The Bomb Girls by Daisy Styles

Author:Daisy Styles
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405924351
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

Cracking

Winter at Helford House was a perfect white wonderland outside, but inside it was ten degrees below zero with only two fires in the entire establishment. A huge log fire in the drawing room and a wood burner in the dining room, both of which were kept going day and night, were the only sources of heat, but luckily Alice and Robin had their love to keep them warm.

As Christmas approached, Alice wondered if they’d get Christmas leave. She so wanted to take Robin to Pendle to meet her family and friends, but theirs was no ordinary war work. Their demanding schedule rolled on regardless of bank holidays, and although she never voiced it, Alice was secretly glad because while she might not be with her family and friends, at least she’d be with Robin. And, she thought to herself, who knew how many Christmases they could look forward to together?

They were no longer referred to as the ‘new recruits’ since fresh trainees had arrived and the senior team mysteriously disappeared over the space of a few days.

‘Dropped’, the word went round.

It gave Alice food for sombre thought. Thirty recruits at a time underwent thorough training for dangerous, intensive action – then they disappeared like they had never existed. One chilling question she and her friends had discussed in their freezing dorm, smoking cigarettes to keep warm, was what was the average life expectancy of a Special Op. Gwynne said six weeks if they were captured; Gladys said much longer if they could operate effectively behind enemy lines; Iris starkly said, ‘But then there’s torture.’

Whatever the answer, Alice now knew that Special Ops were a breed apart; they were all motivated by the certainty that right was on their side and that victory was a prerequisite for any kind of decent future. Equipped with false identities, they would be expected to play a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the Gestapo while doing their best to wreak havoc deep inside enemy ranks. To this end Alice and her colleagues had had to acquire a range of new skills, spending their time on shooting practice and parachute training, wireless operating and Morse decoding, which was drummed into them daily, month after month.

They started with learning the Morse alphabet by rote, which was slow, tedious and boring.

‘I’ll need bi-focals by the time I’ve got this lot under my belt,’ joked Gwynne as she squinted at the arrangements of dots and dashes that formed letters.

For days on end they practised writing five words a minute, and after a few weeks of this exacting process the whole Morse alphabet was familiar to the Ops.

In her sleep Alice dreamed Morse and in her dreams she recognized the series of metallic tips and taps that spelled out a random assortment of words like weather, horse, car and train.

‘Been dreaming in Morse code again,’ Alice told her dorm friends as she dressed one morning. ‘I wish it would stop. Not only am I decoding all day, it’s all night too!’ she grumbled.

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