But here in Withernsea, everything was deadly serious: they were intercepting live radio communications sent to enemy vessels, the same vessels that hunted their countrymen. Lily saw her quarry the moment she first sat down at this desk: wolf packs of U-boats knifing through the waters of the Atlantic, German surface vessels poking their ugly snouts through the Baltic, looking for soft Allied flesh. She didn’t have a brother out there, thank God—hers were both too young—but she had a whole flock of cousins, a pack of school friends, an entire flotilla of old beaux she’d fox-trotted and waltzed through her deb season with. Willy, Terry, John, Phil, Arthur, Kit, Andrew, Eddie, Dickie, Alan, Fred . . . Just running the list in her head, the ones she could lose, sent an icy hand of pure terror clawing down her throat.
Chin up, she told herself again, fingers resting on the knob like a pianist’s on the keys, sliding the length of the band. German transmissions, always to be found in the 4, 8, and 12 MHz bands—ship-to-ship communications fell in the 30 to 50 MHz band. Listening through the static, through the fuzz, sliding slowly along the frequencies. （Have my ears grown? Lily wondered sometimes in the bleariness of late-shift exhaustion. Do they stick out from my head like platters, the way I strain and swivel after radio chatter so many hours and hours and hours a day?） Straining, straining, straining, never knowing when a voice in German would suddenly jump into your ears. Two hours of static droned through her headphones tonight before a nasal Teutonic tenor emerged; Lily gave a sharp knock on the desk, and dimly heard one of the other Wrens calling, “We’ve got a Jerry ship up. Call Fiddian—” Lily was already writing with one hand, transposing the drone of German letter groups as her left-hand fingers poised on the knob, ready to track the voice if it disappeared back into static. She lost the signal in the middle, got it back within seconds, only a few letter groups dropped out there . . . It was all ciphered, just gibberish in five-letter clusters, but she didn’t have to make sense of it. She just wrote until her hand burned and listened till her ears bled, the entire person and essence of the Honorable Lily Baines stripped down to a pair of ears and a pair of hands.
When the call sign marked the close of transmission, Lily stripped off her headphones and passed the naval message pad back over one shoulder. “Call Station X; we’ve got a message to put through on the teleprinter.” Her mouth was dry, and she was sticky with sweat under her coat.
“Nice work, that was a tricky one,” Fiddian said briefly, and went off to ring Station X, which was Bletchley Park. Lily wasn’t supposed to know that, but motorcycle dispatch riders queued up every morning to take satchels of bundled transmissions from the Withernsea listening station and buzz off south toward Station X, and one of the lads had incautiously said something about Bletchley Park and what a ruddy lunatic asylum it was, so presumably it was the same place where a good many of Lily’s chums were employed.
“Darling, why don’t you join us?” one of her ex-deb friends had written. “They need girls here with topping good German, and after that summer in Munich before your presentation, don’t tell me you haven’t got your genitive and dative cases sorted!” But Lily was already here in this converted listening station perched on the mouth of the Humber where the wind ripped across the world like a knife, and as for her friends at Bletchley Park, who knew what they were doing. She certainly couldn’t ask—you don’t need to know was always the answer to that kind of question—but probably they were sitting in cold rooms with hideous mid-Victorian wallpaper, like Lily, making some kind of sense out of these transcribed, encrypted German naval communications.
Which might be anything. Birthday telegrams to the Führer, weather reports, gossip about blinking Wagner concerts at blinking Bayreuth—or lists of American convoy ships they’d sunk, how many tons of supplies had gone to the bottom of the sea rather than into English supply depots and English stomachs. Lists of how many English sailors had died screaming in the North Atlantic.
Willy, Terry, John, Phil, Arthur, Kit, Andrew, Eddie, Dickie, Alan, Fred . . .
“Midshift break,” the girl at the next desk groaned. “Finally!”
The other Wrens went off to the kitchens for a cup of hot strong tea and a smoke, but Lily headed along the promenade by the water, whitecaps shattering below in fitful bursts of spray. A crop of faux castle turrets looked out over the water at the end of the promenade, pasted over with war posters: “Keep Mum, She’s Not So Dumb!” Did you really need a war, Lily wondered, to remind men that women weren’t stupid? Of course you bally well did.