Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [143]
Against this backdrop it was decided that the secrets of Bletchley must remain inviolate. In one sense, the conflict was not yet at an end. Throughout the campaigns of the early 1940s, Churchill had sanctioned careful releases to Stalin of information gleaned from Bletchley, while at the same time endeavouring as far as possible to disguise the source. It was deemed best that the Russians should have no idea what sort of decrypting advances had been made.
Speaking of the Soviets, for Mimi Gallilee, work at BBC World Service in the 1970s offered a few faint echoes of the time that she had spent at the Park. ‘We were keeping a watch on world communism. We weren’t spies but we had a lot to do with dissidents. Solzhenitzyn came over. My boss was the first to have an interview and to befriend him here in the UK.
‘By the 1970s,’ she adds, speaking of her own attitude to the past, ‘Bletchley Park was dead. Nobody would have known what I was talking about. It wouldn’t have meant anything to anybody.’
Even the physical fact of the place itself seemed a little abstract to her, until one day in the 1970s, she decided upon a day trip. By this time, Bletchley was little more than a satellite to the gleaming new town of Milton Keynes. She went there with a friend whom she had known since after the war. That friend did not have any inkling.
‘At this stage, I still didn’t know about the Enigma. The only term I knew was Ultra. I knew what it meant, though not in connection with anything else …
‘So we drove along Wilton Avenue, got to the gate, and I said to my friend: “I used to work here during the war.” She said, “Would you like to go in and have a look?” I said, “I’d love to.” But there was no one there – not that I could see, at any rate.
‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘one day, after the Winterbotham book was out, it was mentioned on the TV news, and my friend was watching. They talked about what was going on at the Park. My friend rang me and said, “I felt so proud, I heard this thing on Bletchley Park and you never said what you did there!” And I said, “Well, there was nothing to say really …”’
The physical fact of the town might have helped as a visual reminder, keeping certain memories strong, but even the smallest changes could suddenly make memory more distant. ‘I did not think Vicarage Walk could have changed a great deal, but it had,’ wrote Gwen Watkins of the little lane in which she had been billeted during her time as a Luftwaffe codebreaker. ‘It was full of parked cars and expensive bicycles lying about in the lane.’
Gwen Watkins had remembered an utterly quiet little lane, where the windows of the house were never opened and the front door was only ever used for special visitors and occasions. Now she saw a house with windows wide open, chintz curtains, music playing loudly from within. ‘I only wish that it had not changed,’ she wrote. ‘I turned away, and never went there again.’3
Curiously, as Oliver and Sheila Lawn recall, there was little in the way of official pressure to keep this silence after their time at Bletchley. It was just understood. ‘It was subconscious,’ says Sheila Lawn, ‘I just never thought about talking. You’d just say that it was war work.’
When the house and grounds were saved in 1991, they found themselves not only overwhelmed with memories, but also able to talk further with one another about all that they had done – some fifty years after the war had ended. They decided in the early 1990s to make a trip to see the Park once more. Just the sight of it was a curiously emotional experience for both of