The Amber Shadows
Page 33
She waits for the army vehicle to drive off – a tall rattling lorry full of soldiers clinging to the canvas – then crosses the road. The woman pushes her red hat back to better catch a look at this strange young debutante running towards her dog. ‘What did you call him? His name’s Scamp. Scamp the miracle dog. Took himself off on an adventure last week, and only just came back.’
Scamp.
But it is him. Honey knows it is still Nijinsky, and that no matter what name he answers to, no matter who he belongs to now, under his fur, through his thin silken skin, the same heart beats that always did.
Historical Note
The Amber Shadows is a work of complete fiction. However, books I found useful in building my own version of Bletchley Park, and from which I used various anecdotes, include: Marion Hill’s Bletchley Park People, Gordon Welchman’s The Hut Six Story, Sinclair McKay’s The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, Michael Smith’s The Secrets of Station X, Gwendoline Page’s We Kept the Secret, Doreen Luke’s My Road to Bletchley Park, Simon Singh’s The Code Book, John Pether’s Funkers & Sparkers and Black Propaganda, Bletchley Park Trust’s History of Bletchley Park Huts & Blocks 1939–45, Asa Briggs’s Secret Days, Roy Conyers Nesbit’s Ultra Versus U-Boats: Enigma Decrypts in the National Archives and Tessa Dunlop’s The Bletchley Girls.
Also generally on World War II and beyond: Careless Talk: The Hidden His tor}? of the Home Front 1939–1945 by Stuart Hylton, Private Battles by Simon Garfield, We Remember the Blitz by Frank Shaw & Joan Shaw, I was Vermeer: The Forger who Swindled the Nazis by Frank Wynne, The Amber Room: the untold story of the greatest hoax of the twentieth century by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, Stephen Walsh’s biography of Stravinsky, Margot Fonteyn’s autobiography, newspapers, novels of the period, and Alfred Hitchcock movies.
The Eight Bells is now called The Eight Belles – a local landlady told me this was changed relatively recently to reflect the heritage of the wartime dancing girls.
Hut 6 codebreaker Ann Mitchell very kindly told me a story of being offered post-overall-washing water by her billet landlady, for bathing. I am extremely grateful to Ann Mitchell and to Ailsa Maxwell for taking the time to chat with me about their memories of working in Hut 6; however Honey’s story is not supposed to be a direct reflection of their experiences.
I should mention that it’s highly unlikely Honey would have the amount of knowledge she does about the overall operation of the Park, but there was no way to communicate the detail of the life of the Park other than to take this liberty, one of many liberties. I’ve changed locations – particularly with regard to where the Polish codebreakers were based, though it’s true they were kept from Bletchley Park – film release dates, adding fouettes to Prince Ivan’s role in Fokine’s original Firebird, among other fictions.
I used the Fashion on the Ration exhibition at the Imperial War Museum to browse for clothing and cosmetics, particularly for Moira, and it was also my source for discovering the popular Bouijois wartime fragrance Soir de Paris.
There are hundreds of papers relating to Bletchley Park available to the public in the National Archives at Kew, and these were helpful in providing various details, including the story about the RAF man who followed a BP worker at the start of the novel, and other insights into security breaches and procedures relating to the running of the Park.
I am grateful also for the written wartime reminiscences of my late nanna and to my grandma for sharing her memories with me.
The Bletchley Park museum staff and guides were incredibly helpful on the various occasions I visited, and although I was too shy to tell them what I was doing, their accounts have helped in numerous ways to shape the novel. Any inaccuracies or liberties I’ve taken are not a reflection on this brilliant museum, which I recommend as a must-visit for anyone who has enjoyed the book and wants to know the truth about this extraordinary group of war workers.
Acknowledgements
A huge thank you to Clare Hey at Simon & Schuster for suggesting a book on Bletchley Park and putting faith in me to write it. There is no doubt that without Clare the book would not exist, and without her edits I would have been floundering in the dark. Huge thanks also to Daisy Parente and Jane Finigan at Lutyens & Rubinstein for being there to support me on ideas in the book itself and the writing process, to Elizabeth Preston for many kinds of P.R. wizardry, to Juliet Mahony at Lutyens & Rubinstein, Matt Johnson the cover maestro, and a big thank you to copy editor Susan Opie for the final tweaks and caught mistakes in the text.
Thank you to my mum for being the best research intern I could wish for, for the notes on fashion, make-up and Conscientious Objectors, and for trusting me with Nanna’s memoirs. A very great thank you also to Grandma – I will never tire of hearing you talk about the war. And to Tim, thank you for putting The Firebird theme into sol-fa for me, and so swiftly. Thank you, Dad, for all your suggestions and enthusiasm. I am not going to thank my dog, but I do acknowledge his influence in the creation of Nijinsky.
Thank you, Keith Sharp, for putting me in touch with Sir David Edward, and an enormous thank you to Sir David for leading me to the incredible Ann Mitchell and Ailsa Maxwell, Hut 6 codebreakers. Ann Mitchell and Ailsa Maxwell have not only my admiration in extreme for the work they did, but also my huge gratitude for their generosity in taking time to talk to me.
Thank you, Hugo Rainey, for your description of what an ortolan sounds like and for pointing me in the direction of xeno-canto.org so I could hear one for myself. Thank you, Claire Marchant-Collier and Lynsey May, for asking to read early manuscripts – you pair make the deadlines and the worry all worthwhile. Thank you, Rhoda MacDonald, so, so much for the Hebridean writing retreat – and even more for refusing to give me the Wi-Fi password. Thank you, Paul Gallagher and wee Freyja, for putting up with me, the slow-cooked meals and the high fives. Thank you, Łukasz Górecki, for letting me use your surname and Kaite Smith-Welsh for the working brunches. Thank you Rose Filippi for so many insights and inspirations and Caraigh MacGregor, thank you for your unwavering support and your mischief.
A very great thank you to the historian David McDowell for taking the time to go through the draft and catch lots of my historical mistakes. I am sure there are more, but these are definitely no reflection on David’s brilliant knowledge of the period.
Thank you, Frances Hider, for your insight that helped crack the story for me. Very many thanks also to my mentor Linda Cracknell, to the Scottish Book Trust, the National Library of Scotland, and to everyone at Salt Yard and the Cambridge Bar where I wrote various parts of the book.
But most of all, thank you Alex, for naming the book when the rest of us were stumped, and for much, much more.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Hourglass Factory
THE AMBER SHADOWS
Pegasus Books Ltd
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 by Lucy Ribchester
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition August 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or
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ISBN: 978-1-68177-448-0
ISBN 978-1-68177-494-7 (e-book)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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