The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  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.

  Jamie:

  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.’

  Ellen:

  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 o
f 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.