That Intelligence toff, Robert Ethan, turned up at the Limehouse late that morning for about three hours. He was rail thin and dressed in dapper tweeds, with huge eyes behind specs thick as bottle glass. His magnified eyes made you feel like a midgie pinned against a piece of card when he looked at you.
Nan fixed up her best double room for him – Number Four, the same one she’d let to the Jerry pilot – but Ethan didn’t stay. He was in a hurry and hopping mad that he’d missed the ado. He’d spent most of the day before stuck on a train waiting for a troops transport to pass. When he got off at last – with special permission to climb down on to the railway track and walk away before the train moved! – he legged it to an RAF aerodrome and tried to fly to Windyedge to make up the lost time. But the weather down south closed in on them, so then he ended up stuck somewhere else in England overnight. Now another storm was rolling in, and he didn’t want to waste his precious time being stuck here.
He hung about long enough to grill us all, and then he poked around in the Jerry pilot’s room, like a terrier sniffing out rats. After his wee nosy he came downstairs and went straight to the gramophone case and tested its working parts. Finally he pawed through Jane’s records, emptying all the album sleeves and checking with Louisa about which ones the Jerry had played. He didn’t say what he was looking for, and as far as I could tell, he didn’t find anything.
Last thing before he went, he turned his sticking-pin gaze on Louisa, standing quiet as a mouse at Jane’s shoulder by the big old mantelpiece.
‘That is quite the collection of wishing coins,’ he said. ‘Aren’t airmen a superstitious lot! Well, perhaps the hoodoo will help you to feel at home, Louisa. Thank you, my dear Mrs Campbell, for being so patient while I shifted the furniture about upstairs. And you, Mrs Warner, for allowing me to disturb your recordings. You have a very youthful taste in music! I apologise if I haven’t put everything back in its proper place – mustn’t leave any stone unturned. I shall dash now before the weather closes in. I am damnably disappointed. Volunteer McEwen, is your utility vehicle at my service?’
As if I had a choice. At least he wouldn’t pull a gun.
It wasn’t until later, back at the Limehouse, that I realised how unpopular he’d made himself.
‘All right, Louisa?’ I asked her. She was rinsing crockery behind the bar, her pretty heart-shaped face pinched and frowning. I added, ‘Where is everybody?’
‘Mrs Campbell is putting things right in Room Four, and Jane is supposed to be having a rest. She spent ages fussing over her records, and she made me go with her to the village shop to try to find sticky tape for a torn album sleeve. Now her bad hip is hurting. She won’t say, but I’m learning to guess.’
‘Does it make you cross?’
Her frowning brows went smooth. ‘I’m not cross.’
I said gently, ‘But I can see that you are.’
She pressed her lips together and shook her head.
We’d only met the day before, but we’d shared a great trial that morning and it made us closer than we would be otherwise. I knew she wasn’t happy. ‘Was it something Nan said? Don’t let her fash you,’ I told her. ‘She’s not too old to change her ways, but she’s slow to learn.’
I lived in fear Nan would twig what I was and we’d have a bitter fight over whether I should leave her house. I didn’t think she’d prefer me to raise a tent in her garden, but I wasn’t ready to find out.
‘If she said something rude, it was ignorance,’ I said. ‘She’s crabbit, but she doesn’t mean to be hurtful.’
‘Oh!’ Louisa gasped, and I saw I’d hit close to truth. ‘It wasn’t Nan. It was that awful Intelligence officer going on about hoodoo! Why? Do I look like a fool-fool country gal? Is that because I’m only fifteen? Or because I’ve left school without finishing? Because I’m not doing a skilled job? Or is it just because I’m from Jamaica?’
She rattled the cups like a rebel. ‘My mum taught music in an English school. She played the harp at weddings, and the church organ for two different congregations. I hardly know what he meant, and anyway it’s Mrs Campbell who’s superstitious, not me!’ She waved at the coins over her head. ‘Have you heard her going on about these? “That’s dead men’s money. Leave it where it is.” She knows the name of every airman every penny belonged to. She talks as if they’re her own children!’
‘I’ll wager she didn’t like that filthy Jerry leaving his wish up there with the rest,’ I said. ‘Let’s take his penny out and see if she misses it.’
Louisa raised her eyes to the wooden beam.
She might not be superstitious, but she knew exactly which one of those silver wishes belonged to that Jerry pilot.
I saw where she was looking, and reached up to pick it between my fingernails. It had a raised rim and came out easily when I pulled on it.
I held it on my open palm so Louisa could see, and we stared.
It was no coin.
‘That’s a typewriter key,’ said Louisa.
It was a wee black enamel disc, just big enough to set your fingertip on, with a shiny, smooth nickel edge. The edge made a sort of lip around the key, like a pot lid. The letter on it was an L: L for Louisa.
And aye, yes, I am sure he chose it on purpose.
Louisa blinked up at the ceiling again, and I remembered Nan in the room above. We stood quiet as mice, listening, but she didn’t come down.
‘It’s off that thing in the box,’ Louisa whispered. ‘It was a sort of electrical typewriter. I saw inside it when he put it on the piano and the lid fell open. The keys were just like that.’
I rolled the disc between my fingers. I wondered why he’d left it.
Louisa held out her hand, and I could see she wanted it for herself.
I dropped it into her palm. She closed her fingers like a gamekeeper’s iron trap snapping shut, and caught me frowning.
She said, ‘He played so beautifully.’
‘You weren’t at all afraid,’ I said, remembering how sick I’d felt. ‘You came along brave as a king going into battle.’
‘No, I was terribly afraid,’ she contradicted. ‘But I wanted to help you! I want so much to do something useful. I didn’t believe he’d hurt us – he hated bullying us. He did it because he had to. Like airmen dropping bombs.’
‘I worried he’d take one of us with him,’ I admitted.
‘So did I, until I saw how tight a fit it would be!’
We shared a shaky laugh. It felt good to have it behind us.
‘We won!’ I said. ‘Our first battle together! Keep that wee charm for luck.’
‘What did I say about superstition?’ Louisa exclaimed, and I laughed again.
‘Och then, keep it as a trophy! Don’t let Nan spy you, though.’
‘I won’t,’ Louisa said.
Mrs Campbell flounced downstairs, carrying a heather broom in one hand and a feather duster in the other. Her wispy hair coiled in sweaty frills around her face. She looked like she’d just finished one battle and was ready for the next.
Though she didn’t see what we’d been up to, my cheeks heated up. I slipped Felix Baer’s typewriter key into my skirt pocket. Tea, I was supposed to be making tea for Jane. I’d lit the burner for the kettle ages ago, and it still hadn’t boiled.
‘The flame needs to be higher,’ Mrs Campbell said, turning it up. ‘Goodness, Louisa, you were in London three years already, did no one teach you how to make tea? Leaving the gas low just wastes it!’
‘Don’t have a go at her for not knowing her way about your kitchen, Mrs C.,’ said Ellen, straightening her cap in a way that told you she was enlisted. ‘She’s not been here a day, and we’ve all had a fright.’
Mrs Campbell harrumphed and made the tea herself. She loaded a tray for me to carry up to Jane.
Then it came out why she was cross about the wasted gas. She was just blaming it on me because the real culprit had already left.
‘That Robert Ethan left the fire on in Room Four, despite all I said to him, and it’s been roaring away all day with no one in there,’ she grumbled as she poured boiling water. ‘And he got the last of the milk as well; there isn’t any more till tomorrow. Aunt Jane’ll have to have her tea black.’
Nan gave me the tray and turned around to check she’d turned off the burner. Then she lifted the wooden gate for me to get out from behind the bar.
‘When you go upstairs, Louisa, would you run into Room Four and close the window? It was much too warm in there by the time I’d swept and put everything back.’ She added, I think to herself, ‘I must get the collection man to check that gas-fire fitting when he fetches the money from the meters. It has come loose. That can’t be safe, and it’s my best room.’
Away I went upstairs feeling assaulted by frustration. I was angry at Nancy Campbell, who was paying me but who was clearly going to be difficult to get along with – and I was angry at myself, too, for not standing up to her. I didn’t understand why I was so moved by the strange German pilot I should by rights have hated, and why I so disliked the British officer who was supposed to be on my side.
It was after three o’clock. In another hour, this far north, it would start to get dark. I lit the fire in our room and left Jane with the tea tray while I went to close the window in the room down the passage.
Number Four wasn’t like ours at all – I could see why Nan said it was her best. It faced south-east, like ours, but had a big Victorian bay window. The room was tidy but freezing, because the middle sash was open wide, and wind made the curtains float and stir like ghosts. I had to hang my weight on the window frame, giving a jump that got my feet off the ground, before I could shift it to close it.
I stood looking out for a moment at the beautiful, bleak brown-and-grey view of the moor and village rooftops and North Sea. It wasn’t raining, but the wind made the Scotch pines bow on the ridge above the old house. Somewhere in the far sky a storm was blowing over, bad weather rushing west from Norway, across Scotland, out to the Atlantic.
My mind followed the wind west to the blue Caribbean Sea and back five years to Mummy’s thirty-fifth birthday. Daddy borrowed a rowboat and took all three of us across the water from Port Royal for a picnic on the coral beach at Lime Cay, and a storm rolled in late in the afternoon when we were on our way back. Daddy rowed for ages and couldn’t get any closer to the mainland, so he and Mummy each took an oar. I was at their feet bundled in the picnic blanket. We were all soaked to the skin, and I had to bang the aluminium coffee pot with a spoon and sing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to set the rhythm for their rowing.
It should have been terrifying – thinking about it, I saw that it might really have been terrifying, especially for Mummy. But for me, it was wonderful, a big adventure, helping them to fight our way home together.
So proud of my girl, Daddy had said. A real voyager, not a bit scared.
I turned back to the cold room. I stood there for a moment – not long, only two or three seconds – and thought about Felix Baer playing records in here for half the night. What was in his mind all that time? Was he a professional musician, like my mother, before the war? What was his family like? Did he have a sweetheart? What would happen to him if the Luftwaffe found out he’d sneaked off to Windyedge when he was supposed to be shooting down British planes?
And why had he pulled a key off his typewriter, an L for Louisa, and stuck it in the ceiling of the Limehouse?
I shook my head to clear it. Then, just before I went back to Jane, I checked to make sure the gas tap was off. The gas fires in Mrs Campbell’s rooms were just like the one Mummy and I had in our London flat, and Mummy had dinned it into my head to make sure the gas was always off when I left the room.
Mrs Campbell was right – one of the Victorian panels around the new fire was loose. I rattled the fixture under my hand, worrying. What if the pipes came disconnected? Town gas was deadly when it leaked. I looked more closely, and saw there were fresh dents on both the new fire and the old frame, as if someone had forced a wedge between them and tried to pry the fire out of its setting.
I stared at the gas fire, small and neat, not as secure as it should have been. In the old fireplace behind the Victorian panels, there would be a dark, hollow space where you could hide anything. Secret plans. Vials of poison. A bomb, perhaps.
Surely Felix Baer would have made noise getting the panels off.
But no one would have heard anything over the music.
I picked at that shaky cast iron panel with my fingernails. I couldn’t get enough grip on it to pry it loose.
I ran back to Room Five. Jane sat calmly drinking tea. She looked at me in surprise; I was fizzing with excitement.
‘What in the world, Louisa?’
‘I’ll be back in a moment, just a moment,’ I panted. ‘I need—’
I opened my flute case and grabbed the thin steel rod for cleaning the flute.
‘What’s Nancy want with you now, girl?’ Jane enquired. ‘You’re not to run her errands; you’re here for me. You mustn’t let her order you about. I’ll have a word if you like.’
‘It’s not her. It might not be anything. I’ll tell you in a minute. Wish me luck!’
‘What in the world?’ she said again, and laughed. Now she was curious. She saluted me with her teacup. ‘Off you go and hurry up! Good luck!’
I was not sure what I’d do if Nancy Campbell discovered me taking her fireplace apart, the day after I arrived in her house. What was the worst that could happen – might she fire me with no pay? I knew how desperate she was for someone to look after Jane. I could talk my way out of this.
I went back to Room Four, wedged the steel rod into the fireplace, and pulled. The panel came off easily, falling into the tiled hearth with a crash. I caught my breath, but no one seemed to hear.
I peered inside the hole I’d made in the wall of the Limehouse.
In the back of the fireplace was an old deep-set stone hearth that went right into the full thickness of the wall. The gas line came up through a pipe in the floor and ran behind the grate to connect to the new fire. It wasn’t at all disturbed by the panel being out. In the dark, sitting in the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old hearth, was Felix Baer’s wooden case.
At first I was confused. I was sure I’d seen him carry it out of the house and put it in Ellen’s van yesterday morning. How could it be here behind the fireplace in Room Four?
I tried to remember what I’d seen, and realised I’d seen nothing. He’d used the gramophone as a decoy, and by some wizardly sleight of hand he made us think he’d put his own case in the Tilly ready to fly back to Norway with him. It was dark, and nobody checked in the back of the van to see if he’d put anything there or not, and he’d made sure Ellen and I were standing on the side of the plane where we couldn’t see him unloading before he took off again.
So clever. And so desperate! What exactly was this thing he’d taken such risks to deliver and leave here?
There was a small cardboard box in front of the case, not much bigger than my fist. I reached in and grabbed the box and the case, and then, as fast as I could, I fit the iron panel back in place. It was easy to take apart and put back together, because Felix Baer had done the hard work of prying the panel loose in the first place. He must have broken it free of its fixture.
I closed up Room Four behind me and went back to Jane with Felix Baer’s wooden box.
The old woman’s pale blue eyes flew wide when she saw what I was carrying. She didn’t tell me off.
‘I suppose you’d better lock the door,’ she said.
I don’t think Nancy Campbell would have ever allowed us near each other if she’d guessed what collaborators we’d become.
Jane rubbed her hands together. I sat the wooden case and cardboard box on the bed and, remembering Felix Baer and his records, turned on the wireless. It took half a minute to warm up. It felt like the longest thirty seconds of my life, longer than waiting for bombs to explode during the Blitz.
But at last we were in the middle of a lovely swing tune, and I turned up the radio – not too much, as I didn’t want to arouse suspicion, and our operation ought to be a quiet one. I opened the case.
I had thought it was some kind of typewriter when I caught my glimpse of it on the piano. But it wasn’t. There was no place to fit paper. Instead, above the keyboard was a plate of letters that exactly matched the keyboard itself. Above the letter plate were three dials and a switch.
Jane was out of her chair, hanging on to the headboard of the bed so she could get closer. The front flap of the box came unlatched and fell open as she sat. We both saw the brand name printed on the inside: ENIGMA.
Jane bent to read the metal card, all in German, that was screwed into the inside of the top lid.
‘It says it is a cipher machine,’ she breathed. ‘It must be for creating code. Or translating code.’
‘Are those instructions?’ I gasped.
‘Not useful instructions,’ Jane answered. ‘Just cleaning instructions! But it tells a bit about the moving parts …’
She kept reading, and I bent alongside her to get a closer look at the machine.
The last keypad in the bottom right corner of the keyboard was missing.
I took the L key out of my pocket and tried to place it over the empty peg. It didn’t fit, but as I pressed the peg down, a Q suddenly lit up in the letter plate above the keyboard.
‘It’s battery-powered,’ Jane said. She straightened up and tapped at other keys. Random letters lit in the display plate. Each time they lit, one of the dials moved along a notch. ‘It’s in perfect working order.’
‘The letters don’t match!’ I exclaimed.
‘It mixes them,’ she said. ‘Then they’re in code. The lid says to refer to instructions we don’t have.’
‘Maybe we can figure it out,’ I said.
Jane opened the cardboard box. Inside it, wrapped in a flannel cloth, were two notched steel gears each about the size of a tin of shoe polish.
‘I think these are extra dials,’ Jane said. ‘You turn the dials to change the way you scramble the letters. If you put different dials in, you get even more ways to mix them up. This will keep us busy!’
I saw that you could set up the machine to turn your message into nonsense, and then someone with the same machine, or one like it, could decode your nonsense by using the same setting.
A German coding machine was sitting on my bed. Did Robert Ethan know what Felix Baer had brought with him? He hadn’t said anything about it.
But he’d definitely been looking for something.
I knew we’d have to tell someone, but I didn’t know where to start. It must be terribly, terribly secret. We couldn’t telephone anybody – the people at the exchange might hear anything we said.
‘What’s that you’ve got?’ Jane asked me.
‘I think it is the key that goes in the corner. The pilot must have taken it off on purpose – he left it with the wishing coins this morning. He said my name. I think he wanted me to find it, but I don’t know why.’
I showed her.
I poked the nail of my little finger into the hollow back of the key, wondering why it didn’t fit over its peg. Something was jammed in there, but even my little fingernail was too big to tease it out.
‘Use a hairpin,’ suggested Jane. So I did.
The jammed-in thing was a curled-up strip of paper. I unrolled it carefully and smoothed it out against the tea tray. It had a name written on it in pencil: Django Reinhardt.
We stared.
Jane turned one of the dials slowly. I looked over her shoulder and tried to do the maths in my head to work out how many combinations you could use to set the dials. Thousands of millions. No, I must be calculating wrong. Millions of millions of different ways to set the code.
It would be so easy to do with the machine and just about impossible to undo without it.
‘Go fetch the Django Reinhardt records,’ said Jane. ‘Bring both albums.’
‘But that Intelligence officer emptied all the record sleeves,’ I reminded her.
‘Get them anyway.’
Mrs Campbell did no more than glance at me as I came racing back downstairs for an armful of Jane’s records. I felt like I’d been running up and down the dark stairs of the Limehouse carrying record albums all my life.
I got back to Room Five, breathless, and dumped the records on the bed. Jane opened the first album. ‘There’s a separate pocket in here for album notes,’ she explained. ‘That’s where I used to hide my bank passbook.’ She checked, found nothing, and picked up the other record.
And behind the notes in that one she found three small leaflets, each one of them made of two folded pieces of paper, a plain white sheet with a red cover. The cover was printed in German.
Jane turned the pages of one of the booklets with trembling hands. The inside of the cover was scrawled with neat, pencilled text. The printed sheet in the middle was a grid of numbers and letters.
‘Instructions and dial settings,’ Jane whispered.
I hardly dared to breathe.
‘The dials are called rotors. I was right: the key plate comes up and you can change them.’ Jane studied Felix Baer’s written instructions. ‘Go on, try it!’
‘I’ll break it!’ I exclaimed.
‘It’s quite robust. Let’s see how it works.’
It really was like having a wonderful new toy. Jane pored over Felix Baer’s pencilled instructions and the printed charts, commenting aloud as she read, while I took the machine apart and fit it back together like a puzzle box. The mechanics of it were rather beautifully simple for such a complicated piece of machinery.
‘These charts tell you the code settings for each day of the month for one group of the Luftwaffe,’ Jane explained. ‘They change every day. He’s given us three months’ worth, but November is nearly finished. Phew! What a production military communication must be!’
We forgot everything else. We played with the German cipher machine until long after it got dark.
‘All we need now is a message to decode,’ I said wistfully.
The old woman laughed. ‘Better pack it up,’ she said. ‘Then hide it all in the back of the wardrobe, under the furs.’
‘But we ought to tell someone!’
‘We need the right person to tell, and the right way to tell them,’ Jane said. Her pale blue eyes were excited in her wrinkled face. ‘Perhaps the radio operator at the aerodrome? You needn’t say what you’ve found – just that you have information for the War Office. Ellen can arrange it, perhaps.’
I nodded. That made sense.
I placed the L key over the empty peg. Now it fitted perfectly.
I hid the incredible machine under Jane’s furs in the back of the wardrobe. Jane watched me open my flute case to put the cleaning rod back. She picked up her teacup, took a sip, and put it down again. It had gone stone cold hours ago.
‘I would love to hear you play your flute, Louisa,’ Jane said.
Tears stabbed at my eyes, and I squeezed them shut.
A man and a woman were crooning together on the radio, just as Mummy and Daddy used to do the minute he came into the house – even in England, where we had to use the piano in our landladies’ sitting room. First thing always when he got home from sea, they’d throw themselves down on the piano bench, and play and sing together.
I realised I hadn’t taken my flute out of its case since Mummy’s death.
‘I’m rubbish,’ I said. ‘I’ve had to do exams, and perform in school, but really I only like to play for fun. I only play for me. Same with the piano. Or singing. I’ll never be a professional like my mother – or you! I don’t like to practise. My favourite thing is just to copy tunes I hear on the radio.’
‘Play what you like, then,’ Jane said.
Despite the sudden wallop of grief, I was still jitterbugging with excitement – playing my flute would be a good way to get rid of the nerves, I knew, before I had to face Nan Campbell again.
But I wanted to play well for Jane – a thing I’d never thought about much before. I didn’t mind being a mediocre piano player. But I suddenly wished I was better at the flute. How wonderful if she would sing with me! I imagined a new record album: ‘The Ballads of Jane and Louisa’ …
‘Jane and Louisa …’ Perfect! It was another game we sang under the Bombay mango tree at my first school in Jamaica, and with my cousins under the breadfruit and ackee trees on Granny Adair’s land in St Andrew Parish. And the first time we’d met, Jane and I had sung a singing-game tune to each other.
All right, I’d play my flute for her.
I switched off the radio. Then I screwed the pieces of my flute together, ran up and down an F-major scale, and began to play.
The easy, lilting, cheerful tune was the sound of before the war. It was so short that I played it again, adding trills. In my head, I sang the verses along with the flute, and it warmed up with me. The music reminded me again of Mummy, who was always humming whatever piece she was working on, and of Daddy, who whistled when he wasn’t singing, and my heart was full of pain and love.
‘What is that?’ Jane asked, when I’d finished.
I swallowed the ache in my throat and sang it for her. Because it wasn’t about Mummy and Daddy. It was about us.
‘Jane and Louisa will soon come home,
They will soon come home,
They will soon come home;
Jane and Louisa will soon come home,
Into this beautiful garden.’
She laughed softly. ‘This beautiful garden indeed! I wonder if anything but heather grows out there in the gloom. I suppose Scotland must be beautiful in the summer.’
She hummed the tune. It was wonderful how fast she could learn a song.
‘Have you brought any sheet music with you?’ she asked. ‘We could play duets. We’ll have to pass the time somehow. Surely it’s not going to be German spies every day.’
And of course it wasn’t. The next day it was 648 Squadron, B-Flight.
The Old Roundhead split up B-Flight for our journey to RAF Windyedge. It was hard to believe he wasn’t purposefully trying to get me in trouble. Adam Stedman took Madeira Section straight there, with Phyllis as a passenger. Meanwhile I had to lead Pimms to escort a patrol of British destroyers down the coast of Scotland on our way to our new post.
‘Without bombs!’ I cursed as we took off. ‘Loaded with tinned beef and spare parts, but no bombs. Just ridiculous. Heavy for an air battle, not properly armed for a scrape with the German navy.’
‘Beautiful night, though,’ said Silver.
‘Yes.’
‘Look around!’
The moon was waning but silvery bright, in a bottle-blue sky, shining on a tossing black sea. It was bumpy flying, a fresh wind blowing behind the storm.
‘It always kind of gets me,’ Silver said.
‘Me too.’ I took a breath, calming down. ‘Maybe there won’t be a battle.’
The turbulence made it hard work for Ignacy and Harry to stay on my wingtips.
‘Can you not take us higher and find some smooth air?’ Ignacy called over the radio. ‘Yorkie’s just been sick. I never had a sparks get sick before.’
Yorkie had been in the Royal Air Force for ten years – I couldn’t believe it. I resisted poking fun.
‘Give him a mint imperial,’ I said. ‘Any higher and we’ll attract attention.’
I didn’t want to meet any Messerschmitts before we’d even found our convoy.
Next it was Harry Morrow reporting that Dougie was feeling sick too.
‘It’s his own fault,’ Harry added. ‘He’s back there with his head down, picking up German code again.’
‘Yorkie hears it too,’ Ignacy reported.
‘Oi, Tex!’ Silver turned around to get Chip’s attention. ‘Can you hear it?’
‘Yep,’ Chip said. ‘It’s not German, though. Just strings of letters.’
‘It’s in code, you twit,’ said Silver.
‘I’m copying it anyway,’ Chip said. ‘I can read and fly and copy code and not get airsick. I should get a medal!’
‘All we’ll get is another telling-off,’ I warned. ‘Be ready to transmit when we reach the convoy.’
Silver got down in the nose of the plane, peering through the Perspex panels at the sea. He was the best observer in the RAF, he could see in the dark, I swear. He spotted the patrol, ships inky black against a sea I thought couldn’t be any blacker. We kept our distance while Chip radioed and signalled to them with a few flashes in Morse. Sometimes our own lads below mistook us for the Luftwaffe and tried to kill us.
But these were glad to see us. I flew low, and there were dark silhouettes waving from the decks, tiny figures, working as hard and in as much danger as we were.
As I climbed skyward again, Silver started spluttering obscenities.
‘There’s a goddam U-boat down there!’ Trust Silver to spot a submarine in the dark below the surface of the black water. ‘Right beneath us! Turn to port – turn one-twenty to port and fire at him, Jamie! He’s on the cruiser – he—’
I spiralled back in a screaming and dangerous dive, sending a volley of gunfire blindly into the black nothingness of the sea.
What I saw, what we all saw, was the explosion as the torpedo from the U-boat hit the Royal Navy ship and its engines blew up. There was a fireball of orange light in the silver and black, and we were so low that the shock rocked our wings.
‘Can you still see it?’ I cried, levelling the Blenheim, checking my wingtips for Ignacy and Harry. They were there, steady on me.
‘Can’t see anything,’ Silver gasped. ‘Bloody explosion blinded me.’ He’d been staring right at it. ‘U-boat’s at two o’clock to the formation, a tenth of a mile out, moving to three, must be travelling at six or seven knots. He can’t have moved far—’
‘Get on the radio and warn the destroyers, Tex,’ I ordered. ‘Tell ’em the coordinates and get ’em to drop a depth charge.’ Then, to my pilots and gunners: ‘Stay low in case he surfaces.’
There wasn’t a damn thing we could do unless he surfaced; we weren’t bombed up to sink him, and we couldn’t fire guns at him underwater.
But if he did surface, he could shoot at us, too.
The sky and sea had seemed so calm a moment ago. Now everything was on fire. Below us, a frantic rescue was going on. The sea was alight with oil and fuel and flame – the men on the sinking ship might burn before they drowned.
‘They got a lifeboat away! Two of ’em!’ Silver yelled. ‘Eleven o’clock to the cruiser. Pass the word, Tex, send someone to pick ’em up!’
I circled over the frantic sea and fired a flare to light the surface, looking for survivors.
‘Think that U-boat’s gone?’ I muttered.
‘If he has any sense!’ Silver answered.
We dogged the sinking ship until the rescuers gave up.
There wasn’t anything else any of us could do. They’d beaten us again.
‘Cheer up, Scotty,’ Silver said as we headed to Windyedge. ‘The lads behaved for you this time.’
I heard 648 Squadron roar in before daylight, and in a flash I was out of bed and leaning from the bathroom window. The planes were lining up over Kingsleap Light, lit specially for our lads, blazing green beneath the waning moon. The Blenheims raged past and I skriked out into the dark, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah!’
I went downstairs with my shawl over my night things to boil a kettle. I’d have to rush to the airfield as soon as I dressed. Mrs Campbell was pottering about, pink-cheeked and excited.
‘The lads are back!’ she cried. ‘Did you count the planes?’
‘Four of ’em! A section and a transport!’
‘Maybe they’ll visit today!’ Nan said.
Madeira had landed when I got to the airfield. Pimms turned up in full daylight, about ten o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, 20 November 1940.
And there was my old friend Jamie, bonny Jamie Stuart, hoisting himself through the hatch to get out of the Blenheim.
He looked about ten years older than when he’d left Windyedge six weeks ago.
It gave me a shock. His narrow face was thinner, those bright hazel eyes ringed with shadow. I knew 648 Squadron had taken a few knocks since I’d seen them. The Blenheims always did, and the airmen were always shattered after a night in the sky. But Jamie had a whipped-dog air about him, angry and desperate, that I didn’t recognise.
He looked around at the moors to the west. The heather had been in a blaze of purple bloom when he was here at summer’s end, and now it was dull with winter’s coming and a thin layer of frost. The same thing had happened to him.
The other Pimms airmen were climbing out of their Blenheims.
Jamie watched them and his face relaxed a mite. He was counting them in just the way we did. He jumped down off the wing.
‘Whoo!’ Jamie gave a yell. ‘We’re home!’
I was hanging around his neck almost before his feet touched the ground.
‘Jamie Stuart! Alive and whole! Hurrah, hurrah!’ I kissed him for old times, though we’d never been true sweethearts.
He gave me a warm squeeze but gently pushed my face away. ‘Not in front of the lads, Volunteer McEwen.’
When did Jamie Stuart ever worry about good form? Not himself at all.
‘You all right?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Just damned if I’ll fly another escort mission without armament. This bloody new commander – you’ll meet him tomorrow, he’s at Deeside just now – we don’t see eye to eye on anything.’
I didn’t like the sound of that. He’d be my commander, too.
‘You need a warm Windyedge welcome,’ I said. ‘Down the pub!’
The Pimms lads who knew Windyedge were piling into the Tilly and rocking it to make the rest join them.
‘Debriefing!’ wailed Flight Officer Phyllis Pennyworth.
‘Och, debriefing can wait,’ I exclaimed. She was too good sometimes. ‘Debrief ’em in the Limehouse! Come on, Phyllis …’
She gave up, and climbed in front next to me.
All nine Pimms lads sang their hearts out for the short ride, and Phyllis seemed tired and happy. How she managed to keep her air-force blue so smart after flying from Shetland in the back of someone’s Blenheim I do not know.
‘Oh, Ellen, it’s good to be back here,’ Phyllis said to me. ‘Are we still room-mates?’
‘Mrs Campbell’s already made up your bed!’ Nan loved that English robin of a WAAF officer almost as much as she loved the lads. And Nan must have heard the Tilly straining up the hill, because the door was open and she was waiting when we pulled up out front.
She wasn’t the only one waiting for us. Jane was in the big chair by the fire, leaning forward to spy as we came in. Louisa was at the piano and spun around on the stool to get a keek.
We came in belting ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’. I was arm in arm with Jamie-lad, and behind us came Phyllis with two lads, Ignacy on one side and Derfel on the other. She was pinker-cheeked even than Nancy Campbell. Pimms Section, 648 Squadron, stamped muck off their boots in the vestibule and threw their greatcoats over chairs. They tossed caps on to tabletops and scraped furniture out of the way, warbling like a flock of off-pitch nightingales.
They wore air-force blue woollen trousers and fleece-lined leather jackets, and a few of them were still in their coverall flight suits with isinglass map holders strapped to their thighs. They made the low ceiling seem lower, the whole wide room a mite more tight. They brought with them the whiff of salt wind and oil and sweat, a reek of men and machinery.
Louisa spun back to the piano and found the right notes on its ivory keys, and she started playing along to ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’. Now that the lads had a tune to follow, they pulled their voices together. Then Jane joined in singing too, and it was – well – that woman’s voice!
It was astonishing.
For one whole chorus we all just stood as we were, still, to listen to her sing.
Then the lads joined in, shouting their goodnights, though none of us was anyone’s sweetheart, and it was broad daylight.
There was no holy pause at the end. They started jawing at once, carrying on for drink, and thumping on the bar.
‘Mrs Campbell, that fire’s not nearly hot enough! I told these new kids you always have a fire going!’
That was Chip Wingate, the American, the one they called Tex.
Derfel Cledwyn, the Welsh navigator who used to be in another flight section, snatched peat logs from the stack. He pushed them into the grate below the wishing-tree mantel. Flames roared and sparks soared, and the lads joined their voices into one big bawl of a chant.
‘Nan-cy! Nan-cy!’
‘Come on, Nan Campbell, get behind that bar, we’ve missed you—’
‘Nan-cy!’
Our Nan was a new woman! She shone like the morning star, twenty years falling off her face in a moment. She glowed as if every one of these loud, foul, jaggy, bristly lads was her true love come home from a year at sea.
‘My darlins, you know it’s not permitted hours yet. Opening time is half eleven.’
They all moaned with disappointment, even the ones who’d never seen her before in their lives.
‘Just like a Scotswoman!’
‘Only a month till Christmas, Nancy Scrooge!’
‘And we’ve been in the air all night—’
‘And Flight Officer Pennyworth needs something to fortify her so she can make her report—’
Old Nan’s eyes shone as if they were full of tears. ‘Not a drop will be served until half past eleven,’ she said in a high voice.
‘It’s already gone noon in Norway,’ said Jamie.
‘Too right!’ Silver agreed. ‘Only three hundred miles away, an hour and a half in a Blenheim, closer than London!’
Everyone went back to drumming on the shining brass countertop, and Nan lifted the wooden yett to let herself behind the bar. There was a great howl and a thunder of applause.
‘No, no, no!’
Awash with pleasure, wisps of hair escaping their glittery grips and getting in her eyes, Nan Campbell smacked someone’s hands away from the ale taps and primly began screwing on the nozzles. ‘Now Chip, you know better!’
‘Huh!’
Our Chip was a short and sturdy lad, with stubbled hair that made his head look like a worn-out scrubbing brush. He set to complaining. ‘Aw, there’s no policemen in sight, and that hill’s so steep y’all can hear anything pulling up a mile away. Just one of your “wee drams”, ma’am – no one will know!’
‘Not until eleven thirty!’ said Nan firmly. ‘I keep lawful hours.’
Chip jerked his thumb over his shoulder, towards Louisa at the piano across the room.
‘If you’re so law-abiding, what’s the little darkie doing in here?’
I flinched and froze with hate.
In my head I heard ‘filthy tinker’ in place of ‘little darkie’. As if I expected it. It took a moment to realise he was being rude about Louisa and not about me.
And the stupid thing was that, being American, Chip wouldn’t have known me for a Traveller if I’d pitched a tent in his granny’s garden.
But the others would, the Scots and English and Welsh.
I knew how Louisa felt. Everybody turned to clap eyes on her, as if she’d been caught trying to nick something.
She leaped to her feet suddenly, pushing herself up with one hand on the piano keyboard so that it let out a crashing angry groan. She looked as if she were choosing whether to fight or to run.
She was holding it in. She was good at holding it in. But I could see she was afire with anger. I’d hidden my secret from these lads so well that now I was too feartie to open my gob and speak up for Louisa. As if she’d never sat between me and an enemy pilot with a gun, whispering warmth into my ear and holding my cold hands until they stopped shaking. She was brave enough to do all that, and I couldn’t say one word among friends for her!
My own mammy would be ashamed of me. Ashamed.
Louisa kept one hand on the piano keys as if that steadied her. She wore the wee frown that turned her bonny face into a pinched heart. Then Jamie’s friend Silver, all dark eyes and film-star good looks, spoke up for her. ‘You’re maybe thinking of the law in Texas, Chippo. The law here is different.’
They sometimes took the mick with Silver, too, because of him being Jewish. That didn’t stop him speaking up; I suppose it is easier if you are an officer and a gentleman.
‘Here it’s a free country,’ added Derfel, the Welsh lad. ‘We even let filthy English in the place.’
Everybody laughed.
‘Louisa is here to assist my aunt Jane,’ said Nan. ‘That’s Mrs Warner to you lads.’
‘Lay off Nancy’s guests, Tex,’ said Jamie.
You know, he is a wisp of a man, so short and slight and fair. And that boys’ school accent, as toffee-nosed as Robert Ethan’s. But Jamie is no coward. I have seen him fight with the steely purpose of a gamekeeper going after a poacher. His face closed up as he turned to Chip – lost the sunny smile, as if the effort of giving a command exhausted him, so different to his usual self before he’d gone up to Shetland.
But he added in a friendly way, ‘Nice to meet you, Louisa.’
‘Nice to have someone at the piano, too!’ Silver put in.
I pulled up a chair by Jane. ‘Come along, lasses, safety in numbers,’ I said, and I beckoned to Louisa. I still felt guilty for not saying anything myself, but at least I could make her welcome.
So me and Phyllis and Louisa and Jane settled in around the table by the fire. As I tucked in my chair I gave Louisa a quick pat on the knee. She was trembling with holding in her anger.
‘Don’t let it fash you,’ I whispered. ‘You’re British and he isn’t.’
Phyllis leaned over to shake her hand. ‘Hello, Louisa. Hello, Mrs Warner! I’m Phyllis Pennyworth – I’ll be staying here as well.’
Jane was like an excited kiddie at a pantomime, leaning forward, her pale blue eyes wide and alight. ‘Tell us who’s who,’ she said to me.
‘Aye, well! I don’t ken them all myself. Some of the lads are new.’ I tried not to think about the old ones, the missing ones. ‘The young man I came in with, fair hair and fox’s face, that’s Jamie Stuart. He’s got a heart of gold. You have any trouble with the others, Louisa, you take it straight to Jamie and he’ll put it right. He’s a pilot, the commander for B-Flight. Two sections, Pimms and Madeira, six aircraft, eighteen men. They take him pretty seriously.’
Did they? They used to. Silver still seemed to take him seriously.
‘His best mate is his navigator, the Prince Charming with the good manners,’ I added. ‘David Silvermont. He plays the fiddle, proper classical stuff – you’ll like him too. They get called Silver and Scotty.’
‘Aren’t they all Scotty?’ Louisa asked.
‘Jamie’s the only Scot in the squadron,’ I said, keeping my voice down. ‘The RAF squadrons come from all over. Aw, look at them. They’re like Nan’s bairns, her own babies. She doesn’t even ken half of them – those Aussie lads are all new.’
‘Chip Wingate, the American, he’s her favourite,’ Phyllis said. ‘He doesn’t need to be here: the USA is neutral, they haven’t entered the war. But he came anyway. She thinks he’s the most heroic of the bunch.’
Jane rapped her fingernails against her teacup.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘how anyone fighting the principles of Nazism, which envisions a master race that does not include the Negro, can articulate a complaint against a coloured person visiting a free establishment and not choke on his own hypocrisy.’
I shrugged. ‘Everybody thinks the world belongs to them. The Scots and the English aren’t any better. Just different. Chip’s a bit of a lad, never shuts up, always looking for a fight. But look. See why Nan loves him?’
He had his silvery toothbrush head down on the bar with his chin resting on his hands, and he was blinking up at Mrs Campbell like a loving pup. She swiped at him with a dishcloth. He was minding her rules, but he was making her sorry.
Louisa gave a wee superior sniff and looked away.
‘Chip’s the gunner for Jamie and Silver now,’ Phyllis said. ‘They’ve all swapped round. They had a rough time this month.’ She yawned, and added anxiously, ‘We ought to introduce them by their proper ranks, you know. Scotty’s got a name a mile long, the Honourable James Gordon Erskine Murray Beaufort-Stuart. Volunteer McEwen is much too familiar with him.’
‘Och, he’s no’ fussed about his name!’ I protested. ‘And I’ve known him longer than you. Since he was in school. I knew his family from before the war.’
Phyllis yawned again. ‘I have to interrogate him every morning,’ she said. ‘I know him pretty well. I know ’em all pretty well. Even the new ones.’
The Australians were mucking about on the hearth, building a castle with peat blocks. Phyllis pointed them out one by one.
‘They all went to the same school and joined the air force together. None of ’em a day over eighteen, and you wouldn’t believe they were that old if it wasn’t on their papers. The ginger lad with the great mop of hair, that’s Dougie Kerr, their wireless op and gunner. The one who looks like he’s only about twelve, that’s their navigator, Gavin Hamilton. Harry Morrow is their pilot – the scarecrow. Harry shouldn’t really be a pilot – he’s too tall, doesn’t fit. He has to fly with his knees up around his ears. He’s a terrible softy – he’s got a photograph of his dogs back in Sydney that he sticks on the dashboard when he flies!’
The peat block castle tower fell to pieces. Sparks flew in the hearth, and our Jamie pushed himself away from the counter and grumbled, ‘Och, you can do better than that, surely, lads? Give it a bit of a base. Get the bricks interlocking as they go on up – come and lend a hand, Silver. These children don’t know anything about construction.’
So Britain’s finest set to work turning the Limehouse hearth into a building site.
‘The third pilot’s Polish,’ Phyllis finished. ‘Ignacy Mazur. He’s the one with the grand moustache – don’t you think it suits him? He walked across half of Europe to get here, after the Germans invaded Poland. Speaks pretty good English now, and a bit of Welsh, too, believe it or not. His navigator, Derfel Cledwyn, is Welsh. Derfel’s the one with the squashed nose.’
Louisa said, ‘What a funny name.’
‘A Welsh name,’ I said. ‘But he gets called Taff. Also because he’s Welsh. All Welshmen are Taff, just like all Scotsmen are Scotty, and the Texan is Tex.’
Phyllis laughed. ‘But their gunner’s just plain English, Bill Yorke – the other moustache, the thin one. He transferred from another squadron. I haven’t worked out Bill yet: a bit quiet. Unhappy about something, I expect. Perhaps he’s not quite used to Ignacy and Derfel shouting at each other in Polish and Welsh when they’re dropping bombs. They’re pretty tight, and he might feel left out.’
Jane laughed suddenly.
‘It sounds to me,’ she said, ‘as if they are your babies as well as Nancy’s.’
‘They’re not our babies at all,’ said Phyllis warmly. ‘They’re our brothers.’
The lads counted down the seconds to half past eleven as if it were the New Year.
‘Seven! Six! Five—’
They drummed on the brass countertop and stamped on the stone floor, chorusing, ‘Four! Three! TWO! ONE!’
Nancy slid a pint glass beneath a tap and began to fill it with ale that foamed like liquid carnelian.
‘See, we can cooperate when there’s a good reason for it,’ Silver whispered, and I laughed.
‘Who’s first, lads?’ Mrs Campbell called out.
I looked up at the black oak beam above the Limehouse bar. Gleaming silver, exactly where I left it, was the tanner I’d put there for luck six weeks ago. I swear, Nancy polished those coins while we were away. I reached up and twisted my shining sixpence out of the wood and slapped it down on the brass counter with a tinny clink.
‘Make that one Silver’s,’ I said. ‘I’m paying. Best observer in the RAF, he can see in the dark. Pull me a pint, too, while you’re at it, Mrs C. I’m parched.’
‘Right you are, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart.’
She beamed at us over the taps, looking for faces she recognised. ‘How about you, Sergeant Wingate?’
‘Sure thing, Nancy,’ said Chip, and pulled his own sixpence from the beam.
When he turned around, Bill Yorke and the young Aussies were watching with interest. The wishing coins were new to them.
‘You put a tanner or a bob up there before an op,’ explained Derfel. ‘Then when you’re safe home, you take it out and buy yourself a drink.’
Along with me and Silver, Chip and Derfel, Ignacy was the only one of us who had left a coin there. The rest were new to Windyedge, and had to dig into their pockets. Nancy began to hand round pints as fast as she could pull them.
Dougie started to take a sip.
‘Not yet,’ Ignacy warned. The Australians all looked at me, confused.
I shook my head. ‘Wait for everybody.’
No one drank. Silver was right; they could cooperate.
When everyone held a brimming glass, I raised my own towards the untouched coins still shining in the ceiling. ‘Absent friends.’
The murmur went around the room. Absent friends. The girls raised their teacups.
‘Sergeant Colin Oldham,’ Silver said quietly, holding up his pint to me.
‘Cheers.’
We tapped each other’s glasses, remembering. Only two weeks ago.
‘Och, you’ll soon learn our ways,’ Nan told the new lads, her eyes wet and glinting. Then she went back to work, as she’d been doing for twenty-five years.
Everybody quieted down a bit now that there was something to drink. Nancy doled out tinned beef sandwiches. Bill Yorke pushed a chair across to sit next to the girls, and got out his cigarette papers. The first two he pulled out were torn, or wrinkled, or something, and instead of flattening them, he crumpled them up and dropped them in the ashtray. He rolled a cigarette for himself before offering them round.
Yorkie was nearly ten years older than the rest of us, a career RAF man, and his windburned face and thin moustache gave him a permanent cynical look. The West Indian lass edged away from him cautiously. I didn’t think she’d had much experience with men.
Bother, I thought; I ought to keep an eye on him.
But I knew that Phyllis already thought so too, and Ellen wouldn’t put up with any nonsense. And he wasn’t doing anything forward or suggestive – just being very generous with his cigarettes.
It was Ellen who fished the cigarette paper out of the ashtray.
She smoked faster than everybody else, no-fuss efficient. Phyllis looked like she was joining in to be polite, and Jane was taking her time, enjoying it. Bill Yorke showed me how to put my cigarette together, but I let it go out almost the second after he lit it. I’d never smoked, and I could just imagine what Mummy would say if I started now, in the pub surrounded by sweaty airmen! So everybody else puffed away around me.
Meanwhile I perched on the edge of my seat, trying not to show how excited and anxious I was, while they described how the U-boat sank the British ship and how maddening it had been not to be able to do any damage to it. Oh God, I knew how that felt. I was torn between wanting to leap up and tell them so, and choking on fresh anger that maybe Daddy’s ship went down because it wasn’t equipped to defend itself. Also, oh, I was jealous. I wanted to be Jamie Beaufort-Stuart, pointing my guns at the deadly underwater shadow. I wanted to be David Silvermont, able to see in the dark, up in the nose of the Blenheim, spotting lifeboats. I even wanted to be Chip Wingate, rescuing survivors by radio. I ached with it.
And I wished I knew how to smoke, because it would have been something to do with my hands, a way to pretend I was calmer than I felt. I thought of Mummy sitting on the veranda by herself one evening in May of 1935, quietly guarding the house by the light of her cigarette. Daddy was away and I was only ten. There’d been strikes and riots in the northern ports off and on all that month, and then, in a protest march in Kingston that day, a woman was shot by the police. Mummy didn’t seem scared; but she smoked and smoked all alone on the veranda long after she’d told me to go to bed.
I am pretty sure that Ellen picked up the crumpled cigarette paper just because she wanted another cigarette and didn’t want to ask Bill Yorke for one. I wouldn’t have either; I didn’t like him any more than I liked Chip. He leaned in too close to your face when he talked, and kept clasping your knee or shoulder when you weren’t looking. I saw Ellen unfold the crumpled paper, frown faintly, and put it in her pocket. She reached for the other he’d tossed away and did the same thing.
I picked up my own unsmoked cigarette and handed it to her.
‘Have this one!’
She gave me a cool nod. ‘Ta, Louisa.’ Then she got out her own box of matches to light it.
The young men from 648 Squadron stayed three hours, till afternoon closing. When it was time for Mrs Campbell to shoo them away, two of the Australians – Harry, the tall pilot, and Dougie, the gunner with the wild gingery hair – had both fallen asleep at the long table in the middle of the pub with their heads pillowed on their arms among the empty glasses.
‘Flying all night will do that,’ Phyllis told us.
Jane said it made her feel exhausted just thinking about it.
‘I’d better go open up the Tilly,’ said Ellen. ‘They’ll never make it back on foot.’
Bill Yorke, too, had fallen asleep, slumped in his chair in his flight suit by the fire with his legs spread and his elbows cocked on the wooden arm rests. Ignacy and Derfel, the Pole and the Welshman, were still awake, but they were slouching against each other’s shoulders as if they couldn’t sit without support. Pimms Section’s commander, slender, sly-faced Jamie Beaufort-Stuart, looked relaxed now, but bone-tired. He was deep in conversation with good-looking David Silvermont, and as I watched I saw them click their mostly empty glasses together again.
Ellen stood up and reached for her overcoat. Jane lifted one drooping hand, like a dying opera heroine, and asked her, ‘You wouldn’t happen to have another cigarette on you, would you, darling?’
‘Aye, of course, Mrs Warner!’
Ellen rummaged in her pockets. She came up with a battered paper packet of Woodbines and gave one to Jane.
The cigarette paper she’d fished out of the ashtray fell out of her pocket.
I didn’t see it till she’d gone, along with everybody else. By then, Jane had smoked her Woodbine and decided she needed to go upstairs to lie down and ‘rest her eyes’. As I was getting up to help Jane with her sticks I noticed the crumpled piece of cigarette paper beneath the table.
I only picked it up because I thought Ellen might want it back. Wartime rationing makes everybody terribly thrifty. It was a piece of paper not much bigger than a few postage stamps! Isn’t it strange how you follow along when somebody else does something?
In any case, I picked it up and was about to put it in my pocket when I realised why Ellen had saved it – and why Bill Yorke had tossed it away.
It was covered with blocks and blocks of letters, beginning with two meaningless groups of three letters apiece and the rest in rows of five, lines of nonsense marching down the thin sheet. I couldn’t read it. I mean, I could read the letters; they were neat block capitals, evenly printed. But they didn’t say anything – they didn’t make words that meant anything.
Whatever it said, it was in code.
Back upstairs in Room Five, Jane lay on the bed and rested her eyes.
I sat down and opened a book. But I kept thinking about the cigarette paper with the rows of meaningless letters. I felt like it was burning an imaginary hole in my skirt pocket. Was it important? No, it couldn’t be, or Bill Yorke wouldn’t have tossed it in the ashtray. But what if he’d done that because he wanted to get rid of it? Had Ellen noticed the writing – did she wonder what it meant?
I pulled the paper out of my pocket and spread it flat on my open book, like a bookmark. The sheet was covered front and back with the rows of printed letters. Bill Yorke was the wireless operator for his flight crew as well as their gunner – he must have taken this down in the air not long ago. Maybe only last night.
Then I had a wild thought.
I had a coding machine and I had a coded message. Perhaps I could put the two together.
By now, Jane was snoring gently as she rested her eyes. I shut my book on the cigarette paper and went to the wardrobe. When I opened it and dug out the coding machine and the box of extra rotors, Jane didn’t stir. So I picked everything up, and my book and a pencil too, and let myself out of the room.
I listened for anyone in the passage. But Phyllis had gone with Ellen to deliver the 648 Squadron airmen to their barracks, and Mrs Campbell was downstairs washing up. I made my way quietly down the passage and into the loo – the toilet was separate from the bathroom, right next to it in a little closet with a door and an arrow-slit window of its own.
I locked the door and sat down on the loo with the book on my knees and the coding machine at my feet. I felt like Pandora as I opened the beautiful wooden box.
Jane and I had left Felix Baer’s leaflets lying beneath the lid on top of the keyboard. I opened the first booklet. I couldn’t read the German headings, but Jane had explained to me how to match up the rotors and plugs. The two groups of three letters on Bill Yorke’s cigarette paper told me where the message began. I knew from Felix Baer’s instructions that when I keyed them in with today’s settings, they’d give me the starting letters for the rotor dials. I took a deep breath and began to type. I didn’t really believe it would work.
I couldn’t decode it quickly. There weren’t any proper words to look at or remember. I had to do it letter by letter, and pay attention to make sure I was hitting the right keys. I hadn’t thought to bring extra paper, so as the decoded letters lit up in the upper keyboard, I wrote them down on the blank endpaper at the back of my book.
After five minutes of struggle and with my back starting to ache from leaning down to the floor to hit the keyboard, I sat up and read in my notebook what the lamplit letters had spelled out:
FEIND LICHE NSCHL ACHTS CHIFF E …
It didn’t look like nonsense.
I tried rewriting it by putting spaces between some of those bunches of consonants, and got:
FEIND LICHENS CHLACHTS CHIFFE …
And that looked like German.
The hair stood up at the back of my neck.
I couldn’t read this, either, but I could tell it was real words. Maybe I hadn’t split them the right way. But those letters meant something.
And with the cipher machine, I’d worked it out myself.
For a moment I was so excited I thought I was going to be sick.
I thumped my fist on the floor. Then I regretted that in case anyone heard it. I was all cooped up in this tiny little room and I wanted to shout and jump up and down, but there wasn’t room to do anything, and also I knew this was as secret as secret could be, and whatever I did, I mustn’t shout.
I had to tell Jamie Beaufort-Stuart. I had to figure out the whole message, and then the next time his squadron of Blenheim bombers went flying out over the North Sea, they’d know ahead of time what they were going to run into.
So the only thing to do was to sit there and decode the rest of it.
I was about to explode with excitement when I finally went back to Room Number Five. I felt as if I were tumbling to earth in a bomb dropped from a plane, Luftwaffe or RAF, I couldn’t quite work out which.
Jane was sitting in her armchair in the chilly room. The radio was switched off and she wasn’t reading. Her face was blank, but her expression changed as I came in. She looked away from me quickly, the way you’d pretend to be innocent if you were caught on your way to scamper up a neighbour’s tree after their tamarinds, but you weren’t actually anywhere near the tree yet.
‘I tried to light the fire and it wouldn’t go on,’ Jane said cautiously, still not meeting my eyes.
She hadn’t had to do that on her own before. She couldn’t kneel, though she was very good at leaning over, and could even touch her toes, to make up for her knees hardly bending at all. It was an awkward way to get at the fire.
Guilt tore through me. I put down the cipher machine carefully, and laid the book on top of it – excited as I was, Jane was my first responsibility, and I’d left her here alone in the cold for half an hour at least. I looked at the meter. There was no gas flowing.
‘It needs another shilling,’ I said. ‘Oh, Jane, I’m so sorry! Why didn’t you call me? I was just down the passage in the loo!’ I reached for the shilling jar and dropped in a coin. There was a moment of very quiet stillness in which I could hear the meter start to whir. I bent down to turn on the gas tap so I could light the fire.
And then I realised that the gas was already on.
She’d turned on the gas tap and hadn’t turned it off again. If she’d started the meter herself without lighting the fire, the gas could have run and run, and filled the room. Maybe she would have sat there in the cold until she fell asleep again. How long would it be before the gas killed you?
It looked like an accident. But even so, what if I’d come back into the room and found her stone dead? After the warning I’d been given – how could I bear it? Just the thought of it made my eyes prick with tears. Accident or on purpose – I didn’t know which would be worse. And it would be my fault for leaving her alone if anything happened, my fault for not being there with her.
I could scarcely bear even to think about it.
I knelt to light the fire and turned it up. I wanted her to get warm.
‘Tell me when you want the fire on,’ I begged. ‘Please just tell me. Don’t try to do it yourself. Let me take care of it. I’m sorry I was away so long just now—’
I glanced over at the wooden box by the door, and my stomach jumped again. I looked back at Jane, and the excitement came flooding back.
Jane met my eyes at last.
‘What have you been up to, Louisa?’ she asked.
‘Jamie! Jamie Stuart! Hold on a wee minute—’
Ellen leaned out of the Tilly, yelling, as I crossed to the Blenheims beneath the half-moon.
I’d been avoiding her, but I waited as the van pulled up. Ellen was an old friend, a good friend. And here was I, not daring to return a fond greeting in case someone threw it back at me as bad behaviour. I felt like a rotten coward.
‘Hop in,’ she said. ‘Och, don’t look like that, I’m not going to kiss you again.’
‘I’m sorry!’ I said. ‘It’s this bloody new commander. If he thinks I’m fooling around he’ll rake me over the coals, and Dougie Kerr can’t keep his gob shut.’
‘Well, I’ve met Cromwell now and he doesn’t like me either,’ Ellen said with sympathy. ‘Hop in, no one’s looking. I’ll take you across in a minute, but I want to talk to you …’
I threw my parachute, helmet, and gauntlets in the back and climbed in next to her. I ought to be grateful for the short ride; I was geared up, and walking isn’t easy in a flight suit full of Ever-Hot bags topped off with a Mae West.
Ellen put the van in neutral. She reached into a pocket of her ATS uniform and drew out a folded paper.
‘Should I read this now?’ I asked. The airfield was darkness and inky shadows. The lights would only be turned on for take-off. Anything that showed might attract German bombers.
‘I’ll tell you what it says.’ She paused. ‘It’s a coded message.’
I didn’t know what to think. I sat silent, waiting for her to go on.
‘It’s a bit of the message you overheard on the wireless yesterday,’ she added in a low voice.
I turned sharply to look at her, but it was too dark to read her face. ‘How do you know about that?’
‘Your gabby new Australian sparks was blethering about it at Mrs Campbell’s. His pilot shut him up. You were busy buying Tex another beer.’
‘Oh, Lord!’ Bloody Dougie Kerr. ‘How did you get it on paper?’
‘That was Bill Yorke, your other new sparks,’ said Ellen.
I shook my head in despair, and she gave a low, dry chuckle. ‘It’s like being stuck with a bunch of schoolkids, aye?’
‘Half of them are a bunch of schoolkids,’ I pointed out. ‘Is this the best time to tell me? I’m away on an op in ten minutes.’
‘Don’t be fashed. It’s not what you think. And I’m not Cromwell.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I know what the message says.’
We sat in the van in the dark, and I stared at Ellen without being able to see her.
I unfolded the paper and flattened it against my leg. Ellen lit a match and held it over a page torn from an ordinary school jotter, just long enough for me to see the writing: printed lines of clear English, beneath recognisable German, beneath unrecognisable code.
I didn’t have time to read anything before Ellen shook the match out.
She spoke quietly, hesitating. It was a long time since we’d seen each other, and she knew I’d lost most of my squadron a couple of weeks ago, and it made us awkward.
‘Yorkie – is that what you call him?’ she began. ‘Bill Yorke, the English bloke with the moustache. He wrote the code on his cigarette papers. I saw it when he tossed them away at Mrs Campbell’s before. And I picked ’em up—’
‘Traveller habit,’ I scolded. ‘You’ll get caught.’
‘Shut yer gob, Jamie Stuart.’ The familiar teasing made her less uneasy. ‘Well, I didn’t get a keek before I’d dropped one of the papers myself, and then Louisa, that West Indian lass who looks after Nan’s old auntie, picked it up next. She’s that canny, Louisa is, sharpest eyes I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.’
‘Fair dos.’
We both know the Beaufort-Stuarts have a reputation that way.
‘Louisa took it and worked out what it meant,’ Ellen said.
‘How the devil did she do that?’
‘Och, well …’ Ellen hesitated. ‘This is the mad bit.’
‘Hurry up!’
‘Windyedge had an unexpected visitor …’
Ellen told me about the German pilot. She told me about ‘Odysseus’, and how Louisa discovered the gift he’d left.
I knew it was true, because it fit. Even without the code name Odysseus, which I’d overheard, the jigsaw pieces fit. Odysseus flew the missing Messerschmitt, the one we never saw. The other Messerschmitt, the one we tangled with, was trying to stop him from completing his mission.
And his mission was to deliver this cipher machine.
‘So he hid the machine and Louisa found it, and she made it work,’ Ellen finished. ‘She couldn’t have done it without his list of settings, but she found that too.’
‘Does she read German?’
‘No,’ Ellen said softly. ‘She got the old woman to translate. So they both know.’
I whistled.
Foes’ gifts are no gifts, warned my classical education. The real Odysseus’s gift had been a trap.
‘Did he bring it for us?’ I asked. ‘For 648 Squadron?’
‘I don’t know. I never heard of anything like it.’
‘Neither did I,’ I breathed.
Ellen held another match over the page.
‘See. It’s an alert to their pilots about the U-boat you met, telling them where to find our ships. If you’d known that when the message came in, you could have warned the navy. Or done something about it.’
The match was burning low.
‘There’s more,’ she said, and shook that flame out too. ‘I’ll tell you this but once. You can get Silver to read it properly after you’ve set off.’ She lit a final match, but only used it to light a cigarette. She said in a low voice, ‘The last part tells where the German submarines will be tonight.’
I sat agog, my mouth hanging open.
‘Just off Bell Rock Light,’ she added. ‘It says. A “wolf pack”, they call it, six of ’em hunting together. Their coordinates look like military mumbo-jumbo to me, but Bell Rock’s clear enough.’
She laughed at me gaping, and held her cigarette to my lips. I took a long drag, but the faint red glow wasn’t bright enough to light the miraculous sheet of paper lying in my lap.
What had I said to Phyllis, on the morning of 7 November, two weeks ago?
I want to know where their submarines are. Some wee thing. One surprising smack in their faces.
‘Buckets of blood, I have to get going,’ I said. ‘Drive.’
I folded the page and tucked it into my thigh pocket, and pelted Ellen with questions as she drove.
‘How can we trust the old woman? Maybe she’s just having fun with the girl. And what about her – Louisa – you only met her this week! Isn’t she terribly young? Is this cipher machine real, anyway? Have you seen it yourself?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe. Aye, she’s young. And no, I have not. But I can tell you Louisa is as sound as you or me. Braver than me. You should have seen her stand up to that Jerry! I trust her, and she trusts Jane, and—’
‘And we’ve nothing to lose.’ I couldn’t believe my luck. ‘You know what? I’d rather go on a wild goose chase for Nan Campbell’s old auntie than take another blind order from Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell.’
Ellen pulled up by my Blenheim and told me, ‘Louisa says you were lucky. She only managed to work it out because it was a full transmission. If any bit’s missing, the letters get in a guddle. So tell your sparks to take care what he copies down.’
The plane loomed above us, shadow on shadow; Chip was a stocky, smaller shadow heffalumping about against the sky as he climbed into the rear hatch. We were being sent on patrol again, bombed up this time, to escort navy ships heading into Edinburgh through the Firth of Forth.
Silver yanked open the door of the Tilly.
‘Thank goodness you’re here, I was worried I’d have to do the flying myself tonight,’ he said. ‘Then you really would be in trouble.’
‘You have no idea.’ I grabbed my gear and jumped out. I didn’t think about whether what I’d do next would get me in trouble – I might never get a chance like this again. ‘Have you plotted our course? I want to take us on a little detour.’
‘Where’d you get this?’ Silver asked. He sat at the navigator’s chart table in the Blenheim’s nose, juggling an electric torch and his wind-direction calculator. ‘This is Tex’s code! Translated! But—’
‘You cracked the Kraut?’ Chip called from the back. ‘I thought special codebreakers had to do that.’
‘Special codebreakers did do it,’ I said evasively.
The intercom crackled as Silver started to talk but changed his mind. Finally he said, ‘East of the Bell Rock Light! Twenty minutes down the Angus Coast. Well, it’s not far off where we’re meeting tonight’s convoy …’ Over the dashboard, I couldn’t see what he was doing as he changed our route. ‘Are Pimms and Madeira going together?’
‘No, I’m going to send Madeira on to Edinburgh alone. Then no one can accuse B-Flight of being late.’
‘Will this get you another reprimand?’
‘Probably.’
‘It’s your funeral,’ said Silver cheerfully.
Fifteen minutes after we took off Chip called out, ‘I’m getting more of those danged coded signals.’
I shivered in the heavy flight suit, but kept my hands steady on the controls, followed my course, watched the quiet moon.
‘Take down as much of it as you can,’ I said to him. ‘Get it all.’
No one questioned me when I ordered Adam Stedman to keep Madeira Section on track for the convoy, and Bell Rock wasn’t far out of our way. The lighthouse there got shot up by a swarm of German bombers not long ago, so it stayed dark unless British ships were about. Tonight it was lit. That was a good enough excuse for checking it out. I knew I could trust Silver with our secret; I could tell him later, and I wouldn’t need to confess to Phyllis or Cromwell.
‘We’ll catch up to you in a jiffy,’ I said to Adam. ‘I want to sweep around the lighthouse.’ To Pimms I said, ‘Stay with me.’
I passed the light, and we kept going, following our strange instructions twenty miles further out to sea. We could still see Bell Rock gleaming. Silver peered through the observer’s window up front, and I glided lower to get a better view.
Gunshot suddenly exploded around us.
I felt the shock as it hit, somewhere in the back of the plane. But the control surfaces held.
I called to Ignacy and Harry. ‘Climb away, Pimms!’
‘What the—’ yelled Chip – of course he couldn’t see anything, sitting at the radio behind me. ‘That went right past my ear!’
‘You OK? Get in the turret—’
‘Two German submarines,’ Silver confirmed. ‘Right next to each other. They’ve both come up for air; you’ll see when we turn around. What do you think, Scotty? Apart from their guns they’re sitting ducks.’
‘Ouch!’ I kicked at the rudder – it felt as if I’d been stung by a wasp, and instinctively I tried to shake it off. A wasp in the plane in November, what the devil? Must be a leg cramp. I flexed my calf and focused on keeping the wings level.
‘They must know we’ve got ships passing,’ I answered Silver. ‘So we’d better try to take them out.’
It wasn’t as if the hand we were playing was a sure bet. Most of the Blenheims that didn’t make it home got shot down by anti-aircraft fire from the ground or from ships at sea.
But we’d surprised them this time – those U-boats were at their most vulnerable. They can’t dive when they’re taking on air.
Silver suddenly started to laugh.
‘What? What?’
‘There’s another – it just came up! You wait and wait for one, and they all come along at once—’
‘Like London buses!’ we howled in chorus.
‘Hey, pipe down, you two,’ Tex complained. ‘Are we going for them or not?’
‘All Pimms aircraft, line up behind me,’ I called to Ignacy Mazur and Harry Morrow. ‘I’m on the near one, Mazur in the middle, Morrow last. Morrow! You know what you’re doing? When your load’s away, climb and head to meet Madeira.’
‘Cheers to that, Pimms Leader!’ yelled Harry Morrow. ‘About time we saw some serious combat!’
We lined up for the bombing run.
I flew as low as I dared through a hail of anti-aircraft fire. My headset was full of Chip whooping it up in the rear turret as he fired back.
‘Great shot, boys! Right between them – Mazur’s load went down on the other side of that middle sub – there she blows! Aw, I can’t tell what happened, it just looks like a giant geyser – no, wait, the Morrow kid made a direct hit!’
Mazur’s victory yell came crackling over the radio.
‘All three, we got all three of the bastards—’
I looked over my shoulder as I climbed away.
The side-by-side submarines stood nearly on end as the explosions lifted them out of the water, like great whales breaching in the dark. Their wet hulls gleamed silver in the moonlight and then sank again, going slowly straight down like ships that have struck an iceberg.
B-Flight came safe home next morning, but not completely sound, because all three of Pimms Section’s Blenheims were full of holes. Jamie’s one was like a sieve, and he got hit in the leg, just a tiny hole in his flight suit and a neat graze in the back of his calf. He wasn’t a mite fashed. Proud of it, pleased it was him and not anyone else that got hurt. Silver made him strip off his boots and flight suit right there in the shade of their plane to make sure he wasn’t bleeding to death. Jamie looked like a schoolboy sitting on the frosty grass in his rumpled blue uniform and socks, with Silver bent over his leg playing doctors and nurses.
‘I’m hoping for a wound stripe,’ Jamie told me, grinning. ‘For my sleeve. A decoration will impress the lads.’
‘All you’re going to get is a dab of Dettol and some sticking plaster, mate,’ Silver told him.
Jamie dragged on his boots and stood up.
‘Go on and limp,’ said Silver. ‘Let’s give Cromwell some drama. You’ve got some explaining to do.’
He took one of Jamie’s arms over his shoulder.
‘If you’re a fighter pilot and you shoot down five planes, that makes you an ace,’ Jamie told me, all full of himself. ‘We can’t battle Messerschmitts, so we’re counting U-boats. We’ve just bagged three.’
‘You what!’ I cried.
Those clear hazel eyes were blazing. He looked tired. Excited. Alive.
I wondered if the wound hurt more than he was letting on.
He said breathlessly, ‘Just two more, and then I reckon Pimms are all aces.’
‘Well done Pimms!’ I exclaimed. ‘You heading to the Limehouse to celebrate?’
‘We’ve got to go get debriefed just now,’ Jamie said. ‘After.’
Silver looked at the sky. ‘Another winter storm tonight, and the last November moon tomorrow. With weather and luck, no more night flights until December. Plenty of time for the pub.’
‘Aye, well, don’t imagine you’ll get a rest,’ I told them. ‘’Specially not you, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart.’
‘Not for one single second do I imagine that.’ Jamie gave a hop, trying to look at the back of his leg in step with Silver, who was four inches taller than him. ‘I say, Volunteer McEwen, could you introduce me to Nan’s old auntie? I need to learn a bit more German, and I want to chat to her about some lessons.’
‘Scotty!’ Silver scolded. ‘Cromwell will have your head if he hears.’
‘I’ll hide in a tree, like Charles II. Silver, do stop fussing – I’ll let you in on things in a moment,’ Jamie said. The grin was back. ‘Oh, and Ellen? Here’s that ten bob I owe your dad—’
‘What ten bob?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Does no one trust me? Pass it along.’
In the Tilly on my own, I unfolded the banknote – very generous if he meant me to keep it. Just like a Beaufort-Stuart, throwing money about, even when they didn’t have any. A pilot’s salary is a deal higher than a driver’s, but it was likely his only income.
Hidden inside the ten shillings was a sheet of notepaper from Jamie’s wireless operator. It was covered with blether in Chip’s sprawling American print. Rows and rows of five letters apiece, none of it anything like words.
Pass it along, Jamie had said.
I thought I might send the ten bob to my dad as he’d bid me. But I knew who the pencil scrawl was meant for, and it wasn’t old Alan McEwen.
I had a guess what Jamie was up to. And I thought this would help him and I wanted to help him. So I did.
It should not have been the carry-on it was to get Louisa and Jane alone with me and Jamie for five minutes.
For several days of dreich misery, sleet whipped at RAF Windyedge, and you’d be surprised how busy our Jamie was kept when he wasn’t in the air. I was kept busy too. Phyllis could write her reports sitting in Nan Campbell’s office or in the bar at the Limehouse, but I had to be at the aerodrome to do my work. Each day I’d bicycle over (to save the Tilly’s petrol), in a great big mackintosh through the wet, up the long lane to the airfield. Then I had to drive Wing Commander Cromwell over to Deeside to meet with 648 Squadron’s A-Flight, or take a mechanic to Stonehaven to collect aeroplane parts from the rail station, or give Jamie and Adam Stedman a lift around the airfield to do inspections.
There wasn’t room in the hangar for all B-Flight’s aircraft, and icy spitters drove at the wings of the sad planes left outside. The sleet came down so hard that Adam and Jamie crawled up through the escape panels in the floor of each plane instead of opening the overhead hatches, while I sat in the Tilly, blowing on my fingers and watching through the streaming windows. One of the shot-up planes sat for nearly forty-eight hours before Jamie spied that water was seeping through the bullet holes. When he put his head up into the cabin he ducked back out sharpish. I could see him gagging.
‘What is it?’ I called, cranking the window down about an inch.
‘The cabin’s all full of mildew. Reeking with it! That’s just happened in two days. Ugh. I’d better taxi her into the hangar or she’ll be unflyable. Get someone out here with a starter for me, will you?’
And I left him and Adam peering up into the plane and holding their noses while I sped off on that errand.
Nobody wanted to walk to the pub through the mud and slush and falling sleet after a day like that, and I couldn’t use the Tilly to drive them time and again.
Next day it was blowing a gale, though the sleet eased. Old Flash rang to say I wasn’t needed at the aerodrome. I could have kissed him. At half past eleven on the button, Jamie’s lot came singing past the limekilns.
‘Jane, Jane, go upstairs,’ Louisa urged.
‘Won’t you play the piano for them again?’
‘I will, but let’s go upstairs on our own just now,’ Louisa said. She started from her chair beside the fire and snatched up Jane’s sticks. ‘For a bit of quiet before the party starts.’
The old woman caught on. For the first time since B-Flight’s last mission, we four would be under the same roof. Jane took the sticks and hobbled out of the bar.
‘What is it your old auntie drinks, Mrs C.?’ Jamie asked, pulling his tanner from the black oak beam. ‘Whisky and a drop of water? I’ll treat.’
‘Not for sixpence,’ Nancy said firmly. ‘Not even for you. That’ll be two and six.’
‘Highway robbery,’ he complained. ‘How does she afford it?’
‘She doesn’t. She had two the day she arrived, and that’s that. Take her a pot of tea if you want to be nice.’
‘Feels a bit mean, Nancy.’
‘Oh!’ I said, getting a dig in. ‘Wasn’t there something about ten bob you owed someone, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve not got it on me now.’
Nancy was not to be moved. So it was tea.
‘Very proper, too,’ Jamie said solemnly.
‘Come on, Jamie Stuart, I’ll help you through the doors with the tea tray,’ I offered.
‘I shouldn’t allow Scotty around that fine woman without a chaperone,’ Silver agreed.
Jamie gave him a half-hearted clout. ‘Jealous.’
‘Just wondering what you’re up to!’
‘I’ll tell you when I find out,’ Jamie said.
At last. Four days gone, and I hadn’t once caught Jamie or Louisa alone without Phyllis or Silver tagging along. I held the hall door for Jamie, and led him upstairs and down the passage to Room Number Five.
Louisa let us in. Jane sat by the unlit fire wrapped in a woolly blanket – of course, it wasn’t three o’clock yet. Some jazz singer was warbling on the wireless, sat like a queen on a doily taking up most of the dresser. Jamie perched the tea tray on a shaky table covered with another doily, and for a wee while we all looked at one another without saying anything.
Then Mrs Warner said, ‘Show them, Louisa.’
Louisa leaped to the wardrobe and delved behind furs and a forest of skinkling, gauzy gowns that I could not see either of them ever wearing. She came up with the Jerry pilot’s precious wooden box, and she set that on the bed and undid the lid. There was a school jotter laid over the keys. She picked that up and, solemn as a judge, passed it to Jamie.
He stood gawping at the thing in the box. It wasn’t quite a radio and it wasn’t quite a typewriter.
‘What is it?’ Jamie breathed.
‘The cleaning instructions say it’s a cipher machine,’ said Louisa. ‘And – well, I guess it is. You know about the German pilot who landed here, don’t you? He left the machine, and he left lists of settings for it. We worked out the message that you picked up the other night – it’s all in there.’ She waved at the jotter. ‘I did the decoding, and Jane did the translating. So we both know what it says.’ She swallowed, with that worried frown puckering her schoolgirl face. ‘I’m so afraid it will get Mrs Warner in trouble.’
‘Not you?’ said Jamie. He stepped closer, hesitated, and then pressed a key. A lamp came on in the top plate of letters.
‘Well, me too, I suppose, but Mrs Warner—’ She stole a keek at Jane.
What the old woman confessed then made my mouth drop open.
‘I am German,’ she explained softly. ‘A registered alien.’
I’d never thought.
I’d never thought. Here was a body hiding the exact way I hid: behind an accent and a name and face and flesh like anybody’s.
If people knew where she came from, what would they do? Who’d trust her?
But Louisa did trust her.
Mrs Warner held her head up. ‘My stage name was Johanna von Arnim. I was arrested –’ she sounded a mite proud of that – ‘last summer. They said I was a category B detainee. After they arrested me, though, they demoted me to category C. I was in prison for three weeks and then interred in a camp for another four months.’
So that’s what they did.
Nan must know. Mrs Warner was her aunt. Crabbit Nancy Campbell was paying a wage to look after an old German woman!
‘Did you do anything?’ Jamie asked. ‘To make them arrest you.’
‘If you mean, did I cause any risk to national security, I should say not,’ said Jane. ‘But I’m telling you so you know.’
He nodded. Then he glanced up at me.
For a moment I imagined it was a challenge, and he wanted me to give my own confession. But my secret didn’t make me a war enemy. With his la-di-da private school and family castle it probably never crossed Jamie’s mind that I was like Jane. He was just asking me if I trusted Mrs Warner.
I nodded back to him.
‘Well,’ said Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart of the Royal Air Force, and offered his hand to Jane to shake. ‘You helped us sink three German U-boats the other night. And I’m telling you so you know.’
She beamed at him over their clasped hands like a shop girl making eyes at a film star.
‘Aren’t we lucky!’ she exclaimed. ‘Isn’t Windyedge lucky!’
‘Yes,’ Jamie said, beaming right back at her. ‘Yes, at last we’re going to be the lucky ones.’
He opened the jotter and held it so Ellen could read over his shoulder.
SEA PATROL SHETLAND HOLD HALF MOON
ABERDEEN SECTOR CLEAR YEAR END
ABERDEEN SECTOR CLEAR START XII UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
JU LXXXVIII SPECIAL DETAIL LISTA TO DEESIDE SOUTH GREEN LIGHT
ABERDEEN SECTOR AWAIT DS COMPLETION
I worried that it sounded so mysterious. I said quickly, ‘We think the spacing’s right, but we’re not sure. There was a block of letter Xs between each line, so that seemed like where the breaks ought to be.’
Jamie Beaufort-Stuart stood studying the page, his face torn between joy and disbelief.
Jane patted the tufty bedspread, letting him know it was all right for him to sit down.
‘Thank you, Mrs Warner,’ he said.
He sat carefully next to the coding machine and laid my exercise book open on the bed beside him. He wasn’t a big man, but it was tight with four of us in the room, and it was hard for me not to be in awe. A real RAF pilot, in uniform, sitting on my bed! I never thought I’d get so close.
But then, I never dreamed I’d have a German coding machine to share with him, either.
‘I wonder how many of these there are in Britain,’ Jamie said softly, running his fingertips lightly over the keys. ‘It must be jolly difficult getting them here. And jolly brave of the chap who brought it.’
‘Yes,’ I said, remembering the piano, the records, the gunshot in the van. Each bit had been awful, but it added up to bravery. ‘He was.’
‘Did he tell you how to use it?’ Jamie asked.
Ellen and I shared a look and then we joined in a high chorus of a laugh, remembering that night.
‘He didn’t tell us a thing,’ I said, when I got my breath back. ‘But he left instructions. They’re in the German leaflets. When he knew I was watching, he dropped a hint about where he’d hidden them. We’d never have managed without the leaflets – the settings change every day.’
Jamie frowned down at the puzzling English phrases in my jotter, narrowing his eyes at it.
‘The bit about the half-moon makes sense,’ he said at last. ‘When the moon is dark, it’s probably just as difficult for the Luftwaffe to find targets as it is for us. So this means something like “leave Shetland alone till the next half-moon”.’ He pointed further along my pencil jottings. ‘And here it looks like they’re going to lay off Aberdeen while this other thing is going on. The city took a pounding in October. Those Roman numerals must mean a Junkers 88 bomber, a Ju-88. I wonder what their special detail from Lista to Deeside is.’
‘Where is Lista?’ Ellen asked.
‘Norway. Just about the closest point to Scotland – we think they’re planning to build an aerodrome there, but it’s not much more than some surveyors’ stakes at the minute. We’ve taken pictures.’
‘We ought to warn Deeside,’ Ellen said. ‘Else A-Flight might run into trouble.’
Jamie screwed up his mouth, staring at the machine. Suddenly he seemed less intimidating. He looked stubborn and baffled and not much older than me.
He nodded. ‘I’ll warn them,’ he said. ‘But I’m not telling Cromwell. I’m damned if I’m going to hand this over to Cromwell! Not when we’ve got an edge on the Luftwaffe at last. I know him, he’ll send the machine off to Coastal Command for fingerprint testing, or make us wait till he tries it himself, or refuse to let anyone else near it. He’ll block us from using it because it’s not in the rule books, especially if he thinks I have anything to do with it.’
Ellen hesitated, and then blurted out, ‘But Jamie-lad, what if it was sent for someone else to use, and not for 648 Squadron? That Robert Ethan, that Intelligence toff, he isn’t anything to do with you. The Jerry who brought it was supposed to meet him specially.’
Jamie narrowed his eyes again, thinking about it.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to let the machine go, either. What Jamie had said – Not when we’ve got an edge on the Luftwaffe at last. Not when I was finally able to do something useful to fight back.
‘Felix Baer left the settings for me,’ I said. ‘He said my name and looked straight at me, and stuck a key up in the bar like your airmen do with their sixpences. For luck, he said. In English. And he’d hidden a note in it.’
‘Aye, he did that,’ Ellen admitted.
I suppose it was odd Felix Baer would do that. Why had he chosen me? I wasn’t even in uniform. Perhaps he guessed his contact would talk to me later, and I was the one who had seen the machine.
However, Robert Ethan hadn’t asked about the machine, and I didn’t find it till after he left.
Jamie reached out a fine, narrow finger and dialled back one of the rotors.
‘You said the settings change every day,’ he said. ‘How many do we have?’
‘We think until the end of January,’ I told him.
Jamie said forcefully, ‘So we have to use them now.’
Ellen gave Jamie a long look, took a deep breath, and nodded in agreement.
‘I’ll have to spin a tale,’ Jamie said. ‘I mean, a tale about where we got this gen.’
‘Gen?’ Jane asked. She hadn’t said a word since he’d shaken hands with her, but she was leaning forward with her head cocked so she could hear everything, and I could tell she was just as excited as the rest of us.
‘Information. Sorry.’ He grinned over at her with bright eyes, amber-green flecked with brown, like dried palm fronds with the sun behind them. ‘We all have our own mumbo-jumbo, and I don’t get off base much.’
Ellen chewed at her lower lip, watching him like she was worried about him. I didn’t think they were sweethearts, but I knew they’d been friends for a long time, since before the war. She wanted to help him.
I had an idea.
I leaned forward and picked up my L key. It came off the keyboard easily. Then I flipped to the back of my exercise book and found Felix Baer’s strip of onionskin paper that had been rolled inside the key.
‘November’s almost finished anyway,’ I said. ‘If we just keep the November setting chart that has the instructions, I can copy out the December and January charts for us to use, and you can give the real ones to Intelligence. I bet they’re what Robert Ethan was looking for anyway. You can pretend you found this key just now, in the bar downstairs with the other wishing coins, and that you found the leaflets where he hid them in the Django Reinhardt record album. And Jane can write this last message in German in the cover of one of the charts, as if the pilot left it there himself.’
‘And when I “find” it, I’ll have to pretend my German’s better than it is. I’ll see if I can borrow a dictionary off my wee sister.’ Jamie stood up. ‘Let me take your key and your note and do some sleight of hand with it downstairs. You’d better make those copies now, so I can take the charts with me today. Then I’ll warn Deeside.’
‘Ellen can get them to you,’ I promised.
I didn’t think I’d get my letter L back, once Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell got hold of it. But I passed it to Jamie.
‘I’ll see you again, ladies,’ Jamie said, giving a gallant little bow.
Then he and Ellen went back downstairs.
Jane and I were alone again, me and my eighty-two-year-old operatic registered-alien German companion, involved in a wonderful small conspiracy that was going to help win the war.
I set to work copying German code settings.
When I’d finished, I folded the exercise book and the copied charts over the keyboard of the coding machine and closed the lid. I put it back in the wardrobe, where it was safe enough hidden beneath Johanna von Arnim’s old evening clothes. Now all we had to do was wait for Ellen to come back to collect the leaflets for Jamie.
‘Why don’t you play your flute for me again?’ Jane suggested.
A different idea came to me all of a sudden.
‘Couldn’t you teach me Morse code?’ I asked.
She turned over her upside-down teacup and lifted the teapot to pour herself some stewed, cold tea. She was surprisingly unfussy about her tea.
‘What makes you think I can teach you Morse code?’ she asked.
‘You were a telegraphist,’ I said. ‘And if I learned now, I could join the forces, perhaps, when I’m older. I only left school two months ago – I feel like I should still be learning things. And … it might be useful.’
‘It might be,’ Jane agreed.
I screwed the sections of my flute together.
‘I thought I could learn it and practise at the same time,’ I said, and held the flute to my lips. I drew in a deep breath, as if I were about to dive into cold water. Then I held down my thumb and opposite pinkie and the first two fingers of my left hand and played an A.
‘Oh, of course!’ said Jane.
She sang an A.
‘Tra-laaaa.’
Dot-dash. Short-long.
I played another A, tra-la, quaver and crotchet, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la.
Jane’s amazing near-contralto swooped up a step to a B. ‘Traaaa-lalala.’
I echoed her on the flute. AB, AB, tra-lahh, tra-lalala, tra-lahh, tra-lalala.
And on up the A-minor scale, getting quicker and surer all the time, until by G we were both breathless and had to stop because Jane started to mix up notes to test me, and I trilled them staccato back to her like sleet against window glass, and we laughed so hard we couldn’t sing nor play.
And in one afternoon I learned almost a third of the alphabet in Morse code.
Phyllis wasn’t in on it. We didn’t dare tell her – she was under Cromwell’s thumb. When Jamie had to give her his report after they blew up the U-boats, he used the Bell Rock Lighthouse being alight as an excuse for sweeping the area around it. I don’t think he lied to her; I’m not sure anyone could. She talked to you like a primary school teacher, brisk and firm. She settled all of Ellen and Mrs Campbell’s arguments (over Ellen’s ration coupons, Ellen smoking in the bedroom, Ellen propping her bicycle against the shed door instead of properly putting it inside, Ellen hanging her wet mackintosh in the bathroom). Phyllis stuck to the rule book about everything. The Isle of Man butter ruffled her feathers something terrible.
‘Oh, no, Mrs Campbell, don’t butter my toast this morning, please. I don’t want to know where it came from, and I shall have to report it if any more comes in!’
I didn’t think she really would report Mrs Campbell for a pound of contraband butter; she was kind as kind. But she would have reported the Enigma machine.
So Ellen and I didn’t have much chance to talk about it, because she and Phyllis shared a bedroom, and there was almost always someone else about when I saw Ellen. I was hardly ever on my own.
I had Jane to look after. She couldn’t go far or fast, but she was determined to make the most of her freedom, and I was constantly panicking that she’d go off without me and get herself into some difficulty. When the gales cleared off, she decided we should take the bus to Stonehaven to visit the library there. We timed it so Ellen could give us a lift to the bus stop (with Phyllis in the van too, on her way to the aerodrome; there was no escaping her).
A thing happened on the bus that scared me and Jane both.
We got on and I paid our fares, and we went and sat just across from a young mum with a wobbly baby on her lap and a little boy next to her. Jane, I discovered, could not resist a baby.
‘Hello, little man!’ She leaned forward, around me, to see him. She covered her eyes and uncovered them quickly. ‘Peepo!’
The baby gave a gurgle of a laugh. His big brother, not yet old enough to be in school, stared.
‘How old are your boys?’ Jane asked in a friendly way.
‘Bertie’s four, and wee Angus is just nine months old today,’ said the woman.
The four-year-old Bertie wasn’t staring at Jane. He was staring at me, sitting right across the aisle from him.
Suddenly he buried his face in his mum’s arm, clinging and fearful. His shoulders shook as he started to sob.
His mum leaned down to listen to him, then looked up and laughed.
‘No, don’t be a silly-willy!’ she told the boy. ‘Of course she isn’t a German!’
Jane gasped and flinched. I heard and felt it. I’d only known her for a fortnight, but in that time we’d seen Liverpool bombed and had faced down an enemy soldier with a gun, and delivered the code that sank three U-boats. I had never known her to be shaken by anything until this moment when she thought she’d been found out.
And she hadn’t even done anything to give herself away; she’d just been caught off guard somehow by a small boy. She stiffened, and sat up straight so that my head blocked the people opposite from seeing her face, and her hands went tight where they were propped on the sticks that lay across our laps. I could feel the sticks pressing hard against the tops of my thighs as she pushed on them.
But I knew that the boy had been looking at me, not her.
He wouldn’t raise his head. He muttered into his mum’s arm.
‘I shall ask her myself.’ She leaned over her little boy and spoke to me directly. ‘You’re not from round about, are you? Where do you come from?’
Jane got it, then.
But she didn’t relax; the sticks pressed down more fiercely into my legs.
‘I grew up in Jamaica,’ I said. I could feel the blood rising to burn in my cheeks, the familiar anger and the unfamiliar urge to fly into a fight, the way I’d felt when that horrid Chip Wingate called me a darkie. ‘I’m British. My dad is—’ I swallowed. ‘My dad was a seaman in the merchant navy, but his ship was torpedoed. Hardly anyone was rescued.’
‘Oh, darlin’, how terrible!’ The young mum’s concern was warm and honest. ‘My husband too, last spring. Just after Angus came along, as well. He never saw the wee ’un.’ She bent her head so she could speak into the cowering boy’s ear. ‘You see, Bertie? Her daddy’s been lost at sea just like yours. She wouldnae speak English if she was a German!’
Jane flinched again.
The woman looked back up at me and gave an apologetic little laugh. ‘You must be the most northerly Jamaican in the kingdom! He’s no’ seen one before. Nor a German, for that matter. But he worries about Germans a great deal. Silly wee lad! There’s no Germans here.’
I was the most foreign-looking person that boy had ever seen, so he thought I must be German.
And here all the while was this German woman sitting stiffly afraid beside me and hoping no one would notice. For once, Jane hadn’t spoken up for me.
I tried to smile – that poor young widow was being nice, after all. But I couldn’t manage it. People being nice to you after someone has made you feel like a criminal or an enemy is just like sticking cardboard in your window after a bomb has blasted all the glass out of it. The hole is stopped up, but the glass is still smashed and you can’t see through the window any more. Everything in the room is uglier and darker.
Mummy would have poked fun at these people, helped me laugh it off, swept up the invisible broken glass, painted pretty patterns on the cardboard in the hole. Alone, I was helpless with anger. I didn’t want to live in the ugly dark room with the smashed window.
‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ I murmured.
And that was that – nobody said anything else to one another throughout the whole eight-mile bus ride to Stonehaven.
But after we got off the bus, and Jane and I were by ourselves being scoured by the salt wind as we made our way very slowly down the High Street to the library, Jane asked me about my parents.
‘Mummy was English,’ I told her. ‘She was born in London. Her father was in the Royal Navy, based in Jamaica, and directed a band for them. He died – both her parents died before she was married. But she was already grown-up then, teaching music at a secondary school for boys in Kingston. I look like her, except that she was blond! We have the same face, same shape of eyes and mouth. I can wear all her clothes now, well, if I take them in a bit at the top.’
It felt good to talk about her, I realised.
‘She gave harp and piano lessons, and used to play at weddings and things like that. Sometimes I got to go along and sit in a corner guzzling wedding cake.’
‘How did she meet your father?’ Jane asked.
‘They both sang. They were in the same operatic society. He was a seaman, too, like her father, but …’ My daddy, Lenford Adair, always bringing me presents from faraway places and shouting with laughter at my school stories. Arguing politics with our landladies in London in his sea-deep baritone voice. My very earliest memory is of him singing on the veranda, while I lay in my cot under the mosquito net in the dark warm night and lizards scratched on the screens and the window slats. Come sit on my knee and sing, Carrie! he’d call softly to Mummy. I’ve missed you, girl.
‘Daddy’s mother, Granny Adair, lives on the tiniest farm on the edge of Kingston, and Daddy ran away to sea when he was fifteen. He was in the merchant navy. So my mother was alone with me a lot. And when I was in primary school there were labour strikes and workers rioting all over the Caribbean, and Daddy’s ship stopped more often in Southampton than it did in Kingston, so Mummy came back to London with me in 1937. She was glad she did it, too, because the very next year there was a big strikers’ riot in Kingston and people got killed.’
And two years after that, the London bus she was riding on fell into a crater made by a German bomb and she got killed.
Suddenly I felt like I was going to choke on the unfairness of this stupid war. How did I get here, walking at a snail’s pace down this windy cobbled street full of cold granite houses, carrying ration books and a forged passport for an ancient German opera singer, helping her find something to read while we waited for a winter evening bright enough to drop some bombs by moonlight?
‘My father wasn’t let in the Royal Navy because he wasn’t born in Europe,’ I added. ‘He’d been a British seaman since he was fifteen, but that wasn’t good enough for the Royal Navy. Even though he ended up dying like a navy man.’
My voice was getting shrill.
It still made me furious, and I dreaded that the same thing would happen to me when – if – I tried to enlist. I thought about the little boy on the bus, who’d taken one look at me and decided I must be the enemy, just because he’d never seen anyone who looked like me before.
But there was the Enigma machine. If I never got another chance to serve, at least I had the Enigma machine now.
I hated the bitterness I’d heard in my own voice. I took a deep breath.
‘Sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m sorry. It didn’t seem to make him angry – he volunteered and they said no. They told him he was doing vital work that needed doing, and that made sense to him. And he was. But it made me angry. It still makes me angry.’
Jane didn’t answer for a minute or so – just concentrated steadily on moving forward, tap-step-tap-step, with her feet and her sticks.
Then when we got to a corner where we had to cross the road, she stopped to rest a moment and straightened up.
‘You have all your life ahead of you. You will have to start fighting,’ Jane said, as if it were a straightforward and practical plan for me: destroy the British Empire’s colour bar and save the world from fascism at the same time.
‘I envy you, a little, my dear,’ she went on. ‘I’m doing it the other way round. I started out my life with all doors open to me, and the world’s events of the past ten years have held nothing but sorrows and disappointments as those doors, and more, slammed closed. My nation has poisoned itself. I will never go home. I will never belong anywhere again. I have no people.’
My heart gave an anxious little skip that was becoming familiar. ‘Oh, Jane,’ I scolded. ‘When the war ends—’
She cut me off. ‘If the war ends tomorrow, I will already be eighty-two years old! My future is rather more predictable than yours.’
She started tottering across the road.
‘But you, girl,’ she added to me over her shoulder, with the warmth coming back into her voice, ‘you might be able to change things.’
I was the courier now.
It made me nervous. I admit it, I was scared of Cromwell finding out. I hadn’t crossed paths with him much, except to drive him to Deeside. But I knew how Jamie hated him, and that made it worth the risk. Anything, now that Jamie had a whiff of his old self back. Pimms were the heroes of the day after that last op. The lads said Jamie never got so much as a Well done out of Cromwell, but that was his own fault for striding in for debriefing and boasting, ‘Guess what happens when we’re armed properly!’
I stopped at the airfield gate on my way out to Stonehaven to collect a crate of administrative bumf from the rail station, and waited for Nobby Fergusson to raise the barrier. He sidled up to the Tilly looking important.
I cranked down the window. ‘What now, Nobby?’
‘Watch out for that bus stop when you get to the crossroads, Volunteer McEwen,’ he said. ‘We have reason to believe it’s the centre of a dangerous spy network.’
My belly lurched. What had he seen? Had he noticed my back-and-forth carrying-on between Jamie and Louisa? But I’d not gone at all out of my way!
Nobby’s mate Jack Hinton put in, ‘I never liked that telephone box much, either.’
‘What are you lads gassing about?’ I said through my teeth.
‘Didn’t they tell you at operations?’ asked Nobby, pleased to be the bearer of bad news. ‘A German bomber flew over last night, dropped a load of TNT up on the main road, and scarpered off back to Norway. Flattened the bus shelter and knocked over the telephone kiosk!’
‘They missed a very suspicious postbox,’ Jack added with a wink. ‘It sits all by itself in a field wall. Perfect place to get rid of a secret message. Maybe the Jerries know something we don’t know!’
‘I’m sure they know all sorts you don’t know,’ I told them as they raised the barrier.
That explosion hadn’t even shaken me out of bed. Why would the Luftwaffe send one lonely bomber to an empty, wet bus stop guarded by drookit sheep?
It put out the telephone line into Windyedge village for a day or so. But we still had the radios at the aerodrome, so 648 Squadron was all right.
In daylight, plain daylight, the Luftwaffe was back the next afternoon with three Junkers Ju-88 bombers. They went skriking past the Kingsleap Light and swung north along the cliffs. Pimms Section got scrambled out to chase them; Old Flash radioed Deeside to beg help from the Spitfires. And Wing Commander Talbot Cromwell leaped into the Tilly with me as his driver.
‘McEwen, is it?’ he growled. ‘Take me to the signal box just before the railway crosses the Clemency Bridge.’
I didn’t have a clue where that was.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘I’ve not been along the railway before.’
‘What the devil have you been doing these past six weeks? There’s been no active squadron here since October. You could have been checking routes!’
‘Petrol, sir.’ I swallowed. ‘I mean, I wasn’t to waste petrol.’
‘You have a bicycle, don’t you? Where’s your initiative? Christ.’ He had a fight with a map and won. ‘There,’ he said, smacking the limp page as if he’d like to do the same to me. ‘Get moving – there’s a farm track above the village that’ll take us there.’
It had long grass growing up the middle, being travelled only by tractors and horses, but that didn’t stop Cromwell making me drive full skelter along the clifftops.
The Ju-88s had cleared off back to Norway when we arrived. But Jamie was up there flying in circles round the smoking holes in the railway line. I knew Silver must be on his belly in the Blenheim’s nose, giving directions, and Tex would be on the floor in the back with the escape hatch open, snapping pictures in the icy wind.
That was the first bomb damage ever I saw. I couldn’t make full sense of it. Where the explosion happened, the track looked like sheep’s wool snarled on a wire fence. Cromwell strode around the wreckage and I trailed along after him with my mouth hanging open.
‘Hah! Unlucky fellows,’ he exclaimed at last, standing at the edge of the hole in the railway line. ‘Poor show for the Jerries! They missed the Clemency Bridge. This’ll take a week to mend, I shouldn’t wonder. But if they’d hit the bridge, the line might have been out for months. Where’s my clipboard, Volunteer McEwen?’
Of course I didn’t have his clipboard.
‘Good God, you’re inefficient, girl! Go get it out of the Hillman. I’ll ask for anti-aircraft defences to be installed on this stretch of the line. They won’t surprise us here again.’
Was it my fault he’d left his flipping clipboard in the Tilly? No wonder Jamie couldn’t stand him.
It was dark when I was let go that evening. All day folk ran about like mad things, railway officials came and went, and RAF officials blethered and shouted at one another. Someone else took the Tilly away overnight, full of ironmongery, and I got sent home on my bicycle. Jamie dashed out as I was leaning over the front wheel to make sure the lamp was properly dimmed, as Phyllis had told me off more than once for riding home with a light showing, and I’d had enough telling off that day from Cromwell without Phyllis joining in. In any case after seeing that hole in the railway, I didn’t want to let the Jerries know where I was.
‘It’s hard work catching you alone,’ Jamie said breathlessly. ‘Here – it’s another German message. There’s a sweet spot in the sky just east of Aberdeen where we seem to get signals straight from Norway. It’s clearer at night, but we had an excuse for haring about this afternoon because of that raid. Wasn’t it lucky! No one was hurt, and now we’re on to the Jerries again! I say, Ellen, if Louisa works out this message, can you ask her to leave it somewhere I can collect it myself? She could hide it in the same record album, and pop a penny among the wishing coins to let me know it’s there, and no one would notice. Just on the outside edge, where I put mine. I’ll know to look for it.’
‘You and all your folk are a clan of lying, crooked schemers,’ I told him, straightening the front wheel of my bicycle. ‘And to think the McEwens get called sleekit, just for being Travellers!’
He laughed. ‘You’re an angel. Listen, I’ve told Silver about this, so he could deliver the cipher machine key and the leaflets and tip-off message to Cromwell – it seemed easier to pretend Silver found it in the Limehouse bar than for me to get in another battle with the Old Roundhead. So Silver’s safe if you need to pass anything on through him, but don’t let Phyllis know what’s going on. She’s a lovely lass, but Cromwell’s got her in his pocket.’
‘I’d be mad,’ I said, warmed to the heart by his laughter and his hope.
I so wanted another win for him.
I shot off into the dark on my bicycle with his scrap of paper in my breast pocket.
I loved the Enigma machine. It was such a beautiful thing, with its nickel-trimmed keyboard and polished wood case. Its steady lamps picked out letter after letter for me to transfer to my exercise book, and in the moment when the meaningless soup of code became German it always felt like a jolt of electricity was going through me. It was magic.
I made duplicates of the next translation, one to leave in the record album, and one to give Ellen, in case she got to Jamie first. The message was complicated: something about a U-boat surfacing for urgent repairs between Scotland and Denmark, asking the Luftwaffe to protect the maintenance ship that was going to meet them. The coordinates were all in Roman numerals, as the cipher machine didn’t have numbers on it. I worked through the code three times to be sure I’d got it right.
I was more anxious about hiding my penny above the bar than I’d been about anything since meeting Jane on the Isle of Man. I thought Nan would less likely notice something new up there than something old missing, but it was a risk. I didn’t want her to catch me. Was I breaking the law? I didn’t think so, I didn’t think there were any laws about what I was doing, but if there were and I was, I couldn’t imagine the consequences. I didn’t want anyone to catch me.
‘Rules are made to be broken,’ I whispered aloud as I folded the copied messages.
We didn’t use the thick paper in my exercise book to leave the message on. We didn’t want anyone but Jamie noticing it behind the notes in the Django Reinhardt record. Jane cut a thin strip from a page of one of her own books, a beautiful edition of a fat novel called Ulysses, itself hidden in a paper dust jacket off a French/English dictionary.
‘Why is your book in disguise?’
‘They never would have let me take it to Rushen Camp if they knew what it was,’ said Jane smugly. She could be quite smug for an old woman. ‘Quite the filthiest piece of writing ever published. It would upset Nancy more than an enemy cipher machine if she found a copy of it under her roof!’
A racy book disguised as a stern old dictionary – it rather reminded me of Jane herself.
I wrote out Jamie’s message in English. Jane guessed a little about how the German coordinates worked, and added a note for David Silvermont at the end. I added a warning on the back about keeping our new communications system secret – as if they needed to be told that!
I waited nervously until the middle of the night to hide it. I lay awake listening to the wind in the Scotch pines on the ridge above the house. Jane wasn’t worried – her relaxed, gentle snore began almost as soon as I put out the light.
When the luminous dial of Mummy’s little Bakelite alarm clock showed it was after midnight, I climbed out over the foot of the bed. It was freezing. I didn’t put on my dressing gown or slippers, though. Cold would keep me alert and I still had enough of the Jamaica bush in me to feel more confident in bare feet.
‘Louisa?’ Jane whispered.
I’d woken her getting out of bed.
‘I’ll only be five minutes!’
I felt my way across the room and through the door, and padded down the passage. My jumping stomach made me incredibly sneaky.
I switched on the light in the loo that Jane and I shared with Ellen and Phyllis, and closed the door. Then I crept on down the passage. If anyone heard me and saw the light around the edges of the door, she would think I was using the toilet.
The cold stairs felt good against my soles. I kept to one side, holding the banister, feeling the smooth wooden treads beneath my feet at the edge of the woven coconut matting. By the time I reached the bottom, my heart was hammering as it had never done when the bombs were falling around me in the Blitz.
No one’s on guard, I told myself. Nobody’s down there.
There wasn’t any light. I didn’t want to switch one on. I felt my way across the cold flagstones, found the poker, and stirred up last night’s fire. Old embers glowed red beneath the banked ash, and gave me the little bit of light I needed.
I still had enough of the Jamaica bush in me that I climbed up to sit on the bar to reach the ceiling instead of standing on a chair. Ellen had told me where to put my penny.
Then, quiet as could be, I crossed the room and slipped the message into the record that I’d left on top of the pile so I wouldn’t have to hunt for it in the dark.
Afterwards, I crept upstairs, opened the door to the loo, and pulled the chain to flush. Then I switched out the light and went back to Room Number Five.
Jane was asleep again – her magical power, able to sleep under any circumstances. There wasn’t a stutter in her even, purring snore as I climbed into bed beside her.
Of course I had to do it all again a few days later.
I was just as nervous sneaking around in the dark the second and third time I did it. But I learned which floorboards creaked, which stair rail rattled, how to stick to the wall so I didn’t bump into furniture. The nerves didn’t go away, but I got better at my job. I wondered if that was how the airmen felt about flying into battle.
The next message wasn’t much use – and half of it was missing.
REPEAT SPECIAL APPROACH STORM FRONT IV XII
FIRST GREEN LIGHT BEFORE HALF MOON
Another German submarine! Coastal Command sent us on a not-too-risky mission to blast holes in Lista, the Luftwaffe aerodrome that didn’t exist yet, as retaliation for the railway attack and to create a headache for the Nazi planners. We wouldn’t have spotted that disabled U-boat if we hadn’t known it was there, but it wasn’t even out of our way. I let Adam Stedman in Madeira do the honours of sinking it. I didn’t want to make Pimms look greedy … or to push our luck.
But our luck held, even though the incomplete message Louisa deciphered next wasn’t as straightforward.
I tossed and turned on my narrow top bunk for three hours instead of sleeping, wondering what it meant.
REPEAT SPECIAL APPROACH STORM FRONT IV XII
FIRST GREEN LIGHT BEFORE HALF MOON
St Nicholas Day, 6 December, would be the half-moon. Christmas was coming. IV XII came before that, 4 December 1940 … And already it was past midnight on 2 December. The fourth was the day after tomorrow. What storm front was approaching on the fourth?
‘Blimey, Jamie, give it a rest,’ Silver hissed from the mattress below. ‘When you turn over you shake the whole bunk.’
‘Sorry.’ I lay on my back like a block. Every inch of me felt uncomfortable.
‘What’s eating you?’
‘Are we due some bad weather?’ I asked. Silver always kept an eye on the met conditions.
‘Just the usual overcast and wind,’ he told me. ‘Do you want an excuse to stay on the ground? “Lack of moral fibre, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart!”’
I snorted. ‘Now? As if!’
‘As a matter of fact it’s going to be quite nice for a few days, which will give the ATA a chance to deliver those new Blenheims – well, old ones without holes. New for us.’ Silver’s voice dropped to a whisper. He asked almost inaudibly, ‘What’s really eating you?’
I leaned over the edge of the bed so my head hung closer to his, and he leaned on his elbows so his head was closer to mine, and we carried on whispering.
‘I can’t figure out the last message.’
‘Maybe we need to pass it to a real codebreaker,’ Silver suggested.
‘Yes, I thought of that, but then we’d have to tell Cromwell. Even if we went straight to Intelligence he’d find out.’
‘He’ll find out eventually,’ Silver warned. ‘The lads are wondering what’s going on. Sooner or later you’ll run out of excuses for the good luck.’
‘If we don’t run out of rotor settings first,’ I pointed out.
‘It’s the Lucky-Rotor Aero Race!’
I choked on laughter, smothering my face in my mattress for a moment.
‘How long are the settings good for?’ Silver hissed. ‘Two months?’
‘How long is a Blenheim crew good for?’ I whispered back.
He didn’t answer.
‘Should I tell Cromwell?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Silver said. ‘The lads need this as much as you do. It would be nice to make it to 1941.’
Silver was right about the weather – we had two glorious days of low sun. It was the beginning of December, but it felt like spring. When our new planes turned up and we tested them over the moors on low-level flight manoeuvres, I half expected to see lambs and daffodils below us. Ellen went about without her mackintosh, whistling. The whole of B-Flight, Windyedge’s ground crew, and the visiting ATA ferry pilots who’d delivered the fresh Blenheims all piled into the Limehouse on the evening of the third. The pub was so full that people spilt outside, as if it were summer.
I didn’t see the old woman and the young girl, but I heard Louisa’s flute and Jane’s singing. They must have stayed in their room because it was so crowded downstairs; you couldn’t get to the bar, and the lads passed their pint glasses back over one another’s heads. But Louisa and Jane had their window open to the mild night, and outside you could hear them working through the Oxford Book of Carols, getting ready for Christmas. Every now and then the flute stuttered for a bit, as if Louisa were warming her fingers.
‘Wow, I’ve got a headache,’ Chip complained the next morning as we lined up to shave. ‘Too much flute tootling over at Nancy’s place.’
‘The flute music gave you a headache?’ Silver scoffed in disbelief. ‘Yanks must be lightweights! Are you sure it wasn’t the beer?’
‘I’m not a Yankee,’ Chip growled. ‘I’m from Texas. You’re the navigator – check a map! What do y’all think of a darkie learning Morse code, anyway?’
‘Can you be more polite, and more specific?’ I asked.
‘The hired girl at Nan’s. She was practising the Morse alphabet all evening.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Silver grumbled, muffled by foam and looking at himself in the mirror, not at Chip.
‘She was tooting it on her flute. Took me back to when I was learning – it’s not easy, you know, until you’ve got an ear for it. And once you know it’s Morse you can’t stop listening, so that’s all I heard all evening – those durned ABCs up and down the scale, whistling up a storm!’
Silver laughed. ‘Well, a flute’s a wind instrument,’ he said.
‘There’s no need to whistle up a wind here.’ I laughed, too. ‘It’s always windy. They don’t call it Windyedge for nothing.’
I bent over the basin to rinse my face. I’d only heard music, Louisa playing scales – but all Chip had heard was the letters she’d been rapping out. How differently you understand things when you start from a different place, I thought, the way my heart gave a jump of relief last night when I saw the Kingsleap Light flashing green as we walked back to the airfield. I was always so relieved to spot it in the air at the end of a hop, and it took me a second before I realised it didn’t matter because I was already on the ground, and it was lit for the fishing trawlers and not for me.
Something clicked in my head.
Whistling up a storm – a wind instrument.
REPEAT SPECIAL APPROACH STORM FRONT IV XII
FIRST GREEN LIGHT BEFORE HALF MOON
Green light
They don’t call it Windyedge for nothing.
A different starting point.
The fragments came together, and their meaning clicked into place. There wasn’t any ‘storm front’. It was a translation error.
It wasn’t Jane Warner’s error – we checked, later. ‘Storm front’ was how the German wireless operator understood ‘windy edge’.
They were going to attack Windyedge on 4 December – in the dark, while the green light was lit. They must already be most of the way here.
‘Silver, back me up,’ I hissed.
I tossed aside my razor, wiped my face on my vest, and yelled, ‘B-Flight! Pay attention!’
Everyone stared.
I didn’t have proof, and if I was wrong I’d probably be court-martialled. But I couldn’t risk losing a whole fleet of freshly mended Blenheims to a Luftwaffe bombing raid.
‘Ablutions postponed,’ I told them. ‘Drop everything and get out to the hangar. We need every single one of 648 Squadron’s planes in the air now.’
‘What, in my pants?’
‘I’m cleaning my teeth!’
‘Before breakfast?’
Harry Morrow, who was younger than me, said, ‘Wake up, Scotty – you’re still dreaming!’
‘Or thinks he’s still lord of the manor,’ sneered Bill Yorke, who was ten years older, damn him.
‘Or maybe I’m following orders,’ I snarled, ‘as you’re meant to.’
Everyone else had protested or complained. But Bill Yorke was stirring up mutiny.
This time they didn’t just stare: they held their breath. I don’t think they were hoping for a fight, exactly; just wondering what would happen next.
Silver shrugged. ‘A drill’s a drill,’ he told Harry, ignoring Bill Yorke. ‘Get used to it.’
‘In my pants?’ Dougie Kerr repeated incredulously, and everyone laughed.
The tension eased. Once again, Silver had given me the edge I needed.
‘A timed drill,’ I improvised. ‘No warning, as if we’re under attack. We have ten minutes to get in the air for a rendezvous off Aberdeen. The past week’s been wizard for B-Flight, don’t bugger it up now; let’s show the Old Roundhead what we can do. Kerr, get your trousers on! Tex, do a head count. We need every plane in the air, the trainer as well; we’ll take the shot-up Blenheims and let the ferry pilots fly the ones they brought. Stedman, you’re mostly dressed, you go get them moving. Silver, you come with me and raise the ground crew.’
I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble with the ground crew – they pre-dated Cromwell.
Silver and I met each other’s eyes.
He moved his lips soundlessly. Not a drill?
I shook my head.
‘I’m with you,’ Silver said aloud.
We were still in bed that morning, 4 December, when we heard the Blenheims taking off.
I sat up and counted and got to ten.
‘That doesn’t make the least sense!’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought there were only six aeroplanes in B-Flight.’
‘Perhaps they keep spares,’ said Jane.
We heard footsteps running in the passage, and the bathroom and toilet doors slamming. Phyllis and Ellen had both leaped into action.
‘The planes took off in the dark!’ I said. ‘The moon went down hours ago – I thought they couldn’t fly without a moon!’
Jane squinted at my luminous alarm clock.
‘I think they struggle to find targets without a moon. But they can fly, and it will get light in half an hour or so,’ she said. ‘It’s a quarter past eight. You and I are slugabeds. Perhaps they’ve been posted elsewhere.’
Ellen and Phyllis clattered downstairs and the front door banged.
Jane went back to sleep.
I don’t know how she could, except that she had the gift of instant sleep. I couldn’t even make myself lie down again.
Five minutes later I recognised the whomp-whomp of German engines, like the bombers flying over London.
I catapulted out of bed and hauled the blackout curtains from the window facing south-east over the sea. The Kingsleap Light bloomed bright green in the dark, flashing as the lamp swung round. There must be British fishing boats about, or the lighthouse would be dark. I leaped across to the narrow north window that faced the airfield, but I couldn’t see anything there. The terrible throbbing German engines were louder now – they sounded like they were right overhead.
Then the fins whistled as the bombs fell.
I couldn’t see the airfield, but WOW did I see the explosions.
‘Jane, Jane!’ I screeched. ‘The aerodrome’s being bombed – come look!’ The need to look was fiercer in me than the sensible need to dive for cover. If something was going to blow me up, I wanted to see it coming.
Or perhaps, like Jane, I just didn’t want to miss anything. She was as silly as me about the fireworks. We crowded for the view at the narrow window.
‘My word, that is a direct hit – something is on fire!’ Jane exclaimed.
We heard distant sirens. We couldn’t see anything on the ground, only oily black smoke lit by the red glow of flames. A thick column rose in the sky, showing the German pilots exactly where to aim on their next pass.
They came back. We couldn’t tell if they hit anything the second time. Then the Royal Air Force came roaring in to chase them off – not our Blenheims, but a swarm of Spitfires from Deeside. It was like watching the Battle of Britain all over again. I thought I’d never grow tired of it: the soaring dots against a bottle-blue predawn sky, the whine and roar of engines, the twisting loops of vapour trails as it started to get light – and in my stomach a knot of painful envy because I was not up there too, doing something useful, able to fight back.
It didn’t last five minutes before the Luftwaffe planes turned tail. They didn’t have a fighter escort to protect them.
‘Hitler is a madman,’ Jane pronounced. ‘What a waste of fuel and effort, bombing an empty aerodrome! I suppose it is a miracle those boys managed to get all their planes off the ground before the bombs fell. Somebody must have seen the storm coming—’
‘“Seen the storm coming!”’ I cried. ‘Storm front! Windyedge!’
Jane grabbed my arm.
‘Jamie got all the planes out in time,’ I breathed.
‘I hope the girls are all right,’ said Jane.
Jane and I spent the afternoon by the peat fire in the public bar feeling nervous, while Nancy Campbell sullenly served and washed up after the villagers. She glanced at the wishing coins every now and then, muttering under her breath, as if she were praying to them. The Blenheims didn’t come back.
Of course the aerodrome telephone was knocked out again, and they couldn’t spare anyone to bring us news, so we had to wait. We played records on Jane’s gramophone to count off the time. It took ten hours and twenty minutes to get to the bottom of the record pile, she said, but we’d only played three hours’ worth (not counting while the pub was open) when the front door slammed in the vestibule.
Mrs Campbell practically fell over herself with anxiety. She threw open the wooden gate and leaped from behind the bar. ‘Phyllis? Ellen?’
It was Ellen on her own. She stood in the doorway.
‘I won’t come through just now,’ she called across the room hoarsely. ‘I’m all over soot. I had to help with the firefighting, and then I had to drive to Aberdeen and back twice.’
She was not joking – soot covered her from head to toe. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her hand on the doorknob was covered with blisters.
I gasped, ‘Oh, Ellen, your poor hands!’
Mrs Campbell looked her up and down and said grudgingly, ‘I’ll light the boiler for the hot water before six p.m., just this once. Mind you don’t fill the bath beyond the five-inch mark. There’s a war on.’
‘Aye, Nan Campbell, I might have some idea about there being a war on,’ Ellen rasped.
Mrs Campbell dared to ask, ‘Where’s Phyllis?’
‘She’s still at the aerodrome, filling out forms. We lost a big supply of tinned food, and she’s trying to order more. She’s all right. Everyone’s all right. The Jerries missed the operations hut. But the hangar is burned to the ground.’ Ellen sucked in a deep breath, and coughed. ‘The lads are all right, too, Mrs C. They had to land at Deeside, because the surface at Windyedge is all over holes. Cromwell was there last night so I had to collect him and bring him here to look at the damage, and then I had to take him back to Deeside again.’
Nan Campbell clutched the brass counter of the bar and gasped with relief. She gave a quick glance at the wishing coins.
‘The ground crew’s filling in the holes, but we won’t be able to bring the Blenheims back till next week at least.’ Ellen coughed again. ‘Phyllis will want a bath, too, when she gets here.’
‘Och, no bother, I’ll light the boiler the now and you get yourself cleaned up,’ Nan said. ‘And when you go back to the airfield, tell the lads working there that if they get hungry they can come here. I’ll see if Morag can put in extra time behind the bar.’
Morag Torrie was the timid village girl who helped Mrs Campbell when it was busy.
‘Ta for the hot water,’ Ellen said, and turned around to stalk upstairs.
‘Take her a cup of tea, will you, Louisa,’ Mrs Campbell uttered. ‘Oh, and there’s some Germolene in the kitchen on the shelf above the sink. For the burns.’
It was as close as I had seen her come to anything like sympathy.
It took me a long time to get my uniform off, for my hands were so sore. Cromwell already had a go at me for wearing mittens knitted by one of my cousins, instead of my gauntlets, which would have protected them. No one to blame but yourself, McEwen. But how am I supposed to drive in those bloody great things? Like wearing wellington boots on your hands.
When I was quaking with chill in my underthings I realised the water in the boiler wouldn’t be warm for another wee while. I’d been dreaming of that bath for the past half a day, I must be going soft, living under a roof with hot water out of a tap!
I hung up my clothes on the back of the bathroom door and wrapped myself in the shawl that Nan disliked because it wasn’t a proper dressing gown. I ran cold water in the basin while I waited for the hot, pulling the stool up so I could sit and soak my hands.
A tap came at the door.
‘Ellen? Shall I leave this outside?’
That was Louisa with a tea tray.
‘Come along through,’ I said, and she edged through the door. ‘All right, Louisa?’
‘I’m all right.’ She gave me a smile and jerked her chin at my hands. ‘What about you?’
‘Aye, no bother. Ta very much for the tea, just set it on the floor there.’
‘Mrs Campbell sent you up some burn ointment, too,’ Louisa said.
‘Och, she didn’t! She’s got a soft heart under that hard shell, hasn’t she? Like an old pearl mussel stuck on a stone in a river bed.’ A corner of the shawl was trailing in the basin and getting a good soak too. I sighed, and watched Louisa put down the tray and stand up again.
She didn’t leave, though.
I gave a jerk of my own chin towards the bathtub, telling her to stay. She sat down on the edge, dark eyes eager, waiting for my news.
I wiggled my sore fingers, splashing water about in the basin. If Nan had a fit of kindness and decided to bring me some sticking plasters as an afterthought, I didn’t want her to hear about our amateur codebreaking.
‘Is the old woman behaving herself?’ I asked. ‘Mrs Warner – do you like working for her?’
‘I love it,’ Louisa said, and I saw that what she meant was that she loved Jane. But she wore a worried frown as she said it.
‘Is it difficult?’
‘It’s the easiest work in the world. I do up her buttons and help with her stockings, and keep our room tidy. And I play my flute or piano duets with her, and we listen to records or the radio, and I read novels out loud. She’s always interested and lets me read what I like. And with Mrs Campbell giving me room and board, I can save most of what she pays me. But—’
‘But there’s bombs,’ I said.
Louisa shook her head. ‘That’s not it. There were more bombs in London. It’s that I worry about Jane. She leaves the gas tap on without lighting the fire. She tries to go out on her own and she says it’s because she doesn’t want to wake me, but the cobbles are always black with ice first thing in the morning and you know how steep the lane is past the limekilns. If she falls or gets hurt or … or worse … well, even if it isn’t my fault, the more I like her, the more I couldn’t ever forgive myself if something happened and I wasn’t there to help.’
She looked away. She gave a quick sniff, then turned about again.
‘She’s teaching me Morse code!’ Louisa said shakily, as if she wanted to talk of something else. ‘She could teach me to sing opera. I bet she’d teach me German if I really wanted to learn something useful.’
I stared at her. ‘Useful! German!’
‘I want to do something to help with the war. I could translate for prisoners, perhaps, when I’m older. I don’t know. Be a spy, like Mata Hari.’ Louisa frowned again. ‘Your poor hands! Do you need help?’
It was most unlikely anyone was listening.
But Louisa rabbiting on about bloody Mata Hari and learning to speak in Morse code like a Jerry made me not want to take any chances.
‘I don’t need help. I’m going to have a bath.’ I stood up, shook my wet hands, and turned on the bath taps. The water roared, covering the sound of our voices beyond the bathroom door.
‘I had a word with our Jamie, over at Aberdeen,’ I told her. ‘He worked out that message this morning, and ordered the planes away from Windyedge. In the dark – most of the lads took off in their vests and braces! Must have been perishing up there without flight suits.’
‘But what did he tell the commander?’ Louisa asked, wide-eyed. ‘Where did he say he got the tip?’
‘He put it back to the first message – remember that one about “Deeside south green light”? Jamie worked out it means us. We’re south of Deeside, just off the green light at the Kingsleap Rocks. They tried to hit us in daylight last week and got the railway by accident, but when the light was lit for the fishing boats this morning, they tried again. They’d have surely got most of our planes on the ground if it hadn’t been for Jamie. Even Old Cromwell saw that. And what do you think he said?’
I pulled Cromwellian eyebrows and put on my best posh English accent. ‘“Good thinking, Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart, but insubordination nonetheless. You didn’t ask permission. Confined to barracks for a week except for operational flying.”’
‘Poor Jamie!’ Louisa exclaimed.
‘Bloody Cromwell,’ I muttered.
The water was nearly to the five-inch line Nan had painted in the bathtub. I’d have to turn off the taps in a moment. I spoke in a rush.
‘Old Cromwell thinks the Luftwaffe is using Windyedge for bombing practice,’ I told Louisa. ‘It’s the shortest hop from Norway to Scotland. But you and I know there’s a Jerry coding machine hidden in the wardrobe down the passage. And I think some Jerry knows it, too – not the one who brought it, but someone else, someone who doesn’t want it here. And they’re trying to destroy it. They’ll keep at it until they think they’ve hit it, and as long as we keep using it they’ll know they haven’t got it.’
That angry little frown split Louisa’s forehead again.
‘No, that isn’t at all sensible,’ she said. ‘The machine could be anywhere. We could have taken it to London by now, or Wales, and still be using it to decode messages for Windyedge. Perhaps they’re trying to punish us because Felix Baer landed here.’
The bath was five inches deep.
‘Or perhaps,’ she added, ‘they’re trying to destroy the airfield so he can’t come back.’
We couldn’t talk any longer because I had to turn off the taps.
B-Flight flew out of Deeside along with A-Flight, on fishing-fleet and battleship escort duties for the whole December moon, getting in the way of the Spitfire fighter squadron based there. Meanwhile the holes in the runway at Windyedge were mended and a new hangar got thrown up next to the crater where the old one used to be.
ABERDEEN SECTOR CLEAR START XII UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
Normally I’d have had my heart in my mouth worrying that we might run into Messerschmitt 110 night fighters on these ops. That message in Louisa’s notebook reassured me. Aberdeen had been bombed pretty fiercely right through October; now the Luftwaffe seemed to be holding back.
Phyllis came to Deeside with us, but I only saw Ellen twice while we were there, taking Cromwell on some inspection errand. The second time I didn’t even get to talk to her. She just gave me a look and shook her head ever so slightly.
I shrugged in reply, and went off whistling, to let her know everything was all right.
Actually, everything was fine.
I’d wanted an edge over the Germans and now that I had one, I felt like our luck had changed. Finding that coding machine, getting unexpected tip-offs that helped us sink four U-boats, saving all our planes from being turned into scrap metal on the ground when the aerodrome was bombed – being one step ahead of the enemy for a week or two – made us lucky.
We hadn’t lost a man since 7 November. That was six weeks ago, and that was a record for 648 Squadron. It is true that one night on warship escort with A-Flight we got caught in the crossfire of a naval battle. One of my propellers was blown away by anti-aircraft fire from a German battleship, and they also smashed Dougie Kerr’s gun turret. But the Royal Navy took care of the German battleship, and although it was no fun limping home on one prop, I managed to land upright. Dougie, whose head stuck up in the shattered turret of the Aussies’ plane, came home with a bloody ear – he’d been clipped by a shard of flying Perspex. Not by a bullet. He’d ducked out of the way just in time.
Lucky!
The mechanics got to work on my plane and we were back in the air two nights later. The turret was harder to fix than the propeller, but a ferry pilot brought in another new Blenheim and took the old one away. Dougie walked around with a plaster over his left ear for a few days.
Six weeks and nobody even had an injury, apart from my lucky bullet on the Bell Rock Light run, and Dougie’s lucky clip on the ear. Dougie’s grazed ear didn’t qualify for a wound stripe any more than my grazed leg did, but in Aberdeen we all chipped in and bought him a gold hoop earring like a pirate.
Windyedge was ready for B-Flight to come back just in time for Christmas.
The moon was old on Christmas Eve when we walked to Nancy’s place from the airfield, crunching ice in half-frozen puddles, howling our way through ‘Deck the Halls’. Nobody knew all of it so there was a lot of fa-la-la-la-la-ing. The sixpences we’d left there the night before the aerodrome was bombed were waiting in the oak beam above the bar. And that Django Reinhardt record album was waiting also, waiting for me to leave Louisa another mysterious message, so she and Mrs Warner could magically translate German code into sensible King’s English.
The war turned Christmas into hard work – London, Manchester and Liverpool were pummelled by the Luftwaffe bombers. The food rationing seemed endless; we were told to buy war bonds as presents. But Louisa looped paper chains made of old issues of the Scotsman from the ceiling of the Limehouse, and heaped pine branches twined with ivy over the mantel, and wound ivy around the tree trunk posts holding up the bar. There was a candle in a jam jar on every window ledge, even though you couldn’t see them from outside because of the blackout curtains.
As we came marching in, Louisa started to pound out ‘Deck the Halls’ on the piano, picking up our song, and Mrs Warner’s wonderful old contralto pulled our ‘fa-la-las’ into line.
Between carols, I pulled up a chair next to Louisa’s piano stool.
‘There’s a sort of unofficial “no bombs” ban over Christmas,’ I told her. ‘Both sides do it. But of course Old Cromwell’s being a Scrooge about making us fly on Christmas Day, since the ships don’t get a holiday either, and we thought we’d have some fun behind his back. We’re going to take Ellen and Phyllis along for the ride. What about it, Louisa?’
She turned to me staring.
‘To the airfield? In the Tilly?’
I laughed. ‘No, in a Bristol Blenheim,’ I said. ‘Out over the North Sea during the Christmas truce.’
Very softly and slowly, she played the opening bars of ‘Joy to the World’.
Then she stopped. She glanced at me, biting her lower lip, and croaked, ‘Yes, please.’
She was so eager it made her look like she was about ten years old. I laughed again.
‘You’ll get a ride in the Tilly as well, come to think of it, if Ellen brings you over tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘Wear extra socks. Wool. Three pairs at least. It gets colder the higher you get.’
The sun on Christmas morning rose shining through clouds, bright red as a cherry-flavoured boiled sweet, a poinsettia in full bloom, a glowing punch bowl of holiday sorrel. I leaned into the window and pulled back the blackout curtains and thought, I will be up there with it today!
Jane was excited because I was excited. She came downstairs to see me off, wearing a beautiful short silver fox-fur cape. Mrs Campbell was slamming things around behind the bar. She couldn’t keep public hours until the twenty-seventh of December, and fretted about not being able to work.
Phyllis scolded, ‘Think of those young men in the air on Christmas Day! They’re not complaining.’
‘Why are you in and out the kitchen if you’re not working?’ Ellen provoked Nan.
‘I’ve to fix Christmas dinner for you girls, haven’t I?’ Mrs Campbell grumbled. ‘You’ll be hungry when you’re back from your flight. Morag’s mother, Mrs Torrie, has sent a bit of venison.’
Most of Mrs Campbell’s meals involved tinned beef, cabbage and turnips, so a morsel of fresh meat would be a proper treat.
Jane took off her cape, bundled it into a fluffy roll, and piled it on top of the counter.
‘Happy Christmas, Nancy,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like to have a fur, as I’ve little reason now to wear them all.’
Nan Campbell went as pink as when 648 Squadron were chanting her name the day they got there.
‘Why—’ She spent so much of her life grizzling that she struggled when she was pleased. ‘Why, Aunt Jane. That is— That is—’ She looked at the lovely soft thing as if she expected it to come back to life as a dozen foxes and bite her to death. ‘I couldn’t!’ She put out a hand as if she were going to push it away, and instead she patted it.
Then there was no going back.
‘Well, if you’re not wearing it, as you say,’ she conceded. ‘Thank you, Aunt Jane.’
Jane had given me one of her fur coats, too. I was stunned. I’d saved enough of my small salary to buy her a record album, as I hardly ever spent money on anything except the gas meter. I’d bought it in Stonehaven when I went by myself to return the library books: William Walton’s Viola Concerto. I thought Jane might like some new English classical music. I was very glad I had something nice to give her.
Ellen gave me and Phyllis each a silver sixpence, because we were going flying with 648 Squadron.
With a dramatic flourish she pushed a silver coin of her own into the beam above the bar.
‘Go on. You do yours now, Louisa.’
My heart seemed to turn somersaults. The ceiling was low enough I could touch the beam with my fingertips, but I wasn’t tall enough to force the sixpence into a crack.
I couldn’t climb on the counter with Nan watching.
I dragged a chair to the edge of the bar to stand on. I could see Jamie’s sixpence, waiting for my penny to turn up beside it the next time another decoded instruction was ready for him. I didn’t want to draw Nan’s eyes over there.
I pushed my sixpence into a crack in the old wood right at the other end of the beam. I’d easily remember where it was – exactly opposite Jamie’s.
My fluttering heart soared, plummeted in terror, and leaped into my throat.
Rules are made to be broken, Lula, Mummy’s cheerful voice reminded me in my head.
If I died that afternoon it would be worth it to ride in an RAF Bristol Blenheim bomber.
I touched my sixpence with the tip of my finger. Keep me safe.
I found myself whistling ‘The Wassail Song’. It was not regulation for Pimms Section to take three girls along on our Christmas mission, and Phyllis was so nervous it was hard not to tease her.
‘No worries, this isn’t a bombing run, we’re just on patrol,’ I told her cheerfully. Oh, it was like being in school, if school had included aeroplanes! It gave me the same feeling of truant joy, the heady satisfaction of undermining authority just for fun.
The ground crew helped the girls into flight suits, pleased as punch to be pulling a fast one on Wing Commander Cromwell.
‘Helmets, good – don’t worry about masks, they won’t need mikes and we’ll stay low enough they won’t need oxygen,’ I told the fitter who was equipping us. ‘Can you get three more Mae Wests? Extra gauntlets and as many Ever-Hot bags as you can find! Don’t tell ops.’
‘As if I would! Whose head is on the block when someone twigs, anyway?’
‘Mine, mine, always mine,’ I assured him. ‘Nobody’s fighting today. There won’t be a bit of trouble. It will all be wizard.’
In flight suits and life vests, the lasses walked to the waiting planes without attracting attention. Madeira Section had already taken off, and Old Flash had promised to make sure Cromwell didn’t go near the hangars or the radio room. Phyllis and Ellen and Louisa stayed close together, a complicated collection of nerves.
Phyllis wasn’t afraid of flying – she was just terrible at breaking rules, and she dithered with anxiety. ‘Oh dear – oh dear, I shouldn’t be doing this. It’s so important I set a good example—’
I knew Ellen was scared. I’d taken her up before, and she hadn’t liked it. But she wouldn’t admit it. She steeled herself by looking angry and bored, and kept close to Louisa, the baby of the gang.
‘Who do you want to fly with?’ I heard Ellen whisper to her. ‘Phyllis is going with the Aussies. You can choose.’
Louisa was the only one of the three who was visibly sparkling with excitement.
‘You go with Jamie. He’s your friend,’ she said decisively. ‘I’ll go with Ignacy and Derfel.’
‘All right, Ignacy and Derfel are safe as houses, but look out for that Yorkie,’ Ellen told her. ‘He’s pinched my bum five times since they got back from Deeside, once a day, regular. If he does it again I might have to thump him in the teeth.’
Bloody Bill Yorke.
Nothing I could do about it now; he wouldn’t be able to bother Louisa from the rear cabin.
But I made a note to keep a close eye on him back on the ground.
I wasn’t going to let him ruin my day, nor anyone else’s.
The only plane I’d been close to was Felix Baer’s Messerschmitt 109. Now I was going to climb inside a Bristol Blenheim bomber. With an engine mounted in each wing and the glass turret riding on its back for the gunner, it seemed gigantic. Its tail rested on a tiny wheel against the ground and its nose pointed at the sky as if the silly tail wheel embarrassed it and it couldn’t wait to take off.
Jamie hustled me on to the wing of Ignacy’s plane, giving me a river of instructions.
‘Walk up the wing along this rough bit; you won’t slip. Sit on your parachute just in front of Taff’s feet – you’re only wee, you’ll fit. Once we’re in the air you can hop on to the observer’s seat in front of him and you’ll have a super view out the nose. Don’t worry about Yorkie, I know what Ellen’s been telling you, but he’s stuck in the rear cabin minding the radio and the rear gun. Mazur and Taff are a sound pair – they’ll take care of you. You won’t be able to hear much, or talk to anyone, so thumbs up for everything bang on, and thumbs down if you need to be sick! Here you are – pop your foot into my hands and I’ll boost you up. Climb in through the hatch—’
Squatting on the broad wing next to me, he locked gloved fingers together.
‘Warm enough? All buttoned up? Mae West tight? Righto, we’re off to the North Sea – just wait till you see the Scottish Highlands from the air!’
The front cabin of the Blenheim didn’t feel gigantic, though. With three of us squeezed in together, it was like being a bit of saltfish in a tin. Ignacy and Derfel chattered to each other in Polish and Welsh as they checked the flight instruments. I wondered if they were doing it on purpose to wind up their new gunner. Or me – they must be used to Bill Yorke by now.
I thought of Phyllis squeezed in with tall Harry Morrow, the Aussie flying the third Pimms plane with his knees around his ears, and Gavin Hamilton, who still looked like he wasn’t old enough to shave. I thought of Ellen squeezed in with easy-going, handsome David Silvermont and Flight Lieutenant Jamie Beaufort-Stuart. For a moment I felt a stab of envy.
But if I’d gone with Jamie and Silver, I’d have to go with Chip Wingate, the American from Texas.
My pilot, Ignacy, waved to get my attention.
‘All right, little one?’
I gave him a thumbs up. He grinned. ‘Engine start!’ he yelled to the ground crew.
One propeller began to turn, then the other. Within seconds they were both alive and it became wildly, deafeningly loud in the cockpit.
Through the clear panes in the canopy overhead, I saw clouds rushing by as we gained speed for the take-off. Then the tail of the plane lifted and I could see trees and moorland ahead of us. Finally, the way a ripe mango suddenly comes unstuck from its stem, we just lifted away from the ground. I could feel we were aloft.
I was in the sky.
Ignacy pushed levers and turned knobs, holding the control yoke lightly with one hand. He waved at me again, gesturing Up, up! He pointed into the Blenheim’s nose. Get up and look!
I crawled forward to a swivelling stool in the nose of the plane. There were wide, clear Perspex panels in the front. I crouched on the metal seat in a cocoon of glass and I could see everything as we took off to the west, into the wind.
Jamie was right about the super view. The Highlands were magical ahead of us. We were still lower than their snow-covered heights, white and pink and gold in the elusive winter sun like a glittering Christmas card. We flew over the moors where the main road passed on its way to Aberdeen. Beneath my feet was a herd of red deer, dozens of them, leaping away as we skimmed overhead.
I hadn’t realised how beautiful it would be. I forgot it was dangerous.
Derfel tapped me on the shoulder and beckoned. When I crawled back to him, he offered me his own leather helmet so I could hear the radio.
‘Hallo, Louisa!’ came Ellen’s voice in my head, crackling over the static. ‘Happy Christmas!’
Only Ignacy had a microphone that connected to Jamie’s plane, so I couldn’t answer her. All I could do was beam. It was smashing.
Ignacy’s voice spoke clearly in my ear.
‘You want to fly?’
He lifted his hand from the controls, and to my surprise the plane flew steadily on.
‘The Blenheim flies herself,’ he told me. ‘Here, try, you will do it—’
He let me crouch next to him and hold the controls. He coaxed me to tilt the wings, following Jamie ahead of us.
Jamie had one extra leather helmet with a headset in it, and I was the lucky lass who got to wear it.
‘All right?’ he asked.
‘Braw!’ I said. I’d been up with him once before and never showed him how it frighted me the first time, and I wasn’t going to now, either.
‘Stand up and take a look out the back!’
‘Stand up? Are you daft?’
‘Maybe, but look at Ignacy waving to us!’
I was too tall to stand all the way straight, but I put my head up in the clear canopy for about three seconds, holding hard to Jamie’s seat back and Silver’s shoulder. I could see Ignacy’s Blenheim flying behind us away off to our left, with the Aussies lined up on our right. The wings of Ignacy’s plane were rocking gently up and down.
After a moment Jamie dipped our own wings to wave back, and I tumbled over into Silver’s lap.
‘Jamie Stuart, you raging gumpus!’
Then Silver and I laughed so hard untangling ourselves that I feared it would make Jamie crash the plane.
But of course he did no such thing, and with the rest of Pimms Section close behind us, we all veered round together to head out over the North Sea.
Ignacy waved me away from the controls so he could turn, and Derfel plucked his helmet off my head and put it back on his own. I saw him talking. But over the roar of the Blenheim’s twin engines I couldn’t hear a thing he and Ignacy said.
They seemed tense and focused now.
I crawled back to the observer’s seat to stay out of their way. Then through the panel in the clear nose of the plane, I saw why they were paying attention. We’d reached the navy ships we were looking for. From the air they seemed tiny, fragile things, black water bugs in an absolutely endless world of grey.
For a moment I thought, It could be Daddy!
Then I remembered it couldn’t.
Not on a navy ship.
Nor on a merchant navy ship any more, either.
Oh, Daddy. How did I get here? I wondered again. How did I get here?
My pilot and navigator now seemed to forget I was there at all. That frightened me a little. I wondered if this was how they felt all the time they were flying: a little bit scared.
We followed Jamie’s plane into the grey sky of fitful sun, and the other Pimms Section plane followed us. Somewhere ahead of us, I knew, Madeira Section was also on patrol. Safety in numbers.
We were faster than the ships below us, so we swooped around and back, sweeping the skies for enemy planes, who might have guns even if they’d agreed not to use them today.
Who made that agreement? How did they let each other know? A radio message? In code? In German? In English?
It was impossible not to feel uneasy.
‘Aw, fer cryin’ out loud,’ said Chip in the back. ‘The Luftwaffe is out here on Christmas Day after all. I can hear ’em jabbering away in Kraut. Tune in and listen, cap’n, they’re not on the same frequency as us—’
Jamie twirled the dials, and then I heard it too, crackling in and out: men’s voices barking orders in a tongue I could not understand.
I had a queer sense of the sky full of invisible young lads ready for a fight.
Jamie and Silver felt it too. They were pulling worried faces at each other. It made my mouth go dry.
I swallowed and licked my lips. ‘What’s up, Jamie Stuart?’ I challenged him.
‘Ah, well, lassie,’ Jamie said in a low voice, ‘I might not have brought you along if I’d known there was going to be a surprise party. I suppose that’s the nature of a surprise party, actually.’
Ignacy and Derfel burst out laughing.
Derfel handed me his flight helmet. We’d picked up the Luftwaffe radio signal too. They were probably patrolling their own shipping, like us. I couldn’t hear much – mostly crackling static.
But now and then came a man’s voice, singing in German.
It was a Christmas carol. I listened and listened.
‘Bloody Jerries,’ said Silver.
They were singing ‘O Tannenbaum’.
‘You hear that, Pimms Leader?’ called Ignacy.
‘It’s the Christmas truce of 1940!’ I exclaimed. ‘But wasn’t it “Silent Night” the Jerries sang with our lads in the trenches in the last lot?’
I gave the Germans a taste of their own medicine. ‘Stille nacht, heilige nacht—’
There was deafening stillness.
Then, in a burst of defiance, the German voice shouted: ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt!’
All of B-Flight heard it.
‘That’s no Christmas truce, that’s the Nazi national anthem!’ yelled Harry Morrow. ‘Can we go get ’em?’
Bloody hell, I thought, not with the girls on board, you young tosser.
‘We don’t know where they are,’ I said. ‘Let ’em sing.’
We didn’t see any German planes.
But we heard the singing, off and on, the whole time we flew over the battleships. Derfel kept passing me his headset so I could listen.
We circled the ships for two hours, until Jamie said we’d passed the English border with Scotland. After that, another RAF squadron from further south came flying up to meet us. Everybody waved their wings at each other in a friendly way and shouted Happy Christmas over the radio. Then that lot took over our job and we could go home.
We’d passed the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay and were heading up the Angus Coast towards Stonehaven when we met the Luftwaffe bomber.
It was a Junkers 88, a Ju-88 – I recognised it as German the moment I saw it. To me it looked like the perfect match for the Blenheims we were flying, twin engines just like ours and about the same size, except the wingtips were sharply squared instead of rounded like ours. It was flying low along the sea cliffs, scouting, an ominous black shadow below us against the winter sea.
I haven’t Louisa’s eye for German planes. But I worked it out quick enough, because when Silver pointed, bloody Jamie stood the Blenheim practically on its wingtip in a turn that made my stomach tumble the wildcat. I held on to my porridge, and I got an eyeful of the Jerry bomber out the side of the canopy, with one of our own Blenheims diving after him.
Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart suddenly pushed the nose of his Blenheim forward, too, and we swooped in a swan dive towards the planes below us.
Those young Australian blockheads were going after that Ju-88 with Phyllis on board. I could see the tracers flaming from Harry Morrow’s guns.
I dived after him. I couldn’t stop Morrow, not once a fight started. But I had to be there if he needed me.
God help me, I prayed.
I sat on the floor with my eyes squeezed shut and teeth grating and my hands clutching the hard, cold edge of the seat on either side of me. I knew that if I came up alive without being sick it would be a flipping miracle.
‘All right, lass?’ came bloody Flight Lieutenant Beaufort-Stuart’s voice in my head. Through the headset, I mean.
I winked an eye open to take a keek at my pilot. He was frowning. He was listening.
I squeezed my eyes closed again. But my ears were open. And then I heard it, too. Someone in the German plane was whistling.
Ignacy’s Polish voice spoke into my open ears. ‘The musical Jerries are out today,’ he said. ‘This fellow knows the classics.’
I may have a classical education but I don’t have a musical one, and I didn’t recognise the mournful tune over the crackling static.
Silver did. He agreed with Ignacy. ‘That’s Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture. The tune’s all right, but his rhythm is off.’
‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘Don’t shoot! Tell Jamie not to shoot!’
Ignacy glanced at me, startled. He couldn’t hear me over the deafening engines.
I scrambled up beside him and peeled the leather helmet away from the side of his head so I could scream in his ear.
‘It’s Odysseus. Odysseus! Tell Jamie not to shoot!’
Ignacy’s voice came calmly into my ears through the microphone in his mask.
‘Tell him yourself. Don’t yell like that.’
I could see the Pimms planes below us on the German bomber’s tail.
The mournful whistle, only two bars, shrilled in my ears, then cut out as Ignacy held down a button on a handheld microphone that he raised to my mouth.
And the next thing I heard made me let out in a gasp of surprise the long breath I was trying to hold.
‘Jamie, Jamie, it’s me, Louisa! Don’t shoot that plane! It’s what the German courier played, Odysseus, you know who I mean! It’s a message – it’s an SOS—’
Then Jamie’s voice, answering her. He said one word only.
‘Mendelssohn?’
And finally Tex’s drawl came in from the back, and he agreed with Louisa.
‘It’s literally an SOS,’ Tex said. ‘That Kraut is whistling SOS in Morse code.’
‘BREAK, MORROW,’ I yelled at Harry, still firing his guns below me. ‘BREAK, YOU TOSSER, HOLD YOUR FIRE.’
The silhouettes of the Blenheim and the Junkers 88 below us suddenly separated, curving in different directions, like a stalk of sugarcane split down the middle.
The German plane headed out to sea. The British planes made long, lazy curves up through the sky to join us, one after the other.
I gasped with relief, then was torn with doubt.
SOS?
That doesn’t mean ‘Don’t shoot.’ It means ‘Send help.’
The plane was a distant speck heading east towards Norway, and the whistling pilot wasn’t getting any help.
Ignacy was outraged. I’m pretty sure the only thing that stopped him going after that Ju-88 himself was Louisa sitting next to him.
‘What the hell, Scotty?’
The German bomber was an ink splodge on the horizon.
‘Mendelssohn’s banned in Germany,’ I told him. ‘And it’s bloody “Pimms Leader” to you.’
‘What the hell, Pimms Leader?’
‘We’re supposed to be holding fire anyway, and I’m not shooting down a dissenter on Christmas Day.’
‘That is not what I meant by what the hell!’
‘Well, what did you mean then?’
‘What is all this nonsense about Odysseus and a German courier?’ Ignacy asked me.
The whole of B-Flight had heard us. All six of my flight crews had heard – eighteen men. Well, seventeen not counting myself.
Phyllis might have heard. And even if she hadn’t, she was in the same plane as Dougie Kerr, who couldn’t keep his mouth shut for five minutes. I’d have to collar her the second we were back at RAF Windyedge – but dammit, then she’d interrogate every one of us in debriefing. Someone was bound to sing.
Ellen, I could trust Ellen to deal with Phyllis. But I’d have to warn her before we landed—
‘I’ll tell you on the ground,’ I said, trying to shut up Ignacy – and everybody else. ‘“Careless talk costs lives.”’
When we landed at RAF Windyedge, Ignacy climbed out first, so he could help me get through the hatch and on to the wing. Derfel came behind, guiding me.
I’d completely forgotten about Bill Yorke. He’d been in the back with the radio and the rear gun the whole time, not saying anything – or not saying anything I could hear, at any rate. He had his own hatch to climb out of and was waiting for me when my feet landed on the ground. He threw a careless arm over my shoulders.
I hadn’t felt sick in the air. I’d been so worked up with excitement and awe and fear – I’d been wondering at the beauty of the sky and panicking at the possibility of being part of an air battle, and astonished that Felix Baer might be near me again in another German plane, and I had not devoted a moment to my stomach. But back on earth I suddenly felt sick.
I swallowed and swallowed, shrinking under the heavy arm of the strange gunner.
‘Where did you learn German code names, then?’ Bill Yorke asked casually. ‘Do we have a little Colonial spy in our midst?’
I had my own wee mission now – one desperate chance to catch Phyllis as she got out of the plane, before she was able to talk to the lads. The second my feet were on the ground I sprinted for Harry Morrow’s Blenheim, just pulling up behind us.
I had to pause for a moment because I couldn’t keep down the oatmeal any longer. But then I kept on running.
What that gunner said to me felt like a bomb going off in my head, and when Ellen stumbled and was sick, I lost everything too.
Yorkie leaped away from Louisa in horror, checking down his front to make sure she’d missed him.
I grabbed him by the wrist and shoulder of his leather jacket and shook him until I hoped his teeth were rattling in his hard head.
‘Stow it, Yorke, you don’t know what’s going on because you’re not supposed to! Are you going to accuse me of spying, too, for calling off the attack? And Tex, for recognising an SOS? Also keep your mucky hands off the lasses.’
Yorkie staggered back against the Blenheim’s wing, trying to decide whether it was worth going for me. Ignacy and Derfel watched with intense interest – who’d win this time?
‘I get that a jumped-up flyboy doesn’t want to tell a lowly air gunner what’s going on,’ Yorkie snarled. ‘But I don’t get why the hired girl knows.’
Louisa was bent over on the grass beside the rear fuselage of the plane, the back of one hand up over her mouth. Silver dodged around us to kneel beside her with his handkerchief.
‘Because she was here when the German agent dropped off the code strings we’re using,’ Silver said, looking up at us. ‘The Windyedge-based ground crew was all here too. Only they’ve been told to shut up about it, so they do.’
Code strings! It sounded deadly important in its magnificent vagueness.
Oh God, Silver was the best mate a body could have. The best.
I took a step back so Yorkie couldn’t use his height against me. ‘Flying Officer Yorke, I said I’d brief everyone on the ground, and I will,’ I said coldly. ‘But call your commanding officer a “jumped-up flyboy” again and I’ll see to it you’re docked a month’s pay.’
The lads all knew that wasn’t an empty threat.
‘Understood.’ Yorkie straightened his collar and tie. Almost as an afterthought, he dropped me a contemptuous ‘Sir’.
Then he stormed off towards the operations hut.
‘You handled that as well as could be expected,’ Silver said, grinning.