I'll Be Seeing You Read Free

by the German Army High Command for top-level communications, had proved even more difficult. A twelve-wheel contraption with hundreds of metal lugs turned each character into a string of electrical impulses converted into code before transmission. Cracking the code had taken many months, involving highly abstruse mathematical calculations based on one lucky careless slip by a German radio operator. My father had been a vital part of the team which had finally unlocked Fish’s secrets. Unlike the breaking of the Enigma codes, this had been accomplished without ever seeing the machine. The method of deduction alluded to in the newspaper was incomprehensible to me – I have trouble with basic arithmetic – though Drew, of course, had understood. But our father had never once spoken of his time at Bletchley Park, and even Ma had only the haziest idea of what he had been doing during the war. ‘Something very dull to do with communications,’ was all he would tell her – or us, whenever we asked him. He was not, apparently, the only one to clam up. While others were trumpeting aloud their wartime exploits, those at Bletchley Park remained silent. Churchill called them the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled.
    The call on the vicar concluded, Drew and I went back to the house. The range had been replaced during the Seventies with an oil-fired Aga, but the Victorian radiators had stayed stubbornly lukewarm and the hallway, as we entered, felt damp and chill. We kept our coats on. Drew lit the gas fire in the study and I went to make some tea. The kitchen had always been the hub of the house. We ate there at the big scrubbed-wood table and the lodger students that my mother took in to fill up empty bedrooms always joined us in termtime. Something was always cooking on or in the range: soups, stews, potatoes, puddings, pies – simmering, baking, bubbling, sizzling, with the kettle hissing for the next cup of tea or coffee.
    I filled the kettle, set it on the hotplate and fetched mugs, tea bags, milk, sugar. The two third-year St Hilda’s students still living in the house had left their mugs and bowls and plates washed up and draining neatly on the rack and while I was waiting for the kettle to boil, one of them returned. Her bespectacled face appeared uncertainly round the edge of the door, framed in the nylon fur of her anorak hood. She was the one who had found Ma unconscious on the kitchen floor and sent for the ambulance.
    â€˜Is there anything we can do, Mrs Porter?’
    There wasn’t, I assured her. And they were welcome to stay on until the house was sold. I promised to keep them informed.
    â€˜We’re so sorry,’ she said. ‘We liked your mother. Very much. Everybody did.’
    I knew it was true. As far as I was aware she had had no enemies, only friends.
    I carried the tea through to the study where the old gas fire was making its usual pop-popping noises. How many times over the years had I carried a mug of tea to my father at work in there, and how often had I returned later to find it scummily cold and untouched on his desk? As a very small child, I could remember stretching up on tiptoe to reach the brass handle, pushing open the door and wandering around the book-lined room, fingering this and touching that. The study door was never locked, admission never denied – except to Mrs Collins. The outsize chess set on the table by the fire was always an attraction: pawns, bishops, rooks, knights, queens and kings drawn up and poised for battle, black team against white. I would shunt them to and fro across the squares. The humble pawns could be made to scoot about, the bishops and rooks to slide, but the majestic kings and queens had to be lifted. Sometimes Da would look up from his desk to smile and make some kindly and indulgent remark; at other times, he was too absorbed in his work to notice me at all.
    Drew was at the bookshelves, taking down a