A uniformed driver approached them. ‘Bletchley Park?’ asked Sally Barker. ‘You won’t hear anyone call it that. It is BP from now on. BP,’ he said. ‘Are you the two ladies from London?’
‘Yes. We were told we would be met,’ Hilda said.
‘That’s me. Step in.’
A few passengers set off from the station on foot. Sally and Hilda climbed into the black Austin Seven Swallow Saloon parked at the entrance of the station. Hilda was no expert on cars, but the make was clear on its front grill. A rather swanky car for a very short ride, she thought, as they turned into the entrance of Bletchley Park, exactly as Sally had surmised.
The car proceeded past the main stone building and through the park, stopping outside a long wooden hut. Trees blocked the view behind the structure, and in front was a neatly manicured lawn with only a handful of fallen leaves to mar its perfection.
‘This is HMS Pembroke V where the Wrens are billeted. Wren Barker, you’ll be staying here.’
‘HMS Pembroke indeed. It must be a dry dock.’ Sally laughed as she left the car with her bag weighing her down. She turned back for a last look at Hilda, who reflected that it would be good to recognise at least one person in the weeks and months ahead.
Hilda was dropped off at Hut 4, the London Signals Intelligence Centre. This was to be her workstation. It was positioned to the rear of the main building facing north, in the shadow of the main house, and she was sure it saw little if any sunshine. Her residential quarters were a stone’s throw away in Hut 19. Damp walls and poor heating were her first impressions. She soon realised that being accommodated on site was a mixed blessing; it meant she would be available for work any time of the day or night.
There were five other women in the residential quarters. Most were civilian, so she did not stand out. She was glad of that.
The next few weeks rolled by with initial training in the ‘Spy School’, run by John Saltman. Hilda was acutely aware of the secrecy of the work carried out at BP, but was unsure what each person did. She was one of many specialist cogs in Britain’s war wheels she learned, and told she must never seek out the route by which the work came to her, nor where it went after her part in its journey was complete.
After the training, she found herself thrown in at the deep end at Hut 4, translating technical documents gathered from the Germans and attempting to decipher the codes in which they were encrypted. She saw very little of her hut-mates for most of the day and worked six days a week.
They rotated through three shifts: four p.m. to midnight was no one’s favourite; midnight to eight a.m. was by far the least popular; and eight a.m. to four p.m. was the most bearable. At the end of the third week, they went off duty at eight a.m. and came back at four a.m. Much of that time was spent sound asleep.
Such a strict rota caused stress for many of the Wrens. Hilda did not feel the pressure as much. When a technical or mechanical text required translation, she gave it her full attention and completed it as promptly and as accurately as she could, then allowed herself to relax until the next piece of specialized work arrived. Some of the coded text was complicated, and to make sense of the message she used a rather noisy adding machine to find a pattern of words. She enjoyed this part of the work immensely. It presented her with a stimulating challenge, and she could see why Raeburn had asked her about cryptic crosswords at her interview. The mathematics test was beginning to make sense too.
The excitement made time fly, and the satisfaction when she interpreted the document accurately was wonderful. More mundane were the questions she had to answer about Germany, its people, significant military centres and uniform identification. She did not question her duties knowing someone, somewhere would benefit from her detailed knowledge of the people and places in Germany.
The only outsiders they heard came on motorbikes, which arrived and left regularly.
She never saw the riders, nor knew where they came from or where they went on leaving BP. Not even a milkman came into view. Their main source of food was a flock of hens pecking around the rear of the huts; eggs were their staple diet until some Americans arrived and introduced them to baloney sausage. Some of the girls were more than happy to spend their meagre wages on Lucky Strike cigarettes and seamless nylon stockings too, though there was scant opportunity to flaunt silky legs in the village dancehall. Indeed, no socializing occurred at all. A minor pleasure for some was in chewing gum as they worked, partly as an aid to concentration, but mostly for the novelty. Hilda gave it up after a month or so, unable to see how it would ever gain mass appeal in Britain. However, America had joined the war, and they gave everyone tremendous hope as well as an insight into a new and exciting lifestyle.
One day, after Hilda had spent more than a year at BP, a colonel came into the room with a technical message for translation. He prided himself on his ability to read it in somewhat hesitant German. Hilda encouraged him. Then she stopped and looked up at him, something pricking at her memory.
‘Hamburg… 1932…’ she said.
He stepped back to look her full in the face but shook his head.
She tried again. ‘British Consul Hamburg, 1927-1932?’
‘Yes, yes, that’s right.’ Light dawned in his eyes. ‘And… you are… are you not… Dr Richter’s wife?’
‘Dr Willy Richter’s widow. And you are Colonel Shepherd?’
He gazed at her in silence for the next few moments and then sat down beside her. She guessed what he was thinking: how could Hilda Richter have arrived in BP?
‘My condolences,’ he said lowering his eyes for a brief moment. Then he looked up at her once more. ‘You are working here?’ he asked, with disbelief on his face, although it was obvious that she was fully employed at BP.
‘You doubt my loyalty to the king?’
There was a slight hesitation, then: ‘No, of course not. I remember now, you are Scottish. I’m just very surprised you are here.’
‘No more surprised than I am to see you.’
It was hard to know how to proceed. Hilda would have welcomed an opportunity to talk about the past with a sympathetic companion, but she was far from sure it would be permitted. Still, nothing ventured…
‘Secrecy is paramount as regards the work I am doing, of course, but perhaps we could talk more sometime about our time in Germany. In privacy, of course,’ she said.
‘I would like that very much. May I also hear your oboe again?’
What a surprise. He did indeed remember her.
‘You remember our duets?’ she said in delight.
‘Yes, we played at the British Consul in the late ’20s or perhaps it was the early ’30s.’
She recalled those happier times with pleasure. She recalled he was the British military Attaché at the time.
‘And you, Colonel – you sang as I played the oboe at the Consul gatherings in Hamburg?’
He smiled. ‘Yes, I was the baritone. It’s all coming back to me.’
‘I still play from time to time. Surely you still sing?’
There was a hesitation. ‘Not so much in recent years, ever since my wife died.’
She thought she saw his bottom lip quiver slightly and there was an awkward pause as they realised they were two lonely souls in this austere place, hidebound by secrecy and hard work and both widowed. Something fluttered inside her, a sensation she vaguely recognised from the past, and she thought tenderly of her years of happiness with Willy. Perhaps a little happiness in the future was not too much to ask… but she cut the thought short before it had time to take root, and straightened her shoulders.