The Telephone Box Library

by Lucas, Rachael

  ‘You’re one of the Whaddon lot,’ he said. Of course this didn’t mean a thing to me.

  ‘Get in,’ he said. ‘Shove up,’ said someone else, getting in and squashing me against the window. We drove off then, and I didn’t have a clue where I was going because the bus windows were painted with blackout paint. We stopped off several times. Each time people went out in twos – nobody was talking, because we were all fresh behind the ears and shy, I think. And then we stopped. The chap who was driving hopped out and opened the back door, and I waited for a second.

  ‘All right, love, last stop.’

  I peered into the darkness around me. That’s when I realized I was the only one left.

  ‘Be ready tomorrow morning at seven.’

  Lucy looked up at Bunty, who was sitting very still, her hands folded in front of her on the table. She looked down at the diary, feeling torn. She desperately wanted to keep reading. Inside this book was a whole life – and Bunty’s writing was so real and immediate – Lucy almost felt as if she was there, sitting beside her. In comparison, the words she’d been slaving over for the last couple of months seemed as if they were written at a remove – which of course they were. She sat back on the chair and pushed her hair behind her ears.

  Bunty reached across, taking the diary back and closing it. ‘Oh, that’s enough of my self-indulgent nonsense.’

  ‘It’s not at all, it’s amazing. I’d love to read it all. So where did you sleep? What happened the next day?’

  ‘Oh, well, as you know – I was taken in by Mrs Brown and that’s when I met Milly, the schoolteacher I was telling you about, who I was sharing a room with. I was full of dread, expecting her to be cross about sharing. But she was jolly and kind, gave me one of her blankets in case I was cold, and told me that Mrs Brown made the best breakfasts you could dream of.’

  Bunty closed her eyes for a moment, and a smile curved at her lips. ‘Gosh, they were lovely. The next morning she woke me up at six and we had crumpets with honey and absolutely tons of butter. You couldn’t get that sort of food in London, of course, unless you were willing to get it on the black market. But Mrs Brown had a beehive, and two Jersey cows, and she made her own butter. Oh, it was delicious.’

  Lucy wished she had her phone and could be recording all this. Bunty carried on.

  ‘Of course Milly was up and off to school – she told me over breakfast that they had thirty evacuees in the village, so they’d had to extend the school day and she’d been brought in to teach. I hadn’t a clue where I was going. Back to Bletchley, I supposed. But no.’

  ‘No?’

  Bunty shook her head.

  ‘Of course I said to poor Mrs B “Is this Whaddon?” and she looked at me as if I was slightly mad. “No, my dear,” she said. “This is Little Maudley. If you’re supposed to be in Whaddon you’re a good ten miles off.” And she laughed at her own joke, which she clearly thought was very funny.

  ‘Anyway, I was shipped off to a field just outside the village, and reported for duty – absolutely freezing cold – to the station.’

  ‘Train station?’

  ‘No. Remember when I took you on a detour?’

  ‘To that old building up on the hill?’

  ‘Yes. That’s where I spent my war. Signal Hill. I was the only girl. Thank goodness I shared a billet with Milly, or I’d have gone crackers. The boys were nice enough, of course, but they treated me as if I didn’t have anything between my ears.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘It’s all in here,’ Bunty said, tapping the faded cover of the diary with a gnarled finger. ‘And lots more besides.’

  ‘I’d love to read more.’

  Bunty rifled through the pages and handed the book back to Lucy. Lucy opened a page and started to read, transported back to a summer’s day many years ago.

  August 2nd, 1941

  It’s so peculiar. Sometimes, here in the village one could almost forget there’s a war on. In other ways it’s not so easy. Poor Milly is having to work terribly long hours at the school, and they’ve decreed that the summer holiday has been cancelled because the children need to be out of their mothers’ hair so they can get on with important war work. Milly says it’s like running a nursery school and a prison all at once.

  Meanwhile I’m in the swing of things. Every morning I get on my bicycle – rain or shine – and make my way up to Signal Hill where I let myself in, and the overnighter is usually getting up and putting on a kettle of water for a cup of tea. I get the tea cups ready, and we make sure all the radio equipment is ready, and then we wait. And then the drivers arrive in a Hillman Minx saloon and deliver the boxes with the recording discs at the same time every morning, or thereabouts. They crunch up the gravel path, rain or shine, through the barbed-wire fence, and deliver us huge heavy boxes. One day last week the absolute worst almost happened – Jack, one of the drivers, was passing the box across to Bill, who is in charge of the station, and somehow they made a mistake and almost dropped the lot. The air was absolutely blue that morning, I can tell you. It wasn’t until they’d mopped their brows that Bill and Jack turned to me looking horrified and apologized profusely for their language.

  ‘It’s absolutely fine,’ I said, feeling more embarrassed for them than anything else.

  ‘Terribly sorry.’ Jack touched his finger to his cap, ducking his head. ‘But my goodness, can you begin to imagine what would have happened if we’d broken one of these?’

  He motioned to the glass recording discs that we played each day, at precise times, without fail. It sounds like gobbledegook to me – a fiercely angry military type shouting in German. But this is serious war work, and there’s no time for dancing. I feel very proud that I’m doing my bit for the war effort, even if I don’t really understand what it is we do.

  ‘I don’t understand either.’ Lucy looked up, her brow crinkling in confusion. ‘So what was the German stuff? Were you broadcasting recordings, or something?’

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly what we were doing. Have you ever heard of black propaganda? Fake German radio programmes were recorded in a studio not far from Bletchley, and then we would broadcast them from our transmitter over there on Signal Hill –’ she waved an arm towards the window – ‘twelve minutes to the hour, every hour. We had to watch the clock like hawks.’

  This was astonishing. Lucy sat back in her chair, putting her hands flat on the table in front of her as if to steady herself. No wonder Bunty had wanted to keep her role in the war to herself.

  ‘Hir ist Gustav Siegfried Eins,’ said Bunty, in a perfect imitation of a German radio announcer. ‘My goodness, those words still give me a chill.’ She rubbed at her arms. ‘I’ve done some reading over the years and found out what was going on. The fake radio programmes were broadcast – a mixture of news, entertainment and misinformation – and could be heard over short-wave radio across Occupied Europe.’

  ‘And you thought you were going to be at Bletchley. It must have been a shock. Did your parents know what you were doing?’

  ‘Goodness, no.’ Bunty looked horrified. ‘I kept my diary hidden away, tucked on a shelf inside the old fireplace in my bedroom. Even writing down what went on was breaking the Official Secrets Act, you know. I was allowed to tell them I’d gone to work near Bletchley, but they didn’t have a clue what that meant – and of course as it turned out I wasn’t there anyway. After the first day I was taken to Whaddon Hall, not far from Bletchley, where they gave me instruction in how to operate the equipment, and a very stern warning that I mustn’t breathe a word.’

  ‘It sounds incredibly exciting.’

  ‘I think perhaps more so in retrospect. There was a lot of waiting around, and it was jolly cold. Of course –’ Bunty gave a snort of laughter – ‘my parents would have been appalled if they’d realized the worst of it. The broadcasts were quite rude. Swearing, and even worse. Some of the stories that were told were quite blue, I have gathered.’

  ‘And full of
lies and misinformation.’ Lucy scratched her head. ‘I suppose it was their version of “fake news”, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well, quite. There’s nothing new under the sun, after all.’

  ‘And all this time, you haven’t told anyone what you did?’

  She shook her head. ‘One was in the habit of forgetting. It’s such a strange thing – I’d spent so long not thinking about it. And then you came along, and all those old memories just seemed to surface. I can remember it now as clear as day.’

  ‘Amazing.’ Lucy put a hand on the diary, as if somehow she could soak up the whole experience. ‘So you didn’t really have anything to do with Bletchley at all?’

  ‘Not really. We went now and again, if we could hitch a lift. I’d go to some of the dances, and they had some wonderful performances. I was green with envy for a long old time that they seemed to be having such fun and I was stuck out in the sticks.’

  ‘I don’t think it was that much fun.’ Lucy thought of the people she’d heard telling their stories of life at Station X, as it had been known in wartime. They told stories of being crammed in freezing cold huts, eyes aching because they were working in dim light, the air thick with cigarette smoke.

  ‘Perhaps not, no.’

  ‘You must have been since they opened it up?’

  Bunty shook her head. ‘Old habits die hard. We were told never to breathe a word, and many of us didn’t.’

  ‘They’re still looking for people to tell their stories. We could go.’

  Bunty shook her head, harder this time. ‘Absolutely not. My story is of no interest to anyone.’

  ‘But would you like to go to the Park and see it? They’ve spent millions on renovating it.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Bunty stood up suddenly. Her face closed down and somehow, she managed to convey without words a feeling that Lucy that was on the verge of overstaying her welcome.

  ‘Right.’ Lucy stood up too. ‘I am going to pop into Bletchingham, and then I’m going to come home and type up the last section of this booklet for Susan. And then after that, I’m going to have a look at some of the books we’ve been given for the telephone box.’

  It was one of the privileges of age, Lucy thought, as she headed back home to take Hamish for a walk. No need for waffle or politeness – Bunty had reached a point in life where capriciousness was tolerated.

  She picked up the lead from the back of the door and in a second Hamish had joined her, panting eagerly. Despite the lowering grey clouds on the far edge of the sky, she left her coat at home – it was a muggy, warm sort of day, and she couldn’t stand the feeling of being baked in a waterproof. It was like being microwaved from the inside out. If it rained, she’d deal with it.

  They headed off towards the allotments and up into the woods where she’d first met Mel. The trees were now a glorious palette of oranges and dark reds. Hawthorn berries weighed down branches and the blackthorn hedges were thick with dark blue sloes, misted with a white bloom. Perhaps she could try making sloe gin. She picked one and bit into it, instantly spitting it out and making a face. It was like biting into acid. They looked utterly beautiful but tasted more sour than anything she’d ever tried.

  She kept coming back to Bunty and her diary. It was strange – for a moment it had seemed as if she was going to hand over the diary, which would have been amazing as – especially now – Lucy was desperate to learn more about Bunty’s life during the war, and to read more about Signal Hill. But at the same time, it wasn’t just history – it was Bunty’s own story. And she still had a hunch that there was something more to it, some secret from the past that Bunty wasn’t ready to discuss or to confront.

  They wandered on through the woods. Hamish leapt through the crackling orange bracken, barking hopefully and sniffing out rabbit trails. Lucy sat on a carved wooden bench in a clearing and looked up at the sky. It was a bruised, threatening purple now. The clouds looked like they were so full of rain that they’d overflow at any second.

  ‘Hamish!’ She felt in her pocket for treats. Since Mel had been using him as a demonstration dog in some of her classes – which was a perfect opportunity to wear him out – he’d been much better at not disappearing whenever he found a scent.

  But not this time. She called again. The first spots of rain landed on her hair – thick, heavy splatters. In a moment it was going to start absolutely tipping it down, and blooming Hamish had chosen this moment to go AWOL.

  A rumble in the distance made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She’d hated thunder and lightning since she was a child.

  ‘Hame!’

  ‘Lost your dog again?’

  Turning around she saw Sam, his two spaniels standing obediently by his feet, a smile on his face. He was wearing a checked shirt and a khaki-coloured coat with a million pockets. He put his hand into one and pulled out a piece of hot dog.

  ‘No “is that a sausage in your pocket” jokes,’ he said, warningly.

  ‘I wasn’t going to say a word.’

  ‘Contrary to her current super-virtuous behaviour, Bee can be a bit of a bugger if she catches a scent. Mel taught me that the secret was always to have something utterly delicious at hand.’

  His brown eyes met hers and he gave a turned-down smile. Lucy thought, out of nowhere, that he was quite delicious enough. Then she shook her head, wondering where on earth that had come from.

  ‘Hamish!’ she called again, her voice slightly squeaky.

  ‘Which way did he go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, feeling guilty. ‘I wasn’t looking.’

  ‘He can’t have gone far.’

  A crack of lightning in the distance made Lucy jump.

  ‘He’ll be okay, don’t worry.’ Sam reached out, putting a hand on her arm. ‘Why don’t we set off down here? It’ll get us out of the worst of the rain, if nothing else.’

  They headed down the soft path, the dogs circling and sniffing as they went. Occasional heavy drops of rain splashed through the canopy of trees, but they were sheltered from the downpour by the branches. They walked, regularly calling Hamish’s name, not talking. Lucy bit her lip. What if he’d been snared in a trap, or got caught down a rabbit hole?

  Sam looked over at her. ‘Don’t worry. I promise, we’ll find him.’

  ‘I should have been looking.’ Her head was pounding, too. Maybe it was something to do with the atmospheric pressure. She rubbed her temples.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Just a bit of a headache.’ She needed to get a grip. Getting stressed out was exactly what she had to avoid. That’s why she was here, in the middle of a wood, trying to find a disappearing terrier in a thunderstorm. For a second she found herself wondering what life would have been like if she’d stayed in Brighton, cut down her teaching hours, but otherwise carried on the way she was.

  ‘Aha!’ Sam, who’d been scanning the clearing ahead of them, put his hands on her shoulders and spun her round. ‘Look who it is.’

  Hurtling towards them, his entire face black with mud and his body not much cleaner, came Hamish. He looked absolutely delighted. Sam’s spaniels bounded towards him and they tussled in a mad heap of excitement, rolling over and galloping into a thicket of brambles and dried-up rosebay willowherb. Lucy felt the weight of Sam’s hands on her shoulders and stood very still. Her head felt fine now, but her heart was thudding irregularly. She took a sharp intake of breath, which somehow broke the spell. He took his hands away, leaving only a sensation of warmth.

  They turned, heading back through the trees towards the path that led back down to the allotments and on to the village.

  ‘He’d have been fine, you know.’

  ‘He might have disappeared forever.’

  ‘I bet he wouldn’t. With you to come home to?’ Sam cocked an eyebrow at her and smiled. His gaze held hers for a moment. She felt her cheeks turning pink and looked across at the dogs, checking they were still in sight.

  Was he flirting? She couldn’t tell –
it had been so long, and she was so out of practice at that sort of thing. School life had left her no time for real life, and now here she was, without a clue. And of course she was only here for the short term. No, they were good friends. That was all. If anything was going to happen, surely it would have happened after she kissed his cheek last night – and it hadn’t. He probably didn’t look at her that way . . .

  * * *

  Bunty stood at the back door of her cottage, looking out at the garden. Margaret and Gordon had picked her up that morning and taken her to their place for the day, which was always a trial. She missed her own things, and Margaret’s house was so painfully tidy that she always felt as if she was getting in the way, even if she just sat down in an armchair and did the crossword. When they’d finally dropped her back at home, Gordon had crossed the road in the rain to look at the now-empty telephone box. The shelves would be going in soon. Margaret, who had thought that a nice tidy bench was a far better idea (‘much more practical than all those rejected books – and who is going to police it?’) had tutted from the front doorstep, waiting to get into the BMW and out of the rain.

  Now the sky had cleared, but everything was still dripping. The hanging baskets needed to be taken down and put away for winter, but everything else could wait for spring. Bunty had always subscribed to the view that gardens should be left to overwinter, the dying foliage providing a home for beetles and bugs and wildlife. And in return, her garden was always full in summer of ladybirds, butterflies gathering around the buddleia and bees humming contentedly around the various species of lavender bush she had growing there. She’d learned it all from Mrs Brown. When she’d arrived at her billet here in the village, she hadn’t had a clue about – well, about much at all, really. Her mother had been a bit of a stickler for doing things herself, mainly because it gave her the opportunity to grumble about how hard done by she’d been. She turned to go back inside, pausing to look at the cracked black-and-white photograph of her parents that stood in a frame on the kitchen windowsill. It was one of the only ones she had – not many people had photographs taken in those days, and everything they’d owned had been obliterated by the bombs that dropped on their street that dark night in 1940. They’d never known their grandson, Gordon, or – Bunty gave a wry laugh – known the story behind his birth. Perhaps it was as well, in a way, that she’d never had to lie to them. They would have died of shock when they’d heard, in any case.