In Farleigh Field: A Novel of World War II

“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.

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.”