The Girl from Station X (27 page)

But of all the girls at Bletchley the palm must go to the 3N indexers – an ugly word for a talented group of loyal and lovely ladies. Mostly Wrens and WAAFs, they
were always on duty, keeping a record of every detail that might be needed for reference in solving some future conundrum. Often, with a gentle word, they would guide the harassed watchkeeper to
the solution that had been eluding him. One of them, a senior and impressive WAAF officer, introduced the Park to the Moped and to Nescafe – both then new to British life. She would
‘take the watch’ when one of the regulars was sick. They also lightened the burden of the main Hut 3 Index.

The ‘Moped’ must have been what my mother called her ‘autocycle’. Probably her cousin Mike, Peggie’s brother, had given her some Nescafé,
as it was the staple drink of the American troops then.

That week leading up to Operation Torch really had been my mother’s finest hour and I found myself silently applauding.

One consequence of Anne’s intense experiences during Operation Torch was that, for the first time, she really felt like an independent woman. She began, every so often,
to feel detached from Knowle, and to question the life lived there by her mother and stepfather:

Mum is still living in the pre-war atmosphere and expects me to be the same and of course I can’t be. These things don’t mean the same to me as they did
before and our outlooks are quite different. We no longer have the same aims and ideas, formerly I had my life as well and so I didn’t mind. Now I have no life at home and no life here
either, and it isn’t much fun!

Bletchley seems to have given her a kickstart in helping her to separate from her mother. This is the first time in the diaries that Anne states that they no longer have much in common. Her
confidence had clearly grown, and it must have been especially rewarding when, in early December 1942, Mountbatten came down to Bletchley.

Travis explained to the Chief that I was the Naval Adviser and he asked me whether my family had anything to do with the Navy, to which I replied that I had no
excuse for being there at all! . . . Mountbatten was v. bored and annoyed Block A considerably by spending most of his visit talking to one of the more glamorous girls in the
Index!

My father always claimed that Mountbatten, whom he had met in the navy, was ‘a most frightful shit and probably a bugger boy!’ Perhaps he had been mistaken in the
second instance.

Anne was now brimming with confidence and even dared to announce to her colleagues that she had supported saluting Admiral Somerville when he had visited the Park – Somerville was one of
the most able British admirals of the Second World War who had fought at Dunkirk and played a major role in the sinking of the
Bismarck
in May 1941. A common thread among those who wrote
about Bletchley many years later was how much they had liked its informality; many wore civilian clothes and saluting was not enforced.
I replied that if people would dress up in
uniform, the least they could do was to conform to the rules of the service, if only out of common courtesy to the King. This was not received with much applause.

Anne missed the rigour and discipline of the RAF, which is ironic, given how she let herself go in later life. She was, despite her criticisms of Bletchley, very proud of her job there and even
boasted about it in the diary, when writing about the others’ casual attitude to saluting:

I might have pointed out that my job was more important in any case than that of the whole of the rest of the watch! They are obliged now to give me the respect due
to my position as NDO and bit by bit are coming round to a more reasonable attitude . . . I am now used to being considered a person of intelligence and ability. I wish to prove to myself and them,
but more to myself, that a non-intellectual can compete in every way with those who think that brain is the one thing that matters in life and despise all those they consider to be their mental
inferiors and I have done this, to my intense satisfaction! I consider that both Lettice and I have proved that, with the education and life we have had, we are capable in all ways of competing
with the so-called workers and are therefore not degenerate or incompetent. All my life, I have had this urge to strike out for myself, to prove that from my own merits alone and not through the
position and chances I have been given I can meet life and cope with it and this war has given us the chance to show what we can do.

But she was still yearning to leave, even writing dramatically that it was
like a concentration camp one can never get out of.
(She would not be aware of the horrors of
the real concentration camps for another two and a half years.) She set out possibilities for her future.

The alternatives are as follows: To remain where I am, probably for the rest of the war, in a job I like. Dead, from every other point of view, lonely and more
introspective every day. Living for the work alone, in an atmosphere that nearly drives me mad at times and getting worse the whole time. To remain in Int. and go to Air Min., there is nowhere else
I could go with my rank. No life outside, awful hours and pretty awful people again. Make a big attempt to get onto a station, which means throwing up everything I have ever done, and all my
training, even if I were allowed to do this. Go abroad, as perhaps Code and Cipher again.

On 13 December, she wrote ruefully:
This is a man’s world all right; they have all the plum jobs.

Now, because she had done so well and shown such dedication, I began to consider my mother more seriously and feel more sympathy for her. I started to understand what it must have been like for
her, when war started, to get to grips with office life, to ‘muck in’.

All night I dreamt about before the war, when there was not this perpetual struggle and one was surrounded by congenial people and we had nice things without
feeling guilty at having them. I suppose, really, we are not all democratic by nature . . . In my dreams, which are really the only part of my life that I enjoy now, I realise in a queer kind of
way that I no longer belong to the old life any more and I seem to be peering at it for a brief glimpse out of another century, occasionally people wander into these dreams from this present life
and I feel vaguely surprised to see them and then I cling more than ever to what I know is going to vanish with the dawn. It is the lack of love and affection, or some bright light to look forward
to, to some ray of hope, that is so awful and what nearly drives me to distraction at times is the feeling that life is racing past and is going to leave us out worn out and spinsters good for
nothing. Rather than that, I believe I would kill myself.

This was melodramatic, but she seems then to have been genuinely low. I even found myself in sympathy with her feelings about the old life disappearing and her confusion over the social changes
brought about by the war. She was right about the old ‘feudal’ ways dying: soon she would note:
the government are fighting over the Beveridge report
–
this would lay the foundations of the National Health Service.

One part of her was reluctant to let the old order go.

I feel overwhelmed with a terrible sadness, at these times, I feel in a strange kind of way that my life is at an end and I cannot struggle along any more alone . .
. I can vaguely understand what it must have felt like for the White Russians to be cast out with their world smashed for ever, their country gone, to face a world, cold and hard, for which they
had never been trained to compete. Who can blame them for taking a few minutes enjoyment, on a year’s savings perhaps, of a glimpse into that lost world?

She follows with a now-dated quote from Lettice, referring to Lettice’s current boyfriend, seemingly not of her class:
Do you think I can cure Gil of saying
pardon?

Despite her new feelings of independence, Anne missed being at Knowle for the holiday.
I feel ridiculously disappointed at not being able to be home for Christmas,
though illogical.

On Christmas morning she was at 40 Belgrave Square on her own, Eva, the cook, having taken a train down to Knowle to celebrate. Anne attended a service at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, where
her parents had got married, but
only the choir sang and the congregation looked like stuffed dummies . . . I didn’t belong anyhow in that atmosphere.
She drove back
to Bletchley, had Christmas lunch of goose with Mr and Mrs Hunt, then at 3 p.m. went to work in the hut.

On 30 December, she was NDO again, and again on New Year’s Eve,
and quite enjoyed it. I am lulled into a kind of resignation now, so that I don’t think or feel anymore
except just the work.

In keeping with her new independence, Anne had made a new friend at Bletchley, Rita Davies, a Jewish woman from Glasgow. Rita pressed upon her a copy of the
Daily Worker
(the newspaper
of the Communist Party of Great Britain) and offered to show Anne the Glasgow slums. It may have been Rita who, on finding out that Anne’s family had a house in Belgrave Square, declared that
she would never have made friends with her if she’d known. My mother told me that, in response, she had recited the following lines from Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera
Iolanthe
:
‘Hearts just as pure and fair/May beat in Belgrave Square/As in the lowly air of Seven Dials.’

Probably it was this friendship with Rita that gave rise to Anne’s musings on 14 February 1943, the day she completed her first year as a flight officer:

I realise now how impossible, or at least difficult, it is to get away from one’s upbringing, certain ideas are drummed into one’s head as a child and
absorbed so that eventually they become a part of the subconscious and they often prove stronger than the adult logical reasoning of later years. After years of struggle, I have at length realised
that one’s friends must have at least some common background, the same values, the same sense of humour up to a point. With the others, one is never quite at one’s ease, there are
jarring notes. In this case, why do I feel more at home with someone like Rita Davies than I do with Mary Cochrane for instance? It is difficult for me to have been brought up still with feudal
ideas, drummed into us since we can first remember such things as pride in our family, setting an example always to ‘our people’. Taught always that we are better than the rest and
coming to believe it, against all reasoned judgement.

She was still struggling with her new working-woman identity and wondering about the values with which she had been brought up.

March 18th 1943.

I have had just about enough of this war and sometimes I think I can’t bear it any more. I must either take a lover or marry someone, this life with no
affection and no colour is killing me, it is cumulative and now that I’m going away from it and feel better in health, I feel I just can’t bear it . . . suddenly I get a glimpse of what
life might be and it was as though I suddenly received a mortal blow and I recoil from it and want to return to Bletchley to the only life I know now, that of soul annihilation. I feel a strange
kind of peace again when I get back, it is as though I no longer exist any more and am just a shadow with no thoughts and no feelings, safe from this terrible mental torment that overwhelms me like
a cloud. How people can live their whole lives like this passes my understanding.

I was torn between finding these sentiments melodramatic and feeling sympathy. When I was nineteen, as a junior secretary in New York, I also had felt stifling boredom, almost despair. Each
morning I had strap-hung on the subway ten or more stations downtown to beyond Wall Street, pressed so tightly to the other office workers that once I didn’t even notice a man masturbating on
my coat till I got on to the escalator and saw the result. To try to detach myself, I would memorise passages from T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, a strangely cheerless choice. I had
wanted to go to America and experience the protest movement but probably hadn’t really taken in what it would be like in the Public Relations and Communications department in a multinational
company’s office below Wall Street, for which I was supremely unsuited, despite having done a Sight and Sound typing course in Oxford Street before I went.

I never confided to my mother my loneliness and my dislike of that deadly job, partly perhaps because I had begged to go to America in the first place and she had found work for me in what had
once been her grandfather and great-uncle’s firm. If I had told her how I’d hated it, and longed to be free at once to travel round America, would she have sympathised, thinking of her
own stultifying hours in certain offices in the WAAF?

Despite her own frequent complaints in the diary about her work, Anne, who at the start of the war did not know how to make a cup of tea, had risen to do an important job. But
in many ways she was still emotionally like a child. When she finally learned that she could leave Bletchley after all – there is nothing in her diary to explain why this was now possible
– she became confused and indecisive, and on top of that came a blow – Zost, her beloved Pyrenean mountain dog, had to be put to sleep due to creeping paralysis. Shortly before,
although he could hardly walk, Zost miraculously followed my mother to the top of the Knowle garden, where she saw him
standing in the daffodils in the orchard, wagging his tail and
looking so happy and pleased with himself. It was such a flashback to the old happier days that for a moment or two, I couldn’t believe there was anything the matter.