The Code Girls

by Daisy Styles

  ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,’ he intoned.

  Ruby wailed in agony when the coffin was covered over and wreaths were laid.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she sobbed. ‘Take me, too, let me be with him in heaven. Please, take me!’

  Back at Walsingham Hall, Ava gave Ruby a sedative, and she fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

  Upstairs, Bella was talking to her mother. ‘It was good of you to come, Mummy,’ she said, as she offered her mother a large glass of dry sherry.

  ‘It was my duty to pay my respects,’ her mother answered, in a tight, choked voice. ‘After all, it was our son who killed poor Ruby’s husband.’

  Bella stared at her mother, who was visibly trembling. ‘We indulged Edward right from the start,’ Lady Caroline continued. ‘He’s brought eternal shame to the Walsingham name.’

  With tears in her eyes, she left the room, leaving Bella staring sadly after her. She had never heard her mother say a word against Edward in all her life. She wondered if her father would say anything, or would he stay in denial, giving no comfort to his heartbroken wife?

  About an hour later, the wake ended as the RAF servicemen from Holkham returned to their base for duty. Clearing away the empty dishes, Ava remarked, ‘It’s funny how folks are always starving after a funeral.’

  ‘I suppose it’s because the sadness of funerals makes the mourners happy to be alive,’ Bella said with a wry smile.

  Ruby made a worryingly slow recovery. She lost weight, grew pale and weak, and she was constantly sick.

  ‘She looks like death warmed up,’ Ava fretted. ‘I think she should see a doctor.’

  Tom drove Ruby and Bella to the Walsingham’s family doctor in Fakenham. Bella stayed with the listless Ruby throughout her examination. When the GP started pressing Ruby’s tummy, Bella grew alarmed: did she have some terrible disease brought on by shock and despair? Her anxieties doubled when the doctor drew the curtains around Ruby.

  ‘I need to do an internal examination,’ he said briefly.

  After Ruby had dressed and the doctor had washed his hands, he sat back in his chair and said with a gentle smile, ‘My dear girl, you’re pregnant.’

  Something stirred in Ruby. For the first time in weeks, her dark eyes opened wide.

  ‘Me? Expecting?’

  ‘I’d say you’re well over two months gone,’ he replied.

  Ruby turned to Ava. ‘Raf’s baby!’ she exclaimed, as tears poured down her emaciated cheeks. ‘Raf’s little baby!’

  Bella threw her arms around Ruby. She squeezed her tightly, then suddenly stopped. ‘Sorry, mustn’t squash the baby!’ she said in delight.

  Incredulous, a glowing Ruby laid a trembling hand on her tummy. ‘My Raf’s baby,’ she whispered. ‘Now I’ve got something to live for.’

  There was great joy below stairs that night. A toast of strong, hot tea was served, which Ruby, the former champion brew girl, couldn’t stomach.

  ‘I wondered why I’d gone off fags,’ she chuckled. ‘Can you believe it?’ she joyously asked her friends. ‘Raf’s not completely gone away, part of him is here, inside me, safe and sound.’

  As the weeks passed, Ruby’s morning sickness got even worse. Seeing her so pale and wan, Ava took control of the situation. ‘You’re staying in bed and only working when you’re up to it,’ she said, in her most authoritative voice.

  ‘But …’ Ruby protested.

  ‘No buts, madam, your health comes first. You need to catch up on your sleep and get some meat on your bones. We want a strong, healthy, bouncing baby, not a sickly, mewling thing.’

  Ava’s strong words had the right effect on Ruby, who, concerned for her baby’s healthy development, ate and slept better than she had since Raf had died. When the sickness abated, she insisted on returning to work.

  ‘I’m bored!’ she declared, appearing in the kitchen, bristling with energy. ‘Give me something to do.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ava, wagging a finger at Ruby. ‘But no heavy lifting.’

  ‘Stop treating me like cut crystal that’ll shatter any minute,’ Ruby protested.

  ‘You’re precious cut crystal to all of us, and we love you!’ said Ava, and hugged her smiling friend.

  As Ruby’s tummy began to swell and her figure filled out, she had the glow only a pregnant woman possesses: a secret happiness that radiated out of her entire body. At night as she lay in her bed, she smiled to herself, as her fingers travelled over her baby bump.

  ‘Look, Raf,’ she whispered, ‘our baby’s growing. I promise I’ll take care of him or her. Whether it’s a boy or a girl, they’ll know about their daddy ‒ their beautiful, wonderful, darling daddy who I’ll love till the day I die.’

  In Stalag Luft VI, a German prisoner-of-war camp in Heydekrug, a far-flung town on the northernmost tip of the country, facing the freezing Baltic Sea, Kit yearned for Maudie. After being kicked out of the barn by the irate farmer’s wife, he and Charlie had managed by an extraordinary stroke of luck to make contact with a member of the Polish resistance who led them to a safe house near Bremen. Unfortunately, one of the men, a double agent working for the Gestapo, had blown the whistle and, in a terrifying night raid, they had all been captured. The members of the resistance were shot and the rest were taken prisoner. In a filthy, stinking cattle truck the captives were driven halfway across the country to what Kit called, ‘the coldest bloody place on earth!’

  The prisoners in Stalag Luft VI were forced to work in a nearby slate quarry. Wearing their tattered POW uniforms, more holes than fabric, they hacked away at icy slabs of slate for twelve hours a day in sub-zero temperatures. Even though they had to do gruelling forced labour inflicted on them by the Gestapo, the emaciated men were barely fed and watered.

  ‘To hell with this shit!’ Kit swore, and fell on to his bunk bed, which was crawling with fleas. ‘The bastards will either beat or starve us to death!’ Furious, he jumped to his feet and stared out of the grimy window at the rows of wooden huts, all hung with long, pointed icicles and topped with a foot of snow. ‘I’m not going to die here,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I’m going home to Maudie if it kills me!’

  Galvanized, Kit joined the escape committee, which had recently learnt through a reliable agent that there were safe houses dotted along the Baltic coastline. Desperate to escape, dare-devil Kit would have considered anything, as long as it meant he could start making his way back to England.

  ‘The escape route has always previously been inland,’ a senior RAF officer on the committee explained to the group. ‘But that way it’s nearly fifty miles to the nearest safe house, which has had disastrous consequences. Escapees have frozen to death en route. If they don’t freeze to death they get frostbite and collapse then the Gestapo pick them up and shoot them on the spot, poor sods,’ he said, pausing to light a cigarette. ‘The beauty of the Baltic safe houses is they’re only a short distance apart ‒ no more than ten miles, I’m told. The escapee is in less danger of dying of cold. He can travel incognito steadily along the coastline from safe house to safe house until he can board a neutral ship.’

  ‘It’s not one hundred per cent firmed up,’ another officer commented. ‘Our man overseeing the Baltic route, Captain Helsberg, says there are risks involved at this early stage.’

  Reckless and desperate, Kit didn’t care!

  ‘Let me try?’ he begged. ‘If I get through, you and Captain Helsberg will know it’s a viable escape route and you’ll be able to send others after me.’ Seeing the senior officers wary expressions, he added persuasively. ‘If I pull it off and make contact with Helsberg, surely it would help you build up a safer Baltic network?’

  The commanders exchanged cautious looks.

  ‘Helsberg’s Danish. He operates as a fisherman on board a fishing vessel which works its way up and down the Baltic coast, picking up escapees then dropping them off, moving them on. If Squadron Leader Halliday made it safely to Helsberg, it would certainly strengthen ou
r links with the Danish resistance, maybe the Norwegians, too.’

  Seeing the argument swaying in his favour, Kit quickly added, ‘I could transmit vital information back to you, too. Come on,’ he implored. ‘I could just as easily die in the bloody slate quarry as I could on the run!’

  The officers exchanged a long look.

  ‘Well, if you don’t mind the risk, why should we stop you?’ the senior officer barked. ‘That’s if we can get you out, of course,’ he declared, as he stood up to shake hands with Kit, who was grinning with excitement. ‘Good luck, old chap. God go with you!’

  After weeks of preparation, they managed to make arrangements with the driver of a horse wagon, a Pole, that Kit should be taken out of the camp, hidden in the large inverted box which served as the driver’s seat. It was tremendously risky, but Kit’s nerve never failed – he was determined to try, whatever the cost.

  ‘God, man, aren’t you terrified?’ Charlie asked Kit, the night before his escape.

  ‘Of course!’ Kit exclaimed. ‘But I can’t stay banged up here till the end of the bloody war!’

  ‘You’ll be tortured if you’re caught, and they’ll shoot anybody who’s helped you,’ Charlie warned.

  ‘Then it’s imperative I don’t get caught,’ Kit said determinedly. ‘God! It’s got to be worth the risk.’

  Charlie clapped him hard on the shoulder.

  ‘God speed – if you get back to Blighty, give my regards to that gorgeous girlfriend of yours!’

  The following day, stuffed under the driver’s seat and smothered in straw, Kit hardly dared to breathe as the driver set off and the horse clip-clopped towards the prison gates.

  ‘Christ! Can you go any slower?’ Kit thought, as his heart raced with fear.

  The guard on duty checked the driver’s papers, then, after giving the contents of the hay cart a random stab with his bayonet, he sent them on their way. So far so good.

  The journey to the nearest town seemed to take forever, but it had its advantages, as Kit arrived at his first stopping point in the pitch dark. Slipping unseen into the safe house, he quickly burnt his POW clothes in a wood-burning stove, then changed into the fishermen’s clothes that had been left for him. After donning a navy-blue corduroy sailor’s cap, Kit looked quite the part with his thick, blond beard and wind-blasted, tanned skin. Travelling on foot, Kit made agonizingly slow progress as he moved along the coastline. But one day, bone-tired, weak from hunger and lack of sleep, he came to the outskirts of Rügen, from where he was able to make his way to the port, where he had instructions to seek out Helsberg’s fishing vessel, Mermaid. Seeing German military police lounging around, smoking in the bars dotted around the port, Kit grabbed a fisherman’s net, and flung it over his shoulder. Adrenalin coursing through his veins, he walked as casually as he could along the harbour until his keen eyes spotted the name Mermaid painted in blue on what looked like a decrepit old fishing boat.

  Captian Helsberg welcomed him cautiously ‒ nobody entirely trusted a stranger in the war years ‒ but after a few weeks of working hard, hauling in fishing nets and taking his turn on the cooking rota, Helsberg started to talk more to Kit. He asked him about the safe houses he’d used along the Baltic coast.

  ‘Jah, jah, god god,’ he said, clearly pleased with Kit’s reply.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough for helping me,’ Kit said, sincerely. ‘I’m longing to get back to England.’

  The captain shook his head. ‘You won’t be going home any time soon,’ he told a rather disappointed Kit. ‘We lost our undercover radio operator and urgently need a replacement.’

  Desperate not to be allocated a task that would detain him longer in mainland Europe, Kit prevaricated.

  ‘I’m a pilot, Captain, that’s my expertise – flying!’

  Helsberg gave him a cynical look as he replied, ‘And RAF pilots aren’t trained to use radio transmitters?’

  Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, Kit slumped in his chair and apologised.

  ‘Sorry, Captain, of course I can use a transmitter. I’m grateful for your help. Now it’s my turn to return the favour.’

  The beaming captain poured out two glasses of schnapps. ‘Welcome aboard, Englishman!’

  Over the months, as Mermaid ploughed up and down the coast, apparently fishing for tuna but all the while picking up and dropping off prisoners of war on the run, Kit proved himself invaluable. Operating the ship’s radio transmitter, he made s contact with resistance movements in Denmark, Norway and Sweden who were desperately seeking a safe passage for escapees. As soon as he was able to, Kit made contact with the escape committee he’d left behind in Stalag Luft VI, letting them know that he was with Captain Helsberg and was working undercover with him. And then he did what he really wanted to do: using the cypher he knew from experience that the Brig favoured, he sent a coded message home …

  Back at Walsingham Hall, the radio transmitter, still in the sewing room, was always in operational mode and was manned throughout the day by either Maudie, Ava, the Brig or Bella.

  ‘Even though he’s flown the coop, we must keep listening in on Edward’s frequency,’ the Brig had insisted. ‘He’d be a bloody fool to communicate with anybody, but given how arrogant and headstrong he is, he just might try.’

  ‘What makes my blood boil is he got away,’ Maudie said angrily.

  The Brig nodded. ‘It would have been a real coup to have handed him over to Military Intelligence.’

  It was Bella who picked up Kit’s message, late one autumn evening.

  ‘Hey!’ she called from the sewing room where she was doing her shift with the radio transmitter. ‘What do you make of this?’

  Holding cups of cocoa, Maudie and the Brig hurried out of the kitchen to join her. The Brig smiled as he recognized the familiar cypher. ‘It’s the four-letter replacement pattern,’ he said, nudging Bella off the chair. ‘Budge over, sweetheart, while I decrypt it.’

  Maudie watched in fascination as the Brig worked out the algorithm, then matched the coded letters. Suddenly, he stopped short.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ he yelped. Murmuring to himself, he tensely checked the message again.

  ‘Is it Edward?’ Bella cried.

  ‘No,’ the Brig answered, and turned to face Maudie. ‘It’s not Edward – it’s Kit! He’s alive – he’s on the Baltic coast.’

  Maudie cried out and dropped her mug of hot cocoa on to the stone floor. Terrified there’d been a mistake or that she’d misunderstood, she didn’t dare believe it could be true. ‘It can’t be!’

  ‘Check again, Brig,’ Bella urged.

  ‘I’ve double-checked already,’ he declared.

  ‘Send a message!’ Maudie whispered.

  ‘What message?’ he asked.

  ‘Something only Kit and his men will have known, something they shared the night of the raid,’ Maudie answered slowly. After a brief pause, she said, ‘Ask if there was a moon the night of the raid.’

  The Brig sent off the coded message, then they sat in total silence and waited. A message quickly came back.

  ‘Come on, Maudie, you can help me decode it,’ the Brig said, and put another chair beside the transmitter for her to sit on.

  Maudie keenly watched the Brig matching the letters to his cypher. ‘Bomber Moon!’ she cried as the words appeared. ‘Kit! Kit! Kit!’ she chanted, hugging herself in ecstasy.

  ‘You send a message, Maudie,’ Bella said excitedly.

  Helped by the Brig, Maudie tapped out the coded letters for Kit to read.

  ‘COME HOME, MY LOVE.’

  32. Knitting Bees

  Maudie, who had barely slept with all the excitement, radiated joy the next day.

  ‘He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive!’ she chanted like a mantra throughout the day.

  Ecstatic as she was, Maudie was careful not to flaunt it when Ruby was around; she had her love back from the dead, but Ruby didn’t. Wary of upsetting her friend, Maudie hugged her miracle to herself. Typic
ally, it was straight-talking Ruby who broke the awkward, strained atmosphere. Sitting with her friends at the table, she looked them all firmly in the eye and said, ‘I can see you’re all walking on eggshells around me and I don’t like it!’

  Maudie, Bella and Ava exchanged guilty glances.

  ‘It’s wonderful news that your Kit’s alive, sweetheart,’ she said warmly to Maudie, who clutched Ruby’s hand as tears filled her eyes. ‘I know my darling can’t ever come back, but it doesn’t stop me from rejoicing with you.’

  ‘Oh, Ruby!’ Maudie cried, as she hugged her dear, sweet friend. ‘I didn’t want to upset you.’

  ‘From the bottom of my heart, I’m happy for you, Maudie. So now,’ she added with one of her contagious giggles, ‘can you all stop pussy-footing around me, it’s driving me mad! The sooner we get the atmosphere in this kitchen back to normal, the better.’

  One golden autumn morning with fallen leaves crisp on the ground, a letter addressed to Ruby arrived from Poland. Flustered and excited, Ruby ran to find Maudie.

  ‘Look! Look! A letter from Raf’s mum and dad!’ she cried, brandishing the letter in the air. ‘It’s taken weeks to get here, and it’s been opened,’ she added breathlessly. ‘Translate it for me, Maudie, tell me what they say,’ she begged.

  ‘Dear daughter-in-law,’ Maudie dutifully translated. ‘Though our hearts are broken, we are so very grateful for your letter from Norfolk, which Rafal loved so much. It gave us joy to know you were happy together. Maybe one day we will all meet, when this terrible war is over. We have nothing left now but memories of our beautiful son. We are quite alone in our endless grief.’ Maudie stopped to wipe tears from her eyes. Ruby, stricken by their poignant words, also wept as her friend continued, ‘We want to look after the woman our son loved so much. Please would you accept from us, with our respect and affection, this financial gift.’ Maudie broke off to calculate the amount on her fingers. ‘My God! That’s nearly £1,500!’

  Ruby, who’d been poor all her life and had lived in a tiny Walsingham tithe cottage along with her family since she was born, slumped in shock in one of the Windsor chairs beside the Aga.