Between Silk and Cyanide

by Leo Marks

  After two years of sustained effort but sporadic achievement SOE’s credibility with the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and itself was little higher than 84’s with the tax-inspector. Our political manoeuvres, forward planning and operational techniques were all suspect, and the scale of our D-Day participation would be determined by the Chiefs of Staff. This formidable body – accustomed to losing its battles by orthodox means – didn’t share Churchill’s enthusiasm for irregular warfare, and had refused to give SOE an official directive setting out its terms of reference and operational responsibilities. Without this Intelligence equivalent of a banker’s reference, SOE would have no chance of getting its proper quota of aircraft and equipment and would be unable to fulfil its growing commitments to the agents in the field or to their governments-in-exile.

  If SOE was ever to get that long-awaited directive instead of a winding-up order, it had above all to convince Lord Selborne – and through him the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff – that the secret armies and resistance groups it claimed to be forming not only existed, but would be ready by D-Day to fulfil Churchill’s mandate to ‘Set Europe Ablaze’. The Executive Council’s hopes of obtaining this proof centred on the prospects of thirteen men. The Golf quartet was expected to bring Jambroes out of Holland; the Arquebus trio to establish de Gaulle’s leader-ship in France; and the six Gunnersides to blow up a heavy-water plant in Norway. The vital thirteen were now in the final stages of their training.

  But there was one more major problem in this last-chance month. The outcome of the battle with C was likely to depend on the responses of the Americans.

  C and SOE were competing for their custom and, in an effort to acquire the bulk of it, CD had sent a telegram in main-line cipher to Bill Stevenson, our man in Washington, and asked him to show it to Bill Donovan, the head of OSS: ‘SOE WIL BE READY BY FEBRUARY AT THE LATEST TO MOUNT OPERATIONS INTO FRANCE, SCANDINAVIA AND THE LOW COUNTRIES AND I AM CONFIDENT THAT THE FEBRUARY MOON, WHICH STARTS ON THE 14TH OF THE MONTH, WIL MARK THE TURNING POINT IN EUROPEAN RESISTANCE.’

  I did my best not to shout. ‘Doesn’t CD realise that the Low Countries’ security couldn’t be lower?’

  He left without comment.

  Until my appointment as head of agents’ codes I’d been head of nothing except a queue for a sweet shop, and the main advantage of my promotion (apart from acquiring Muriel) was the ease with which I was able to intercept secret French messages before they were sent to Duke Street. The supervisor of the new distribution room, a FANY sergeant I intended to headhunt, had been told by her predecessor that all incoming code groups had to be checked by me as soon as they arrived, and she usually had them waiting.

  Returning to my office clutching Salmon’s latest, I was dismayed to find Nick seated at my desk. He was also clutching a document, which he held out to me in silence.

  It was a curt note from Gambier-Parry, C’s head of Signals, stating that the early Dutch code groups which I wanted to examine were no longer in his possession as all such material had been sent to Captain Dansey in June of last year. We knew this was a lie because Dansey had meticulously listed every item he’d received from C and there’d been no record of any Dutch code groups.

  Nick said with a hint of sadness that it would be pointless to press Gambier-Parry further – the reply would be the same.

  He and the ladies then went home early, presumably to their separate destinations, and I stared round the empty office like a small boy in detention who’s forgotten his offence. There were no indecipherables to break, no agents to brief, no coders to interview, and Nick’s records were locked up. My only company was Giskes, and I could no longer bear his smirk.

  I hurried upstairs to give the WOK-makers their cream-cake tea, and spent ten minutes trying to relieve their monotony, which probably made it worse.

  I then had to cope with my own, and faced the shock discovery that I was stale.

  I hadn’t taken a day off since June ’42, and wanted to escape from escape routes, blown agents and everything to do with SOE for the rest of the afternoon.

  The nearest bolt-hole was a flat in Park West to which daytime visitors were always welcome, but Major O’Reilly’s flat was in the same corridor, far too close for the peace of mind essential to that particular comfort.

  A film perhaps? If it didn’t deal with the war. Fred Astaire and his other foot, Ginger Rogers, were doing their nimble best to Follow the Fleet at the local cinema. But it wouldn’t be much of a respite to hear:

  We joined the navy

  To C the world

  And what did we C?

  We saw the C.

  Besides, two agents in training were using Irving Berlin’s lyrics for their poem-codes and we probably owed him royalties.

  I knew all the time that I was going to the only haven which had never failed me in times of distress, where the answers to everything were to be found if one knew where to look for them and where agnostics like me could safely say their silent prayers …

  84 Charing Cross Road.

  Note

  * C’s headquarters were in a street called Broadway, which to our regret was in the borough of Westminster instead of New York.

  FIFTEEN

  The Bolt-Hole

  ‘Giving a small boy the unsupervised run of a rare bookshop can put the future of both at risk. In my case, it also jeopardised SOE’s.’

  Author to himself en route to 84, February 1943

  The tortuous road which led from childhood to Baker Street had begun at 84 Charing Cross Road.

  Every Saturday morning from the age of eight onwards I was taken to Father’s shop (which was doing too well to open on Saturdays) so that he could start teaching me the profit margins of rare books and a few elementary tricks of the trade. As compensation, every Saturday afternoon Mother took me up the road to the Astoria cinema, which occasionally showed films we both understood.

  But one Saturday morning when I was eight-and-a-half my higher education began. Father proudly showed me a signed first edition of The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe which he had just acquired. It had cost £6 10s and was to be priced at £850 as the Americans were certain to want it. Although I wasn’t supposed to waste time reading the merchandise, the moment he left to attend to the overnight mail I riffled through The Gold Bug hoping that at that price it might contain a few interesting pictures. Instead I found myself reading about a message in code which had to be broken because it contained the secrets of a buried treasure. Poe used dozens of words which I didn’t understand, including cryptograph, but I knew what a crypt was as I’d learned at school that Crippen had once crept into one, crapped and crept out again.

  An hour later I needed no cinema. All I wanted was a code of my own to break. I remembered Father telling me that every book worth over £5 had its cost written in code at the back so that his staff could tell at a glance how much discount to allow awkward customers, but he hadn’t explained how the code worked. ‘Time enough for that,’ he said. For me that time had now come.

  At the back of The Gold Bug ‘C/MN’ was written in pencil. Since it had cost £6 10s – Father never lied about anything except his consumption of whisky – then surely ‘C’ must be 6 and ‘MN’ 10. But Poe would want to know how Marks & Co. dealt with the rest of the figures.

  I examined the backs of twenty other books, and found that the only letters written in pencil were ‘A C E H K M N O R S’.

  Whatever the code was, it couldn’t be as difficult as Poe’s or Father and his partner Mark Cohen couldn’t have used it. Could it have come from a word? The letters ‘C E H N O’ spelt ‘C O H E N’. That left ‘A K M R S’ – ‘M A R K S’. 84’s code was M A R K S C O H E N

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  But could I have solved it if I hadn’t known that ‘C’ was 6 and ‘MN’ 10? It was time to find out.

  My grandfather had a rare bookshop (E. & M. Joseph) at Leicester Square and my cousins an even rarer one (Myers & Co.) in Bond Street
, and as I was usually welcome at both premises the next time I visited them I took the opportunity of inspecting their codes. They were far harder to work out than Father’s but I was eventually able to tell him that their profit margins were even greater than his.

  From that moment onwards, I had two ambitions: to know as much about codes as Edgar Allan Poe and one day to become a writer, probably of horror stories, possibly of films.

  The shop stood on four floors at the corner of Cambridge Circus, and one of its regular patrons stood on four paws outside the Palace Theatre opposite. He was a benign bulldog who was the constant companion of a lady named Doris. Doris was a short-term companion for those who could afford her prices. She was an avid collector of Rudyard Kipling as well as passing clients. Whenever she left her beat to enter Marks & Co. she insisted on being served by the most physically prepossessing member of Father’s staff, who was also its best salesman, Frank Doel.*

  On the rare occasions when Doris hadn’t enough cash on her to acquire the Kipling she coveted she would ask Frank to reserve it for her and return sometimes a few minutes later, sometimes a few hours (it depended on the weather), to complete her transaction.

  Although 84 was respected by book-collectors around the world – and numbered amongst its other distinguished clients a member of the royal family (who liked his pornography bound in vellum), Charles Chaplin, Bernard Shaw, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Michael Foot, mp (who later saved 84 from demolition by having a preservation order placed on it), the British Museum, scores of universities and (most important of all to Marks & Co.) the book trade itself – the firm indulged in one activity of which its loyal customers knew nothing.

  Marks & Co. were kings of the book ring. They were one of the five leading firms of antiquarian booksellers who never bid against each other in the auction rooms. One member of the ring would be allowed to buy a book for a nominal sum, say £100. As soon as the auction was over the five conspirators would hurry to their nearest safe house – usually a Lyons tea shop – and conduct a private auction. If one of them bought the book in question for £500, the £400 profit would be divided in cash amongst the other four. This process was called a ‘knock-out’, and Frank Doel once blew an entire operation.

  A famous heart specialist named Evan Bedford instructed him to bid up to £300 for an edition of Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, the earliest printed book on the circulation of the blood, which was coming up for auction at Hodgson’s. Too busy with his own Harley Street saleroom to attend the auction himself, he telephoned Frank at home late at night demanding to know why the book had been sold to another dealer for £200 when he’d authorised Frank to bid three. Frank confided that it had been sold in the knock-out for £650. The irate physician immediately undertook to have the whole question of the book ring raised in the House of Commons, which caused cardiac arrest amongst its five participants.

  The then editor of The Times Literary Supplement, himself a collector of rare books, was anxious to avoid a scandal and invited the five leading firms of antiquarian booksellers to sign an undertaking that they would take whatever steps they thought necessary to put an immediate stop to the book ring – if such a thing existed. The big five arrived at the editor’s office a quarter of an hour earlier than expected and, whilst waiting to sign the undertaking, held a knock-out in the anteroom. It was far better security for them than a Lyons tea shop and the tea was free.

  I asked the normally discreet Frank why he’d told a client about the book ring.

  ‘Well, you see,’ he said, ‘when the phone rang the wife and me were having a jolly good fuck in front of the fire.’ He hesitated. ‘And I don’t think too well on my back.’

  He seemed to be thinking well enough on his backside as he sat at his desk at the far end of the room totting up the day’s takings. He was closely watched by Father’s partner, Mark Cohen, who had reluctantly agreed when the firm first made its bid to enter the elite world of antiquarian booksellers that it should be called Marks & Co. rather than Marks & Cohen. The two men made one perfect bookseller, Mr Cohen providing the knowledge, Father the acumen. They’d worked together for twenty years without a written agreement because they understood what a partnership meant. Mr Cohen, who had two daughters but no son, regarded the war as a welcome postponement of his partnership with me and asked somewhat nervously if I had been given the day off by the Ministry of Labour. I was relieved that my domestic cover story hadn’t yet been blown.

  Monitored all the way by Mr Cohen, I wandered along the densely packed shelves picking up a handful of peacetime whenever I stopped and reluctantly putting it back, going from Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, from Johnson’s Rasselas to Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, and Baker Street didn’t exist until I came to Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome.

  I’d stood alone with brave Horatius, the bloody Captain of the Gate, for twelve consecutive hours because a Belgian agent with an urgent message had spelt his name ‘Horateous’. And that same agent with an even more urgent message had spelt the Etruscans who could scarce forbear to cheer with a ‘k’, and it had taken the girls and me sixteen thousand attempts spread over three cheerless days to discover it.

  I decided to cede the ground floor to SOE and visit the rarities upstairs, which included Father.

  As I passed the one part of the shop which was artificial – a door covered in the spines of books to conceal the fact that it led to the unmanned basement – Mr Cohen and Frank were engaged in some complex research. The till was two and sixpence short.

  Only established clients – or newcomers who survived Frank’s scrutiny, 84’s equivalent of a pass – were allowed to climb the staircase which led to Father’s office and the two floors above. The CD of Marks & Co. was seated at his desk with his back to Doris. He was absorbed in collating 84’s latest acquisition – a first edition of Vedute di Roma, which included the rare volume of Carceri, the Italian prisons. According to Father, good booksellers never turned the pages of books, they strummed them, and he was strumming Vedute now to the glorious tune of its asking price.

  I enquired about the state of 84’s health, which was more important to him than his own, and he pointed to a pile of orders from dealers and private clients around the country and from America. He then proudly produced a letter on War Office notepaper from Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke and whispered, as if it were a state secret, that he was chief of the Imperial General Staff. The letter started ‘Dear Ben’ and was written as from one field marshal to another. I knew that Alanbrooke had a passion for books on ornithology and that the bulk of his library had come from 84. Now he wanted Father to find him a Gould’s Birds of Asia in mint condition and was enquiring about the price.

  Commenting that Alanbrooke was a real ‘mensch’ with no side to him at all, Father retrieved the letter from me, picked up his pen (he could write more quickly than most people could type), and began composing his reply.

  I tested the powers of thought transference:

  Dear Alanbrooke,

  My boy tells me that at C’s behest your Chiefs of Staff committee is continuing to withhold an official directive from SOE and that if it doesn’t deliver one soon in mint condition this splendid organisation may be obliged to shut shop.

  I am at a loss to understand why C has such animus towards SOE. Would I be wrong in conjecturing that there’s an Intelligence ring in existence with a knock-out in Broadway?

  Please accept Gould’s Birds of Asia with the lad’s compliments.

  Yours, etc.

  Why was Father looking at me as if wondering whose son I was?

  The second floor was the magic floor, the healing floor, my refuge from St Paul’s School and my hope in years to come. It was called the Occult and Masonic department.*

  It consisted of a large outer office, a small inner one, and George Plummer, whose specialised knowledge established the prices of occult and Masonic books around the world.

  Like most outstanding b
ooksellers Plummer had little formal education and seldom read for pleasure. He had a particular flair for Masonic books and was honorary adviser to the Grand Lodge library, yet he wasn’t a Freemason himself because Catholics were forbidden to join secret societies other than their own. This didn’t prevent him from taking Father into the inner office and rehearsing him in Masonic ritual until he was word-perfect.

  Of all the bizarre clients who’d visited Plummer’s domain there were three who interested him most. One, an erudite mystic called Aleister Crowley, charged his devotees exorbitant prices to watch him perform a popular ceremony not in front of a fire but on top of an altar; the second was Edward Everett Horton, an American comedian who appeared in several Astaire–Rogers films, collected books on tintinnabulation, and confessed to Plummer that three Dominican bell-ringers were constantly at work in his head; and the last was his employer’s son, who, as a small boy of eight, had perched on a stool at his desk and broken his first code.

  I didn’t want to be reminded of that episode but found myself glancing at the space which he’d cleared for me. It was occupied by a copy of Bourke’s Scatological Rites of Mankind reserved for Mr Harry Edwardes, the president of the Society for Psychical Research, and I wondered why he was interested in excremental practices. I left a note for Plummer saying how sorry I was to have missed him and managed not to sign it DYC/M.

  The third floor glowed like the face of a young FANY who’s just broken her first indecipherable. It was full of books in exquisite bindings and they hardly seemed to have aged a wrinkle since they’d paraded like mannequins in their former salon, the palace of Versailles. Ten minutes in their company was a day in the sunshine.