And so it had proved to be. The two girls had taken the train from Euston Station to Bletchley Junction, an hour north of London. It was almost dark when they arrived. The station and the town were both unprepossessing. A pall of dust from the local brickworks hung over the air. There was nobody to meet the train, and they carried their own suitcases up a long path beside the railway line until they came to a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
“Crikey.” This time even Trixie was alarmed. “It certainly doesn’t look very inviting, does it?”
“We don’t have to do this,” Pamela said.
They stared at each other, each willing the other to bolt.
“We can at least find out what they want us to do and then say ‘no thank you very much but I’d rather be a land girl and raise pigs.’”
This put them both in better spirits.
“Come on. Let’s face the music.” Trixie nudged her friend, and they walked up to the main gate. The RAF guard on duty in the concrete sentry box had their names on his clipboard, and they were directed to the main house, where they were to report to Commander Travis. Nobody offered to carry their bags, which more than anything told Pamela that they were now in a very different world from the one she was used to. The driveway passed rows of long drab-looking huts before the main house came into view. It had been built by a nouveau riche family at the height of Victorian excess and was a sprawling mixture of styles with fancy brickwork, gables and oriental pillars, and a conservatory sticking out of one end. New arrivals from lower down the social scale were often impressed, but to girls raised in stately homes, it produced the opposite effect.
“What a monstrosity!” Trixie exclaimed, laughing. “Lavatory gothic, wouldn’t you say?”
“But the view’s pretty,” Pamela said. “Look—there’s a lake, and a copse, and fields. I wonder if there are horses and one can go riding.”
“It’s not a house party, darling,” Trixie said. “We’re here to work. Come on. Let’s get it over with and find out what we’re in for.”
They entered the main house and found themselves in the sort of impressive interior they were used to—ornately carved ceilings, panelled walls, stained-glass windows, and thick carpets. A young woman carrying a sheaf of papers came out of a side door and didn’t seem surprised to see them. “Oh, I suppose you’re the latest lot of debs,” she said, regarding Trixie’s mink collar with disdain. “Commander Travis is upstairs. Second door on the right.”
“Hardly the warmest welcome,” Trixie whispered as they left their suitcases and ascended a rather grand carved-oak staircase.
“Do you think we’re making an awful mistake?” Pamma whispered.
“A bit late to turn back now.” Trixie squeezed her hand, then stepped forward to knock on a polished oak door. Commander Travis, the deputy director, looked at them with clear scepticism.
“This is no joyride, young ladies. In fact, it’s bloody hard work. But I hope you’ll find it’s rewarding work. You’ll be doing your part to stop the enemy—just as important a job as our boys in the service are doing. And the first thing we stress here is absolute secrecy. You will be required to sign the Official Secrets Act. After that you are not permitted to discuss your work with anyone outside your unit. Not even with each other. Not even with your parents or boyfriends. Is that clear?”
The girls nodded, then Pamela got up the courage to ask, “Exactly what will our work be? We’ve been told nothing so far.”
He held up a hand. “First things first, young lady.” He produced two sheets of paper and two fountain pens. “Official Secrets Act. Read this and sign here, please.” He tapped a finger on the paper.
“So you’re saying that we have to promise never to divulge what goes on here before we know what goes on here?” Trixie asked.
Commander Travis laughed. “You’ve got spirit. I like that. But I’m afraid once you came in through that gate, you became a security risk to the country. And I assure you that your work here will be a damned sight more interesting and rewarding than other jobs you could do.”
Trixie looked at Pamela, shrugged, and said, “Why not? What have we got to lose?” She took the pen and signed. Pamela followed suit. Later, when she was alone, she discovered that she was to be sent to Hut 3 to translate decoded German messages. Pamela didn’t know what Trixie was doing, as they were only allowed to share information with members of their own hut, but she knew that Trixie was annoyed that she hadn’t been given a more exacting and glamorous job. “Filing and typing in the index room. Can you imagine anything more boring?” she had said. “While one gathers, the men in the huts have all the fun working on strange machines. I’d never have come if I’d known I’d be doing boring, menial stuff. How about you? Is your job going to be menial, too?”
“Oh no, I’m going to be chatting daily with Herr Hitler,” Pamela said, then burst out laughing at her friend’s face. “A joke, darling. One has to keep up a sense of humour at all times. And yes, I’m sure my job will be utterly menial, too. After all, we’re not men, are we?”
And she had never told Trixie any more than that. She was horribly conscious of the importance of her job and that a failure to translate or a mistranslation might mean hundreds of lives lost. She realised that she was usually handed the lowest-level-priority decodes and that the priority intercepts went to the men, but just occasionally, she had the satisfaction of coming up with a hidden gem.
The task had been challenging and exciting at first, but after a whole year, she had become tired and jaded. The unreality of it all, the discomforts and the constant stream of bad news from the battlefields were beginning to wear down even a cheerful person like Pamela. The huts were horribly basic, freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, always gloomy with inadequate bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. And at the end of long shifts, she had to return to her billet—a dismal boarding-house room backed against the railway line. As she rode back into town on the ancient bike she had acquired, she found her thoughts turning to Farleigh in the spring—the woods a carpet of bluebells in this first week of May. Young lambs in the fields. Riding in the early morning with her sisters. And she found that she really longed to see her sisters. And she had to admit that she had never really been close to any of them, except for Margot, whom she hadn’t seen in ages and missed terribly. They were all so different—Livvy, five years her senior, had been born prissy and grown-up, and was always telling the others how to behave properly.
Pamela realised with regret that she hardly knew Phoebe, the youngest daughter. She had seemed a bright little girl and had the makings of a splendid horsewoman but spent most of her life in the nursery, away from the rest of the family. And then there was the annoying Dido, two years her junior, fiercely competitive, and desperate to be grown up and out in society—to have everything Pamela had. But Dido saw her as a rival, never a partner in crime as Margot had been, and they had never shared the same intimacy.
Pamela turned back to her work when a basket of transcripts was placed in front of her. The early-morning messages were beginning to come in, which was good news. It meant that the brainy chaps in Hut 6 had got the Enigma settings right, and the resulting printouts were in real German, or at least vaguely understandable German. She picked up the first card. The Typex produced long strips of letters divided into groups of five. Xs were periods, Ys were commas, and proper names were preceded by a J. She looked at the first one: WUBY YNULL SEQNU LLNUL LX. This was something that came through every day. Wetterbericht. The morning weather forecast for sector six. And null meant nothing important was going on. She wrote out a quick translation and dropped it into the out-basket.