The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  There was also, she recalled, the task of making sure that the radio sets on board the flotilla of destroyers were working satisfactorily, which entailed getting into boats and sailing out into the Solent – and working not only with British vessels, but also a couple of Norwegian ships and even a Free French vessel.

  ‘I got the delightful job of going to sea on trials with them to see if their sets were behaving properly,’ she wrote. ‘The French, of course, served excellent French wine in their ward room. They used to say the Free French Naval HQ existed solely for the purpose of providing it. They were vereeee French!’ There was also the simple exhilaration of being out on the waves. ‘Out manoeuvring with the British ships in the Solent was a riot. I found myself trying to help a harassed British liaison officer on the bridge converting flag signals . . . into English and then into French.’

  For Vivienne Alford, the time she spent at the out-station at Hartland Point, north Devon, could be quiet to the point of being idyllic. ‘The Hartland period was sheer delight . . .’ she wrote, ‘peering into pools, swimming in the bays, sunbathing on the rocks (with the RAF flying low) and cadging clotted cream. Watches were not eventful . . . One summer night . . . I sat on a cliff watching the sun go down, making a golden path across the sea.’4

  Social engagements on the coast could be variable in quality, Elizabeth Mashall recalled:

  We fared much better at North Foreland than at Portland Bill. To begin with, we got the usual invitations for ‘a party of Wrens’, usually to a beery, smoke-filled hall but our luck changed when I actually knew one or two officers of a Hampshire regiment that came to the area. My stock rose and we were invited to some better organised dances. I have very pleasant recollections of dancing an extremely energetic ‘Bumps-A-Daisy’ at one of these events.

  Dancing was one of the key amusements of that era; not merely during the war, but for some time before it too. Women and men alike were apparently addicted; the romantic side of these occasions was obviously important, but so too, it, was the energy of the dance itself. One beguiling image we have of the Wrens – right the way across the world, from remote corners of Yorkshire to the shores of Ceylon – is of young women who, having worked hard, then went out in determined fashion to dance hard too. In the more exotic climes, it was one of the ways in which these young women managed to adapt to their new lives.

  One unprecedented aspect of the conflict was the numbers of young women who voyaged around the world to be near or at its heart, and the almost casual courage echoing through so many different accounts seems extraordinary now. By 1942 and 1943, Wrens were being dispatched in greater numbers to theatres of war such as north Africa. But the stories that we hear from Cairo, Tangier, and indeed the Western Desert, are vivid illustrations of how women were starting to negotiate a form of new settlement for themselves. In some cases, they were to volunteer themselves determinedly for duty in hazardous arenas which were then considered suitable only for men – just at the point when the fortunes of war in north Africa were begin to turn.

  11 Storms in the Desert

  Wren Rosemary Norton was based in and around Plymouth, listening to U-boats, when she heard that there might be opportunities for overseas service coming up. Those with a working knowledge of Italian, she recalled, were particularly sought after. Her own grasp of Italian appeared to be at best sketchy – but, showing admirable verve, she rushed out and acquired a text book of Italian grammar, along with any other volumes that might help familiarise her with the language. She had the necessary wireless qualifications and so – as far as she could see – the language itself was the only hurdle. A brief though intense period of cramming followed. She applied to go abroad and was accepted. There was, she recalled, fortunately no test of fluency in Italian.

  Was the adventure quite what she had expected? Having sailed out on a troopship, she arrived in Algiers on her twenty-first birthday. ‘My first impressions of north Africa were the smell and the flies,’ she wrote. ‘The smell one got used to, but the flies were a bore.’ From here they were flown to Bone, in a troop-carrying plane that sounds terrifyingly antediluvian. She recalled that it had ‘small open port-holes’, so that ‘one could put one’s hand out and feel the wind rushing past.’ This was clearly not a supersonic aircraft.

  On arrival in Bone, she and her Wren colleagues were stationed on the top floor of a hotel in a village called Bugeaud, which lay above the port. The ratio of men to women was, as one would expect, extremely high and as a result of this, she recalled, ‘we led a very social life.’ ‘The views over parched brown hills, cork forests and eucalyptus trees to the blue Mediterranean were spectacular,’ she wrote. ‘Marvellous bathing and sailing and expeditions by mule down the mountainside.’1

  Paradise had its practical setbacks, though. ‘Every drop of water for drinking, washing, cooking etc had to be fetched in four-gallon petrol cans and carried up to our top storey quarters.’ Moreover, much of the cooking was done on the roof of the hotel, with wood dragged up from the groves below. Yet it is easy to see how even these conditions had their own sort of poetry; and how they lent an intensity to life that could hardly be forgotten years afterwards.

  A chief Wren who had helped make even these rackety arrangements possible had been there some weeks before. Beatrice Bochman had previously run a mobile listening unit near Portsmouth, in a small coastal village where the greatest hazard had been coming off the night shift and trying, without a torch on a moonless night, to negotiate a field of cows and a clifftop path. She too had applied for an overseas posting; and when the summons came, she responded with alacrity. ‘After some hectic shopping for tropical kit, I found myself . . . on a troopship bound for Algiers.’ At that stage, it was considered that the port of Bone was uncomfortably too close to the actual conflict for women. So, for a while, Bochman and her colleagues were set to work on deciphering captured coded Italian documents. The working space was spectacular: ‘An exotic turreted castle at Dravia which housed a large RAF “Y” unit, six Psychological Warfare civilians from Bletchley and a few peripatetic naval “Y” officers.’

  A few weeks later, Bochman and her colleagues scouted out the hotel at Bone and set about making the most of the charmingly vintage facilities. But for all the brilliance of the high vantage point, the conflict against Italy was constantly moving on and there was a fast-decreasing amount of traffic for the station to deal with. So while it was decided where best to dispatch three dozen or so Wrens, they were moved from the hotel to a rather striking villa. Again, their experiences there were the sort to sear themselves on to the memory. Mrs Bochman wrote:

  Our ‘Villa Lavie’ looked very Algerian. Castellated white walls with a coloured frieze and a cupola from which we flew a flag. Every day a number of Italian Prisoners of War were brought to work for us. Some made miles of pasta which they dried on washing lines around the galley (by morning, some had fallen down and crunched when you walked on it); others made pretty patterns with shells round the flower beds and all sang ‘Santa Lucia’ as though they were in the chorus at La Scala.

  Not all such adventures were so picturesque. Across the Mediterranean a few months previously, Aileen Clayton – who had volunteered for Y Service duties on beleaguered Malta – found that life had an increasingly pyrotechnic edge. One night, in the confusion and alarm of a German bombing raid, she had been attempting to board an Alexandria-bound plane on the military runway while bearing an attaché case filled with classified documents. But one explosion caused a horrific chain reaction:

  Without any warning, there was suddenly the sound of a terrible crash. Another aircraft taking off on the runway had smashed into our guide and immediately the two aeroplanes were engulfed in flames . . . The pilot yelled: ‘For Chrissakes, get the hell out of here. There are mines on board that kite!’ There was no time to put down the ladder, so we dropped straight to the ground. I was clutching for dear life my precious briefcase which was filled with secret documents. The heat was intens
e . . . Then there was an enormous explosion. The mines on board one of the aircraft had blown up. My companion flung me to the ground ramming my briefcase, which I was still clutching, on to the back of my head.

  He did it only just in time. A splinter slithered across the case, jamming my face down into the mud, and scarring the leather – and incidentally, breaking my jaw, though I did not realise this at the time . . .

  After this catastrophe, there was nothing for it but to head back for cover. Departure from Malta that night was obviously impossible. ‘Eventually we found our way back to the underground control room,’ she wrote, then recalling how she exclaimed: ‘ “What a way for a girl to spend her birthday,” I grimaced . . . I was just 24 years old.’2

  Clayton was not alone in finding the Malta posting wearing, both physically and mentally. For the people of the island, the situation was dire; food supplies were diminishing, and luxuries such as tobacco becoming scarcer by the day. Lieutenant Eric Wilkes, who was later to return to the academe from which he had been pulled, was posted to the island’s tiny Y Service unit from the Middle East. His first few hours on the island, having arrived by night, told him almost all that he needed to know. ‘An army car took me to my overnight lodging at Valetta – a lovely spacious bedroom,’ he wrote. ‘I think it was in or near the Castille. In the morning, I realised why I had been warned not to walk around in the dark. The building had been partially bombed and various surviving doors opened into thin air.’ He also recalled how, that bright morning, an air raid started and he witnessed a priest ‘sending children flying’ in his anxiety to get to the bomb shelter.

  The shelters were in constant use; and according to Wilkes, they could be smelled from fifty yards away. The officers already manning the Y unit were upright military men, not apparently very keen on the ‘untidy graduates’ being sent their way; young cerebral types like Wilkes had very little interest in drill or weapons maintenance, and there was not much that his comrades could do about it. The wireless station was on the seashore, with minimal facilities such as an adjacent cookhouse.

  Yet even in the midst of the grimness of Malta – the ever-sparser rations, social hours restricted to a local inn called the Lord Nelson, which specialised in cheap grog – there were odd moments of Ealing-style comedy. One concerned the use of the military phrase ‘Most Immediate’; owing to an overabundance of pads stamped with the phrase at the top of every page, there were rumbles of irritation back in Cairo, and indeed Bletchley Park, when requests for simple equipment replacements appeared to be couched in terms of the utmost urgency.

  The work being done on Malta was still extremely important; during the German bombing raids late in the year, it was Bletchley Park’s success in penetrating the Luftwaffe codes – with all of the pilots’ messages assiduously sent on thereafter – that enabled the British to shoot down so many German planes, thus preventing more wholesale destruction.

  Aileen Clayton soon found herself transferred back to the Middle East. Her first posting was to Cairo, where, after all the adrenalin and fear of Malta, her role was rather calmer and more considered. As well as Y Service work, there was a more therapeutic role: to be a friendly face to some of the younger officers who were pouring into Cairo on leave after harrowing ordeals in the desert, and who knew nothing of the city, merely that they wanted to lose themselves in it briefly. There were dinner invitations, and Clayton recalled how these were regarded as part of one’s duty; if one was not available, one would ring around one’s friends to see who was. Then the young lads would be dragged into Cairo’s social whirl, and taken to parties and dances.

  Poignantly, Clayton recalled one flight commander who had been through a great deal and simply wanted to come round to her place and drink tea out of a china cup, with the tea things on a tray; in other words, the marks of normality, the metonyms of calm domesticity. The tea clearly made a tremendous impression upon the airman: when he was finally shot down over Sicily, his parents wrote to Clayton, both to tell her and also to thank her.

  The extraordinary atmosphere of Cairo was also maintained for Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, despite the news that her husband Dan had been taken prisoner in Italy. Working for General ‘Jumbo’ Maitland Wilson, later to become Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, she established her office next to the Map Room – ‘an Aladdin’s Cave of immense interest if only one had time to devour all its information,’ she wrote. After a sojourn in Baghdad, the Countess and her colleagues had returned with a parrot that she called ‘Coco’:

  He had a very small cage so . . . I went in search of something better. In a slum shop filled with snakes, pigeons, guinea pigs and finches, I found one and after much bargaining, bought it. The shopkeeper gave me a present: a white mouse with pink eyes called Faud, which he put in my pocket . . . later, when people came to see the General and Faud was running around on the floor, some would say ‘Oh – is that your mascot?’ Others saw him but didn’t comment. We suspect they think he is part of a Cairo hangover.3

  The very idea that there was such a phenomenon as a ‘Cairo hangover’ tells us much; but there is also a defiantly quirky and eccentric sense of humour, the notion that the dignity of a hugely important general’s quarters would not be decreased by being shared with a parrot and a white mouse.

  Incidentally, the story did not end happily for Faud the mouse; one day, he was accidentally squashed flat under a falling filing cabinet. For weeks, even figures such as Lord Gort would ask of the creature’s whereabouts, only to be told the news. Again, we see an irrepressible compulsion towards irony, which perhaps had the effect of blocking out the real horrors of the conflict in the desert.

  That war was still considered no place for a woman; but Aileen Clayton persisted in getting closer than most. As she said of the role of the interceptors in the desert: ‘The Y Officer’s function was to keep the controller informed of all intercepted information which was of immediate operational use, and to assess, by co-ordinating this information with data from all available sources, the extent of enemy air activity. In this way, Operations could be given at any time a complete picture of the opposing airforce, its organisation and its methods.’

  It hardly needs to be added that Clayton, by now a senior Y operative, regarded herself as an ideal candidate for such a role. Perhaps surprisingly, the moment at which such a chance materialised was conflated in her memoirs with a moment in her romantic life:

  Wing Commander Morgan came over from Algiers to discuss the future of Y in the Mediterranean and indicated that he wanted me to join his staff there . . . On top of this, I was on the verge of becoming engaged, but I had seen too many of my friends widowed within months of marriage and I wrote to my mother explaining that ‘my job means so much to me, I couldn’t have it ruined by constant worry over a mere man. I just cannot let my private life seriously affect my interest in winning the war – that would be too unpatriotic.’

  To today’s reader, for a 24 year old to make such a dispassionate decision must sound incredibly pompous and jingoistic. But it must be remembered that, young though we were, we had a dedication that is perhaps incomprehensible in the climate of today.4

  Dedication such as Clayton’s was soon to be rewarded, for after months of bloody conflict in the desert, the Allies were preparing in the latter part of 1942 to finally drive the Germans back. Mobile Y units had a vital role to play in this gambit, and some months beforehand, specially trained men had been deployed from Bletchley Park. One was Noel Currer-Briggs, who had been given codebreaking tutorials in the directorate of Bletchley by the veteran cryptographic expert Colonel Tiltman. After he and his colleagues had passed gruelling initial tests, they were set to work on Afrika Korps codes; their speed at unravelling the messages ensured that they were later sent off to join the Allied forces which were to land in Tunisia. Lieutenant-Colonel Sayer wrote a memo concerning another highly skilled Y service operative:

  One of the most cheering things that’s happened this
year is the collection of undoubted evidence that our new Signal Procedure has badly upset the enemy ‘Y’ service. They don’t like it at all, and from the documents we collected, it was evident that they were floundering badly. Most of the credit for this goes to Bill Tozer . . . Bill has since had a personal letter of thanks from General Auchinleck. Richly deserved.5

  Y operatives such as Currer-Briggs spent their time in cramped, hot mobile units reading encoded German traffic at great speed; once again, the traffic was bound for Bletchley Park. Very great care was taken to ensure that no mention – in memos or even by telephone – of intelligence from such messages was obscured.

  And now, the British interceptors were being joined by their American counterparts; there were differences in skills, as well as cultures. ‘In the field, [Y operators] had to write with one hand keeping the other on the tuning knob, as the set would drift off frequency, so that the operator had to retune slightly to hear the answering station,’ wrote Hugh Skillen. ‘Very good British operators could handle two sets at once, double-banked. The American officers could type very fast, in capitals, and the Commanding Officer himself could read semi-automatic Morse like most of them.’ There was apparently some confusion when the Americans hand-wrote ‘S’ like ‘Z’ and vice versa, and there were a few tutorial sessions on such matters with diagrams drawn on blackboards. But the operation, as the Allies prepared to consolidate north Africa, was notably slicker than at any other time.