Bletchley Park was where one of the war's most famous
- & crucial
- achievements was made: the cracking of Germany's Enigma" code in which its most important military communications were couched. This country house in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to Britain's most brilliant mathematical brains like Alan Turing & the scene of immense advances in technology
- indeed the birth of modern computing. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic & the war in North Africa. But though plenty has been written about the boffins & the codebreaking fictional & non-fiction
- from Robert Harris & Ian Mc Ewan to Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing
- what of the thousands of men & women who lived & worked there during the war? What was life like for them
- an odd secret territory between the civilian & the military? Sinclair Mc Kay's book is the first history for the general reader of life at Bletchley Park & an amazing compendium of memories from people now in their eighties
- of skating on the frozen lake in the grounds (a depressed Angus Wilson the novelist once threw himself in)
- of a youthful Roy Jenkins useless at codebreaking of the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels
- & of the implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend & boyfriend working in adjacent huts knew nothing about each other's work."