Between Silk and Cyanide Read Online Free Page B

we couldn't decode.
    I didn't want him to know that he'd be dependent on me. I improvised a little and told him that we had a team of girls who'd been specially trained to break indecipherable messages. Each girl, I said, 'adopted' an agent so that if he made a mistake or two in his messages, she'd be familiar with his coding style. I then asked him to run through his poem for me and took out his code-card to check the wording. He shyly admitted that Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' was his favourite poem, and that he was grateful to his instructor for allowing him to use it. He added that he was afraid someone else might have picked it first. He was silent for a few moments and then whispered the words I wasn't sure to whom:
     
    Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow.
     
     
    Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And time, a maniac scattering dust,
And life, a fury slinging flame.
     
     
    Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
     
     
    Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
     
    I was careful to keep looking at the code-card. There was nothing more that I could say to him. But there was one thing that I could do.
    Without telling anyone, I ordered a car and went to meet the coders of Grendon. Every girl in the code room at Station 53 could have walked out of her job at a month's notice. They were all in the FANY, a volunteer organization whose members could resign at will. The average age of these girls was twenty, though there was a sprinkling amongst them of watchful matriarchs, and most of them had been selected as coders on an arbitrary basis because they happened to be available when coders were wanted. After the briefest training they were dispatched to one of the most secret establishments in England and left to get on with it. They were never allowed to meet the agents whose traffic they handled and who were only code-names to them. The Gestapo had no more reality for these girls than when they'd joined the FANY.
    As I opened the door of the lecture room, forty of them stood to attention. I wasn't sure how to get them to sit down again and made a vaguely royal gesture which had no immediate effect. I walked up to the blackboard at the far end of the room, wrote out a message in code which I hoped was legible and turned to face them.
    It was the first time I'd ever given a lecture except to the one or two girls I'd taken out. I wasn't prepared for their impact en masse. I spotted two gigglers at the back of the room and talked only to them for the first five minutes—about agents in the field and the risks they took to send messages to us. I quoted verbatim from a telegram Dansey had shown me only two nights ago about a Yugoslav partisan, eighteen years old, who had been caught with a wireless transmitter, had refused to betray the organizer whose messages he was sending and was eventually taken to the mortuary 'no longer recognizable as a human being'. They didn't handle Yugoslav traffic. There was a sudden urgency in that room to handle the Gestapo.
    I asked them to help break the message on the blackboard as if they were the Gestapo; I showed them what enemy cryptographers would look for if they had intercepted the message. I began to anagram and asked them to join in. They were shy at first—but soon suggestions were being called out from all round the room and those from 'the gigglers' were amongst the brightest. I reserved them for Paul.
    It was oversimplified, of course, but it gave them the 'feel' of code breaking, and the principles they were shown were absolutely valid. I let them finish the message themselves. The clear-text read: 'From the coders of Grendon to the agents of