Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [128]
Of course, like every other aspect of the war effort, the fact of VE Day in May 1945 didn’t instantly mean that everyone could be released from their duties. As Jean Valentine recalls: ‘When the war in Europe in stopped, my mother wrote to me in Ceylon and said, “Isn’t it wonderful that war’s over, when are you coming home?” My mother didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t come back immediately. I said, “Mum, excuse me, it’s still going on here.”’
But it was not just the fact that the war in the east was still rumbling on. Even in Europe, demobilisation was a complex business. Troops were not returned home instantly. And for the majority of the denizens of Bletchley Park, release from the work was slow. In the period between May and September of 1945, there were fresh tasks to address. Rather than decrypts, there was now the business of sweeping up after the destruction.
‘Technical books came in in their dozens from Germany,’ says Sheila Lawn of that time. ‘And they had me and a few other girls just sitting and making details of the books so that they could be traced. The author and the way it was published and what the subject was.’
Her husband-to-be Oliver was engaged in similar mopping up. ‘I was writing reports detailing what we had done. And we both left in September.’
‘It was a sort of dribble down,’ says Sheila. ‘The numbers got less. Ten thousand, then eight thousand, however many it was, we didn’t all leave at once.’
There is a curious poignancy about the annual report of the Bletchley Park Recreation Club at the end of 1945. In the previous year, the club had proudly boasted of ‘play-readings’, ‘operatic performances’, even a musical concert given by the Bletchley Park choir on the BBC, as well as ‘fencing, chess, badminton and squash’. Now, though, the activities were fading as the young people began to move away. The floor of the hall no longer vibrated to the thump of couples ballroom dancing; there were fewer to take part in the specially organised cycling and hiking clubs. Even the ‘swing music enthusiasts’, as the Park’s annual report referred to these daring souls, were dwindling in number. Bravely the club went on, meaning to carry on with all these impeccably middle-class activities until the very end.
In June 1945, there was a curious echo of Gordon Welchman’s initial observation about codebreakers’ aptitude for music. The BBC was already aware of the rich gathering of talented musicians at the Park, and had featured some of them in a previous broadcast. Now, startlingly, it was decided that there should be a broadcast from the Park itself. In one sense, it looked like surprisingly lax security – but then, of course, Bletchley’s talented actors had been touring the local county, with their audiences aware of where they worked if not of what they did. So why not the BBC? Among the pieces performed were works by Ralph Vaughan Williams – a composer who, in his harking back to Tallis and to English folk melodies, reinforced a certain national sense of age-old coherence. The audience for the programme was not told what else the musicians had been achieving in recent years.
By that time, with Europe now silent, coming to terms with the devastation, grim news was still reaching Bletchley Park from across the world. In August 1945 intelligence was received that atom bombs had been dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rosemary Calder told Michael Smith of what it was like when the messages started coming in. ‘I was on a day-watch by myself,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know the bomb had been dropped but you could tell from the disruption of all the messages that something terrible had happened. You could