The Secrets of Station X by Michael Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

stones and a beating to any Patti or Tetracinni. As far as our own staff were concerned, once one had discovered the human end of them, they were worth their weight in gold. If we did strike a dud, it was my business to sell him or her. I am told that I once swopped a small and incompetent typist for a large and priceless card index.
    Secrecy was paramount, Josh Cooper recalled. Service personnel initially wore civilian clothes in an attempt to suggest that the site had nothing to do with the military.
    We were all instructed not to tell friends and relations where we were, but to give as our address a Post Office Box Number in Victoria Street. Letters addressed to this box were delivered to Broadway and forwarded to Bletchley by MI6 courier. The system broke down when large parcels were addressed to the Box Number. In one case a grand piano was consigned in this way.
    Most staff were put up in hotels until Parliament authorised the billeting of personnel vital to the war effort on ordinary households . Private cars were used for transporting staff into work and taking them back to their rooms. ‘A great friend lent me his Bentley for the duration of the war because he decided it was better for it to be driven than being put up on blocks,’ recalled Diana Russell Clarke. ‘So I had this beautiful grey Bentley and of course they were useful because we used to collect people to come into work and then drop them home afterwards.’
    The two things that stuck in the mind of Phoebe Senyard, a 48-year-old spinster, who was a senior clerk in the Naval Section, were the great secrecy surrounding the whole affair and the wonderful food the staff were provided with.
    A great deal of secrecy had to be observed of course and we were given instructions to inform inquisitive persons thatwe were attached to the Air Ministry for the aerial defence of London. What I remember very well were the wonderful lunches with which we were served. Bowls of fruit, sherry trifles, jellies and cream were on the tables and we had chicken, hams and wonderful beef steak puddings. We certainly could not grumble about our food.
    The threat of war seemed to leave the staff at Bletchley completely unruffled. As Barbara Abernethy recalled, at lunchtime, most of the codebreakers would troop out onto the lawn in front of the house to play rounders.
    We had a tennis ball and somebody managed to commandeer an old broom handle, drilled a hole in it and put a leather strap in it. It was all we had, things were getting a bit tough to get. If it was a fine day, we’d all say rounders at one o’clock, we’d all go out and play, just to sort of let off steam. Everybody argued about the rules and the dons just laid them down, in Latin sometimes. We used trees as bases. ‘He got past the deciduous,’ one would say. ‘No he didn’t,’ another would argue. ‘He was still between the conifer and the deciduous.’ That was the way they were.
    Malcolm Muggeridge, who served in MI6 during the war, recalled visiting Bletchley and watching the codebreakers debate the finer points of the rules of rounders.
    They adopted the quasi-serious manner dons affect when engaged in activities likely to be regarded as frivolous or insignificant in comparison with their weightier studies. They would dispute some point about the game with the same fervour as they might the question of free will or determinism, or whether the world began with a big bang or a process of continuing creation. Shaking their heads ponderously, sucking air noisily into their noses between words.
    For most of the university dons recruited as codebreakers since the First World War this was the life to which they had become accustomed, a mixture of Oxbridge high table and Foreign Office gentility. But to many of the more junior staff it was a world they had never seen before. ‘It was beautiful,’ said Barbara Abernethy. ‘Lovely rose gardens, mazes, lovely old building, wonderful food.’ For a brief moment,