The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish by Noreen Riols Page B

was sent first to Montague Mansions, a block of flats in the street behind Norgeby House, to work with the Crazy Gang, the secret agents I had met that first afternoon when I
was interviewed by Harry Miller. Once I was part of their team, I discovered they were in fact delightful, and very friendly. But all the same the place made me think of a windmill operated by the
Marx Brothers. The doors were always wide open and men and women in shirt-sleeves, mostly men, seemed to be perpetually roaring up and down the corridors, shrieking to each other. The entire block
might have been teeming with members of the Secret Army, but if it was I never found out. We were such a closed group, even among ourselves.
    Montague Mansions was never designed to be an office complex. It was a sedate, rather luxurious block of flats which had been taken over by SOE. And it could not have been a more inconvenient
place in which to work. We used to trip endlessly backwards and forwards between Norgeby House and Montague Mansions: the crucial thing we needed or the person we were looking for was always in the
other building. The house had three floors plus a basement. I was working on the top floor. And there was no lift. I cannot think how many times I raced up and down those flights of stairs, and I
do mean raced. I’d caught the bug from all the other hyperactive inhabitants tearing about the place.
    On my way down I flew past Leo Marks’s office on the ground floor. Marks was probably the greatest cryptologist of the war. He was very young – only about twenty-two at the time
– short and stocky with a bulbous nose but a captivating smile. He had a great personality. His door was always wide open, and there always seemed to be a party going on inside. Apart from
the fact that he was very popular, there was the added attraction that his mum always sent him to work laden with cakes and sandwiches, which he shared around – commodities that were not to
be found on every table during the war. Leo had been recruited to cope with the coded messages that came in from the different
réseaux
and was in charge of a roomful of decoders,
all girls I believe, who worked in Michael House, a neighbouring building belonging to Marks and Spencer.
    Before Leo’s arrival, messages that the decoders found difficult, even impossible, to transcribe – they called them ‘indecipherables’ – were often returned to the
pianist with a request for retransmission. But given how much pressure the radio operators were under, it was inevitable that they made mistakes. Sometimes the organizer dictated messages to the
pianist while he was actually transmitting, which meant he had to encode them as he transmitted – an almost impossible task. And the result was often a jumble of letters which the girls
couldn’t decipher. But when Leo arrived he decided that there was no such thing as an ‘indecipherable’. If the pianist had risked his life to send the message, then the least
people at the receiving end could do was work at it until a solution was found rather than ask the radio operator to risk his life again. He inspired the girls with his enthusiasm, but sometimes
they still had to admit defeat. Then Leo took over, going through endless permutations until he finally deciphered the message – I believe the greatest number was over 900, and it took him
three days to work it out. Leo found perfectly encoded messages suspicious. He concluded that they came either from a German operator who had somehow managed to secure the code or a pianist who had
been arrested and was being forced to continue transmitting under German control, thereby enabling the enemy to discover plans for drops as well as other useful information. But this unfortunate
situation was not as dramatic as it might appear, because it also worked the other way round, to our advantage. If the Section head knew that the code, and possibly the radio operator, were in
enemy hands, he