STEM Tuesday

Welcome to STEM Tuesday: Author Interview, a repeating feature for the last Tuesday of every month. Go Science-Tech-Engineering-Math!

Today we’re interviewing Candace Fleming, author of The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win World War II.  It’s a fascinating look at the British effort to defeat a Nazi invasion by breaking their military codes. The staff were mostly female, and most of those women were teenage girls. The book is garnering a lot of attention and starred reviews.

“In this absorbing book, Fleming approaches the subject by telling the individual stories of 10 young women… who left their homes to work secretly on projects related to the German military’s Enigma cipher machine. Even readers with little interest in codes and ciphers will find the women’s experiences intriguing.” — Booklist Review (starred)

CTB: Hi Candace. Welcome to STEM Tuesday. My first question: Did you always want to be a writer?

Candace: Yes, I’ve always been a writer. But I also wanted to be an archeologist, flight attendant and other things. In college I got a degree in American History.

I worked at the Chicago Historical Society after graduation, but when my second child was born with a health concern I retired. “What do I do now?” I asked myself. I thought – writing! And I started by writing my life for magazines: Parents Magazine, American Baby, Pediatrics for Parents, etc.  “Seven Nap time Strategies,” is one example of an article I sold. My sons, Scott and Michael are in their early 30’s now. So… I’ve been writing for a long time.

CTB: That’s quite a career change.

Candace:  It was. My then-husband and I were young and had never consider the possibility of having a sick child. I was working to buy paint so I could spruce up the bathroom or buy new curtains for the bedroom. Yes, I ended up with some home décor. But, more importantly, I completed an apprenticeship (although I didn’t notice it at the time). I learned to work with an editor and meet a deadline. I learned how to interview people.

I switched to writing for children when I started reading picture books to my own sons. I couldn’t get enough of them. We’d come home from the library with a BIG stack and start reading. At bedtime, it’d be my boys crying, “Please, mommy, turn off the light!” and me begging to read, “just one more.”

Of course, what I was really doing was discovering the bones and music picture books. Eventually, I thought I would write one of my own. I sent it in through the slush pile and an editor at Simon and Schuster found and bought it.”

CTB: What gave you the idea for The Enigma Girls?

Candace: I’m endlessly curious. I had just seen the Bletchley series on television. So during a trip with friends to London, I went out to Bletchley Park. I’d assumed the place was small and secret, you know, an exclusive gathering of the most brilliant, scientific minds. Once I got there, I discovered that there were over 9,000 workers. It’s mind boggling given how small the area is. More mind boggling? 80% of these workers were female and most of these were young teenagers.

The teens weren’t code breakers in the expected way. They weren’t sitting around a table trying to find cribs. One girl might be indexing information. Another might be operating a typex machine, or a bombe or Colossus. They were cogs on the assembly line of a cypher breaking factory, which is essentially what Bletchley Park was.

Each girl had her own job. She didn’t know what other women were doing. That included the women they sat near, or had lunch with, or roomed with. Most didn’t even know they were breaking enigma ciphers until the 1980’s. Before that they weren’t allowed to discuss their work with anyone, not even with their co-workers.

CTB: But they were girls. That’s not something we would see in military programs today.

Candace.  Exactly! I thought, “Wow! Teenage girls!” And how astonishing that everything happening was top secret and that the girls never told anyone they’d worked there. Even when they got married, they never told their husbands. They’d signed the Official Secrets Act, you see, and they took that very seriously.

CTB: The girls were told to describe their jobs as “clerical work.”

Candace: That’s right. They basically lied about what they were doing, both during the war and for decades after. They could even tell people they’d worked at Bletchley Park, codenamed Station X. It was all very hush-hush. Some of the girls would receive letters when they were recruited that read:

CTB: The work had an enormous impact on the war effort.

Candace: Yes. It is believed that the girls’ consistent hard work shortened the war by about 2 years. Think how many lives that saved! Think of the generations here today because of them. No, they were the Alan Turing’s or other big names in cryptography. They were ordinary girls. Some hated the work. It was slogging work, and often repetitious. Even so, they knew they were doing something important for the war effort, even if they didn’t exactly what that was.

And they were still kids, you know? Teenagers. They lacked the sophistication of modern teens. Many still lived at home before being summoned to BP. Others were still in school. Many had never traveled from their small towns. And while they did their jobs admirably, they were still so young. They played pranks and joked. They were high-spirited and goofy sometimes.

CTB: So what was the Enigma machine?

Candace: The machine was used by the German military to send encrypted messages to the troops. It looks like a typewriter with keys for letters, but those keys were actually connected to a lamp board in the rear. And there were gears that were adjusted or replaced every day. The German sender and receivers were sent instructions for how to set them up each day. That allowed them to send and decipher codes. It was the British intention to decipher those codes as well.

CTB: But the codes changed every day.

Candace: That is what made things so difficult. The enigma machine created a sophisticated alphabet cipher. The soldier would type a letter on the machine, but gears would translate it to a different letter. The person on the other end would have a similar machine and if set correctly, would allow them decipher the code one letter at a time. The people at Bletchley Park had to determine the new ciphers each day. There were more than 159 quintillion possible combinations. I wanted readers to understand how hard the codes were to break

CTB: With word counts and project requirements, there is never enough space for everything. Where there stories of girls that didn’t make it into the book?

Candace: Because I wanted to pick young women from all classes of society, as well as for each job, I ended up setting aside some terrific human stories. Take, Muriel Dindol, for example. She quit school at the age of fourteen because, she claimed, it bored her. Her parents lived in the town of Bletchley, and Muriel found a job at Station X as a messenger. This meant she spent her shifts delivering top secret messages to various departments. Of course, she didn’t know they were top secret. She also claimed she wasn’t curious about what was inside the manilla envelopes she carried. She’s wanted to work at BP because the older girls going in and out of the place seemed glamorous to her. “I wasn’t interested in war work,” she said, “but I wanted money for makeup.” Muriel left behind her recipe for lipstick. I wouldn’t recommend you try it.

CTB: With all of your experience, what advice would you give to a young reader who wants to be a writer?

Candace: Oh. That’s a good question. Here’s some thoughts:

• Writing is meant to be fun.
• You don’t have to finish – not everything is as project
• You don’t have to write from start to finish

I still write by hand with a blue Bic pen. It’s a reminder that the work is not precious. I can ball it up or scratch it out. Also, I like the smell of the pen. I’ve been using it all of my life, and its smell tells my brain “we are writing.” Sometimes the bottom of my arm is covered in blue ink from rubbing against the paper as I write.

So many kids think that writing has to be neat. It doesn’t have to be anything. Also, I hear readers tell me they have writer’s block. They have this idea that one should write from story’s beginning straight through to its end. Truthfully? I don’t know anyone who writes that way. Most skip around and write what you they know. They go back and fill in the blanks.

That’s why I like loose leaf paper. It’s intentionally messy. Sure, by the second draft I use Word. I edit on my laptop. But I always, always write by hand the first time around – both big and small projects.

CTB: What are you working on next? Anything we should be looking for?

Candace: I’m finishing a book tentatively titled Rhino Country. It’s about rhino poaching. I went to South Africa and spent 4 weeks with rangers and conservationist. I also completed a week-long wildlife forensics class alongside anti-poaching units from all across South Africa, and I worked at a rhino orphanage, helping to care for the babies orphaned by poaching. Honestly, I left my heart there.

I’ve also written Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal and the Lost Dream of Jonestown for Anne Schwartz Books/ Random House. It’s about the Peoples Temple movement. It’s coming out in April 2025. It’s YA nonfiction and very dear to my heart, because of the extraordinary people who shared their stories with me. There’s a real bravery to being that honest. While the story of Peoples Temple serves as a cautionary tale, it is also a very human one.

“Young people are bound to recognize themselves in the idealism of Annie Moore; the rebelliousness of Tommy Bogue; the love/hate feelings harbored by the teenaged Stephan Jones for his father.”

Candace Fleming in an article at San Diego State University.

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Candace Fleming is the author of more than fifty books for children and young adults, including the 2021 Sibert Medal-winning Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera, as well as the 2021 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award-winning The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindbergh. A recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, she is also the two-time winner of both the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and the Sibert Honor. Her most recent titles are The Enigma Girls and Narwhal, Unicorn of the Arctic.

Photo by Kecia Stovall

Today our host is Christine Taylor-Butler, a graduate of MIT and author of The Oasis, Save the… Tigers, Save the . . . Blue Whales, and many other nonfiction books for kids. She is also the author of the STEM based middle grade sci-fi series The Lost Tribes. Follow @ChristineTB on X and/or @ChristineTaylorButler on Instagram, and @ctaylorbutler on Bluesky. She lives in Missouri with her family, a tank of fish and cats that think they are dogs.