CODE-MAKING, CODE-

BREAKING – ‘THE LIFE

THAT I HAVE’

1943

LEO MARKS WAS SOMETHING OF A LONER AT school – he loved to retreat into his own private world of word puzzles and codes. So as Britain fought its intelligence war with Germany, the young code enthusiast was an obvious candidate for Bletchley Park, the mansion ‘somewhere in the country’ that was the centre of the nation’s code-breakers. Bletchley’s great coup was its deciphering, early in the war, of the German ‘Enigma’ encoding machine that gave Britain advance knowledge of enemy war plans.

To his initial disappointment, the 22-year-old was the one member of his induction course who did not move on to Bletchley. He was sent instead to the London offices of SOE, the Special Operations Executive which organised the resistance movements behind German lines, following Churchill’s order to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Leo’s job was not to break codes, but to create them for the agents that SOE was parachuting behind the enemy lines, and he rapidly rose to become SOE’s head of communications. In his few hours off work, he met and fell in love with Ruth, a nurse who was training for air ambulance work – only to lose her in 1943 when she was killed in an air crash.

Distraught with grief, the code-maker went up on to the nearest roof, and as he gazed up at the stars he imagined Ruth among them, mentally transmitting to her a poem:

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.

A few months later, in the spring of 1944, Leo was organising the codes for Violette Szabo, a young French resistance worker who had been working under cover in German-occupied France, helping to blow up bridges and railway lines to interrupt the Nazis’ supply lines. Violette was due to be parachuted back into enemy territory to help prepare the ground for D-Day, the Allied invasion of northern France, but she was having trouble remembering her code. Every secret agent had to memorise a verse whose letters created a code that was unique to them, and Violette kept forgetting hers – until, in desperation, Leo produced the lines that he had written for Ruth.

‘I could learn this in a few minutes,’ she said, and when Leo tested her next day, her codes were word-perfect. As a token of gratitude, she presented him with the perfect present for a code-master – a miniature chess set.

Later that summer SOE received news that Violette had been ambushed in France and transported to the German labour camp of Ravensbrück. A few weeks later came worse news. After brutal torture by the Gestapo, she had been executed – shot through the back of the head as she knelt, holding hands with two other captured female agents.

After the war, Violette Szabo’s life story was made into a film, Carve Her Name with Pride, and many thousands of cinema-goers were moved by her code poem ‘The Life That I Have’.

‘Dear Code-Master,’ wrote one eight-year-old boy in his own personally devised code, which Leo had to work hard to decipher. ‘She was very brave. Please, how does the poem work? I’m going to be a spy when I grow up.’

A covering letter from the boy’s father explained that his son was desperately ill, so Leo sent the invalid a present – Violette’s own chess set, with an invitation, when he got better, to come and meet some of her fellow agents. The SOE’s master cryptographer composed his reply in the eight-year-old’s personal code, and was delighted to hear that his letter had helped the child rally for a month. The miniature chess set and the memorable code poem were at his bedside when he died.