Matt wondered if he’d ever find the rest of the riddle. If he even wanted to.
He gave up on the Y Station display and wandered over to the Codebreakers’ Wall. Veterans, families, and Bletchley Park supporters could have names engraved on a brick on that wall; he already knew Lily’s family had bought one for her in 2015, five years after she died. He’d dug up an Instagram video of the occasion: a wobbly handheld shot of a brick wall, the young voice of one of her grandchildren burbling, “Gran was just the coolest, I mean, a viscount’s daughter who did codebreaking and had a Dylan Thomas tattoo on her forearm?”
He’d dropped the phone then and cried. Just fucking wept.
He could feel his eyes pricking now as he found the same brick: Lily Margaret Wright, née Baines. “Hey, Baines,” he said softly. He’d be damned if he called her by her married name. The Google hunt had turned up her husband too, of course. Good-looking guy, ex-RAF, fifty-two years married. Matt hoped he was a good guy. Matt also kind of wanted to punch his face in.
He’d hoped he’d feel something, looking at Lily’s brick. Closure sounded stupid, but . . . something? “Maybe I’ve been hoping this will turn out like a movie,” he said aloud, “and your granddaughter will walk up and tap me on the shoulder, and she’ll look just like you. Played by Lily James in the movie, of course.”
But that was even stupider. No granddaughter doppelganger could replace Lily Baines, the voice on the other end of the transmitter. The voice he couldn’t find again, no matter how many frequencies he tried on the old wireless.
Matt cuffed at his eyes, then hailed the nearest tour guide. “Sir? How do you buy a brick for the wall?”
“For a veteran, you mean? Do they already have a brick?”
Yes, but Matt wanted to buy another. And he knew what he wanted it to say.
LILY BAINES, 2023
MY SIGNAL MOON
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As the author of The Rose Code, I’ve already written hundreds of pages about the women codebreakers of legendary Bletchley Park—that isolated English country manor where the best and brightest minds in Britain labored during World War II to break the supposedly unbreakable Axis military codes. But The Rose Code doesn’t cover one key stage in the codebreaking process: the Y Station listeners.
Y Stations were signals-intelligence hot spots. Dotted all over Britain, they were staffed at first by men, but as more and more Englishmen headed to the front lines, recruitment shifted toward young women with good listening skills and if possible, fluent German. These ladies came from all walks of life, spending their war glued to clumsy Bakelite headphones and bulky radio receivers, listening round the clock for scraps of German naval transmissions and blips of Morse code. They wrote down every intercepted enemy communication with frantic speed, and their scribbled transcriptions were bundled off （via teleprinter or motorcycle saddlebags） for decryption. Without the keen-eared women of the Y service, the codebreakers of Bletchley Park would have been out of a job.
Lily Baines is fictional, but her wartime career is closely based on that of Pat Owtram, a petty officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service who was posted to Withernsea in Yorkshire as a special duties linguist. Like Lily, she was billeted in a requisitioned seaside hotel and intercepted German naval communications across the Baltic and the North Sea, working under the severe Wren Fiddian. Pat’s crystal-clear accounts of her work—from the bandwidth where she did her hunting to the procedure of sending messages on to Bletchley Park—are detailed in Tessa Dunlop’s splendid book The Bletchley Girls. To my knowledge, Pat never intercepted any transmissions from the future . . . that, of course, is my embellishment!
Matt Jackson is fictional, and so is his job—the United States Navy does not have a rate called signals technician. But there are many modern-day servicemen and servicewomen like Matt, who work on ships and in naval listening stations, mostly in little cold rooms full of computers, and their work is directly descended from that done by the Bletchley Park codebreakers. Their official rating isn’t classified, but much of their work certainly is, so I fictionalized Matt’s rate and left the technical details of his decryption on the also-fictional Colin Powell deliberately vague. Many thanks to my active-duty navy husband, who fine-tuned the military-ese to sound more realistic. He also put me in touch with some naval intelligence colleagues who told me as much as they legally could about the work that they do in those cold little rooms, and honed all the ship-to-ship radio chatter to sound authentic （as well as terrifying—localized conflicts and shooting wars really have started over communication mishaps in the field!）。