Back to our “story”! Is it time to talk about the Bletchley girls?
I have written about them often, because these extraordinarily smart young women were an important part of my childhood. Fiona, Vivian, and my mother’s sister Gay. Not long ago I found their names inscribed in the book at what is now the Bletchley Park visitor center. The place has become a famous tourist attraction, now that the contribution of the men and women who worked there during World War II is widely known through books, films, and television programs. Back then, and for many years thereafter, their success in utilizing the captured Enigma machine to break Nazi military codes was “very hush-hush”, and the girls who came to live in our house, an easy bike ride from Bletchley, were sworn to secrecy.
To me, a little boy, these women were mysterious, exotic, glamorous creatures. Their perfumed, powdered feminine presence loomed far above me, alluring in ways I was not yet able to understand. I remember, particularly, the sensual physical appeal of Fiona, a young woman whose body aroused in me what must have been, unrecognized, my very first sexual urges. She would have been no more that twenty-one, twenty-two, surely, full of fun and full of erotic energy.
For you, I suspect, Harry, a virile and physically-aware man in his mid-thirties, a man in need of adulation, she must have been… temptation in the flesh. My mother once told me, later in life, that there had been parlous moments in your relationship, and I have wondered if you ever succumbed to the carnal temptations you would preach about to others. Certainly, if anyone, this was the young woman whose attractions could have lured you into her all-too conveniently located bed.
But listen, Harry, there is an even darker side to your relationship with the Bletchley girls, one that I learned about to my dismay—and entirely by accident—years later, in researching the Bletchley story, when I happened upon a book called “The Hidden History of Bletchley Park: A Social and Organizational History”, by one C. Smith. I wonder if you ever knew about it? Ever read this passage:
while most residents appear to have been incurious, there were some locals, intrigued by the arrival of a military installation in their town, who attempted to discover what was going on. One such example was reported to CG&CS’s (Government Code and Cypher School) security staff, who recorded the incident in some detail:
“There is a parson in this neighborhood whose name is the Rev. Harry L. Clothier, The Rectory, Aspley Guise. We have had a number of people billeted there from time to time and as a host he is very kind. He has, however, apparently acquired a good deal of information about Bletchley Park, some of which gets rather close to the knuckle. The four girls who are billeted there now are getting a good deal disturbed about hm because he not only seems to try and catch them out with the idea of obtaining a little more information, but he repeats what he knows to everyone that comes to the house and seems to take a quite unchristian delight in getting the girls into an awkward position when introducing strangers.”
Well, Harry, to say I was shocked to read this is a vast understatement. Shocked that the Bletchley girls (Smith reports four of them; I remember only three) were “getting a good deal disturbed” about you, that you were repeating what you knew to “everyone that comes into the house,” that you took such “unchristian delight in getting the girls into an awkward position”—all this was news to me. But I was perhaps especially shocked because the report seemed, well… so believable. So much in character. Smith continues:
if the [security] agency was too heavy handed with offenders then that, in and of itself, would have been revealing. As a result, CG&CS appears to have taken a policy of trying to frighten offenders into silence as opposed to resorting to legal action. In the case of Reverend Clothier, it was decided that the best course of action was that he be ‘officially warned to keep his mouth shut.’ Rather ominously, the security official suggested that what the Reverend required was ‘a thorough frightening.’
So, Harry, I can’t imagine what it meant for a proud man like yourself to be “officially warned to keep your mouth shut.” Do you recall having received that “thorough frightening” from the security agency? How did they frighten you? With threats? Were you chastened by the experience? Were you any less chummy with the girls, more circumspect in what you broadcast from then on?
You always were something of a jokester and I’m sure you thought your intrusiveness with the Bletchley girls was a rather harmless piece of entertainment. That government security officials saw it as potential treachery is alarming. I wish I had learned about it in some way other than reading a history book written by some anonymous stranger.
As usual, too, I wish that I knew more.
Your ever questioning son, Peter
No comments:
Post a Comment