Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [101]
Conversely, some of the codebreakers appeared to live in communities that either valued discretion, or had a sense of what it was that the homecoming lad was really doing. This seemed to be the case for Keith Batey whenever he got leave: ‘As to going home, and lack of uniform: no one found it odd. People knew that everything was pretty strict. This business about call-up, reserved occupations and what you were doing. Everyone was directed to what they were doing. No question about that. And no one asked me what I was doing.
‘Though there was my brother … he wasn’t in Bletchley,’ Mr Batey continues. ‘He was younger than I and was still at Oxford in the middle of the war. Then he went to the RAE, then after the war he became a parson. Many years later – quite recently in fact – he said to me: “It was pretty obvious what you were doing. There were you, a mathematician, and Mavis speaking German. There was never a doubt.” So you can see that lots of people put two and two together and sometimes got the right answer.’
From the moment one left the Park and embarked upon a train journey, one was under an infinitely intensified version of the phrase: ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. But for some, there seemed to be little in the form of stern lectures or admonitions. Nor were there any restrictions on leave, or where that leave might be spent. It was understood from the start by the Park’s administrative authorities that after the exhausting focus of the work, after all the concentration and the unremitting shift system, these young people would need their breaks simply to maintain their sanity.
But for the others, it was all a matter of self-discipline. A prevailing sense of anxiety that Germany might after all win the war helped enormously. One veteran recalls how she hated to drink even the smallest amount off-duty, because she was terrified that if she got drunk, she would blurt out confidential information that could be overheard by anyone. Another veteran developed a fear that she might talk in her sleep.
Sheila Lawn recalls her own regular journeys home to the far north of Scotland, and how, as soon as she walked through the gates of Bletchley Park to the railway station, she was under her own jurisdiction. She also recalls what for many of us would be a trying journey, even now.
‘Of course, the trains were more reliable then,’ she says smiling. ‘We used to get a week’s holiday four times a year. They paid your fare, third class, which for me was a great matter because I went up to Inverness to see my parents to have a nice few days there. You’d go down to the station, you’d try to make it a suitable shift, you’d walk down with your case to the station, and usually the trains were absolutely crowded in that area, and so often I was shovelled in with a great lot of Forces chaps, and hopefully find a seat, though sometimes it was a case of sitting on your case in the corridor.
‘And then sometimes the trains would be rerouted. Whether it was because of difficulties on the line because of bombing, I do not know … so sometimes, you would be pretty late in getting up to Inverness. But they got there. In those days, once you got to the lowlands of Scotland, they changed the engines, they put a double engine on, to draw you up over the Highlands.
‘I always used to be a bit dirty with the flakes from the engine. They would fly into the carriage through the window. So first thing on getting home, I used to have a shower, or a bath, I can’t remember which, and mother would have a hot drink for me, and she always asked me what I wanted for lunch, so I’d tell her, and it would be all ready for me. This would be luxury.’
And luxury, indeed, with no one asking her anything about the nature of the work that she was engaged upon down in Buckinghamshire.
The Hon. Sarah Baring –