The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘We worked eight-hour shifts – that included night shifts, in rotation,’ says Jean. ‘And of course night shifts were lonely. You were there all by yourself, eight hours, and the only person you saw was the sailor who came in every hour, every couple of hours, with a batch of new signals for you to sort out.’ And after all this – the silence of the work disrupted only by the high-pitched exclamations of young women attempting to fight off huge tropical flying insects – it was back on the bus to be returned to their accommodation in Colombo itself.

  Jean Valentine was not a timid girl; and when it came to questions of the local fauna, she was able to keep a steady head in what would have been trying circumstances for anyone with a phobia. Accommodation, for instance, involved ‘palm leaf roofs and walls that went up so far and the space in between for the air to go through. I went to the loo one day and there was a very big spider there and I did go “Waaah!!” ’ she says with a laugh. ‘I can’t remember what I did with the spider. But we weren’t too bothered with that really. There were snakes too.’

  Jean recalls that she had no difficulty adjusting to the local cuisine, even after the notably stolid diet offered in Scotland. This had been made easier, she remembers, because of the terrible food on the voyage out to Ceylon; having spent weeks picking weevils out of bread, she was ready to throw herself with gusto into the fresh, delicious food.

  After long spells of intense hard work, proper breaks were allotted. And these gave Jean and her young female colleagues a chance to explore a world they would never otherwise have seen. ‘Every three months or so, we got a week’s leave, and we went up into the hills. Some people went to a rest camp. I was fortunate to have made a friend who happened to be a tea planter – and I and my friends would spend a week up there on his plantation.

  ‘It was a different life. This man lived by himself. I don’t know much about his history – he certainly had a daughter who was married to a tea planter. I never heard about a wife, so I don’t know what happened to her. But this planter would sit at the table, and when people put down their forks and knives, the servants would miraculously appear. The planter had a bell, and he’d just touch it and they’d appear. It was a different life. And of course the food was beautiful.’

  Jean was in fact witnessing the last efflorescence of a colonial world, one in which a wealthy white British tea planter could summon servants to his table with the discreet ring of his bell. At the time, though, few could have been consciously aware that such a set-up already had an antique patina.

  ‘And the surroundings were lovely,’ she says. ‘There was a local club where the tea planters all foregathered. It was really a very pleasant climate. None of the blistering hot days that you got elsewhere in the tropics.

  ‘When we first got to the plantation, tea was brought in to us every morning. They drank tea barely coloured . . . it was very pale. Very flavoursome, but very pale. That was first thing in the morning – early morning tea and a banana. The servant arrived with it.

  ‘And then we’d spend the day lounging around, lying in the garden. Or our host would take us out for a run in the car, in the countryside . . . If you’ve been working hard, it’s quite nice . . .’

  Even back in Colombo, the intense concentration of the work was broken up with a lively nightlife. ‘We had a wonderful social life because we were somewhat outnumbered by the male population. We were never short of people to take us to dinners or dances. I remember going to the cinema only about once because that’s not what you did. Instead, you were invited out to the Goreface hotel to a dinner dance – or to the Grand Oriental, the GOH as it was called.’

  Even so, the etiquette for such occasions remained relatively rigid. ‘We had to go in civilian clothes because we were normally with officers and the officers couldn’t be seen with other ranks,’ says Jean, her eyebrows raised. ‘We got so many plain clothes passes a week [i.e. permission to go out in plain clothes] – two passes a week, I think. But nobody checked you going out, so you were OK to go out in plain clothes . . . We would go out in plain clothes, taking our uniform in bags, and then change into them when the night was out. The first time I did it, I went out with this bloke and I said, “Excuse me, I’ve got to change now.” And I changed into my uniform in the back of the taxi. So when we walked in through the gate of HMS Anderson again, we were in uniform.

  ‘Anyway, we had a pretty good life,’ she adds. ‘We really did. Because we could always trot down to the sea and have a swim . . . and there was a swimming club where we could go . . . it was really very nice.’

  Like Victor Newman, she fondly recalls one place in particular: ‘We would go to a place called Mount Lavinia. There was only a hotel and a few little huts. There was a very nice beach – you could lounge around on that and have a bit of a swim . . .’ Nor did money seem much of a worry to young Jean. Although Wrens’ pay was far from spectacular, things changed when she was dispatched abroad. ‘I got a little extra, so in terms of wages, we’re talking about £1.50 a week.’ That modest sum would go quite a long way: ‘Dancing and social life? Men were only too happy to pay for all that if you went out with them. And I bought the occasional garment. I think my mother sent me the occasional bit of money.

  ‘There was no special intensity,’ she concludes. ‘But then I don’t think I was a very emotional sort of person, I just sort of went along. Took what was coming. Probably quite grateful to have had the experience. But it was just part of life’s rich tapestry. You didn’t feel special or anything, and maybe you were quite glad to have got away from the miseries of the blackout. We were just enjoying a new experience. Doing the sort of things that people do now for a holiday.’

  For Victor Newman, the work in Ceylon was hard, but it was also in some respects curiously congenial. ‘We were watch-keeping for the first couple of months,’ he says. ‘Then we were asked by the authorities if anyone could use a typewriter. Well, I could because before I was called up, I used to work in a little office attached to a corn-grinding mill.’

  In his first few days, Weybridge lad Mr Newman had met an old friend of his from the town who had been posted to HMS Anderson a little beforehand without either of them knowing. His new duties brought another coincidental reunion: ‘I was given a short course on touch-typing, and it was around then that I met another person from Weybridge: Edna Frost, a Wren.’ This left the Weybridge interest disproportionately represented in Ceylon.

  ‘So there were eight of us who made up the various watches. The Wrens lived separately, away from the base, and they were transported up every day to work. It was around this time that we opened up the high speed link with Australia.’ This was a new automated Morse-sending mechanism: ‘A hundred and twenty words per minute of Morse, on a machine that looked a little like a seismograph, with the needles going up and down. There was also a high speed link with England.’ The work was faster but, thanks to the new technology, a shade less repetitive and grinding. And even if it was still quite a slog, those long shifts were smoothed out by the promise of a turquoise sea and rich sunshine.

  For codebreaking clerk, or ‘cipherine’, Barbara Skelton, the opening up of the Mediterranean by 1944 led her into a way of life that, although harrowing, was yet many times more attractive than the frowsy, depressing London she had left behind. It was announced, she wrote, that ‘once the Germans had retreated over the Greek border, the Embassy in Athens would open up, and [her friend] Mary Foreman and I had been chosen as the new cipher team. Soon after, to the envy of the other cipherines, we were driven to Alexandria to board a crowded troop-ship bound for Italy.’

  Skelton was apparently in high good humour, a superior remarked to her as she negotiated her way on to the packed ship past countless troops. Yet arrival on the Italian coast was more sombre:

  Mary and I disembarked at Salerno, where we spent the night. It was raining and sad as practically the whole of the town had been wiped out. We were then driven to the Palace of Caserta . . . Lions leered down fr
om the tops of stairways. The grounds were laid out with terraces and fountains with water cascading over marble statues of the hunting goddess Diana, with her leaping hounds. The cobbled courtyard abounded in jeeps.

  A little later on, she recalled snatches of scenes – a ‘picnic in a forest of cork oaks where most of our lunch was given to a troupe of ragged barefoot children gathering acorns, then a wartime coffee substitute’.1

  Miss Skelton was soon transferred back to Greece for her ‘cipher’ duties and remembered wryly the booklet that was issued to soldiers on the voyage there. It contained admonitions and advice; reminders that the soldiers were lucky to be going to Greece, and that the Greeks were worthy allies. There were warnings, including one not to admire babies – their mothers might interpret this as ‘the evil eye’. They were also counselled against boasting that they had won the war. By this stage, they hadn’t.

  Levity was also discouraged for the very good reason that a number of evacuated Greek families were slowly starting to drift home; given the atrocities, alongside the wholescale extortion that the Nazis had visited upon the Greeks, it was clear that they would be coming back to an impoverished, broken land. The country would be riven with internal tensions, and a pervasive sense of suppressed rage and violence would soon find other ways of erupting. Greece had been utterly violated, and a vast amount of its wealth had simply been stolen.

  For someone like Barbara Skelton, moving within exclusive British diplomatic circles, there would be a degree of shelter from the aftershocks of conquest. Athens had not been completely flattened, and the people had not been crushed – not, that is, in the obvious sense. ‘Unlike the sallow Italians, the Greeks had fresh brown complexions,’ wrote Skelton. ‘There was a smell of pine everywhere, which is not the case now [today], alas, the pine trees having been replaced with shoddy buildings . . . From my room, I had a view of a tiny Byzantine church surrounded by cypresses.’

  She and her friend Mary attended to their wireless duties within the grounds of the British Embassy. For the most part, life was lived at a fairly basic level – the wartime diet even there consisted largely of Spam and bully beef. Barbara and Mary would sneak out of the embassy during breaks and surreptitiously rush down to the meagre local markets, where they managed to supplement all that processed meat with the odd cabbage. She noted that, despite the conditions, the Athenians had lost none of their taste for very sweet cakes, and that the city still seemed to abound with small patisseries.

  At the more exalted end of the social scale, there was something almost comically enduring – with a tinge of bathos too – about the way the whirl of parties reasserted itself. ‘We were taken to a round of parties given by the Greek aristocracy,’ wrote Skelton, adding that on some occasions, ‘in the evenings, we would drive into the country to stop at some wayside taverna. In exchange for tins of bully beef we would be given a delicious dinner of pigeons roasted over a pinewood fire.’

  That was a brief period of calm; soon there would be further thunderclaps over Greece, in the form of civil war.

  The consequences of brutal invasion were also reflected in Algiers, as the Countess of Ranfurly found:

  The French, Poles, Greeks and other nationalities I have met in the Mediterranean theatre are nearly always cheerful. We meet them at work and at dinner parties but rarely discover the tragedies behind their facades. Nearly every week people manage to reach Algiers from Occupied France . . . No escapees talk of their adventures or their grim journey – it is kept quiet for fear of jeopardising the chances of thousands of others who are trying to get out . . . the French have taught me that behind the gayest faces lie the deepest tragedies.

  Yet a place like Algiers itself had the power to wipe clean memory and overwhelm European senses. ‘Green lizards basked on the edge of the paths. The trees are at their best now; the acacias are frilly white and there are wild flowers everywhere.’

  For Wren Rosemary Morton, Algiers was a little less romantic; it was, she recalled, a miasma of flies and smell. And in work terms, even the retreat and surrender of the Italians seemed to bring no immediate let-up in the frenetic and gruelling pace:

  When Italy capitulated to the Allies, it was decided to move the Wrennery down to a villa on the coast which had been occupied by some very brave naval commandos. They had been sailing across on dark nights to unidentified craft to raid enemy positions, bringing back any secret documents they thought might be of value to the Allies. There was a wild idea, as [these commandos] were not linguists, that they should take along a Special Duties Wren who would be able to identify which documents would be best to steal.2

  Given the chilly reception that young women like Aileen Clayton had received simply by arriving in north Africa, it seemed unlikely that that idea would be taken up.

  However, signals watching did slow down, at least in that part of the world. And this gave Rosemary Morton more time to absorb her extraordinary situation. Apart from anything else, she and her Y Service colleagues were now living at close quarters with captured Italian soldiers. There was a welcome bonus: the gift of fresh tagliatelle made by the men (also enjoyed by fellow Wren Beatrice Bochman). But that was not all they brought to the party:

  The kitchen in the Villa la Vie was in the basement, dark and frequently filled with smoke from the old range on which the Italian prisoners of war cooked for us. But this didn’t deter them from singing – they had beautiful voices and despite being semi-literate, they all seemed to know their Italian operas . . . they concocted their own midday meal and all ate it from one big dish . . . One day I looked in the oven to see how our lunch was progressing and found Santo’s wet sandals in there – he was hurt and mystified by my reprimand as it was quite clear that they needed to be dried.

  In the Cocos Islands, young Peter Budd’s idyll had drawn to a close, as it had for the two dozen or so other listeners on Direction Island. After an eighteen-month stint, he was informed that he was to be shipped out to take his direction finding skills to a quite different location: Karachi.

  Even the journey there had something of an epic quality – first, the 2000-odd miles back to the mainland, then 2600 miles by rail from Colombo to Karachi – and it was during this vivid sensory journey that Mr Budd found himself standing face to face with one of the most totemic figures of the twentieth century.

  ‘At Madras, we changed on to a troop train,’ says Mr Budd who was accompanied on his new posting by two fellow naval operatives. Anything you might read about Indian railways now was surpassed by the nature of their journey. ‘An Indian troop train was a goods wagon with benches. No windows, no toilets. We’d been on it for about twelve hours and it was shunted into a siding. It stayed there for three days, south of Hyderabad, thousands of miles from anywhere. Now all we’d been issued with was a docket saying we were allowed to have a meal on a restaurant car or railway station. We had nothing for three days and if the Army hadn’t shared their rations with us . . . you’d go out to the driver in the morning with an army tin mug and he’d give you a mug of hot water, which you could use for tea, shaving or washing.’

  Eventually they arrived in Delhi. ‘A lot of Indians lived on the station,’ continues Mr Budd, ‘under cover. We were sitting there waiting for the Bombay train to come in. Suddenly about a thousand Indians poured in. I was pushed right up to the edge of the rails.’ And when the train arrived, an extraordinarily distinctive figure disembarked almost nose-to-nose with Budd. ‘Closer to me than you are was Gandhi. And next to him was Nehru. They’d just been let out of prison to go to Stafford Cripps’s first talks on Indian peace. And silly to say it – but he looked just like Gandhi.’

  For the next leg of the journey, Mr Budd and his comrades were in the relative luxury of second class. But the final stage, in which they crossed the desert, was an ordeal. Instead of glass windows, their carriage merely had shutters. ‘So you either got sand-lashed or suffocated.

  ‘But we eventually got to Karachi and the three who were being
relieved were waiting for us. The one in charge said “Who’s taking over from me?” I looked on the documents and apparently it was me. So I was put in charge of the direction finding operation there.’

  It might not have been a remote desert island but Mr Budd swiftly found some spectacular consolations in Karachi. The direction finding station itself was a tiny place out in the wastes and the wilds – but they didn’t have to live there. In fact, their quarters, by comparison to most, were highly desirable.

  ‘This is where a life of luxury began – we were taken to the European YMCA. So, being in charge, I had my own room, with a bed, and sheets, mosquito net,’ says Mr Budd. ‘We got fed in the YMCA. We had a motorbike which we all had to learn to ride – to go out in the desert, where the direction finding station was. So there were four operators and myself.’ Like the Cocos Islands, there was a formidable remoteness about the place. They were in contact with HMS Anderson at Colombo, thousands of miles away. Other than that, says Mr Budd, ‘No one knew anything about it, we were right up in the north-west of India. Bombay was the nearest big place and that was a hell of a long way away.’

  The lack of obvious supervision had other unexpected effects. Being so far from the centre of operations, for instance, the bureaucracy was a little hazy; which, for five young men carrying out their duties but otherwise left to their own devices, carried immediate benefits. ‘In the Royal Navy you get a paybook,’ explains Mr Budd. ‘And if you are moved to a ship (or establishment, like Karachi) where they haven’t got your documents, they’ll pay you as long as you’re a month in arrears. Well, we went to this Indian Navy pay place and because we were European, the Indian clerk there thought we were naval officers. We wore civvies up there.