Part I: Speed of sound note, for example, peace-keepers’ weapon (7-3)

1 Across

On seeing the machine-gun, John Fellowes did not flinch. Armed policemen were an increasingly common sight across the capital, although loaded automatic weapons make most normal people a little nervous. John Fellowes, however, was not a normal person. His lack of concern was not because he was a grizzled soldier, nor an assassin, nor even a terrorist, who might regard bullet wounds as a mere occupational hazard. Far from it. He was a professional cryptic crossword setter. At the sight of the firearm, his instinct was to compose a clue.

As he wandered across the concourse towards the turnstile, he immediately began mulling over the possibilities of the words machine-gun. At once, he spotted the presence of an ‘-ing’, which promised a pleasing anagram. The word menacing would leaving uh behind. Or inhumane with cg left over. Alternatively, machine-gun spells I can hug men. How about: I can hug men armed with this (7-3)’ Fellowes knew he could do better.

No matter what the occasion, John Fellowes couldn’t help but make clues of words that he heard or images that he saw. A few days earlier, his accountant had tried to explain the financial status of the Bookman Bureau, Fellowes’ crossword-setting agency. As soon as he had heard the word bankrupt, he jumbled the letters and produced: ‘Clever prank, but empty (8)’. The term receivership had provoked: ‘Liquidation? Taking in a boat, we hear (12)’. Fellowes had even made a clue of his accountant’s Sri Lankan name: ‘Lo, he groans at me like crazy accountant (6,12)’. Ramesh Goonatillike was unimpressed. But then, he was a Sudoku man.

As he stood on the escalator taking him down into London’s catacombs, Fellowes reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a beautiful black fountain pen; a Pelikan Ibis that had belonged to his grandfather. Fellowes liked to use it as often as possible. Not only did the pen feel good in his hand, he liked to think he was holding a small piece of family history. He knew the ink would soak into the newspaper as he wrote: ‘Speed of sound noted, for example, peace-keepers’ weapon (7-3)’. But he didn’t care. He read the clue back to himself, smiled and nearly tripped off the escalator.

1 Down

There are almost no circumstances in which someone falling over is not funny. And yet Marcus Johnson, who had publicly fallen over on at least nine occasions since the outbreak of the war in 1939, was confident that this occasion was the least amusing. He was, after all, about to tell Admiral Bradby, Naval Chief of Staff for the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, that key code-words Overlord and Neptune had just appeared in the cryptic crossword of a national newspaper.

Bradby, unable to glean the gravity of the situation from this desperate tumble, howled with delight. He, like Marcus Johnson, had worked the last seventy hours without a moment of sleep, and was already on the point of hysteria. All it needed to tip him into convulsions of laughter was the sight of Johnson’s suddenly panicked face, already crimson from the sprint down fourteen flights of stairs.

The office rang with the slap of Johnson’s palms hitting the hard stone floor of his bunker, thinly covered in an ancient carpet that the Admiral’s secretary had begged from her Auntie Avril. No time for niceties, like floorboards, or carpet underlays. Men like Bradby had to be protected from Goering’s bombers as quickly as possible. Those in the attic offices, like Johnson, were clearly deemed less precious.

As he lay prone on the floor, Marcus Johnson was not a little put out by the Admiral’s peals of delight. He had hoped for a modicum of sympathy or at least an embarrassed cough, not fits of giggles. He conceded that they were all under a great deal of stress. D-Day was imminent and the workload immense. Everything had to be right for success in Normandy. But laughing at the misfortune of an underling was hardly fair. Even worse, they were losing precious seconds. He scrabbled to pick up the first edition newspaper he had dropped on the floor. It had been folded over to the crossword.

“Sir!” panted Johnson. “It’s the Germans! They know we’re coming!”

At once, Bradby’s face fell.

2 Across

Fellowes stepped out from the station concourse onto Halstead High Street on his way to the Bureau. He was trying to regain his composure after yet another traumatic tube journey. The armed police officer had not been the cause of the stress. That had been the train itself – arriving at the platform full; faces and torsos ghoulishly pressed up against the windows. When the doors had opened, there had been a moment of awkward silence when the people on the platform realised that the passengers had no intention of budging. Someone had cried: “Move up! Some of us have got to get to work!”. “You think I’m standing with my face in someone’s armpit for my health?” came the reply. A half-hearted plea from the driver had brought some shuffling inside the carriage allowing Fellowes to squeeze himself on. He had stood like a statue in storage for the nine stops until he arrived at Halstead, feeling very flustered.

To regain some composure on arrival, he had spent a few moments sitting on the platform bench while the crowds charged off to the escalator and their respective places of work. He also checked his coat to make sure the Ibis had not been pilfered in transit. He then considered the word pilfer, took out his pen and jotted down: ‘Lift short stack – force hesitation (6)’.

Walking north up the High Street, he unwound a little further – until he caught sight of CoffeeNation. This café was the latest clone in a chain that had only arrived in London a few years earlier. The citizens and workers of Halstead had been deemed insufficiently affluent to have their own outpost of CoffeeNation until two months ago, when a gleaming new coffee-shop arrived, taking the place of a failed discount bookseller. The people of Halstead had clearly not been great readers, even at bargain prices. But wealth had crept along the tube line, bringing with it a whole new vocabulary of prosperity. What had once been “cheap office-space” was now “premium business real estate”. Likewise, “pokey, draughty bed-sits” were now “stripped-floor compact studio apartments”; hardly an honest use of language in Fellowes’ opinion. He admitted that he played around with language for a living. But these estate agents weren’t playing, they slowly stabbing it to death.

The gentrification of Halstead had brought some benefits: a non-discount bookstore which sold more than recipe books, erotic art and poorly-printed pound classics. The price for all this was the promise of higher rents. CoffeeNation was a daily reminder that his business, the Bookman Bureau, was doomed.

Fellowes was about to walk right past the coffee shop when he remembered telling Turner he would go in and sample their range of over-priced drinks. In recent weeks, his colleague, employee and friend had taken to striding smugly into the bureau carrying an enormous cardboard vat which appeared to hold nearly two pints. Turner would take all morning to drink it, by which time it must have turned cold, since the cooling time of coffee could not all be that different from water.

Pondering whether milk or water would cool faster, Fellowes thought of a phrase he had heard at school. Specific Heat Capacity would make a good word for a large Sunday cryptic. He stood there, realising that ‘cheap tactic pacifies’ gave him a leftover ‘y’, when a man bustled past and disappeared into the coffee shop revealing a disheartening queue at the serving area. Fellowes emerged from his thoughts, catching a glimpse of CoffeeNation’s clientele. It confirmed that he would certainly look out of place in there. The local uniform was rigid informality. Although Fellowes spotted articles of clothing he recognised, like cloth caps, jeans and pin-striped suit jackets, they were worn in such startling combinations that they underlined quite how far out of touch with his contemporaries he really was. Though only in his late thirties, Fellowes had the style and demeanour of a man in his early fifties. He eschewed fashion for loose, fading corduroy trousers, stretched V-neck jumpers and threadbare jackets; colours ranged from dark brown to light brown, offset by shirts of a colour that could only be described as ‘frequently washed’. Consequently, he looked out of place in Halstead High Street, home of a young, vibrant business community, offering strange web-based ethereal services he didn’t understand.

Fellowes was steeling himself to enter when he glanced across the street to the tiny coffee kiosk to see if his temporary defection would be noticed by the elderly Russian who manned it; at least, he had assumed the man to be Russian. The man could equally have been Ukranian or Hungarian; Moldovan or Czech. Fellowes acknowledged that millions had died in the previous century because Ukrainians, Hungarians, Moldovans and Czechs took exception to being lumped into one group, especially when done at gunpoint by Germans or Russians. He did not know the ins and outs of the politics and history; the vendor’s permanently severe expression did not encourage questions. The man’s overall appearance gave the impression of being, first and foremost, a survivor. Yet Fellowes doubted that even this man could keep afloat with Halstead’s latest influx of workers and residents who demanded strange hot drinks made with bizarre incarnations of milk. The Eastern European offered milk in only two forms – with and without.

Fellowes caught the man’s eye and could not look away.

2 Down

Marcus Johnson was happy to acknowledge that he was no expert at war. In fact, he didn’t know many people who were, despite being one of millions drafted into His Majesty’s armed forces. Like most of them, he was making it up as he went along. Constructing artificial floating harbours, as he had been conscripted to do, had never been done before. These ‘Mulberries’, as they were curiously called, were to be towed across the English Channel hours after a successful amphibious assault on Normandy – which had also never been done before.

The last serious attempt at such a massive military manoeuvre had been the attack on Gallipoli in 1915. When the Allied fleets started pounding an obscure, rugged peninsula in the Dardanelles for several weeks, the Turks naturally began to suspect something was afoot. When the lengthy fifteen thousand gun salute ended, the invasion began. ANZACS were mown down in their thousands. The man whose idea it was to attack Gallipoli was one Winston Churchill. Nearly thirty years on, he was back; and everyone knew how desperate he was to avoid repeating his bloody error.

Marcus Johnson had surmised that the moral of the Gallipoli story was the importance of secrecy and surprise. How one kept something like Operations Overlord and Neptune under wraps was not obvious. Again, no one had done anything like this before. But the world and even Marcus Johnson’s wife knew the invasion of France was coming very soon, although no one could be sure exactly where, or precisely when.

He had been sitting at his over-sized desk, in his under-sized attic office when he encountered the clues that made him charge down several flights of stairs to Admiral Bradby. He had only just returned from a trip to The Strand to buy a first edition. In broad daylight, the journey from the Admiralty would take less than five minutes. A blacked-out Trafalgar Square, however, had turned this short stroll into a minor odyssey. It had taken him nearly twenty minutes by the light of the moon to grope his way to the newsstand and back.

Safely at his desk again, he turned at once to the crossword, a pursuit that reminded Johnson of happier times. The word puzzle’s conventions and codes were comforting as he spent most of his working hours hopelessly out of his depth. For a few moments, he was able to forget about his Mulberry and just fill in the blanks. He had made light work of the top half of the grid. But when he read 17 Down, he started to worry. ‘North-Eastern quiet melody – one a sailor might even pray to!’. Northern-Eastern was NE; quiet was P; a melody, a TUNE. A sailor might indeed pray to Neptune. Perhaps it suggested that the operation was not as secret as they had hoped. He began to feel nauseous.

When he saw 19 Across, his nausea turned to panic and he ran out of his office to find the Admiral.

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© James Cary 2008