When a young man of twenty, the son of an antiquarian bookseller who had a shop at 84,Charing Cross Road, cast about for some branch of the British military to employ him and his penchant for codes, he had to contact an uncle in order to be accepted.
I suppose he could have become a foot soldier or been digging ditches but fortunately for the Allied combatants of WWII, his enormous talents as an original and intuitive codebreaker and codemaker were quickly utilised, if not his sense of humour.
A self taught obsession with the intracies of extracting and burying information in jumbles of letter and numbers as well as inventing new methods for doing so, he quickly rose to overseeing part of the operation plus the training of radio operators and their attached agents in the field, prior to being dropped behind enemy lines.... knowing full well their lives depended on his ability to instill in these agents a thorough grounding in the various codes and their memorising of a poem used as the key.
One of the best books I've read in a long time. An absorbing often amusing autobiography.. tinged with anxiety and pain, he describes his forboding at the coming night drop of Violette Szabo into a particularly dangerous area, giving her a poem he composed for his lover..
Violette Szabo was executed at Ravensbruch without ever using it...
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
Leo Marks
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