Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
A Clandestine Community
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
To my neighbors, I’m a homeowner. To my wife, a life companion. To my kids, a part-time bank teller. To my students, a classroom vaudevillian. To my cat, I’m a can opener.
My life is lived in crevices and compartments. Wherever I travel, a part of me is always in disguise. Like a spy’s deep cover.
Today, I’m a tourist at London’s Euston Station. I’m taking the train to Bletchley Park.
For most of its existence, Bletchley was known, if it was known at all, for brickmaking. Then during WWII, the British War Office requisitioned an obscure, nondescript country estate—a resident once called it “lavatory-Gothic”—on the edge of town because it was quintessentially camouflaged to German bomber pilots.
Here, a super-secret community of codebreakers were sequestered and then tasked with decoding the Nazi cipher machine nicknamed Enigma. After the war, the Supreme Allied Commander credited Bletchley with shortening the war by a full two years.
I’m headed to Bletchley to get a firsthand sense of the place. I want to describe the war years to my high school history students in ways that go beyond the dates, personalities, battles and geo-political results.
Disembarking at the Bletchley rail station, I imagine myself a new recruit, anxiously ready to serve my country. I want to join this clandestine community of cryptologists, cooks and carpenters, typists and town folk, car mechanics, academics, linguists, motorcycle dispatch riders. Mathematicians, chess players, crossword puzzle champions. A papyrology expert.
Before induction, I’m asked if I’m colorblind. Because colored pencils are used to mark signal traffic by source, enemy location and military branch, colorblindness is disqualifying. I pass.
My assigned workstation is an underheated, squatty, one-story building. For eight-hour shifts, I bend over a trestle table. With fatigued eyes I codebreak radio signals intercepted from German U-boats, Luftwaffe air battalions and Gestapo outposts. To stay alert, I discover the joy of mentally whistling tunes playing on the wireless.
Round-the-clock, eight thousand former housewives, debutantes, shopgirls and schoolteachers operate cryptographic machinery, translate enemy documents, perform clerical duties. The women and I mutate into electronic pulses or cogs attached to Bletchley machines attached to other machines installed on battlefields, naval ships and listening posts the world over. A sci-fi peek into the coming internet world.
One day a schoolgirl, age 14, quits her studies to work as a messenger. The prickly enforcement of child labor laws is shrugged off. She finishes the war as a senior staff secretary. I never learn her real name.
Our homosexual co-workers lead a double double life. Homosexuality is illegal, but Bletchley runs on secrecy and compartmentalization—commonly known as not prying into other people’s personal lives.
The ill-mannered and the misfit do their bit for the war effort unfettered by cancel culture. The only culture war worth fighting is the real: decoding a fascist culture.
Everyone code switches, hiding their individual truths. Our work is cerebral, antiseptic, detached from our biographies. I mask my identity into not having one. Disguised, I’m no longer who I was.
Secrecy liberates me from judging and from being judged. Crossing our covert campus, my step is springy.
Despite the close quarters, and the muffled voices of colleagues conferring, I don’t smell anything. No perfumes, no body odors.
I can’t even smell myself.
