The Baghdad Railway Club(39)

Another sentry stood at the door marked ‘Telegraph Office’, and this showed its importance. He inspected my identity card, my chit authorising me to send from this office, and opened the door for me. Most messages from the Hotel were, I believed, sent ‘clear’ – that is, not in any code save the Morse of all telegraphy. Here, I believed, the majority of the messages would be coded. It was a long, thin room, facing on to the river, with all shutters and windows open on that side. The river was directly below, but the sounds from it seemed to come from far off. The desks were placed crosswise at regular intervals, and each was loaded with a mix-up of equipment. But when it came down to it, every bit of kit could only either send or receive, and it was all connected by wires to a clock in a glass case on the end wall. Next to the clock, and in joint command of the room with the clock, sat an officer smoking a pipe, and with absolutely nothing on his desk save a leather tobacco pouch. A large safe stood on the other side of the desk from the clock.

The officer rose as I entered the room. He was a tall, dark-eyed and hairy man, although whether his head was hairy I couldn’t tell, since he wore his cap. His legs, certainly, were extremely hairy. (He wore shorts – and very well-pressed ones at that.) He wore a wristwatch, the better to show off the thinness and hairiness of his wrists, and I was sure this watch would be exactly keyed to the clock on the wall, for he was obviously the most orderly of men. His name, he told me, after smoking at me for a while, was Captain Bob Ferry. He had very clean fingernails, and he wore a gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand.

‘I want to send to London,’ I said.

He smoked on.

‘War Office?’ he said, with a kind of gasp. He was afflicted with a stutter, only he did not stutter, but waited for the word.

‘Well, take . . . a pad,’ he said. ‘The man Collins will see you right.’

He had twirled his pointing finger in the air before settling on Collins, who sat two desks away from where we stood. Ferry placed a small notepad in my hand. The headings were ‘Message’, ‘To’, ‘From’, and ‘Sender Can Be Found At’. There was a carbon beneath, so that a duplicate would be made of whatever was written.

Under ‘To’, I put ‘The Head Clerk, Department F, War Office, London’. (That was Manners.) Under ‘From’ I wrote out – somewhat reluctantly – ‘Capt. Stringer, Railway Office, Corps HQ’. Under ‘Sender Can Be Found At’, I gave both Rose Court and my office number at the Hotel. That was the easy part, but what was my message? Of the choices available it must be either ‘GRUFF’ – ‘Request identity of local agent’, or ‘RELAX’ – ‘Request telephonic communication’. I wrote ‘GRUFF’ and then, because it looked ridiculous on its own, I underlined it.

The clerk, Collins, was typing at a perforating keyboard, making words into Morse as he read from another of the pads. I saw on it a list of five-digit numbers: a military code. It might have been anything from ‘Turkish assault expected’ to ‘Send more foot powder’. I shouldn’t have been looking at it either way.

Collins turned around, and said quite sharply, ‘Be with you in three minutes, sir.’ I stepped back. Captain Ferry was speaking to another of the clerks: ‘It is not to be sent from this office. We are not in the business of transmitting tittle- . . . tattle. It is a private matter.’

‘We refuse to send, then?’ said the clerk.

‘We do.’

Ferry did not sound angry so much as rather steely. A little under two minutes later, the man Collins held out his hand to receive my pad, and I watched him as he read the word ‘GRUFF’. He keyed it in at lightning speed and with not a flicker of expression on his face. He then made a note in a ledger referring somehow to the message sent, and took the Morse tape he had created to the man at the next desk, who fed it directly into an automatic transmitter. Collins returned the top sheet of the pad to me, but kept the duplicate copy.

As the man at the automatic transmitter sat back and closed his eyes, I imagined the word ‘Gruff’ flying down the cable to Basrah, running under the waters of the Gulf to Bombay; then reversing, so to speak, out from Bombay to the south of the Red Sea, proceeding north to Alexandria, crossing the Med to Malta, then on to Lisbon, before embarking on the home straight: running north under the Atlantic to Cornwall, from where, as I believed, the cable followed the tracks of the Great Western Railway up to London, and the War Office. I figured the word coming out of the machine in Department F, being torn off and handed on to a runner – a boy scout, or perhaps the boy scout who had guided the Chief and me – and given at last into the hands of the supercilious Manners.