Page 49 of The Dark of the Moon
‘Her specialist field is Partial Differential Equations,’ he says. ‘Seeing her name was a coincidence, but I remembered you said Janina’s surname was Krakowska, so I recognised it straight away. And then I realised Ewelina is the Polish version of Eveline, which was your code name in France. So I came up with a hypothesis that this could be Janina and Jakub’s missing daughter and I sent her a message and the hypothesis turned out to be correct.’
A waiter hovers, but Dan asks him to give us a little more time as we have much to catch up on, and Ewelina tells me her story.
‘I grew up in a tiny village in the Pyrenees, believing my name to be Eveline Espelet and my parents to be French. When I reached my teens, and I was old enough to know such things, they told me my real parents had been a Polish couple to whom they had given sanctuary during the war. A neighbour had denounced them to the Gestapo and they’d been arrested one night. But there was just time to hide me. The French couple who’d taken us in passed me off as their child in order to save me. They kept me safe as my real parents were taken away to their deaths. All I have of them is this headscarf of my mother’s, and my name. They called me Ewelina, the Polish version of the French name Eveline. My adopted parents told me they’d said it had been the name of a dear friend of theirs. I was named in honour of another brave soul who had tried to help them.’
Her words make me cry all over again. Once I’ve blotted the tears from my face, I raise my hand towards Finn across the table, spreading my fingers wide. ‘You truly are a remarkable boy,’ I say.
He looks at me, his expression serious. ‘Are you happy or sad, Philly? Now you are having tea at The Ritz with Janina’s daughter?’
‘Bless your soul, my dear, I am utterly happy. Absolutely stunned by your brilliant surprise, but totally and utterly happy.’
I really don’t think it can get any better. But then the waiter reappears and sets down towering stands of cakes and scones in front of us. And with a final flourish, he puts a smaller plate down before Finn, saying, ‘Your special dietary requirement, sir. Marmite sandwiches, as ordered.’ And my joy is complete.
Finn
Ewelina met us at Bletchley Park the next day. She was very interested to see the memorial to the Polish cryptographers and to hear all about Philly’s experiences working there, which had led to her meeting Jakub and Janina at the château in France. She laid two red roses on the plinth, one for each of her parents.
Ewelina was wearing her red scarf and Philly was wearing a black jacket with a little gold and blue brooch on the lapel. She saw me noticing it and she showed it to me. ‘It’s my Bletchley Park commemorative badge,’ she said. It had the letters GC&CS at the top, for the Government Code and Cypher School, and the dates 1939–1945. As we were going round the rest of the Park, I spotted another lady wearing one so I knew she must have been there during the war as well. I pointed her out to Philly but she said she didn’t recognise her, but as there had been about 9,000 people who had worked at Bletchley Park and its outposts it was statistically unlikely that they would have known each other.
Philly showed us the Hut where she’d worked with Alan Turing and the Cottage where she met Dilly Knox. There was even an old-fashioned car in the stable block, just like the one she’d been driven down to Tangmere in. We walked through the rooms in the main house, and she swore she could still smell the over-boiled cabbagein the dining room, but I think she was imagining things. It just smelled of dusty carpets and old wood panelling to me.
In one of the other buildings there was a display which was all about Enigma machines and the origins of supercomputers, which I found very interesting. Then it got a bit busy and suddenly there were too many people, and we had to go outside quite quickly because I started feeling panicky.
‘Let’s go and see the lake,’ Philly said. We walked away from the crowds and stood on the grass under the trees on the far side. ‘We used to come and sit out here in our lunch breaks if the sun was shining,’ Philly said. ‘Not Alan, he’d stay at his desk, whatever the weather. But some of the others. And occasionally I’d meet Jess here, if we were both doing a day shift and our lunch hours coincided.’
‘What a lot of extraordinary people there must have been,’ said Mum. ‘I had no idea there were so many thousands who worked here. It makes it all the more remarkable that none of the secrets ever leaked out.’
‘I don’t think we realised how extraordinary it really was, at the time,’ said Philly. She was leaning on her walking stick with one hand, while the fingers of the other were touching her commemorative Bletchley Park badge. ‘But you’re right. It was a place filled with brilliance. People like Alan and Dilly, obviously, but all the others who played their part as well. We may have been hidden away in our own little universe, but there were thousands of stars here, secretly shining in the darkness of war. Each of us determined to make a difference and bring it to an end as quickly as we possibly could.’
She was quiet for a few moments. The winter sunlight slanted through the bare branches of the trees and shimmered across the surface of the water, glinting on Ben’s signet ring where it hung on the chain around her neck.
I thought about the film we’d gone to see at the open-air cinema in France the summer before. And then a line from it popped into my head. ‘Do you remember what Keira Knightley said to Benedict Cumberbatch at the end ofThe Imitation Game? That sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.’
She looked at me and her red lips turned upwards into a smile. ‘I do indeed,’ she said. Then she unpinned the Bletchley Park brooch from the lapel of her jacket, and she held it out to me. ‘I want you to have this, Finn. Because you have done things I never could have imagined. Finding Ben for me. And Ewelina.’
I took it from her and put it in my pocket. I remembered to say thank you as well. I wasn’t going to wear it, because obviously I hadn’t actually worked at Bletchley Park, but I decided I’d take it home and put it in the special drawer where I keep my most treasured possessions. The photocopied rubbing of Ben’s name is in there. And I’m going to laminate the menu from our tea at The Ritz and keep it there too.
‘I’d like to go home now,’ I said. And so we all walked back to the car park. Ewelina said she’d give Philly a lift to the station to catch her train and we all said goodbye. Mum and Dad had booked us a room in a Travelodge for the night. But when we got into our car, I said again, ‘I’d really like to go home now.’
They looked at each other and nodded. ‘Me too,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s just go then.’ And so he turned the car towards the motorway.
It was completely dark by the time we crossed the border into Scotland. Mum was fast asleep in the back and I was sitting in front with Dad. He said it was like he was the Pilot and I was the Navigator, although we have Satnav so I didn’t really have to do any map-reading. Instead, I was watching the lit-up signs flash past us and counting the emergency telephones along the side of the motorway. I thought it might be useful to know where the nearestone was, in case we broke down and then discovered that Dad’s phone had run out of battery. In the distances between the signs and the phones, the road was lit only by the car’s headlamps and the moon which was shining in the sky towards the west. It reminded me about something Philly had said to me one day when we were sitting on the porch at the house in France and I’d been telling her about Synchronous Tidal Locking and the moon never turning its back on the Earth. I told her, ‘There isn’t a dark side of the moon, you know. It’s more accurate to call it the far side, because it does receive sunlight at certain times. It’s just that we never see it.’
And then she said, ‘I think people are like that, Finn. There’s the face they show and then the side they keep hidden. It’s the less obvious side that can be the most intriguing.’
‘I’m not very good at understanding the side people show,’ I said. ‘So I don’t think I’ll be any good at understanding the dark side.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think that’s the case. I think you are better at it than you imagine because you aren’t dazzled by the light of the obvious in the way that other people are. Like the stars, which are always shining, but we can’t see them in the daytime because the light of the sun blots them out. You see the truth, though, because you look at life through a lens of logic and persistence.’
We passed another emergency phone – the 122nd since I’d started counting them – and I thought about how people can get lost. It made me feel a bit panicky but then I held the Bletchley Park badge in my pocket tightly and I looked at Dad’s face, lit up by the glow from the dashboard, and I felt calmer. So then I went back to that thought. People can get lost. And some might never be able to be found, like Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart. But if you’re very persistent and you use logic, sometimes you can be the person who finds even the ones that other people have given up on.
They are out there, waiting to be found. Just because you can’t see them, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. You don’t always have to see things to still believe in them.
Like gravity.
Like truth.
Like the stars in daytime.
Like the far side of the moon.
Like Ewelina.
Like Ben.
Q.E.D.