The Chalky Sea

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The Chalky Sea Page 19

by Clare Flynn


  Sandy didn’t even look up. He waved a hand to signal her to sit down and continued to shuffle his papers, signing his name to documents with a flourish of his tortoiseshell fountain pen. Gwen wondered why she was so nervous. She’d known Sandy for years, sat around a table with him, Roger and Daphne, playing bridge, tramped over the Downs with a bag of clubs playing mixed foursomes at the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club; damn it – she’d even seen him drunk, slumped at the end of her dinner table after he had downed enough whisky to put Falstaff to shame. She remembered what Daphne had told her about their dirty weekends and suppressed a smile. So why was she so edgy, like a small child waiting to be reprimanded by a teacher?

  Eventually Sandy sighed, leaned back in his chair and screwed the top back on his fountain pen.

  ‘No easy way to do this. Not my decision. Directive from HQ. All available forces have to be deployed efficiently. You’ve done a first rate job.’ He coughed and looked away, staring over Gwen’s shoulder out of the window.

  Filling the silence, Gwen said, ‘You’re closing down the listening station?’

  ‘Certainly not. It’s too damned useful to do that. Some of the intelligence we have gained from your work up there has been absolutely vital.’

  She heaved a sigh of relief.

  He coughed again, then said, ‘However, we have a town full of allied soldiers and we need to prioritise their use over that of ordinary citizens. The Royal Canadian Corps of Signals are taking over from the RAF. That wouldn’t have ruled you out from continuing but several of the Canadian infantry are fluent German speakers due to family connections and it makes more sense for one of them to take on your duties. Plenty of other things for you to do, and we need to keep the Canucks happy. Restless lot. Apparently they’re cheesed off that they’ve not seen active service yet and we have to find more for them to do than spending all day on the firing ranges.’

  ‘I see.’ Gwen bit her lip, fighting a sudden urge to cry. She wanted to point out that the Canadians could be sent overseas at any point and then she’d have to return to the job – or train another soldier up to do it. She felt resentful. It was because she was a woman and because Eastbourne was swarming with redundant Canadians she was going to be forced back into making beds and pouring tea. There was no point in arguing though. It would get her nowhere – and earn her a reputation for being bolshie.

  She wondered if she was dismissed and started to get up.

  The Major rapped his knuckles on the desk. ‘I’m not done yet.’

  Gwen felt her cheeks reddening, infuriated at having to kowtow to Sandy.

  ‘There’s always a need for a smart gal like you, Gwen. We can make use of you here. Top secret stuff. Plenty of work in the typing pool and we can’t take on just anybody. You’ve already been vetted so you’ll be ideal.’

  ‘But I can’t type.’

  ‘Can’t be that hard to learn. If it was that difficult you wouldn’t get so many young girls taking it up. You’ll soon catch on. Remember there’s a war on. All hands to the pump. I’d rather have a reliable trustworthy gal like you who may be a bit slower bashing the keys than a qualified typist who doesn’t know when to keep her trap shut.’

  Gwen fiddled with the cuff of her jacket, struggling to find the right words. She was angry. Feeling patronised, used, humiliated. Her work up at the listening post had been good. She had given no cause for complaint and it was ungrateful and unfair of the military to dispense with her because there were spare men around. Why weren’t the Canadians being sent to the front? There were enough of them. Surely there was a way Mr Churchill could use them for what they had been trained. But what was the point in arguing? Eventually she breathed in slowly and said, ‘When do you want me to start?’

  ‘Couple of days. Need you to train up the Canadian chap who will be taking over from you. The man is a competent Morse decoder and has had basic training in using the radio equipment. All you have to do is show him how to transcribe. Make sure he knows how to fill in the damned forms. You know how HQ get the wind up if they’re not completed correctly.’

  Pringle got to his feet and began pacing in front of the window. Outside, a group of naval cadets were playing an impromptu game of cricket.

  ‘Instil in him the need for speed and accuracy. Make sure he knows about the pickups and what to do if the motorcycle rider doesn’t turn up. You know the drill.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, wishing she could add; so why not let me carry on doing it?

  ‘He’ll be sitting alongside you at the station. You show him the ropes tonight. Tomorrow get him to do it while you supervise and then, unless he makes a pig’s breakfast of it, he’ll be on his own the night after. You can start here Monday morning in the typing pool.’

  So – she was not only to be deprived of her role, she was to train up the man who was to take her place. The unfairness and pointlessness enraged her. It was like the last war. Women had been in demand to drive ambulances, had risked their lives to tend the wounded, taken on jobs in factories to make armaments, only to be cast aside and sent back to the kitchen as soon as the surviving men came home from the front. This war was to be no different. Smarting with anger, she left Sandy’s office and strode down the long school corridor and out into the flagged courtyard where she had left her bicycle. Cycling back up the hill she channelled her anger into the energy needed to tackle the steep gradient.

  That evening when Gwen arrived at Beachy Head there was no sign of her replacement. Her spirits lifted. Perhaps they’d had a change of heart and found another job for him. She took up her usual place next to Warrant Officer Irving and accepted a cup of tea brought over to them from the next door radar station by the Home Guard sentry. It was a warm evening, still light even though it was nearly ten o’clock.

  Gwen liked the night watch. The shift was six hours and it meant going to bed at five in the morning but, apart from negotiating the blackout on the way home, it was nice to be awake and working while the rest of the town was sleeping, doing her bit to protect them, helping in a small way to bring about the end the war.

  The outgoing listeners handed over the logs to Gwen and Warrant Officer Irving and told them it had been a quiet evening so far with very little chatter from the Channel. Gwen adjusted her headphones and smiled. Back to business as usual.

  After about twenty minutes the door opened and the Canadian soldier walked in. Gwen sighed. Not only was she to lose her job after all but lose it to a man who couldn’t even be bothered to turn up on time. She didn’t look at him, leaving her RAF colleague to reprimand him for his late arrival.

  ‘Sorry. I had trouble finding the place. I went to the chain home station next door.’

  Gwen turned to look at him. It was one of the three chaps she had received into her home. The good-looking one with the elderly dog. The one who had been over-familiar.

  He recognised her at the same moment. ‘Mrs Collingwood! I didn’t expect to meet you up here. They told me there was a woman who’d been seconded from the Women’s Voluntary Service but I never guessed it would be you.’

  She nodded, and seeing the puzzled look on the airman’s face, explained that the Canadian was billeted in her house. She turned back to him. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t remember your name.’

  ‘It’s Jim,’ he said quickly.

  Irving rolled his eyes. The informality of the Canadian army was legendary. ‘Evening, Private Jim,’ he said.

  Jim looked abashed. ‘It’s Armstrong. Private Jim Armstrong.’

  The RAF man extended a hand. ‘I’m Irving. Now I’ll leave you to Collingwood’s mercy.’

  Jim looked nervous. Gwen gestured to him to take a seat at the small metal table and began to explain the procedure and how she and Warrant Officer Irving worked together. She took him through the paperwork, explained how the transcripts were prepared in both German and English and went through the handover procedure with the riders from HQ. She was seething with resentment and raced through her explanations so
quickly that Jim had to ask her to repeat some of the points. In the corner Irving twiddled his dials, headphones on, absorbed in his task.

  ‘Okay, Collingwood. Jump on board,’ said Irving.

  Gwen grabbed her headset, listening in to the VHF radio and transcribing the Morse as the transmission progressed, leaving Jim to sit and watch, until Irving threw him another pair of headphones. ‘May as well listen in, even if Collingwood’s still in charge tonight, Armstrong.’

  The intercept was between a Luftwaffe pilot and his control station. When Gwen had first started the transcriptions she had been puzzled by the strange terminology the Germans used such as references to kirchtum – church towers. By now she had worked out that it was merely a reference to the altitude of the plane. She was not supposed to remember what she heard and what she transcribed and the forms were whisked away by the motorcycle riders to some unknown destination for analysis. She doubted if there was much of real interest. Anything important would be encrypted and relayed in a more secure way than these brief verbal exchanges between airmen and their controllers. She took a strange satisfaction in recognising the voices of some of the individual Luftwaffe pilots though. It didn’t happen often, as most of the air traffic frequencies were monitored further along the coast in Kent and at Hastings, but there were occasions when she picked them up and often wondered about the identity of these men, whether they were married, had children, which towns or cities they came from.

  Frequently Gwen heard derogatory comments about Germans from people in the town. While sharing their anger at what the war was putting them through, Gwen resented the way friends and neighbours lumped every citizen of Germany into the same pot. Though she acknowledged the evil of Hitler and his henchmen, Gwen stopped short of tarring the entire population of Germany with the same brush. She remembered German classmates from her school in Switzerland, a family she lodged with one summer in Munich when she was trying to improve her German, the shopkeepers who had served her, the waitresses in the Kaffeehaus who had brought her sachertorte and coffee. She remembered the laughing eyes of the tram conductor who held his tram up for her when she was running down the road, the fat dimple-cheeked cook who had ladled her extra dumplings with her soup. It was impossible to think of these people as the enemy. Impossible to feel hatred, to wish them dead, to believe them all culpable of the crimes of their leader.

  When the brief transmission was over, Gwen took off her headphones and turned to Jim. ‘Did you get that?’

  He held out a piece of paper. She read what he had written down – a word perfect transcription of the brief exchange between the pilot and his control tower. Gwen sighed, disappointed at his competence.

  ‘Good,’ she said, grudgingly. ‘Now translate it.’

  Armstrong scribbled with his pencil and returned the paper to her. There was nothing she could quarrel with in his work.

  Suppressing her annoyance, she said, ‘I’ll show you how to fill in the forms ready for the dispatch rider.’

  The night passed quickly and when their shift ended Gwen had to acknowledge that Jim was going to be a competent operator. ‘I’ve been allocated two days to show you the ropes, but I don’t think that will be necessary. You seem to have got the hang of it so I’ll let you get on.’ She was aware that her voice had a caustic tone.

  Armstrong frowned. ‘Aren’t you coming tomorrow? But what If I have questions or am unsure what to do?’

  She gave him a withering look. ‘You know as well as I do, Private Armstrong, that is extremely unlikely.’

  ‘Unlikely but possible.’ He gave her a broad grin and she had to admit that he was likeable even though she was trying her hardest not to like him. He was also attractive with those blue eyes and long legs. She brushed the thought away as if it were a stray fly.

  The Beach at Holywell

  The day after she’d been forced to hand over her headset to Private Armstrong, Gwen went down to the beach. Near Holywell there was a break in the barbed wire and while the foreshore was out of bounds and still heavily mined, the promenade was accessible. Gwen liked to walk along to the bottom of the cliff below the now neglected Italian Gardens, past the Edwardian beach chalets and the closed up Holywell tea room. The area was effectively the end of the line before the beach gave way to the vertical chalk cliffs that became Beachy Head. Before the construction of the gardens and the promenade, the area had once been home to lime kilns and chalk pits where the local fishermen worked to supplement their income from the sea.

  The late afternoon was mild but overcast and the sea more grey-green than peppermint. Shallow waves lapped at the shore and beyond them the water stretched out, calm and flat like unfurled silk cloth. It was going to get dark soon but she had her blackout torch and there would be a full moon tonight. Moonlight on the sea always created a silvery light which illuminated the path.

  Gwen sat on the wall in front of the chalets. At one time she and Roger had thought of renting one, but the idea was dropped as he was travelling so much with his job and once it became clear, if unsaid, that they were not going to have children. Like the tea room, the beach chalets were closed up, not just for the winter but for the war. Gwen tried to remember what it used to be like here on a peacetime summer day, the promenade scattered with people strolling, children playing in the shallows or fishing in the rock pools under the cliff for shrimps. Ice cream and cups of tea, teacakes and scones. Buckets and spades – although the sand was accessible only at low tide on the shingle-dominated beaches.

  This was the time of year she loved best down here. The time when she was rarely disturbed and was free to sit and think, or walk, mulling over problems, indulging memories. It was rare she ran into anyone now that the war had made the seafront virtually out of bounds and most of the town’s children had gone away. She usually saw a couple of soldiers or Home Guards in charge of the Bofors gun under the cliff but otherwise the place was deserted and she revelled in her solitude.

  She pulled her thick Arran cardigan around her and stared at the sea, losing track of time. On evenings such as this, she would talk to Alfie. After all those years since her brother's death, Gwen still felt his presence. It was torture, knowing he was not there yet feeling he was. Not physically – there was no ghostly hand to touch her – but his spirit was still in her, around her. They used to finish each other’s sentences and often communicated without speaking. A favourite game was to think of an object and have the other guess what it was. It was their party trick.

  Alfie was the only person she had told about her lost baby, apart from the doctor and now Pauline. When she had discovered she was pregnant she had whispered the secret news that he was to be an uncle. After the miscarriage happened she had sat in this same spot on the wall of the promenade and wept as she told him what happened. She had heard no words in response from Alfie but telling him was a small comfort, a burden shared.

  This evening she wanted to tell him how mixed up and confused she felt, how her normal restraint was crumbling, how she worried constantly about Roger, how much she missed him. Yet undercutting all this was fear. Fear that she was a hollow shell, a husk of a person, incapable of expressing the feelings that came so naturally to other people. Gwen thought of Daphne and her dirty weekends with her husband in hotel rooms. She thought of Pauline Simmonds and her passion for her husband. She and Roger had never known anything like that together. And yet she loved him. She really loved him. She had no doubt of that.

  What held her back? What stopped her feeling the desire that was second nature to other people? Was it Roger himself? Was it that she didn’t find him attractive? She explored the thought and then dismissed it. As soon as she’d seen him across that dance floor in Berlin she had been drawn to him. No, it wasn’t him. It was the act itself. It seemed wrong to allow oneself to lose control in that way. To abandon dignity, to let go. Were she to do so she feared she would be lost forever, made vulnerable, exposed. And that meant confronting the possibility of losing Roger too.
After Alfie, she didn’t think she could bear it. And she cared too much for Roger to expose him to the possibility of being jinxed by her love. Better to do as her mother had done and keep her emotions strictly reined in. Get through life as if it were a series of tasks to be ticked off a list, until one day she would be free of it all and be united with Alfie again.

  This evening was quiet. Just the occasional cries of gulls and jackdaws and the gentle murmur of the waves.

  Gwen didn’t notice Jim Armstrong until he was right beside her, so lost in thought was she. He pulled himself up onto the wall next to her.

  ‘I wanted to say sorry,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’ She was annoyed at the interruption.

  ‘Taking your job.’

  Gwen shrugged. ‘It wasn’t your decision. You don’t need to apologise.’

  ‘I know – but I wanted you to know that I do understand how annoyed you must be about it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She continued to stare out to sea.

  ‘I didn’t ask to do it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They did a skills audit and it came out that I understood German. I mean I told them. My mother is German. Well, she’s Canadian but born in Germany and she grew up with German as her first language. I had no idea you were doing the work before me.’

  ‘Look, Private Armstrong, I’ve told you, there’s no need to apologise or explain.’

  ‘Call me Jim,’ he said. ‘But I saw how you looked at me and I wanted to… you know… acknowledge that.’

  Gwen sighed and turned to face him. ‘All right. Yes I was annoyed. I still am. I was doing a good job. They had no cause to replace me. They need to find work for you lot and yes, that makes me angry. How do you think it feels to be sidelined because you’re a woman? Used when they have no alternative, and then flung aside like a piece of seaweed. And to add insult to injury they expected me to show you what to do.’

 

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