Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [1]
Then they caught their first view of the big house itself, with the lake before it, the thick branches of a Wellingtonia tree obscuring some of the windows. One or other of them raised an eyebrow at the prospect. For these two young women – both of whom would have been familiar with grander properties – initial impressions were not remotely favourable. ‘It was a bit of a shock,’ says Sarah Baring lightly now. ‘We thought the house was perfectly monstrous.’
Scattered around outside the mansion, on its lawns, were spartan-looking single-storey wooden huts, with little chimneys coughing out thick, inky smoke, and windows covered for the blackout. Round to the side of the house were what had been the old stables, and a sturdy red-brick outbuilding referred to as ‘the Cottage’. The paving around the house, and on the concrete driveway, was in a state of disrepair, with potholes.
It was difficult to see beyond this, but the grounds went on further, much further; there were meadows filled with more huts, and concrete blocks. ‘And there were,’ Sarah Baring says, ‘men and women emerging from all these huts, giving the impression of a labyrinth from which there was no exit.’ She also immediately noted a disconcerting ‘absence of people in uniform’.
The front of the house, looking across the pretty ornamental lake and beyond into the gloaming, down the hill, faced towards the town; but any glimpse of Bletchley was obscured by trees. The only reminder of the outside world was the distant shrieks of train whistles echoing in the spring air.
Once through the door of the big house – which bustled with more intense-looking young men and women in civilian clothes – the two young women were pointed up the stairs, and presented themselves on the first floor to the man who had sent them the telegram: Commander Travis, Deputy Director of Bletchley Park.
Travis immediately asked the two bemused young women to sign the Official Secrets Act. He then told them of a temporary billet in town – a hotel – in which they would be staying, and added that their duties would begin the following morning. ‘He said to me, “I hear you’ve got the German,”’ says Sarah Baring, ‘which at that moment I thought was rather funny because I thought he meant a man.’ At that point, Commander Travis told the two women very little of what their duties would entail; only that the need for secrecy was absolutely paramount.
And after this faintly dreamlike introduction, Sarah and Osla’s years at Bletchley Park began.
Other recruits to the Park often arrived late at night. During the blackout, there would have been no lights visible from the dowdy Buckinghamshire town; these people would not have been able to make out through the murk a single detail of the small red-brick houses, or the long terraced streets, or the pubs. ‘In the early hours of the morning, I alighted on the station platform, and was met by an army captain,’ said one veteran. ‘I might as well have found myself in Outer Mongolia.’
‘I got to Bletchley around midnight,’ recalled another veteran. ‘Everything was in darkness. There were some iron steps going over the bridge. There wasn’t a soul about.’
There is, perhaps, a touch of the Graham Greene thriller about this image: the steam train drawing away, its red rear lights disappearing into the black distance; then a thick silence, broken only by the click of solitary footsteps pacing in the deep shadows of an unlit platform, waiting for the mysterious contact to arrive. ‘A system of passwords has been instituted to enable authorised persons to circulate in the grounds after dark,’ stated an early Bletchley Park memo in October 1939. ‘[It will]