Enigma

way it was all Miss Smallbone's fault. If Angela Smallbone hadn't pointed out in the common room after prep that the Daily Telegraph was holding a crossword competition, then Hester Wallace's life would have gone on undisturbed. It was not a particularly thrilling life—a placid, provincial life in a remote and eccentric girls' preparatory school near the Dorset town of Beaminster, less than ten miles from where Hester had grown up. And it was not a life much touched by war, either, save for the pale faces of the evacuee children on some of the nearby farms, the barbed wire along the beach near Lyme Regis, and the chronic shortage of teaching staff—a shortage which meant that when the Michaelmas term began in the autumn of 1942, Hester was having to take divinity (her usual subject) and English and some Latin and Greek.
    Hester had a gift for crosswords and when Angela read out that night that the prize-money was twenty pounds . . . well, she thought, why not? The first hurdle, an abnormally difficult puzzle printed in the next day's paper, she passed with ease. She sent off her solution and a letter arrived almost by return of post inviting her to the final, to be held in the Telegraph's staff canteen, a fortnight hence, a Saturday. Angela agreed to take over hockey practice, Hester caught the train from Crewkerne up to London, joined fifty other finalists—and won. She completed the crossword in three minutes and twenty-two seconds and Lord Camrose himself presented her with the cheque. She gave five pounds to her father for his church restoration fund, she spent seven pounds on a new winter coat (second-hand, actually, but good as new), and the rest she put in her Post Office savings account.
    It was on the Thursday that the second letter had arrived, this one very different. Registered post, long buff envelope. On His Majesty's Service.
    Afterwards, she could never quite decide. Had the Telegraph held the competition at the instigation of the War Office, as a way of trawling the country for men and women with an aptitude for word puzzles? Or had some bright spark at the War Office merely seen the results of the competition and asked the Telegraph for a list of the finalists? Whatever the truth, five of the most suitable were summoned to be interviewed in a grim Victorian office block on the wrong side of the Thames, and three of them were ordered to report to Bletchley.
    The school hadn't wanted her to go. Her mother had cried. Her father had detested the idea, just as he detested all change, and for days beforehand he was filled with foreboding ('He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more' Job 7.x). But the law was the law. She had to go. Besides, she thought, she was twenty-eight. Was she doomed to live out the rest of her life in the same place, tucked away in this drowsy quilt of tiny fields and honey-stoned villages? Here was her chance of escape. She had picked up enough clues at the interview to guess that the work would be codes, and her fantasies were all of quiet, book-lined libraries and the pure, clear air of the intellect.
    Arriving at Bletchley station in her second-hand coat on a soaking Monday morning, she was taken straight by shooting brake to the mansion and given a copy of the Official Secrets Act to sign. The Army Captain who inducted them laid his pistol on the desk and said that if any of them, ever, breathed a word of what they were about to be told, he'd use it on them. Personally. Then they were assigned. The two male finalists became cryptanalysts, while she, the woman who had beaten them, was dispatched to a bedlam called Control.
    'You take this form here, see, and in this first column you enter the code name of the intercept station. Chicksands, right, that's CKS, Beaumanor is BMR, Harpendon is HPN—don't worry, dear, you'll soon get used to it. Now here, see, you put the time of interception, here frequency, here call sign, here number of letter groups
    Her fantasies were dust. She was a glorified clerk, Control a glorified funnel between the intercept stations and the cryptanalysts, a funnel down which poured the ceaseless output of some forty thousand different radio call signs, using more than sixty separately identified Enigma keys.
    'German Air Force, right, they're usually either insects or flowers. So you've got Cockroach, say, that's the Enigma key for western fighters, based in France. Dragonfly is Luftwaffe in Tunis. Locust is