‘I just want to make sure the Stavanger op gets filled in properly,’ he said. ‘Get Louisa to do it – her writing’s always tidy. See how I’ve done the other Enigma ops, look – I put a Morse E at the start, just a dot, to remind me which flights were connected with the coding machine. Don’t want it to be too obvious.’
I knelt beside Ellen with the book against the bed as I wrote out the details, at his instruction, determined I wasn’t going to weep. Miss Lind watched over my shoulder. When I’d done, and blown on the ink to dry it off, I shut the book.
It felt very final. We all knew he wouldn’t write in it again.
For a moment we were quiet about that.
Then Elisabeth Lind, looking down, smiled her crooked little half-smile at me kneeling by the side of the bed.
‘I’m Julie,’ she said.
‘Ellen told me. After you left Windyedge.’ I simply couldn’t think of her as anything other than Miss Lind.
‘Ellen told me that you seem to think you’re responsible for Pimms Section’s flight leader being a headstrong Scots lunatic.’
‘I wanted so badly to help!’ I wailed. ‘I wanted to do something!’
‘Buckets of blood!’ She sounded exactly like her brother. ‘You did do something, Louisa Adair! You gave us our only captured Enigma machine!’
‘I could have given it to you as soon as I found it. We could have contacted your commanding officer somehow. And then maybe everything would have worked out differently, and—’ I glanced at Jamie. I wasn’t going to be the first to mention again that not a single crew in Pimms or Madeira had survived their last mission.
Miss Lind looked thoughtful. ‘But you know, if you hadn’t used it, perhaps it would have been destroyed in one of those early bombing raids, just as the papers were. Or, if you hadn’t ever found it, it would have still been in the Limehouse, but you wouldn’t have guessed when the Luftwaffe was coming. And instead, you were always one step ahead of them. Remember the bomber you turned away in the air, that awful night of freezing fog? Maybe that bomber would have killed all of us and destroyed the machine at the same time, if the coded message hadn’t warned you. And B-Flight would have still gone down in flames. Maybe if you hadn’t done anything it would have turned out worse.’
‘If you hadn’t recognised Felix Baer whistling his SOS, we might have shot down his plane on Christmas day,’ Jamie put in hoarsely. ‘If he hadn’t thought you were Calypso, and even if they hadn’t bombed Windyedge, perhaps no one would have ever discovered where he hid the machine.’
I opened my mouth to protest, and realised they were right.
Not so much in that other, different, terrible things might have happened without my interference, but in that we just wouldn’t ever know the millions upon millions of combinations that fate’s rotor dials could have lined up.
Jamie’s sister gave me that crooked smile again. I liked her much more without the disguise.
‘Anyway this is how it’s turned out,’ she said. ‘And I shall make sure the full story doesn’t go beyond my commanding officer. The official version is that the machine was hidden behind the gas fire in Mrs Campbell’s best double room until I found it there just before B-Flight went to Stavanger.’ She paused, and made a point of looking at us one by one until we each met her eyes. She did Jamie last, as if she thought he needed an extra dose of telling-off. ‘You’re all accountable for treason against the British Crown under the Official Secrets Act if you reveal a word about any of it for the next fifty years.’
‘I’m not a child,’ muttered Jamie. ‘Nor are Ellen and Louisa. You needn’t keep up your Intelligence officer act now that you’ve taken off your false eyelashes.’
‘Well, I have to warn you about the Official Secrets Act, I’ve been told to, and I’m doing it now as I’ve got all three of you in one place and there’s no one else listening,’ she said crossly. ‘And there’s a difference between being held accountable for treason and actually being guilty of it. Accountable means you have to be able to justify your actions. I don’t know how you’d justify revealing any of what you’ve been doing for the past three months, but you could probably justify doing it.’
‘I bloody well could justify doing it,’ said Jamie. ‘I’d do it again.’
‘Someone will do it again,’ I said. ‘Now that we’ve shared it.’
Jamie:
Louisa was going to be wasted staying at Nan’s, with her head full of Morse code and her backbone of steel and her hunger for action.
I shifted my legs. It was practically impossible to sit up straighter without putting pressure on my hands. I tried not to flail; they’d all go soft on me if they thought I was in pain.
‘What are you going to do next to help win the war, Louisa?’ I said. ‘You should join the WAAF.’
Louisa shook her head and gave a terrifically prim response, sounding like Phyllis.
‘I’m fifteen. They’d never let me in.’
I couldn’t believe she’d let a little thing like that stop her.
‘When’s your birthday?’ I persisted. ‘You’ll have to get an adult National Registration card when you turn sixteen. Sergeant Lind here fibbed about her age when she took her driving test, and if you need anybody to pull strings for you at the recruitment office, I’d say she owes you a big favour anyway.’
I couldn’t understand why Louisa looked so angry.
And then I realised she thought I’d pushed her into a corner. She wasn’t ‘of pure European descent’. She thought the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force would turn her away, the way the navy turned away her father.
‘The air force lifted the colour bar in 1939,’ I said. ‘I guess it wasn’t done with a big welcome or a lot of fanfare, but there are a few West Indians in the RAF. I met one myself last autumn, George Archer, gunner in a Wellington bomber. Family man, lovely chap. I think the WAAF would take you.’
As I watched the familiar excitement creep back into her heart-shaped face, I secretly thought that giving Louisa the tip-off that would get her into the services was perhaps my finest hour: the best thing I’d done for Britain since the war started. A bomber pilot sent night after night on missions of destruction doesn’t get much opportunity to be creative.
Buckets of blood – what was I going to do next?
Weren’t there a couple of one-armed ferry pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary? I knew my wee sister had a friend who flew for them. Maybe she could introduce me.
It would be a while yet before the damaged bits of me healed, but the war wasn’t over.
Ellen:
Louisa as a WAAF! I tried to imagine her in air-force blue and a peaked cap. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see her as an officer, bossing folk about.
I needed to shift gears, too. Under Nan Campbell’s roof for fifty times as long as any other? Shaness – much too long.
I thought I’d apply for a bit of training. Gunnery – or those teams that raised the barrage balloons, protecting cities from enemy aircraft. Maybe even become an officer myself. I’d learned a lot watching Jamie.
The next few months wouldn’t be easy, living with the Torries in Windyedge and waiting for a transfer.
But Louisa and I would have each other while we waited.
Louisa:
I remembered what Jane Warner had said about a razor and ink being all it took to fix her passport.
Rules are made to be broken, Lula.
When my sixteenth birthday comes around in the spring, I thought, and I get my new National Registration card, I have only to get rid of one stroke off the 6 and add another loop to make it an 8.
You, Jane said to me, with warmth in her wonderful rich voice, you might be able to change things.
I’d have to fight. I knew I’d have to fight.
But I was ready for that.
A real voyager.
We’d all have to fight. I wouldn’t be alone.
Author’s Declaration of Accountability
When I starte
d thinking about what I’d say here, I tried to remember the first spark for this story. And when I dug beyond the obvious – the Enigma machine, the defecting Germans landing in Scotland, the Blenheim crew, the coins in the pub ceiling – what I came back to was the old woman.
Believe it or not, that’s what I started with. I wanted to write a story about a mysterious old woman.
Originally I just wanted to create a bond between a young person and an old person. It is mostly because I am losing, and miss deeply, my wonderful grandmother Betty Flocken and her generation – she was born in 1916 and died in 2015. In the back of my mind I was thinking of Margaret Mahy’s Memory, which is about a troubled teen who ends up caring for a stranger with Alzheimer’s disease, and Penelope Lively’s The House in Norham Gardens, about a younger teen who has to care for her elderly aunts. But my stock in trade is World War II thrillers. How was I going to include a mysterious old person in my adventure story?
In the summer of 2014, the same summer that Betty Flocken suffered the fall that foreshadowed her decline and death six months later, I had one of the most wonderful experiences of my life: I took a flight in a World War II-era Avro Lancaster bomber. It, too, is among the last of its age, one of only two in the world that still fly, and I had a view from the gun turret as we circled over Niagara Falls. Afterwards, I chatted with the pilot, Dave Rohrer, who has spent more time at the controls of a Lancaster than any wartime pilot ever did. He told me about a pub he’d visited in England near a former World War II airfield, where a wooden beam over the bar was full of coins placed there by airmen who never came back from their missions. Dead men’s money, the bartender called it, telling Dave not to touch.
From that moment, I knew I had to write a story about those wishing coins and the bomber squadron who left them there.
When I finally got to work on the idea, I thought I could set up my young heroine and her ageing companion in a pub like the one Dave visited, near a wartime airfield. The local Royal Air Force bomber squadron could somehow get involved with the viewpoint character. I thought it would be fun (fun as in I will enjoy writing this, not as in this story will be light-hearted) if I explored Jamie Beaufort-Stuart’s background as a bomber pilot, which is only mentioned in passing in Code Name Verity.
In June 2018, I received a letter from an Australian reader who reminded me that it wasn’t just British and American men and women who flew in World War II, and requested that if I ever wrote a ‘Bomber Story’, would I please remember the Australians. As it happened, I was in the midst of writing a Bomber Story. So at my correspondent’s request I included Harry, Gavin and Dougie as one of 648 Squadron’s aircrews. In fact, the RAF bases in wartime Scotland consisted of very few Scots, and the rest of Scotland was full of foreigners too. There were Polish, French and Norwegian naval units in Glasgow; Polish, French and Canadian troops were based throughout the country; there were civilians from Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway and Spain; there were prisoner of war camps in Scotland holding both Germans and Italians. Later in the war, US military troops were also based in Scotland, of which about ten per cent were black. One wartime logging unit was made up of 900 men from British Honduras (now Belize).
I lived in Jamaica as a child and completed my first three years of school there, and over the past ten years I’ve become fascinated by the role of Caribbean men and women serving in Britain in World War II. I first became aware of them when I was writing Code Name Verity. I’d wanted to include a black airman at the end of that novel (and I did), because I hoped to paint in a little diversity among the mostly European and white cast of characters. My original plan was to make that airman American. But when I started digging, of course I discovered that the only black Americans to fly in World War II were the Tuskegee Airmen. They didn’t fly in France and they didn’t fly in bombers and they didn’t fly in integrated crews, and I needed my airman to do all those things, so I made him Jamaican instead of American. Out of some sixteen thousand men and women from the Caribbean serving in the military in World War II, about five hundred were enlisted in the Royal Air Force. The United States segregated their armed forces back then: the British, however reluctantly, did not. (When the US entered the war, the British bent over backwards to accommodate American Jim Crow regulations, resulting in frustration and resentment from servicemen and local populations all over the United Kingdom.)
It wasn’t just Caribbean men who volunteered to join the war effort. Considering themselves to be British subjects and motivated by patriotism, about six hundred Caribbean women joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service to support their ‘mother country’ in World War II. Another eighty served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. They felt that they were fighting against the more ferocious institutionalised prejudices of Nazism – despite the ironic and infuriating prejudices they faced from their own governing bodies. For example, when the British sent two hundred Caribbean servicewomen to work in Washington, DC, only white women were eligible for the assignment, so as to avoid offending the Americans.
Louisa Adair is not really based on anyone but herself, but a starting point was Lilian Bader. Bader was born in 1918, in Liverpool, England, to a West Indian father and an English mother. After both her parents died she was raised in a convent school where she stayed until the age of twenty – it took her longer than most of her peers to find work because of her colour. When Britain entered World War II she joined the NAAFI (which ran military canteens), and early in 1941 she entered the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she was trained as an aircraft-instrument repairer, achieving the rank of acting corporal – and she even got taken up in a Royal Air Force plane so she could see flight instruments in action. Her experience of being taunted as a Nazi by a group of evacuee children who had never seen a German, or a black person, inspired Louisa’s unsettling experience on the bus to Stonehaven.
Only one Jamaican (a white man) flew in the Battle of Britain, possibly the only Caribbean man to do so, though several others, some of them black, flew British fighter aircraft later in the war. The Jamaican who fought in the Battle of Britain was Pilot Officer Herbert Capstick, nineteen years old in the summer of 1940. He was the navigator in a Bristol Blenheim aircraft. After changing squadrons later in the war, he was part of a crew who sank a U-boat in 1942.
I might not have ever paid much attention to the type of plane Herbert Capstick flew, except that a chance remark of Jamie’s in Code Name Verity forced me to create a Blenheim squadron for The Enigma Game. I must have done a quick search, ten years ago, to see what kind of bombers were being flown early in the war, and assigned Jamie to Blenheims. When I began writing this book, after only a little research I soon became obsessed with these overlooked Royal Air Force light bombers.
Thousands of Bristol Blenheims were in service at the beginning of the war, fighting in both the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain; the first bombing raid against Germany was made in a Blenheim. Blenheims were the most plentiful of the RAF’s aircraft as the war began, and more aircrews were lost flying them than any other type of RAF plane. As Jamie mentions, only one Blenheim pilot, Flying Officer Reginald Peacock, became an official ace by shooting down five German aircraft during the fierce air wars of 1940. I didn’t make up the story of the Blenheim crew who flew all the way back to their own base after a mission, shut down the engines, and died on the runway before they were able to climb out.
There is only one Blenheim flying today, rebuilt from parts, and based at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, England. A Canadian version of the Blenheim known as the Bolingbroke is currently being restored to ‘ground-running condition’ at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario, and a few other examples survive in static museum exhibits. I spent a day checking out the Blenheim on permanent display in the RAF Museum at Hendon, London, where the docent was kind enough to remove the front cockpit escape hatch so I could stick my head up into the nose of the plane (as Jamie does when he’s inspecti
ng 648 Squadron’s aircraft in the rain) and try to imagine what it might be like to fly in it. Standing next to this Blenheim’s wing, with my head level with the rear gunner’s turret, I found my heart aching at how small the plane is. It is much smaller than other twin-engined bombers. It is two feet shorter than a Spitfire fighter plane and only a foot taller than a Messerschmitt 109 fighter. Its crew of three must have been tightly packed. And as one Blenheim pilot put it, if you met German fighter aircraft while you were flying, you didn’t come home.
But the RAF continued to use these planes well into the war, in Africa and the Far East as well as at home. As the war progressed, the armour and armament improved, and the Blenheims were often equipped with early and experimental radar. Jamie’s fictional 648 Squadron is most closely based on the real 248 Squadron, who also flew out of Scotland over the North Sea in the winter of 1940–1941. In real life, 248 Squadron did indeed pick up foreign language radio transmissions which they believed to be German.
The idea of overhearing German radio transmissions leads me to ‘Odysseus’ and his mission. Felix Baer’s landings in Scotland were inspired by two unrelated wartime incidents: the flight of Rudolf Hess made on 10/11 May 1941, and the interception of a German bomber whose crew defected to the United Kingdom on 9 May 1943. Rudolf Hess was, believe it or not, Hitler’s Deputy Führer when he flew to Scotland in a Messerschmitt 110 Luftwaffe night fighter fitted with long-range fuel tanks. Hess had consulted the aircraft designer himself, Willy Messerschmitt, about modifications and training on the aircraft to enable him to make the flight. To this day, no one is really sure what Hess hoped to achieve. Theories are that he might have had key information to deliver about Germany’s imminent invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941; or he may have been invited by British Intelligence; or he may have acted as an emissary on behalf of someone else.
The Enigma Game Page 32
