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Everyone else in the war had their reunions; from the RAF boys to the Land Girls, bonds were formed, friendships sealed, that carried on through the years after 1945 in the form of regular socialising and regular commemorations. The men and women of Bletchley Park were denied all this. Instead of an annual dinner dance, or even simple meet-ups for a few pints at a chosen local, they were instead left with their silent memories. Whereas for everyone else of their generation, the war was understood as the most fundamental of formative experiences, Bletchley veterans instead had a hole where acknowledged experience should have been.

And as the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s wore on, there must have been a few private memories that became a little frayed. For if one can never discuss with anyone what one has experienced, then how is that remembrance to be kept pristine? But thankfully, the sheer intensity and uniqueness of life at the Park helped enormously in this respect, giving most recollection a laser-beam quality. And interestingly, both the Bateys and the Lawns maintain that it was a shade easier for them altogether; even though, as married couples, they found that they did not discuss the Park after the war, there was none the less that element of shared experience. Even a little element of complicity.

These days, Bletchley Park veterans are most frequently asked: ‘But why? Why did you have to stay absolutely quiet for so long?’ When any of the codebreakers goes to give a talk at a school, the pupils’ most frequently asked question is: ‘How on earth did you manage to keep it all secret?’ In an age of Twitter, of instantaneous global mass communication, such an idea seems genuinely baffling to the young. ‘On top of this,’ says Mavis Batey, ‘you’ve got programmes like Newsnight talking about things like Osama bin Laden and giving away serious intelligence. It’s as if the idea of secrecy has gone.’ Author Neal Ascherson, whose sister had been a Wren at Bletchley, found her discretion both admirable and astonishing. ‘That silence was very British,’ he wrote in the Observer a few years ago. ‘Nobody else could have kept it and nobody was rewarded for keeping it. We wouldn’t be able to keep such silence today.’

One answer, as previously noted, is a large measure of Cold War paranoia on behalf of the authorities, mixed with a sharp sense that a number of countries were still using encryption systems similar to the Germans. Aside from this, though, a slightly more philosophical explanation for the all-pervasive silence – as might be surmised from a wider study of the history of the intelligence services – is that secrecy has, until recently at least, been something of a British fetish.

For secrecy, in some senses, is power; to know something that someone else does not know. The staggering achievement of Bletchley – the inspired lightning flashes of genius combined with the most dedicated work – was perhaps something that Britain could hold on to with pride as the aftermath of the war stripped the nation of its empire and its wealth, and left it desperately scrambling to find a position in this new world of East/West blocs. We might no longer have the firepower but we still did retain a native ingenuity (witness the ferocious 1950s pride concerning such innovations as the Harrier jet – we could still lead the world when it came to inventive genius). And as we moved from wartime espionage to the gathering possibilities of industrial espionage, the idea of staying mum retained not merely its importance but also its dignity.

There is an element of old-fashioned patriotism involved too. To this day, there are a few veteran codebreakers who will not speak of what they did, and who are infuriated by anyone who does, despite the fact that the subject has been openly known about, and discussed, since the 1980s. There were, and are, those who feel that Frederick Winterbotham – the first man to go into print to reveal the Bletchley secret in 1974 – was in his own way