Alice was right, too, though. They couldn’t afford to be late for their shift. This wasn’t school any longer; they couldn’t just run extra laps ifthey were tardy. A hundred and forty Wrens worked at Coverdale, trading off in three eight-hour shifts so there was never a moment when the radios were left unmonitored.
Most of the girls disliked the graveyard shift, but Dot preferred it. At night, the cows were tucked safely away in the barn. Now she slid a tentative boot into the indent Alice had already made in the snow, her eyes on the bovines. As if on cue, all eight of them swung their thick black heads in her direction, blinking at Dot against the snowflakes on their lashes. She took one step, then another, heart pounding, then she broke into an awkward run, sprinting and stumbling through the deep snow, flailing her arms for balance.
When at last she reached Alice, her friend was doubled over with laughter. “Well done. You made it, matador. Let’s go to work now.”
When they reached it, Alice tugged the door to the hut open with a grunt, freeing the ice from its hinges, and they stepped inside. The large room was mostly an open space, with a long table on either side. At each table, a dozen or so women hunched over their Marconi CSR5 receivers, searching frequencies for enemy signals.
Dot stomped her snowy boots at the entrance and stuffed her mitts in her pockets, but she kept her coat on. The girls on the midnight shift, who they were replacing, still wore theirs. Dot tiptoed to her assigned chair, eyes on the curly-haired girl she would soon relieve. She was leaning in, absorbed in a transmission she had caught, and her right hand was printing madly. The fingertips of her left hand barely touched the radio’s dial, but Dot could tell she was ready to adjust it the slightest bit if the sound or voice in her headphones faded into static.
There could be no break between the girl leaving her post and Dot arriving. So when Dot arrived behind the seat, the girl turned up the volume and kept taking notes until Dot swooped in for the headphones. Assuming her warm chair, Dot picked up the message where the other girl had left off, and her workday began.
For eight hours straight, every day until she lost track, Dot and the other girls listened and wrote, shivering from the cold. No one waspermitted to leave their radio during their shift unless she raised a hand to visit the lavatory. When they finished for the day—or night, depending on the shift—there was time for a quick meal in the mess hall, then they collapsed onto their beds and were snoring before Dot could count to ten. Sixteen hours later, it all began again.
And yet, Dot’s enthusiasm for the job never waned. Whenever she stepped into the HF/DF hut, her body buzzed with anticipation.
Every ship in the world was able to broadcast messages, and each message could be caught and intercepted by a focused hunter like Dot. The trickiest part was singling out a lone dit dit dah among a literal sea of dits and dahs. Ironically, the regimented systems of the Germans had made that task a little less difficult. Their U-boats were positioned within a grid system, a large rendering of which was posted on the wall of the hut. Twice a day, Grand Admiral Dönitz ordered the submarines to surface and report their location, weather reports, and other nonemergency information, all in under thirty seconds. Every time a U-boat checked in, Dot and the other listeners swiftly located it in the grid. From there, they could search for the frequency on which it was broadcasting. The submarine’s bearings were teletyped to Ottawa, then to England, where the people in charge could take whatever evasive or aggressive action the situation warranted.
Dot was made for this: listening, translating, thinking like the wind. The work fueled her mind like nothing ever had. It gave her great pleasure to know that the enemy underestimated the power, speed, skill, and determination of the young women at Coverdale. The young women nobody talked about.
And yet, despite Dot’s confidence in her abilities, some moments still caught her off guard. She got satisfaction from recognizing specific transmitter operators by their idiosyncrasies, such as their word choices or keying rhythms, but she never got comfortable with the occasional blast of a human voice, joining or overlaying the monotone dits and dahs. The mechanical sounds were no more than a puzzle to her, but the voices—whether German, American, British, or any other nationality—remindedher that every signal came from an actual person. Somewhere out there, someone’s son or brother was in danger.
The Wrens never shared the actual messages they’d intercepted, but sometimes they chatted over supper about familiar voices. Dot usually stayed out of those conversations, but Alice tried to bring her in. She’d told Dot that she had a wonderful sense of humour, and that she needn’t be so shy. At first, Dot had scoffed, a little hurt by Alice’s teasing, but Alice assured her that she wasn’t joking.
“You have to talk more, Dot,” she’d said. “You are hilarious, but nobody knows it except me.”
One night at supper Alice decided to prove her point. She asked Dot in front of everyone if she had heard from the Menace lately.
Dot was taken off guard. “The Menace?”
“He’s German, but he speaks in English,” Alice said, giving her a wink of encouragement. They’d talked about him before, but just between them. “You know him. He talks directly to us, trying to scare us.”
Dot cast a glance at their coworkers, uncertain. “The Menace? Oh yes, I heard him the other day.” Normally, hearing voices bothered her, but the Menace didn’t. In her mind, he was more of a caricature than a man.
“Oh?” Alice asked coyly. “What did he say?”
Sucking back her natural reserve, Dot dropped her voice and sharpened her words into a German accent. “Hello, listeners! Ve are here in U-boat and ve are coming to kill you!’?”
Surprised to hear Dot playing like that, the girls laughed so loud the room rang with it, and Dot warmed through. Alice lifted a sassy eyebrow.Told you so!
Later that night, as Alice settled into the bunk over her head, Dot’s mind returned to the discussion in the mess hall.
“It must really annoy the Menace and his fellow Germans, not knowing if we hear what they’re saying,” she said.
Her friend shifted above her, rocking the bunk as she got comfortable. “What would you say to them if you could transmit? Do you ever think about that? I mean, they’re the enemy and all, but really, they’rejust men from another country, doing what our men are doing. Sometimes I hear shouting, but it’s not clear enough to translate. I wonder what they’re saying.”
Dot had asked herself the same question many times. Every so often, she longed to reach out to those under fire and answer the most terrible broadcasts. To offer some sort of comfort. Like the American pilot who screamed as his plane plunged earthbound in a helpless spiral. Or the strangled voice of a German sailor in a doomed U-boat, screaming for mercy that would never come. The boundaries between countries and nationalities blurred at times like that. So many times she’d listened with tears in her eyes and questioned the horror of it all.
“I think,” she said quietly, “we already know. Fear sounds the same in any language.”
twenty-twoDASH— Fort William, Ontario —
Thank goodness Dash had listened to her mother when she’d told her to dress warmly for Fort William’s northern climate, and not to forget her winter boots. The drive from Dash’s hotel to the massive Canadian Car and Foundry Company buildings was dicey at best. Her driver, a serious young man named Charlie, blasted through snowdrifts and fishtailed over icy roads. A couple of times she wondered if she might have to get out and push the car out of the snow, but somehow they survived. As Charlie bumped against the sidewalk and parked, Dash told herself that if she got the job, one of the first things she would do was offer him driving lessons.
The snow had stopped for now, thank goodness, and the sky was a blinding blue over a soft white world. Sunshine beamed straight down from heaven and twinkled on the frozen surface. The day was far too beautiful for anything to go wrong, she told herself, so as she waited in the back seat of the car for Charlie to open the door, Dash smiled with optimism. He’d told her that part of his job was to open the door for her, soplease, miss, stay put.It was charming, really. Through her window, Dash watched him labour around the car through knee-deep snow, yank the door open through a drift, then he saw her safely to the sidewalk.As he lurched back to the driver’s seat, she heard him mutter something about the stupidity of living in northern Canada in the winter, then he shut himself within and turned on the engine.
Dash turned and gawked at the huge building before her, struggling to believe that another one of the same size loomed behind it. The two of them had originally been constructed to house a half-dozen wooden-hulled, steel-framed trawlers, since CanCar, as Charlie called it, had built ships for the French Navy to use as minesweepers in the last war. Prior to that, the company’s first factory, located in Montreal, had produced railway cars. Now they built and contained an entire fleet of Hawker Hurricanes. These people knew what they were doing, and Dash wanted to be a part of that.
Everything about being here was a thrill. On the train ride to Fort William, Dash had read up on the planes until she knew all she could. In addition to impressing the interviewer with her knowledge, she planned to keep her eyes peeled—maybe she’d see a Hurricane today. If she was lucky, she might even meet the legendary Miss Elsie MacGill herself.
