Bletchley Blue

The train from Euston was forty minutes late and smelled of wet wool and coal smoke, and Elias Lowther spent the whole of it pretending to read.

It was the second week of February, 1942. Outside the window, Hertfordshire went by in shades of grey: grey fields under a skin of old snow, grey hedges, grey sky pressing down on the chimneys of grey towns. Inside the compartment, an RAF sergeant slept with his mouth open, a woman knitted something khaki with savage speed, and two young men in good overcoats talked loudly about a cricket match from 1938 as if nothing had happened since.

Elias had a letter in his coat pocket. It had come to the house in Much Wenlock three weeks ago, on thick cream paper with no letterhead, and it said only that Elias should report to Bletchley station on the eleventh, with luggage for an extended stay, and should not discuss the matter with anyone. It was signed with initials nobody in the family recognised.

Before the letter, there had been the interview. A room in London, near Broadway, with a gas fire that didn't work and a man in a tweed jacket who had asked Elias to translate a paragraph of German about the price of herring, and then a paragraph about a submarine, and then had asked, quite casually, whether Elias did crosswords. Elias had said yes. He had asked how fast. Elias had told him. He had written something down and said, "Thank you. That will be all," and Elias had gone home on the train thinking it had gone badly.

Mother had wanted to know what kind of job didn't have a name. Father had said, from behind the newspaper, "The kind you don't ask about, Norah," and turned a page, and Mother had stopped asking.

Robin had written from his training establishment on the south coast: A job with no name! How thrilling. I expect you'll be parachuted into Berlin with a cyanide pill in your molar. Do write and tell me everything, so I can tell nobody. Your devoted brother, Sub-Lieutenant (very nearly) R. Lowther, RNVR.

Elias had laughed for a whole minute at that. Then had sat on the edge of the bed with the letter, and thought about Robin in a uniform at sea, and stopped laughing.

Elias had kept that letter too. It was in the same pocket as the cream one. Between them, they felt like the two halves of something Elias did not yet understand: the part of life that could be told, and the part that could not.

The train slowed. A station sign slid past, its name painted out the way every station sign in England had been painted out since 1940, so that invading Germans would not know where they were. It didn't matter. The guard came down the corridor calling, "Bletchley! Bletchley! Change for Oxford and Cambridge!" and the two young men in good overcoats stopped talking about cricket, stood up, and reached for their suitcases at exactly the same moment as Elias.

They all looked at one another.

Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to.