Page 25 of The Dark of the Moon
Everyone was assembled in the kitchen that evening, where the dishes we’d cooked were simmering on the stove, filling the room with the smells of the celeriac soup and a rabbit stew with a rich gravy of herbs and red wine. Over the past week, I’d got to know the group better. The leaders of the group were high-ranking Polish army officers: Antoni was a General, Gwido a Lieutenant Colonel and Maksymilian a Major. Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski were civilians who’d been co-opted into the Polish cipher bureau and there were about ten others, all skilled codebreakers, radio technicians and translators. Within the confines of the château they used each other’s Polish names, although they’d been given French covers, which they used whenever they ventured beyond the safety of its walls. Janina’s husband, Jakub, was a man of few words, his complexion as pale as his white-blond hair from the hours he spent hunched over a radio set in the hot, airless attic. The strain of passing on those abhorrent messages for decoding showed in the preoccupied lines of his face. But his eyes lit up with love as his wife set the huge copper pot of soup on the table and stooped to kiss him on the cheek before taking her place next to him.
The room was filled with laughter as the soup was being served, the men relaxing a little at the end of another long week in exilefrom their homeland. I remember Antoni joking in Polish about how these days even the French were reduced to eating the sorts of vegetables they used only to deem suitable for feeding to cattle and Eastern Europeans. I was passing my bowl to Henryk so he could fill it with soup from the vast copper pan that Janina had placed in the centre of the table, when the kitchen door opened and a stranger walked in. I froze. Was this the moment when we would all be arrested? My presence at the table would surely make it far worse for them all if I were discovered to be British. But Marian looked up from his soup plate and smiled.
‘Good evening, Bolek! You’re just in time to join us for dinner. Allow me to introduce you, too, to our charming guest, Eveline. You were so kind as to facilitate her travel to be with us for these few days.’
He turned to me. ‘Bolek is French, so you’ll have to bear with his terrible Polish.’
‘Enchanté, mademoiselle,’ said the man, with a slight bow in my direction. Then he said, in English, ‘We are very pleased to welcome you to Cadix. It was good of Dilly to spare you.’ I realised then that this must be the head of the French intelligence service, the man who’d brought the Polish team here, and Bolek must be a cover name too.
Henryk produced some bottles of wine – liberated from the cellar, he said – and poured generous glasses for each of us. ‘Na zdrowie!’ he said. ‘Cheers! Here’s to another week of sticking it to the Germans!’ As we raised our glasses in a toast, an ominous rumble of thunder sounded from outside. The storm was upon us. There’d be no flying tonight.
The drinking went on long into the night. A bottle of vodka was conjured up as we were clearing away the plates and hours after I’d excused myself and gone up to my room, I could still hear the faint strains of rowdy singing filtering up from the kitchen. They needed to let off a bit of steam from time to time, I supposed.Despite the festive atmosphere, their work put enormous strain on them and the threat of discovery was a constant danger, lurking out there in the darkness just beyond the château’s thick walls where the storm was gathering in force. Lightning flickered suddenly through the slats of my shutters, followed almost immediately by an ear-splitting thunder-crack. Despite the heat, I pulled the covers over my head and prayed it would blow over quickly.
The skies remained overcast for the next couple of days, the air still hot and heavy in spite of the storm, and my despair mounted as the window for my extraction started to close. But then one morning, as we were clearing the breakfast table, Jakub appeared in the kitchen and handed me a slip of paper. On it was written the coded message I’d been waiting for, using my poem. It only took moments to decipher it.Be ready, it said. I threw it into the stove and watched the flames consume it, feeling a mixture of relief in knowing they’d soon be coming for me and guilt at the thought of having to leave behind the friends I’d made here.
The next afternoon, as Janina and I walked to the chestnut tree in the corner of the sunflower field as usual, the clouds began to break, and a widening ribbon of blue sky appeared above us. When we reached the tree, I spotted something silver against the dark trunk. A few stems of lavender had been bound together with a strand of blue wool and tucked into a crack in the bark.
Janina reached to take it down. ‘Tonight you will leave,’ she said. ‘This is the sign.’ She handed me the little bunch of flowers. ‘You will come back to this tree at midnight and wait. Be careful to stay concealed. Someone will come to the corner of the field over by the oaks. They will flash a torch five times. Do not make yourself known until you see that signal. Then you’ll know it’s safe to gowith them. If for any reason they don’t appear, or if they don’t give the correct signal, you must stay hidden here until one of us comes to find you. Do you understand?’
I nodded, unable to speak as a surge of conflicting emotions flooded through me: relief, mixed with fear for the friends I’d made here and sadness that I’d be leaving them in such danger. As I clutched the lavender, I hugged her tight and for a moment we stood there like that, the scent of the flowers enfolding us. Then she drew away, wiping a tear from her eye as she said, ‘We’d better go back. You have packing to do. And we must prepare a few things to go in the plane with you.’
As we walked back to the château, I picked some more wildflowers, gathering an armful of scarlet poppies and white cow parsley into a billowing bunch. I handed them to her at the door. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘The colours of the Polish flag. And the poppies match your scarf – a reminder that you have friends in Britain who are working with you, even at a distance. Get a message out to us if you change your mind about staying here.’ Then I left her to go upstairs and pack my bag.
An hour later, I stood back to survey my room, making sure I’d left nothing behind. There was a soft tap at the door and I called, ‘Come in.’
Marian Rejewski stood there. ‘Are you ready to leave us, Eveline?’ he asked.
I gestured to my bag. ‘All packed,’ I replied.
‘I have one more message for you to take back with you,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent. But not to be written down. Please can you make sure it gets through to the highest levels of command?’
I nodded, and listened carefully to what he had to say.
Just before midnight, I slipped out of the side door of the château and hurried down the lane to the sunflower field, being carefulto keep to the cover alongside the trees. The waning moon was an almost perfect semi-circle among the ragged wisps of cloud. I offered up a quick prayer to anyone who might be listening that the sky would remain clear enough for the plane to get through.
For what felt like an eternity, I stood alone in the tree’s dark shadow, careful to remain hidden, keeping my eyes glued on the far corner of the field. Then, at last, a dimmed torch flashed there five times. I stepped forward into the moonlight beside the sunflowers and saw a figure approach.
‘Follow me,’ said themaquisard, taking my bag from me before I could protest that I could carry it perfectly well myself, and setting off through the trees. The pace was brisk. He threaded his way confidently through the woodland in the darkness, with me stumbling over every root and rock behind him. Adrenaline carried me forwards because I knew the plane wouldn’t wait. At last, we reached the edge of a clearing where I breathed in the familiar perfume of the lavender field. The silver-grey furrows stretched away from us down a long, gentle slope, making a perfect runway.
‘Wait here,’ the man said. ‘Then come to the plane as soon as it lands.’
I nodded, knowing how crucial that speed would be.
The night was warm, and I was sweating in my woollen jacket and skirt after the scramble through the woods. Nothing moved in the darkness. The air was filled with the orchestra of crickets, but then all of a sudden they fell silent, as if some invisible conductor had let fall their baton, bringing the symphony to an end. I strained my ears to listen. And then I heard it: the low rumble of the Lysander’s engine. It grew louder, then louder still, a roar that surely must be heard for miles around, summoning every enemy policeman in the vicinity to come running. My heart was pounding with equal measures of fear and hope as the plane appeared in the moonlight and circled the field. Might Ben be the pilot this time?
At one end of the field, four shadowy figures appeared, and one flashed a code with a torch. Then two of them stepped into their positions and a third sprinted down the gentle slope, forming the inverted ‘L’ shape to guide the pilot in to land.
I held my breath. A perfect touchdown, and then the plane was rushing towards me up the field. The scent of crushed lavender filled the air as it turned before coming to a halt, and I ran from my hiding place, clutching my bag to my chest. I craned my neck to look up at the pilot, but when he turned his head to watch the cargo being offloaded, I could see straight away it wasn’t Ben. As I returned his thumbs-up sign, I swallowed the lump in my throat that was equal parts disappointment and relief.
As soon as the three descending passengers’ feet touched the ground, I was climbing the ladder, followed by two more people who’d emerged from the shadows to follow me on to the plane. Even as I was fastening the straps of the seat belt, this time taking the seat at the rear of the compartment where the Baby had sat on my outward journey, the plane was beginning to move again, gathering speed then lifting into the air. It felt slow, the weight of the Lizzie surely too cumbersome to be able to fly, but then, miraculously, we’d cleared the trees and were climbing towards the half-moon above us, which lit the way home.
I gathered myself, taking stock of my fellow passengers. A woman sat in the cramped seat opposite mine and a man was on the floor, his knees curled into his chest, their luggage stuffed in around them. They grinned at me. ‘Oh là là,’ said the woman, fanning herself with her hand. ‘Quelle aventure!’
We managed to communicate, in my broken French and their broken English. They were part of a new Resistance network, they told me, coming to Britain to be trained in the use of radios. The man was a teacher, the woman a student at the university in Marseille. I didn’t tell them much about what I’d been doing in France, consciousthat the fewer people who knew of the whereabouts of the Polish cryptographers, the better. I simply said I’d been delivering some materials and they nodded and smiled, saying, ‘Merci.’
The two of them slept a little as we flew northwards through the night, but I stayed awake, watching as the pilot navigated the corridor of darkness, avoiding the main cities again. When the Channel appeared – a glint of silver at the edge of the darkened land – I breathed a big sigh of relief and reached over to shake the others awake so they could watch England come into view and be ready for our landing.
The first light of a glorious sunrise was just striking Dover’s white cliffs as the pilot veered left, towards the Downs. And then I was able to pick out the first familiar landmarks – the curve of the coastline towards the point of Selsey Bill and the Isle of Wight in the distance beyond that – and we began to descend towards Tangmere.
