They came round the curve and the road was clear. The turning to the cottage was on the left, deserted, but as they came level with it a policeman suddenly stepped out from the hedge opposite and held up his hand. Jericho hesitated and then pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The policeman stepped smartly out of the way and Jericho had a momentary impression of an outraged brick-red face. Then they were dropping down into the hollow and rising again and passing through the village. Another policeman was talking to a woman on the doorstep of her thatched cottage and he turned to stare at them. Jericho trod on the accelerator again and soon the village was behind them and the road was corkscrewing down into another leafy hollow. They rose into Shenley Church End, passed the White Hart Inn, where Jericho used to live, and then a church, and almost at once they had to stop at the junction of the A5.
Jericho glanced in his mirror to check there was no one behind them. It seemed safe enough. He said to Hester: ‘You can get up now.’ He was in a daze. He couldn’t believe what he was doing. He waited to let a couple of lorries go by, indicated, and then swung left on to the old Roman road. It ran straight and true ahead of them, northwest, for as far as they could see. Jericho changed up a gear, the Austin gathered speed, and they were clear.
Wartime England opened up before them – still the same but somehow subtly different: a little bit smudged, a little bit knocked about, like a prosperous estate going fast to ruin, or a genteel elderly lady fallen on hard times.
They didn’t encounter any bomb damage until they reached the outskirts of Rugby, where what looked from a distance to be a ruined abbey turned out to be the roofless shell of a factory, but the depredations of war were everywhere. Fences beside the road, after three years without repairs, were sagging or collapsed. The gates and railings had gone from the fine country parks to be melted down for munitions. The houses were shabby. Nothing had been painted since 1940. Broken windows were boarded over, ironwork was rusted or coated in tar. Even the inn signs were blistered and faded. The country was degraded.
And we, too, thought Jericho, as they overtook yet another stooped figure trudging beside the road, don’t we look slightly worse each year? In 1940 there had at least been the galvanising energy unleashed by the threat of invasion. And in 1941 there had been some hope when Russia and then America had entered the war. But 1942 had dragged into 1943, the U-boats had wrought murder on the convoys, the shortages had worsened and, despite the victories in Africa and on the eastern front, the war had begun to look endless – an unbroken, unheroic vista of rationing and exhaustion. The villages seemed almost lifeless – the men away, the women drafted into factories – while in Stony Stratford and in Towcester the few people who were about had mostly formed into queues outside shops with empty windows.
Beside him, Hester Wallace was silent, monitoring their progress with obsessive interest on Atwood’s atlas. Good, he thought. With all the signposts and place names taken down, they would have no idea where they were if they once got lost. He didn’t dare drive too quickly. The Austin was unfamiliar and (he was discovering) idiosyncratic. From time to time the cheap wartime petrol caused it to emit a loud bang. It tended to drift towards the centre of the road, and the brakes weren’t too hot, either. Besides, a private car was such a rarity, he feared some officious policeman would pull them over if they went too fast and demand to see their papers.
He drove on steadily for more than an hour until, just before a market town she declared was Hinckley, she told him to turn off right on to a narrower road.
They had left Bletchley under a clear sky but the further north they had gone, the darker it had become. Grey clouds heavy with snow or rain had rolled across the sun. The tarmac pushed across a bleak, flat landscape, with not a vehicle to be seen, and for a second time Jericho experienced the curious sense that history was going backwards, that not for a quarter of a century could the roads have been this empty.
Fifteen miles further on she made him turn right again and suddenly they were climbing into much more hilly country, thickly wooded, with startling outcrops of bare rock striped white by snow.
‘What place is this?’
‘Charnwood Forest. We’re almost there. You’d better pull over in a minute. Here, look,’ she said, pointing to a deserted picnic area set just off the road. ‘Here will do. I shan’t be long.’
She hauled her bag from the back seat and set off towards the trees. He watched her go. She looked like a farm boy in her jacket and trousers. What was it Claire had said? ‘She’s got a bit of a crush on me’? More than a bit, he thought, much more than a bit, to risk so much. It struck him that she was almost the exact physical opposite of Claire, that where Claire was tall and blonde and voluptuous, Hester was short and dark and skinny. Rather like him, in fact. She was changing her clothes behind a tree which wasn’t quite wide enough and he got a sudden glimpse of her thin white shoulder. He looked away. When he looked back she was emerging from the dark woodland in an olive-green dress. The first drop of rain plopped on to the windscreen just as she got back into the car.
‘Drive on then, Mr Jericho.’ She found their position on the atlas again and rested her finger on it.
His hand paused on the ignition key. ‘Do you think, Miss Wallace,’ he said, hesitantly, ‘in view of the circumstances, we might now risk first-name terms?’
She gave him a faint smile. ‘Hester.’
‘Tom.’
They shook hands.
They followed the road through the forest for about five miles and then the trees thinned and they were into high, open country. The rain and melted snow had turned the narrow lane into a mud track and for five minutes they were forced to crawl in second gear behind a pony and trap. At last the driver raised his whip in apology and turned off to the right, towards a tiny village with curls of smoke rising from half a dozen chimneys, and very soon afterwards Hester shouted: ‘There!’
If they hadn’t been travelling so slowly, they might have missed it: a pair of lodge gates, a private road with a red-and-white pole slung across it, a sentry box, a cryptic sign: WOYG, BEAUMANOR.
War Office ‘Y’ Group, Beaumanor, ‘Y’ being the code name for the wireless interception service.
‘Here we go.’
Jericho had to admire her nerve. While he was still fumbling sweatily for his pass, she had leaned across him to proffer hers to the guard and had announced briskly that they were expected. The Army private checked her name off on a clipboard, went round to the back of the car to make a note of their registration number, returned to the window, gave Jericho’s card a cursory glance, and nodded them in.
Beaumanor Hall was another of those huge, secluded country houses that had been commandeered by the military from their grateful, almost bankrupt owners, and that would never, Jericho guessed, return to private use. It was early Victorian, with an avenue of dripping elms to one side and a stable yard to the other, into which they were directed. They drove under a fine arch. Half a dozen giggling ATS girls, their coats held over their heads like tents to ward off the rain, ran out in front of them and disappeared into one of the buildings. The courtyard held a couple of small Morris commercial trucks and a row of BSA motorcycles. As Jericho parked, a uniformed man hurried over to them carrying a vast and battered umbrella.
‘Heaviside,’ he said, ‘Major Heaviside, as in the eponymous layer. And you must be Miss Wallace and you must be …?’
‘Tom Jericho.’
‘Mr Jericho. Excellent. Splendid.’ He shook their hands vigorously. ‘This is a treat for us, I must say. A visit from head office to the country cousins. Commander sends a thousand sorrows and says d’you mind if I do the honours? He’ll try and catch us later. ’Fraid you’ve missed lunch, but tea? Cup of tea? Filthy weather …’
Jericho had been braced for some suspicious questions, and had used the journey to rehearse some careful answers, but the major merely ushered them under his leaking umbrella and guided them into the house. He was young, tall
and balding, with spectacles so smeared with debris it was a wonder he could see through them. He had sloping shoulders, like a bottle, and the collar of his tunic was blanched white with dandruff. He took them into a cold and musty drawing room and ordered tea.
By now he’d finished his potted history of the house (‘designed by the same bloke who built Nelson’s Column, so they tell me’) and was well embarked on a detailed history of the wireless interception service (‘started out in Chatham till the bombing got too bad …’). Hester was nodding politely. A woman Army private brought them tea as thick and brown as shoe polish and Jericho sipped it and glanced impatiently around the empty walls. There were holes in the plaster where the picture hooks had been pulled out, and grimy shadows traced the outlines of large frames, now removed. An ancestral seat without ancestors, a house without a soul. The windows looking out on to the garden were crossed with strips of sticky tape.
He pointedly took out his watch and opened it. Almost three o’clock. They would need to be moving soon.
Hester noticed he was fidgeting. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, leaping into a brief lull in the major’s monologue, ‘we might take a look around?’
Heaviside looked startled and clattered his teacup into his saucer. ‘Oh, crumbs, sorry. Right. If you’re fit, then, we’ll make a start.’
The rain was mixed with snow now, and the wind was blowing it hard, in waves, from the north. It lashed their faces as they came around the side of the big house and as they picked their way through the mud of a flattened rose garden they had to raise their arms against it, like boxers warding off blows. There was an odd keening, howling noise, like nothing Jericho had ever heard before, coming from beyond a wall.
‘What the devil’s that?’
‘The aerial farm,’ said Heaviside.
Jericho had only visited an intercept station once before, and that had been years ago, when the science was still in its infancy: a shack full of shivering Wrens perched on top of the cliffs near Scarborough. This was of a different order. They went through a gate in the wall and there it was – dozens of radio masts laid out in odd patterns, like the stone circles of the Druids, across several acres of fields. The metal pylons were bound together by thousands of yards of cable. Some of the taut steel hummed in the wind, some screamed.
‘Rhombic and Beveridge configurations,’ shouted the major above the racket. ‘Dipoles and quadrahedrons … Look!’ He tried to point and his umbrella was abruptly snapped inside out. He smiled hopelessly and waved it in the direction of the masts. ‘We’re about three hundred feet up here, hence this bloody wind. The farm’s got two main harvests, can you see? One’s pointing due south. That picks up France, the Med, Libya. The other’s targeted east to Germany and the Russian front. The signals go by coaxial cables to the intercept huts.’ He spread his arms wide and bellowed, ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? We can pick up everything for the best part of a thousand miles.’ He laughed and waved his hands as if he were conducting an imaginary choir. ‘Sing to me, you buggers.’
The wind slashed sleet in their faces and Jericho cupped his hands to his ears. It felt as though they were interfering with nature, tapping into some rushing elemental force they had no business dabbling in, like Frankenstein summoning down lightning into his laboratory. Another gust of wind knocked them backwards and Hester clutched at his arm for support.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ yelled Heaviside. He gestured for them to follow him. Once they were on the other side of the wall they had some shelter from the wind. An asphalt road girdled what looked, at a distance, to be an estate village nestling in the grounds of the big house: cottages, farm sheds, a greenhouse, even a cricket pavilion with a clock tower. All dummy frontages, explained Heaviside, cheerfully, designed to fool German air reconnaissance. This was where the work of interception was done. Was there anything they were especially interested in?
‘How about the eastern front?’ said Hester.
‘Eastern front?’ said Heaviside. ‘Fine.’
He bounded ahead of them through the puddles, still trying to shake out his broken umbrella. The rain worsened and their fast walk turned into a run as they sprinted for the hut. The door banged shut behind them.
‘We rely on the feminine element, as you can see,’ said Heaviside, taking off his spectacles and drying them on the corner of his tunic. ‘Army girls and civilian women.’ He replaced his glasses and blinked around the hut. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said to a stout woman with sergeant’s stripes. ‘The supervisor,’ he explained, then added in a whisper: ‘Bit of a dragon.’
Jericho counted twenty-four wireless receivers, arranged in pairs, on either side of a long aisle, each with a woman hunched over it wearing headphones. The room was quiet apart from the hum of the machines and the occasional rustle of intercept forms.
‘We’ve three types of sets,’ Heaviside went on quietly. ‘HROs, Hallicrafter 28 Skyriders and American AR-88s. Each girl has her own frequencies to patrol, though we’ll double back if things get busy.’
‘How many people d’you have working here?’ asked Hester.
‘Couple of thousand.’
‘And you intercept everything?’
‘Absolutely. Unless you tell us not to.’
‘Which we never do.’
‘Right, right.’ Heaviside’s bald head was glistening with rainwater. He bent forwards and shook himself vigorously, like a dog. ‘Except that time the other week, of course.’
Afterwards, what Jericho would remember most was how coolly she handled it. She didn’t even blink. Instead she actually changed the subject and asked Heaviside how fast the girls had to be (‘we insist on a speed of ninety Morse characters a minute, that’s the absolute minimum’) and then the three of them began to stroll down the central aisle.
‘These are sets tuned to the eastern front,’ said Heaviside, when they were about halfway down. He stopped and pointed to the elaborate pictures of vultures stuck on the side of several of the receivers. ‘Vulture’s not the only German Army key in Russia, of course. There’s Kite and Kestrel, Smelt for the Ukraine –’
‘Are the nets particularly active at the moment?’ Jericho felt it was time he should say something.
‘Very much so, since Stalingrad. Retreats and counterattacks all along the front. Alarms and excursions. You’ve got to hand it to these Reds, you know – they can’t half fight.’
Hester said casually: ‘It would have been a Vulture station you were told not to intercept?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And this would have been around the 4th of March?’
‘Bang on. About midnight. I remember because we’d just sent four long signals and were feeling fairly well chuffed when your chap Mermagen comes on the blower in a frightful panic and says: “No more of that, thanks very much, not now, not tomorrow, not for ever more.”’
‘Any reason?’
‘No reason. Just stop. Thought he was going to have a heart attack. Oddest damned thing I ever heard.’
‘Perhaps,’ suggested Jericho, ‘knowing you were busy, they wanted to knock out low-priority traffic?’
‘Balls,’ said Heaviside, ‘pardon me, but really!’ His professional pride was wounded. ‘You can tell your Mr Mermagen from me that it was nothing we couldn’t handle, was it, Kay?’ He patted the shoulder of a strikingly pretty ATS operator, who took off her headphones and pushed back her chair. ‘No, no, don’t get up, didn’t mean to interrupt. We were just discussing our mystery station.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘The one we’re not supposed to hear.’
‘Hear?’ Jericho looked at Hester sharply. ‘You mean it’s still broadcasting?’
‘Kay?’
‘Yes, sir.’ She had a rather melodious Welsh accent. ‘Not so often now, sir, but he was awful busy last week.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t, like, try to listen, on purpose, sir, but he does have the most beautiful fist. Real old school. Not like some of the kids –’ she spat out the word ‘– they’re using nowadays.
Nearly as bad as the Italians, they are.’
‘A man’s style of Morse,’ said Heaviside pompously, ‘is as distinctive as his signature.’
‘And what is his style?’
‘Very fast but very clear,’ said Kay. ‘Rippling, I’d say. Fist like a concert pianist, he has.’
‘Think she rather fancies this chap, don’t you, Mr Jericho?’ Heaviside laughed and gave her shoulder another pat. ‘All right, Kay. Good work. Back to it.’
They moved on. ‘One of my best,’ he confided. ‘Can be pretty ghastly, you know, eight hours listening at a stretch, just taking down gibberish. Specially at night, in the winter. Bloody freezing out here. We have to issue ’em with blankets. Ah, now, here, look: here’s one coming in.’
They stood at a discreet distance behind an operator who was frantically copying down a message. With her left hand she kept fractionally adjusting the dial on the wireless set, with her right she was fumbling together message forms and carbon paper. The speed with which she then started to take down the message was astonishing. ‘GLPES,’ read Jericho over her shoulder, ‘KEMPG NXWPD …’
‘Two forms,’ said Heaviside. ‘Log sheet, on which she records the whispers: that’s tuning messages, Q-code and so forth. And then the red form which is the actual signal.’
‘What happens next?’ whispered Hester.
‘There are two copies of each form. Top copy goes to the Teleprinter Hut for immediate transmission to your people. That’s the hut we passed that looks like the cricket pavilion. The other copies we keep here, in case there’s a garble or something goes missing.’
‘How long do you keep them?’
‘Couple of months.’
‘Can we see?’
Heaviside scratched his head. ‘If you want. Not much to it, though.’
He led them to the far end of the hut, opened a door, turned on the light and stood back to show them the interior. A walk-in cupboard. A bank of about a dozen dark green filing cabinets. No window. Light switch on the left.