Bletchley Blue

The train from Euston was forty minutes late and smelled of wet wool and coal smoke, and Mara Lowther spent the whole of it pretending to read.

It was the second week of February, 1942. Outside the window, Hertfordshire went by in shades of grey: grey fields under a skin of old snow, grey hedges, grey sky pressing down on the chimneys of grey towns. Inside the compartment, an RAF sergeant slept with his mouth open, a woman knitted something khaki with savage speed, and two young men in good overcoats talked loudly about a cricket match from 1938 as if nothing had happened since.

Mara had a letter in her coat pocket. It had come to the house in Much Wenlock three weeks ago, on thick cream paper with no letterhead, and it said only that Mara should report to Bletchley station on the eleventh, with luggage for an extended stay, and should not discuss the matter with anyone. It was signed with initials nobody in the family recognised.

Before the letter, there had been the interview. A room in London, near Broadway, with a gas fire that didn't work and a man in a tweed jacket who had asked Mara to translate a paragraph of German about the price of herring, and then a paragraph about a submarine, and then had asked, quite casually, whether Mara did crosswords. Mara had said yes. He had asked how fast. Mara had told him. He had written something down and said, "Thank you. That will be all," and Mara had gone home on the train thinking it had gone badly.

Mother had wanted to know what kind of job didn't have a name. Father had said, from behind the newspaper, "The kind you don't ask about, Norah," and turned a page, and Mother had stopped asking.

Robin had written from his training establishment on the south coast: A job with no name! How thrilling. I expect you'll be parachuted into Berlin with a cyanide pill in your molar. Do write and tell me everything, so I can tell nobody. Your devoted brother, Sub-Lieutenant (very nearly) R. Lowther, RNVR.

Mara had laughed for a whole minute at that. Then had sat on the edge of the bed with the letter, and thought about Robin in a uniform at sea, and stopped laughing.

Mara had kept that letter too. It was in the same pocket as the cream one. Between them, they felt like the two halves of something Mara did not yet understand: the part of life that could be told, and the part that could not.

The train slowed. A station sign slid past, its name painted out the way every station sign in England had been painted out since 1940, so that invading Germans would not know where they were. It didn't matter. The guard came down the corridor calling, "Bletchley! Bletchley! Change for Oxford and Cambridge!" and the two young men in good overcoats stopped talking about cricket, stood up, and reached for their suitcases at exactly the same moment as Mara.

They all looked at one another.

Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to.

Mara said nothing. Mara got down onto the platform first, into a thin cold drizzle, and walked briskly towards the exit with her suitcase bumping against her knee, and heard the two young men come down behind, also saying nothing, very loudly.

At the bottom of the footbridge, all three of them stopped, because none of them knew where to go.

There was a long moment.

"I think," said the taller one, at last, "it's that way." He nodded towards a path that ran beside the railway, towards a line of trees and a high wire fence. "I asked a porter at Euston. He said, 'Oh, that place,' and winked at me."

"Did he," said the shorter one, appalled.

"It's apparently the worst-kept secret in Buckinghamshire," said the taller one, and then went red, as if even saying that much might be treason.

"Well," said Mara, "it's the best-kept secret in my family. My mother thinks I'm going to work for the Ministry of Food."

That got a small laugh from both of them, which felt like a victory.

After that they walked towards the trees in single file, not speaking much, like people going to the funeral of someone none of them had met.

The path ran beside the railway line for a quarter of a mile, under bare dripping trees. A goods train went by, very slowly, wagon after wagon of coal, and the ground shook. Somewhere behind the fence, a bicycle bell rang, and a woman laughed, and a door banged. It sounded, Mara thought, like a boarding school. It sounded entirely ordinary. That was, perhaps, the cleverest thing about it.

The gate was guarded by a soldier with a rifle and a face like a closed door. He looked at Mara's letter for a long time, then at Mara, then at the letter again, and then he lifted the barrier, and Mara walked into Bletchley Park.

It was not what Mara had imagined. Mara had imagined something grim and grand: a fortress, perhaps, or a bunker in a hillside. Instead there was a big, ugly, comfortable Victorian mansion, all red brick and green copper domes and mismatched windows, as if several architects had argued and all of them had won. There was a lake with ducks on it. There was a lawn. And scattered all over the lawn and among the trees, like toy buildings dropped by a careless child, were huts. Long, low, wooden huts, painted green, with blackout boards over the windows and smoke drifting from little tin chimneys. Some had numbers painted on their ends. People hurried between them with their collars up, carrying folders and cups of tea, not looking at each other.

In a cold room in the mansion with a portrait of somebody's grandfather over the fireplace, a man in uniform gave Mara a document and a pen.

"The Official Secrets Act," he said. "Read it. Sign it. Then I'll explain what it means, because nobody ever reads it properly."

Mara read it, properly. Then signed.

The man took it back and blotted the signature. "Now," he said. "What it means is this. From today, you will not tell anyone what you do here. Not your mother. Not your sweetheart. Not your vicar. Not the person in the hut next to yours, unless they need to know it to do their job. You will not tell anyone in ten years' time, or twenty, or on your deathbed. If anybody asks, you are doing clerical work for the Foreign Office, and it is very dull." He looked up. "Do you have family in the services?"

"My brother," said Mara. "Royal Navy. He's just been commissioned."

The man nodded slowly, as if that were the answer he had expected. "Then you will find this harder than most," he said. "Some of what you see here will be about ships. Some of those ships may be near your brother. You will not be able to warn him. You will not be able to tell him anything, ever, even after the war." He held Mara's eyes. "If that is going to be impossible for you, say so now, and you can go home on the four o'clock train, and no one will think any less of you."

The room was very quiet. Somewhere outside, a duck quacked on the lake.

Mara thought of Robin's letter. Do write and tell me everything, so I can tell nobody.

"I understand," said Mara.

"Good," said the man. "Welcome to Bletchley Park. You're in Hut 4. Naval Section. Somebody will show you where to go." He stood up. "One more thing." He hesitated, and for the first time looked less like an official and more like a tired man in a cold room. "This place is full of very clever people doing very hard work, and most days it will feel like nothing you do makes the slightest difference. It does. I can't tell you how. I can't tell you when. But it does. Remember that, on the bad nights."

He sat down again, and picked up his pen. "And you'll need a billet. The billeting office will sort you out. Try not to get the one in Wolverton with the landlady who keeps goats."