Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [31]
‘There was the British Restaurant, where you could go and buy a meal at lunchtime. And no meal was allowed to cost more than half a crown. Half a crown was a very posh meal. That was a great deal of money.’
Some have less than fond memories of the town. During the pitch darkness of the blackouts, Jane Fawcett used to make her way to the Park with a hammer in her bag. ‘You never knew who you might meet,’ she observed crisply.
No one in Bletchley was immune from the depredations of rationing. Mimi Gallilee recalls how, for the women especially, the task of finding new or replacement clothing could turn into rather a quest. ‘If you had to do shopping, you took the train to Bedford or Northampton and on a rare occasion, to Watford. That’s if you wanted to buy clothes. Furniture was all on dockets and people didn’t have the money anyway. You waited until your clothing coupon ration came around, I think twice a year. You got twenty-six at a time. A fully lined ladies’ coat would cost you eighteen of those coupons and you see from that how little you could buy.
‘And a pair of socks or stockings would be one coupon. So you couldn’t have loads of anything. Shoes: if you had a hole, or if something started going, they were taken to the repairer, you didn’t just sling them out as you do now.
‘Towards the end of the war,’ she adds, ‘a dress shop opened in Bletchley. It was close to the Studio Cinema.’ Beyond that, she says, there was ‘the butcher, the baker, the Co-op grocery store, and then the department store. And if you could afford to buy things in there, you were rich.’
And so it was that Bletchley and its inhabitants found itself growing steadily more populous as fresh young faces were drawn in from across the country, and from a variety of different backgrounds. If there was fervid speculation as to the provenance of these youngsters, the townspeople were good enough (and patriotic enough) to keep it to themselves. Nevertheless, rather like that of the Park workers themselves, this act of conscious mass discretion is one that still surprises. To this day, many Bletchley veterans are lost in admiration not merely for the hospitality shown to so many of them, but also for the fact that the people of Bletchley were careful never to ask what exactly went on up at the Park.
In terms of security, this was obviously invaluable. As Sheila Lawn’s landlady indicated, it was obvious to the people of the town that the Park was a secret establishment, and swarming with boffins. But to stifle the urge to discuss, or speculate, seems to have become endemic.
As Mimi Gallilee explains, what now seems startling would have come much more naturally back then. At the start of the war, it was not merely the ubiquitous ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ posters; road signs and railway station signs were taken down as a means of confounding potential spies and potential invaders. It was widely understood, whether in the forces or as a civilian, that one should discuss no more than necessary.
Given that, says Mimi Gallilee, one couldn’t occasionally help wondering what was going through the heads of the townsfolk. ‘What I marvel at is: what were the people who lived in Bletchley thinking? I don’t ever remember anyone ever saying to me “What do you do there?” So I began to wonder. What on earth were they thinking about? What did they think was going on in the Park?
‘Nobody said anything. The Bletchley inhabitants had no reasons to carry any secrets about with them. So it wasn’t duty.’
Perhaps there is a slight class factor: that of the folk in the big house having automatic precedence over the townspeople over looked by the estate. Regardless of their youth, the largely middle-class intake of recruits to Bletchley Park were of a higher social station than the townsfolk. And the townsfolk simply