Bletchley Park

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