THERE’S A road near where I live; an ordinary suburban road lined with houses of all shapes and sizes. I’ve been walking along it for years, and always wonder – probably out of boredom – whether the people who live there might have stories of similar architectural variety. Last week I was lucky enough to meet one of them. She has a story to tell all right – and it is, quite literally, the stuff of spy thrillers.
Leslie Greer was born in England to an Irish father and an English mother. She moved back to Ireland at the age of six; by the time she was finishing a degree in modern languages at Trinity College Dublin, the second World War was in full swing. She got a job teaching German at Queen’s in Belfast – but after a year, with just seven students in her class, she felt she should, as she puts it, “be doing something more useful”.
The professor who had employed her, a veteran of the 1914-18 war, offered to help. “He arranged for me to go and be interviewed in London to see if I’d be suitable,” she says. “And they decided, as I was fluent in German, that I could be. They said, ‘Go to Bletchley next Monday – and you’d better take Wellingtons with you, because it can be rather muddy’. So I said, ‘Yes, but what will I be doing?’ ‘Oh, we couldn’t possibly tell you that,’ they said.”
If the name “Bletchley” hasn’t raised any hairs at the back of your neck, then you clearly haven’t read Robert Harris’s evocative thriller Enigma. During the second World War this estate in a small town in Buckinghamshire was a top-secret decryption centre where codes and cyphers were unravelled. The intelligence produced at Bletchley Park was crucial to the Allied war effort, and the institution itself was so hush-hush that many of its female military personnel were officially posted, not to Bletchley, but to “HMS Pembroke V”. “We certainly did have it well drilled into us that we were not to speak of our work at all,” Greer says.
These days things are rather different. Bletchley has become a full-on tourist attraction complete with website, family fun days and a cafe. Greer emits a noise that is suspiciously close to a snort. “I used to go and visit my brother, who was living near Chelmsford,” she says. “Once, while I was there, a message came through; ‘A few of us are going to go and look at Bletchley Park’. I said, ‘No thanks. Four years was quite enough’ . . .”
If you’ve been doing a bit of mental maths you’ll have figured out that this spirited lady is not in the first flush of youth. Does she mind if I ask how old she is? “No, I don’t mind at all. Ninety-five,” comes the matter-of-fact reply.
The reality of signals intelligence wasn’t as dramatic as novels and movies suggest. “On the whole, I thought it was pretty boring,” Greer says. For three years she worked on what she calls “the index”, making a note of every scrap of coded information which came in.
Did she ever come across Alan Turing, the scientific genius credited with cracking the Enigma code and inventing the computer? “Yes, I think I must have – but only slightly,” she says. He was badly treated by British officialdom after the war, she adds. “Just because he was gay.”
Greer’s first-rate German eventually saw her promoted to a unit which “tasted” incoming intelligence in order to decide which material the codebreakers should tackle first. It was stressful work but inevitably, there were moments of levity. “One Christmas we managed to smuggle in some . . . wine, I suppose. We ended up singing German songs, which must have sounded odd if anyone was listening. But it was what we had in common.”
Greer paints a vivid picture of her years at Bletchley Park. Doodlebugs, the bombe (a giant computer), the Russian front. And dogs, brought in by their owners for a meal at a time of strict food rationing. Greer offers a lopsided smile. “Word went out after a bit that dogs were not to go into the dining room.”
Turing’s technological brilliance may have cracked the code in the end, but in her way this extraordinary woman also won the war. Imagine that she lives on that sunny, sleepy south Dublin road. It will never feel boring to me again, that’s for sure.