We'll Meet Again (5 page)

After the preliminary greeting, Mr Welchman turned to Prue. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he said. ‘Education, interests, that sort of thing.’

‘Why?’ she demanded.

‘You are curious, I understand that, but I need to get to know you so, I’m afraid, you are going to have to indulge me and answer my questions. It is important, not idle curiosity.’

‘I was taught at home until I went to Rodean and then to Switzerland …’

‘Finishing school?’

‘No, university. I studied languages.’

‘Ah. What languages?’

‘German and French.’

‘What do you make of this?’ He pushed a piece of paper across his desk to her.

At first what was written on it seemed a jumble of meaningless letters arranged in groups of five, but on closer inspection she
realised they were German words with the spaces in the wrong place. Once she had separated them, the translation was easy. ‘“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”,’ she read aloud. ‘Mr Churchill’s words.’

‘Good.’ He took the paper away and replaced it with another. ‘Try this.’

She puzzled over it for some time. ‘It doesn’t make sense as it stands,’ she said. ‘But if you replace all the “o”s with “e”s and the “g” with a “c”, it reads:
“Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen, da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.”
’

‘And the translation?’

‘“For just when ideas fail, a word comes in to save the situation.” It’s Goethe.’

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘We can use you.’

‘For my German?’

‘Among other things. Do you want to do something for the war effort, something important, so important that I cannot tell you anything about it until you get there?’

‘Sounds intriguing. Yes, of course.’

‘Go home now. Report to Commander Travis at Bletchley Park at noon on Monday morning. Be prepared to stay.’

‘Where’s Bletchley Park?’ she asked.

‘It’s a country house in Buckinghamshire, about fifty miles north-west of London. You can get there easily by train from Cambridge.’

They shook hands and Prue and her father left. They found a restaurant where they had a frugal lunch.

‘It’s all very mysterious,’ Prue said, looking with distaste at the meat pie on her plate. ‘I’m intrigued.’

‘I expect it’s translation work of some kind.’

‘That doesn’t sound very exciting.’

‘Depends what it is you are translating. It could be secret stuff.’

‘Secret! Whatever will we say to Mama?’

‘Oh, we’ll think of something. She will be glad you are not going to be in the services, I expect.’

‘Papa, have you engineered this?’

‘No, not at all. Alice Harridan is going to do similar work, according to her father. He told Edward Travis about you and Travis told Gordon Welchman, who is responsible for recruiting suitable people.’

‘I haven’t seen Alice since school. She was a bit of a swot, I remember. The rest of us used to tease her about it.’

‘That was unkind.’

‘She didn’t seem to mind.’

They finished their meal and took a taxi to Liverpool Street station to catch a train, and arrived home in time for dinner.

Being told by her husband that Prue was going to do office work in a country house and would be in no danger at all, the Countess accepted that her daughter was going to be leaving home. ‘It’ll be like going back to school,’ Prue told her. ‘I’ll be home for the hols.’

Gilbert left on Sunday evening and on Monday morning Prue caught a train to Cambridge. It wasn’t until she left the train at Bletchley and was standing on the platform looking about for a porter that she realised Alice had been on the same train. They greeted each other warily. Alice was little different from the schoolgirl Prue had known. She still wore her hair cut short and spectacles on a rather aquiline nose. She was wearing a tweed suit and flat-heeled shoes, in contrast to Prue’s wool dress, warm cape and high heels.

They soon discovered there was no porter and they would have to hump their cases to the park. ‘That’s it,’ the ticket collector told
them, shrugging towards a high, chain-link fence. ‘If you follow the path round that, you’ll come to the gate.’

‘My God, it looks like a prison,’ Prue said, as they struggled along the path. They could not see what was on the other side for trees. Her case was heavy and she was beginning to wish she had packed fewer clothes and had the rest sent on. ‘Do you think they’ll dress us in overalls with arrows on them?’

‘I was told security would be tight,’ Alice said. ‘I’m sure you were too.’

‘Do you know what we’re going to do?’

‘No idea.’ They had reached a guarded gate and, on giving their names to the sentry, were allowed in and made their way up to the house, passing a lake and several newly constructed wooden huts on the way. There were people, quite a lot of them, going in and out of these huts, some in naval uniform, some in khaki, most in civvies. They paid no attention to the newcomers, who made their way to the front entrance of the sprawling inelegant mansion and announced their presence to a receptionist who sent them upstairs to Commander Travis’s office. He was a plump, balding man with an engaging smile, who told them he was the deputy head of Station X.

‘I knew your father well, many years ago,’ he told Prue as they shook hands. ‘How is he?’

‘He is well, thank you.’

He moved on to Alice, shook her hand and mentioned her father too. It seemed this was a job for the boys or, in this case, girls.

‘The work we do here is highly sensitive,’ he said, after telling them to be seated. ‘I cannot stress that too strongly and so before we go any further, you are required to sign the Official Secrets Act. It means you cannot under any circumstances tell anyone what
you are doing here, and I mean no one, not even your nearest and dearest.’ He handed them each a sheet of paper and a pen and watched them read and sign it. ‘You will be assigned to different sections of our work and you do not speak of it, even to each other. Is that clear?’

‘As crystal,’ Prue said, handing back her signed paper. Alice did likewise.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the Government Code and Cypher School, GC & CS for short, also known as Station X, but we always refer to it as Bletchley Park or BP. I’ll have someone show you where you’ll be working and order a car to take you to your digs.’

‘We’re not living in, then?’ Prue said. ‘I thought all the huts …’

‘They are where we work, not where we sleep. I am afraid there is no accommodation on the premises, but because we work a twenty-four-hour shift system and people are coming and going all the time, we have buses and cars to bring you in and take you home. The billets have been chosen with care, but you do not say a word to your hosts about your work. I doubt they will ask.’ He rang a bell and a girl in a W.R.N.S uniform appeared and was told to take Prue to Hut Six and Alice to Hut Eight.

Hut Six was a long building with a central corridor and rooms to the left and right in which people of both sexes worked at plain desks. Prue found Mr Welchman in the first of them. Having ascertained that she had signed the secrecy document, he explained what was happening. ‘In a nutshell we are in the business of intercepting and decoding enemy radio traffic, most of which is brought to us by motorcycle from listening stations,’ he said. ‘The enemy uses a very clever machine called an enigma, to encipher their messages. Our job is to find the key to unscrambling it all and thus reading what they have to
say. We pass the decoded information on to whoever needs it.

‘We have a modified Type X machine made to work like an enigma, and other more complicated electro-mechanical machines called bombes, which do the job of checking what we think might be the key, but they won’t work unless we have a crib to start them off, things like call signs, transmission times, the length of the message and, more often than Herr Hitler would like if he knew about it, the silly mistakes of the German operators. Without those there are 58 million million million possibilities.

‘Our work is further complicated because there is no universal setting; every section of the army, navy, air force and intelligence services all use different machines and different settings and they are changed every twenty-four hours on the stroke of midnight. Then we have to begin all over again.’

‘Gosh! What a task. Can it be done?’

‘Oh yes, we are doing it. In this hut we are dealing with German army and air force signals. Other huts are doing other things and working on different aspects of decrypting, but you do not need to know about those. I have only told you this much so that you can understand how vital the work is and how important it is to be accurate and never to breathe a word to anyone of what you do.’

‘I understand.’

‘The decoded messages are in German, naturally, and that is where you come in. You will be working next door in Hut Three. I’ll take you there now to meet Commander Saunders.’

It was in Hut Three that the five letter groups were separated into German words, a process called ‘emending’ and then passed to the translators who sat round a table with the leader of the Watch facing them. ‘Sometimes there are gaps in the message because of poor reception or the mistakes of the sender and these
can sometimes be guessed at,’ she was told. ‘Or we could ask for it to be run again or sometimes the same message would have been sent to someone else and that might reveal the answer. It is painstaking work and needs accuracy, dedication and the utmost secrecy. The enemy must never know how we have obtained our information. In fact, most of our own side don’t know either. When we send on the information, we have to say it comes from a most reliable source. Sometimes we make it look as though it is a report from a spy.’

‘I understand.’ Now she understood that strange translation she had made for Mr Welchman. Only later would she realise that had been child’s play to what she would be asked to do.

‘I’ll take you back to the office to find out what shifts you are on for the next three weeks,’ Mr Welchman said, leading the way back to the main house. ‘There’s a canteen and some facilities for recreation. Is there anything else you want to know? About your job here, I mean. There is no need for you to know what everyone else is doing. It is actively discouraged. Oh, and you will need to know the password to get around in the grounds.’

‘Am I allowed to write letters?’

‘Of course you are, but they will be censored, naturally. And letters addressed to you must come via a box number at the Foreign Office. No post leaves here with a Bletchley post mark either. Letters are taken away from the site to be sent from a number of different locations. Now I suggest you go and have some lunch and then find your billet. Admin will tell you where that is. Report to Hut Three …’ He consulted a chart on the wall of his office. ‘Sixteen hundred hours.’

So she was going to be on Watch B, the evening shift, which didn’t give her much time to settle into her billet before starting
work. She felt excited and a little apprehensive and would have loved to tell her mother or Tim what she was going to do, but she could not say a word. She would write to Tim tonight and give him the Foreign Office box number, though what she would tell him, she was not at all sure. As to what to tell her mother, that posed an even bigger problem.

A wren in uniform came to drive her to her lodgings in the town, and she picked up her bag and followed her guide out to a large Humber car.

‘We’ve found your aunt,’ the Red Cross lady told Sheila. ‘You were right, she does live in Bletchley. Her name is Mrs Constance Tranter and she is a widow. She has agreed to take you in.’

‘What about Charlie?’ They were talking in the Bennett’s front room. June was busy pouring out tea for them.

‘We have no information about him, I’m afraid, but if we hear anything we’ll let you know straight away.’ She paused. ‘I think that after all this time we will have to assume he perished.’

She didn’t want to hear that, however true it might be. ‘When am I to go?’

‘As soon as you are ready.’

‘I’m ready now. It isn’t as if I’ve got much to pack.’ She had never been used to much in the way of possessions but even so her wardrobe was meagre by any standards. Besides the clothes she was wearing she had a wool skirt, two blouses, a cardigan, two pairs of pyjamas, some underwear, socks and stockings, a pair of slippers and toiletries, all donated, none of it new. There was also a rucksack to put them all in. With the money she earned she
had bought a second-hand dress, an overcoat, a scarf and a pair of gloves. The Indian summer had gone and there was a distinct nip in the air as September came to an end. She had also treated herself to a little make-up for her pride’s sake.

‘You don’t need to rush off today,’ June said. ‘Tomorrow will do.’

Sheila didn’t want to go at all. It meant leaving her family behind. The fact that all but one of them had been buried and all that was left of them were seven new graves, side by side in the churchyard, made no difference. She felt as if she were deserting them, turning her back on everything she had known and loved. More importantly it meant abandoning her search for her brother. When not at work, she and Chris had combed the streets between her old home and the docks, looking for him. They had found no sign of him, no evidence at all that he had ever existed. She had steeled herself to go to the morgue and the places where they laid out the dead, but Charlie was not among them. ‘If he’s not there, he must still be alive somewhere,’ she had said to Chris, ignoring the fact that many bodies were so mutilated they could not be identified, a fact she was well aware of but refused to acknowledge.

Chris had been a stalwart, putting up with her moods which swung from despair to hope, from snapping at him to leaning on him to cry out her misery, anger and frustration. She would have to say goodbye to him too. And what would she find at the end of her journey? The Red Cross lady’s words, ‘agreed to take you in,’ sounded as if her aunt had needed some persuasion.

‘You needn’t stay there if you don’t like it,’ Chris said, when she told him later that day as they walked the streets. ‘You can always come back to live with us. The evacuation’s on again and Ma’s going to send the kids to the country. There’ll be room.’ Chris’s younger brothers and sisters had been evacuated the year before,
but when the prophesied bombing had not happened their mother had brought them home again, as many others had done, which made the present bombing all the more dreadful. There had been raids every night since that fateful one that had killed her family, adding more damage, more casualties.

‘Thank you,’ she said, dully. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

‘You’ll write to me, won’t you? Tell me how things are.’

‘Course I will. I’m not going far away.’ Her grief had made her numb to all other feelings: hope, joy, love, even to misery. To give Chris his due, he had tried to understand and had stuck by her even when she was ratty or silent, walking the streets with his arm about her shoulder or sitting silently beside her in the Bennett’s front room, while she stared at the wallpaper with unseeing eyes. He was her prop and she was going to miss him more than she liked to say. ‘I’ll be back.’

He came to see her off, carrying her rucksack on the bus to Euston station. On the platform he gave it to her and made a clumsy attempt to kiss her. She turned her head away and his lips contacted her ear lobe. Afterwards, sitting in the train with the rucksack on the luggage rack above her head, she regretted that. Poor Chris! He had been so good to her and she had not even let him kiss her goodbye. As soon as she was settled she would write him an affectionate letter to make up for it.

Settled was hardly the word she would use by the time she went to her room that night and took out her pencil and notepaper. She had started off on the wrong foot simply by addressing her aunt as Auntie Connie.

‘I am your Aunt Constance,’ the lady had said repressively. ‘I wish you to address me properly.’ She was tall and thin, with iron-grey hair pulled back tightly into a bun. She wore a black skirt and a grey twinset. There were pearls at her throat.

‘Sorry. It’s what Mum said and I thought …’

‘Your mother never did have any sense of what was right and proper. She would never have married Walter Phipps if she had, but then what choice did she have?’

‘Pa was a fine man and a good father. He always thought of others before himself and he died doing his duty. I won’t have you insulting him, nor Ma neither. She was a smashing mum and we all loved her.’ Anger prevented her from weeping, which she might easily have done under the circumstances.

‘Your loyalty does you credit, I give you that. Now, let’s take your things up to your room and settle you in.’

Victoria Villa was a detached four-bedroom house whose name was etched in the lintel above the front door. It was double-fronted with bay windows either side. Inside it was well furnished and spotless and smelt of disinfectant and Mansion polish. The hall and stairs were covered in fawn carpet. Sheila followed her hostess up the stairs and was shown into a small bedroom at the back of the house. There was a single bed beside which was a little table, a built-in wardrobe, a dressing table and an upright chair. The floor was laid with linoleum and there was a single rug alongside the bed. ‘This is your room,’ her aunt told her. ‘You will keep it clean and tidy at all times and you will avoid making a noise. I have another guest who is working on shifts and she sometimes needs to sleep during the day. She is, for your information, a real lady. Her father is the Earl of Winterton and her brother is a viscount. But you don’t need to worry about that. You are never likely to meet them.’

‘I shan’t be here much during the day, shall I? I have to find a job to pay my way.’

‘Of course but, until then, you can help me in the house. My daily help has left to do war work.’ While she spoke she opened
Sheila’s rucksack and began taking garments from it and holding them up for inspection. ‘Is this all you have?’ It was said with an expression of distaste.

‘Yes. Most of it was given to me by the Red Cross. I only had what I was wearing on the day the house was bombed.’

‘It’s adequate for you, I suppose.’ She tidied the clothes away in the wardrobe and drawers and put the empty rucksack on top of the wardrobe. ‘The bathroom is at the end of the landing and the water can be heated by turning up the pilot light on the geyser. I do not expect you to spend long in there and you will leave it as you find it. Lady Prudence Le Strange will take precedence, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Sheila said with bitter irony while she wondered what the lady would be like. A carbon copy of her aunt perhaps?

‘Good. I am glad you understand. Now let’s go down to the kitchen. Ah, that sounds like the bus. Lady Prudence will be in time for tea.’

They had reached the hall when the front door opened and a young woman breezed in. She could not have been more unlike a Puritan aunt. She was tall, fair-haired and well-proportioned, but it was not that which attracted Sheila, it was her cheerful smile and expressive blue eyes. ‘You must be Sheila,’ she said, holding out her right hand. ‘Mrs Tranter told me she was expecting you today. Welcome to Bletchley.’

Sheila shook the hand. ‘Thank you, miss.’

‘My lady,’ her aunt corrected her.

‘Nonsense,’ Prue said. ‘I’m Prue. I can’t be bothered with all that “my lady” stuff.’

‘You will be ready for a cup of tea,’ Constance said, ignoring that. ‘I was just going to put the kettle on.’

‘Oh, good. I’ll dump my bag in my room and be down in a jiffy.’ She raced up the stairs two at a time.

‘I don’t know what the world is coming to,’ Constance said, watching her go. ‘Come, Sheila, into the kitchen with you.’

The kitchen was large, with a red-tiled floor, a kitchen range as well as a gas cooker. There was a gas water heater over the deep white sink and a long dresser on whose shelves crockery was displayed. It had drawers and cupboards beneath the shelves. A small table stood in the middle of the room. A tabby cat snoozed in a basket by the hearth. Sheila bent to stroke it. ‘What’s it called?’

‘It is a she and her name is Tiddles. She keeps the mice down. You can set out the tea tray while I make the tea.’

Sheila had no idea what was meant by ‘set out the tea tray’, but was soon being instructed by her aunt. ‘Tray cloth first,’ she said, pointing to a drawer in the dresser. ‘Cups and saucers, milk in a jug, sugar in a bowl, the stand for the teapot.’ Each item was accompanied by a pointing finger. ‘You will find tea plates in that cupboard and a cake tin. The cake goes on a stand. That’s it, there. You will need a knife from the drawer.’

By this time the kettle was beginning to sing on the gas stove, a much more elegant version of the stove that had been in their own kitchen. Her aunt warmed the pot, added three spoonfuls of tea leaves and then the boiling water. ‘Have you brought your ration book?’ she asked. ‘I will need that.’

‘It’s in my bag. I’ll fetch it.’

‘Not now. It will do after we have had tea.’ She removed the third cup and saucer, picked up the tray and carried it into the sitting room whose bay window looked out onto a small front garden and beyond that the street. It was furnished with a three piece suite, a display cabinet containing ornaments, a book shelf, a bureau and a small coffee table on which Constance put the tray. They were joined almost immediately by Prue. She sat on the settee and patted the seat beside her. ‘Come and sit by me, Sheila,
and tell me all about yourself. I gather you’ve been bombed out.’

‘Lady Prudence,’ Constance said. ‘Sheila will have her tea in the kitchen when she has finished serving you.’

‘But I understood she was your niece, not a servant,’ Prue said.

‘Yes, but she is not used to titled company …’

‘Goodness, I won’t have anyone standing on ceremony on my account. I’ve no doubt Sheila is dying for a cup of tea. I know I am.’

Her aunt sighed. ‘Go and fetch yourself a cup and saucer, Sheila.’

‘It’s all right, I don’t mind,’ Sheila murmured.

‘But I do.’ Prue was adamant. ‘Go on, Sheila, fetch another cup and saucer. I want to hear all about you. The blitz must have been horrendous.’

Sheila escaped to the kitchen, in two minds whether to return or not. Her aunt was impossibly snobbish and she would just as soon keep herself to herself. She smiled. Lady Prudence Le Strange had the measure of the lady and was used to having her own way. She carried a cup and saucer back to the sitting room and took her place beside Prue. Prompted, she was soon telling her new friend what had happened and about her search for her brother and how kind the Bennetts had been. ‘It’s like that in our part of London,’ she said. ‘We all look out for each other.’

‘How dreadful for you. I cannot imagine what it must have been like. I’ve only got one brother and he’s in the army. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost him.’

‘I imagine you would be sort of numb, like me. I didn’t seem able to think straight and every thought led back to Ma and Pa and the kids. I tried not to think about them and at the same time I wanted to remember them, remember everything about them, the things we did, what we said to each other, the laughs we had.’

‘It sounds like a happy childhood.’

‘It was.’

‘Nine crammed into a two-up two-down,’ Constance said.

‘It wasn’t two up, two down. We had three bedrooms, a sitting room, a dining room and a kitchen. We used the dining room as a fourth bedroom and managed just fine.’

‘No bathroom. How on earth did you keep clean?’ her aunt went on. ‘But then I suppose you didn’t.’

‘We were all clean,’ she said indignantly. ‘The kids got dirty playing out, but Ma soon cleaned them up again. There was a bath hanging on the back wall. We used to bring it in when we needed a bath. The house was spotless too, Ma saw to that.’ She felt the tears gathering in her eyes as the memories rushed back, and tried unsuccessfully to blink them back.

‘You poor thing,’ Prue said, taking her hand. ‘I won’t ask you any more questions. You tell me when you want to, when you’re ready.’

Sheila found her handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t seem to help it.’

‘You’ll have to pull yourself together if you want to find a job,’ her aunt said. ‘No one wants to employ a cry baby.’

Prue ignored her and turned to Sheila. ‘Will you be looking for a job?’

‘Yes. I’ll have to earn my keep.’

‘What can you do?’

‘I served in a general store. I was at work when the bomb fell on our house. I should have been with them all. I feel bad about that.’

‘Don’t, for goodness’ sake. It wasn’t your fault. I’m sure you will have no difficulty finding work. I might be able to help.’

‘You don’t mean up at Bletchley Park, surely?’ Constance queried.

‘Yes, why not? I can’t promise anything, of course, but I’ll do my best.’ She turned to Sheila. ‘Would you like to go for a walk before dinner? I’ll show you round.’

‘Yes, that would be nice.’ Sheila had had her dinner at the Bennetts’ before she left, but afraid to show her ignorance, she did not mention it. She fetched her new coat and joined Prue in the hall.

‘Don’t you have to go back to work?’ she asked as they set off.

‘No. We do shift work. I’m on eight to four this week.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Can’t tell you, I’m afraid. Hush-hush, you understand.’

‘Sorry I asked.’

‘She’s an old battle-axe, isn’t she? Your aunt, I mean.’

‘Yes. I never met her before today. She and Ma didn’t get on.’