Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [71]
Highly virtuous! And something, I feel sure, that would have captured the imaginations of many of the male service personnel of Bletchley. As indeed would the stories concerning Wrens sunbathing topless on the roof of Gayhurst Manor.
If for the codebreaking civilians in the huts, the bounds of knowledge seemed limited, then for a Wren they were more limited yet. It was not just the mechanistic nature of the work of bombe operating; it was the commute back to the dormitories. Jean Valentine only realised, upon returning some decades later, how very little of the Park she had ever seen in that brief period during the war. She recalls: ‘Everything was so brilliantly compartmentalised.’
And the restrictions were not purely physical – the methodology of the work was equally hermetically sealed. ‘I worked in that bombe room,’ she continues. ‘And when we got an answer from the machines, we went to the phone, to ring through this possible answer to an extension number. It wasn’t until all these decades later that I realised we were just calling Hut 6 across the path.’
If they had done their jobs properly, the encrypted message would be typed in and a length of tape would come out in German. ‘Then that went to the pink hut which was just opposite to the entrance of Hut 11, not six steps away. There the translators changed it into English. And the analysts decided who was going to get this information. This was all happening in this tiny little square. I saw nothing of Bletchley Park except that grass oval in front of the mansion.’
There was also an element of culture shock produced for many by being transplanted right into the centre of what was still largely rural England. She recalls: ‘We used to go to the village hop on a Saturday night if we weren’t working. The whole village used to turn out for this hop. To my absolute horror, one evening, a woman, there with her baby, took her bosom out and stuck it in her baby’s mouth. Now, I had never seen a baby being fed in my life before, and certainly not at a village hop.
‘But it seemed to be the norm. No one else seemed to think anything about this woman casually producing a breast and feeding her baby.’
Sheila Lawn considers that ‘Eighteen-year-olds then were younger than 18-year-olds now in terms of attitudes.’ But this is perhaps something to do with regional divides; it is reasonably well documented, for instance, that in the 1920s and 1930s, people who lived in small communities in the English countryside were more relaxed about such matters as premarital sex than their town counterparts. Even there, many children born out of wedlock were swiftly subsumed into the larger family – the child in question being told in the occasional case that its mother was its ‘sister’.
Regardless of how young the Bletchley recruits felt themselves to be, however, it was obvious that passion – and, indeed, love – were always going to find a way in such intense circumstances. But there was another sort of intensity at Bletchley too – a steadily growing sense of friction caused in part by the ballooning expansion of the Park’s activities, and by the sheer numbers of its personnel. There were to be moments midway through the conflict – in Britain generally, as well as throughout Bletchley Park – when it seemed that morale could not sink any lower.
16 1941: Bletchley and Churchill
He’s the grand old man
For us he’s doing all that he can
Britain’s guiding star
Known near and far
Wearing his famous bulldog grin
And smoking his big cigar
It’s difficult to listen to Max Miller’s chirpy 1941 ditty now without wincing just a little. Enthusiasm is one thing, but sugary show-business sycophancy? Yet this song, ‘The Grand Old Man’, was something of a hit at the time; not merely because it was a less cynical age but because a colossal number of people felt, as soon as he took over in May 1940, that Britain was extremely lucky to have Churchill’s leadership. (Very few people, for instance, would have agreed with Evelyn Waugh’s