• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This might have been particularly addressed to those who approached life in this small town from the more rarefied end of the social scale. One veteran recalls with glee the privations inflicted upon ‘the debs’, the glamorous upper-class girls drafted in through family connections and suddenly finding themselves having to live in suffocating little houses near a main railway line, ‘where the occupiers kept their coal in the bath’.

‘Let’s not forget,’ says Geoffrey Pidgeon, who was working with the signals intelligence Y Service at the time, ‘you have the situation of “girls of quality” going into a room with a twenty-five watt bulb, and the instruction that they are to have only one bath a week. And there is lino everywhere.’

But one should never underestimate the fortitude, and indeed the impeccable manners, of that generation of upper-class ‘gels’. Certainly, the Hon. Sarah Baring seems now to have fond memories of the scenario that she found herself in. ‘We were very lucky, my friend Osla and I, we were billeted with a lovely old couple,’ she says. ‘In a village. We used to be driven backwards and forwards to work from the billet. And it was a nice house, a very pretty house near Woburn Sands.

‘I think it was the manor house of the village. I’m not sure – we hardly spent any time there. We were either sleeping, or eating, or going off to work again. So we didn’t really get to know the village very much. But our landlords were very good to us, very kind. They never complained, they just fed us, which was very decent of them. They had extra rations of course.’

Indeed, she only recalls one source of tension about her domestic arrangements, and that concerned one of her fellow billetees: ‘We weren’t the only ones, Osla and I. There was one of the cryptographers. We didn’t like him very much, we thought he was frightfully pompous. So we weren’t very nice to him.’

One other small problem, remembered by many other people during that period, concerned the simple business of getting out of bed on a dark morning in the depths of winter. ‘It was always cold in the war,’ says Sarah Baring. ‘I can remember getting up to go on to day-watch and we just had a small electric fire. The cold! Getting out of bed! Freezing. Because no one had central heating, or anything like that.’

For the townspeople of Bletchley, it was not just this extraordinary collection of quasi-academics that had to be assimilated; there was also the occasional question of evacuated children to be dealt with. One such was 13-year-old Mimi Gallilee, later to work at the Park itself, who found herself fetching up in Bletchley quite unexpectedly. The town – and its collection of little shops and limited amenities – is still imprinted vividly in her memory.

‘Before the war broke out, during the last couple of weeks in August – all the schools were on holiday – we were called back to school in Islington,’ Mrs Gallilee says. ‘We were talked to just in case there was a war and the parents had an opportunity to put their children’s names down for evacuation.

‘I was evacuated with the school, and we were sent to what was the lovely old Hemel Hempstead. Boxmoor Hill. It was beautiful there. But I was so homesick for my mother – I had only been there eleven days. And so she was sent to Bletchley. And she came and took me, found somewhere for me to live close by her.’ But Mimi’s mother had to find somewhere to work. Bletchley Park was where she ended up. Her young daughter followed a little while later, and remembers the town itself in those days:

‘The first shops, such as they were, started beyond the railway bridge. And you had three or four little shops in a row. A fish shop. There was a jeweller and a WH Smith. Rustons the chemist. A sweet shop – well, it sold sweets when it actually had sweets in. A public house, the Duncombe Arms. There were two or three pubs. I didn’t go in them, obviously, so I would never know what they looked like inside.

‘I never quite realised at that age that