Signal Moon by Kate Quinn
March 1943
Withernsea, England
When there was a war on, and when your part in it was so deadly serious it sometimes kept you from sleeping at night, there was really nothing to do but make jokes about it all. It was either make jokes or start weeping at your desk, so Lily made jokes.
“The wallpaper in this place is going to do me in,” she quipped an hour into her shift that Monday. “I can see my obituary now: ‘The Honorable Lily Baines, petty officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, twenty-two, dead of mid-Victorian chintz.’”
The others laughed, a welcome sound of cheer in the chilly parlor. The little seaside hotel, in which Lily and her fellow Wrens had spent nearly every day of the last year, had been made over into a listening station at the start of the war. The space was crammed with desks, naval message pads, and National HRO receivers with their cranky dials and chunky headphones. The only part of the room that still looked like a parlor was the wallpaper, pink blotches that might have been cabbage roses or maybe diseased kidneys, writhing across the walls and down the corridor outside, and in all the rooms upstairs where Lily and her fellow Wrens billeted in a welter of hideous china and starched doilies. “This whole place is a mid-Victorian howler,” Lily had decreed their first day, already slotted into her place as court jester, the one who kept everyone laughing.
And if she often felt like weeping from the stress and the fear and the endless grinding dread of it all, what did that matter? There was a war on; you pinned a smile in place and kept going.
“No daydreaming, Baines,” tutted Lily’s superior officer, a middle-aged woman named Fiddian who had a face like a fist. “Put those headphones back on.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Lily blew on her mittened fingers. No one bothered to take off the coats bundled over their uniforms; it was far too cold. One of the advantages of joining the Wrens was supposed to be that sleek, dashing, brass-buttoned uniform (designed by Molyneux!), but no one ever saw the uniform here; Lily and her fellow Y Station listeners spent every shift bundled to the ears.
“When I joined up, I thought I’d be shipping off somewhere hot and exotic.” Lily’s desk-mate sighed during their next loo break down the hall. “Help fight the Hun, yes, but somewhere warm. No one ever said anything about getting shipped off to Yorkshire.”
“Yorkshire’s a bally marvel,” Lily said loyally, washing her hands. She’d grown up in York not sixty miles away, her father’s town house a stone’s throw from York Minster even if Father spent most of his time in London. And all right, Withernsea wasn’t exactly going to bump the pyramids of Giza off the list of the world’s wonders anytime soon, but—
The other Wren snorted as she toweled off her fingers. “Don’t try to tell me this place is what you had in mind either, when you heard Join the Wrens and see the world.”
“No use getting a fit of the dismals about it,” Lily said bracingly, swinging out of the loo and back toward her desk. “Keep your chin up!” She could practically hear her father in her own words—he was off at the Foreign Office, but the frown of the fifth Viscount Baines had no trouble at all curdling the marrow at two hundred miles plus. And nothing made him frown like bloody defeatism. Doing your bit with a stiff upper lip and no grousing—that was the Baines family tradition, even before the war. Father always liked to say that if his children had the Honorable stuck in front of their names, then by God they were expected to earn it, and Lily agreed with that; really, she did.
So she pushed down her own fit of the dismals and slid the big Bakelite headphones back over her ears. Cold enclosed rooms, headphones, and secrecy—that was a Y Station listener’s world in a nutshell. Reaching toward her wireless receiver, she began turning knobs and went hunting.
It hadn’t seemed like hunting when she was doing her training course in Wimbledon over a year ago as a newly assigned special duties linguist. It had been serious business, of course, but there had been a certain fierce pleasure in learning to do it, and do it well: tuning her ears to the next room where a chap with a microphone droned a never-ending series of call signs, code groups, and German words, and Lily and a cluster of German-speaking Wrens scribbled on their pads, straining for every syllable. Can you repeat that? one of the girls had been foolish enough to ask, and the snap from the next room came right quick: Are you going to ask the Nazis to just repeat that, when you’re taking down their transmissions in the North Sea? It was all about learning to listen with every spark of energy you had, straining to hear as the teachers started building in interference: fading signals, interrupted signals, aural chaff (Write down exactly what you hear, and no guessing, girls!). Lily would exchange delighted grins with the others when they got a message clear; they’d compete to see who was best at parsing the transmissions.
But here in Withernsea, everything was deadly serious: they were intercepting live radio communications sent to enemy vessels, the same vessels that hunted their countrymen. Lily saw her quarry the moment she first sat down at this desk: wolf packs of U-boats knifing through the waters of the Atlantic, German surface vessels poking their ugly snouts through the Baltic, looking for soft Allied flesh. She didn’t have a brother out there, thank God—hers were both too young—but she had a whole flock of cousins, a pack of school friends, an entire flotilla of old beaux she’d fox-trotted and waltzed through her deb season with. Willy, Terry, John, Phil, Arthur, Kit, Andrew, Eddie, Dickie, Alan, Fred . . . Just running the list in her head, the ones she could lose, sent an icy hand of pure terror clawing down her throat.