The Truth in Our Lies

by Eliza Graham

  Beattie did all this with a seeming lack of tension, cigar lit, hands in trouser pockets, but he and every one of the staff at the studio knew a mistake could ruin everything. A second’s delay in starting a broadcast could alert listeners to something not being quite right. A background sound might give away the fact that the people on air were sitting in a studio in Bedfordshire, not Germany. Or a problem with the telephone lines connecting us to the transmitters might mean our so carefully composed and delivered words went nowhere.

  Live broadcasts gave us the opportunity to jump on news stories as they emerged. And they spared us the rigmarole of prerecording onto records. But if a slip was made while you were on air, there was no way of correcting it. Getting our hour-and-a-half programme safely broadcast every night except Saturday, when the slot was given over completely to a live concert band, was our responsibility. ‘If we fuck it up, it’s the end of our unit,’ Beattie regularly warned us.

  ‘Before I go, tell me how the circus piece’s going?’ he asked Micki.

  ‘Nearly finished.’ She’d done so well at interviewing and suggesting stories that he’d asked her to write up her own idea about German circuses successfully replacing the dwarfs who had formerly entertained crowds. She read what she’d written. ‘“It’s been decided that it is more humane to remove such sadly deficient specimens and offer them a kinder alternative to working for the rest of their lives.”’ Micki paused. ‘I don’t know whether I should replace “It’s been decided” with “The authorities have decided”?’

  Usually we were at pains to keep our language as simple as possible – not always the case with German state radio broadcasts. Active case, not passive. Snappy. Easy on the ears.

  ‘I like the distancing effect,’ Beattie told Micki. ‘Those monsters washing their hands of their crimes, shilly-shallying, as we say in English. Read the rest of it.’

  Listeners would know that the euthanasia programme for the handicapped had supposedly been suppressed following public protest, but would suspect it was continuing in secret. Micki’s story cheerfully stated that orphans from Hamburg were being assessed in juggling and comedic skills. Good news for circus lovers: the smaller children are just as funny as the dwarfs! And as child talent was not hard to find, the supply would not dry up. Micki had left the listener to infer why this was.

  Beattie nodded at the last point as she read it. ‘It’ll remind listeners of how many mothers died in last week’s bombing raids,’ he said.

  ‘Won’t it make German civilians loathe us even more?’ I asked.

  ‘They’ll hate the RAF,’ he said. ‘But they’ll hate their own authorities even more for letting the bombers through and not encouraging evacuations.’

  I looked again at the embroidered biblical words on the wall. Grace had sewed similar quotations for Christmas bazaars, so neat in her stitching, so good at choosing colours.

  ‘Five minutes,’ Beattie said, leaving the room.

  Micki wrote on the margins of her script. She stopped, resting a hand on her chin, a rare, faraway expression on her face. Perhaps the mention of small children had made her think of Maxi. She still hadn’t spoken much about him. I didn’t like to pry. ‘Your work is excellent,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe how quickly you’ve picked it up.’ She wrote fluently and with precision. And she was obviously very intelligent.

  Father Becker’s fingers tapped away. From time to time the typewriter emitted a dull metallic jarring as the keys tangled themselves up. Since his arrival, priest and typewriter had been fighting a daily battle of good and evil, as Beattie termed it. And that wasn’t the only battle fought. Father Becker regularly misplaced his ID papers, his glasses, his scarf. Sometimes I marvelled that he’d been able to organise himself sufficiently to follow the travel itinerary from Switzerland to Bedfordshire put together for him by Intelligence. It was a miracle he hadn’t ended up in Berlin or Moscow.

  He released the lever and carefully pulled out the typed sheets and carbon copies with the air of someone detonating an explosive. He handed me one of the copies. In his typewriter the carbons always seemed to slip out of place and were usually smudged.

  ‘Here you are, sergeant,’ he said, proudly handing me a copy.

  I just hoped this new team member of Beattie’s would be able to do justice to the script.

  7

  In the car, driven once again by Atkins, Beattie told me that the prisoner he was going to see was a lieutenant captured in North Africa and shipped here from a Middle-Eastern POW camp. He’d been accused of involvement in the execution of British prisoners near Dunkirk in 1940. Beattie folded his arms, indicating that he wouldn’t tell me more.

  I read through Father Becker’s script. Of course I wasn’t a native speaker. At a push I could pass for a German who’d lived in southern Africa or South America since early childhood. But a sharp ear would pick out a stressed consonant or drawn-out vowel that wasn’t quite right. No broadcasting in German for me. I’d been disappointed when Beattie first explained this to me, but as the weeks passed, the work I did writing and editing scripts and interviewing prisoners had consumed me. My mind felt stretched and challenged. ‘Intelligence,’ Beattie told me when I first started working for him. ‘In the usual sense of the word. This war will ultimately be won by what’s between people’s ears.’

  Sometimes I suspected it would be won by the side who could tell the best lies. And that was where I came in with Father Becker’s script: making sure the lie had been inserted seamlessly, which it usually was – for a religious man he wasn’t a bad liar. My work was often more anodyne than lying: inserting a fact that might seem like a lie but wasn’t. Sometimes I wondered whether the line between truth and lie was blurring itself in my mind. If I could almost convince myself that these stories I inserted or twisted were true, what else might I have convinced myself of? Hadn’t I told myself that I’d been kind to Patrick when I’d written him that last letter?

  A tall, upright figure in RAF uniform stood on the roadside at the village’s edge. My heart wanted to jump out of my chest at the sight of him. William Nathanson, I reminded myself. Not the other tall RAF pilot I’d been thinking of. I hoped Beattie hadn’t heard me gasp at the sight of this man.

  The car halted. Atkins opened the door for Nathanson. He sat beside me, sandwiching me between the two men. ‘Just as well transport gave me the larger car,’ Beattie grumbled. It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that they always seemed to give him this Austin Twelve.

  The blue uniform suited Lieutenant Nathanson – almost an exact match for his eye colour. His hair was a chestnut brown. Before the RAF had got hold of him a lock of it had probably fallen over his forehead. He adjusted his tall body stiffly, perhaps still suffering pain from his crash landing. Atkins cast her eyes over him before she closed the door. Most women would have done just the same.

  He appeared surprised to see me with Beattie but greeted me politely, convincingly masking anything he might feel about my face. Nathanson was an actor, after all. Though perhaps he simply couldn’t see much of the scarred side, positioned as he was to the left of me, his long legs neatly arranged so they didn’t invade my space.

  ‘Just in case you’re wondering, Sergeant Hall’s not actually my secretary,’ Beattie said. ‘Don’t ask her to make the tea – she produces a kind of insipid puddle. God knows how we’ll marry her off when this is all over.’

  I decided to ignore Beattie. ‘Sorry to drop this on you.’ I passed the script to Lieutenant Nathanson. ‘But it’s for your first broadcast tonight. Time is tight, so you might like to have a quick look now.’

  ‘Ah.’ He sat straighter in the car seat, flicking through the pages, eyes scanning the text. ‘It’s always helpful to get scripts in advance.’

  ‘I gather you’ve done this kind of work before, lieutenant?’

  He glanced at the driver. Beattie gave a reassuring nod. ‘Not black broadcasting,’ Nathanson said. ‘But the . . . ordinary kind, yes.’


  Black was what we called our broadcast mixtures of lies and truth; black not only because of what we said but because we pretended to be something we weren’t: a German radio station. Grey was propaganda, mostly truthful but unattributable material. White was the BBC and, according to them, attributable and truthful. ‘At least we in Black are honest liars,’ Beattie said sometimes.

  ‘Call him William, Hall,’ Beattie said. ‘You know me, never stand on formality.’

  ‘I’m Anna,’ I told William, who blinked as though my uniform made me in some way unfeminine and undeserving of my name. Or perhaps he’d just noticed my scarred face.

  ‘Before the war I did a bit of stage work,’ William said after a moment. ‘A few performances in repertory in provincial towns and cities.’

  ‘Hall is a thespian, too,’ Beattie said. ‘Or was. Before she moved to a job in advertising.’

  ‘Advertising?’ he said. ‘Sounds very glamorous, very Manhattan.’

  ‘I was only a copy-writer. No dry martinis at six.’

  ‘Look at us all now,’ Beattie said. ‘A team of misfits, liars and geniuses.’ William Nathanson didn’t look as if he belonged in the first two classifications. He probably played cricket in the summer. But perhaps he’d come to England too late to master the game? No, not that late: his English was uninflected – you had to live in a country from a young age for that to be the case. He was reading Father Becker’s script, a slight frown on his brow. From time to time he reached a hand to his lower spine, rubbing it as he concentrated.

  He finished scanning the script and turned to the first page again, moving his lips as he read. He stopped when he saw me looking at him, but it was me who blushed.

  He grinned. ‘It helps to speak the words to myself.’

  ‘The script may change before this evening,’ I warned. ‘If new intelligence comes up, we have to tweak.’

  ‘The motorcycles bring us information at all times,’ Beattie said. ‘I hear their tyres on the gravel and the couriers in their black boots trip-trapping up to the front door and my heart misses a beat.’

  In the front of the car Atkins coughed.

  ‘A bit like being on the stage,’ William said. ‘If a director gets it into his head to make changes an hour before curtains up.’

  For a second I was nineteen again, on a stage in an Oxford college garden, praying I’d remember the latest amendments to a script made by the enthusiastic third-year student director.

  ‘Nearly at our destination.’ Beattie’s voice had grown grim. Or it might have just been the view of the western end of Bayswater Road out of the car window, the stuccoed houses opposite Hyde Park looking tired and shabby.

  ‘Sorry you can’t come in, sergeant. But you may find the air outside fresher in more than one way.’

  ‘I’ll manicure my nails.’ I blushed at Beattie’s furious glance. ‘Sorry, sir. I’ll get on with the play.’

  The car turned right into Kensington Palace Gardens: Crown property, exclusive, with the palace itself sitting on the south-eastern side. Before the war some of Queen Victoria’s children and grandchildren had lived in the palace. It had been bombed, I remembered. If the royals were still in residence, could they have any idea who their neighbours here were?

  We stopped at the sentry point set into a barbed-wire fence enclosing three of the houses. Surely this couldn’t be the cage? Remove the fence and it looked like somewhere you’d go to visit an ambassador and worry about a speck of dirt on your white kid gloves.

  ‘Looks too gracious to be involved in anything dirty,’ William said.

  Like its neighbours, the house was huge and white-stuccoed, with the air of something imported from a more exotic landscape, yet possessing a very English kind of respectability, in keeping with the plane-tree-lined road and Victorian lanterns. Even with the overgrown garden and barbed wire, it was hard to imagine anything more violent than a disputed lawn tennis point occurring here.

  The sentry examined Beattie’s papers and nodded at William and me to hand over ours. ‘The young lady’s not going in.’ It was spoken as a statement. I bit my lip. ‘She’ll wait in the car with my driver.’ We drove in, halting in front of the door, and the men got out.

  ‘I’ll stretch my legs,’ I told Atkins.

  ‘Don’t go too far.’ She’d driven Beattie long enough to know that the job of chauffeuring him was subject to sudden changes of plan. Beattie might burst out of the door within twenty minutes and announce we were driving to Bermondsey to talk to a refugee from Poland. But Beattie knew we had to have both William and the script at Milton Bryan in time for the evening broadcast.

  The sentry eyed me suspiciously as he let me out. ‘I won’t be long,’ I told him.

  He nodded, eyes screwed into a scowl before widening as they spotted the scar tissue on my cheek. For men like him I fell into that strange category of being neither a male nor a female with a normal face. For William Nathanson I seemed to inhabit the category of human being. It was too soon to be certain, but so far I approved of him.

  I walked down the avenue. Its pavements needed sweeping, but blackbirds sang in bushes; there was little sound of traffic and probably hadn’t been even before the war. A pair of schoolgirls strolled past me in the opposite direction – some London schools had returned to the city since the air raids had eased. I caught the scent of warm leather satchels, dusty, rubbery classrooms and a snatch of conversation – beastly Mrs James and a grim arithmetic test. For a minute or so life felt ordinary, in a way it hadn’t for years.

  I reached the palace railings and peered through. Guns and sandbanks filled the gardens. How naive I’d been to imagine peacetime lingered here.

  Eyes, green, glaring, met mine from behind a tree. A fox. I’d heard they were colonising London, living on bombsites, relishing the rats that had also moved in. This was a big fellow, probably a dog fox. He smouldered at me. I couldn’t move my eyes from his. I was on his territory. His upper lip stiffened into a growl before he slipped between two bushes and disappeared.

  I clung to the railings, feeling dazed. Ridiculous. I’d survived a fire and yet a small wild animal had shaken me. Vermin in Kensington Palace Gardens. I smiled – an anecdote to relate later. Something more useful too, perhaps? I let go of the railings and took my writing pad from my satchel, mind whirring. I rested the pad against the trunk of a plane tree and scribbled a note to myself.

  German cities were experiencing an increase in animal invasions – not just foxes, but perhaps wolves? Good news: authorities have succeeded in reducing the numbers of invading wolves in whatever-the-city by almost a quarter this week. New ways of dealing with the problem continue to be researched. Or would rats be less newsworthy but more worrisome to a German housewife? I replaced the pad in the satchel and retraced my steps to the fenced-off mansions. The sentry scowled at me again. ‘Papers?’

  I handed them over.

  ‘These don’t give you access to this centre if you’re not accompanied by someone with clearance.’

  ‘I’m one of Mr Beattie’s team.’

  ‘Where does it say that?’ He made a play of squinting at my papers.

  ‘You know I’m with him.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You saw me with him in the car just half an hour ago.’

  The guard stared at the scars on my face again without even trying to hide his smirk. If only I could wear civilian clothes and my veil, keep my face hidden. Damn Beattie for not getting me properly transferred over to a civilian role when he took me on. It suited him for me to be uniformed. Perhaps it gave the unit a note of respectability.

  ‘Dear me, someone’s had a bit of a burn,’ he said. My hands curled up into fists.

  Atkins was still leaning against the car, smoking and watching us. She walked over slowly towards us.

  ‘Everything all right?’ She raised a well-shaped eyebrow at the sentry. ‘Mr Beattie will be expecting Sergeant Hall to be waiting in the car.’

  He grunted
and opened the gate for me. I muttered a ‘thanks’ to her as we returned to the Austin. She shrugged it off. ‘The man’s an idiot.’

  I took a breath, annoyed and shaken by my reaction to the guard. I needed to pull myself together. Millions facing death all around the world and Anna Hall was still over-sensitive about her face?

  I sat back in the car and took out my writing pad, as much to calm myself down as for work purposes. ‘I saw a big dog fox,’ I told Atkins. ‘Bold as brass, just standing there.’

  In the rear-view mirror, Atkins’ eyes widened. ‘I’ve heard they’re moving into cities.’

  I returned to my notes. This was a quiet workplace, away from Father Becker’s unrhythmic typing and Micki’s commentary on the landlady’s West Highland terrier chasing squirrels in the garden. Atkins took knitting needles and wool out of the glove compartment. ‘Shouldn’t do this in uniform,’ she told me, ‘but I’m desperate to finish.’

  ‘A jumper?’ I asked.

  ‘For my old dog. It may be spring, but Millie feels the chill, so I unpicked this old cashmere cardigan to make something for her.’ Her eyes, a child’s light-blue, met mine.