‘In 1943? I don’t believe it.’
‘I’ll prove it.’ She rose and went into the hall, and I could hear her digging in the cupboard by the stairs. I thought I’d seen all of her photograph albums, but the one she returned with was new to me – one of the old kind, with red leather covers and black paper pages, and little square photographs held in by gummed paper corners.
‘There,’ she told me, opening the book between us; pointing to a picture. ‘That’s when I was twenty-one, instead of eighty-three.’
I’d known that she’d been pretty, in her youth. I’d seen a photograph of her at twenty-five – her wedding picture, taken with my grandfather beside her – but by then she had matured. She’d looked respectable. At twenty-one, standing by the doors of Union Station with a suitcase, she’d still had a girlish look about her, young and fresh and innocent. She was wearing a dark-coloured suit, with a blouse and a skirt, and her hair was swept up at the sides and piled high on her head, with the back left to fall in loose waves to her shoulders.
‘I love your hair,’ I said.
‘Oh, that’s a pompadour. Everyone did it like that, it was easy.’ She turned a page. ‘Here you go. This is in front of the office, and there we all are, one shift. That’s Molly, there, and Joan…you’ll know the two of them, at least. We get together every now and then, for lunch.’
The two young women in the photograph did bear a strong resemblance to my grandmother’s best friends. I’d never questioned how they’d met, or how long they’d known Grandma. I had always just accepted that they turned up every month or so; they went on trips together. If asked, I would have guessed they’d met at church, not doing secret wartime work in New York City, sixty years ago. I looked at them with new eyes, as I searched the fifteen faces for my grandmother’s familiar one. I found her. Raised my eyebrows.
‘You smoked?’
‘Oh, sure. Most of us smoked. When I went down, I was the youngest of my group, and I was always teased about being the baby, and so I started smoking. Cigarettes were rationed, then. So many things were rationed. We bought stockings on the corner, and cigarettes, too – we lined up for them. But then, we were used to lining up for things in New York. We lined up to see Frank Sinatra – a block long, to see him, and New York policemen on horseback patrolling the crowd. It was something.
‘Now, this is the beach,’ she said, pointing, ‘Jones Beach, and I’m in a two-piece red and white bathing suit.’
She was, too. I couldn’t tell the colour from the photograph, of course, but it was definitely in two pieces. I would never have imagined that I’d see my grandmother, at any age, in a bathing suit like that, any more than I would have imagined us ever having this kind of conversation. It was faintly surreal still – not only that she was talking about things so openly, but that she was talking about them to me. It was almost as if Andrew Deacon’s death had flipped some hidden switch inside her; as if, like him, she’d suddenly decided that the time to keep silent had come to an end. It was now time to speak.
‘And this is a nightclub,’ she said, moving on. ‘I don’t know the name of it. And I don’t know who these men are, either. I think they came from Belgium, because they couldn’t speak English, and they came off a ship and I think somebody arranged for us to go out with them.’ She looked closer. ‘This was taken not long after I went down, because I’m wearing my Toronto suit, my dark brown suit with the pinstripe, and the short skirt and the collar out. And here again, that’s me, in a gold suit. I remember the colours,’ she said, with a smile, and a nod to the black-and-white pictures. ‘Clothes were a very big part of our lives, in New York. We all became very fashion-conscious there. We all had cocktail dresses, and we all had lounging pyjamas, which we had never had before. We had great clothes, and they were a lot cheaper – you could get some good deals in New York, then. We used to go to Klines, down near Grammercy Park, in the Village – that was a wonderful place. And I bought a hat at Saks once. I had a love affair with hats, then, and besides, all of us, on our first visit back to Toronto, we simply had to have a hat box with us, just to be impressive. We were being paid well in New York, more than what we were used to – BSC gave us thirty-five dollars a week – but we spent every nickel.’
‘You said, “first visit back to Toronto”,’ I said. ‘Did you get home a lot?’
‘I only went home the once. But my mother came down. All our mothers came down to see how we were doing, and we had a lot of visitors. We took them to every part of New York we could think of, and got to know New York very well, better than even Toronto. It was such an exciting city. There was the Empire State Building, the Rockettes, Radio City Music Hall, and the jazz places, down in the Village – I absolutely fell in love with jazz, that year. And the Latin Quarter…that was a real nightclub. It was owned by Barbara Walters’s father, and we’d take people there, for the floor show, and dancing. And then of course New York had all the operas, and the plays – I remember I saw Lady in the Dark, a play that starred Tallulah Bankhead, and there was this hilarious fellow with a small part, no one knew him but he stole the show. In later years, I found out that was Danny Kaye.
‘We saw a few celebrities like that, in the embryonic stages of their careers. Sinatra, like I said…and on 52nd Street there was a restaurant, the Toots Shor restaurant, where we used to go, and at the end of the first showing of a play, the actors and actresses would come in and sit there in fear, waiting for the first edition to tell them whether they were in, or whether they were out. We saw some faces there that you’d recognise.
‘And Walter Winchell…you know who he was? A few of us were in the drugstore – and drugstores in those days had bars where you sat to have soft drinks, and milkshakes – and Walter Winchell was sitting beside us. He had such a loud voice, really piercing, and he said, “You girls are from Canada, because of the way you say your ‘oots’, and ‘aboots’”, and then he said, right out loud, “I know where you’re working.” Well, there was dead silence, and then we just kept on talking, and he didn’t go any further, but it was a close call. Because you had to be very careful…there were places you didn’t go, things you didn’t do. They were very strict at BSC. They kept tabs on us, even when we moved into our separate apartments. We were checked all the time, we were followed. We weren’t aware of it, but we realised it did happen, because if you did the wrong thing – talked to the wrong sort of people, or went to the wrong sort of place – they knew about it. Once our whole shift, the gang of us, went out for dinner, for somebody’s birthday, and we sat at one long table and just laughed and laughed and had a really good time, and the next day we were called on the carpet and told in no uncertain terms to never do a thing like that again, to never make ourselves conspicuous. And a few girls – not anyone from my shift, but a few girls were even sent home. They just went overnight, and we never knew why.
‘So we tried to be careful. We never told anyone what we were doing at work; we never discussed it, not even amongst ourselves. I didn’t know what the other girls I roomed with did, and they didn’t know what I did.’
‘How did you manage that, living so closely?’
‘I don’t really know, we just did it. It’s hard to explain, to someone young like you, who’s never been through a war, but we just did it, we kept quiet. There were posters around in those days that said, “Loose Lips Sink Ships”, and for me, I was always aware that my brothers, the two of them, might be on one of those ships. So I watched what I said.’ She shrugged. ‘When people asked what I did, I always said, “Oh, I work with passports.” I never saw a passport. But people don’t really want to know what you do.’
She paused a moment, thinking; then, ‘It wasn’t until years later, when the books about Sir William started to be published – The Quiet Canadian was the first, I guess, by Montgomery Hyde, and then the Intrepid one – and then I felt that I could talk about what was mentioned in the books. Not what I did specifically, but what was in the books. And even then…my
parents died, and never knew. They never knew exactly what I did.’
I sensed a bit of sadness there, as though she would have liked them to have known, to have been able to take pride in what she’d done to help the war effort, the way they had, no doubt, been proud of both their sons in uniform.
‘What about your brothers?’ I asked. ‘Did you tell them?’
‘I didn’t have the chance. My elder brother, Mike, was killed in Sicily the summer I was in New York, in 1943. And Ronnie died at Juno Beach, on D-Day. I went home after Ronnie was killed. It was hard on my parents, especially Mother. She needed me home.’ She paused, and then, as though the talk had veered too far in a direction where she didn’t want to go, she deliberately lightened the mood as she turned a fresh page in the photograph album. ‘Oh, here, I was meaning to show you this one,’ she said. ‘This is my glamour shot. It was taken by a photographer on Madison Avenue.’
This picture was larger than the others, professionally posed, like all those old studio shots of the Hollywood starlets. Her hair was still swept up into the pompadour, her make-up picture-perfect, and her dress cut low, its sweetheart neckline squared with metal clips.
‘My black dress,’ she said. ‘Black was very popular in those days. On the shoulders – you can’t really see very clearly – but it was jet beads, all jet beads, made into an epaulette, like on a soldier’s uniform, and the beads all hung down in a fringe.’ She traced them with a finger and a reminiscent smile. ‘I loved that dress.’
She tipped the page to look at it more closely and two papers slid out from between the album’s pages, slipped across the table, and would probably have landed on the floor if I hadn’t reached out to collect them. The top one, the smallest one, turned out to be a hotel menu.
Grandma glanced up. ‘I’d forgotten I had that. Just look at those prices,’ she told me. ‘Full-course dinners, thirty-five cents! At a buck and a half, you were really living it up.’
‘And what’s this?’ I asked, flipping the other sheet of paper over. It was larger. Official. Some kind of a letter.
‘Oh, that’s just a certificate, acknowledging my service in New York. That’s signed by Sir William himself,’ she said, as I began to read it. ‘He was a very gracious man. They held a reunion, you know, at the Military Institute in Toronto, back in 1984, for all of us who worked for BSC. Of course Sir William, by that time, wasn’t well. He couldn’t come, but he sent a video tape, and they showed it on a big screen, and he welcomed us.’
I frowned, not really listening, as I read the certificate.
She went on, ‘That was one of the nicest things we could have gone to, at the Military Institute. There were a hundred and one in attendance, including Sir William’s secretary, who came from England, and his grandson, who came from Bermuda, and all of us women – we came from all over. They can’t have had an easy time finding us, because there were no real records kept, you understand. Everything had been so secret. And then a lot of the girls who were single back then, well, they’d married, and had different names, so it must have been difficult, tracking us down. They did it all by word of mouth, really, and letters. They got a long list together… everybody passed names, of the women they knew of—’
‘Grandma,’ I cut her off, ‘speaking of names…’
But she’d already started her next thought. ‘And it was the funniest thing – this was the fortieth anniversary, you know, and there’s a sort of a nucleus of at least six of us who’ve kept in contact over the years, and when you’re with people all the time, they don’t change. It’s like watching your own children grow up, you don’t notice the change day to day. So the night of the dinner, the six of us got all dressed up, and went down, and walked into the room and thought, “My gosh, they all look old!” Grey hair, as far as you could see!’
She was chuckling about this when I finally got her attention.
‘The name on this certificate…’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, it says “Amelia Clarke”.’
‘Yes, well, that was my maiden name, Clarke. You knew that.’
‘But your first name is Georgie.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s just a nickname. My big brother, Mike, was so keen to have another boy in the family he simply refused to believe that I wasn’t one. He wouldn’t call me by my name – instead he called me George, and that just stuck. Even your grandfather…well, he was good friends with Mike, so he knew me as Georgie, from when we were kids. I was never Amelia, to him.’
All these years I’d assumed that her first name was short for Georgina, or maybe Georgette. My frown deepened as I tried to understand fully. ‘Your name is Amelia?’
Something in my tone must have struck her, then, because she looked over. Met my eyes, levelly. ‘Yes.’
But I still had to say it, out loud. ‘I’ve read all the letters, the ones Andrew Deacon wrote home to his sister in England, while he was in Lisbon. He mentions his wife all the time, every letter. And her name,’ I said, ‘was Amelia.’
Lots of people, I knew, could have had the same name. Certainly, in a city the size of New York, there would have been any number of Amelias back in 1943. But my journalist’s radar was active enough to have picked up on something…
A hunch, nothing more; but I’d built my career on such hunches.
She didn’t say anything, not right away.
She looked out the window, to where she had planted the rosebushes, against the back fence, and her eyes began losing their sharpness of focus, the way that James Cavender’s had when he’d talked of his childhood. Watching her, I wasn’t altogether sure that she still saw the window, or the yard. I wasn’t sure that she still knew that I was in the room.
Until she spoke.
‘You have to understand,’ she said, ‘that it was wartime. I was working for the government. I went where I was told to go, and did what I was told to do. And Deacon…’ For the first time since she’d started talking, I could see that she was having difficulty. She paused, and her breath came out soft, on a long, weary sigh. ‘It’s been sixty-two years, Katie. And you want to know what happened, and I’m not sure how well I can tell the story.’ Still looking out the window at the rosebushes, she confessed, ‘I think sometimes, we had it so ingrained in us, to never talk to anyone, that now it can be so hard to remember…’
She did remember, though, how it began.
It was the first day of November, 1943. Her alarm clock broke that morning, and that set the tone for everything that happened after that.
By the time she got to work, she’d lost a button from her coat and banged her knee and scraped her ankle on the kerb, which tore her stocking. And to make things worse, her supervisor met her at the door to the TK room, with a letter in his hand.
‘They need this upstairs, on the thirty-sixth floor,’ he said. ‘Run it up, would you? You know where things are, up there.’
She knew enough to know that her appearance, harried and dishevelled, would be bound to raise some eyebrows on the upper floor, among the British secretaries. But her supervisor was a man; he didn’t think of things like that.
Resigned, she took the letter from his outstretched hand and turned away again.
There were two other women on the elevator with her, but they both got off together at the fourth floor. After that, she had the whole car to herself…or so she thought. Relaxing a little, she took out her lipstick and tried to at least make sure that looked all right. Even with the mirror of her compact angled back and past her shoulder she had no clue there was anyone behind her till the man’s voice said, ‘Good morning, Miss Clarke.’
She wheeled, surprised.
She’d only met the chief of BSC one time. She wouldn’t have been sure, this time, that it was William Stephenson, except she’d been impressed at that first meeting by his eyes. They were distinctive – long and grey and heavy-lidded, filled with a dispassionate intelligence. The kind of eyes that saw more than they ever gave awa
y.
She wondered what they were seeing now, looking at her.
She wasn’t at her best this morning – not the way she would have liked to look, to meet her boss. But when she’d managed to recover from the unexpected jolt, she was able to greet him, in her turn, with a reasonable degree of composure.
He nodded at the envelope she held. ‘Is that for me?’
It wasn’t, but she let him have it all the same. He read the name, and gave it back. The fact that he’d known her name wasn’t really a surprise. He had a reputation for knowing everything there was to know about the people he employed. It wasn’t for nothing that some of the women had taken to calling him ‘God’.
He asked her, ‘So, how are you liking it, working downstairs?’
She wasn’t sure how she should answer. After all, she didn’t want to imply that she hadn’t enjoyed working up on his floor, but…she opted for honesty. ‘I like it very much, thank you.’
‘Good.’ He watched her quietly, then said, ‘Your young man’s in the RAF.’
‘Yes, sir, he is.’
He nodded. ‘I was in the RFC, last war. The Royal Flying Corps.’
Georgie had the impression that wasn’t the end of his statement. She waited. She still felt amazed he’d said anything to her beyond that ‘Good morning’. He didn’t have a reputation for conducting small talk.