The Spyglass File (The Forensic Genealogist Book 5)

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

‘Thank you,’ Elsie said, dashing back to tell RKB and Jean the news.

  ‘And now we sit and wait for the rest of the bombers,’ RKB said gravely from his desk. ‘How are you holding up, Elsie?’

  ‘Fine, thank you, sir,’ she lied.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ he remarked.

  Elsie headed back to the operations room where the twelve operators were listening to silence once more. Elsie surveyed the scene; it really was the calm before the storm.

  Forty-five painful minutes of quiet airwaves followed.

  At eight o’clock, RKB received another phone call and he called Aileen and Elsie back into the office to tell them that Fighter Command had confirmed that more than two hundred and fifty fires were alight around the city. One of which was the cathedral.

  Elsie lowered her head and weakly nodded; her grandparents’ house was just a few streets from the cathedral. If the house hadn’t already been hit, it was within spitting distance of a huge burning landmark on a night with a full moon. She cleared her throat. ‘Do the people there know what’s coming? That those first bombs were simply markers?’

  RKB shrugged. ‘I doubt it, Elsie. The air raid sirens have been going since ten past seven and they won’t stop until the raid’s over, so hopefully your family and the people of the city will take note and get out of harm’s way.’

  A firm knock at the door made Elsie jump. It was Rusty, one of the senior WAAF operators. Ordinarily unflustered and calm, her manner as she burst into the room without waiting to be invited unsettled everyone in the office at once.

  ‘Sorry, sir—just thought you should know, we’re picking up the bombers. Hundreds of them by the sounds of it,’ she said breathlessly.

  RKB led them all out into the operations room. In stark contrast to the place that Elsie had just left, it was now a veritable buzzing hive. Every operator was hurriedly jotting in their log books. Pages were being turned. The codebooks were being frantically flipped through and operators were leaning across, whispering to their neighbouring colleagues.

  Elsie hurried over to the nearest operator and snatched up her log book. She had recorded the routine conversations that had taken place between pilots and their control base. In her log book alone, she had recorded the call signs of ten different pilots. Elsie moved to the next operator, Betty.

  ‘How many have you picked up?’ Elsie asked her.

  ‘Dozens,’ came the hasty response. ‘It must be a terrifying sight, Elsie, I tell you.’

  By the time Elsie had completed a circuit of all the operators, she converged with Aileen, Jean and RKB and all of them reached the agreement that there must be close to five hundred bombers inbound to Coventry.

  Elsie stood back from the conversation. They’d had it. Her parents. Her grandmother. Coventry.

  It was all over before it had even begun.

  The sun was rising, at last overpowering the treacherous moon. It was gone six am when the final bombs had rained down on Coventry, the city having been relentlessly pounded by wave after wave of bombers—all night long.

  Elsie finally left the operations room and stepped out into the early dawn. She picked up her bicycle but was too tired to ride it. She began to walk it along the deserted country lane, her mind completely numb. It was too early to know the full extent of the damage and destruction, but she knew that her family’s chance of survival had to be very low.

  Suddenly, she dropped the bicycle and vomited beside the road. She held onto her hat as the burning dark liquid cascaded down onto the grass verge. The cause of the sickness could have been anything. The effects of the night. Too much coffee and cocoa. Morning sickness. Stress. Probably, a combination of all of those things.

  She wiped her mouth, picked up her bicycle and continued on slowly towards the billet. Her stomach, mind and heart were now empty; she walked on like the living dead.

  Silently, she unlocked the front door. Inside, all was quiet. She faltered as she passed the sitting-room. Slumped back on one of the sofas was Violet, bizarrely wearing a flouncy yellow ball-gown and her WAAF hat. After the night she had endured, Elsie couldn’t help but smile. As she walked up the stairs to her bedroom, it amazed Elsie that five hundred bombers could destroy an entire city whilst life continued obliviously for people like Violet.

  Her bedroom, at last. She was certain that she could have slept standing up. She collapsed back into the bed with no energy with which to even bother undressing.

  As she lay down, she noticed the pot of quinine pills beside her on the bedside table. She looked at it for a long time before picking it up and holding the pot above her.

  Finally, she unscrewed the cap and poured the contents into her cupped hand.

  Chapter Fifteen

  25th December 1940, West Kingsdown, Kent

  ‘Bloody thing!’ Elsie cursed, trying to do the buttons up on her uniform. ‘Help me, will you, Violet?’

  Violet, curled up in a ball on the bed beside her, groaned. ‘No.’

  Elsie removed the blackouts from the window, sending a shock of sunlight into the room, then tugged the blankets from Violet’s bed. ‘I’m serious, Violet. I need you to help me.’

  Violet rolled over, making a feline whine as she did so. ‘Please tell me that you’re not on duty today, Elsie Finch.’

  ‘Only a short one—I’ll be back in time for dinner.’

  Violet sighed noisily and rose from the bed.

  ‘Pull it around from the sides, will you?’ Elsie said, placing Violet’s limp hands on her hips.

  Violet pulled the material taut, but even that wasn’t good enough—there was no way that Elsie was going to be able to button up her tunic. Until now, she had managed to keep the bump well hidden, with only a few passing comments from the other girls that she had gained some weight recently. But in the last few days her belly had grown preposterously large. Her new uniform, with its red silk lining and thin cuff stripe, had only had two months’ wear, and now it was too small. Or she was too big.

  ‘Great. Now what am I going to do?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘Get a corset? Tell people the truth?’ Violet suggested, falling back into bed and pulling the blankets over her head. ‘It’s not as if they won’t find out at some point anyway. You had your chance with the pills but now it’s too late.’

  Elsie swallowed hard, knowing that underneath Violet’s bullish words were the grains of truth. The morning after the Coventry raids, Elsie had flushed the quinine pills down the lavatory. When Violet had asked—and repeated to ask on a daily basis—what Elsie’s new plan was, she had told her the same answer: that she had no idea. One thing was certain, however, she could no longer disguise the fact that she was expecting a child. ‘I’ll tell Jean today,’ Elsie murmured, as much to herself as to Violet.

  ‘I think it’s probably the right thing to do,’ Violet agreed. ‘Clause 22.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Clause 22—your exit from the WAAF,’ Violet clarified. ‘I’ve considered going out that way myself. Ruth Selmes was selling her urine for two pounds a bottle.’

  Elsie shot a horrified look at Violet. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it’s an easy way out of the WAAF.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave the WAAF,’ Elsie retorted.

  ‘You didn’t seriously think that you would be able to continue in the service with a baby, did you?’

  ‘I don’t know…’ Elsie hadn’t thought—that was the problem. She couldn’t leave, not now. The Y-Service was doing such important work. She was doing such important work. She had only just recently been promoted. The letter recommending her advancement to the rank of Assistant Section Officer had arrived on the same day as the letter confirming what she had already known: that her parents and grandmother had been killed in the raid on Coventry. In the days following the attack, Elsie had used a forty-eight hour pass to visit the city, where she spoke to neighbours and the local ARP warden, who had found all of them dead in their beds. They had apparently made
no attempt to seek shelter and were killed instantly in one of the first raids of the night. Elsie had picked her way across the rubble-strewn city that no longer bore any resemblance to the place that she had often visited when staying with her grandparents as a child. The house—the entire street, in fact—had been reduced to an unidentifiable mound of bricks, wood and household detritus. She had stood on the street corner, behind a safety cordon and wept.

  The memory made her stomach quiver, bringing her back to the present, back to her first Christmas alone.

  ‘Are you okay, Elsie Finch?’ Violet asked, reaching for her hand.

  Elsie smiled. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Thank you.’ She took a few moments to compose herself, then said goodbye to Violet and left the house.

  ‘Göring and his cronies are having the day off, by the looks of it,’ Jean Conan Doyle informed Elsie, when she arrived at work.

  The operations room was almost deserted. Just six operators were twiddling their dials, searching for sounds of the enemy.

  ‘There’s been nothing at all so far today, thank heavens,’ Jean added. ‘Make yourself a cocoa—take your time.’

  Elsie smiled. ‘Before I get started, there’s something I need to tell you.’

  Jean lowered her glasses from the bridge of her nose, letting them dangle from the chain around her neck. ‘Sounds ominous. Come into the office.’

  They entered the Intelligence Office and Jean closed the door.

  ‘Take a seat,’ she said, sitting behind the desk in RKB’s chair.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Elsie announced, staring at the ground between her shoes. She had just needed to blurt it out, or she knew that the words would never have come.

  ‘Pregnant?’ Jean echoed.

  Elsie nodded and looked up. She saw the shock and disappointment in Jean’s eyes as she processed the information.

  ‘How far gone are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Four months.’

  ‘But…’ Her words trailed into a silence that betrayed her thought process. Jean cleared her throat and straightened in her chair. Elsie knew in that moment that her time in the WAAF was over. She faced a humiliating return to the deadness of Bramley Cottage. She faced certain divorce and ostracism from her friends, any remaining family and her neighbours. Bizarrely, she thought of Mrs McKay smugly commenting on her condition. She had made a terrible mistake.

  Jean stood and opened the top drawer of a metal filing cabinet and withdrew a single sheet of paper. She set it down on the desk and began to write on it. It was bound to be something to do with Clause 22. It was all over.

  Elsie tried and failed to read the upside down text. Tears began to prickle in her eyes, blurring her vision as she gave way to due process.

  Jean looked up sternly. ‘So. Am I correct in assuming that when the time comes to deliver your husband’s baby, you will want some time off, then somebody else in the family will be taking care of it, allowing you to return to the Y-Service? Or is there an alternative plan in place?’

  Elsie was stunned. She looked at Jean, who was sitting emotionlessly, just as she had done at Elsie’s interview at the Air Ministry. Jean cocked her head to one side. ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes…yes, that’s right,’ Elsie stammered.

  Jean smiled. ‘Very good. The other girls will be amazed to hear that you managed to keep your husband’s brief return in August so quiet. Right, back to work. Göring’s men may well have finished their Christmas dinners and be back in the air by now, for all we know.’

  Elsie stood. ‘Thank you, Jean. Thank you.’

  ‘Off you go,’ Jean said, flicking her hand dismissively at Elsie.

  Elsie entered the operations room and took a deep breath. Jean had not only offered her a life-line to be able to stay in the service, but she had also shown her what she had to do: give the baby up—but to whom? It wasn’t what she wanted, not really, but what alternative did she have? This way, her friends and family would be oblivious. Mrs McKay and the other neighbours in Nutley would be oblivious. After the war, her life could continue and pick up from where she had left off. It was her one and only choice.

  Elsie sighed deeply and a heavy weight, that she had been unaware that she had been carrying, was suddenly lifted. She stood at the back of the operations room, seeing her life with detached clarity.

  Elsie walked back to the billet slowly and meaningfully. It was a chilly day and the sun had failed to remove the frost from the extremities of the passing hedgerow. The calmness that had earlier filtered through her body had remained. Jean, saying nothing more of the pregnancy, had dismissed Elsie and two other girls early because of the silent airwaves. It was one of the quirks of war, that Christmas Day had granted everyone a reprieve from fighting.

  Elsie stopped short of the billet to listen to a blackbird singing gaily among the hawthorn branches beside her. She pulled her coat tight around her tummy and closed her eyes. It was the sound and feeling of normality.

  ‘Are you lost, Elsie Finch? Or have you gone stark raving mad?’

  Elsie opened her eyes and glanced over to the cottage. Violet was standing at the front door wearing a posh outfit and a crown of silver tinsel. Elsie grinned, waved, and continued the short distance to the house.

  Despite the wartime deprivations, she found the cottage surprisingly festive. All the girls were wearing their best frocks and sported tinsel adornments; the gramophone was quietly playing a medley of carols; a small Christmas tree, sparsely decorated with hand-made woollen baubles stood proudly in the sitting-room and the wondrous smell of the Christmas dinner cooking pervaded throughout the house.

  ‘Go and get changed and I’ll get you a drink,’ Violet ordered. Then she lowered her voice. ‘How did it go—with Billy, I mean?’

  Elsie smiled and briefly summarised their conversation.

  ‘I told you it would all work out, didn’t I, Elsie Finch?’

  Elsie grimaced. ‘No, you said I would be thrown out of the service.’

  Violet twirled around and shrugged. ‘I would have jumped at the chance of enacting Clause 22.’

  Upstairs, Elsie squeezed into a red velvet dress that fully revealed her bump, and headed down to the sitting-room.

  ‘Happy Violet Christmas,’ Violet said, offering her a glass of rum.

  Elsie chinked her glass with Violet’s and sank into the armchair beside the fire. She sipped her drink and, under the dulcet tones of O Come all Ye Faithful, she listened to the simple sound of the burning logs shifting and adjusting in the fireplace.

  ‘Would that we could listen to something decent,’ Violet complained. ‘I really need to get away from here. Have a debauched, drunken night with some Polish pilot or other.’

  Elsie laughed. ‘Polish?’

  Violet shrugged and swigged more drink. ‘So as I don’t have to converse with him.’

  ‘You are dreadful, you know.’

  Violet raised her eyebrows. ‘I do know that, yes.’

  ‘Dinner!’ Betty called.

  Violet stood, linked her arm through Elsie’s and led the way into the dining room.

  Betty and Rosemary stood proudly behind the table that they had decorated with sprigs of holly and ivy.

  ‘Ox heart with stuffing and vegetables!’ Rosemary declared. ‘Sit down and tuck in.’

  The dinner was surprisingly tasty. They ate, chatted and sang along with the carols quietly warbling away in the sitting room. Despite all that had occurred, Elsie felt contented, grateful even. After the dinner, Betty presented her wartime Christmas pudding, made with potato, apple and grated carrot. As they ate, Elsie made her announcement.

  ‘Girls, I’ve something to tell you,’ she said, glancing between Rosemary and Betty.

  ‘You’re pregnant?’ Betty guessed.

  ‘We know,’ Rosemary confirmed.

  Elsie turned to Violet with a frown.

  ‘It wasn’t me!’ Violet protested.

  Betty looked across to Elsie and said earnestly, ‘We’re not sil
ly, Elsie. We guessed weeks ago.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it, though?’ Rosemary asked, helpless to prevent a grimace at whatever was in her mouth. ‘That’s the bit we don’t know.’

  ‘I’m going to have it adopted,’ Elsie revealed.

  ‘Probably for the best,’ Betty agreed.

  ‘Anyone want some carrot fudge to take the awful taste of the pudding away?’ Rosemary asked with a laugh.

  And that was it. The revelation that Elsie had been putting off for several weeks had been said and the earth hadn’t stopped turning.

  ‘Oh, Violet, switch off the gramophone—Round the Empire will be on the wireless any moment. And the King’s speech.’

  ‘I don’t think I much care what he’s got to say about anything,’ Violet murmured as she left the table.

  Rosemary fetched the carrot fudge and returned with a small pile of envelopes.

  ‘What’s all that?’ Betty asked.

  ‘Christmas cards,’ she answered. ‘I’ve been snatching them from the postman and hiding them from you. I thought it would make today a bit more special if we waited and opened them all together.’ She began to hand them out, as Violet switched on the wireless.

  The women began tearing into their cards, smiling and passing comments to the others. ‘Oh, look what dear Bertie has sent!’ ‘Mother sends her regards to you all.’ ‘I daren’t read you what Dickie said!’

  Elsie tore into her final envelope, listening as she did to the wireless.

  ‘…Destiny has given England the torch of liberty to hold and she has not dropped it; she has not allowed the stormy waves of terrorism to let that bright light even flicker. She is thankful that when the test came, she had the high courage to meet it. Today, England stands unbeaten, unconquered, unafraid…’

  She pulled out the card and discovered that it wasn’t a Christmas card at all. It was a note from Agnes.

  Elsie, word has reached me that you are several months in the family way. I suggest that for your sake and for that of my son, you return without delay to Cliff House. Regards, Agnes.