Only a few weeks after arriving in Germany I found myself, courtesy of Michael’s father, sitting behind a desk in a German signal office. I worked beside both men and women and they accepted my accented German knowing, or believing, I had lived in Ireland, and making allowances for my foreignness. If only they knew.
Michael had been taken away to be a pilot in the Luftwaffe and if it wasn’t so damn well serious it would all have been laughable.
I’d cried a little when he left me, unfamiliar in huge flying jacket and big boots. He’d hugged me close and whispered caution in my ears. This show of sentiment usually abhorred by the Germans was acceptable, even deemed sweet, in a young married couple. I watched Michael climb into the aeroplane for his lesson and my heart was in my mouth as he careered down the runway and took off into the skies.
He would be expected to bomb Britain, his home, his loved ones; it was grotesque and I didn’t know how he was going to get through it.
I heard footsteps behind me and glanced over my shoulder to see Frau Hoffmann standing behind me, watching; she was small and blonde and very pretty but we were all a little afraid of her.
‘Aren’t you doing any work today, Frau Euler?’ Her German was precise, sharp. I had to drag my mind to the task in hand trying to remember what I’d learned at Hari’s side in her funny little office.
I adjusted the earphones and began to take notes hoping my spelling in German was adequate to the job. As the messages were in code, I expect I could get away with it but there was no knowing with a woman like Frau Hoffmann.
When I had been helping Hari it had all been easy to me, a little experiment, a chance to show how clever I was. In the German language, it was tricky but I was quick to learn and the codes were similar patterns to those we used at home. Numbers allied to certain letters soon became translatable even with a sort of haphazard kind of accuracy and I began to earn the respect of my fellow decoders.
Simple messages came through, usually nothing of any consequence and I waited expectantly for something big to arrive, some plot of the enemy to communicate to someone, perhaps Hari in Wales. I would be a spy—how I didn’t know—but I would help my country win this futile war, that I was sure of.
After his training was over and before he was sent on active service Michael was given leave and we went together to his father’s farmhouse and talked. I wanted him to talk about us, about our marriage, sham though it was, but his first words were about Hari. I might have known.
‘Those radios you use, the signals you send, could you let Hari know how we are and all that?’
‘Tell her we’re married in name only, you mean?’ We knew the contents of his father’s brief message to England. ‘What do you think I am a witch? I’m struggling enough not to show myself up as it is—’ My tone was sharp—‘and you want me to take such a risk just to let my sister know you’re not unfaithful, is that it? You would risk my life and possibly yours for such a small thing?’
‘Speak German,’ he said, ‘it’s safer.’
‘Even when we’re speaking treason?’
‘Treason?’—he sounded wounded—‘I wouldn’t ask you to do that.’
‘That’s exactly what you are doing.’
‘No I’m not—’ he thought about it—‘well I suppose I am really. Sorry.’
‘If I signal Hari, if I manage to work out how, it will be about something far more serious than you and me, Michael.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Make a guess,’ I said, knowing my eyes were narrowed.
‘For God’s sake don’t take risks.’
‘Oh, it’s taking risks to send vital intelligence to my country but not to contact home to give a trivial message to my sister.’
‘It’s not trivial to me,’ he said.
I suddenly felt the anger, the fight, the hope go out of me. ‘I know.’
For the next few days we lived like a married couple except for one important matter, at night we went to separate beds and I would lie awake thinking of him, wanting him, most of all wanting his love. But I cooked for him, managed the unfamiliar foods. I washed his clothes, his intimate underwear, and all the time he treated me casually, as he always did.
Michael tutored me some more in German though by using it every day I was losing my foreign accent and speaking in the same guttural way as he and the rest of my working friends did. I thought of the word ‘friends’ with surprise; the Germans were our enemies and yet the very intelligent men and women I shared my days with were human just like the Welsh stock I came from.
I was glad to go back to Hamburg and to the office, glad to be free of the desire to fling myself at Michael’s feet and beg him to love me. And yet, once at my desk, with my headphones flattening my permed unruly hair, the idea of communicating with home began to grow and ferment.
Frau Hoffman seemed to soften towards me and, watching her, I knew, incredibly, that she was in love with one of the brilliant men who worked in the office that housed the weird machine that appeared to be a typewriter but was much more.
I went to have a better look at it one evening when the office was almost deserted. There wasn’t one but several of the machines and I couldn’t think how they worked.
‘A little out of your league, Frau Euler,’ Frau Hoffman said with a hint of a sneer. I was startled. I hadn’t heard her come up behind me.
I agreed with her at once, nodding my head as if I was in a Punch and Judy show.
She looked dreamy. ‘I was widowed, you know.’
This was unexpected. ‘Iron Drawers and Iron Jaw’ I’d named her in my mind. I didn’t know what to say but I soon realized I was not required to say anything.
‘It was in the early days of the war. He was a pilot, you know, just like your husband. They don’t last long, Frau Euler, so be prepared.’
She moved to another machine and touched it almost with affection. ‘But love can come again even to the most unlikely of us.’
Unwisely I offered my opinion. ‘I don’t think I will love any other man than Michael.’
‘You may never have the choice.’ Her tone was hard, she was Iron Jaw again in an instant. ‘Now get out of this office, you have no business to be here. Don’t you realize you could be regarded as spying? We break ciphers here so that we can bomb the enemy, the arrogant British, into oblivion.’
I looked as dumb as I could and apologized, shaking my head at the machine as though it was beyond me, as indeed it was. I retreated hastily and set off for the farmhouse on my bike.
I was fuming. How dare Frau Hoffman sneer at my homeland, my people? We were all human but then she had no humanity in her. This was a side of the German people that was beyond me.
It was a long ride home, giving me a chance to think. I would try to make my radio work somehow. Now I could take discarded pieces home from work, at least I had some important pieces of equipment. I would make contact with home—now I would be a spy, though unofficial and untrained, with a glad heart and a clear conscience.