BLETCHLEY, REVISITED

Dear Harry,

My apologies for the long silence. Shortly after I last wrote I developed a truly horrible cold and have been laid up for several days. Fearing that I might have somehow contracted the latest variant of the current coronavirus epidemic, I even went to the hospital for a test, but happily that turned out negative. So what I've been suffering from is "just a cold."

But I have not been totally incapacitated. I have been able to write--and have been in touch with my Facebook "friends" (all three thousand of them; again, don't ask, it would take far too long to explain to a mind attuned to 20th century technology--BBC radio and the early days of television!) to keep them abreast of things. It is gratifying to know that I have such a great resource of people who care to read what I write, and sometimes even respond with their own thoughts and comments.

Otherwise, I have been reading--principally a long novel called "The Rose Code" by Kate Quinn, a book that I think you would have enormously enjoyed. As I have perhaps too frequently reminded you, you were always a great fan of tales of mystery and suspense, and this one would have especially intrigued you because its milieu is the place I wrote about in my letter last week: Bletchley Park. I reminded you of our personal connection with this incredibly hush-hush, historic center of World War II intelligence activity because we had three of those super-smart "Bletchley girls" living with in the Rectory at Aspley Guise. Believe it or not, three of those girls in Kate Quinn's book are billeted in a three-story redbrick Queen Anne house... in Aspley Guise! Sound familiar?

One of the three main characters in Quinn's book, all Bletchley girls, shares a lot of personal history with Sarah Baring, whose book we talked about together just last week--which irritated me a bit at the start, I have to say, until I discovered in an afterword that the borrowings were fully and forthrightly attributed. With the other two, all from quite different social backgrounds and of starkly different character, she leads us through the intense, at times harrowing experience of the work of those codebreakers on which the lives of so many service-men and -women came to depend. It's a compelling story of incredibly hard work, incredibly long hours, and above all the personal cost of the absolute imperative to maintain strict secrecy in such a hothouse environment. 

Quinn's skill is to wind the clock back as well as forward for her three young women, following their fortunes and misfortunes, their love affairs and poignant animosities, their loyalties and betrayals through the war years. What was an engaging read for the first half of the book becomes, in the second half, a real page-turner, galloping toward a climax in which the three friends rediscover their deep attachment even as they uncover a dreadful truth about the events at Bletchley Park. 

I was hooked. Okay, I'll confess that some remaining cynical part in my pragmatic, determinedly unsentimental male persona was irked by what seemed to me a few excessive moments of romance. But I was taken by the main characters--a "debutante" whose mother has a permanent suite at Claridges and is, before the war, presented to the King at court; a bright, keen, somewhat cynical social climber from the working-class East End of London; and a shy, seemingly slow-witted country girl, bullied horribly by her mother, who hides an Asperger's genius mind within. I was taken, too, as much by the gripping images of London in the Blitz as by the tense, harried scenes in the "huts" of Bletchley Park.

All in all, an excellent read, Harry, and one you would have loved--as you loved those Bletchley girls!

Gratefully---this time for the love of books like this!--your son, Peter