Every year Herself and a friend embark on what she deprecatingly calls an old lady holiday, though it’s not really that. It’s more of a nerd trip, without dressing up as Klingons or visiting films sets. Instead they pack coats and sensible shoes and visit places that interest them.
Last year they went to Jane Austen country. They walked around crumbling old piles and heard stories about tragedy and unspoken passion. There was a lot of dying from consumption.
This year they visited Bletchley Park, the home of the second World War codebreakers. Neither of them is particularly interested in militarism, but they were attracted to the idea of ordinary people involved in something extraordinary. In the movie version of the story, The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, the focus is on the genius, and tragedy, of Alan Turing’s life, along with a few Oxbridge boffins: sitting in the panelled rooms of the main house, smoking pipes and designing the house-sized computers used to break the German codes. Of course, the project would never have happened without them, but the main bulk of the labour was carried out by people who didn’t know what they were doing.
In those days Bletchley wasn’t close to any towns (Milton Keynes wasn’t created until decades later), so everyone lived onsite. Ten-thousand people were accommodated in freezing breeze-block huts. There was a makeshift medical centre, a refectory, even a hairdresser. The operation ran continuously, so people worked in shifts: imputing strange symbols into the machines and passing what came out to others, who in turn imputed the symbols into other machines. The work was tedious and gruelling and sickness rates were high.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this was that most of the people in Bletchley didn’t know what all this work was for. They may have had their suspicions, but all they were told was that it was important and that they could let no one know about it. All 10,000 had to sign the official secrets act, and seemed to take the code of silence seriously, even for years afterwards. Herself and her friend were told about a married couple who had both worked in Bletchley before they met. Neither spoke to the other about it and didn’t discover their mutual secret until decades later.
Obviously, what they experienced was calibrated for tourists. It emphasised how the codebreakers saved lives, but perhaps elided how many died as a result of their work. Yet the many audio accounts they listened to gave an intense impression of how common purpose can, at least for a time, bind people together. Women were given roles they would never have won in the civilian world. (And couldn’t afterwards). Even class differences were slightly less important.
Many of those who gave testimony said it was the best time of their lives: a rather grotesque admission, given what was happening elsewhere in Europe, but also understandable. It was, to use a cliche, a simpler time: there was a common enemy, and a consensus that that enemy had to be defeated. British people can still be dewy-eyed about a war that killed at least 50 million people, but perhaps what makes them emotional isn’t so much the military aspect but that people were far nicer to each other.
Today that kind of consensus would seem to be impossible: some would opt not to believe news sources, or opt to believe a TikTok video telling them that the Nazis are misunderstood. This century the closest we’ve had to a wartime footing in Ireland has been the Covid pandemic – and while it did have a unifying effect for a time, it also seemed to unleash something that has metastasised into online threats and riots at IPAS centres.
In war, so goes the saying, truth is the first casualty. But truth is already under assault. You’d worry about what comes next.
