A Longer Journey

Mind Games

The war in Europe broke out when I was seventeen—“this new war”, as Aunt Emily rather eerily called it—and Mr Thomas left to join. He never told me in what capacity, and at the time I envisaged him in the armed forces, driving a tank or manning a gun on a warship. However, with his knowledge of European languages he would probably have been somewhere in communications or espionage.

Of course I wanted to go too. A week before my eighteenth birthday I had the courtesy to inform Aunt Emily that I would shortly be joining up.

I expected resistance, at least an attempt to delay me, and I was ready with a number of phrases, garnered mainly from printed posters, about duty and pride and how short and decisive the conflict would be. My aunt waited with half-closed eyes for me to finish.

“You are very young, Methusaleh,” she said.

I felt fully as irritated as I had intended to feel. Wasn't the relative of a young man leaving to join the war suppoed to show some sort of emotion—fear? Awe? Grief? I told her how eagerly I looked forward to going, and added something about fearing neither wounds nor death.

She nodded in a non-committal manner.

“Methusaleh,” she said rather distantly. “War.... War is a very dreadful thing.”

Dreadful, indeed, I mocked her bitterly inside my head. So very disturbing to one's repose of mind. Most uncalled-for. Distressing. Do go and lie down. I would never have dreamed of sneering aloud, but I stared at her rather fiercely until she shrugged her hand at me.

“I have no objection to give,” she said.

But the armed forces objected. I failed my medical.

How could I fail a medical? I could have wrestled that medical officer to the floor with one hand tied behind my back. My eyesight and hearing were perfect and my stamina could have broken records.

So my physical form was nonstandard, meaning, I suppose, that the size of my eyes, shape of my head and set of my shoulders would not fit standard issue kit and would not appear sufficiently uniform in a row of combatants. Maybe my heartbeat struck a different rhythm, or my internal organs didn't conform to normal sizes and positions. They had their standards, and I was no match.

I avoided speaking about it to my aunt. I telephoned Mr Smith to beg for any possible means of contacting my old tutor. Mr Smith said his brother was not due any leave for at least two months, and he could not guarantee to forward letters—but his tone seemed sympathetic, and so when he asked if I were joining up soon, I poured out the whole story.

Mr Smith telephoned me back two days later. He could not help me as regarded joining the armed forces, he said, but if I wished to help the war effort, there were openings for young men of talent, and should I wish, I could attend an interview in Milton Keynes the following week, and take up quiet lodgings in the same town thereafter.

I could legally tell you, now, everything I worked on during the war, but I knew very little of it myself; I was far too junior. I was given problems to solve, sometimes with other people and sometimes alone. Sometimes I felt like a schoolboy doing his algebra and geometry again. Under close supervision I was asked to decipher coded messages, but the moment I made any progress these were taken away and I was asked for a fuller report than I could give.

Some of the work seemed more like games—not sports but mind games. I and some other young people were given different kinds of messages and asked to think of ways to embed them in physical objects. Colour combination was one way, and I heard later that for five months of the war, a cafe owner put green or red fillings in a customer's daily baguette according to whether a U-boat was in port, and switched to yellow when her chain of information broke down... and so at least one of my ideas may in a small way have helped in the war. I also suggested stitching patterns in clothing, but this had already been used and detected; and apparently random patterns of dirt on vehicles or buildings, but I never heard of this one being used.

There was another sort of game in which you had to send a representative to an opposing team and then receive messages back from him; at some point their messages would be intercepted and subverted, so you had to invent ways to identify exactly when this happened, and how to interpret and even harness the misinformation.

I liked this. Assuming your rep stayed loyal at heart, you could prime him to use a variety of apparently inadvertent misstrokes or even misspellings within each message, and the errors had to be varied enough not to be traceable by the uninitiated. You could even prepare different error patterns for different levels of intention. For instance, the default error pattern meant all was well and the information was genuine; a second pattern meant that that messenger had been caught and had ostensibly agreed to work for the other side, sending false information; a straight message or unnegotiated error pattern showed that the message was not even written by the same rep. In addition to all this, error patterns could be given expiry dates.

However, the hardest problem to solve was when a rep had genuinely gone over to the opposing team. None of us would do this willingly, because we guessed enough know that this meant acting out the part of a traitor to our country in the war, so our bosses had to assign the parts.

The best way to circumvent treachery was to occasionally ask reps for info that we already knew, and look for contradicions. Patterns of discrepancy between different reps needed careful interpretation: sometimes it might simply be poor quality information, but you had to treat it as double-crossing until you were sure. Often the traitor gave a high proportion of truth just to keep his credibility, but if the true info consistently came too late to act upon or was markedly trivial, that gave him away.

And so I passed the greater part of the war in playing games instead of facing real dangers. Some of my colleagues were chosen for missions, it seemed, but presumably my unusual features made me too obvious a figure to send anywhere that required anonymity or false identity. I was uncomfortable with what I felt to be a position of unreasonable personal safety, but I didn't resent it as I had resented my failed medical.

Perhaps, after all, I was not quite as safe as I had thought. At an informal evening party I was chatting to the wife of one of my superiors, when for no reason that I could perceive, important-looking men seemed suddenly to gather round me, offering me more drinks and hanging on to my every word as though they mistook me for someone important... but whom they could have mistaken me for, I was at a loss to imagine. Then, on my way home, something tripped me up at a dark street corner, a blanket was thrown round me, and I found myself tied up and bundled into the back of a car.

I struggled for a bit, but with three large men sitting on me I made no progress. The car was moving, so I decided to tune in to its movements, quietly pick at my bonds with hands and feet at the same time, and wait for an opportunity to escape.

The driver and the men around me spoke little, but when they did so, they all spoke more loudly than necessary, in French, with varying degrees of school accent. They were pretending to be foreign, then? And the journey, which took well over half an hour, had too many left-hand turns in it, plus a particular sequence of bad road bumps that I was fairly sure I felt at least three times. This strongly suggested I was being circled around and taken not very far at all.

Hooded in the blanket and firmly tied, I was bundled into a building and up what felt like a lot of stairs, into a large, bare room with no windows except for a dim skylight. There had been an electric light fitted in the ceiling, but it was missing, as was anything else electrical, metal or sharp. Drinking water was delivered twice a day in a wooden bowl, and food likewise, but no cutlery, through a sort of lockable wooden drawer in the wall. Plumbing was a firmly fixed stone closet and bed was a flattish pad and a blanket.

During the three days before anyone came to question me, I searched my mind for further clues to the mystery. I was sure I had broken no rules: I had never talked about my work or taken written material back to my lodgings. I was in a large building, close to where I lived and worked; and, discounting closer smells like the plumbing and the old blanket, the air coming up through the building smelt very similar to my workplace. Was I at work, then? Was this another mind game—a sort of puzzle I had to solve; and, if so, what was I supposed to accomplish? In the story my father had read to me a thousand times, the story that came back and sounded through my head when I was alone, how did Jacob know it was an angel who met him, how did he find out that wrestling was the right thing to do, and how did the two of them agree on which rules to wrestle by?

I decided to wrestle with my room. The door was too obvious and the delivery-drawer hatch too small; the skylight was barred heavily, but the metal bars were secured to a wooden frame, which I could just about reach if I rolled up my bedding, stood on it and jumped.

In the Stalag Lufts, airmen were tunnelling under prison huts and fences for months and years in forlorn hopes of escape. Hanging one-handed on the bars, I scratched with my fingernails the wood of the skylight frame, wetted it with my saliva, kept it as damp as it would absorb. Urine would have been quicker at rotting wood, I knew, but the stronger smell would give me away. I was also working at two floorboards underneath my bed, but I considered the skylight my best hope.

My first interrogation began with a bespectacled man of about fifty staring at me silently across a table, flanked by two non-uniformed soldiers. I gazed back for a while, looking for anything I ought to be able to read.

“Sir. Can you tell me why I am here?” I asked at length.

“That is for you to talk about,” he replied.

“Am I supposed to escape?”

He frowned, an expression I read as genuine puzzlement, quickly concealed.

“Do you think you are playing a game?” he asked after a pause, using a threatening tone.

“It crossed my mind,” I said.

“No,” he said, keeping his tone sharp. “This is not a game. Tell me all you know.”

“I can tell you my name and address,” I offered, suddenly wondering if I were being tested on The Rules. If I passed, could I be in line for a spying assignment? I knew that, inadvertently, my eyes had dilated with the sudden hope, but I didn't think he could read my face as well as I could read his.

“You can tell me about these games of yours.”

“I beg your pardon, sir; I can't.”

On my next questioning, Mr Em, my immediate superior, was present. He told me, and signed to me at the same time, that I could speak freely. The man in thick glasses asked me to recount the night of the cocktail party, and seemed interested in the fact that I could not well remember my conversation with the lady in the green dress.

“Can you remember, for instance, mentioning the name of a newspaper?” he asked. “It must have featured in your conversation. You mentioned it several times. You subsequently tasted an American drink and pretended to recite a list of the United States, with several omissions.”

So... I realised, now, and with a keen sense of disappointment, that this was not a test of my abilities, but a misunderstanding. A dangerous one for me? I wasn't sure. Openness, or near-openness, had to be the best course.

“I think I've guessed what's happening,” I said in a tight tone that would indicate emotion but would conceal which emotions I might be feeling. “A newspaper must be a code-word for a person or a place, and I've said a sequence of words by accident that seems to match a piece of secret information. And you think that firstly I'm a traitor, and secondly that I would give out a secret into the middle of a crowd of probably the same men who wrote the code words.”

They exchanged glances, and I hoped that my surmises were close enough, and yet inaccurate enough, to prove consistent with my expected level of strategic skills whilst demonstrating my ignorance of the present case. Innocent as I was of any wrongdoing, to appear naïve would still deepen their suspicions.

“Do you recall,” Mr Em asked me, “a young man you had never seen before, listening to your conversation?”

“There were a lot of men. I thought they did seem to be paying attention—”

“No, before that.”

“I don't think anyone was with us. The nearest person was the waiter, mixing the cocktails—Oh, the waiter. But I had no reason to be watchful. As far as I knew, I wasn't saying anything.”

“There is always reason to be watchful,” the man in glasses retorted. Then, with deliberate suddenness: “Which newspaper do you read?”

“The Times,” I answered.

“Not the Telegraph?” he asked, observing me narrowly.

“Sometimes. Not so often.”

“Can you account for a collection of word puzzles found at your lodgings?”

“I've never taken my work home!”

“Crossword puzzles?”

“I do them. I don't keep them. Two years ago I thought of using a crossword grid pattern as a transposition grille. But I never did any of that work outside the office.”

“Very well, Mr Johnson,” said the older man, adjusting his spectacles. “There was no evidence found at your apartment. We believe you to be ignorant, the subject of an innocent coincidence of conversation. However, I am required to keep you here for the time being, until certain events are past. You will be given more comfortable furniture, and we request you as a loyal subject of His Majesty to submit to this and not to waste our resources trying to escape.”

I confessed, then, to my prior attempts towards loosening floorboards and rotting the skylight frame, and both men laughed loudly. And I submitted to my captivity quietly—very quietly indeed. I slept. For some days I didn't bother waking up for food or water. A doctor woke me thoroughly once to find out what disease I was dying of, but I wasn't dying, and when he left I lay down again, slowed my breathing and waited for the end of the secret war operation I had seemingly predicted by accident.