Page 24 of The Dark of the Moon
His name was vaguely familiar to me, but it took me a moment to work out why. ‘Zygalski?’ I said. ‘Like the Zygalski sheets we used to use for solving the daily Enigma keys?’
He looked surprised, grinning broadly. ‘You are familiar with those in Britain? Yes, I was the one who came up with the idea. We used to have to make our own, but cutting out every square by hand was inefficient and far too time-consuming. When we met Alan Turing in Paris, he took the idea back with him and had machine-cut sheets made. He sent us a set, which we used until the damn Germans changed the enciphering method again.’
I nodded, feeling a little overawed at being in such company. The brain power of these men was legendary among those of us in the know. It was also dawning on me that, despite the difficulties and risks involved, it was no wonder that my bosses at Bletchley Park were so keen to keep the lines of communication open with this Polish team.
Just then, a woman put her head around the door and said, ‘There you are! They’ve kidnapped you already, I see, before you’ve even had your breakfast.’ She wore her hair in a plaited crown and was dressed in a loose cotton skirt and cardigan. She turned to scold the men. ‘Where are your manners? You’ll wear our guest out, as if she wasn’t already exhausted enough after her journey here last night.’
I took to her immediately. Her name was Janina Krakowska, she explained as she led me to the kitchen, and she was here with her husband, Jakub. He was a radio operator, intercepting German messages and passing them on for decoding, and she was anothermathematician who worked on codebreaking with the team of cryptanalysts I’d just met. As she bustled around the kitchen, making coffee and toasting slices of bread, I noticed the curve of her belly, rounded like the edge of the new moon, holding the promise of fullness. ‘I’m four months pregnant,’ she told me with a shy smile, tucking a stray strand of her blonde hair back into its braid. ‘Even in the middle of a war, life goes on. Of course, it makes me miss my family back in Poland all the more. I wish I could be with them. Or, at least, I wish they could be here with me. Our country has been torn apart, yet again, by the invaders.’
‘Aren’t you worried about being captured by the Germans?’ I asked. I could hardly bear to think what their fate would be if their activities were to be discovered by the authorities.
‘Of course,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘But we are well taken care of by the French Secret Service, who pretend to work with the Vichy regime but remain loyal to de Gaulle. They keep us hidden here in plain sight. Apart from those in the Resistance with whom we work, people in the local community think we are simply a bunch of rather eccentric labourers, brought here from somewhere in the east to contribute to the war effort by cutting wood and working in the fields. As long as this part of the country remains under control of a nominally French government, we are left to get on with it. After all, Europe is full of people like us, exiles who’ve been displaced, uprooted from their homelands. As far as anyone knows, we are just a handful of refugees among the hundreds of thousands who are on the move every day, looking for a safe place to stay.’
She poured me a cup of coffee and set butter and jam on the table before me. ‘Now eat,’ she said. ‘And then we will go and join Marian, Henryk and the others and you can tell us more about the latest advances in codebreaking in Britain. I’m interested to know how you’re tackling the extra rotors the Nazis have implementedin the naval Enigma machines. We’ve been trying to find new ways to hack the daily settings, but it’s tough without the means at our disposal to build a more sophisticatedbomba.’
I felt more relaxed in her company than I had done for days – in fact, ever since my mission to France had been proposed. Dilly Knox had been right. In more senses than one, the Poles and I spoke the same language.
We spent the morning working in the study with the others. Janina showed me how she decoded some of the radio intercepts, which her husband received on a transmitter hidden in the attic of the château. The Germans and the Vichy French were using a variety of coding methods – not just the Enigma machines – and messages transmitted by both police forces were relatively easy to decrypt. They made chilling reading. Most were lists of numbers that, Janina explained, detailed people who’d been rounded up and sent to work camps. ‘See here,’ she said. ‘They’ve been grouped in categories: Jewish, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Political Suspects, Handicapped ... Anyone the Nazis choose. We pass these figures on to the British and French intelligence services.It’s vital that we tell the story of what’s really happening. The horror of what’s going on across Europe is unremitting. I know my own relations back in Poland will by now have been sent to the camps. I can’t bear to imagine how they are coping in such terrible places.’
An expression of pain flickered across her features and, instinctively, she put her hands on her belly, protectively cradling the slight bump. What would the future hold for her unborn child, I wondered. I could see the strain she was under, and I dreaded to think what might happen if the group at the château were to be denounced by some suspicious local policeman.
‘Couldn’t you come to Britain?’ I asked. ‘I could try to ask the people who brought me here to get you out. You and your baby would be safer there.’
She smiled sadly, shaking her head. ‘France is the best place to intercept these messages. And the French have been good to us. We have to trust them to keep us safe. I’m grateful for your offer, but the British haven’t ever offered us the chance to leave. It’s made more complicated, too, by the fact that Russia is a British ally. What they’ve done to our country is really just as bad as what the Germans did, invading from the east just a couple of weeks after the Nazis invaded from the west. Poland has been torn in two, racked by those enemies, our people brutalised and murdered by both sides.’
I nodded, understanding. ‘But Britain is not your enemy,’ I said. ‘We’re on your side. General Sikorski’s set up his command in London. Isn’t that a declaration of friendship?’
She shrugged. ‘Like I said, it’s complicated. We’ve discussed trying to go, of course, but as long as this part of the country remains azone libre, we feel we should stay. It’s relatively safe, and the work we do here is so important. Being Polish means we’re used to living with an enemy on the doorstep. We have our ears to the ground here, so to speak, and we must continue to be the voices of those who’ve been silenced.’ The tremble of her lips belied the strength of her words.
I reached across and gave her hand a squeeze, struggling to find any words to express how brave I thought she was. She took a deep breath, regathering her composure, and we turned our attention back to the sheets of paper on the desk in front of us. I redoubled my efforts to take in as much as I could, committing most of what she told me to memory and making a few short, coded notes where necessary, so I could debrief the Bletchley cryptanalysts on my return. Even with the limited resources they had access to here,the Polish team had come up with new ways to tackle the range of ever-changing German codes with which we were faced every day.
While the mornings were spent at work in the study, in the afternoons, unless significant radio traffic was coming in, we had a bit more free time. Janina had scratched out a herb bed in a corner of the courtyard, where she grew feathery fronds of fennel and dill, as well as pretty white-flowered caraway for its seeds. Even that early in the summer, the ground was baked hard, but she tended and watered her patch of garden daily, nurturing her little crop, which would enhance the taste of the scant rations with flavours of her homeland. ‘These herbs won’t survive through the summer,’ she said. ‘When it gets too hot, they’ll shoot up and then die. So I’ll pick everything in a couple of weeks’ time and dry the leaves, but I’ll keep back some of the seeds to grow more later.’
We would also walk in the fields and woods surrounding the château, foraging for ingredients to help supplement the evening meal. Each day, without fail, Janina would tie on a red headscarf to cover her blonde hair, and we’d go down the lane and climb over a gate into a neighbouring field. I couldn’t identify the crop growing there at first – robust, waist-high stems sprouting broad leaves, each with the beginnings of a fat bud at the top. ‘They’re sunflowers,’ Janina told me. ‘Just imagine the sight at the height of summer! Each stem carrying a flower fringed with gold like a lion’s mane, their faces turning to follow the sun as it travels across the sky every day.’
We’d skirt around the edge of the field, which was surrounded by oak woods, giving it a safe, secluded feel, to the far corner where a huge, solitary sweet chestnut tree stood, and we’d sit there in its shade for a few minutes. Leaning against its rough bark, I’d tilt my head back to look up through the branches, spots of sunlight dancing through the leaves. The waxy flowers reminded me of the trees in Hyde Park, where I’d walked with Ben. ‘One day,’ I toldJanina, ‘I hope you will come to London. We’ll go for a walk in a park there and I’ll take you for tea at The Ritz.’
She laughed. ‘I’d love that – The Ritz Hotel ... Imagine me going there!’ She brushed the dust off her skirt, once again cradling the gentle swell of her belly, then reached up to take hold of a low branch to help haul herself back on to her feet. ‘Oof,’ she said. ‘This little one is growing bigger by the minute. Come, let’s see what we can find growing in our larder today.’
She was an expert at identifying edible fungi and we gathered handfuls of chanterelles and Penny Bun mushrooms, inhaling their savoury, earthy smell as we plucked them from the ground at the edge of the woodland. We picked more herbs, and salad leaves too – wild thyme, marjoram, chervil and dandelions.
I was surprised to see her stoop to gather a posy of wildflowers as we walked back with our baskets full. She laughed at the expression on my face. ‘You think I’m being frivolous! But this is just as important as the nourishment we gather for our bodies. There’s a saying that goes, if you have a loaf of bread, sell half and buy a lily. It’s important to nourish the soul as well, and remember that there is still beauty even in these times of darkness and cruelty. These flowers remind me of the ones we used to have on the table back home, in the days when my country was free.’
I recalled the evening I’d walked along the lane back in Bletchley, when the hedgerows were full of bluebells and the vixen and her cubs had appeared. I remembered thinking that this was what we were fighting for. So I, too, picked a bunch of ox-eye daisies and cornflowers and when we got back to the château I put them in a jug and placed them on the chest of drawers in my bedroom. Janina was right – they might be just a few wildflowers, but they represented far more. When I woke in the middle of the night – the faces of Amy and Teddy often still haunted my uneasydreams – the faint glow of the white petals in the darkness gave me reassurance and comfort.
The days passed and soon I realised I’d been in France for a week. The only visitor to the château had been the priest who’d led me there on the night I arrived. He’d appear occasionally and I surmised he was passing messages back and forth between the cryptographers and themaquisards. There’d been no word of my return to England, though. I realised how fortunate I was to have that escape route to safety when my friends here did not, so I tried not to let my mounting anxiety show. The weather had been fine, warm and sunny during the day with fresher nights under clear skies, when the full moon shone bright gold among a swathe of silver stars. I prayed the clear conditions would last into the week ahead, when surely they’d come back for me. Otherwise, I’d have to wait another full fortnight while this moon wasted and died away and a new one grew in its place to become bright enough for the Lysanders to be able to fly by its light again.
Even though I tried to conceal my increasing sense of tension, I’m sure Janina knew how I was feeling. One morning, after breakfast, she announced we were going to go to the market in town. I assumed I’d have to remain in the château, hidden away, but she shook her head, knotting her red scarf beneath her chin. ‘It’s OK. The square will be busy on market day, so you won’t stand out as a stranger. And they are used to us going there regularly like everyone else, so if we don’t they may think it a bit strange. Don’t worry, you won’t need to do any talking – if anyone asks, I’ll say you’re my cousin, passing through on your way to Toulouse to be with family there. Your name is Eveline, remember. But your French accent sounds so British that it would give you away, so don’t talk to anyone and we’ll be fine!’
I was nervous, but at the same time curious to see more of the town, whose elegant towers perched tantalisingly on the hilltop inthe distance. And the distraction of the market would be a very welcome one.
Having been cocooned within the château and its environs, it was a thrill to walk along the road winding up the steep hill, joining a stream of others as we made our way along boulevards shaded by spreading plane trees to the Place aux Herbes in the centre of Uzès. I couldn’t help wondering whether pairs of eyes were watching us from behind the shuttered windows of the houses we passed, and if they were, were they friendly ones or did they belong to those who might denounce us?
I tried not to look self-conscious, sticking close to Janina, who seemed far more relaxed than I felt, smiling easily and occasionally raising a hand in greeting to some of the stallholders. We bought some potatoes and a large vegetable shaped like a lumpy football, which Janina calledseler.I later discovered it was celeriac, although this wasn’t something I’d ever been familiar with back home. We also purchased a jar of honey, and some scarlet tomatoes – far larger ones than any I’d ever seen before. There was no meat at the butcher’s stall, but he let us have a bag of bones for making stock. ‘We’ll make a delicious soup with these and theseler,’ Janina explained. ‘With a few pickles chopped into it, and plenty of fresh dill from the courtyard, you’ll see what a feast it can be.’
I noticed, though, that she discreetly handed the butcher a slip of folded paper when he gave her the soup bones. So her regular trip to this market was about more than simply buying provisions. The network ofmaquisardsmust be operating here, I realised. I wondered what might be in that message, and how word might be delivered when the time came for me to be extracted, but I knew better than to ask any questions.
Once we’d finished our shopping, we walked down from the top of the town to wander along the esplanade, making the most of the opportunity to gaze out at the views across the wide valleybeneath us before we had to return to the confines of the château. I craned my neck to gaze up at the elegant, soaring towers of the town above us, fine examples of architecture from centuries past, wishing I had more freedom to be a tourist and explore in more detail. But the sun was climbing in the sky, our shadows shrinking before its growing intensity, and it was soon time to walk back down the hill carrying our laden baskets. The air seemed to have grown heavy and humid suddenly, pressing down on us as we went, and I couldn’t help glancing anxiously towards the west. From the viewpoint of the esplanade, I’d noticed dark clouds were gathering there. The weather was changing.
