Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [133]
For the women who were to become their wives, this was still an era in which ladies were not expected to go out to work, despite the mass mobilisation of the female population throughout the war. When a wife became pregnant, it was understood that her career was over and that she would become a mother and a homemaker.
Having said all that, it would clearly have been a travesty if the women of Bletchley Park had led their intellects slide into abeyance. Happily, for both Sheila MacKenzie and Mavis Lever, this was emphatically not the case.
Sheila continued academically. However, her original plan to teach on the continent was still looking extremely uncertain. What shape would that continent now be taking? How much of it would be subsumed by the heavy mass of the Soviet Union? The war forced a geographical change of Sheila’s plans. She had to confine herself to British opportunities.
‘I did what you can do in Scotland, a general degree,’ Mrs Lawn says. ‘Based on the previous subjects I had done. That was quite hard work over the year. And then I did a year in Birmingham University, a post-graduate diploma in Sociology and then I went in for personnel management. A complete change. It still wasn’t easy to get abroad.’
She and Mr Lawn felt the full icy blast of austerity Britain in their first two winters after the Park. It is one of those periods which now, with some distance, is almost as difficult to imagine as the war itself. As Sheila recalls: ‘Oh, but it was cold. There was very little fuel and very little hot water. That was even worse than during the war. Everything was rationed, including potatoes and bread. And clothes were rationed until 1952, I think. When Oliver and I were married, we could only get dockets for basic furniture. But Oliver had a great-aunt who died and some of her beautiful furniture came to us. So we got a bedroom and a living room from that.’
The scrimping that went on for Sheila and Oliver’s wedding day now seems almost unthinkable. ‘My mother made do and mended. She was very good with her needle. For instance, out of two beautiful silk jumpers of the 1920s, which she had kept in a trunk, my mother was able to make three jumpers; I had two and she had one. And she remade some of her frocks for herself and for me. And my going-away – I was married in borrowed clothes, very successfully.
‘I had a lovely veil which belonged to our minister’s wife and had come through her family. I went away in army blankets, dyed a lovely maroon colour. They were made by a cousin of mine who was learning to be a tailoress. And with the tailoress she was working with, she made a suit for me – skirt, waistcoat and coat. I wore it for years. It was much admired. My undies were parachute silk. Gorgeous stuff to use. It was “make do and mend’‘ with a vengeance!’
Mavis Batey also felt certain that her future was of an academic nature, though the duties of bringing up a young family with her new husband Keith came first. ‘We were in Oxford, we went back to Christ Church, and I didn’t really get back into any kind of intellectual activity until my three children were grown. After that, I could go to the Bodleian Library every day. So I eventually picked up.’
But what of the Park’s most famous innovator and presiding genius? For Alan Turing, still only thirty-four at the end of the war, technology was drawing closer and closer to enable him to realise his concept of a ‘Turing Machine’; equally, though, his homosexuality, and the British establishment’s attitude towards it, were to contribute to his tragic – and wholly pointless – death.
The transition from war to peace seemed, initially, to make little difference to Alan Turing’s working life. After his removal as head of Hut 8 and his return from the United States, he came back