You want a young Liza Minelli nude? Well, here she is as Pookie Adams, a banana peeled in a tacky cabin in a joint end-of-virginity scene with co-star Wendell Burton playing fellow college freshman Jerry Payne.

Jerry: [seeing Pookie naked for the first time] Gee, Pookie, your body’s just… beautiful.

I have to agree. She’s gorgeous. But you’ve got to wonder why, as he gently removes each item of clothing, he carefully hangs it up to avoid wrinkles. Situations like this, what’s wrong with the floor?

Pookie: Yeah? Well, I’d better get my beautiful ass into this beautiful bed, before it freezes off!

The two are perfect for each other. Pookie’s offbeat behaviour – lying to a nun on a bus so as to sit next to Jerry, her intriguing views on life and happiness, her rambling monologues – are in delightful contrast to Jerry’s deadpan attitude. How these two could manage a romance is part of the interest of this film.

I think it’s safe to say that this is Liza’s film. She sparkles amongst the “weirdos” of a Northeastern college town in the late Sixties. She’s the most eccentric character around, but she sees herself as the voice of sanity.

Perhaps I’m inclined to agree with her. Her lively views on society, romance and cultural expectations are refreshing, opposed to the more conservative attitudes of those around her.

It’s a pleasure to see the young Liza act. She makes the most of her character, she captivates the viewer, she owns the movie. This was acknowledged by the professional critics of the day, even as they panned the movie itself.

At the time, I resented the way they mocked the elements of romance and sentiment that I enjoyed so much. Long walks through meadows with the music swelling, soulful glances, shared joys – these are the things that set me sighing. And above all, that delightful song that made Vincent Canby of the New York Times roll his eyes:

Come Saturday morning
I’m goin’ away with my friend.
We’ll Saturday laugh more than half of the day.
Just I and my friend,
Dressed up in our rings and our Saturday things
And then we’ll move on
But we will remember long after Saturday’s gone.

Liza Minelli scored an Oscar nomination for her role. And three years later, in another movie I love, she pumped up the role and won an Oscar for Best Actress in the fabulous Cabaret. Nobody complained about the music in that one!

I guess I’m just a sentimental old coot, remembering my fumbling first times at love and all the rest of it. This is a movie to cherish, especially since I was in my teens, in my first year of university, when I saw it. I love it.

—Skyring

Resources

• Little by little, Jerry is seduced by Pookie’s desperation, by her humor, by her presents (including a prize beetle) and also, I assume, by the relentlessly sentimental background music that fills the soundtrack every time they wander through a meadow. –Vincent Canby, New York Times
• First love is beautiful hurt….if it happens to you once, you’re lucky. IMDB
• A Facebook page for the movie!
• The book of the movie of the novel

The science of codebreaking and codemaking is usually a subject guaranteed to glaze the eyes of all but the most devoted. Technical details abound and the reader is led through bowels of alphabet soup.

Usually.

Not this time. The codebreakers of WW2 were an eccentric lot, it turns out, all brilliant, many fatally flawed. Leo Marks (son of the bookseller who established the famous 84 Charing Cross Road shop) is no exception.

Brilliant. His book about his wartime service in the Special Operations Executive – charged with devising codes for agents sent to Occupied Europe – is a literal work of genius.

The actual work of code-making and codebreaking is passed over easily enough. There are no long technical passages or pages full of tables, but instead Leo gives the reader the gist of the mechanics without the details. Enough to know that it was hard enough to encrypt a message using paper and pencil and then send it using Morse code, especially if one was in a hurry and the Germans were hunting down unauthorised radio transmissions.

Leo describes how he was interviewed by Special Operations Executive, getting off to a shakey start,

[The interviewer] began by asking what my hobbies were.
“Incunabula and intercourse, sir.”
It slipped out and wasn’t even accurate; I’d had little experience of one and couldn’t afford the other.

He was given a small test – to decode a sample message. He took some time, and the spymaster would look in now and then, sigh and back out. When Leo was finished, he handed over the correctly decoded message and was then asked to return the codebook, prior to being shown out of the building.

“What codebook?”

The official rummaged through the papers on the table and produced a codebook. The test had been for Marks to decode the message using the codebook, a task suitable for one of the female radio operators.

“You aren’t actually using this code in the field?” Marks asked, knowing that if he could break a message in an hour, the Germans could surely do the same in an afternoon.

As it turned out, the codes in operational use by SOE were easily cracked, and from that moment, Leo Marks spent his war coming up with better codes and better ways to use them. He independently invented the uncrackable “one time pad” and his wrinkle was to print them on silk, far more easily concealed in the clothing of an agent than on pads of paper.

He had a deep attachment to the agents sent overseas, often with totally inadequate codes. This is the story of his long hours, days and years spent in helping them and improving the codes. The difference in codes was quite literally between life and death, often with hideous torture intervening. Or, as he put it, between silken codesheets or the cyanide pill carried by agents.

He wasn’t the sort of cog-in-the-machine toe-the-line desk warrior fighting the war from a comfy chair. He bucked the system and was on the constant verge of dismissal or promotion. Unconventional to a fault. Always with one distant eye on agents deep in Occupied Europe, operating with radio sets the size of suitcases, tapping out messages in Morse while German direection-finding vans zeroed in on them.

And his unconventional book is a delight, a joy to read. It is more than well written, it is a work of literature in its own right. Quite simply, it is as brilliant as its author.

But be warned, dear reader. You will need a handkerchief to mop up the tears. Sometimes from laughter, sometimes from sadness. This is a book that will insert probes into the deepest parts of your mind and tickle the emotion centres, sometimes pleasure and pain at once. I can’t really describe it, but this book somehow joins your subconscious mind to the author’s and you share his thoughts in a way that is both intimate and completely natural. I have never met another book that comes close.

There’s enough detail to satisfy those with an interest in codes, the story is well told, it is full of fascinating characters, fraught with tension all the way through, but the joy of reading this book is in the words and sentences. Puns and wordplay abound.

Leo Marks, I wish you had written this book decades ago, and followed it up with many more in the same vein.

It’s not just codes and agents. Leo’s father was Ben Marks, of the famous antiquarian booksellers Marks and Co., immortalised in Helene Hanff’s classic 84, Charing Cross Road.

Marks & Co. were kings of the book ring. They were one of the five leading firms of antiquarian booksellers who never bid against each other in the auction rooms. One member of the ring would be allowed to buy a book for a nominal sum, say £100. As soon as the auction was over the five conspirators would hurry to their nearest safe-house – usually a Lyons tea shop – and conduct a private auction. If one of them bought the book for £500, the £400 profit would be divided in cash amongst the other four. This process was called a ‘knock-out’, and Frank Doel once blew an entire operation.

A famous heart specialist named Evan Bedford instructed him to bid up to £300 for an edition of Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, the earliest printed book on the circulation of the blood, which was coming up for auction at Hodgson’s. Too busy with his own Hartley Street salesroom to attend the auction himself, he telephoned Frank at home late at night demanding to know why the book had been sold to another dealer for £200 when he’d authorized Frank to bid three. Frank confided that it had been sold in the knock-out for £600. The irate physician immediately undertook to have the whole question of the book ring raised in the House of Commons, which caused cardiac arrest amongst its five participants.

Frank, normally discreet, explained later that when the call came, “My wife and I were having a jolly good fuck in front of the fire.” He paused. “And I don’t think too well on my back.”

“The only indecipherable code in the world is a woman,” Leo Marks said. The coding work was actually performed by young women drawn from the “First Aid Nursing Yeomanry” (known as “FANYs”) and it puzzled Leo that periodically his clerks would have days where they would make far more errors than usual. His efforts to find out the reason why are hysterical, but in his own style he found a way to crack that code and to arrange for less important work on those particular days.

He knew that if a message from an agent in the field could not be decoded, it would have to be repeated, a dangerous procedure adding to the risk of detection. He declared that in future there was to be no such thing as an indecipherable message, and led his young women through hours and days of exhaustively trying every combination to find errors in coding.

He ended the practice of giving field agents easily remembered poems or quotations as a basis for their coding. The agents selected five random words from the quote, indicating which ones in a special codegroup at the beginning of the message, and used them to encrypt their text. Given enough text, the Germans could break the code, work out which poem was being used, and then read all subsequent messages with no difficulty at all.

Marks’ solution was to give each agent an original creation, easily remembered, often cheerfully obscene:

Is De Gaulle’s prick
Twelve inches thick?
Can it rise
To the size
Of a proud flag-pole?
And does the sun shine
From his arse-hole?

Unlikely that these verses would be found in any reference work available to the Germans!

He became engaged to the god-daughter of one of his superiors, and when she was killed in a plane crash in Canada, he opened his heart:

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

He later gave this poem to Violette Szabo, who was captured after D-Day, tortured and executed. Her story was told in the film Carve Her Name with Pride, and the poem is read out as a voiceover in the final scene as the screen fades to black.

—Skyring

Resources

• Leo Marks in Wikipedia
• The Englandspiel

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.        (Leo Tolstoy)

Hey Skyring,

Yes I know I just wrote you a letter, but something inspired me, so I’m writing another. It happens occasionally

I went and saw The Last Station last weekend with my Dad and Stepmum. Admittedly it wasn’t one of those movies I had any particular interest in seeing, just something I went to see because they wanted to see it and I wanted to see them. I’m sure we’ve all been to that kind of movie. But, I actually really enjoyed it. I know basically nothing about Leo Tolstoy, other than the fact that he wrote War and Peace. Which I haven’t actually read. Yet. (Maybe one day!).

But it was actually quite good! Obviously I have no idea if it was historically accurate, having basically no prior knowledge about him whatsoever (which is bizarre really, considering how much I like to read!)

Anyway, I was walking back to my friend Kirsty’s house today, after buying a new fleece, and saw that quote from the movie, and it’s inspired me!  Especially in regards to what I was trying to say about love and life in my last letter (which I don’t like for the record, it doesn’t feel very coherent. For a change.)

That quote actually reminds me of the scene from The Amber Spyglass when (SPOILERS!) Lyra goes through and opens the door from the Realm of the Dead to the real world, and all the souls are freed and become particles of the natural world. For someone who doesn’t really know what they believe what happens when you die (really there is no way of knowing), that sounds like a really nice thing to happen. I think it would be nice to become part of a flower or whatever when I die.

I also really like the quote because I don’t really understand it. It makes me think. What is life really? And what is love? More things I don’t really know. Maybe we aren’t supposed to know all the answers. Heck I know we aren’t supposed to know all the answers! And I don’t even want to know all the answers! Life would be far less interesting if I never got to wonder about anything any more.

But anyway, the movie. As I was saying, I really enjoyed it, the characters were very convincing, and I  felt really sorry for Leo’s wife, although she seemed like a heck of a drama queen. Maybe some of it was justified, I know if people were carrying little notebooks around and writing in them all the time it would drive me crazy! Especially if I thought/knew they were writing about me!

I really liked Tolstoy too, he seemed to me to be a really interesting guy! He was portrayed as being quite thoughtful, and I really liked that he seemed genuinely interested in the protaganist and what he had to say. Reminds me of my friend Michael actually

Sorry, this went off on a bit of a tangent, and I didn’t really talk about the movie much!

I hope you’re having a good weekend

RTS, Discoverylover

Hi, Discoverylover!

You are a temptress! I went out and got a block of Whittaker’s Hazelnut chocolate. Yes, it’s sold in Australia, though I had to go to a couple of places before I could find it. And I scoffed the whole block during the evening. While I listened to Sister Hazel.

Here’s another take on life:

You know what the trouble is? Trouble is that probably all the good things in life take place in no more than a minute. I mean all added up, I bet you at the end of seventy years, should you live so long, you can sit down, you can figure the whole thing out:

You spent nineteen years sleepin’, you spent five years goin’ to the bathroom, you spent thirty-five years doin’ some kinda work you absolutely hated, spent seven thousand eight hundred and fifty-three minutes blinkin’ your eyes.

And added to that, you got that one minute of good things. Then one day you wonder whether your minute’s up. –Liza Minelli as Pookie Adams in The Sterile Cuckoo

I love that film. It has one of my favourite songs in it, the relentlessly corny Come Saturday Morning:

Come Saturday morning
I’m goin’ away with my friend
We’ll Saturday spend ’til the end of the day
Just I and my friend
We’ll travel for miles in our Saturday smiles
And then we’ll move on
But we will remember
Long after Saturday’s gone

I don’t believe in Pookie Adams’ “minute of good things” theory. Not for a minute. But I love her character. Quirky, screwball, vulnerable and brash. An odd and charming mix. Liza Minelli had a second bite of the cherry with Sally Bowles in Cabaret and scored a hit.

Some people seem to get more out of life, to live more colourfully, more completely than others. To get more out of a Saturday, dressed up in their rings and their Saturday things than out of the other days. To get more out of the ordinary, everyday, days than others get out of special Saturdays.

I think it’s a matter of living for the day, for the minute, for the moment. To savour every experience with your whole soul. Even just brushing your teeth, or walking to work can be a treat, if you do it with your full attention, your eyes open and sparkling.

Yours aye,
Skyring

Likes

• The Sterile Cuckoo

Hey Skyring

Yes, now I’m just being silly (surely that doesn’t surprise you!). But I suspect you set me up for that, so I’m gonna go with it. Give a dog a bone and all that :p Actually I think Sister Hazel have a whole lot of songs about life. Or love. They’re kind of interchangeable aren’t they? Or the perfect life would be.

Not necessarily that kind of love, even. Just love. Loving your life is such an important thing to me. After all, as the songs says, we do only get one of them.

One of my favourite rants is about people who don’t like their job, but stay there anywhere. I’m sure there are exceptions, but personally, I think that a job is a huge part of your life, even if I agree that life should not just be about work. Maybe I’ll feel differently in a few years, if I ever get a mortgage and a family and all that, but really? Why would you want to spend so much of your time and energy doing something you don’t enjoy? And I’m not saying that everyone will enjoy every single part of their job, but it would be nice if people were generally happy with what they were doing. Heck, there’s parts of my job I seriously dislike (really, who wants to unbolt the same exhibit every other week because it keeps breaking!), but generally I enjoy going to work!

So anyway, life. I guess what most of us want out of life is to feel loved, and to love. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return, right? I know that’s how I feel. And I want to feel like I’ve made a difference in the world.

Sorry, I know this is all over the place. I should just send it and let it be, maybe you’ll be able to make some sense out of it!

As always, rts

Discoverylover

PS Yes, I’m eating that chocolate now

PPS Here are three(ve)(:p) of my favourite songs about life by Sister Hazel:

• Tear By Tear
• Change Your Mind
• All About The Love (LP Version)