Bird's Eye View. Elinor Florence

to glance at the results before distributing them to the various sections.

      Late one afternoon there was a knock on the darkroom door and Gideon Fowler’s head appeared around the corner. “You were right about that farm, Jolliffe. We diverted an aircraft yesterday to take another dekko, and we found a convoy of trucks heading toward the barn. Apparently the Jerries are using it as a fuel depot. One of them must have cultivated that field and botched the job.” I noticed how much younger he looked when he smiled, despite the furrow between his eyebrows.

      Summoned to Shoreham’s office the next afternoon, I walked down the hall slowly. Even though I had been right once, I wouldn’t be surprised if he warned me to remember my rank.

      When I knocked and entered the room, Shoreham gestured to a chair. “Sit down, Jolliffe. Did Fowler inform you about your crooked rows?”

      “Yes, sir.” I sat down stiffly on the edge of the wooden chair, knees and heels together in military precision.

      He consulted a buff-coloured file folder on his desk. “What you did constituted fairly elementary interpretation — are you aware of that?”

      “No, sir.”

      He squinted at me, as if trying to read my mind. “Interpretation requires a distinct set of skills. The primary difficulty for most people is learning how to see the world by looking straight down on it. In order to reorient themselves to do this, our interpreters have to be reasonably intelligent, and also quite imaginative.”

      He studied my file again. “I think we can assume from your examination results that you’re intelligent — do you also have imagination?”

      “I don’t know, sir.”

      “We don’t want too much imagination, you understand. We don’t want people thinking they see tanks under every hedgerow.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “And we need people who have an excellent memory, and an eye for detail. Half the battle is remembering things from a previous set of photographs — things that didn’t make sense at the time, but take on new meaning when they are seen again.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “We want people who can work under pressure, a great deal more than you are experiencing now. Many of our photographs are interpreted while important officers are waiting for the results. But we can’t rush through our work, or lose our concentration. Do you think you are capable of that?”

      “Well, sir, I was accustomed to deadlines when I was working for a newspaper.” I stopped and bit my lip. “Of course, that wasn’t nearly as critical.”

      Shoreham smiled. “No, although your newspaper work was probably more exciting. The thing is, photo interpretation is boring, sometimes quite deadly. You have to spend long hours hunched over a desk — it can be very tiring. The blink of an eye, the lapse of attention for a single second, seeing without understanding — any of these could result in a vital element escaping detection.”

      “Yes, sir.”