Something a bit different this time, looks like I’m the first one to try something non-comedy:

My father seldom spoke of the war, though I knew he played a part in it. It is possible he was ashamed that he never served on the frontlines themselves, though at forty years old, short sighted and with a pronounced limp, he was no-one’s idea of a soldier. He was, however, a clever man, in a slow and cautious way, and he spoke fluent German. It was these factors that would lead him to work for MI:5 in counter espionage.

One thing he did speak of, often, was a day three years before the war began, Sunday October 4th. My father lived in the east end of London at that time, as many of us Jews did, and was involved heavily in the local community groups. That Sunday was the day Oswald Mosely and the British Union of Facists attempted to march through our home, uniformed and jackbooted, Hitlerites in all but name, in a world that had yet to wake up to what such people were capable of.

There is some mystery as to why the march was allowed to go ahead, it was not as if the government was unaware of its provocative nature, a police escort was even provided to protect the Blackshirts from those who would oppose them. Yet one must remember that we had yet to stand against German expansion at the time, that we were seeking peace with the Nazi part that had such close ties with Mosely. Fascist, alas, was yet to become a dirty word at that point, it would not be until after the war till its name truly became mud.

But while the government would rather look the other way, the people of the east end would not, my father’s group, and several other local Jewish groups, formed together on Cable Street and attempted to stop them. When they arrived they were shocked to find they weren’t alone the street was thick with Socialists, Trade Unionists, Irish catholic immigrants and anti-fascists of every stripe. They built barricades and manned them together, the police tried to eject them, but they stood firm. My father spoke that day of the way the Blackshirts carried themselves; they, I think, would call it pride, but he saw it for what it was, not pride in themselves, but distain for others. Yet he could also look at those who stood with him, shoulder to shoulder, and speak of a different pride, one that is earned in a shared experience, in solidarity between those who are different, not one that is donned with a shiny uniform, and came from hate of those who were not the same. Years later, he would see that look again.

My father had a favourite trick in those years, if he suspected a man of having sympathy with the German cause; he would begin to play up his heritage. He would introduce himself as a Goldberg, even though he commonly went by merely Gold, and his given name as Elias, Elijah or, if he were feeling particularly daring even Ezekiel (in reality Eli was never short for anything, but his name in full), he would mutter to himself in Yiddish, on one occasion he even produced a yarmulke and donned it in the middle of a conversion. Not all those siding with the Germans were fully exposed to their Anti-Semitic propaganda, but many where, and my father was always very good at reading faces. And not all of them could keep the revulsion out of theirs.

One of the few tales he told me himself, was a story from 1943, an agent had been somehow passing information on ship movements in the enemy, and his superiors feared that this might result in the German’s realising that we had broken their Enigma code and were co-ordinating our ships in response to their communications (my father was not that we had cracked Enigma at that point, that information was not made public till 1974). My father was always methodical, he spent some time monitoring our radio traffic, switching ciphers did not seem to stall the response, so he monitored the radio operators, but none triggered his suspicions. Needing a quick result, he arranged for several ships to transmit false locations, changing the information himself at each step along the chain, then he waited for the German fleet’s response.

Eventually word came to him (via the Enigma cracking ULTRA project, although he wasn’t to know it) that the fleet had fallen for one of his scams. He had narrowed his target down to a small telegram office. It was at this point that he began his scheme; firstly he took a job in the office himself (as Elijah Goldberg of course). Immediately the leak stopped, the spy was worried that my father was an MI:5 plant (as he was) he was clever, but not clever enough not to confirm his location so readily.

There were three men my father suspected; their names were Henderson, Allen, and Wakefield. My father then put phase two of his plan into operation, he began to act suspiciously, asking questions often, disappearing for stretches of time, watching the other men explicitly. The suspects primed, my father sent a colleague of his, a large, burly Irishman named Callaghan, to interview the suspects, he told them he was looking for a spy, that someone had been passing movements to the Germans. Allen told Callaghan he suspected my father, Wakefield outright accused him, Henderson said nothing. It was at this point that my father knew he had his man, any innocent man would assume he was the spy, but a guilty one would not, as he would know that he himself was the spy, and that accusing the only Jewish employee would be a suspicious move on his part. He was smart, but not smart enough, my father’s favourite kind of target.

All that remained was for my father to confirm his suspicions. He knew the spy would not dare transmit data for some time, so, garnering information about procedure from a previously captured agent, he sent a an emergency message to Henderson, telling him MI:5 were onto him, and to proceed to a rendezvous in order to be extracted. The rendezvous was of course false, my father captured Henderson right there, damned by his own attempts to flee.

Henderson, it transpired, had long been a Nazi sympathiser; he had been a member of the BUF, the other side of the barricades on that fateful day in 1936. He had been passing information to the enemy for years, the British Navy estimated his actions had sunk at least five ships, and damaged many more. When Henderson was faced with this, he dropped his façade and sneered openly at my father, that same contempt and arrogance he had seen on the faces of those young men in 1936, so brazen despite their defeat. My father told Henderson he would hang.

But his superiors had other ideas. The allies were planning to invade Sicily, and a mass mis-information campaign (dubbed Operation Mincemeat) was planned in order to convince the German’s otherwise. Henderson was ordered to be turned, despite my father’s protests, and his crimes absolved. Once again the government had sided with a home fascist, and this time my father had no-one to man the barricades with him. Operation Mincemeat went ahead to great success, the invasion of Sicily paved the way for the Normandy landings the next year, and the end of the war the year after that. My father sometimes wondered how many ships Henderson’s loose lips had sunk on the German side. Three? Four?

A few years later my father was forced to leave MI:5, he was amongst those outed Kim Philby, the Soviet mole. He spoke of this to me only once, when he talked of how great the betrayal felt; the socialists, he said, had stood by him at Cable Street, only to stab him in the back years later.

My father spoke of Cable Street often. It was an icon, for him, people of all kinds standing together. But he would later confess to me, in his darker hours, that he no longer knew who stood by him at the barricades, and who marched in the street, and who let them go by.

Tom