The Enigma Game

by Elizabeth Wein

  ‘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.

  Louisa:

  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

  Jamie:

  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 w
as 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.’