Every Secret Thing (8 page)

‘Anyway, he said no the first time. And then, of course, I had to talk him round, because I really wanted to go. If I’d been a man, I’d have done what my brothers did; I’d have gone over to fight, but I couldn’t. I had to sit at home and watch all of them, all the young men of my neighbourhood, all the boys I’d played with, gone to school with, watch them all sign up and go off, and I felt like I’d go crazy if I didn’t
do
something, if I didn’t find a way to help the war effort. That’s why I took the job at John Inglis, to begin with, because they made the Bren guns and I thought maybe one of those guns might end up helping one of my brothers, you know? Or your grandfather. Not that he was fighting on the ground like they were – he’d gone over earlier, right at the start of the war, to join the RAF. I’ll never forget when he sent me that photograph of him in his uniform, he looked so handsome…’

‘Is that the picture in your room?’

‘That’s right. Oh, my friends were jealous when they saw that. He looked just like a movie star. And of course, we weren’t officially engaged then, but there was an understanding, and he’d write me all the time; I’d get a letter nearly every day. He told me what was happening in England…all the bombings, and the deprivations, and I wanted so desperately to do something that would help.

‘This was what I tried to tell my dad, to make him understand, and in the end he said all right, that it was useless arguing with a redhead anyway, and that I might as well go if I’d made up my mind to. So then I told the other three girls, and a few days later the four of us left together and we went on the train to New York.

‘That was my first time away from home – people didn’t travel then, the way that they do now – and I cried all the way down on the train. I guess I looked funny to other people, but Dad had taken me to the station, and when I turned back he was tipping his hat to me, saying goodbye, and that got me going. I cried all the way to New York.’ She still looked half embarrassed to admit it. ‘I tell you, Katie, I was so homesick the first three weeks I thought I’d die. It’s a terrible thing, homesickness.’

I’d never really felt it much, myself. Maybe if I’d had the sort of home she’d had – a father, mother, brothers – then the pull to home, for me, would have been stronger.

Behind us, in the living room, unseen, the mantel clock chimed off the half-hour with a melody so delicate it sounded like a music box.

She said, ‘They put us in the Beekman Tower Hotel, on First Avenue. We were allowed to stay there for a month, I think, and then we were supposed to go out and find apartments for ourselves. Well, I’d never been away from home, like I said. I didn’t have the first idea how to go about finding an apartment. But one of the girls I’d gone down with was older, quite sophisticated, and she found us a place. We lived in a brownstone, on East 54
^th
. It was just what you see on TV – you could hear the garbage cans rattling and all, and there was a nightclub on the corner, it was really something else. But it was exciting, the time of my life.’

I couldn’t help but call her on the contradiction. ‘I thought you just said you were homesick.’

‘Oh, only for three weeks. And then I fell in love with the city. There’s no other city in the world like it. I’ll never forget the first day we were there. It was spring, just a beautiful day, and the four of us thought we’d walk down for a first look at where we’d be working, and on the way down there we went past a bar. I can’t remember who suggested it, but somehow we got the idea to go in and each have a drink, to celebrate our arrival in New York. I didn’t know what to order – I’d never had alcohol – but they had a drink called a Manhattan. Well,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d die, it was so awful.’ Grandma had the greatest laugh; I’d always loved her laugh. ‘That was my first drink and I’ve never forgotten it.’ As if to erase the memory, she took another long sip of her Bloody Caesar. ‘Anyway, after that we walked on to Fifth Avenue, 50
^th
and Fifth, to the International Building at Rockefeller Center. It had only just been finished a few years before, you know, and it was stunning, with that big statue of Prometheus outside. So we stopped, and we had a good look at the building, to see where we’d be going, and then the next day we started work.

‘We worked for BSC – British Security Coordination. They had part of the mezzanine floor. There were offices upstairs, as well, but the mezzanine floor was where they had the passport office, and that was the cover. Anyone coming in would have just seen the passport office; they’d never have known what was really going on, behind the scenes. Most of the real work went on in a huge room we called the TK room, a big open room filled with teletype machines, and blacked-out windows so no one could see that we worked round the clock.

‘You had to be a British subject to work there – that’s why they recruited so many Canadians, you know, because we all had British passports in those days. There was no such thing, then, as a Canadian passport. Most people working at BSC were Canadian – some Aussies, some English; the executive level were nearly all Brits. Aristocratic Brits…
very
aristocratic.

‘We reported to a British Major who had us sign the Official Secrets Act. I don’t know that it hit any of the other girls the way it hit me, but this Major said, “I don’t care if it’s twenty years down the road, and you’re working in an office, and someone asks you, ‘Who was the person at the next desk to you, when you were with BSC?’ – you know, casual –
Don’t tell them!
” He had me afraid to go out on the street.’

‘So it was pretty secret stuff, what you were doing?’

‘Well, we were working for Sir William Stephenson.’

She floored me with that single, simple statement. Sir William Stephenson – the Canadian millionaire hand-picked by Churchill himself to control British secret intelligence out of New York in the Second World War, and whom Churchill had code-named ‘Intrepid’. The Man Called Intrepid. There’d been a bestselling biography written of Stephenson, under that title, some years ago, and a television miniseries too. I’d read the book, and seen the movie – real exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff, as I recalled, if not always entirely accurate. His business had been training spies and saboteurs, and intercepting enemy messages and breaking codes. My grandmother, on her teletype machine, might have been passing on the secret location of a German submarine to the navy so the sub could be destroyed, or she might have been relaying the instructions being given to a Japanese commander.

It made me view her wartime job in quite a different light.

I think she understood. She said, ‘We didn’t know, you realise that, what we were going down to. We had no idea we were going to work for such a wonderful man, for Sir William. He was like nobody I’ve ever known. Not then. Not since.’ The living-room mantel clock chimed its light melody into the pause as my grandmother searched for the proper description. ‘He was a small man, physically small. You could pass him in the street, you wouldn’t know him. He had a way of making himself almost invisible, really. A curious thing. He would stand very still, and he wouldn’t make eye contact, and honestly, you wouldn’t see him; wouldn’t know that he was there. I know – I shared an elevator with him, once, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when he spoke. I’d thought I was alone, you see.

‘I only met him – face to face, I mean – one other time, and that was when I went to a cocktail party at his penthouse. I was working on the thirty-sixth floor, then, the floor that Sir William was on, and he gave this party and I went to it, but other than that our paths didn’t really cross. He was really on another level, someone to admire. Nobody up on the thirty-sixth floor ever used his name, that I recall. He was always called DSC – Director of Security Coordination. It was a mark of respect, really – we all respected him. At times he seemed almost superhuman. I don’t know how many times he crossed the Atlantic, during the war, but I read somewhere, I think, that he made more than forty crossings, and he was always back and forth to Washington. And the things that he did…

‘I didn’t know everything at the time, mind you, but I knew more than most of the girls. They were downstairs, most of them, in the TK room, with the teletype machines, and everything down there was in code. No one knew what messages were coming in, what details they were passing on, but up on the thirty-sixth floor it was different. All the things I saw upstairs were in English. So I knew, then. I knew what we were doing.

‘It’s a powerful thing, to know that you’re helping save lives. I really felt, at last, that I was helping to fight the war. Not in the same way my brothers were, of course, but in a way that was important.’

More important than most people knew, I thought. I wondered how many women like my grandmother there were across the country, still – living anonymous, ordinary lives; rubbing shoulders with people who had no idea of what they had done in the war.

‘It was interesting work, on the thirty-sixth floor,’ she went on. ‘I was the assistant to the secretary for one of Sir William’s top men. But my friends were all down in the TK room, and it was hard to get together, so I asked for a transfer and I went down there. In some ways, it would have been absolutely fantastic to have stayed upstairs, but they were mostly
private-school
girls, upstairs; they didn’t laugh as much as we did. And, actually, the way things turned out, we couldn’t have had more fun.’

She smiled again, recalling, ‘We worked shifts. There were three shifts a day, and our group stayed together, we rotated round all together, fifteen girls to a shift. We used to go out at four o’clock in the morning, over to Hamburger Heaven – they served cakes like you wouldn’t believe. Oh, the butterscotch! You would have died, Katie. It was the best. And we’d go to the movies… I remember after one midnight-to-eight a.m. shift, a few of us went to the Paramount. I don’t remember all of what we watched – there was one movie with Robert Cummings in, I
do
recall that. That was sad. But anyway, we got there at eight o’clock in the morning, and we left at eleven-thirty at night and went back to work – we’d spent nearly sixteen hours at the Paramount! And in the summer, we used to go right from our eight o’clock shift to Jones Beach. It got so hot in the city, in the summertime, really hot, so we’d go to the beach, and one time I went I got sunburnt, I’ll never forget…I fell asleep, I guess. That night I stayed off work because I was so badly burnt, and a nurse came to the apartment. I thought I’d get all kinds of sympathy, but no, I got reprimanded, for not taking care, because there was no one else to relieve us. So I didn’t do that again. But oh, how I did love to go to the beach. I remember I had a two-piece bathing suit…’

‘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.’