Earth Day: Evening walk on the Serpentine Dike

Dusk on the dike

Open your nostrils

Receive the fragrance of burst willow buds
Breathe spring-steeped air.

Tread lightly:

Hear your own soft footfalls
Feel them reverberate from soles to crown.

Overhear the cadenced conversations of geese

Flying low over the marshlands
Whoosh of wings audible against air.

Catch the splash of squalling ducks

As they swim, see the perfect vee behind each
Traced on the glass-still water.

Scent coming rain

Feel the first hesitant droplets touch your hair.

Sense elusive memories

Connecting this walk with years of other walks.

Feel beneath the feet

The uneven shape, the wild mud and grass-clad body
Of Earth our Mother – familiar, beloved.

The Enemy is Listening by Aileen Clayton

Aileen Clayton (nee Morris) joined the WAAF in 1939. The first woman to be commissioned as an intelligence officer in the British Armed Forces, she served first at Kingsdown in Kent and later at various posts around the Mediterranean. For her devotion to the Y service, to which she contributed so much, she earned honour and recognition.

After years of planning, staffing and supervisory duties in theMediterranean, she was spared at last for a visit home. Once there, she was taken on a tour of the Y stations before being decorated at Buckingham Palace by the king.

In her memoir, Clayton recalls dancing with an officer whose unit she knew was bound for Anzio. At age 25, she bore the "intolerable responsibility" of knowing something ominous that she could neither speak of nor change.

In the chill of foreboding for the young man, (and indeed he perished in the Anzio landings), she was struck by a feeling of premature age, of having "mislaid" her youth, a dark memory that remained with her for life. A similar premonition preceded the loss of her young brother, who failed to return from operations with No. 221 Squadron in March 1945.

For all those who worked in the Y service, the relentless immediacy of hearing pilots crash and die through radio messages took an enormous toll. So, of course, did the pressure to work with great speed and accuracy, solve an endless stream of threats to the system, and of course, maintain absolute secrecy about their duties.

Clayton was over sixty when she published this remarkable eye-witness memoir in 1980, when at last, the veil of secrecy was drawn back. In the Foreword, Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Rosier, GCB, CBE, DSO praises the wartime work of the Y service, along with "the extraordinary resilience and adaptability of women who showed that they were supreme in what they were doing."

Brave, calm and adaptable in the face of unimaginable pressure and adversity, Clayton credits the work done by her Y service colleagues for aiding the advancement of women. In a casual tone, she comments that fortunately "both [US General and later President Dwight D.] Eisenhower and [Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur W.] Tedder were convinced that women could safely and efficiently undertake work which had previously been looked on as strictly a male province."

Earth Abides

A pink supermoon rises over the Serptentine River, with Mount Baker visible on the horizon.

Walking on the dike last night, I remembered a poem that came to me more than ten years ago as I walked home in the quiet dusk from Bear Creek Park.

Today I felt moved to revise it, but only slightly.

Earth Abides

As the sun sets here to bring heat and light to the far side of our planet

the moon rises pink and enormous.

What does it portend?

Growing brighter as I walk,

it clears the gap between trees as dusk deepens.

In the midst of mystery, we have lived careless,  

forgetful beneath the glare of streetlights,

of the nightly blessing of the moon’s faithful lantern

illuminating our earthly path.

Careless, we’ve forgotten the many gifts of our mother,

on whose bosom we yet walk and live.

Yet still, in mysterious munificence,

our earth abides.

The Secret Listeners by Sinclair McKay

Like McKay's book about the wartime codebreakers of Bletchley Park, this is engaging, well-researched, and filled with fascinating details about what life was like for the men and women of the Y (wireless) service in the same historic era. Enjoying and enduring their mundane task of listening to Morse signals and taking them down, they laboured in stations across the world, some "unspeakably dreary;" others comfortable, romantic and exciting.

Breaking up the focus of routine, they experienced bizarre moments, as when late in the war, two Germans were overhead to abuse Hitler and agree on the spot that both would desert. At a base in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), "daubs of colour and brilliance from nocturnal insects" and "lizards on the football pitches" afforded some consolation for "the wearying slog of the shift system."

As they gave their youthful energy to the task at hand, some experienced moments of true horror. The author quotes Aileen Clayton's expression of the terrible burden of secret knowledge she had to bear. When she danced with a young man she felt a chill at learning his unit; she knew it was bound for Anzio. The fact that she could not speak of this, or warn him in any way, made her feel '"very cold and alone...almost old.'" (She was 25.) And indeed her dance partner was killed within a few days of landing. After the war, Clayton penned a memoir called The Enemy is Listening, which describes her wartime work in the Y service. 

Superseded by digital technology, Morse is a dying art. "No one will ever again acquire that fast-thinking fast-fingered skill that the Y service veterans mastered." Working with incredible speed and accuracy as well as patience and endurance, those young people had "a grandstand view of history." In 2009, they were finally given commemorative medals. Most by then were dead.

"Possibly due to their numbers" Sinclair McKay comments, "the various branches of the Y service seem to have been better at organizing reunions over the years, giving a sense of community and remembrance to many who had worked at the more secretive Bletchley Park."