Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
A Clandestine Community
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Dear Travel Journal,
To my neighbors, I’m a homeowner. To my wife, a traveling companion. To my kids, a part-time banker. To my students, a classroom vaudevillian. To my cat, I’m a can opener.
My life is lived in crevices and compartments. Wherever I am, a part of me stays in disguise. Like a spy’s deep cover.
Today, I’m a tourist at London’s Euston Station. Every twenty minutes a train departs for the one-hour trip to Bletchley Park.
Before World War II, the town of Bletchley was known, if it was known at all, for brickmaking. During WWII, a super-secret community of codebreakers worked at Bletchley successfully decoding the Nazi Enigma cypher machine. After the war, the Supreme Allied Commander credited this clubhouse for brainiacs with shortening the war by a full two years.
Disembarking at Bletchley station, I imagine myself a new recruit anxiously anticipating induction into this clandestine community. Because colored pencils are used to distinguish signal traffic by source, location and military branch, a pass-fail interview asks if I am colorblind. I pass.
The main Bletchley building, where I complete my paperwork, suggests a sumo wrestler moonlighting as a Victorian flower seller. The British War Office requisitioned this obscure, nondescript country estate because it was architecturally self-camouflaging to German bomber pilots. Someone once called it “lavatory-Gothic.”
Our community is comprised 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. To the mix add in a goodly number of social misfits with concealed identities.
I am assigned to an underheated, squatty, one-story building. On my eight-hour shifts, I bend over a trestle table laboring with fatigued eyes to codebreak radio signals intercepted from German U-boats, Luftwaffe air battalions and Gestapo outposts.
Eight thousand of my co-workers are housewives, debutantes, shopkeepers, schoolteachers. They operate cryptographic and communications machinery, translate enemy documents, perform clerical duties. Round-the-clock the women keep our code-breaking computers working at full capacity.
The homosexuals among us lead a double double life. Homosexuality is against the law, but at Bletchley the nation’s survival depends on not prying into other people’s work product or their personal pleasures.
One day a schoolgirl, age 14, quits her studies and joins us to work as a messenger. The prickly enforcement of labor laws is shrugged off. She finishes the war a trusted senior staff secretary. I never learn her real name.
Missing from our club are people of color. Even when facing annihilation, the British Empire upholds it blinkered class and color prejudices. When it really, really matters, almost all lives matter.
Once inducted, the ill-mannered, the miscreant, the misfit do their bit for the war effort unfettered by cancel culture. We try to steer clear of culture wars. The only war worth fighting is a real one.
At Bletchley, my individual identity is ignored, suppressed, irrelevant. Everyone code switches. People from different backgrounds, with divergent ideologies, diverse lifestyles and discrete sexual orientations put their histories, their hopes, their individual truths on hold.
My secret is that secrecy liberates me from judging and being judged.
