Chapter One
A Hard Man to Place
In January 1942 I was escorted to the war by my parents in case I couldn't find
it or met with an accident on the way. In one hand I clutched my railway warrant
— the first prize I had ever won; in the other I held a carefully wrapped
black-market chicken. My mother, who had begun to take God seriously the day I
was called up, strode protectively beside me — praying that the train would
never arrive, cursing the Führer when she saw that it had and blessing the
porter who found me a seat. Mother would have taken my place if she could, and
might have shortened the war if she had.
My father, who was scarcely larger than the suitcases he insisted on carrying,
was an antiquarian bookseller whose reading was confined to the spines of books
and the contents of the Freemason's Chronicle. His shop was called Mark ... read full excerpt from Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 ebook
