Page 26 of The Dark of the Moon
Major Bertram was waiting as I climbed down the ladder. ‘Welcome home, Eveline!’ he said. ‘Mission successful. Well done. And you can now return to being Miss Buchanan once more.’
I turned to say goodbye to my two fellow travellers, but they were already being led to a waiting car.
‘Come with me to the cottage,’ said the Major. ‘There’s a bath waiting for you, and some breakfast. Then you can get some sleep, and this afternoon we’ll take you back to your people at Bletchley. I know they’re eager to hear from you.’
Never had a soak in a hot bath been so welcome. Never had bacon and eggs tasted so good. And never had a bed felt so comforting, as I slipped between the cotton sheets in one of the upstairs bedrooms at Tangmere Cottage. I thought of Janina and the others in the château, imagining them going about their work, and offered up a little prayer for their safety. Beneath my pillow, just before I fell into a deep, replenishing sleep, I placed the little bunch of lavender stems tied with blue yarn, which I’d kept tucked into the breast pocket of my jacket all the way home.
Finn
Before we came on our holidays to France, when we were studying The Moon and Space, I did a project with Dad about 5 Things That Could Happen If The Moon Were Destroyed. These are the things:
Tides would be almost non-existent. During Full Moons and New Moons, which occur when the sun, Earth and moon are all aligned, we have spring tides, which are the largest differences between high and low tide. When they’re at right angles, which happens during a Half Moon phase, we have neap tides, which are the smallest differences. It’s the moon that exerts the greatest forces on the oceans, so if we had no moon, we would only have small neap tides all the time.
The length of the day would be constant. The moon exerts a tiny frictional force on Earth as it spins, and this is slowing it down, making our days get longer. A few billion years ago, a day on Earth was only about 10 hours long. Little by little, the moon has been slowing down the Earth’s rotation and now our days have grown to be 24 hours long. In another 4 million years, we won’t need leap days anymore as the rotation rate will have slowed enough to even out the need to add an extra day to our calendar every 4 years. That wouldn’t happen without the moon.
There would be no more eclipses. Eclipses require 3 objects to be in alignment: the Sun, a planet and its moon.
The stars would look much brighter in the night sky. Obviously, the Sun is the brightest object in the sky. The moon is the second brightest, 14,000 times brighter than the next-brightest object in the sky (which is Venus). The light from the moon washes out many stars. Without it, the night sky would be much darker and so we’d be able to see loads more stars.
Debris could fall to Earth, but it wouldn’t necessarily exterminate life. If the moon were to be smashed up by an asteroid (and you wouldn’t need a very big one, just a medium-sized one about 1 kilometre in diameter would do the job), the debris would spread out in all directions and some of it would hit the Earth. If the moon were to be hit in just the right way by the asteroid and the pieces were small enough, they might form a belt of rings around the Earth, like Saturn has.
I can now add another item to the list, which is that Philly wouldn’t have been able to fly to France and back on her secret mission if there hadn’t been a big enough moon for the Lysander pilots to navigate by. So all in all, the moon is pretty cool.
I’m still sort of wishing an asteroid would strike the Earth in the next 24 hours, though. That would mean the sailing camp would definitely have to be cancelled, and Mum probably wouldn’t go on her writing course either.
Philly
It felt very strange to be back behind my desk at Bletchley Park again. My head was still full of images of the extraordinary team at Cadix and the chatter of Polish voices: Marian’s patient tones as he showed me a method he was working on to break a new code; Henryk’s uproarious laughter as he poured another round of drinks; Janina’s gentle words of hope for a peaceful future for her unborn child as she watered her herb garden in the courtyard. It was all so vivid, and at the same time it felt like another slightly unreal world, a world overshadowed every minute of the day by the threat of deportation and execution.
Dilly Knox was absent when I was asked to report to the Cottage again. I briefed his trusted assistant, Mavis – the woman in the twinset and pearls – and a man who simply introduced himself as ‘Commander Fleming, Naval Intelligence Division’.
I told them everything I’d managed to glean during my stay at Cadix and they took copious notes. I relayed Marian Rejewski’s insistence on the importance of the police messages, building up that chilling picture of the deportations to camps in the east. And finally I passed on the message he’d given me on that last evening, stressing its importance: ‘He says to look at the radio traffic in and out of a place called Peenemünde. Something is being built there. Something of great strategic significance. Large numbers of Polishworkers have been sent to a factory there, they have it on good authority.’
Commander Fleming raised an eyebrow and nodded. ‘That’s helpful,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Miss Buchanan. We’ll make sure this information gets through to those at the very top.’
As I left the Cottage, I asked Mavis, ‘How is Mr Knox?’
She shook her head, her eyes filled with sadness. ‘Not very good, I’m afraid. But he still insists on working. I’ll be visiting him at his home tomorrow. He’ll be very interested to hear everything you’ve brought back from your mission.’
‘Please pass on my best wishes to him. If you think that’s appropriate?’
She smiled. ‘I will. He’ll be glad to know you’re home safely.’
Then the door shut behind me and I made my way back to Hut 8.
It was only years later, in the 1950s, when I read a book calledCasino Royaleabout the escapades of a Secret Intelligence officer called James Bond, that I recognised the author’s photograph. The man I’d met in the Cottage that day was 007’s creator, Ian Fleming. And I couldn’t help but wonder just how much inspiration for the characters of Vesper Lynd and Miss Moneypenny he’d drawn from his encounters with women like Mavis and me while he was working at Bletchley Park.
As the summer wore on, my work continued to keep me as busy as ever. Alan asked me to help work with him on a new project, working with a different team in a section code-namedFish,on a code which they calledTunny. This was a new method of coding employed by the German army, known as the Lorenz cipher. Lorenz was even more complex than Enigma – messages were coded usingmachines that had twelve rotors instead of Enigma’s three or four – and while theFishteam at Bletchley were developing powerful machines to help break the code, Alan had devised a system of calculating mathematical probabilities to help shorten the process of working out the rotor sequences. We christened the new systemTuringery. It reminded me a little of the methods the Polish team at Cadix were using, meticulously working out mathematical approaches to decoding the Morse-based radio messages they were intercepting there. I was glad to think the techniques the Poles had shared with me during my stay might have helped inspire his methods again. Alan’s determination to solve every fresh challenge the German codes could throw at us continually impressed me and I could see how his colleagues held him in the highest esteem. He had a truly brilliant mind.
Our work was all-consuming, but on my precious days off I was able to see Ben a few times. Now that I knew better, I noticed that his own leave coincided with the two-week periods either side of the new moon, when the night skies were too dark for the Lysander missions to fly. I tried not to let on to him that I’d been to France, conscious that the details of that trip were so highly classified. But one hot August day we packed a picnic and walked along the canal and the river to Great Brickhill, where we stopped for a drink in the Old Red Lion. As we sat eating our fish-paste sandwiches, I couldn’t resist saying, ‘How is Jim Elliot these days?’
It took Ben a few moments to register and then he shot me a look of astonishment. ‘How do you know Jim?’ he asked. I made no reply, just took a sip from the glass of cider I’d been enjoying and smiled enigmatically. I could see the cogs turning in his mind as he worked it out. ‘No,’ said Ben. ‘You didn’t ...? I knew there’d been a special mission a few weeks back ... That surely wasn’t you, was it?’
‘I’m afraid it’s classified. If I told you, I’d have to kill you,’ I joked.
He reached for my hand, shaking his head. ‘What an astonishing woman you are, Philly Buchanan.’
I smiled and kissed him. ‘And what an astonishing man you are, Ben Delaney. You and your Lizzies, flying in and out of Tangmere. It’s quite an operation you Special Ops boys have going on there.’
