by Clare Flynn
‘Righto, sir.’ She hesitated then said, 'I don't suppose you have any news of Roger?'
'Why would I? Haven't you heard from him?'
She shook her head and felt herself shivering. 'He did warn me I might not.'
‘Well then. That's your answer.' He looked down then his mouth stretched into a grim smile. 'War's not easy for any of us but it must be tough for the two of you, being apart. My old Daffers drives me up the wall at times but I couldn't even begin to imagine what life would be like without the old girl.'
He coughed loudly as though to draw a line under the sentiment he had shown. 'Right then. Where were we? Ah yes, all this is subject to you managing to get through the training. We’re taking a risk using a woman. It’s demanding work. You’ll need to be on the ball.’
Gwen swallowed her annoyance. It was Sandy’s manner. At least she wasn’t married to the old duffer like poor Daphne.
The interview seemed to be over and she was about to get up, when she realised he had told her virtually nothing. ‘Will I be working here, sir? And won’t I need to be in one of the services?’
‘Wear your WVS uniform. That will do. No time to get other people involved. Flight Sergeant Carrington will fill you in on all the details. Decent chap. RAF. Wait outside and he’ll come and get you. Dismissed.’ He had already picked up a sheet of paper from the pile on his desk and was reading it.
Gwen jumped to her feet and went back out to the anteroom. Flight Sergeant Carrington, a short man with a finely clipped moustache, was already waiting for her. He led her through a maze of corridors into a windowless office. There was a woman sitting behind a desk waiting for them. She motioned Gwen to take a seat. The interview was entirely in German. At first Gwen, taken by surprise, found herself stumbling over her words. The woman told her to take a deep breath. The breathing calmed her and she managed to get through the rest of the short test with growing confidence. As well as testing her oral skills, she was asked to translate several sentences printed on a card from German into English, then several more the other way round.
Eventually the woman sat back, nodded to Sergeant Carrington and said, ‘She’ll do.’ She stretched out a hand to shake Gwen’s.
The security vetting was next. Gwen had imagined this would take days, weeks even, but things evidently happened faster in wartime. She was asked to provide the names of some references and then was left alone at a desk in an empty classroom while Carrington took the list and disappeared. After an hour a young Wren brought her a welcome cup of tea.
All must have been satisfactory as after another nail-biting hour, Carrington reappeared, perched on top of one of the desks in front of hers and began to explain her new job.
‘We have a number of radio operators at work here in the town and its surrounds. All along the coast in fact. Top secret, of course. Listening in. Picking up Morse code messages from the enemy. There’s a shortage of German language skills and while most of the messages are in code and are sent off to a secret destination for decrypting we need someone to translate the uncoded messages and any voice traffic before the messages are passed on for analysis. A lot of it’s routine stuff. Weather reports and suchlike. Airmen reporting their coordinates. The important stuff is all encrypted, but the enemy could get careless now and then and we need to be ready for them.’
Gwen nodded, her heart thumping. Finally she was going to have a job to do that might make a difference. Even if it didn’t, using her language skills and being entrusted with secrets had to be better than serving tea and compiling lists.
After a period of classroom training with a couple of Wrens and three WAAFs in a building in what had been one of the many public schools in the town, Gwen understood the basic principles of operating a radio receiver and was competent in Morse code. She was assigned to a listening post near to the main radar station on Beachy Head. Each of the women would be working in a pair with an airman or naval signaller. The decision to extend the remit to women did not go as far as entrusting them to operate without a man alongside.
Gwen was cold. Colder than she’d ever been – despite her heavy coat and thick gloves. She leaned against the wall and rubbed her hands up and down her arms and tried to stop shivering. The roof was leaking and the rain was beating a tattoo on the tin covering. A drip ran down her neck so she edged sideways. Every night for the past week she’d spent sitting on a canvas folding chair in this cramped space with a young air force warrant officer who had acne and bad breath. He had made it clear to Gwen, without saying as much, that being here in a repurposed railway container on a clifftop with a middle-aged woman was not the assignment he’d been hoping for. Gwen tried to make conversation, but Warrant Officer Irving shrugged or answered her questions with monosyllables so she eventually settled for an uncomfortable silence.
Her job was to listen into the German VHF voice transmissions and log everything she heard. It was one thing to sit happily twiddling the dials of the wireless equipment in a comfortable classroom and another to be doing it with icy cold hands in a tin box on top of Beachy Head.
Most of the time it was Luftwaffe pilots talking to their controllers. As she became accustomed to listening she began to recognise different regional accents. Occasionally she recognised some of the individual voices.
The radio traffic had been quiet tonight. It meant she had plenty of time to translate the messages she had logged before they were picked up by a motorcycle rider and whisked away to a destination unknown, referred to only as Station X.
At first, on busy nights she had tended to translate as she listened, writing the messages down in English. That approach earned her a reprimand – the powers-that-be wanted both the verbatim German and her translation. It was irritating. If they didn’t trust her translation skills why not just get her to transcribe the verbatim German? It was not up to her to question though, and in a war maybe it was necessary to check everything and trust no one. Gwen told herself the important thing was that she was directly involved in the war effort.
Listening to these young German pilots informing their base stations that they were headed for home made her feel close to the action, playing a vital role, even though it was hard to imagine what use her work would be put to. Much of it was reportage of things that had already happened and by the time her transcriptions reached the mythical Station X it was probably far too late to do anything about them. Maybe they were looking for patterns though? Perhaps there was significance in things that she couldn’t see? It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle and she was collecting pieces with no sight of the bigger picture.
Sometimes the intercepts involved the Germans reporting sighting of British convoys. Whenever this happened she would alert Warrant Officer Irving as she listened and scribbled and he would jump into life and immediately send messages to alert the RAF to scramble to protect the ships involved. The convoys were carrying supplies of essentials – food and armaments – so her work was indeed making a difference. At last she was in the thick of things.
The New Recruit
Aldershot
Jim was finishing his breakfast in the canteen one morning when Walt slipped into the seat opposite him. Jim stared at him without speaking, then carried on eating his porridge.
‘Aint you going to say anything, Jim? Not even hello?’
Jim continued to eat in silence.
‘So, you’re still mad at me. I suppose I can understand that.’
Jim kept his eyes down, conscious that somewhere in the room Corporal Howardson would be watching this encounter.
Walt reached a hand to grip Jim’s arm, halting the progress of spoon to mouth. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, Jim. It’s the last thing I wanted. You weren’t meant to find out that way. We never expected you to walk in on us like that. We reckoned we’d find the right time and place to tell you. Break it to you gently. But you didn’t give us a chance.’
Jim put his spoon down, his appetite gone. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The
blood rushed to his head and his fists clenched under the table.
Walt continued. ‘I’ve always looked up to you, Jim. Don’t you think I would have avoided it happening if I could? It’s upset Ma and Pa. And Alice had to go through hell at home when her folks found out what was going on. If I could have prevented all that I would have done.’
Jim looked at Walt, unable to reconcile this stranger across the table with the little brother he had always loved.
Walt leaned forward. ‘Look, we didn’t mean to fall in love. It just happened. One of those things. It’s been hard on Alice. Folks have taken against her. Every time she’s in town she says she can sense people talking about her, pointing fingers. She can hardly bear to go work in the library.’ He picked up a knife and began to tap it nervously against the tabletop. ‘If the two of you hadn’t rushed into getting engaged practically as soon as she finished school, she would have had time to recognise her real feelings.’
Jim pushed his bowl away and got to his feet. ‘You’re telling me it’s my fault, are you?’
‘No need to put it like that. All I’m saying is if you’d waited a bit, given her some more time–’
‘You’re saying I pushed her into agreeing to marry me? Is that what she told you?’
Walt looked away. ‘Not exactly. But you know what I mean.’
‘No. I don’t know what you mean at all.’
‘You take everything for granted. You think it’s all yours for the taking. Everything comes easy to you. You were top of your class at school. Could have gone to university if you hadn’t wanted to stay on the farm. You got the best looking girl in the town. You were always Ma’s favourite. Pa gave you more responsibility on the farm than me. I’m always left to run behind in your shadow. But Alice sees me in a different way. She sees me, not a paler version of you.’
Jim shook his head. ‘Ma had no favourite. Pa gave me more responsibility because I did more of the work. I did well at school because I studied hard. When will you stop thinking the whole world owes you a living, Walt? When are you going to grow up and take responsibility for your own actions?’
Jim started to walk out of the mess room but Walt was on his feet and moving after him.
Jim turned to his brother. 'Shove off and leave me alone, Walt. I joined up so I wouldn’t have to look at your self-satisfied face any more. I don’t know why the hell you joined up, unless it’s because it’s yet another thing you couldn’t bear for me to have without trying to have it too. Now get out of my way.’
They were on an all-day regimental exercise. It was freezing cold and, late in the afternoon, the gorse was still laced with a thin dusting of frost. Six men from another company were holed up in a deserted farmhouse somewhere, playing the part of a group of Germans, and Jim and his cohort were expected to track them down, ambush the building and take them prisoner. They were at the top of a slope, looking down on the derelict farmhouse, figuring out how to take its occupants by surprise.
Greg Hooper was lying on his stomach beside Jim, looking through binoculars. ‘We’ll need some kind of diversion at the front of the farm so we can sneak round the back way.’
‘How the hell are we going to do that?’ Scotty McDermott looked doubtful.
‘There’s no chance,’ said Mitch Johnson. ‘There’s no cover in front of the building. The bastards have got us.’
‘Come on. We can’t give up,’ Jim said. ‘Remember what the corporal said. Extra chocolate rations if we capture them and an extra five miles on the route march if we don’t.’ He tried to inject some enthusiasm into his voice. ‘Couldn’t we get round the back and surprise them that way?’
‘There’s ten foot of barbed wire on one side and a sheer cliff on the other.’
‘We could abseil down the cliff.’
‘With what? Where’s the rope?’
‘Hell. Should have thought of that.’
They flung around more ideas but none were seen to have any merit.
‘We need a distraction to lure them out of the building.’ Jim frowned in concentration.
‘We could get one and torture him,’ said Mitch, a big grin on his face.
The others started laughing.
‘Shut up you idiots, they’ll hear us.’ Greg sounded impatient. ‘And be serious. We can’t torture anyone.’
‘They’re supposed to be Germans. Fair game.’
‘Haven’t you heard of the Geneva Convention?’
‘Yeah but we could say they were Gestapo, then anything goes, Grass.’
‘For Pete’s sake, guys, this is getting us nowhere.’ Jim was losing patience.
‘I’ve got an idea.’ Mitch jumped to his feet, squatting down on his haunches in front of them. ‘It’s getting dark and cloudy. It’ll be hard for them to see exactly what’s going on. How about we start firing, then get Scotty to imitate the sound of a woman screaming and a baby crying. They’ll think a civilian’s wandered on to the range and got shot up. They won’t be able to avoid coming out to help an injured woman and a baby in distress.’
‘But there is no woman and baby.’
‘That’s the best bit,’ said Mitch. ‘We dress Scotty up as a woman with a bundle that will look like a baby.’
‘Oh no! No bloody way!’ said Scotty.
‘Where do we get women’s clothes out here?’
‘We don’t. We have to create the illusion. Scotty takes his battle dress and trousers off and flashes his lovely bare legs. We can make something that looks like a skirt using some canvas. Come on, guys, it’s worth a try.’
There was silence for a moment while they mulled over Mitch’s idea.
Fists pumping, they sprang into action.
It took a few minutes to transform Scotty into a vague semblance of a woman. The finishing touch was a couple of handkerchiefs knotted together to form a headscarf and conceal his short back and sides. Not enough to fool anyone close up but at a distance in the fading afternoon light they might have a chance of convincing someone.
Greg set the plan in motion by hurling a grenade against a rock over the brow of the hill so the occupants of the farmhouse could hear it but not see the explosion. They were always being warned of the danger of unexploded ordinance and the risk of civilians wandering onto the ranges so there was some vague logic to their flimsy plan. Scotty began to scream and wail in a high pitched voice that was a convincing imitation of a distressed or dying woman. He interspersed the screams with wails from the baby that was a bundle of gorse swaddled in bandages from the first aid kit, and began to stumble down the slope towards the building.
Two men emerged from the farmhouse and looked about cautiously. Scotty screamed again and then, flinging the baby to the ground, collapsed face down. The two men ran towards him as Mitch and Greg moved down one side of the slope using gorse bushes as cover, while Jim and the two others made their way down the other side. As the “Germans” reached the dying woman, Scotty leapt to his feet and Mitch and Greg and one of the others rushed in to help overpower them. Jim ran on down the slope, gun at the ready and hurled a grenade against a water tank outside, producing a gratifying explosion. The door of the house burst open and four men came out, looking around in confusion. Jim slipped behind them, then shouted, ‘Hands up, Schweinhunds!’ while his two companions each pointed their guns at the men.
‘You bastards. You bunch of cheats!’ one of the captives cried out. ‘That’s not fair play.’
‘All’s fair in love and war,’ said Mitch. ‘We’ve got you.’
One of the captives turned, attempting to run back into the house. Jim stuck out a leg and tripped him up, sending him flying onto his hands and knees on the gravel. Jim moved towards him, hand stretched out to pull him to his feet, saying, ‘Come on, pal. It’s all over. You have to know when to quit.’ Realising it was his brother, he dropped his hand and stepped back.
‘You did that deliberately. You cheated. You wanted to humiliate me.’ Walt’s voice was half-whine half-whisper.
Over the top of the slope Tip Howardson was coming towards them. ‘An extra five miles tomorrow for the whole bloody lot of you.’
‘But we got them, Corporal,’ said Scotty.
‘Where’s your uniform, McDermott? What the hell do you think you’re playing at? What’s that on your head?’
Scotty McDermott started to explain their elaborate ruse, but it served only to madden the corporal further. ‘You and Armstrong can do one hundred press-ups as soon as we get back to camp. And the whole damn lot of you are doing a fifteen miler tomorrow. Full kit. The forecast is for rain.’
As he finished speaking, they realised there was someone standing in the shadow of a gorse bush beside them. Captain Bywater emerged from the gloom. Tip Howardson turned to the officer, saluted and said, ‘Captain, sir, I was reprimanding these men for making an exhibition of themselves. They’ve turned a serious exercise into a farce.’
‘At ease, men.’ Addressing the corporal, Captain Bywater said, ‘I was about to congratulate them. I was watching from behind the brow of that hill. Saw the whole thing. Damned clever. I’d like to congratulate you men for your ingenuity. The screaming baby was a stroke of genius. The attacking team deserve extra rations. And if you happen to pass by the Dog and Duck I’ll stand each of you a pint tonight.’
He turned to look at the captive “Germans”.
‘You lot are pathetic. Fancy being conned by this ugly fellow.’ He pointed at Scotty. ‘If that’s your idea of a young woman, no one in Aldershot is safe.’
The men hung their heads, humiliated. Bywater slapped Scotty on the back. ‘Damned resourceful. That’s what we need. A bit of nous and imagination. See to it that they get those extra chocolate rations, Corporal.’ He turned and went back over the top of the hill.
Howardson addressed the men. ‘I suppose you think you’re clever. Well I’m watching you lot. One step wrong and you’ll all suffer for it.’ He turned to the captured “enemy”. ‘Looks like you’ll be running your extra five miles on your own this time. Now back to base.’