Between Silk and Cyanide (10 page)

'I don't expect them to send much traffic,' he said casually, 'but what they do send may be pretty important. I don't want one indecipherable! Not one. Even if I have to send you in with 'em.' He pushed me into the briefing room and walked off chuckling.

Messrs Poulson, Helberg, Kjelstrup and Haugland sprang to attention as one Grouse and remained sprung until I'd carried my impedimenta to the briefing officer's desk. I'd brought a special prop with me to give me some confidence. It was a self-important briefcase which I'd purloined from the stationery department and nicknamed Wanne. The tools of my trade were inside its gullet: some practice poems for the Grouse, some squared paper and a copy of Marks & Co.'s latest catalogue.

If a briefing officer had any special talent, he should demonstrate it in the first five minutes. Afterwards he might have lost his audience.

My special talent was distributing squared paper. The one obstacle in the way of my proving it was a briefcase named Ozanne. I'd forgotten the combination of the secret lock and was in no position to consult the stationery department. Growing sallower by the moment, I twiddled, reasoned and wrestled with it but my repository was closed for the duration.

'We could perhaps be of some helping?' enquired Poulson, the leader of the quartet.

I ceded the problem to them, hoping they'd think it was an aptitude test. They solved it inside a minute, then sat back to await the next conundrum.

They'd done no coding for six weeks and it was essential to establish how much they remembered and whether they were as accident prone as their briefing officer. I'd devised a hard time for them which fell into three parts: exercise, checking and briefing officer's summary.

I handed them some squared paper and a poem a-piece and asked each of them to encode an improvised message in Norwegian and English at least 250 letters long as quickly as they could. They started work as if they expected nothing less.

The agents were now in an exam situation and for the next thirty to fifty minutes I was redundant.

All briefing officers shared the problem of how best to pass the time while surreptitiously monitoring the progress of their pupils. Some prepared for their next briefings, others began reports on their last. I wrote poems for the agents, and since I did so strictly from Signals necessity, and my readership consisted of agents, coders and enemy cryptographers, I had no writer's block. I had not foreseen that in the presence of a courteous quartet dedicated to saving us from an atomic New Year I would be rendered wordless, wingless and grounded.

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. Haugland 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.' Helberg 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.

If I realized 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 opposed 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 realized 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 realized 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 lused 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 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 stop-watch, 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 It 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 fox-trot
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 fox-trot as one word. If he were caught, he could try spelling it as two. Until WOKs, etcetera…

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 by 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…
[3]

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 square-papered world had 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.

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'.