Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [139]
Meanwhile, Mimi Gallilee had been given the chance to see how some of a generation’s greatest minds disported themselves in everyday circumstances. What she witnessed are scenes that – if there hadn’t been a war – might have been commonplace in Oxford or Cambridge, and which otherwise she would never have seen.
‘Like, for instance, Alan Turing,’ recalls Mimi. ‘All of my memories of him are of seeing him walking along the path and turning left at Hut 9, always with his head down. He was a very intense young man, and he always looked worried.
‘That’s how people were there. You would have been frightened by Josh Cooper if you met him. He was a big man, and he was cumbersome. When he walked along, he would exclaim things like: “Pincers!”’
Josh Cooper’s eccentricity did not end there. One story that did the rounds of Bletchley concerned the evening when he walked out of the Park gates with his hat clasped in his hand and a briefcase somehow balanced upon his head. One might easily imagine such a thing happening in an Oxford quad. As Mimi Gallilee says, ‘We accepted it as normal. You didn’t laugh at him really. You got used to it. There were so many like that. Brilliant people, in their own sphere.’
Elsewhere among the huts, there had also been perceived sexual eccentricity – again, the preserve of the older universities – which Mimi Gallilee says was viewed from a radically different point of view. And this in itself was an education to the young woman, doing much to colour her post-war view of such matters: ‘When we were young, we were very ignorant, because we didn’t know about homosexuality. If somebody seemed a bit effeminate, we’d just have a little giggle, but we didn’t think beyond that. Was it innocence or ignorance? And you didn’t hear that kind of thing being talked about anywhere – you certainly wouldn’t hear it at home – so you really didn’t know very much about anything.’
Being in the grounds of Bletchley Park was then, for someone as young as Mimi Gallilee, an education in itself. She says that she would sometimes look at these sophisticated people and know that she would not be able to casually drop into their conversations. ‘The kind of conversations you would overhear would all be on a higher scale. If you overheard things in the cafeteria, they would be talking, discussing – obviously nothing about their work, but wider subjects – and it was a rarefied atmosphere.
‘The majority of them were from university,’ she adds. ‘And now I can say that they wouldn’t have sniggered and laughed at things that the ignorant would – such as I. They wouldn’t perhaps have pointed and laughed at certain people, for instance. The more I think back, the more rarefied I realise it was.’
In the later years of the war, when Bletchley Park’s numbers had multiplied and the Colossus decrypting machines had turned code-breaking almost into an industrial process, some were nevertheless keen to see the collegiate atmosphere continue. Professor Max Newman encouraged his senior staff to take time off ‘to think’. He opened up ‘research books’, available should any member of staff be hit by a bright idea and wish to record it there and then. This book was open not just to mathematicians and linguists but to Wrens as well. And if enough people expressed interest in an idea, they could all be gathered together to discuss it at what would be termed ‘a tea-party’.
Finally, a quick overview of how many Bletchley Park veterans dispersed in the post-war years gives us a vivid flavour of its intellectual and artistic mettle.
Jane Fawcett, who had worked in Hut 6, managed after the war to pursue a similarly academically satisfying career in architectural history that took in running the enormously