The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

‘My pleasure. Again.’

  The dog looked back at her over its shoulder this time, as they marched off.

  Nijinksy, she thought. And he was so like a ballet dancer with his high-stepping paws and his moody eyes. Dickie would love that; she would have to write to him. But what a name for a hunting dog. So very typical of Hut 3, she thought, turning towards the cottage gate. The intelligence hut. If she’d been asked that night to make a play of Hut 3 she would have her cast already mapped out. A stout army man with a bristling moustache whose plain clothes weren’t fooling anyone. Two or three Felixes — handsome Cambridge boys, wanting for soap but sensitive enough, good at languages. Not codebreakers. An American, some impossibly leggy eighteen-year-old girls, gooey. Then she wondered what the Hut 3 watch would come up with if asked to make a play of 6.

  Mathematicians, male and female, tweed, fearsome women with the keys to the indexes round their necks. And in the Decoding Room, a frazzled typist with scarlet hair. That would be her. They would have to hire a costumier to pick holes in the woollen jumpers of the actors playing the cryptanalysts. There was a man in Honey’s hut – Geoffrey Bald, his name was – who sometimes came to work in his pyjamas.

  She held the parcel close to her face. The postmark was foreign; that was what was different about it, the alphabet. She looked up the street to see if she could spot Felix Plaidstow or the dog but they had melted into the blackout.

  At the front door she turned her latchkey stealthily. The smell in the hall was moist and sharp; tinned mandarins and suet. There would be a tray left in the kitchen, that was the evening meal way. She jumped, as she always did, when she caught the glow of Mrs Steadman’s luminous bird hanging on the hatstand. It was removable and could be pinned to any number of headpieces, or, in an emergency, used as an enormous brooch; a precautionary measure to being run over by cars or bicycles in the blackout, government advised.

  Mr Steadman was lurking under the stairs in his dark overalls, fiddling with one of the narrow shelves that served as bunks in case of air raids. Bletchley had taken only three hits during the months London was battered, none of them this far south. But every night Mr Steadman muddled with his sandbags and his bullseye lamps and his ration boxes under the stairs. In those three raids, Mrs Steadman had crowded them all into that poky cupboard armed with bowlfuls of raw carrots. She held no truck with the Anderson shelter in the garden or the Morrison shelter in the kitchen. She didn’t believe in corrugated iron or wire cages. Her aunt had been killed in an Anderson shelter that took a direct hit in Southampton. Going to the communal shelter at the brickworks was out of the question. The Steadmans despised their neighbours.

  Mr Steadman grunted something that might have been a question, and Honey muttered back something about the Ritzy being full and made towards the kitchen. She took the slippery bacon in its brown paper from her pocket and left it in the cold cupboard. From the front parlour she could hear the hum of the wireless, and the crack of knitting needles. On the hall table was a pile of balaclavas, every shade of pink going, next to a box labelled up with a War Office postal address. She wondered how the soldiers in the African desert would take to magenta.

  On the upstairs landing she noticed a sliver of pale light coming from underneath Rebecca’s doorframe, and wondered whether she should knock for once, but hadn’t the energy.

  Her own room was freezing, its spartan space filled only by a bed, a wardrobe, a small table and a chest of drawers. There was little upholstery to keep in the heat and it always felt cool, which was a boon in summertime but not now. The parcel still in her hand, her coat still on, she turned up the gaslight. She flicked with her foot the coloured rag-knot rug that lay across the centre of the room. It shifted back easily from the polished boards. One thing that could be said for Mrs Steadman, she kept a charwoman and she kept the place spotless. But that was where her hospitality ended. Honey dropped to her knees, then her bottom, then extended her long legs along the floor. The wood was warm, an oasis in the cold room, sitting directly above the parlour hearth. Downstairs Mrs Steadman nursed a glowing fire every night for herself and her husband at which ‘guests’, as she called her billettees, were not welcome.

  Honey stretched out until she was lying flat on her back, the heat seeping through the wool of her coat. It was growing thready in patches but the clothing ration meant she couldn’t purchase another until the New Year. She would have to ask her friend Moira to help mend it, she was clueless with a needle.

  After a few minutes she had thawed enough to undo the belt. She sat up and took the parcel onto her knee. Its wrapper was an odd sort, thicker than British brown parcel paper, and with that strange postmark in the corner that she now saw bore Cyrillic lettering. The paper had been stamped twice, by two separate censors, one of them British, the other with the same Cyrillic. For a second it popped into her head that it might be a bomb. She took it gingerly to her ear, to her face. The phrase curiosity killed the cat entered her mind very slowly. But there was no ticking, only the sweet woody smell.

  She slid her finger under the corner and carefully tore the top rim. Whatever was inside was wedged tight. She could feel the soft smudge of newspaper padding under her fingertip. Tearing the rest of the wrapper off, she found herself holding a tin; a gaudy red and white thing with nothing front or back but a picture of coloured pencils fanned out as if inviting you to select one.

  She frowned. Pins and needles had begun to settle in her legs and she shifted her weight. Moving sent a shiver of cool draught down from the window. She ran her finger round the rim of the tin but it was sealed. Funny, because there was something a little old-fashioned about it. Perhaps the design looked dated, or perhaps it was faded, she couldn’t tell in the light. She dug her nail into the sealant, just as she had done with the bacon in her pocket, and sliced efficiently around it. With a small pop came that smell again, sweet and musty; an older woman’s perfume, almost like her mother’s.

  She pulled away the lid and saw more paper; this time carefully pressed tissue. Thinking it to be the strangest game of pass the parcel she had ever played, she smiled as she tore the final wrapper off, the thought of the man in the dark coat, with his greyhound at heel, melting into her mind.

  In her palms was a cold, solid lump.

  It looked like a square of glass, heavily smoked, shattered, then mosaicked back together, and brown, held together by a thin foil square of steel or tin as the sandwich filling in the middle. It was only slightly larger than the width of a deck of cards, and about a quarter of an inch thick. She turned it over. On one side it was hard and glossed to a shine, on the other the surface was softer and more pliable.

  She snorted in disbelief. Was it some sort of giant brooch without backing? An ornament someone had forgotten to carve?

  The packaging sat at her feet, and she reached for it. The Russian alphabet, the boxy backwards R’s and diagonal H’s and hard Y’s. She saw it now in the postmark ‘.’One of the few Russian words they all knew in Hut 6 from books and newspaper reports. Leningrad. Where the Nazi army had arrived over a year ago. Where they had begun their assault on the structure of the east. So many decrypted signals had travelled through her hands bearing that name, it had become a keyword for the cribsters in the room across the corridor. But who in Leningrad would know her name, let alone have the will or wherewithal to smuggle a parcel past the censors and onto international post routes? And what the devil was it? Just a slab of broken smoked glass?

  She turned it in her hands, still half-fearful that it might after all be some kind of ingenious bomb, bracing the sharp corners of the square rather than the flat sides. She raised it to her nose to breathe in more of the scent. On the way up it caught the glow of the gaslamp, and a silent firework of mosaic red sprang to life; a network of cracks and veins, bubbles and pools, an impeccable tawny jewel. And that was when the pieces dropped into place in her mind, and she suddenly felt – even if she did not yet know – what she was looking at.

  Cha
pter 2

  There were two things that separated the Park estate, that sat along the lane from Bletchley station, from others like it. The first was the eight-foot chain-link fence that surrounded the perimeter, topped by curls of barbed-wire. The second was the people.

  The Park buzzed like a university campus at most times of day, but it was something else to watch at changeover time, which came every eight hours. Quarter to eight in the morning and a patch of land no bigger than the Buckingham Palace grounds would be transformed into the like of London’s Piccadilly Circus. In each direction, to and fro, close to a thousand people poured past the gates, on foot and bicycle, waving papers at the red-capped staff of the Military Police, spilling out of khaki rusting buses and grey jeeps and old glossy black Rollers requisitioned for the purpose. When the incoming buses had emptied, the night- shifters would spill onto them in the opposite direction. It was exactly like a spilling, coming off night shift, the feeling of pouring your jellied limbs into a leatherette seat, turning down the bus blind and cranking down the dirt roads to the out-of-town billets.

  You could tell the ones coming off night shift even before they got onto the buses by their faces: brains leeched of energy but still doing the jitterbug overtime. Their clothes would smell of the coke stoves kept inside the Park’s huts and sometimes the steak and kidney pudding they’d been offered at three a.m. break in the cafeteria. The Wrens — the Women’s Royal Navy Service – could be picked out by their blue uniform, skewed after a night doing whatever furtive and noisy things they did inside the wood walls of Hut 11.

  The entrance gates stood to the left of the estate, and led sidelong towards the mansion. To get the proper postcard view of the house – the sepia one that had sneaked into gift shops while the old aristocratic owners still had it — you had to wander down past the lake, towards the front perimeter. Standing, looking across the water’s cool surface, you could see the red-brick and sandstone building emerge hodgepodge beyond a bank of lawns. It was oddly shaped, made from memories of its owners’ travels: a loon-eyed gryphon, a half-barrel of faux-ancient windows, a little bit of medieval cloister taking up part of the front wall. A nub of conservatory came poking out at one side and somewhere behind it a bronze roof dome had faded into a frivolous mint green hat.

  Honey had joined the Park in late spring 1941, a year and a half ago. Then, the odd angles had looked beautiful and eccentric; Sahara gold and hot red. But in winter, on an overcast day like today, it had the look of a joke out of season; a jester’s costume in an old wardrobe. Soon after she’d arrived she’d found herself pressed at lunch between a debutante scandalised at its vulgarity and a messenger girl gaping at its glamour.

  It was to the right of the mansion, as you stared at it, that most of the wooden huts had sprung up; giant rabbit hutches for burrowing workers. Everyone employed at the Park had to stay within their own creosoted boundaries; to go into any hut other than your own was forbidden, except to the beer hut for refreshments, the administration hut with permission, or the mansion, to dine, for recreation or because you had been summoned.

  Winman, Head of 6 — Honey’s hut — liked to paste on a noticeboard in the entrance to the hut morale-boosting achievements that came from their work, and because of this Honey did have a vague mental map of what went on where. But it had its limits.

  Everything started with the raw intercepted signals that came in to Hut 6 from listening stations around the country, brought by motorcycle – she knew this as she’d had a brief stint as a motorcycle dispatch rider early in the war that had ended in tears when the roads became frosty. Or sometimes they came in by teleprinter. After the messages were logged, the ciphers were broken using cribs — snippets of messages deduced through guesswork – and other cryptanalytical hocus-pocus. It was then that the stack of intercepts would come to Honey and her colleagues in the Decoding Room. Usually there were four or five of them on shift, each with a Typex machine rigged up to the decryption settings of that particular broken key — for there were many German keys in a day — and they would churn their way as fast as they could through the pile of intercepts. Hut 3 was where the final decoded messages went, for assessment or analysis for action in the field. Sometimes the men from Hut 3 would come through looking for a duplicate or missing message. More often than not the two huts communicated only by a wooden pulley and box, linking them.

  Between them 3 and 6 dealt with army and Luftwaffe signals. Hut 2 was where the beer was found. Or black tea or powdered milk or sometimes horrid scones made with currants — dry fly cakes. Hut 1 was where you went if you had a problem with your billet. Hut 11 was the noisy hut. (No one knew what the machines did but according to a cribster called Wilf the Wrens who operated them all got so hot in there that they worked in their underwear. This had not been verified.) Huts 4 and 8 were connected in the same way 3 and 6 were. Huts 5, 7, 9 and 10 did God knows what. She didn’t think there was a Hut 12, but there were other small toilet huts and garages and cots at the back of the mansion where they kept pigeons. Perhaps Hut 7 was for the pigeon boys.

  She creaked open the door to Hut 6. The air inside was even colder than outside, a stale coldness like a cheese store. The windows in the hut were closed and blacked out, and coke stove fumes seeped out from under each room door into the main corridor in acrid channels. On the notice-board directly in front of her a blotter sheet had been torn out and in pink pencil was written in capitals, ‘SOUTHHAMPTON RAID DIVERTED’, and below ‘intelligence from the YELLOW 12 December allowed RAF from Chicksands to be scrambled and German targets foiled. Winman.’

  Like everything in Britain now, signage was the enemy and the doors that branched off the hut’s main corridor were blank — you simply needed to know where you were going. Honey’s room was last on the left. There were four women in already, bent over cups of black tea steaming perfumed ribbons. At the end of the room Miss Mooden, Head of Room, sat at her neatly stacked desk beside a black Bakelite telephone. Honey took the desk nearest the door. Beside her Typex, underneath the lamp, someone had left a magazine open: ‘Ask Sister Mary: Headaches and Boils.’

  No one had started yet. The machine in front of her sat like a grumpy toad, waiting. The Typexes were clumpy plastic-and-steel typewriters, about three and a half feet wide, with extra cogs sprouting from the sides and a reel on top that formed the toad’s hump. Coiled around this reel was a roll of thin white tape that spat out the letters as you typed. She ran her fingers around the mechanics to check nothing was loose and everything was oiled. The in-trays were empty, which meant the night shift had worked through the previous day’s keys, and no one had broken into the next day’s yet.

  In a quiet voice Mooden was explaining the work to a new girl standing by her desk. ‘You can do the pasting today. It’ll be very fast once they get typing. But the pasting’s easy. You don’t need to think about anything, just cut the tape they give you into strips and stick them to a piece of paper with that brush.’

  ‘Can I ask what’s a crib? And is it the same as a menu?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Oh.’ Mooden’s face froze. She looked round to see if anyone would jump in to help her, or perhaps if anyone was going to listen in while she muddled through an explanation. Honey saw her eyes land on Moira Draper, sitting at the next station.

  ‘Moira, could you . . .?’

  ‘I’ve not even had my tea yet.’ Moira had her hand round the back of her own machine, straightening out the wires. ‘You don’t need to know what those are, love, it’ll come with time.’

  ‘We’ll just stick with the pasting today, I think, since it’s your first day. Don’t worry if you hear any funny words. Moira can help you if you get stuck.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Beatrix Loughborough — Lady if you believed the rumours – was saying, across the table from Honey. ‘What I heard was that she was followed by a man all the way from the station. No one knows whether he’d come into the town from outside, or if he was from town.’ Beatrix was at the machine
directly opposite, bent forward whispering to the others. Next to her Sylvia, a quiet girl from Aberdeen, was picking around the edges of her cuticles, pressing back the skin.

  ‘But surely . . .’ interrupted Moira, then trailed off as Beatrix steamed on.

  ‘She said, or rather what I heard she said was that she knew he was following her for some time. She turned a street too early, and he did the same.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ Honey asked.

  Moira leaned over. ‘Some girl in another hut says she was followed home by a man, couple of nights ago.’

  Honey felt her neck prickle, a draught passing.

  Sylvia said, ‘And she didn’t blow her whistle or run?’

  ‘Do you carry a whistle?’ Beatrix asked coolly. ‘Anyway, he asked for her papers,’ she mouthed the word, ‘and she showed him her identity card, and then he said, “No, your Bletchley Park papers. Show me your 1250, your BP papers.’” Beatrix paused.

  ‘I heard—’ Sylvia said.

  ‘So she showed him,’ Beatrix went on. ‘She dug in her pocket and pulled them out. She said at that point if she’d had a torch she would have shone it in his face. As it was, there was enough moonlight for her to see he had RAF chevrons on his shoulder. Not sure how many.’

  ‘No torch, no whistle,’ Moira murmured.

  ‘And then,’ Beatrix said, ‘he looked at her papers and said, “You shouldn’t have shown me these.’”

  Mooden at that moment finished a point of explanation to the new girl and there was silence.

  ‘But then what happened?’ asked Moira.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did he give her back her papers?’

  ‘I assume so.’

  ‘So he didn’t arrest her or . . . drag her into a bush?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Beatrix, leafing through a pile of loose red-stamped sheets. ‘I didn’t hear the end of the story. But I mean the point is: don’t talk to strange men. No matter what they’re wearing. Or not. Like that man fiddling with himself on the train last week.’