In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  Before catching the train home I’d drop by the same spot and pick up the envelope that would be waiting for me. On these occasions, my nerves would be at full stretch and the back of my neck prickling with fear. This – the pick-up – was the most dangerous moment of the whole operation. If I had been betrayed this was when Australian security would swoop.

  But nothing ever happened. I’d stuff the envelope into my handbag and hurry to the station, my mouth dry and my knees trembling, and tumble into the Croydon train in a state of near collapse. By Springwood I’d be myself again. By the time I had alighted at our peaceful little station and was strolling up Alto Avenue towards our comfortable home, I’d be ecstatic.

  Excitement is a drug. My high would last until Denis came home and we’d open up the envelope in the privacy of our bedroom. Or it might even stretch on through dinner, with me preternaturally bright and cheerful, almost manic in my laughter and sudden silly enthusiasms. But then, slowly but surely, the reaction would set in. I’d go to bed on those days muddleheaded with exhaustion, and though I’d sleep like a log I’d wake up tired and depressed.

  The tiredness would wear off, but the depression might last for days. If that happened, Denis would become concerned and do his best to cheer me up with quiet banter and little treats. There was a restaurant in Croydon, a small cosy place called the Café Rouge, with a leaded window overlooking Croydon High Street. We’d help Shirley feed the children, and then wander down to the café in the dusk and take our place at our usual table in the window.

  ‘Are you sure we are doing the right thing?’ I’d always ask. ‘We aren’t really spying on our own side, are we?’

  Denis would look me in the eye and place his hand on mine. ‘Trust me, darling.’

  Once, tired after a long day, his usual patience had grown thin and he snapped when I asked the inevitable question. ‘For heaven’s sake, Norma, use your head. You don’t think Stewart Menzies would send us stuff about the Eastern Front unless he wanted it passed on to the Russians, do you?’ Suddenly contrite, he picked up my hand and kissed it. ‘Darling, it’s safer feeding the stuff out to the Russians here in the backblocks of Australia. Everybody is looking over everybody else’s shoulder in London.’

  Which made sense.

  The money they were giving us was considerable. Each packet I picked up from the dead-letter box contained at least one hundred pounds, and we did an exchange at least once a month. At first I kept a running tally, but the figures got so high – over a thousand pounds, enough to buy a decent house – that I became scared and refused to even look at the beastly stuff. We are doing this out of loyalty and patriotism, not for money, I told myself firmly. But the feeling of guilt lingered on. I just wished money hadn’t been part of the picture.

  The strain of spying had a continuing effect on me, but it seemed to have no effect on Denis whatsoever. He would bring home his sheaf of messages in his leather briefcase, and then after a perfectly normal evening playing with the children he would retire to our bedroom and do the photographing. ‘Fiddly business,’ he would complain, pegging each sheet against the cupboard door before taking two or three snaps. ‘I only hope the DNI appreciates what I do for my country.’

  As Denis’s helper, I became quite familiar with the signals we were working with. Much later, I was to learn that they were the famous Ultra signals, enemy signals decoded by Britain’s specialists at Bletchley Park, but in those days they were not called Ultra but ‘Zymotic’, or ‘Zip’, the word printed on the top right-hand corner of each flimsy sheet. They had subtitles, too, according to the subject matter they dealt with. Our messages always had the sub-title ‘FEB’, which I guessed meant Far East Bureau. If I spotted a message without ‘FEB’ – and I did once or twice – Denis would groan with annoyance and snatch it from me. ‘Young Fleming needs to buy a new pair of glasses,’ he’d say, stuffing the message back into his briefcase. Ian Fleming was now Denis’s opposite number in London, being personal secretary to the new British DNI, Admiral Rushbrooke. It was his job to send the messages directly to Denis.

  I may have been a spy, but I was a wife and mother too, enjoying all the joys and sorrows of that station. Getting up early to make school lunches for the boys, and taking them to the station for their train trip to Winnington Grammar, a small primary school two stations down the line. Doing the shopping with Shirley, and helping to carry the heavy shopping bags back home. And enjoying the modest highlights of suburban family life: weekend picnics in the local pine forests, trips into town to visit the zoo or to attend a pantomime, and shopping expeditions with Aunt Batten. And perhaps best of all, evenings in town with Denis, when we’d dine at the Windsor Hotel or in the Athenaeum Club before taking in a film.

  Only once did my two worlds collide. I’d been having a thoroughly domestic day, doing the weekly wash and then tracking into town to buy presents for Bobby’s birthday, when I literally bumped into Seman Ivanovich Makarov, head of Soviet Intelligence in Australia.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said politely, and then stood back and lifted his hat. ‘Nona! What a pleasure to meet you like this. Would you care to join me for a cup of coffee?’ The shock of the meeting had set my heart thumping, but after a moment or two I recaptured my sangfroid.

  ‘Don’t you think that might be dangerous? What if someone should see us?’

  Makarov smiled. ‘We are two Russians in a foreign land. What would be more natural than that we would share a cup of coffee in the sunshine?’

  I had an hour to wait for the Croydon train, so I decided to accept the invitation. In fact, I felt a small thrill of excitement at the prospect. This was the very stuff of the spy novels I had read as a girl. The partner of the famous secret agent, Elli, sipping coffee with her Soviet controller.

  I’d been visiting the hobby shop on the embankment below Princes Bridge, and there was a decent little coffee shop next door. We took a table overlooking the Yarra and sat in the late winter sunshine, Makarov with a small cup of Turkish coffee, me with an espresso. We were quite alone, the only other person in sight a small boy fishing from the embankment wall.

  ‘Moscow Centre is very pleased with the material that your husband is providing,’ Makarov said quietly. ‘In fact, it is regarded so highly that when it is received, Stalin himself is notified and visits the decrypting room to read it for himself.’

  ‘I am glad,’ I said. ‘It makes it worth the fear I always feel when I am making a drop. I always feel as if a burly policeman is just around the corner, waiting to tap me on the shoulder.’

  Makarov looked at me seriously. ‘Your part in the business is very much appreciated, Nona, I assure you of that. One day, we will have to make sure that your work is duly recognised.’

  I shook my head. ‘Knowing that my country is throwing the Nazi invaders off its soil is reward enough for me,’ I said.

  We chatted on quietly, not about spying or even about the war, but about other things. Makarov was a good conversationalist, and it was pleasant to sit and talk in Russian about Russian art and the great Russian writers of the past.

  ‘I like Tolstoy best of all,’ Makarov said. ‘He uses words as a musician uses notes in a musical score. He makes even trivial things seem glorious. But when he turns to really glorious things, such as the Battle of Borodino, his language is sublime.’

  ‘The Kremlin doesn’t mind you reading Tolstoy?’ I asked. ‘Surely, Tolstoy glorifies the Tsar, and the Russian nobility. I would have thought that War and Peace at least would be on the banned list.’

  ‘Our heroic past is not exclusively the property of you émigrés,’ Makarov said tartly. ‘The proletariat also shared in Russia’s glories. It was ordinary people who won the Battle of Borodino, not the Counts and the Grand Dukes and their hangers-on.’

  ‘Touché,’ I said. Then I searched in my purse and took out the 1812 silver rouble my mother had given me. ‘I always carry a little piece of our glorious past around with me,’ I said. ‘It thrills me that this
little coin was made at the very time that Cossacks were chasing Napoleon from our country.’

  Makarov took the coin from me and looked at it closely. ‘Of course your mother gave this to you?’ he asked, and I nodded.

  He handed it back almost reverentially. ‘You are a true patriot, Nona Orlovna.’

  As we were parting, I gripped his arm. ‘You call me Nona,’ I said. ‘That is the name I once used but it is not my name now. How did you know what I was once called?’

  ‘Oh, you are well known to the GRU,’ Makarov said carelessly. ‘In our files you will always be known as Nona Orlovna. Even though we suspect that it is not your real birth name.’

  I felt a sudden chill. ‘What do you know about me?’ I asked. ‘Have your people been spying on me?’

  Makarov paused imperceptibly before answering me. ‘Our people have kept an eye on you and your mother for many years,’ he said. And then he saw my concern and relented. ‘We have kept a caring eye,’ went on. ‘Julia may have raged against the Party but she has done nothing to harm us. So we have treated her with . . . care.’

  I couldn’t accept ‘care’, but I breathed a sigh of relief anyway. There had always been rumours within the émigré community in Malaya that the Russians had spies amongst us, so I wasn’t unduly shocked. But there had also been a fear that certain of us might be in the Communists’ sights, however far we might be from Moscow. People remembered how Trotsky had been tracked down to his hideout in South America and killed, and lesser opponents of the Communists had been the target of assassination even in the Far East.

  In 1943, the tide of war turned in the Allies’ favour. On the vast plains of European Russia, hitherto victorious German armies found themselves facing an enemy that seemed suddenly to know their every move. At the titanic battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, the Russians were successful and entire German divisions were swallowed up and lost forever. The successes of the Eastern Front were reflected elsewhere. In North Africa, Rommel had been stopped: now he was defeated. In the wastes of the Pacific, giant American battle-fleets began to overwhelm their Japanese counterparts. To the north of Australia, Australian and American troops began to beat back Japanese soldiers in the jungles of New Guinea.

  The tenor of people’s talk changed. They no longer wondered whether we might lose the war, but how soon we might win it.

  One afternoon towards the end of that year I was reading in the lounge when there was a knock on the door. We were in the middle of a typical Melbourne spring storm, with thunder rolling and heavy rain crashing down but with shafts of sunlight on the hills around us. A bedraggled Ivan Lyon stood on the front porch, his uniform soaked through and a blown-out umbrella in his hand.

  ‘Sanctuary for a stranger?’ he asked. I could see that he was not his usual cheerful self, so I cut to the chase. ‘You are getting out of those wet clothes and into a hot bath,’ I said firmly. ‘I’ll dig out some stuff of Denis’s for you to wear while Shirley dries your uniform in front of the fire. In the meantime I’ll be baking us a decent cake.’ History was repeating itself.

  By the time the cake was ready, and the tea brewed, Ivan had emerged from the bathroom, looking a good deal better than when he went in. Cutting him a generous slice, I asked, ‘How is your mission going? Denis told me that Bill Reynolds and the Krait had arrived safely months ago, so I had expected you would have been well on your way by now.’

  Ivan spread his hands. ‘It’s stalled, Norma. Dead in the water. I need an engine. After months of planning and frustrating delays cause by various mechanical problems, we were finally on our way when the engine completely self-destructed off Maryborough. Can you believe it? We had to be towed all the way to Townsville, where we have been stuck ever since. To make matters worse, Bill has left us. With no engine available, so the Army boffins tell us, he got fed up with the inactivity and joined the American secret service.’

  No wonder Ivan was not his usual buoyant self.

  ‘I guess you can probably find someone to take over from Bill’, I sympathised, ‘but even if you do, you won’t be going anywhere in an engineless boat. If the Army can’t, or won’t help, why don’t you ask Denis if he can come up with something? He’s in Melbourne right now, and if anyone can find a replacement engine, he can. He and the DNI know the oddest people and seem to be extraordinarily well-connected.’

  I was right. ‘Piece of cake,’ said Denis, after hearing Ivan’s tale of woe. ‘There’s a Gardner marine diesel engine down in Tasmania. Tailor-made for the Krait. The Army were hoping to get their hands on it, which is probably why they’ve been less than helpful. I’ll lay claim to it tomorrow. I’ll also get the Gardner’s top chap, Bert Bevan-Davies, to scrounge as many spare parts as possible. As soon as we can ship it to Townsville, you’ll be on your way.’

  By the time Denis walked him down to the station, Ivan was a changed man, his despondency transformed to his particular brand of Celtic elan by the fresh prospect of action.

  The Krait finally left on her much-delayed mission – and for her appointment with destiny – in August. In mid-October, Denis came home aglow with inner joy. He steered me out of the kitchen to the privacy of the hall and gave me a triumphant hug. ‘He’s done it,’ he said softly. ‘It’s still very hush-hush because they are still on their way home, but it looks like Ivan’s bombed the Japs to smithereens in Keppel Harbour. We received a signal today. Typically Ivan, it was short and to the point. Just two words. “Mission completed”.’

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was never to see Ivan again. He came back to Australia as a hero, but a largely unsung hero because the authorities kept his feat under wraps so as not to compromise a bigger raid he was planning. This raid was Operation Rimau, and it ended with every member of the party dead.

  My only consolation is that before Ivan died he was to learn that his beloved Gabrielle and their son Clive survived the sinking of the Nanking. Ivan died gloriously, badly injured but firing at attacking Japanese soldiers until his very last breath. The way of his death was fit for for a Wagnerian opera, but I have no doubt that in those last desparate moments Ivan’s thoughts would not have been on war or glory but would have been reaching for his family.

  If 1943 was the year the tide changed, 1944 was the year of unambiguous victories. All over the world, Allied forces were triumphant, their successes piling up. Finally, on the 6th of June, the longest day of the northern summer, the Allies invaded Europe, storming ashore at Normandy in the largest seaborne invasion the world has ever seen.

  The writing was on the wall.

  One day Denis came home early, and at first I didn’t recognise the tall man by his side with thick gold captain’s rings on his arms and gold braid on his cap. ‘Is that you, Alan?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘At your service, Ma’am!’

  Captain Alan Hillgarth had been appointed Chief of British Naval Intelligence, Eastern Theatre, with his HQ in Melbourne. I sent Shirley to the shops with all our meat coupons, determined to give him a decent dinner.

  ‘I’ve been hearing all about your secret work, Norma,’ he said, laying his index finger against the side of his nose. ‘Quite a professional, from what I hear.’ I could only think he was referring to my work dropping off the Zymotic cables for the Russians, and blushed furiously. Surely this wasn’t the stuff one chatted about over afternoon tea?

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ I temporised. ‘I do so much, you see.’

  Alan ruffled my hair like a fond uncle. ‘Turning young Ivan Lyon into minor royalty,’ he said. ‘I think that was a masterstroke. You know that Commander Long got into the act as well? He put the story out through Vera and Mabel Brookes, and it took off like wildfire.’ The DNI’s wife Vera was a Carpenter, a member of one of Australia’s richest and best-connected families, while Mabel Brookes was the unchallenged doyenne of Melbourne society. With that pair behind the story I was surprised that Ivan hadn’t ended up a Prince of the Royal Blood.

  We had chop
s and sausages for dinner – the best the Croydon butcher could do at such short notice – and when the children had gone to bed and Shirley had left to visit one of her girlfriends we settled ourselves on the back verandah and talked. At first we talked about how the war had affected us. I told Alan how awful it had been in Singapore in its last days, and how different I had found Australia, and then Alan told us how dreadful the first years of war had been in an England pounded by the Luftwaffe. ‘We moved our home to Ireland,’ he said, almost shamefaced. ‘We have a family place there. I know it sounds like running away, but friends of Mary’s kept getting popped off, and death is so final. So I moved her and our daughter to Ballanderry, out of harm’s way.’

  The conversation turned to the people we knew. Alan had just been with Colin McKenzie in Ceylon so he knew a lot about what was happening in Malaya. ‘We’ve established radio contact with Force 136,’ he said. ‘We’ve dropped them some radios and other equipment, and even put in some extra personnel.’ Force 136 was the group led by Freddie Spencer-Chapman which was working with Chin Peng’s Communists in the jungles of Malaya.

  ‘How is Bob Chrystal?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, pretty well – except he had an ulcer all along and it’s now playing up. Serve the blighter right for not telling us. Colin’s just had a message from his HQ in the Telom Valley. The MCP people in his region haven’t done much fighting against the Japanese, but they are having a pretty decent go at the Kuomintang forces in the area. Looks like the Communists are taking the opportunity to do their Chinese rivals in the eye while the going’s good.’

  Back in England, there had been some changes. We had known that Admiral Godfrey had been replaced by Admiral Rushbrooke as the British DNI, but now Alan could tell us why. ‘Godfrey got on C’s nerves,’ he said. ‘He thought he was an old woman, and I suppose he was in some ways. Godfrey wouldn’t go along with the way Stewart plays politics with the secret intelligence he’s getting through the codebreakers. He thought it wrong for one man to have so much unchecked power. So he got the shove.’