Until WOKs were introduced.

  One of the Grouse coughed – a snippet of sound which broke through every defence I had.

  I made the greatest mistake a briefing officer can. I thought about their mission instead of their coding: ‘How bloody how’, I wondered, ‘were the five of us going to drop into the middle of Hardanger Vidda, with no reception committee to guide us down, where visibility was nil because the fog was as thick as General de Gaulle’s pr—, and where hundreds of precipices waited to impale us?’ And if the four of them did survive the drop (the fifth Grouse hadn’t survived the thought of it) then how bloody how could they survive what followed? How could they drag explosives and containers across minefields of ice till they reached the Barren Mountain and somehow contacted Einar Skinnarland and somehow crossed the guarded bridge at Vermok and somehow blew the plant up and themselves with it, after sending us an indecipherable to remember them by?

  The how bloody hows of the future were replaced by a most immediate why:

  Why was Knut Haugland still numbering his key phrase while the others were a quarter way through their first transpositions? Nothing in Haugland’s report had indicated that he was a slow coder.

  I finally realised that I was a slow observer. Haugland wasn’t using squared paper! He was encoding his message on a plain sheet of paper which he was carefully ruling for himself. He wasn’t even using a ruler. He was drawing the lines against the edge of a pencil. I realised why. There were no stationery shops on the Barren Mountain and Haugland was ‘coding for real’. Nobody, least of all me, had prompted him to do this. I wrote a memo on Father’s catalogue, next to an offer to make valuations for probate, instructing the training schools that in future all agents must practise their coding on plain paper without rulers. I then continued to watch my instructor at work. He’d almost caught up with the other three, but it was his style which impressed me even more than his speed. He attacked his code groups as if each letter he disposed of were a limb on a sentry at Vermok. It was a formidable display of silent code-killing.

  I won a flicker of surprise from them when I collected their poems and messages and distributed Helberg’s to Poulson, Poulson’s to Haugland, Haugland’s to Kjelstrup and Kjelstrup’s to Helberg, and asked them to decipher each other’s traffic.

  The sharp adjustment from one coding process to another usually caused agents to make their worst mistakes. Encoding and decoding were not the Signals equivalent of breathing out and breathing in and few FANYs and even fewer agents were equally good at both. At least one Grouse might find himself limping.

  The atmosphere was suddenly as full of unspoken frustration as group therapy in the hands of an amateur. This was the time when coding character was shaped. In the next few minutes all the agents were likely to display habits or weaknesses which would be an invaluable help in our long struggle against their field indecipherables. But it would be the worst possible time to be caught monitoring them.

  I gave up the luxury of watching and tried to make do with another sense, one with which only children like myself are especially familiar: I listened to the sounds of a pencil breaking, of a rubber being used with venom (I’d check up afterwards to see who’d erased what), of Poulson saying something sharply in Norwegian, and of the others laughing. He’d used an expletive which Wilson uttered whenever I asked him to write poems for his agents, a chore which he had so far declined.

  According to my stopwatch, which I’d managed to set without the assistance of the Grouse, they were five minutes ahead of average swearing time. That was good. And the only sound now was of pencils claiming paper and that was good too. But it sounded more like three pencils than four. I glanced up to see which Grouse had fallen by the coding wayside.

  Kjelstrup was showing all the symptoms of coding paralysis. Perhaps the fault lay with Haugland, whose message he was decoding. Perhaps Haugland wasn’t as good as I thought. I wanted to say, ‘Go back to the beginning if you’ve lost your way. It’s quicker in the end.’ But Kjelstrup had to find his own way back.

  An organ-grinder struck up a tune in the street outside. None of them seemed to hear it. There is a special loneliness in unshared music, even if it was ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. I reached for my pencil.

  Kjelstrup glanced reproachfully in my direction as if I were personally responsible for his ordeal and was leaving him to flounder.

  I know what loneliness is, old chap:

  I danced two waltzes

  One foxtrot

  And the polka

  With no partner

  That they could see

  And hope I did not tire you.

  I glided round

  The other ballroom

  The one called life

  Just as alone

  And have to thank you

  For giving me

  The sprinkling of moments

  Which are my place at table

  In a winner’s world.

  Keep a space for me

  On your card

  If you are dancing still.

  Whichever agent used this as his poem-code (it was ultimately Peter Churchill) would be told to spell foxtrot as one word. If he were caught, he could try spelling it as two. Until WOKs, et cetera …

  Glancing again at the clock I saw that Kjelstrup had a long way to go but that the others had completely finished. What happened next was so surprising that I found myself breathing backwards. Without a
word being spoken or a look being exchanged Poulson, Helberg and Haugland pretended that they were still dividing their messages into groups of five. It was as if they’d reached an agreement in silent Morse to give Kjelstrup a chance to catch up with them. It was a gala performance designed to ensure that if I reported one of them to Wilson for slow coding I would also have to report the rest.

  I allowed Poulson to catch me watching him. He sighed as he resumed his labours, and the others sighed with him. I envied their togetherness almost as much as I marvelled at their shorthand.

  The fingers of feeling

  Be they gloved by the shy

  Or pointed bare and bold

  By the shyer still

  Seek to find

  By fumbling or by fate

  Another hand to clutch …*

  I left it at that, not only because it contained the mandatory minimum of twenty-six words but because it had left me. When I looked up they had finished.

  I collected their poems and messages and spread them in front of me for checking. I hoped there’d be no failures. If there were, I wouldn’t tell Wilson. Their failure would be mine and there would be time to put it right.

  I made several errors myself in the next few minutes and wished they’d stop watching me. But it soon became a squared-papered world and some twenty minutes later I knew the Grouse the only way I was supposed to. With one exception, they were first-class coders: Haugland wasn’t first class. He was in a class of his own.

  The others had made a few minor mistakes and were merely terrific. In Haugland’s case there wasn’t a single letter wrong or a coding hair out of place – but it wasn’t his accuracy which won me for life. He’d elected to encode a message 350 letters long instead of the 250 minimum which the others had accepted. It was those extra letters, his golden century, which had delayed Kjelstrup. Haugland had performed another coding miracle. Unlike most agents he’d chosen the five longest words in his poem instead of the five shortest.

  Haugland’s work was an illuminated manuscript. Haugland himself was even rarer. He was a coder’s man.

  Careful not to single anyone out, I congratulated them on their exercises and spared them the usual summary. All they needed was a few basic tips.

  I stood up to give them, hoping they’d carry more weight: ‘Free your language, vary your transposition keys, don’t fall into set patterns. Code as if you’re making love.’

  The latter slipped out. The Grouse’s inner and outer ears pricked up. They listened to the rest of what I had to tell them as if I were delivering a bulletin and they were starved of coding news. Their attention was so riveting that I was the captive audience and forgot that I had an appointment with the Free French in ten minutes’ time.

  I declared the Grouse season closed for the day. They stood to attention and thanked me for arriving to them.

  I thanked them for opening my briefcase.

  One of them held open the door for the fifth Grouse to leave.

  The next time he arrived to them he hoped to give them a safe code instead of a snare.

  Note

  * Ultimately used as a reserve code by an American wireless operator.

  SEVEN

  SOE-Minded

  The RF section, our de Gaulle connection, occupied a house in Dorset Square which had formerly belonged to the directors of Bertram Mills Circus. This inspired continuity was one of SOE’s favourite in-jokes, though it was no joke having to visit RF section, the most troubled and troublesome in the whole of SOE.

  A new director of RF had just been appointed. His name was Colonel Hutchison and he’d been brought in at short notice in the hope that, as Tommy put it, ‘he’d have the balls for the job’.

  It took me five minutes to reach 1 Dorset Square from Chiltern Court and I was still too immersed in Norwegian waters to adjust so rapidly to a change of briny. I entered the house like a reluctant ringmaster to put the Free French through the hoops of their coding.

  There would be no free flow between us. The agents were under strict orders from Duke Street not to discuss the secret French code with me and I was under strict orders from myself not to tell them to use it as seldom as possible. It would have been easier for all of us if I’d been able to brief them individually but they usually turned up in clusters of six, and today I was expecting eight.

  I reminded myself at the door of the briefing room that the secret French code was the best damn code there wasn’t. ‘The secret French code is the best damn …’

  The briefing room was empty – as empty, that is, as any room can be which has a poster of de Gaulle in it. His eyes seemed to be reading my private traffic.

  The Free French were punctilious about their appointments and I wondered what had happened to my missing eight. I waited fifteen minutes, could produce nothing for the agents’ ditty-box and prepared to leave.

  A hare of a colonel bounded into the room and sat down beside me. He introduced himself as Colonel Hutchison and started speaking French as if he’d invented it. If I interpreted his every other sentence correctly, he’d introduced a rule that everyone on the premises must speak only French. He also recommended that they thought in French. He relaxed his principles when he heard my accent. He had cancelled the agents’ briefings in order to be briefed himself.

  I asked if he wanted me to teach him to code.

  ‘Good God, no,’ he said. ‘I’ll set ten minutes aside for that some other time. I just want to discuss a point or two with you. Now, Marks, tell me what you know about the secret French code.’

  I thought in French, Get me out of here, mon Dieu, and I won’t eat bacon for a fortnight. This was the most dangerous question I’d yet been asked in SOE.

  ‘The secret French code?’ I echoed. ‘I’m afraid I’m in no position to tell you anything about it.’

  ‘Why not? Why all this secrecy? Tell me what you do know.’

  I gave him a potted history of the code without specifying which pot it should be consigned to.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently, ‘but what actually happens when they want to pass one?’

  I presumed he meant a message in secret French code and described the mechanics of distribution as SOE believed them to be.

  ‘So my directorate is just a clearing house?’

  I’d heard Tommy describe it as another kind of house, but nodded.

  ‘Good. Tommy told me you were the man I should talk to!’

  Thanks, Tommy.

  ‘Now then. Who’s your opposite number in Duke Street? And what can you tell me about him?’

  I had no idea where this was leading, apart from the guillotine. I told him that my opposite number’s name was Druot, that we’d met once, spoken twice and that he was brilliant at forged currency, forged documents and photography.

  ‘What about codes?’

  ‘I understand they’re one of his many commitments.’

  The hare-turned-ferret may have smiled. I could certainly see his moustache more clearly. ‘Tell me. How do you contact this Druot? Through RF or directly?’

  ‘Directly, when I can. Through Tommy if it’s urgent.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Tommy.’ There was a distinct frown in his voice and I wondered if he’d had any trouble from the Chairman of the Awkward Squad.

  ‘I want to go back to that secret code. Why—’

  The phone rang. He answered at once and I listened to the most informative conversation I had yet heard in the RF directorate. ‘Right, right, right, right, right, right away.’

  He bounded up – ‘I have to see the director of Operations. But you and I will talk again! Very soon’ – and bounded out!

  The length and line of his questions promised well for his directorate but badly for me. Given a little time, he was bound to notice that some incoming messages in secret French code weren’t being delivered to Duke Street as promptly as they should have been, and he’d demand an explanation from Ozanne.

  A phone call from Dansey – very rare
when I was at a briefing session – instructed me to return to the office as quickly as I could.

  It was equally rare for him to slam down the receiver.

  Major offences in SOE – such as leakages to C, which were considered almost as treasonable as leakages to the enemy – were dealt with by the Executive Council. Minor offences, such as being right, were disciplined by the directorate in which they occurred.

  Heffer, Dansey and Owen were waiting for me in Dansey’s office. Heffer had just had a meeting with Ozanne and informed me with no apparent regret that the Signals directorate and I were soon to part company. I was not going to be sacked for technical incompetence (‘That can sometimes backfire,’ said Heffer) but on the far deadlier grounds of ‘temperamental unsuitability for SOE-type work’.

  Thanks to Heffer, it was a suspended sentence. He’d persuaded Ozanne that a stay of execution would give him and Dansey time to look for a suitable replacement; Heffer had even suggested that the shock might produce a marked improvement in me. ‘Start looking today!’ Ozanne had instructed. The reprieve was subject to one condition. If I showed my coding report to anyone, I was to be dismissed forthwith.

  On the issue of WOKs Ozanne remained inflexible. They would leave when I did.

  I suggested whoever succeeded me should come from Bletchley and have the experience which I knew I lacked.

  They glanced at each other. Then Heffer announced that he had something to say to me on behalf of them all: ‘Now and again you’ve shown a certain promise. But your greatest failing amongst a host of others is that you are not – and are now most unlikely ever to become’ – I expected him to say ‘adult’ – ‘SOE-minded.’

  I knew that I had just heard the most important phrase anyone had ever spoken to me – with the possible exception of ‘help yourself’. I also knew that for the rest of my SOE life, however short, I would go in search of ‘SOE-mindedness’. It was the vitamin deficiency I didn’t know I lacked.