But apart from the worry, if I’m honest, the war so far made me grow a mite comfortable in ways I’d never expected. I didn’t think about the future – how did anyone? Should I go back to my own folk, would I marry, could I make a living? No one needed to decide any of that now, not when we might all be speaking German in another year! I might as well enjoy myself in my wartime job, enjoy being just the same as other folk.
And then in November 1940, it all turned over. After November 1940, I couldn’t be so comfortable.
It started with Nan Campbell asking me to do her a favour on my way back from delivering a load of engine parts to Deeside near Aberdeen. She had two guests arriving to stay at the Limehouse and needed help getting them there. One was Jane Warner, Nan Campbell’s ancient auntie, who had broken her hip and had to walk with two sticks. She’d just come out of hospital and had no other place in the world to go. The other was the girl Nan hired to help her auntie make the journey, and to look after her a time. Could I collect them in the Tilly from the nearest bus stop, Nan asked – the Tilly was the Hillman Minx van I had charge of, converted for carrying bags of stuff or a troop of men, with wooden benches in the back under a canvas top. Nan’s old auntie had brought piles of luggage and couldn’t possibly walk two miles to the Limehouse.
I said I didn’t mind, and when I got back from Deeside, there was the old woman waiting with her young assistant at the bus shelter on the Aberdeen road. They did make me laugh, all among their furs and their cases, when I pulled up! They looked like a pair of imperial Russian princesses running away from the Red Revolution.
The hired lassie gave me a surprise, for her smooth skin was the pale brown of milky tea or the inside of a fiddle. I wondered if crabbit Nan Campbell knew she’d hired a black girl. It had all been done over the telephone and in the post, and if this lass was anything like me, she might not have said. It’s easiest not to say, if you’re trying to get work. Unlike me, she wasn’t going to be able to hide her secret for much longer.
She was a pretty young thing, neat and small, with a heart-shaped face that looked a mite fed up at the minute. She wore a sleek black mink coat that shone more glossy than her dark hair, and she had a flute case on a long strap carried over her shoulder. The poor old lady, also bundled in a pile of fur, had fallen fast asleep waiting for me to turn up. She sat perched on one of her cases, bent with her hands clasped together over her sticks, her forehead resting on her knuckles.
I parked the Tilly at the bus stop and got out to help with the luggage. The old lady jerked awake as I slammed my door shut behind me.
I’d only ever spoken to one other black person in my life, and it had been a most uncomfortable conversation. But I was going to have to live under the same roof with this one. I swallowed hard and reminded myself she was just hired help and I was an ATS volunteer. She wasn’t going to start by calling me a dirty tinker, and I’d better not start by making her feel like a British Colonies outcast.
‘I’m Volunteer Ellen McEwen,’ I said, taking great care with it. ‘I’m the ATS driver for RAF Windyedge. I also stay at the Limehouse.’
‘I’m Louisa Adair,’ said the lassie, sharply holding out her hand, like a challenge to fight.
I shook hands with her. Her grip was very firm for somebody so slight and so polite. I made an effort. ‘What a bonny coat!’ I told her.
‘The furs belong to Mrs Warner,’ Louisa said, waving the other hand towards the old woman. ‘The only way we could get them here was to wear them!’
‘How do you do, Mrs Warner?’ I said.
‘You may call me Jane,’ said the old woman, with a look at Louisa that made Louisa smile, as if they were leaving me out of a joke between them.
‘Jane it is, then,’ I said.
I took a breath and went round the back of the Tilly to drop the tailboard so I could load up the pile of cases. It could have gone worse. Ah well!
‘Och, a gramophone!’ I sang out when I found it.
Piled on top of the biggest leather valise, to keep it off the damp ground, was a portable wind-up record player – a very good one, too, with its own loudspeaker built into a beautiful wooden case. Louisa helped me to lift it into the Tilly.
‘That’ll liven things up at Mrs Campbell’s,’ I said. ‘You’ll be popular with the airmen when the next squadron gets here!’
I was most curious about Louisa’s dark skin, but I didn’t like to ask. I didn’t let people poke their nebs into my business, and I wasn’t going to poke into hers. What must it be like, I wondered, never to be able to hide?
I tossed all our gas masks, my one as well, and Louisa’s satchel and flute and her own two cardboard suitcases, on top of the luggage in the back, and slammed the door. God pity her, how had Louisa ever managed that lot on her own? She must have hidden pools of strength. I could guess where the fed-up look came from.
It was no easy task getting Jane into the Tilly, either. Her old arthritic knees didn’t do any bending, and the seat in the cab was high. She couldn’t manage to stand on the running board. Louisa and I had to lift her in feet first – with our arms full of fur, it was like lifting a bear.
At last we managed it, and Louisa climbed in on my side to ride in the middle, and I climbed in behind the steering wheel. Louisa sat right up on the edge of the seat like a tiny tot so she could see over the dashboard.
‘And now you are high enough to get a braw view of Windyedge as we come down the lane,’ I said to them as I started up the van.
Windyedge Aerodrome sits on top of the moor above the fishing village it is named for, just south of Aberdeen. It has sat there some time, built before the Great War, in the early days of flying. About it runs a proud stone wall, with its good looks all ruined by a high wire fence topped off with barbs. The road follows the wall for a mile and a half, past lookout towers and bunkers for anti-aircraft cannons. The other side of the road is all wind-bent hedge and fields and wild woodland.
I drove through this drearysome landscape as I’d done a hundred times before, one hand resting on the gear stick and the other lightly steering as we passed along the narrow lane. The road was dry, and the clouds seemed far away, high and rippling, a sky like a wide sheet of grey river pearls.
One black spot floated low over the North Sea like a fly on my windscreen.
I blinked.
Not a spot: an aeroplane. Such a totsy wee speck before it became frightening: before I knew how close it was going to get to me.
‘That’s a German plane,’ said Louisa.
‘Don’t be daft!’ I said. ‘It’s coming in to land.’
‘I don’t know what kind it is,’ she told me. ‘But I can tell them apart. I was in London all through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.’
The plane had wings like blunt butcher’s knives, not the tapered wings of our Hurricanes and Spitfires. It screamed in low over our heads.
‘That’s a German plane,’ the lass Louisa insisted. ‘It’s a German fighter.’
‘They’d be shooting at it if it was a German plane,’ I said uneasily. ‘See the watchtower? There are guards there, with machine guns. There’s an anti-aircraft battery just below them that you can’t see from here, and another at the edge of the cliffs.’
The old woman, Jane Warner, didn’t say anything. She and Louisa craned their necks away off their shoulders and swivelled their heads around, trying to see in back of them to watch as the plane landed. But I had to keep my eyes on the road.
We passed the aerodrome entrance and its guards’ shed. The lane gives a sharp turn there, heading downhill. Below us now, Windyedge village lowered itself cottage by cottage into its dark and narrow harbour. Down there was a post office playing at being a shop, a handful of cold-looking stone dwelling places whose thatched roofs were tied down with rope so they couldn’t blow away, and a Presbyterian chapel behind a shut door, all with small, deep-set windows to keep their inhabitants in a state of eternal darkness. Beyond the harbour lurked a little beach,
but you couldn’t get to it through bales of barbed wire and concrete blocks that were supposed to keep German tanks and troops from unloading there. It felt like the most unwelcoming place on God’s earth in 1940.
You had to go into the village a ways and back up another narrow lane to get to Nancy Campbell’s pub. The pub was perched above a row of four stone arches built right into the hillside, like underground lairs. Heavy oak and iron doors fitted into the archways, and these were soundly locked and bolted to keep folk out.
‘Those are limekilns,’ I told Louisa. ‘Where they used to make lime, for concrete and plaster, back in the day. That’s why the pub is called the Limehouse. Then they got used as a prison, for deserters in the Great War, and—’
I shut up my blethering. She didn’t need to know that my two uncles had been locked up in those limekilns for a week after they got caught ‘trespassing’ on the airfield ten years ago, in peacetime – snaring rabbits. That’s my family connection to Windyedge. It doesn’t fash me – it made my mam split her sides laughing when I told her I was getting paid to work there now. But I wouldn’t want anyone to know.
The Tilly whinged and complained as it slowly climbed the steep lane past the old limekilns. Waiting for us at the top of the hill was the hotchpotch of granite walls and blue slate roofs of the Limehouse, like an old laird’s castle collapsed into the moor. A few tall Scotch pines tossed their limbs restlessly about above it in the wet wind.
The pub sign was a painting of the four limekiln arches. Louisa gave a shudder as we pulled up in front.
‘I expect you’ll find Scotland a great deal colder than where you come from,’ I said. ‘But you’ll be warm enough inside. There are gas fires in the bedrooms.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Louisa answered through tight lips. ‘I’ve only come from London just now.’
I helped to unload the old woman’s things, but I couldn’t stop to move them in. I was meant to be on my way back to the airfield, not wasting Air Ministry petrol running errands for Nancy Campbell. As I turned the Tilly to face about so I didn’t have to reverse down the lane, I saw Louisa holding the door open for the old woman. I wondered how the brown-skinned lass would cope with Nan when they met for the first time.
Not my lookout, I thought with relief, as I headed back to RAF Windyedge.
I didn’t have any idea who was in the plane that had just landed, but I didn’t take Louisa’s warning very seriously. It was likely some bigwig, or prisoner even, who needed to be shuttled someplace. The airfield staff would miss me right away if they needed me.
Sergeant Norbert Fergusson was standing outside his guard’s hut in front of the barrier to the aerodrome drive, watching the sky through field glasses.
I cranked down the window of the Tilly and leaned out. ‘What is it, Nobby?’
‘Bloody Jerry just landed on our airfield,’ he said through his teeth.
Shaness. The oath in Traveller cant hissed in my head, though I’d taught myself not to speak it aloud. Louisa had been right. It was a German plane.
‘Why didn’t we shoot him on his way in?’ I exclaimed.
‘The ack-ack lads on the north side gave him a burst, didn’t you hear? But then they stopped. He had his cockpit open, waving a big white sheet behind him, and his Luftwaffe markings are all covered up, too. Looks like he means to surrender, or something.’
‘Get the barrier up,’ I told him. ‘They might need me to drive somebody somewhere.’
‘Better you than me if there’s a bloody Jerry involved,’ said Nobby, and raised the barrier.
I went along the gravel drive as fast as I dared. I was in two minds as to whether I ought to hurry in case I got in trouble for not being about when I was supposed to, or to go slowly so I didn’t have to meet any German airmen. The Tilly’s tyres spat up pebbles behind me. I passed the concrete barracks and the aircraft hangar with its faded green paint, and pulled up in front of the operations building.
There was one plane on the airfield, a great grey ugly thing, wings like knife blades and high Perspex cockpit bulging on top like a giant one-eyed insect.
I could see what it was, up close on the ground. It was a Messerschmitt 109 fighter.
The Luftwaffe markings, German black cross and Nazi swastika, were covered up with white canvas sheets, bound tight and flat with strips of webbing. Two lads from Windyedge’s short-staffed ground crew were standing stiffly on guard in front of each wing, holding rifles. There wasn’t anyone else about – they’d all trooped into the radio room to talk to the wireless op.
I waved to the guards, but they were taking their job seriously and didn’t wave back.
So then I made a great howling mistake.
When I think on it, I don’t see how I could have known it was a mistake. I went into the operations building. It had been put up before the last lot, the Great War, one of the oldest ops buildings in the nation, and everywhere was a mite mazy and crumbly inside. I went looking for everybody.
The door to the radio room was open. I heard a low voice talking. When it stopped, I heard the high-pitched nagging bleep and click of a Morse code key.
Standing in the open doorway, where he could see who might be coming down the passage as well as all the folk gathered in the room, was the German pilot.
I foolishly didn’t take on who he was.
I thought he was a good-looking lad – tall and clean-shaven, with close-cut, mouse-blond hair. He wasn’t in uniform, maybe that’s why I didn’t guess. He wore a dark blue roll-necked sweater, like a sailor, and a knitted scarf, underneath a long leather coat. He didn’t have anything on his head. A leather bag, darker and more worn than his coat, hung on a strap over his shoulder. He stood with his booted feet parked on either side of a small wooden case, like a gramophone.
There wasn’t anything about him to tell me he was a pilot, still less an enemy one.
So I came bold as brass to poke my neb in at the door, and he just took hold of my arm – carefully, like a gentleman at a ball – and when I turned to look at his face in surprise, he raised his other hand.
He was holding a narrow black pistol.
He pulled me close against his squeaking leather coat and pressed the muzzle of the pistol firmly against the side of my head.
I could not have been more easily caught if I had been a rabbit in a poacher’s snare.
That was the moment when I learned hate.
Even more than I feared him, I hated him. I hated all Germans. I was blind with it. I couldn’t move nor think, not even to fight.
And I couldn’t fight, because now I was his hostage.
Jamie:
‘Hey, Cap’n, I’m getting another of those bastard Kraut messages in Morse code.’
Chip’s voice crackled through my headset over the roar of the Blenheim’s engines.
Silver and I had a new wireless op, Chester P. Wingate – Chip for short, or sometimes Tex because he was a full-blooded American from Texas. The USA wasn’t at war, but our Tex had come over as a sparks on a cargo liner just as the Atlantic grew dangerous: merchant vessels escorted by destroyers, civilians drowned alongside navy men, passenger lines cancelled. Chip was going home on a ship that was dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe off the South Foreland Light and it went down right under his feet. Chip was one of the lucky ones pulled out of the water, and when he’d dried off, he marched straight to the nearest RAF recruitment office.
He was fluent in Morse code from his radio days at sea, and he was happy to be given a gun, too, so they made him a wireless op/rear gunner. He and I came to 648 Squadron on the very same day in July 1940, but it wasn’t until November that we flew together. He’d lost the rest of his crew on that same terrible hop when Silver and I lost Colin. Chip’s damaged Blenheim had stalled and nosedived on landing back in Shetland, and his pilot and navigator were both killed instantly. Chip, in the back, had been lucky again.
In fact Chip and Silver and I were all that was left of last summer’s Pimms Section. We�
�d all been lucky before, so we reckoned we’d be lucky together. God knows we needed luck.
On 18 November we were flying reconnaissance. My other two Pimms Section crews were new to me and one of them was completely new to 648 Squadron, and though we were in freshly maintenanced Blenheims, we needed practice at formation flying. We’d been sent out over the North Sea in broad daylight, without a fighter escort. I wasn’t happy about that, and of course I’d said so and got told off by the Old Roundhead again for arguing with my superiors.
We had guns ready front and rear, but were generally loaded up with cameras instead of bombs. Now we were overhearing these German transmissions in Morse code from somewhere. The last thing I wanted for my new flight section was to run into German planes.
‘How many does that make?’ I asked Chip. Behind me in the cramped gloom of the aircraft’s body, perched in his bulky flight suit at the radio set, Chip had been reporting them for the last hour.
‘Fourteen. Got five of ’em all at once last time.’
‘In code?’
‘No, in Kraut. If it was in code I wouldn’t know it was Kraut, would I?’
‘Tex is physically incapable of saying the word German,’ Silver suggested. He crouched in the glassed-in nose of the plane where there was a ledge for him to lay out his charts.
‘I can say it. I just think it’s bad luck to say it in the air.’
‘Let me see,’ Silver said to Chip.
I’d told Chip to write everything down. Silver crawled out of the nose to sit beside me and reached behind the bulkhead to the radio set, and Chip passed him a sheet of paper. Silver frowned at Chip’s scrawled columns of letters.
‘What is this, are you trying your hand at nursery rhymes? Fun kistka putt, ichho ere nichts – funkist kaput, tich … ?’
‘And Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall!’ I laughed. ‘That’s not German.’
‘He’s written it like code, in five-letter blocks,’ Silver said. ‘Maybe you can figure it out.’
With one hand on the flight controls and the other balancing the throttles, I glanced at the page and looked away again. I thought about it as I stared at the high grey cirrus cloud, five thousand feet above us even though we were flying at ten thousand feet. The sky looked like a sheet of silk spilt all over with grey river pearls, serene and beautiful. Even after five months of operational flying I still couldn’t marry the pure sky with the menacing enemy radio messages coming out of it from who knows where. It felt like evil magic.
The Enigma Game Page 4