Bletchley Park; Home of Secrets

We went away last week to stay in Harrow; that's why I was off the radar. I know it sounds silly, but I don't like to advertise big absences on the web, especially not now Mr AJ's business uses the home address as a base. It's just a precaution, not a reflection on how trustworthy I think my blogfriends are!
But anyway, we went and had a fantastic time so, with your permission, (or not, I really don't mind and I'm doing it anyway) I have written up the day by day account and I am going to post it here as daily as possible when I get back to work.

So, Day One;
We travelled down on the Friday night and stopped off at Bicester Travelodge. We find breaking the journey down helps so much from the point of view that you get an extra night away, the adventure of a night as a family of 5 crammed into a room for 4 , and the early start next morning which gives you virtually an extra day of holiday.

Usually when we go to Harrow we use it for shopping, settling in and a visit to Bicester village (with the range of shops that I look at and think "How much??? On clearance?") where we dodge Japanese tourists and eat a late breakfast at Pret a Manger before setting off again. This year I was feeling less inspired to spend money we don't really have on stuff we don't really need, so I figured that in the name of experientialism (my new favourite thing to be; I am an experientialist, not a materialist) we could spend the time better visiting a place I've wanted to see ever since Kate Winslett and Dougray Scott met eyes over the crossword puzzle. And the fact that Benedict has recently lifted the profile of the place even higher might have had something to do with it as well.

So we went to Bletchley Park. It's a fascinating place for a historian or  a mathematician or a computer nerd. It's a fascinating place generally, since the whole story had been so comprehensively covered up during the first thirty years after the war, only to go completely stellar now as a result of films, documentaries and, of course, the tragedy of Turing.
The estate still has a feel of somewhere they let you into cautiously, but getting out will be harder; the fences are still up, and the huts ranked along the drive to what was once a pretty country house look so alien against a sculptured lawn and lake with small fountain.

If you don't know the story of Bletchley and the breaking of the Enigma machine, then the introductory exhibition is a must. We are nerds (or geeks, whichever is the right term) and were perfectly happy to meander round rather than follow their organised route. Besides which, we had a limited time to spend and we knew what we wanted to concentrate on.

There are huts set up to resemble the code breaking areas manned by crossword addicts, mathematicians and clever people recruited just for the purpose, areas where broken code was translated into good English, huts where machines whirred round trying endlessly to break that day's cipher so that we could have a head start on the Nazi plans and be able to move against them. There were period details, posters warning that "Careless Talk Costs Lives" and information, information, information.

The machine designed by Alan Turing was called the Bombe and run by WRNS who had to set them up and take them to pieces every day. There is a working model in one of the buildings which we stood and watched for quite a while. The process was complicated, the whole rigmarole of catching messages, coming up with a possible menu based on regular words in use, entering those into the Bombe and linking the ins and the outs together only to end either when the code had been picked or the day was over at midnight, to strip the machine down and set up again for a whole new day must have been repetitive, just so slightly boring and also noisy. It was an honour to learn that one of the visitors there that day was a 92 year old lady who had been a Wren working in the Bombe Shed. She had never seen the machine for 70 years, and would not stop talking about it, pointing out the parts she remembered, the noise that one machine made ("and we had quite a few in the shed") and the fact that at the end of the war the machines were turned off, stripped down to component parts and not even one left as a museum exhibit.

There was an exhibit about the Imitation Game, parts of which were filmed at Bletchley, and an exhibition about the people, including Alan Turing, who built the first thinking machines during the war that changed and became the things we now love and use as computers. Hi story is so sad, a real morality tale of bias against diversity, and a real blow if one considers that he was only 41 when he died, and what potentially was lost in future developments. I'm so glad he was pardoned posthumously, and hope that the same acceptance could be offered to all the post-war offenders.

We watched The Imitation Game that night and it gave its meaning extra depth, having seen what his work had contributed to the war and the shortening of the conflict.