The next one was equally routine. ABSTI MMSPR UCHYY RESTX OHNEX SINN. A test sending from a German command to make sure the day’s codes were working. “Thank you, Hamburg, they are working very nicely,” she said with a smile, as she dropped this one into the basket. The next one had come through badly corrupted. Half the letters were missing. Messages were often received like this and required the skill used to solve a crossword puzzle as well as a good knowledge of the German terminology of war. Pamela managed to deduce that the subject of the message was the twenty-first Panzer Division, part of Rommel’s desert force. But the following letters—FF-I—G had her flummoxed. Was it two words or even three? If it was more than one word, then the first one might be auf, meaning “on.” She stared harder until the letters danced in the poor light. She longed to remove the blackout curtains, but only the warden was allowed to do that at his appointed hour. Her eyes hurt. Rest, she thought. I need to rest.
Then she was alert again, a hopeful smile on her face. She tried the letters. Auffrischung. The twenty-first Panzer Division needed to rest and refit!
She jumped up and almost ran through to the watch room. Wilson, the older man who was watch chief, looked up with a frown. He didn’t approve of women on his night shift and ignored Pamela as much as possible.
“I think I’ve got something interesting, sir,” she said. She put the Typex in front of him with her translation underneath. He stared at it, frowning for a long time before he looked up. “Rather a stretch of the imagination, wouldn’t you say, Lady Pamela?” He alone always insisted on addressing her with her title. To the rest of them she was P.
“But it could mean that the twenty-first Panzers might be withdrawn. That’s important, isn’t it?”
Two other men at the table leaned over to see what the fuss was about.
“She may be right, Wilson,” one of them said. “Auffrischung. Good word.” He gave Pamela an encouraging smile.
“See if you can come up with something else that makes sense, then, Wilson,” the other said. “We all know her German is better than ours.”
“You should pass it along to army HQ anyway, just in case,” the first said. “Well done, P.”
Pamela allowed herself a grin as she returned to her seat. She had just emptied her in-basket when voices at the other end of the hut signalled the arrival of the early day shift. Pamela took her coat from its peg.
“Lovely day out there,” one of the young men said as he came toward her. He was tall and gangly, peering at the world through thick glasses. His name was Rodney, and he was the epitome of the studious young Oxford or Cambridge men who had been lured to work at Bletchley Park. “Lucky you get time to enjoy it. Rounders match this afternoon, I gather. If you happen to like rounders. I’m a complete duffer at it myself, I regret. And country dancing tonight, but then you’ll be working, won’t you.” He paused and ran a nervous hand through unruly hair. “I don’t suppose you care to come to the cinema with me on your night off?”
“Kind of you, Rodney,” she said, “But frankly, on my night off, I’d rather catch up on sleep.”
“You are looking a little hollow around the eyes,” he agreed, never having shown himself to be tactful. “These night shifts do get to one after a while, don’t they? Still, all in a good cause, so they say.”
“So they say,” she repeated. “I wish we could see that we’re making progress. The country, I mean. All the news seems to be bad, doesn’t it? And the poor people in London being bombed night after night. How long can we take it, do you think?”
“As long as we have to,” Rodney said. “Simple as that.”
Pamela looked at his retreating back with admiration. He represented the backbone of Britain at this moment. A skinny, awkward bookworm, yet determined to keep going for as long as it took to defeat Hitler. She felt ashamed of her own depression and lack of faith as she went to retrieve her bicycle and rode into town.
Her digs at Mrs. Adams’s boarding-house were close to the station, and a train whistled as it approached the platform. If my parents could see where I’m living now, Pamela thought, with a grim smile. But then they had no idea where she was working or what she was doing. Under the Official Secrets Act, she was not allowed to divulge anything to anybody. It hadn’t been easy to persuade her father to let her leave home, but she had turned twenty-one and come out into society, so he could hardly forbid her. And when she had said, “I want to do my bit, Pah. You said it’s up to us to set an example, and I’m setting one,” he had reluctantly agreed.
She dismounted from her bike and wheeled it along the pavement. She felt sick with hunger and tiredness, but she sighed as she wondered what breakfast would await her today: the lumpy porridge made with water? Bread fried in the drippings from last Sunday’s scrag end of mutton? Toast with a scrape of margarine and watery marmalade if they were lucky. And her mind drifted to the spread on the sideboard back at Farleigh: the kidneys and bacon and kedgeree and scrambled eggs. How long before she could go home? But if she went home, how would she force herself to come back?
There was a newsstand outside the station, and a headline read “Hero Comes Home.” Pamela glanced at the front page on the pile of newspapers. Since the war began and paper was scarce, the print had become smaller and more crowded and the pictures tiny. But there, halfway down the front page of the Daily Express, she spotted a grainy photograph of a man in RAF uniform and recognised the jaunty grin. She fished in her pocket for tuppence and took the newspaper. “Ace pilot Flight Lieutenant Jeremy Prescott escapes against all odds from German prisoner-of-war camp. Only survivor of a breakout.” Before she could read any more, her legs buckled under her, and she sank to the ground.
Instantly there were people around her, arms lifting her up.
“Steady on, love. I’ve got yer,” one voice said.
“Bring her over to the bench, Bert, and someone go in the station café for a cup of tea. She’s as white as a sheet.”
It was the kindness more than anything that produced a great heaving sob from deep within Pamela. All the tension, the long nights, the hard work, the depressing news escaped from her in that one sob, and following it, the tears started streaming down her cheeks.
She felt herself carried and placed gently on a seat. She found she was still clutching the newspaper.
“What was it, love—bad news?” the woman at the newspaper stand asked.
Pamela’s body was still shaking with sobs. “No, it’s good news,” she managed to gasp at last. “He’s alive. He’s safe. He’s coming home.”
That afternoon she received a message to report to Commander Travis. Her heart skipped a beat. What could she have done wrong? Had someone reported the incident at the station? She was heartily ashamed and embarrassed about her complete lack of control. Pah would have been mortified, would’ve told her she had let the side down. And now she worried: Had she said anything she shouldn’t? She had heard rumours about people who had said too much, breached security. They disappeared and were never seen again. There were nervous jokes about where they had gone, but nobody laughed too much. The jokes might have been true.
But then one was not summoned to the deputy director for everyday matters. She jumped on her bike and pedalled back to the campus. Commander Travis looked up from his paperwork as she came in. He motioned to the chair beside his desk. She perched on the edge of it.