The Girl from Station X (23 page)

I was tantalised and, after trawling through
The Times
index and finding nothing, I obtained help from the librarian in my local library’s reference section, who helpfully sent me
to the
Westminster and Pimlico News
, off Victoria Street. Within ten minutes, I had found in its archives the newspaper report of 18 September 1942:

The inquest report went on for three pages. Had Mrs Mandeville ever shown suicidal tendencies? No, was the answer. Angela Griffiths was quoted as saying that she had found the
‘deceased’ on top of the lift, but then denied that there had been ‘any kind of a row’ in the flat. It emerged, in further questioning, that the porter of the block –
this was the building that my mother had visited, in which the two women had shared a bedroom – had heard raised voices. Angela Griffiths ended up with a black eye, acquired, she told the
court, while getting the ‘deceased’ off the top of the lift.

Angela Griffiths was also asked if she had struck her own visiting mother that night. She did not answer that question directly but admitted to having been angered by her mother’s
dismissive remark about the ‘deceased’, more or less stating that her demise did not matter as long as Angela was all right. There were also queries about the lift’s
mechanism.

I felt strange when I read of these events connected with my mother’s past. They reminded me of a scene from a Terence Rattigan play. I recalled my grandmother telling me
about the incident (without giving Griffiths’s name, which she had probably forgotten), as if to illustrate how dangerous it was to associate with such types. Indeed, my grandmother had given
me the sinister impression that, at any moment, a lesbian could turn herself into a murderess.

And Angela had confessed to my mother that she was
very jealous and possessive
. It could have been Anne in that lift shaft.

A
nne’s first day at Bletchley Park, 12 August 1941, sounds grim.
It is the most peculiar place, masses of odd-looking civil
servants and men with orange shirts and long hair about.
Adding that she feared she would never be the kind of person who could be unaffected by their environment, Anne also found
herself fazed by Bletchley’s laissez-faire atmosphere. Unlike most of the others there, she insisted on always carrying her gas mask and wearing a hat and gloves when going out. At once she
began to worry about being so cut off from the RAF, and wondered whether she had made the right decision in coming.

Bletchley Park was situated midway between Oxford and Cambridge and a forty-minute train ride from London. By the time Anne arrived, it was already playing a crucial part in the war, as a secret
Intelligence Centre. It was here that, famously, the code used by the German armed forces to transmit information was broken by the Enigma encryption and decryption machine. Dotted around the
grounds a number of temporary buildings had been erected which were called huts and given numbers. It was in these huts that the bulk of the work was done. Each hut had its own function. Anne had
been allocated the job of an indexer in Hut 3, where about seventy-five people worked on a three-shift system. Its main purpose was to translate, interpret and act upon intelligence that had been
received and decrypted in another hut. It was a complex operation that was organised using a hub and spoke system. In other words there was a central operations room, called the Central Watch Room,
where intelligence was first handled. Here, representatives from the three sections, Naval, Military and Air, worked, unusually, together. The spokes of the operation were the divisions of each of
these three sections within the hut, and information would be passed backwards and forwards from the Central Watch Room down through the chain of command.

One of the most important tasks was to maintain a minutely detailed indexing system so that whenever a new piece of information came in, it would be broken down into its component parts and each
piece of information recorded in a separate file. The idea was to create a database so that if you needed to find out about a particular ship, officer or place, all previous intelligence on it
could be instantly accessed.

Anne’s job was to work on this indexing system – on the face of it a menial task, but essential to the smooth running of the hut. It was in fact a very complex task, because of the
volume of information coming in and because there were code names in use within the messages which had to be puzzled over. There were service abbreviations, service jargon, acronyms and slang used
within the messages from unit to unit. Plunged into this new and daunting job, Anne did not write her diary for a fortnight. Then, on 6 September 1941, she was cheered by an unexpected visitor to
Hut 3.
In came the PM himself, smoking the proverbial cigar and looking very well and pleased with life.
Churchill, after sitting down at the desk of Anne’s boss,
Group Captain Robert Humphreys, and reading some reports, declared:
‘Well, if we don’t win the war with information like that I don’t know how we shall win
it!’

Anne was thrilled. She wrote more of Churchill’s visit:

We are rather pleased with ourselves . . . as thanks to some of our information we have sunk a huge convoy in the Mediterranean. He only went into Hut 6 and our
Hut, in fact the whole thing was rather thrilling. He went out and made a speech at the main building but we missed hearing it. It appears however to have pleased everyone very much indeed and he
said how important the place was and that it might easily shorten the war and that he thanked all the personnel working there on behalf of the government . . . it really was rather a thrill to see
him, in our office, sitting at Humphreys’ desk and looking at our Middle East reports! Later Humphreys circulated a letter thanking us all for our work and help, which was very nicely worded
and made us all feel pretty good. The P.M. at his speech outside the main building said: ‘It is amazing that a place that looks so simple can really be so sinister.’

De Haan has told me that B.P. is one of the most amazing places of this war, so I suppose it should console me for a lot of other things.

Flight Lieutenant De Haan, another of Anne’s superiors, was right. In July 1941, a month before Anne arrived, the Italian cipher, C38m, had been broken by Bletchley. Edward Thomas, in his
essay ‘A Naval Officer in Hut 3’ in
Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park
, edited by F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp, explains the significance of this:

this yielded, among other things, advance warning of the sailing dates, routes and composition of virtually all trans Mediterranean supply convoys and it also threw
occasional light on Italian main-fleet movements. During 1941 the gist of the relevant Enigma decrypts had been signalled by Hut 3 to the Mediterranean authorities by the SCU/SLU [the special
communications unit and special liaisons unit] channel, while that of the C38m decrypts had been sent by a part-naval, part-civilian processing watch in Hut 4 separately to Malta and elsewhere. An
outstanding result of these messages would be a spate of sinkings in late 1941, which played a big part in Rommel’s retreat to El Agheila at that time.

Despite the work being interesting, Anne was unhappy, stating in the diary that she was so miserable that she scarcely knew how to get through the day and that she could not bear to go on like
this, wasting the best time of her life, that she had a mad longing to do something desperate –
something that will gratify the senses. An affair with someone in London would be
the answer to all problems.

My mother’s self-pitying side shows itself more in these Bletchley diaries than in any other of the war diaries. She found the life there colourless and, although not sybaritic by nature,
she yearned for material comforts –
lovely furniture, flowers, chintzes and plenty of everything. Just for 24 hours.

She was not the only one at Bletchley who reacted like this. The naval officer Edward Thomas wrote of the ‘grimness of its barbed wire defences and the cold and dinginess of its hutted
accommodation’, and Diana Payne, a Wren, later described her first sight of it: ‘a hideous Victorian mansion standing in grounds with several large huts . . . a strange assortment of
civilians going in and out of the building’.

Supporting Anne during this early Bletchley period was Mrs Hunt. Since Leighton Buzzard and Bletchley were so close, Anne was able to continue as the Hunts’ lodger and remained friends
with them. When I was about ten, Mrs Hunt stayed with us in Sussex, accompanying me to a village fete, where my dog Buzzy uncharacteristically lifted his leg on my sandal, probably out of
excitement at the little dog show. A man made a lewd remark which Mrs Hunt chose to ignore; I remember her as a protective and benign presence. Each year, she would send me a Christmas card with a
handkerchief inside.

Now I read about all her kindnesses to my mother, how she put
apricot cream roses
in the younger woman’s room, saying she had picked them because they reminded
her of Anne’s
lovely complexion
, and how she managed to acquire three bottles of gin for Anne ‘under the counter’. I hope she never knew that my mother
became a serious drinker.

Anne’s moods fluctuated wildly in these weeks of early autumn 1941. Sometimes she loathed Bletchley, then she would change her mind and decide that she had been right after all to get out
of Code and Cipher work, where she really had just been a clerk, and into Intelligence, where there were definitely
some openings
, and which in reality suited her better.
She added that her ambition was to become a flight officer, the next rank up in the WAAF:
I should get a terrific kick out of it.

In October 1941, her close friend Cynthia, who had been at Knowle when Alan threatened to shoot himself, became engaged and Anne again turned down poor John M –
I suddenly knew
that I couldn’t
bear
to marry him even if it meant my remaining an old maid all my life.
She would contemplate marrying him
several times after that.

Meanwhile she had made a new lifelong friend, Lettice Ashley-Cooper, first mentioned in Anne’s diary on the day of Churchill’s visit that September. Lettice was urging Anne to share
a cottage, saying that this would make their life at Bletchley more bearable.

Lettice was very loyal. However, they seem to have fuelled one another’s discontent. Lettice, more robust and self-assured, had many friends and relations in high places and was always
scheming for ways for them both to leave Bletchley. And Anne, while admitting that
the work is fascinating
, still yearned to be back with the RAF and for
life
with a capital L.

The first war diaries had shown my mother doing her best, and had thus been a pleasant surprise, but suddenly this changed. I was shocked when I read the first page of her next diary.

December 1st 1941. Knowle.

I am still in bed eating masses of oranges, which seems incredible, as they are reserved for children under six. They are just what I like these days and seem to do
me good too. Dr Moncrieff says that my heart is tired and that I am to stay here until Thursday.

Apart from eating oranges reserved for children as part of rationing, my mother was skiving off from Bletchley after less than four months. I was suspicious of her quoting her doctor, as I had
known her often to exaggerate an illness when she wanted to get out of something. Due to a cold, she had been very late at the party to celebrate my own wedding and would not have shown up at all
if Molly had not stepped in at the last moment and driven her to London. Guests, particularly her own friends, kept asking me: ‘Where’s your mother?’ She would do the same two and
a half years later at my son’s christening, getting lost and simply not turning up at all.

She had also cancelled going to Majorca with a Sussex friend, Susan S, at two days’ notice, announcing importantly: ‘My doctor
strongly
advises me not to go!’ Susan
could not recover her air fare but my mother was seen lunching out near Susan’s house the next day, and shortly afterwards went to Russia, a place where she
did
want to go.

In early December 1941, Dr Moncrieff sent her to Knowle for a week to recover, then told her not to return to the office until Boxing Day.
It is a marvellous
prospect and I don’t intend to let myself feel guilty, because I have needed a rest for ages and have had no leave for a long time either, so if possible, I intend to return feeling really
well for once.

Her defiance about lack of guilt – she obviously
did
feel a bit bad about not going back earlier to Bletchley – was also familiar to me. She would employ a similar tone when
declaring: ‘I’ve decided to buy myself a present!’ Perhaps the most ludicrous example of this was in the early 1990s, when Molly, a busy woman, drove her from Sussex to Sloane
Square, a two-hour journey, to buy at Peter Jones a large china rabbit, of which she already had several, and back again.