Philly #2
I joined the queue of about twenty-five people lining the corridor.
Eventually, we were shown into a large room, not unlike a school exam hall, where desks had been set up.
At each place, a single sheet of paper lay face down with a stubby pencil placed on top of it.
A man stood at the front of the room with a stopwatch.
‘On the paper before you is printed a crossword puzzle,’ he said, once everyone had shuffled in and found a place to sit. ‘You will have a maximum of twelve minutes in which to complete it. Before we begin, please write your name and address on the back of the sheet.’
The silence in the room was broken only by the scratching of pencils on paper.
‘All ready?’ he asked. ‘Then I shall count down five seconds and you may turn the sheet over and begin. Five, four, three, two, one ...’
My mind was completely focused as I worked on solving the clues, enjoying slotting the answers into the blank squares.
Some were easy enough. Silencer . Bogie .
Agenda . Others were more cryptic. I hesitated momentarily over Newark – ‘Is this town ready for a flood?’ – then filled in the last of the blanks to make 21 down Sennight .
Done! I looked up from my work. A couple of the others seemed to have finished already and I exchanged a faint smile with the man diagonally across from me as he, too, set down his pencil.
‘And stop! Time’s up.’ The invigilator clicked his stopwatch.
‘Right, that’s the test over. Please leave your paper on the table so that your answers can be checked.
A few of you seem to have completed the puzzle.
Whether anyone has managed to do so correctly, and whether the donation can therefore be made to charity, will be announced in tomorrow’s paper. ’
I went to meet Agnieszka in a nearby café. ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘How did you get on?’
I shrugged. ‘It was easy enough. I did it within the twelve minutes.’
She laughed. ‘I knew you would, you’re such a brain-box. What a lark!’ She loved dropping in colloquial English expressions wherever she could practise using them.
I thought nothing more of it until, a couple of weeks later, a rather strange missive dropped through the letterbox of my digs.
It said that, as a result of my successful solving of the test crossword in under twelve minutes, I was invited to report to an address in London the following Monday afternoon.
I should bring my kit-bag and be prepared for a reassignment of my duties.
Beneath the signature were printed two even more intriguing words: Military Intelligence.
I sat on the top deck of the bus from Paddington as it jolted its way through the bomb-torn streets to Green Park.
The Ritz wore its cladding of sandbags with an air of stolid defiance.
As I got off, a pair of smartly dressed women coming out of the door brushed past me in a cloud of perfume and cigarette smoke.
I shouldered my kit-bag and crossed the road, checking the address on the letter for the umpteenth time to make sure I was in the right place.
The doorway of the building was nondescript, but it seemed I was expected and I was ushered in, told to leave my bag at the front desk, and shown along a labyrinthine series of corridors and stairwells to a small office on the third floor.
I knocked and entered the room, where a smiling major I presumed to be from the Army Intelligence Corps sat behind a polished table with a pile of folders before him.
He checked the name on the top one, then extended a hand for me to shake.
‘Miss Buchanan. Please take a seat.’ I noticed he didn’t offer his own name.
My interview must have lasted about an hour, I suppose.
He’d clearly done his homework. He asked me about the Telegraph crossword and whether I enjoyed doing such puzzles.
He enquired about my schooling in Scotland, about the offer of a place at Cambridge University and about my duties in the ATA.
He asked about my parents and my brothers. Then he asked which languages I spoke.
‘Polish – although I understand more than I can actually speak. Schoolgirl French and German. But none of them exactly fluently,’ I replied apologetically.
I had no idea what I was being tested for, but I didn’t want to disappoint the major.
He seemed a kindly man. And my competitive streak had kicked in at the sight of those other folders in the pile beneath mine.
‘Splendid, splendid,’ he said, smiling and nodding, making a note on a pad of lined paper. ‘To be honest, we really need someone who can speak mathematics more than any other language. Arithmetic was never my strong point. It’s all Greek to me!’
There was no opportunity for me to ask any questions of my own.
It appeared the interview was over and that I had been successful.
There was no explanation, no offer made for me to accept or reject.
He simply stood up, shook my hand again and gave me a movement order, along with a rail warrant to be swapped at Euston Station for a ticket.
‘Get the train to Bletchley. Ask for directions to Bletchley Park. They’ll take things from there. ’
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 holding as 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.