Bletchley Park Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Pre-war, my mother wrote shorthand
In Aberdeen's harbour area
Her employer, a coal merchant, traded abroad
He kept a loaded pistol in his drawer
German skippers from Bremen
Shipped in coal, with rising tension
As Hitler's dark star rose

In the wider arena, after war broke out
Life for the conscript soldier was:

Camouflage, fatigues, orders, rations
Transport, equipment, smokes, lectures
Squad drill, dummy runs, parades, communications
Boredom, terror, maintenance
Sentry duty, cleaning of weapons, leave passes
Regulations, guns firing, shells bursting
Tanks rumbling, breech blocks, corpses
Burial duties, plastic surgery, lost careers and loves

In the secret arena,
Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern computing
Shortened the war by 2 years
Saved millions of lives

Click click click went the busy Bletchley brains

An enigmatic phone call alerted the chosen
‘Aunt Flo is not so well'
When they signed the official secret act
A revolver lay beside it…A sinister warning


Churchill called them
‘the geese that laid the golden eggs
And never cackled'

Click click click went the busy Bletchley brains

Deciphering enemy signals by mind numbing maths
Collecting, code cracking German Enigma settings
Breaking the secret messages of Japan

Cryptoanalysts, linguists, classicists
Wrens from Woburn Abbey's Wrenneries

Click click click went the busy Bletchley brains

Rank or status cut no ice in their work
Secrets buzzed through the air like invisible bees

Hitler's cipher machine was cracked like an egg
From gibberish to German with ten Colossi computers

Click click click went the busy Bletchley brains

Turing and Welchman's Bombe machines ticking over
The real life backroom Bonds of the secret army

They worked like dynamos, while Britain sizzled and burned
And terror turned Europe into a human pyre
When night bloomed deadly flowers above our cities

Click click click went the busy Bletchley brains

Diagrams, statistics, blueprints, numbers
In the miasma of computation, I'm an alien onlooker
A baby boomer, a numeracy illiterate
Much of the fragile peace was won by maths