The Girl from Station X (24 page)

Perhaps my mother’s charm had also worked on Dr Moncrieff. Her sick leave from Bletchley would end up lasting two and a half months.

Anne does not seem to have paid much attention to the doctor’s advice to rest. Her convalescent lifestyle sounds far more hectic than the job. She went out dancing with
Terence O’Neill (who later married Jean, my mother’s companion in the Balkans) at the Mirabelle, motored to Epping with him and his brother-in-law, then, back in London, shopped,
lunched with Terence at the Berkeley, where she saw her friend Babe, and dined with her friend Diana at Le Cigale.

December 16th 1941.

This holiday came in the nick of time and has been such a mental and physical rest; it has made the whole difference to life. Still don’t feel too good and
have a fever each night.

Jean suggested to me that Anne as a young woman could have suffered from glandular fever, not diagnosed then, and which I had had myself in my early twenties – I went to Knowle to
recuperate. It would have accounted for Anne’s high temperatures and bouts of depression. Was I being too hard on her?

December 30th 1941. Knowle.

I feel so depressed about 6 each evening and could burst into tears. It is the queerest feeling, not exactly depression, but I would like to cry my eyes out and it
comes on every night about the same hour and has done for the last 3 evenings.

On 7 December, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor –
So at last, America is with us . . . it is a pleasant feeling, now that we are all together at last
.

Anne would spend Christmas that year at Knowle.

December 21st 1941.

Heavenly day, like Switzerland. We picked some holly. The berries are simply superb this winter, masses of them.

The Russians have re-taken another largish town and Hitler has taken over supreme command of the German army.

The next day she was in London again, shopping for hats, noting the poor quality of their felt, due to the war. Books, she added, were now printed on coarse paper, had pages missing, and often
the same letter was repeated two or three times in one word.

In London another doctor, Sir John Weir, and Dr Moncrieff suggested that she might have jaundice. (I wondered, perhaps ignobly, if she had found ‘tame’ doctors in these two, who
would be inclined to recommend long rests. But the ‘rests’ only resulted in more frantic socialising. No wonder she went on having temperatures!)

On 1 January 1942, she visited Babe’s sister in Lincolnshire, where she rode a grey horse and enjoyed herself. She returned via King’s Cross, where, shamed by a woman porter
half my size
, she explained that she had just got out of her
sickbed
. That evening she was out again with Terence at the Mirabelle, the 400 and
the Embassy, and the following day, to lunch and a movie.

I have no vitality
, she wrote that evening, with astonishing lack of self-awareness. Meanwhile 40 Belgrave Square was
like an ice-house
. There
had been no glass in the windows of her bedroom since the Blitz.

A fortnight later, she was still on sick leave.

January 13th 1942. 40 Belgrave Square.

Snow on the ground and the trees in the square looked so pretty covered in snow. Shopping and lunch with Kata and Patrick
[Kata’s son]
and a movie. In the evening, Margaret and I went to see ‘Blithe Spirit’ and ate later at the ‘Cigale’. Saw Moncrieff. I am not to go back until the 30th
now.

Anne walked miles in the snow, from Belgrave Square to Selfridges, then down Bond Street and across Piccadilly, ending with the war artists’ exhibition in Trafalgar Square. She tried to
understand the
fanciful
work of Paul Nash, described his planes looking like
various animals
, and returned to scrutinise the paintings a second
time.

Still nostalgic for
the old jokes of Bicester days
, she then strolled through Grosvenor Square, hoping to see the WAAFs manning the balloons, but none were to be seen,
not surprising as it was bitterly cold and the one balloon snow coated.

January 15th 1942.

Down to Knowle. Nice and quiet, it is terribly cold and the sky all overcast as though it was going to snow some more, but it never does; though the snow is still
lying on the ground. We are cutting trees in the woods and getting £1 per tree for them from the lumber kings.

January 16th. 40 Belgrave Square.

I had a temperature again of 99.8 before I went out, 40 is like an ice cube and I sleep in my dressing gown and when I lay in bed in the morning the air is so cold
that I can see my breath.

Despite her temperature, she was out late that night at the Berkeley. Next day it was Pimm’s at the Dorchester, followed by golden plover.
I love those birds so much but it was
v. good.

Over Christmas, thousands of people had died of starvation in Leningrad as a result of the German siege that had started in September. My mother does not mention the siege but was keeping track
of other events in the Soviet Union:
The Russians are reported to be fighting in the streets of Orel and are only 60 miles from Smolensk, which is Hitler’s HQ.

The weather in England that winter sounds almost Russian, certainly at Knowle, where the snow hung around without falling, where there was no sun for days and at midday it was almost as dark as
in the evening.

In late January, she heard some upsetting news. Alan was engaged, to
some girl in Windsor. It gave me an awful shock somehow and yet I couldn’t have married him myself,
although I was in love with him for a long time
. Alan had not answered her last two letters, the first of which, she said, had evidently given him the impression that all was finished
between them. She had then written to congratulate him on his DFC, but he had not replied to that either. She had not written again, having realised that she was no longer in love with him.
However, this news of his engagement sent her into the depths of despair:
sometimes I feel as though I shall run out in the street and marry the first man who comes along, because this
is just a series of being left out in the cold and at times the nostalgia of the whole thing drives me into the very depths of depression and yet I’m made so that I must have these affairs or
go crazy. I suppose I’m much too serious about the whole thing.

She had rejected
him
but still couldn’t help feeling unwanted. Her friend Cynthia had married the previous month, and now, two days after that news about Alan, Anne’s other
close friend Diana decided to marry a brigadier over twenty years older than her and with a son aged twelve. Juliet was about to marry Trevor, her New Zealand pilot, and a colleague at Bletchley
– another Anne – got engaged to a soldier in the Scots Guards. Then, three weeks after the news about Alan, her former fiancé David wrote to tell Anne that he was engaged to an
Irish girl.

There were compensations.

January 22nd 1942. Knowle.

One, if not the loveliest morning I’ve spent since the war. Just ski-ing by myself and breaking new snow in yet untrodden fields whilst the sun shone and the
snow glistened. The wax gave out that glorious smell when it melts in the sun and my skis slid through the powder snow with no effort at all. Overhead, the sky was a brilliant blue and for once I
did not envy the fighter pilot who whined over me quite low and I wondered if he could see a lone skier in the fields and what he thought about it if he did
.

Skiing, tennis, rock-climbing, flying: the pure pleasure of these physical activities enabled her to forget the war and her personal problems. I loved to read about Knowle in
the snow, and of her joy in skiing. For once, all too rarely, my mother was happy.

Anne at last returned to her work at Bletchley in mid-February 1942. In the following months, she did not have time to be bored. By May, she had really got into her stride with her work.

May 1st 1942.

Capt. Bennett on and v. helpful. Nicest of the duty officers I’ve struck yet. The way in which it is assumed that I can check Hut 4 and see the
D.O.s
[duty officers]
make no mistake on so short a training is past belief. The job is terrifying really, there are so many things I can slip on.

She seemed, in this situation, to come out better than some of her colleagues – one girl, Elizabeth, had been given special permission not to work nights as she

couldn’t take it. When Elizabeth came in this morning, grumbling and saying, ‘I must be taken off this — job at once’ I could have killed
her, as we are doing this 3 weekly business for her sake alone and I think, as it will be 8 weeks since she went on sick leave last, that she might make the effort to try again, as she knows the
job is going to end in any case, instead, she almost brags about having burst into tears in the middle of the night.

Anne seemed to have conveniently forgotten about her own two and a half months’ absence. She added robustly – her long sick leave had no doubt done her good – that she was
hoping to give a dinner party the following evening:
after this war, we should all be wonderful organizers.

This new-found confidence was so unlike the mother I knew. She was rewarded, for on 2 May she received a letter from De Haan, stating that she been granted
Acting Paid Rank of
Fl.Off. WEF 14th Feb 1942. Authority Air Min Acting list 112/42 dated 28.3.42. Of course I was thrilled to bits.

The next day was a
terrific party with John, Terence and Lettice and then to the Trout.
Soon, however, Anne was back to her almost obsessive dislike of those she worked
with, this time as observed in the Bletchley cafeteria –
all these filthy civilians with their greasy hair and dirty trousers. How I hate the men too, except dear little Captain
Bennett.
She added perversely:

Were I a man I should go mad working in the Hut service . . . I long for the dullest job, provided it is to do with operations of some kind, which is the nearest to
doing the ops. oneself. It is in action and in risking one’s life and in the achievement of the perfect harmony of mind and body that is needed for success in action that one rises to supreme
heights, not over papers at a desk.

Harking back again to Bomber Command, she noted that the RAF were
bombing German towns constantly
–
Lübeck, Hamburg and other
ports
. Her longing for action was perhaps unsurprising. After all, she was the daughter of a soldier. Her father had already served in South Africa and India before being sent to
France with his regiment in August 1914. But he was not just a man of action. He had published that book,
Finance and War
, and, from a folder of letters of condolence to my grandmother
(labelled, in her writing,
To be kept for Anne
), I read that, shortly before his fatal accident, he had just been transferred from the front and put into an Intelligence job, which was why
he was on his way to Dunkirk.

My mother, as I would see from her RAF record, had, by the end of the war, clocked up
six
jobs in Intelligence between 1941 and 1945. Surely she could see that it was possible to
perform daredevil feats like those of the fighter pilots – her father had obtained his pilot’s certificate for aviation at the Cavalry School in Netheravon before the First World War
–
and
to use one’s intellect?

But in her diary, in reaction to those whom she perceived as conceited male intellectuals, she kept insisting that she had
no admiration for the brain.

One interesting aspect of Bletchley was the synergy between the three services. Anne had been working under F.L. Lucas, a writer and lecturer from King’s College,
Cambridge, in a research section called 3R. But now, with the arrival of three naval officers sent by the Admiralty, 3R became 3N, a Naval Section, and on 4 May 1942, Hut 3 was taken over by the
navy. A Lieutenant Commander Lavers became Anne’s boss, and Lucas was relieved, to develop the research section of Hut 3, which became 3G. From now on, Anne, though still a WAAF, would work
at Bletchley with the navy.

A Paymaster Lt. Haslam, who has just come back from the Mediterranean, came over to learn our stuff and Lt. Cdr. Lavers was also there this evening. He is to
replace Mr Lucas and there are to be 3 naval officers under him to work watches, so I suppose we shall gradually all go.

The reorganisation of Hut 3 had come about because of the increasingly significant part the work of the hut had been playing in operations abroad. Hut 3 staff had become more experienced at
identifying what information they had gleaned from Enigma would be of use and at dispatching it in an intelligible way. One of the code breakers’ finest moments had been the previous year,
when Hitler sent Rommel to help the struggling Italian army push back the Allies in North Africa. They managed to break the key used between army and air forces in Libya within days of Rommel
landing at Tripoli, so were quickly able to provide information on his plans and movements. For the first time, a direct line of communication was set up between Hut 3 and the intelligence services
stationed in Cairo, cutting out the conventional chain of command via the War Office and Air Ministry.