Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [89]
The rise in personnel numbers demanded by the work also led, with a certain warm inevitability, to the formation of more and more romantic relationships. It is an aspect of Bletchley life that one might have expected the authorities – for the reason of ‘careless talk’ – to patrol with the greatest of care. But actually, for many, the course of love ran remarkably smooth.
19 The Rules of Attraction
It is perhaps a generational thing; but when one thinks now of what might loosely be termed ‘wartime romance’, one is struck by two stereotypical images. The first is that of young English roses being swept off their feet by sharp-talking American soldiers with bribes of fancy cigarettes and bubblegum; the second, the agonies suffered by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in black and white at Carnforth railway station in Brief Encounter. In general, the Americans are depicted as forthright sexual vulgarians, whereas the British are every bit as repressed as their stiff upper lips would imply.
Such clichés, of course, have no value whatsoever, but it is interesting to contemplate the chasm that has opened up between that wartime generation and our own. The Brief Encounter repression may have been overdoing it a bit – according to many contemporaneous accounts, it assuredly was – but a great many stories from within Bletchley Park tell us that wartime romance was in some senses quite different from today’s version.
It is perhaps the most sweetly inevitable part of the Bletchley Park story: a well-educated community of young people – the women greatly outnumbering the men – and a great number of those young people pairing off romantically.
Park veteran S. Gorley Putt put it slightly differently, referring to the ‘hot-house confinement’ of the Park, and how it created a fervid atmosphere in which ‘sexual infatuations … became obsessional … nerves tautened to breaking point by round-the-clock speedy exactitude would fumble, in off-hours, for emotional nourishment.’1
Doubtless so; and given the claustrophobia of the community, added to the tension of the work, perhaps the occasional outbreak of sexual hysteria was inevitable. However, alongside this rather Bloomsbury-esque vision of the Park are the more subtle, though none the less pleasing stories of the many relationships formed that did actually continue. What surprises now, though, as one hears various accounts of the beginnings of long, happy marriages, is how remarkably relaxed the Park authorities seemed in matters of the heart.
Mathematician Keith Batey recalls how one of his very first memories of Bletchley Park was the sight of ‘nubile young ladies’ wandering to and fro. But it was not long before he and Mavis Lever met. He was in Hut 3; she was working with Dilly Knox in the Cottage. One night, she had an operational message to convey to Hut 3. Their eyes met, as both now laughingly recall: ‘Late one evening, I was in the hut, on the evening shift, and that’s how I met her,’ says Keith. ‘This little girl arrived from Dilly’s outfit with this message or problem – she didn’t know how to solve it.
‘I didn’t see her again for another year,’ says Keith, laughing. ‘And she never admitted it, but it was true.’
Mr Batey is not exaggerating greatly about the amount of time it took them to meet again. Those who worked in different huts and different parts of the Park seldom met or crossed over, because the workings of each department were kept closely sealed. If they did meet, any conversation concerning work was forbidden.
Given this level of concern, one might have thought that the Bletchley Park authorities would look with concern upon the blossoming of any inter-hut relationship. However, as Mavis Batey recalls, things seemed easier than that once she and Keith became an item: ‘There were no rules against “courting”. We thought we had been very secretive – but when we announced our engagement, we were told that there were bets on when we would. The person who handled booking for the lunch sittings had noticed that we always made sure we