Page 10 of The Dark of the Moon
In a bit of a daze, I collected my bag from the desk downstairs and stepped out into the afternoon drizzle to find the bus that would take me to Euston. The station was crowded and chaotic as people milled around trying to find trains. The timetable was always disrupted, for all sorts of reasons including air raids, blackouts, and troop movements. But I managed to get my ticket and push my way through the throng to the platform pointed out by a helpful guard, where a train was just pulling in. I even found a seat, stowing my kit-bag in the overhead luggage rack and sinking into it thankfully to try to assimilate all that had just happened over the course of the day. I felt a pang of regret at leaving the ATA and my friends back at the base. I hadn’t even had a chance to say my goodbyes. But I was excited, too, and not a little intrigued to see where this new assignment might take me.
Another girl scrambled on at the last minute, just as the guard was blowing his whistle outside the carriage window, and the corporal who’d taken the seat opposite mine got up and offered it to her. She plonked herself down, smiling her thanks and breathing a big sigh of relief. She noticed the movement order I was holdingas I wanted to scan it again to be sure of the name of the place typed on it.
‘Where are you headed?’ she asked, nodding towards it.
‘A place called Bletchley,’ I replied. I supposed it would do no harm to tell her that – she’d see where I got off the train in any case.
‘Me too! That’s a coincidence. It’s all been a bit of a blur today, I must say. Do you know anything about this Bletchley Park place?’
I shook my head. ‘No idea. I just had an interview, then was handed this and told to get myself to Euston.’
‘Same here,’ she said. ‘It’s all very cloak and dagger, isn’t it. Thrilling! My name’s Jessica, by the way, but everyone calls me Jess.’
‘Ophelia,’ I replied, as the train gave a lurch and the posters advertising Bovril and War Savings Stamps slowly began to move past on the other side of the window, ‘but everyone calls me Philly. And you’re Scottish too?’ Her accent had a faint lilt to it, so we quickly settled down and began chatting. She’d been born in France, to British parents, she told me, and had been working in the French Consulate in Edinburgh when war broke out. She’d moved to London and joined the ATS, but the other day she’d received a letter inviting her to come for today’s interview and precipitous reassignment to Military Intelligence.
We felt like old friends by the time we reached Bletchley Station, where we heaved our bags down from the rack and clambered from the train on to the darkened platform. Night had fallen and it was pitch black. We asked the stationmaster the way to Bletchley Park and he pointed us towards a track between two high fences. We lugged our bags along it until we came to a guarded gatehouse.
The corporal manning it looked over our movement orders without a word. Then he handed them back to us and nodded, unsmiling, saying, ‘Welcome to the lunatic asylum, ladies. Wait there. Someone will be along for you shortly,’ before disappearing back into his hut.
After a disorienting car ride along winding country lanes, we arrived at our billet – from what we could make out in the darkness, a small cottage among some trees. Jess and I were both dead on our feet. ‘The coach will pick you up at seven thirty sharp tomorrow morning,’ said the driver. ‘Make sure you don’t miss it. You don’t want to be late on your first day.’ Then he drove off, leaving us to tap on the door of the cottage. The moon had emerged through a break in the clouds, making the leaves of a holly bush, standing like a sentry beside the gate, shine like black lacquer. Otherwise, the darkness was featureless, adding to the sense that we’d somehow left the world behind, landing in this place that was so completely mysterious and unknown. In the silence beyond, a fox barked a series of sudden, high-pitched yips, making me jump.
Then the door opened, casting a slanting rectangle of light on to the path, and we were greeted by our hosts, a friendly couple called Mr and Mrs Webb. They ushered us inside, exclaiming over the journey we must have had from London, and gave us slices of toast and dripping, washed down with cups of tea, before showing us upstairs to our bedroom.
I was used to being in digs, and to making do with beds in dingy boarding houses or even sleeping on an occasional mess hall floor at aerodromes around the country, but I think Jess was a bit thrown by the sight of the single bed in our room.
‘We’ll go top to tail,’ I said, dumping my bag down on the bare floorboards. ‘You can have the end with the headboard.’
I was so tired I honestly couldn’t have cared less where I slept. The room was small, tucked under the sloping eaves of the roof, but the sheets were clean, the pillows soft, and there were warm blankets for us to wrap ourselves in. And so, at the end of that long, strange day, I resigned myself to this new accommodation, setting the alarm on my travel clock before falling into the deepest of sleeps.
Finn
Dad had to go to the harbour to talk to the man about the boats and Mum said she would go with him as she could just pop to the shops, and would Philly and I be OK if we were left to our Own Devices? We both said we’d be fine. The Old Lady’s Device is an ancient iPad – it must be about 5 years old at least – and my Device was my laptop.
It was lovely and quiet, and we were both sitting on the terrace because it wasn’t too hot yet and Mum said I needed the fresh air. I looked at what Philly was doing, and it was a crossword. She saw me looking and asked what I was doing so I showed her my Sudoku. It was a Difficult one. I prefer logic to words, because words can be slippery things, with confusing meanings. She nodded. ‘Good problem-solving.’ Then she said, ‘You like doing puzzles, don’t you? Well I’ve got another one for you.’ She picked up a pencil and some paper that Mum had left lying on the porch table and she wrote out an equation like this:
(12+144+20+3√4)/7 + (5 × 11) = 92+ 0
I looked at it for a while. I could see it was correct, but I didn’t know why it was a puzzle, it just looked like a straightforward bit of maths to me. ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ she said. ‘It’s actually a limerick. But you have to know the old-fashioned names for some of thenumbers.’ She pointed to each of the operands in the equation in turn and recited this rhyme:
‘A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more.’
‘Haha!’ I said. ‘That’s funny. I like it. Can I keep it?’
‘Of course.’ She handed the paper to me. ‘Are you going to laminate it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Then we turned back to our Devices again to finish our own puzzles. We both finished them quite quickly and Mum and Dad still weren’t back. I remembered the way she’d looked at the cemetery when we were driving past it the other day, and that I’d thought I could do some more rubbings there. So I said, very politely, ‘Would you like to go to the cemetery to look at the gravestones? You said you wanted to do that someday.’
‘Do you think we have time?’ she said.
