The Girl from Station X (21 page)

My mother was now at Leighton Buzzard, at 60 Group HQ, an Intelligence Centre. This Leighton Buzzard office dealt with all overseas traffic and was a part of the Air Ministry. Anne described it
as
the most interesting of all the cipher traffic places that exists . . . there are about 10 of us on a watch . . . quite a few nice ones – Angela Griffiths, whose father is a
mining engineer in Rumania.

Events that spring were discouraging. On 27 April, the Germans had occupied Athens and Allied troops were about to be evacuated from the rest of Greece. A few days later, Iraq declared war on
the Allies. The evacuation of Greece was now almost complete, though with 3,000 still left behind.

My mother relished learning these facts through her work, ahead of the public, and putting them in her diary, feeling thereby that she was experiencing
history in the
making
. She also recorded changes in the roles that women were now permitted to play. On 1 May, she saw her first woman porter and observed that there were now women ticket collectors
and women attendants on trains, though usually a man was still in charge. This last fact would have disappointed her. Anne was so unlike my grandmother, who had admitted to me that she would not
have felt confident under a female doctor. My mother always felt more secure
with
a woman in charge. She must have been excited by these particular changes brought about by the war.

Meanwhile American planes were arriving in Britain, their pilots to instruct British pilots in flying the new types of aircraft which, Anne wrote, could bomb from 30,000 feet. She wrote
excitedly (and indiscreetly) about a cipher from the previous night, during which she had worked a nine-hour shift:

someone in command at Abyssinia asking for freedom to bomb the bases of the Iraqi air force as Iraqi planes had bombed our aerodrome that afternoon and done a
considerable amount of damage, it was giving a raspberry for the orders forbidding them to bomb Iraqi bases and they also said ‘due to our shortage of fighter aircraft’. Later on, we
got the answer. Giving him a free hand to bomb as he liked. It’s all rather thrilling in a way being so much in touch with things.

She was now billeted to Silver Birch, Plantation Road, Leighton Buzzard, Beds, the home of a Mr and Mrs Harry Hunt. They would become lifelong friends.

On 11 May, Angela Griffiths failed to reappear in the Leighton Buzzard office after a short leave in London. The air raid on the capital the previous night was reportedly the worst yet; Anne
wrote that Whitehall was enveloped in smoke from the still-raging fires, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament had been hit, the Alexander Hotel had been bombed, and those trapped in the
shelters there were heard crying while rescuers worked to get them out.

Angela eventually turned up in the Leighton Buzzard office, having been in a London flat which had had a direct hit. Her eyes were red from burning cinders and her hands cut by broken glass.

Despite these awful events – including more damage to the City of London – Anne seems to have been almost enjoying this part of the war. She comes across as quick, responsive and on
her mettle. Her emotional life also seems intense. Here she writes of coming up to London by train from Knowle:

As we approached the City there were more and more signs of the devastation of the last air raid. Practically every street had a yellow diversion sign and others
were all roped off. There were masses of police about and people stood about in little groups watching people working amongst the debris. For the first time I felt a terrible feeling of tragedy
everywhere and although people were going about their business as usual they looked tired and had set faces. There was an indescribable feeling of depression in the air, which I have not felt
before and as we were turned this way and that like in a maze, I began to realise the extent of the damage. I saw that it would be impossible to reach Cannon Street and so I got out and started to
walk, carrying my suitcase, which seemed to weigh a ton and it was only then that I really saw what it was like. You could not go literally more than a 100 yards or so without passing some damaged
premises, either shops, with no fronts to them at all, or great blocks of concrete fallen from a portico, or the now familiar white notices, ‘Dangerous Building’ stuck onto a wall or
door. Everywhere lay heaps of rubble, broken boards and charred beams, smoke was pouring up from heaps of rubble in a number of places and the fire brigades were busy. I could not believe that they
were still smouldering since the raid, but was told that they were indeed. There was dust on everything and as I walked on in a part of the city near the river, that perhaps I had known once but in
any case could never have recognised amidst the gutted and ruined buildings of which it was mostly composed. Mercifully, to me, the glimpses of reality are few, and the tragedy of what was the city
only dawns upon me at moments. Here I seem to live in an unreality and cannot seem to connect this devastation with the London that I love, then some little thing seems to bring it home to me with
a sickening flash which makes one want to cry out with the sudden pain of realisation of what it means. Outside some business premises were piles of books, the pages blackened by fire and the
remains of a burned typewriter stood forlornly in the street. People seemed to hurry on about their business quietly, mostly on foot, though a few buses were running in some of the main
thoroughfares. I went through a fish market and up to the monument at the edge of London Bridge, then as I crossed the river, I got the most wonderful view up to Tower Bridge, the light was
reflected in the water and the barges were chug chugging up the river. Rivers have always fascinated me, there is an atmosphere about them that leads me to wild fancies. I got back to 40 Belgrave
Square from London Bridge and of course I had missed my train by half an hour at least. On Birdcage Walk, the flowers in St James Park were more beautiful almost than I have ever seen them, perhaps
they seemed so in contrast to what I had just seen.

Here Anne was able to see beauty amid the horror of war. She was also enjoying her new job. Her work at Leighton Buzzard was as a signals clerk. She learned how to use a Typex machine, a sort of
large typewriter on to which you would type a message in plain text and it would churn out an encrypted version. This would then be sent out by radio using Morse code. It was a labour-intensive way
of transmitting information but was necessary for security.

Anne, working as one of ten clerks, was amused by her colleagues’ behaviour:
Nina, bawling just like a schoolmarm . . . several thousand BAs etc and lets you know it too,
Musso, knitting on top of the Typex lid, then suddenly decides to do an OPS summary or suchlike, about six pages long, which she does almost without a mistake
, Gardenia, with her
grand sense of humour
, ‘Smithie’ (another one, this time female), Maureen McWaters, the Irish girl at the teleprinter, Topsy Stevenson
banging away
on the Typex about 100 to the dozen . . . never seems to make a mistake. She is a BA law . . . Angela just sits doing nothing and saying ‘Bloody’ and ‘My God’ every moment
and looking at the clock endlessly.

Angela Griffiths appears to be the only one not pulling her weight. Anne, though, seems to have revelled in being part of the group, perhaps even too much, for after drinking Pimm’s with
one of her new women friends at the Swan, she fainted, in front of Mr and Mrs Hunt. I couldn’t help wondering whether this was an early indication of her alcoholism.

In late May, Anne and her mother stayed at Thurlestone, as they had done the year before. The house in Hope Cove was still full of evacuees – at least twenty in a house that normally slept
nine. Anne was ecstatic about the cliffs, the light over the sea, the noise of the waves breaking against the rocks and the cries of the seagulls.
Bluebells were everywhere and larks
were soaring . . . the gorse was in bloom. The smell of the sea made me feel a kind of yearning and a wild desire for adventure in far lands . . .
Coming back to reality, she
declared:
When I look back, I am horrified at the futility of my existence.

She meant her life before the war – skiing, fishing in Scotland, Palm Beach in winter, cruising in the Caribbean – all of which she had enjoyed but now suddenly perceived as
shockingly hedonistic.

She went on to write seriously of the current war situation – the sinking of the
Bismarck
on 27 May, then, by 1 June, 15,000 Allied troops evacuated from Crete, the Allies having
lost the island to the Germans. In April there had been the bombing, then disabling, of HMS
York
while it was being repaired in Souda Bay off Crete – Anne had read about it in a
cipher before it became general news.

In early June, she visited Aunt K again and experienced a scene in the local tube station of Londoners preparing to bed down for the night:
people sitting on sacks in the passages
leading down to the platforms and there was such a wind blowing that it almost blew their skirts over their heads and I thought what it must be like to spend a whole night there in that cold
combined with the inevitable smell of the tubes.

In contrast, there were visits to Knowle – haymaking, the sweet smell of lavender, the garden full of roses. And she still had her own bit of garden there,
full of bloom . .
.
Even in wartime, Anne found stability and relaxation at Knowle, as I had often done myself.
Home, every smell and mood of it is familiar to me since I was a
child
. . .
The cream pink rose which grows on top of the stoke hole roof is perfectly lovely. They are cutting the hay . . . we spent some time turning it ourselves and
by the time I left it was almost all carted.

Here were my mother and grandmother ‘turning the hay’ as Aunt K had done as a girl at Knole, with her friend Bird, thirty years earlier.

Anne first heard of Bletchley Park on 21 May 1941, through a friend who

is in a most interesting job and is in a place known as a ‘war station’. I gather they translate things and that it is a combination of all 3 services.
They are thinking of having WAAF officers there and she is going to make enquiries about it for me. Of course she can’t tell me much about it which is tiresome. They are connected with
Transcom
[a branch of US Defense]
AMC
[Air Military Command]
on private wires. All rather exciting, though at present some of the stuff at
Transcom is thrilling and you really feel that you are doing something. I am more thankful every moment that I am in the RAF and not in the army. 3000 parachutists have landed in Crete and half of
them have been rounded up already.

Anne was curious, even enthusiastic. On 5 June through the intervention of this friend – who never appears in the diaries again – she was interviewed at Bletchley Park itself. Its
main purpose – though it is doubtful as to whether Anne would have known all this then – was the breaking of enemy codes and ciphers. Other related tasks included the study of enemy
wireless systems, the translation and clarification of decrypts, the communication of this intelligence to the government and a discussion with them of the significance of such intelligence.

In the diary she does not mention the appearance of Bletchley Park – also known as Station X – which she later found grim, but concentrates only on the interview, in which a Captain
Edgar asked her to read out a passage from an Italian newspaper, then translate it. She was then handed a test paper by Group Captain Humphreys, her future boss, containing information about
planes, which included the phrase ‘
retractable undercarriage
’. Despite her recording in her diary that the interview had been
terrifying
and that she
didn’t do very well, her stint at Madame Boni’s, and the Italian lessons that she had just taken in Nottingham while based at Hucknall, must have helped.

Her next interview, six weeks later, at the Air Ministry, with
a most charming man who spoke v. good Italian and French
, more or less clinched the job. She was told
that she might be wanted soon, after just one more interview at Whitehall.

This final interview was on 11 August, with a Squadron Commander Hill, who said that she might have to go down to the country that night, but must first report to a Miss Hogan in Broadway, SW1,
after getting some photos of herself.
Off I went to get the photos done, did some shopping and then went to lunch with Gig and then back for the photos, took them to Air Min and off to
Broadway. They gave me the wrong address
.
This was an incident that my mother would relate in later life, still wondering even then whether she had deliberately been sent to a
butcher’s shop as a test of initiative –
I found it none the less in the end and was taken to see the Grp Cpt, the CO, a most charming man, in fact they were all charming
there and this is the HQ. They gave me petrol and the GC told me to stick to my billet at all costs and not to go down till the morning. They seemed to have found out all about me and the whole
interview there was very nice. I came out pleased but shattered with exhaustion and nerve strain.

Before starting at Bletchley, Anne went on leave in early August with her mother to Craignure on the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland. Here, in this beautiful
setting –
the air soft and sweet . . . lilies and Marsh Marigolds in full bloom
– a person intrudes in the diary in a way that is shocking and disturbing. I
had been half-expecting this character to show herself, and had been on the lookout for her, without knowing her name. I assume that my mother was writing about her now because, on holiday, away
from her work routine, she had more time to reflect on a subject that, for her, was important and complex.