was lined and worried beneath her sun-dried, greying hair.
‘I have to be there at least a month,’ Hari said dully. ‘I’d much rather be home but, as everyone says, this is wartime and you can’t always do as you want.’
They were both startled as there was a sudden, loud rapping on the farmhouse door. Hari followed Jessie, ready to protect her against intruders.
‘You, Georgie Dixon, how dare you show your face around here after what your mother did?’
‘There’s a message.’ He thrust out a piece of crumpled paper.
‘From where?’ Jessie’s tone was still hostile. ‘If your mother is trying to apologize she can go to blazes.’
‘It’s not from my mother, it’s from some man. He was funny… foreign, didn’t understand why Mam wasn’t you.’
‘Oh, right then,’ Jessie said flatly.
Hari looked at George. He was taller now, a man, he should be serving in the forces by now. They returned to the kitchen and Jessie opened the paper. She sank into a chair, her face white.
‘It’s from Michael’s father.’ She handed it to Hari.
The words danced before Hari’s eyes. They were typed but smudged, and covered in stains. ‘Mrs Dixon’s had a good look at this.’ Hari’s voice was bleak. Jessie took the letter back and read it aloud.
‘Son and new bride doing well under my wing M.H.E.’ She looked up at Hari her face alight with joy. They’re alive, Michael and Meryl are with my husband in Germany, they’re safe!’
Hari sank into a chair. ‘And married!’
She stayed with Jessie until the daylight was almost fading; neither of them spoke much as there seemed nothing to say; their loved ones were alive but at what price?
Dawn was breaking as Hari took the long drive back through Pen Caws Road on the way through Swansea and back to England.
As she neared the town she heard the bombs crashing and whining as they hit the terraced houses on the slopes of Mount Pleasant. Fires burnt on Kilvey Hill as German bombers tried to beat the docks into oblivion, missing important targets but decimating the buildings and killing many of the inhabitants who scampered, too late, towards the comparative safety of the shelters.
She drove through it all and stopped outside her home. She would sleep at her home whatever happened and then, tomorrow, she would pack more of her things and shake the dust of Swansea from her feet and make for England and Bletchley Park. She might just as well stay there for good; Michael was now a married man, he had chosen her sister and her own hopes were in ruins.
Thirty-Eight
Only a few weeks after arriving in Germany I found myself, courtesy of Michael’s father, sitting behind a desk in a German signal office. I worked beside both men and women and they accepted my accented German knowing, or believing, I had lived in Ireland, and making allowances for my foreignness. If only they knew.
Michael had been taken away to be a pilot in the Luftwaffe and if it wasn’t so damn well serious it would all have been laughable.
I’d cried a little when he left me, unfamiliar in huge flying jacket and big boots. He’d hugged me close and whispered caution in my ears. This show of sentiment usually abhorred by the Germans was acceptable, even deemed sweet, in a young married couple. I watched Michael climb into the aeroplane for his lesson and my heart was in my mouth as he careered down the runway and took off into the skies.
He would be expected to bomb Britain, his home, his loved ones; it was grotesque and I didn’t know how he was going to get through it.
I heard footsteps behind me and glanced over my shoulder to see Frau Hoffmann standing behind me, watching; she was small and blonde and very pretty but we were all a little afraid of her.
‘Aren’t you doing any work today, Frau Euler?’ Her German was precise, sharp. I had to drag my mind to the task in hand trying to remember what I’d learned at Hari’s side in her funny little office.
I adjusted the earphones and began to take notes hoping my spelling in German was adequate to the job. As the messages were in code, I expect I could get away with it but there was no knowing with a woman like Frau Hoffmann.
When I had been helping Hari it had all been easy to me, a little experiment, a chance to show how clever I was. In the German language, it was tricky but I was quick to learn and the codes were similar patterns to those we used at home. Numbers allied to certain letters soon became translatable even with a sort of haphazard kind of accuracy and I began to earn the respect of my fellow decoders.
Simple messages came through, usually nothing of any consequence and I waited expectantly for something big to arrive, some plot of the enemy to communicate to someone, perhaps Hari in Wales. I would be a spy—how I didn’t know—but I would help my country win this futile war, that I was sure of.
After his training was over and before he was sent on active service Michael was given leave and we went together to his father’s farmhouse and talked. I wanted him to talk about us, about our marriage, sham though it was, but his first words were about Hari. I might have known.
‘Those radios you use, the signals you send, could you let Hari know how we are and all that?’
‘Tell her we’re married in name only, you mean?’ We knew the contents of his father’s brief message to England. ‘What do you think I am a witch? I’m struggling enough not to show myself up as it is—’ My tone was sharp—‘and you want me to take such a risk just to let my sister know you’re not unfaithful, is that it? You would risk my life and possibly yours for such a small thing?’
‘Speak German,’ he said, ‘it’s safer.’
‘Even when we’re speaking treason?’
‘Treason?’—he sounded wounded—‘I wouldn’t ask you to do that.’
‘That’s exactly what you are doing.’
‘No I’m not—’ he thought about it—‘well I suppose I am really. Sorry.’
‘If I signal Hari,
‘What do you mean?’
‘Make a guess,’ I said, knowing my eyes were narrowed.
‘For God’s sake don’t take risks.’
‘Oh, it’s taking risks to send vital intelligence to my country but not to contact home to give a trivial message to my sister.’
‘It’s not trivial to me,’ he said.
I suddenly felt the anger, the fight, the hope go out of me. ‘I know.’
For the next few days we lived like a married couple except for one important matter, at night we went to separate beds and I would lie awake thinking of him, wanting him, most of all wanting his love. But I cooked for him, managed the unfamiliar foods. I washed his clothes, his intimate underwear, and all the time he treated me casually, as he always did.
Michael tutored me some more in German though by using it every day I was losing my foreign accent and speaking in the same guttural way as he and the rest of my working friends did. I thought of the word ‘friends’ with surprise; the Germans were our enemies and yet the very intelligent men and women I shared my days with were human just like the Welsh stock I came from.
I was glad to go back to Hamburg and to the office, glad to be free of the desire to fling myself at Michael’s feet and beg him to love me. And yet, once at my desk, with my headphones flattening my permed unruly hair, the idea of communicating with home began to grow and ferment.
Frau Hoffman seemed to soften towards me and, watching her, I knew, incredibly, that she was in love with one of the brilliant men who worked in the office that housed the weird machine that appeared to be a typewriter but was much more.
I went to have a better look at it one evening when the office was almost deserted. There wasn’t one but several of the machines and I couldn’t think how they worked.
