Between Silk and Cyanide (61 page)

'I've another question for you,' he finally announced.

He was in no hurry to ask it, but I didn't reopen my betting-shop.

'Was it true what you told me about Peter Piper and his peck of pickled peppers?'

'Absolutely true, sir—but not the whole truth.'

'I thought as much. I can manage the rest of the way, thank you.'

He nodded abruptly and I began the long trek home but he at once called me back in a coup de grace tone.

I turned to face the firing-squad, and perspiration was my blindfold.

'Leo, I've a bit of advice for you. No matter what happens to SOE in the short-term, keep your pickled pepper up and push on with your job. The code war, as you call it, isn't over yet. Oh, and while I think of it—that security check bumph was a great help to me but I don't propose to tell anyone I've seen it. Goodbye, old chap.'

Ten minutes later I discovered the meaning of '
Ne supra crepidum suter judicaret'
:

'A wise cobbler should not judge above his last'.

A far from wise head of Codes had to wait twelve hours before learning from Heffer what PITA had said to him and Nick at their second conference.

He'd been very impressed by our new codes and security checks, and by all that he'd heard about the quality of our FANYs! He'd also been impressed by our new WT sets and equipment. But above all, he was satisfied that we'd learned from our mistakes, and would be able to cope with the problems of the D-Day traffic, and intended to say so in his report to the ministry. He also intended to recommend that the ban on flights over Holland must continue, and that in the short term sorties over Belgium must be cancelled or curtailed.

'He's done all he can to let us off lightly,' said Heffer. 'The trouble is he's been overrruled.' He then disclosed that, without warning to SOE, the head of Bomber Command had cancelled all our air ops. over Western Europe. 'He's been got at by C, but grounding us isn't enough for them. They're trying to persuade the War Office to close us down completely, and if Gubbins doesn't catch the next plane home, they've a damn good chance of succeeding!'

I thanked him for the information and turned to go, but he called me back as sharply as PITA had.

'Payne made a comment about you which puzzled us. He said that to prove some point you were trying to make, you insisted on showing him some Top Secret documents.'

I vowed never to trust another cobbler. 'Top Secret documents, Heff?'

'He described them as UFAs, and we couldn't admit that we had no idea what he was talking about. Perhaps you'd care to enlighten us when you have a moment?'

I assured him that I would.

•       •       •

Two days later a first edition of Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation, 1819 was acquired by 84.

I tried to buy it from them at cost so that I could present it to a friend, but according to Father (the biggest cobbler of us all) the British Museum had stepped in first.

Convinced that my friend and I would never meet again, I wrote a short UFA in his memory:

Think only this of me
That there's some corner
Of an SOE barrow-boy
That is forever PITA.

The girls failed to break it.

Gubbins had been in the Middle East for six weeks and SOE regretted every year of them. His deputy, Sporborg, had kept him fully informed about the crisis in London and expected him to fly back while we were still in business, but on 3 December Gubbins sent him a message:

… ESSENTIAL TO REMAIN CAIRO TILL CHURCHILL BACK FROM TEHERAN. AM CONFIDENT CRISIS CONTAINABLE ON LINES AGREED WITH SELBORNE OUR TELEGRAMS OF 2ND. ALSO CONFIDENT ATTLEE (DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER) WILL DEFER FURTHER MEASURES TILL ABLE CONSULT CHURCHILL. EXPECT RETURN LONDON MID-DECEMBER. FURTHER MESSAGE FOLLOWS.

Heffer, seldom a pessimist unless he was happy, was convinced that SOE would be disbanded if the Mighty Atom didn't catch the next plane home. Nor did he share his confidence in Lord Selborne's ability to defend us in Cabinet.

On 4 December the minister's personal assistant was dispatched to Baker Street on a fact-finding mission, and was escorted into my office by Sporborg and Nick.

She was a red-haired sledgehammer named Pat Hornsby-Smith. Her manner was brusque, her figure superb, and her voice had parquet flooring. She at once admitted that she knew nothing about codes, and spent the next thirty minutes asking highly perceptive questions about each silk she was shown. She then made several jokes at her own expense which convulsed Sporborg and Nick, a sure sign of the importance of her visit.

An hour later she enquired with a hint of provocation if there was anything else I'd like her to look at.

The wrong person to be asked such a question, I made the mistake of producing an artefact which even Nick hadn't seen as it had only arrived that morning from the Thatcher Barn.

It looked like an ordinary pocket handkerchief, and in case she was tempted to blow her nose on it I hastily handed her a torch which had been fitted with an ultra-violet beam, and invited her to switch it on. A few seconds later she was astonished to find herself staring at 100 WOK-keys which had been invisibly printed.

'… it would be useless without this, Miss Hornsby-Smith.'

I then picked up an ordinary-looking pencil which it had taken Elder Wills six months to produce. Praying it would work, I rubbed it across the handkerchief and a whole line of WOK-keys disappeared.

I then explained that the chemicals in the pencil ensured that the keys could be permanently erased the moment they'd been used, and her response was immediate.

'So if the handkerchief is captured the back messages are safe?'

Impressed by her perception but disturbed by her enthusiasm, I hastily added that invisible codes weren't for general issue as they could only be used in special circumstances.

This didn't deter my visitors from testing Wills's wizardry (ladies first), and Nick accidentally erased three lines of keys.

The sledgehammer then asked for a specimen of every silk she'd seen 'with instructions attached' so that she could explain them to the minister. She was particularly keen to show him the handkerchief and pencil, but I had to explain that they were the first examples of their kind the Thatched Barn had produced, and I'd promised Elder Wills not to part with them.

Giving me a look which she would one day bestow on the House of Lords when she was Baroness Hornsby-Smith, she declared that they'd be far more use in the minister's hands than languishing on my desk and, after a warning glance from Sporborg and some eyebrow Morse from Nick, I reluctantly surrendered them.

Locking them in her briefcase with an array of silks I couldn't spare, she thanked me for trusting her with them (another joke perhaps?), and departed five minutes later to accompany Nick on a tour of the stations.

I subsequently learned from Heffer that she'd christened the silks 'toys' and the coders 'Marks's harem'. He didn't disclose what she'd christened me.

My encounter with her had been a wholly new experience not because she was a Minister's PA but because I'd been supported throughout by an invisible presence.

This wasn't the moment to dwell on who she was, or how I'd been lucky enough to meet her, or any other such trivia. All that mattered to me was that she'd become part of the code war, and that I wanted her beside me for the rest of my life.

Although Selborne relied on the old hands in Baker Street for ammunition to convince the Cabinet that SOE's activities were an asset, it wasn't the Executive Council, the country sections or the Signals directorate which enabled him to make his first breakthrough. It was Flemming Muus of Denmark.

In the nine months since this remarkable agent (the Danish equivalent of Tommy) had taken control of his country's Resistance, he'd not only succeeded in ensuring that SOE continued to receive key information about the rocket sites at Peenemünde; he'd welded his co-patriots into a Secret Army, organized over 900 acts of sabotage, and started a training school at Zeeland for would-be agents.

Although reluctant to leave Denmark, he'd been recalled to London in October for consultations with Commander Hollingsworth and the Free Danish Council, and Lord Selborne had decorated him with the DSO on King George VI's behalf.

I'd given him a code-briefing early in November, and he was as hearty and forthcoming as when I'd briefed his Table Top team. He g admitted it was hard to concentrate on codes when he had so much else to attend to, and we arranged to meet again before he left, which he estimated would be within two weeks 'at the outsidest.'

On 2 December he was still in London, and accompanied Commander Hollingsworth to a conference convened by Brigadier Mockler-Ferryman (head of the Western directorate). Neither they nor any of the other officers present knew why they'd been summoned.

They were informed by Mockler-Ferryman that SOE had been instructed by the War Office to cease all operations in Denmark Holland and Belgium until further notice. They were also told that the War Office required an acknowledgement of the order by ten o'clock next morning, and wanted draft plans to be submitted for the recalling of SOE personnel.

On 3 December an enraged Muus descended on Whitehall, accompanied by Mockler-Ferryman and Hollingsworth, who soon found themselves redundant.

Determined to prove with the plain-speaking for which he was famous that there was no danger of his country becoming another Holland, he bombarded the War Office and Air Ministry with facts about the Danish Resistance of which they were completely unaware. The War Office withdrew its embargo, and the Air Ministry agreed to resume sorties over Denmark—with the exception of certain areas which Muus pointed out were too well protected for the aircrews' safety.

He was due to return to Denmark on 11 December to attend to his lesser duties, and on 9 December I gave him his final code-briefing. The invisible presence sat next to him throughout, and when he thanked me for the WOKs and LOPs he was taking home with him, she kissed him goodbye on his invaluable forehead.

Her name was Ruth, and she lived with her parents in a flat in Park West, and we'd met two months ago in unpromising circumstances.

She enjoyed the swimming pool, and early one morning she'd caught me swinging across the rings in my bowler hat, which I'd doffed to her without falling in, and even that hadn't prevented her from seeing me again.

Although we were able to meet for only a few hours a week, every sked with her taught me that there were forms of communication which I didn't know existed. I learned that she had a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, which meant that I could safely take her home to my parents as she was half a nice Jewish girl.

I'd persuaded her that I worked in an admin office in Baker Street and she wondered if it was the 'funny outfit' which used to be run by her godfather. She then informed me that he lived in Park West—'His name's Charles Hambro and he's a merchant banker.'

I told her that he'd need to be as he was a customer of my father's.

I did my best not to think about her in Baker Street (if agents could cut away their silk life-lines, so could I) but my best wasn't good enough, and I could think of little else. I'd been worried about going to bed with her in case I talked in my sleep but soon discovered that she was my sleep.

We both tried to forget that she was returning to Canada shortly before Christmas to resume training at an air-ambulance base.

On 10 December Sporborg warned Gubbins in his strongest telegram yet that C and the Air Ministry were broadening the scope of their attack and were trying to force an enquiry into 'every aspect' of SOE's activities. (He'd underlined 'every aspect' in red ink, for which there was no cipher equivalent, so we repeated the phrase in case eagle-eye missed it.)

The warning had the desired effect, and on 11 December Gubbins flew to Algiers en route to London.

By the Mighty Atom's standards, he'd failed to accomplish his Middle East master plan. By anyone else's, his successes were phenomenal. Ignoring the climatic conditions (and possibly causing them), he'd not only established SOE's future role in the Balkans, which the Americans were trying to diminish; he'd reorganized Cairo and Massingham, sorted out the chaos in Greece, and sold SOE's potential to a general named Elsenhower. He'd even found time to convince Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia that SOE would send his partisans the arms and supplies they needed, though the same assurances had been given to his rival Mihailovič.

He arrived in Baker Street on 16 December, and at once composed a memorandum for the Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff which Nick described to Heffer as 'a masterpiece', a term he usually reserved for Signals equipment.

With the Mighty Atom now in control of the Whitehall conflict, it was possible to concentrate on SOE's other little war.

On 18 December Dourlein and Ubbrinck (the Dutch escapees) sent a message from Spain amplifying their warnings that all Dutch radio links were in enemy hands, and identifying the WT operators they'd encountered in Haaren prison (the two agents had been smuggled out of Switzerland by MI6).

On 22 December Flemming Muus reported from Copenhagen that the decisions reached in London had been fully implemented, and Denmark had been divided into six military districts, each supervised by a regional committee on which SOE was represented. All this in a tiny country infested with Germans.

It was a very different situation for the Free French and Buckmaster.

On 23 December messages from France warned both Duke Street and F section that shortage of supplies was forcing agents to take unnecessary risks in order to survive, and that many of them had been caught by the Gestapo or the Vichy police. The messages urged SOE to resume dropping operations.

On Christmas Eve I learned from Ruth's father that she'd been killed in a plane crash in Canada. I went up to the roof of Norgeby House, which was the closest I could get to her.