“Daddy’s mother, Granny Adair, lives on the tiniest farm on the edge of Kingston, and Daddy ran away to sea when he was fifteen. He was in the merchant navy. So my mother was alone with me a lot. And when I was in primary school there were labor strikes and workers rioting all over the Caribbean, and Daddy’s ship stopped more often in Southampton than it did in Kingston, so Mummy came back to London with me in 1937. She was glad she did it, too, because the very next year there was a big strikers’ riot in Kingston and people got killed.”

And two years after that, the London bus she was riding on fell into a crater made by a German bomb and she got killed.

Suddenly I felt like I was going to choke on the unfairness of this stupid war. How did I get here, walking at a snail’s pace down this windy cobbled street full of cold granite houses, carrying ration books and a forged passport for an ancient German opera singer, helping her find something to read while we waited for a winter evening bright enough to drop some bombs by moonlight?

“My father wasn’t let in the Royal Navy because he wasn’t born in Europe,” I added. “He’d been a British seaman since he was fifteen, but that wasn’t good enough for the Royal Navy. Even though he ended up dying like a navy man.”

My voice was getting shrill.

It still made me furious, and I dreaded that the same thing would happen to me when—if—I tried to enlist. I thought about the little boy on the bus, who’d taken one look at me and decided I must be the enemy, just because he’d never seen anyone who looked like me before.

But there was the Enigma machine. If I never got another chance to serve, at least I had the Enigma machine now.

I hated the bitterness I’d heard in my own voice. I took a deep breath.

“Sorry,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. It didn’t seem to make him angry—he volunteered and they said no. They told him he was doing vital work that needed doing, and that made sense to him. And he was. But it made me angry. It still makes me angry.”

Jane didn’t answer for a minute or so—just concentrated steadily on moving forward, tap-step-tap-step, with her feet and her sticks.

Then when we got to a corner where we had to cross the road, she stopped to rest a moment and straightened up.

“You have all your life ahead of you. You will have to start fighting,” Jane said, as if it were a straightforward and practical plan for me: destroy the British Empire’s color bar and save the world from fascism at the same time.