Читать книгу Bird's Eye View - Elinor Florence - Страница 16

My pupils felt permanently dilated, like a cat’s eyes in the night. I now spent most of my daylight hours in the windowless darkroom, and emerged only after sunset into full blackout.

I remembered the old saying about a soldier’s life: 10 percent hell, the rest sit around and wait. When the weather was good and the recce pilots were flying, the lab people were working under intense pressure. Either we were making prints, extra prints, and then more prints because another section wanted copies, or the pilots were weathered out and we were killing time by cleaning equipment and checking chemicals.

Today I was in the print library, filing a batch of photographs with purple fingers. All the girls had them, because the developing fluid stained our skin a gentian colour. Since our work was secret, if anyone asked us about our hands, we were supposed to say we had been dyeing the curtains in our quarters.

My thoughts were as dismal as the black, roiling clouds covering the sky. The Allied situation was grim. Our troops in North Africa were being driven back, fighting fiercely for each yard of sand. The Germans had penetrated deep into Russia. The Japanese had conquered the entire British Empire in the east, and the Americans were battling for supremacy in the Pacific.

I had quietly celebrated my twenty-first birthday the previous day, in sharp contrast to the joyful occasions at home with cake and presents. I had allowed myself the luxury of shedding a few tears into my pillow before falling asleep.

If I had stayed in Touchwood, I would now be old enough to join the women’s air force. The Canadian women were doing a stellar job, but none of them had been allowed to leave the country yet because of fears for their safety.

Nobody mentioned it — the subject was taboo — but I couldn’t help secretly wondering what would happen if the unthinkable happened and Germany won this war. Would the conquerors allow the Canadians to return home? Or would my uniform mean spending years in a prison camp, or even worse? It was too terrifying to contemplate.

I heaved another deep sigh and picked up the next stack of photographs. They weren’t top priority — a pilot had used the last of his film on his way home across northern France. The photos had been examined and were going into a cardboard filing box, where they would stay until after the war.

The European fields were most unlike the neat squares back home. They were a hodgepodge of shades and textures: a crazy quilt, with rivers, hedges, and roads featherstitching them together like dark and light embroidery floss.

These photos were obliques, taken from a side angle as the plane banked at low altitude. I wondered how our own farm would look from the air. I could see rivers and roads, trees and roofs. The bare fields showed the parallel marks of cultivation where the blades had cut into the earth.

As I placed each photograph in the box, I studied it closely. I had a niggling feeling that something was out of place — what was it? Spreading the photos out on a wooden table, I took up a magnifying glass.

An hour later, I was standing in Mrs. Hamilton’s tiny office. “Excuse me, Section Officer, but I couldn’t help noticing something odd when I was filing these photographs.”

She listened to my explanation, then pushed back her chair. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, quite frankly, but any discrepancies should be noted.”

We marched down the long hallway to Shoreham’s office. Mrs. Hamilton gave a gentle knock, and we were told to enter. Shoreham was seated at his desk in front of the oversized French windows. The dark clouds had parted, and a shaft of pale afternoon sunlight fell over his shoulder.

Two other people were present. One of them was the head of the camouflage section, a tall, dark-haired officer in his mid-thirties named Gideon Fowler. I knew him by sight, and only because he was so handsome it was impossible not to notice him. He reminded me of the actor Robert Taylor, right down to the pencil-thin moustache, the cleft in his chin, and the sleekness of his glossy black hair. Several girls in the darkroom pretended to swoon behind his back whenever he walked past.

The other was Janet Withers-Brown, one of the officers who worked in camouflage, a fair-haired woman with large front teeth. I had taken an instant dislike to her when she came into the darkroom asking for a set of prints. She had spoken to me quite rudely, as if I were one of her servants.

“Leading Aircraftwoman Jolliffe found something unusual, sir. I thought you should be informed.”

“Quite right, Section Officer. You may return to your duties.” She saluted and left the room.

“Let’s have a look.” Shoreham took the sheaf of photographs from me and placed them on his desk.

I could feel my face beginning to burn. Bad enough explaining to Shoreham, but making a fool of myself in front of two other officers as well? If only Janet what’s-her-name would wipe that smirk off her face.

I pointed at the photograph on the top of the pile. “It’s this farm here, sir,” I said in a low voice. “His rows aren’t straight.”

As soon as I spoke the words, I knew I sounded ridiculous. Janet made a snorting sound, then pretended to cough.

Shoreham leaned back in his chair and smiled at me with his usual avuncular expression. “All right, let’s hear what you have to say. Start at the beginning.”

Standing rigidly at attention, I took a deep breath. “Well, sir, you can see that the farms in this area are prosperous.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of the size of the barns, and the number of outbuildings. And the trees and bushes are larger, which means this area probably has more moisture. The soil is different, too.”

“In what way?” Shoreham didn’t even look down at the photographs; he was still watching me.

“I compared these photographs with some others that were taken farther south a few minutes earlier. It was close to noon. I could tell by the short shadows. Since they were on the same strip of film, the exposure would be similar. But the colour of the soil on these farms to the south is quite a bit lighter. Probably it contains more sand. In this area to the north, the soil is black. It’s likely very good topsoil.”

The eyes of both men were fixed on me now. Janet was examining the sole of her shoe. “I might be completely wrong, sir. I’m sure you have people who can give you this kind of information. I just couldn’t help noticing …”

“Go on.” Shoreham’s tone was encouraging.

I pointed with my purple fingertip. “Well, on every farm, you can see the furrows quite clearly in the cultivated fields. Here, on this farm, the one with the really large barn, the rows aren’t straight.”

“And what do you think that indicates?”

“All the farms except this one have perfectly straight furrows. That takes a bit of skill. I don’t know if it’s the same in France, but where I come from, it’s a matter of pride to make your rows as straight as possible. On this farm, sir, the one with the biggest barn, the furrows are really cock-eyed. They are wobbling all over the place, as if a complete amateur ploughed this field.”

There. I had said it. Now he could tell me to go and jump in the river, and I would gladly go.

Shoreham took up a magnifying glass in his right hand and braced the photograph on his desk with the piece of flesh-coloured celluloid that had replaced his left hand. I tried not to stare at it while he studied the photo.

I spoke again, to cover my awkwardness. “You won’t be able to see it in a couple of weeks, because the grain will have grown up by then. It’s just after seeding, when the earth is still bare, that you can see the rows. That’s when the farmers back home like to drive around the countryside and look at each other’s fields, to see what kind of a job the others have done.” I knew I was talking too much and stopped abruptly.

“As you said, perhaps an inexperienced farmer sowed this field.” Shoreham angled the photograph toward the shaft of sunlight slanting across his desk.

“That would be the logical explanation,” I hastened to agree. “Perhaps the farmer is away, or unable to work. But in a farming community, usually if the man of the house isn’t fit, the neighbours would help out by doing the seeding.”

Shoreham lowered the magnifying glass. “Anything else?”

“No, sir. Well, there is one thing, but there could be a dozen reasons for that. You see this road to the farm is a bit wider than the other roads in the area — as if it’s been built up.”

He shuffled the photographs into a neat pile and rose from his chair. “Righto. We’ll send these back to the experts again and see what they can make of them. Thank you for your observations, Jolliffe. We’ll keep you posted.”

We exchanged salutes and I left the room without glancing at the others. I hurried down the hall toward the darkroom, thankful to escape. I imagined the others were examining the photographs and laughing. Probably Janet was making some snide remark right now.

For the next few days, I paid close attention to developing my prints and didn’t even allow myself to glance at the results before distributing them to the various sections.

Late one afternoon there was a knock on the darkroom door and Gideon Fowler’s head appeared around the corner. “You were right about that farm, Jolliffe. We diverted an aircraft yesterday to take another dekko, and we found a convoy of trucks heading toward the barn. Apparently the Jerries are using it as a fuel depot. One of them must have cultivated that field and botched the job.” I noticed how much younger he looked when he smiled, despite the furrow between his eyebrows.

Summoned to Shoreham’s office the next afternoon, I walked down the hall slowly. Even though I had been right once, I wouldn’t be surprised if he warned me to remember my rank.

When I knocked and entered the room, Shoreham gestured to a chair. “Sit down, Jolliffe. Did Fowler inform you about your crooked rows?”

“Yes, sir.” I sat down stiffly on the edge of the wooden chair, knees and heels together in military precision.

He consulted a buff-coloured file folder on his desk. “What you did constituted fairly elementary interpretation — are you aware of that?”

“No, sir.”

He squinted at me, as if trying to read my mind. “Interpretation requires a distinct set of skills. The primary difficulty for most people is learning how to see the world by looking straight down on it. In order to reorient themselves to do this, our interpreters have to be reasonably intelligent, and also quite imaginative.”

He studied my file again. “I think we can assume from your examination results that you’re intelligent — do you also have imagination?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“We don’t want too much imagination, you understand. We don’t want people thinking they see tanks under every hedgerow.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And we need people who have an excellent memory, and an eye for detail. Half the battle is remembering things from a previous set of photographs — things that didn’t make sense at the time, but take on new meaning when they are seen again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We want people who can work under pressure, a great deal more than you are experiencing now. Many of our photographs are interpreted while important officers are waiting for the results. But we can’t rush through our work, or lose our concentration. Do you think you are capable of that?”

“Well, sir, I was accustomed to deadlines when I was working for a newspaper.” I stopped and bit my lip. “Of course, that wasn’t nearly as critical.”

Shoreham smiled. “No, although your newspaper work was probably more exciting. The thing is, photo interpretation is boring, sometimes quite deadly. You have to spend long hours hunched over a desk — it can be very tiring. The blink of an eye, the lapse of attention for a single second, seeing without understanding — any of these could result in a vital element escaping detection.”

“Yes, sir.”