Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [41]
And he did seek professional psychoanalytical help. According to his biographer Margaret Drabble, during his time at the Park, he had bad dreams about drowning in icy seas. Indeed, Wilson became a source of such concern to the Park authorities that he was offered a stay in a grand mental institution in Oxford, although he wisely declined. It is easy to see that for a man already as tightly wound and temper-prone as Wilson, the sensation of being hemmed in, doing utterly vital yet at the same time dreary work, and living in a featureless town, must have been maddening. Whatever the case, Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown just after the war and it was while he was recuperating that he began writing short stories.
Wilson is perhaps the most perfect emblem of the stresses that could be suffered at the Park, but he was not alone. ‘There were some codebreakers who had nightmares,’ says one veteran. ‘It really all could be that intense.’ And Gordon Welchman’s own account includes a telling detail:
Josh Cooper and Colonel Tiltman were not only heads of expanding sections, they were both distinguished cryptanalysts. I was far too wrapped up in my own work on Enigma to know about the breaking of other codes and ciphers under these two experts. I remember, however, being told by Josh Cooper that his work was an almost intolerable strain.
Success so often depended on flashes of inspiration for which he would be searching day and night, with the clock always running against him.7
Despite the strain that he felt personally, Josh Cooper was an object of admiration even to those from outside the Park. ‘He was one of the most unforgettable people I have ever met,’ recalled WAAF signals intelligence operative Aileen Clayton, who at that time was based at the Kingsdown Y-station. ‘A brilliant mathematician, and much younger than he appeared to be at first sight, he was the archetypal absent-minded academic – slightly deaf, incredibly unkempt in his dress, dark hair flopping over his face, hair which he constantly brushed back with a vaguely irritated gesture, often thereby dislodging his thick spectacles. Yet one was aware of an inner brilliance.’8
Clayton went on to describe how, just as she entered his hut, Cooper was starting to go through some scraps of paper – not encrypted messages, but odds and ends from the pockets of a German bomber shot down over East Anglia. In the manner of Sherlock Holmes – and before the widening eyes of young Miss Clayton – he began to assemble, from old tickets and a cigarette packet, the pilot’s exact movements on the continent prior to his mission.
It was not merely an intellectual exercise. The more information one could glean, the more the bomber’s interrogators could startle him with their apparent knowledge of his comings and goings – and in so doing, startle him into giving away further information.
‘Nowadays,’ recalled Aileen Clayton, ‘we are blasé about detective stories, seeing them so often on the television – but to me, then, it was quite fascinating to see how, from such little things, so much information could be gleaned.’
So while the pressure was obviously intense, in another sense, the game was also afoot. And for others at Bletchley Park, this was precisely the reason why they seemed not to become quite so highly strung. For instance, Alan Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges throws intriguing light on the way that many of the ‘boffins’ may have viewed this branch of war work:
Nor was there any pretence at heroism in Bletchley circles. It was not simply that Intelligence traditionally