Chapter One
Meadow Lodge, Melstead St Mary
October 1962
Evelyn
Out in the garden Evelyn Devereux could hear ringing from inside the house. With an energetic step, she dashed up the lawn, assuming it was one of the children calling to say which train they would be on. But by the time she lunged for the telephone on the hall table, she was too late.
Oh well, if it was Pip or Em, they would probably try again. Meanwhile, she would make a drink for everybody; they had certainly earned it. Noticing there had been a second delivery of post, she picked up the letter from the doormat and went through to the kitchen.
She filled the kettle and put it on the gas stove. From the kitchen window she watched her husband, Kit, carrying some chairs across the lawn towards the marquee which was still in the process of being erected. Alongside him was her brother, Edmund; he too was carrying chairs. They were both laughing about something and clearly enjoying themselves. Particularly Kit. And nobody deserved to be happy more than he did. Not after everything he had suffered.
Back in 1939 and desperate to do his bit for King and country, and with the RAF unable to train pilots fast enough at the start of the war, Kit had taken matters into his own hands by going to Canada to learn to fly. Evelyn knew that his desire to go had been fuelled partly by his need to impress her. Oh, how she wished he hadn’t been so impetuous!
Returning home the following year, he’d been on board the Arcadia and while crossing the Atlantic the ship had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. When news of the sinking had reached them in the village, they had all believed Kit was dead. They had even held a memorial service for him. But miraculously he’d survived. Appallingly burned from when the Arcadia had been hit, he’d been in the most awful pain when he’d finally made it home to Melstead St Mary, mental as well as physical pain. To this day he couldn’t fully remember what had happened to him, only what he’d been told, that a passing American merchant ship had rescued him. He was transported to a hospital where he was treated not just for his injuries, but for amnesia. It was weeks before his memory returned, and partially at that.
It had taken him a long time to recover and he’d bravely endured countless excruciating operations to repair his scarred flesh, vowing after each visit to the hospital that he’d never go through it again. But somehow he’d found the strength to do so, and gradually he’d regained some of his old self which had been buried beneath the layers of pain and horror of what he’d gone through.
Evelyn liked to think she’d played her part in his recovery, but really it was his stepmother, Romily, who helped the most by encouraging Kit to join her in the Air Transport Auxiliary. He refused on the grounds that he wasn’t fit enough, but Romily wouldn’t accept no for an answer and kept on at him. ‘Good God, Kit,’ she exclaimed, ‘we have pilots with missing limbs and Lord knows what else, poor devils! Of course you’re fit enough!’
In the end, as he still liked to joke, he waved a white flag of surrender and agreed to give it a try. Never did Evelyn consider that it had been easy for Kit to fly again, but being useful gave a much-needed boost to his self-esteem.
There had been an assumption, once Kit was safely home in Suffolk, that he and Evelyn would marry, but they didn’t. Instead, Evelyn went to do her bit for the war effort, which meant she was no longer living in the village. But the real reason Kit wouldn’t propose to her was because he flatly refused to believe that anybody, least of all Evelyn, would want to marry a gruesome wreck like him. He just couldn’t believe that any woman could love him when he was so badly disfigured.
But in October 1942 they married and the following June Evelyn gave birth to twins, Philip and Emily. It didn’t seem possible that those babies were now nineteen and enjoying (maybe a little too much!) student life at Cambridge University. What a joy they had been for both her and Kit. He adored them, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his Pip and Em. He was so very proud of them. And of Evelyn, he never tired of telling her. Which was why he had insisted on throwing a lavish party to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary.
Watching her brother emerge from the marquee along with Kit, the pair of them still laughing over something, Evelyn thought what a shame it was that Edmund and his wife, Hope, hadn’t had a child of their own. Of course, he was utterly devoted to Annelise, their adopted daughter, but he had once confided in Evelyn that he would have loved a house teeming with boisterous children. ‘That’s so typical of a man,’ she had gently chided him, ‘not thinking of the actual work involved in caring for a brood of children. Not to say the pain of giving birth to them!’
One or two very quiet well-behaved children might have suited Hope, but a rowdy houseful would have been torture for her. Evelyn had long since come to the conclusion that while Hope, a prolific children’s author, wrote so imaginatively for her audience, almost as though she were a child herself and inhabited the world she created for them on the page, she didn’t enjoy their company very much. She found them exhausting to be around, always preferring to escape to her study where she could pour her energy into her work.
Evelyn meant no criticism of her sister-in-law in believing this, it was merely an observation. Hope was also Kit’s sister and they had been friends since they were children themselves, so there wasn’t much they didn’t know about each other. Their being married to each other’s siblings had a satisfying sense of symmetry to it, and perhaps a sense of rightness, of how it was always meant to be.
She went over to the fridge for a bottle of milk and after filling a jug, her eye caught on that day’s copy of The Times on the kitchen table. Neatly folded, it was where she had left it at breakfast that morning, the cryptic crossword only half completed. Time was she would have done it in the blink of an eye. It was her ability to do this, coupled with her love of mathematics, which was what she had studied at Oxford, that led her to do the work she had during the war.
Nobody in the family, or her current circle of friends, had ever known exactly what she did, and because she had signed the Official Secrets Act, it had to stay that way. She told people then, and even now, that it was clerical work for the Ministry of Defence she had been assigned to do, that it was all a bit hush-hush. ‘I was nothing but a glorified paper-pusher,’ she would explain to anyone who asked what she did. ‘Utterly boring, but it was essential to keep the wheels running for the war effort.’
Like many of those she worked with at Bletchley Park, her recruitment had come by way of an old college tutor. Out of the blue she had received an invitation from Dr Goulding to meet up for a drink and a chat. Several days after seeing him in Oxford, she received a letter requesting her to attend an interview in London. She was happy enough teaching at the village school, but sensing an opportunity to be free of the drudgery of looking after her ungrateful and ill-tempered mother, and to give Kit time to adjust to the direction in which his own life had gone, she leapt at the chance to escape. Within the week, and leaving her furious mother in the capable hands of a nurse, she arrived at Bletchley Park and started work as a decoder in Hut 5. It was the most satisfying work she had ever done, the most exhausting as well.