Chapter 17
2016
Lucy sat with her legs tucked underneath her on Will’s sofa and translated the final page in her bundle of shorthand papers. She glanced over at Will who looked intent. It was a strange task but it was something she was enjoying far more than her day job. Perhaps because it was a novelty.
She looked down at the final page. It started the same as all the others: with a date. This one was marked September 8th 1943 and started:
Italy Surrenders.
Five days ago, Italy surrendered to the Allies and …
Lucy read through the report she’d painstakingly translated from shorthand into longhand one more time. She’d got the hang of shorthand now. It had taken all evening and now as she reached her final set of pages, she was barely looking at the shorthand guide for confirmation. Understanding the sweeps and strokes of certain letters not because someone was telling her in a class, but because she was genuinely interested in the sheets of wafer-thin paper in front of her, crumbling at the edges, and the secret words they contained. It was enthralling, reading through them, eachone a document of key events from the Second World War outside the Channel Islands.
Beside her, Will was still going, his back hunched, head bent over the coffee table. His notepad filled with writing that Lucy could decipher less than the shorthand she’d now mastered.
‘Your handwriting’s awful,’ she said.
‘Hmm?’ He looked up and blinked at her. He’d been far away, lost inside the loops and swirls of the pages in front of him. ‘Yeah, I know.’ He grinned. ‘My mum says I should have been a doctor with handwriting like this.’ And with that he was done with the conversation, dipping his head and clicking his pen as he worked his way through the alphabet, trying to piece together the last of his document.
Lucy waited and went through her set of pages. Facts and figures littered the pages of Allied wins and Axis losses, mentions of overseas resistance and British naval conquests. Her stack held mostly events from 1943.May 12th 1943: Axis Surrender in North Africa. July 1943: Allies Invade Sicily …and so on.
She looked over at Will’s pages. The date on the top sheet he’d transcribed was 1942. She didn’t lift it up, didn’t want to break his intense concentration again, so she waited until he’d finished.
November 10th 1942: In violation of 1940 Armistice, Germany Invades Vichy France.
‘That’s interesting,’ she whispered, looking up to find Will had finished and put down his pen to shake his hand out. They’d been translating for hours.
‘Someone was writing out the news reports,’ Will said.
Lucy nodded. ‘Yeah, I got that,’ she said with a laugh.
‘Sorry.’ Will rubbed his hand across his tired eyes and yawned. ‘That was a really obvious thing to say. I suppose the question is, why?’
Lucy sat and stared at the sheets. ‘Swap?’
‘Mmm, go on,’ Will said, passing her his sheets and reaching over to take hers.
Lucy skimmed the headlines.
November 13th 1942: British Eighth Army recaptures Tobruk.
November 18th 1942: Heavy British RAF raid on Berlin with few losses.
‘What’s the first date?’ Lucy asked.
Will flicked. ‘November 10th of ’42. What’s the last date?’
It was Lucy’s turn to rifle through their notes. ‘September 8th 1943. That’s ten months in total from start to finish in this bundle.’
They were silent as they read each other’s notes. ‘Why would someone do this for nearly a year? And then stash carbon copies away?’
Lucy recalled her history lessons from school on the island. ‘Radio sets were taken away at some point in the war. Can’t remember when though.’
Will opened his laptop and searched on the Internet, calling up an image of theEvening Pressfrom June 1942. He angled the laptop to show her the article about the removal of wireless sets.
‘They confiscated all the radios twice. The first time was only for a matter of weeks quite early on in the Occupation. Some kind of reprisal for there being a spy harboured on the island, I think. And when he’d been found and everyone suitably punished, the reprisal ended.’
‘Then they were given back?’ Will asked doubtfully. ‘Really?’
