clk/sd

m’aidez m’aidez mayday

Coastal Defence

Actually I am afraid to write this.

I don’t know why I think it matters. The Battle of Britain is over. Hitler’s planned invasion, Operation Sea Lion, failed three years ago. And soon he will be fighting a desperate war on two fronts, with the Americans behind us and the Russians closing in on Berlin from the east, and organised Resistance in all the countries in the middle. I can’t believe his advisers don’t already know what went on in the makeshift huts of iron and concrete up and down the south-east coast of England in the summer of 1940 – in a general sense at any rate.

Only I don’t really want to go down in history as the one who gave out the details.

RDF is Range and Direction Finding. Same acronym as Radio Direction Finding, to confuse the enemy, but not exactly the same thing. As you know. Well. They call it Radar now, an American word, an acronym of RAdio Detection And Ranging, which I do not think is easier to remember. In the summer of 1940 it was still so new nobody knew what it was, and so secret that

Buckets of blood – I can’t do this.

—

I have spent a vexing half-hour scrapping with Fräulein Engel over the pen nib, which I swear I did not bend on purpose the first time. It is true that it spared me having to continue for a good long while but it did not move things along for that harpy to straighten it out against my teeth when I could have easily done it myself against the table. It is also true that it was stupid of me to bend it out of shape again, on purpose, the second she handed it back to me. Then she had to show me SEVERAL TIMES how, when she was at school, the nurse would use a pen nib to make a pinprick for a blood test.

I don’t know why I bent the stupid thing again. It is so easy to wind Miss Engel up. She always wins; but only because my ankles are tied to my chair.

Well, and also because at the end of every argument she reminds me of the deal I made with a certain officer of the Gestapo, and I collapse.

‘Hauptsturmführer von Linden is busy, as you know, and will not wish to be interrupted. But I have been told to summon him if necessary. You have been given pen and paper by his judgement of your willingness to cooperate with him, and if you will not write out the confession you have agreed he will have no choice but to resume your interrogation.’

JUST SHUT UP, ANNA ENGEL. I KNOW.

I will do anything: she has only to mention his name and I remember now, I will do anything, anything, to avoid him interrogating me again.

So. Range and Direction Finding. Coastal Defence. Do I get my thirty pieces of silver? No, just some more of this hotel stationery. It is very nice to write on.

Coastal Defence, the unabridged version

We saw it coming – someone saw it coming. We were that little bit ahead of you and you didn’t realise it. You didn’t realise how advanced the RDF system was already, or how quickly we were training people to use it, or how far we could see with it. You didn’t even realise how quickly we were building new planes of our own. It is true we were outnumbered, but with RDF we saw you coming – saw the swarms of Luftwaffe aircraft even as they were leaving their bases in Occupied France, worked out how high they were flying, saw how many of them were making the raid. And that gave us time to rally. We could meet you in the air, beat you back, keep you from landing, distract you till your fuel ran out and you turned tail until the next wave. Our besieged island, alone on the edge of Europe.

Maddie was sworn to secrecy on the life of her unborn children. It’s so secret they don’t give you a title when you have anything to do with Radar; you’re just called a ‘special duties clerk’. Clerk, Special Duties, clk/sd for short, like w/op is for Wireless Operator and Y for wireless. Clk/sd, that’s possibly the most useful and damning piece of information I’ve given you. Now you know.

Maddie spent six weeks in Radar training. She was also given a very nice promotion and made an officer. Then she was posted to RAF Maidsend, an operational base for a squadron of new Spitfire fighter planes, not far from Canterbury, near the Kentish coast. It was the furthest she had ever been from home. Maddie was not actually put to work at a Radar screen in one of the direction finding stations, though Maidsend did have one; she was still in the radio room. In the fire and fury of the summer of 1940 Maddie sat in a tower of iron and concrete taking bearings over the telephone. The other RDF girls did the ID work on the glass screens with the blinking green lights, and wired or telephoned it to Operations; then when Operations identified approaching aircraft for her, Maddie answered air-to-ground radio calls as the aircraft came limping home. Or sometimes roaring home in triumph, or newly delivered from the maintenance depot at Swi

SWINLEY SWINLEY

At Swinley. Thibaut has made me finish writing the name. I am so ashamed of myself I want to be sick again.

Engel says impatiently not to bother about the name of the workshop. There have been repeated attempts to bomb it to bits and it’s not really a secret. Engel is sure our Hauptsturmführer will be more interested in my sample description of the early Radar network. She is cross with T. now for interrupting.

I hate them both. Hate them all.

I HATE THEM

Coastal Defence, damn it.

Snivelling IDIOT.

So. So, on the RDF screen you’d see a green dot for an aircraft, one or two, moving across the screen. It might be ours. You’d watch a battle building, the dots multiplying – more joining the first as the pulsing light swept the screen. They’d come together and some of them would go out, like the cinders of sparklers. And every green flash that disappeared was a life finished, one man for a fighter, a whole crew for a bomber. Out, out, brief candle. (That is from Macbeth. He is said to be another of my unlikely ancestors, and actually did hold court on my family’s estate from time to time. He was not, by all contemporary Scottish accounts, the treacherous bastard Shakespeare makes him out to be. Will history remember me for my MBE, my British Empire honour for ‘chivalry’, or for my cooperation with the Gestapo? I don’t want to think about it. I expect they can take the MBE away if you stop being chivalrous.)

If they were radio equipped Maddie could talk to the planes the special duties clerks saw on their screens. She’d tell the pilots more or less what she’d have told them back at Oakway, except she didn’t know landmarks so well in Kent. She’d pass bearings to the moving aircraft, along with wind speed and whether or not there were holes in the runway today (sometimes we got raided). Or she’d tell other planes to give priority to the one that had lost its flaps, or whose pilot had a lump of shrapnel lodged in his shoulder, or something like that.

Maddie was listening for incoming stragglers one afternoon following a battle that hadn’t involved the Maidsend Squadron. She nearly fell off her chair when she heard the desperate call that came in on her frequency.

‘Mayday – mayday –’

– Recognisable in English. Or perhaps that was French, ‘M’aidez’, help me. The rest of the transmission was in German.

The voice was a boy’s voice, young and scared. He broke off each call with a sob. Maddie swallowed – she had no idea where the anguished cries for help were coming from. Maddie called out, ‘Listen – listen!’ and switched her headset on to the Tannoy so that everyone could hear, and then she grabbed the telephone.

‘It’s Assistant Section Officer Brodatt in the Tower. Can I get directly through to Jenny in Special Duties? All right, Tessa then. Anyone with a screen going. I need an ident on a radio call – ’

Everyone crowded round the telephone, reading over Maddie’s shoulder as she took notes from the direction finding station, then gasping aloud as the meaning of her notes sank in.

‘Heading straight for Maidsend!’

‘What if it’s a bomber?’

‘What if it’s still loaded?’

‘What if it’s a hoax?’

‘He’d be calling in English if it was a hoax!’

‘Anyone speak German?’ shouted the officer in charge of the radio room. Silence.

‘Christ! Brodatt, stay on the ’phone. Davenport, you run to the wireless station, perhaps one of those girls can help. Get me a German-speaker! Now!’

Maddie listened with her heart in her mouth, holding her headset to one ear and the telephone to the other, waiting for the girl at the RDF screen to pass her new information.

‘Shhh,’ warned the radio officer, leaning over Maddie’s shoulder and taking hold of the telephone receiver for her so her right hand was freed up for taking notes. ‘Don’t say anything – don’t let him know who’s listening –’

The door to the radio room banged open and the subordinate Davenport was back, with one of the WAAF wireless operators hard on his heels. Maddie looked up.

The girl was immaculate – not a blue thread out of place, her chignon of long fair hair coiled in regulation neatness two inches above her uniform collar. Maddie recognised her from the canteen and rare social evenings. Queenie, people called her, though she was not the official WAAF Queen Bee (that’s what we call the senior administrative officer on the base), nor was it her name. Maddie did not know her real name. Queenie had acquired a certain reputation for being fast and fearless; she sauced superior officers and got away with it, but equally she wouldn’t leave a building during an air raid until she’d made sure everyone else was out. Distantly connected to royalty, she was of some rank herself, of privilege rather than experience, a Flight Officer; but she was said to work as diligently at her wireless set as any self-made shop girl. She was pretty, petite and light on her feet, and if there was a Squadron dance on a Saturday night she was the one the pilots went for.

‘Let’s have your headset, Brodatt,’ said the radio officer. Maddie uncurled the gripping earphones and microphone and passed her headset to the pretty little blonde wireless operator, who adjusted the phones to fit her head.

After a few seconds, Queenie said, ‘He says he’s over the English Channel. He’s looking for Calais.’

‘But Tessa says he’s approaching the coast at Whitstable!’

‘He’s in a Heinkel bomber and his crew’s been killed and he’s lost an engine and he wants to land at Calais.’

They all stared at the wireless operator.

‘You sure we’re all talking about the same aircraft?’ the radio officer asked dubiously.

‘Tessa,’ Maddie said into the telephone, ‘could the German plane be over the Channel?’

Now the whole room held its breath, waiting for Tessa’s disembodied reply as, somewhere underneath the chalk cliffs, she sat staring at the green flashes on her screen. Her answer appeared beneath Maddie’s scribbling pencil: Hostile ident, track 187 Maidsend 25 miles, est height 8,500 ft.

‘Why the hell does he think he’s over the English Channel?’

‘Oh!’ Maddie gave a sudden gasp of understanding and waved at the enormous map of south-east England and north-west France and the Low Countries that covered the wall behind her radio. ‘Look, look – he’s come from Suffolk. He’s been bombing the coastal bases there. He crossed the mouth of the Thames at its widest point and he thinks he crossed the Channel! He’s heading straight for Kent and he thinks it’s France!’