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neighbour, seeing him returning to his parents’ home
each evening and leaving each morning laden with
black market food by his Mama sent him a white
feather. When he told his parents (who understood he
was some manner of civil servant) that he was to be
sent to Cairo for a week, his father left the room. “Now
look what you’ve done,” said his mother. “He’s gone to
get pissed.” But his father returned after an hour with a
pith helmet, which both parents made him swear he’d
wear at all times.
In his Cairo hotel, he got talking with the Jewish
American comedian Jack Benny, who persuaded him
that being Jewish, he ought to start taking this war – a
wonderful chance to fight the greatest anti-Semite of
all time – a damn sight more seriously. Marks then told
him a funny story about an uncle’s efforts to evade the
call-up in WW1 and watched in astonishment as Benny
re-told the story, giving a perfect impersonation of the
uncle he had never met. “Thank you Jack Benny,” he
says, “for giving me a month’s holiday in the hour we
spent together … And thanks for not being ashamed of
being proud of your race. I wish I had the courage to be
one of the troops you’re here to entertain.”
Marks’s war, though, was anything but a lark. It
was part of his job to brief agents on their codes just
before they were dropped into enemy territory. Their
life-expectancy was pretty low, and their radio transmissions
were usually the first thing that gave them
away to the Gestapo. Marks carried this responsibility
heavily and he remains angry, bitter even, to this day
about the bungling and the bureaucratic in-fighting that
resulted in so many astonishingly courageous men and
women being captured, tortured and executed.
These included his special hero ‘Tommy’ Yeo-Thomas,
who was caught late on in the war and endured
unbelievable torments because the Gestapo knew that
he knew everything there was to know about resistance
in France, but who nonetheless managed to escape. Or
Noor Inayat Khan, the brilliant daughter of an Indian
prince and religious leader; a capable enough wireless
operator for the SOE in France, but because of her
religion and upbringing she was incapable of telling a
lie. Khan died in a concentration camp, as did the most
famous SOE agent of all, Violette Szabo, subject of the
postwar film, Carve Her Name With Pride. By late in
the war, where agents had to use poem-codes, Marks
had decreed that they should at least be originals, as
well-known ones could be pieced together by the Germans
and the codes broken more easily. Part at least of
Szabo’s fame is due to the one he gave her to memorise:
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours
The love that I have
BUY Leo Marks books online from and
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