Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [16]
Even for the most delicate aesthete, however, the grounds gave few causes for complaint. And for some recruits, the gardens, with the backdrop of the house, had a slightly collegiate feel, although those recruited from Oxford and Cambridge would have found it several steps down in aesthetic terms from the beauty that they had left behind.
But in wartime Britain, particularly as the years went on – with all the rationing, the taped windows, the blackouts, the peeling paint, the fading, drab colour and, in many cities, the increasing number of bomb sites – Bletchley Park and innumerable other requisitioned country houses like it must have offered some kind of psychological respite. Certainly a number of the veterans recall that in the summer months, both the gardens of Bletchley and the countryside around acquired the most colourful and beguiling life.
As more and more young recruits came flooding in, the house and its immediate grounds seemed to reflect this colourful life. One veteran recalls that ‘it was a village confined on the grounds … countless people passing in and out of the main gate, strolling, talking, and sitting around. There was a great seething of people – always movement – comings and goings. The whole thing reminded me of a bustling London railway terminus.’3
It was a railway terminus that bustled for twenty-four hours a day. Nigel de Grey remarked of the young new recruits fresh off the trains from Oxford and Cambridge that they were ‘dropping in with the slightly unexpected effect of carrier pigeons’. Throughout the early 1940s, when the numbers of workers rose from hundreds to thousands, the shift system meant that people came in and out of the main entrance gates at all hours.
Inside the fences, recalls one veteran, were signs reminding the young recruits that this was no campus talking shop and exhorting them to the highest discretion at all times. But outside the fences, in the summer months, and well away from the brickworks that pocked the town’s edges, there were shades of prelapsarian innocence about the green countryside around the house. Men and women would go for long bike rides along quiet country lanes. This, of course, was England before motorways. And in wartime, motor traffic was also extremely restricted by the strict rationing of petrol. ‘Very few people at Bletchley Park had cars,’ says John Herivel. ‘Only the most important.’
So on leaving the house, perhaps at the end of a shift, and climbing on to a bike either to return to a billet or simply to get some fresh air among the fields, the young codebreakers, after only a few minutes’ cycling, would have seen and heard a countryside that we would scarcely recognise today.
The fields would still have been small and manageable, as opposed to the vast industrial-farming prairies that are the hallmark of the contemporary English landscape. And apart from the buzz of insects, the lowing of cattle, distant church clocks, and faraway train whistles, the lanes would have been rich with a quality of quietness difficult to find nowadays within a 100-mile radius of London.
‘I bought a third-hand cycle,’ says Sheila Lawn. ‘The second person who owned it, who worked at the Park, must have been very brainy, but somehow she could not learn to ride the bicycle. So I bought it. It was a very strong bicycle. I called it Griselda. I had it for years. And if I was on a day off, and I didn’t have any people to meet, or any plans, I used to cycle.
‘Of course the countryside around Bletchley was totally different from the countryside in the Highlands. It was a contrast. And I just loved it.’
These young recruits, as we have seen, were drawn from all across the country; many had left home for the very first time. The curious thing about the house at Bletchley Park, and the chalky lands around, was that they offered a calming backdrop to the deathly serious task in hand.
‘I was very interested in natural history,’ recalls