If I told you what my mother used to do I’d have to kill you !

OK I’ll tell you then.

She was a war time code breaker and later on a spy !

My mother was born into an upper middle class southern English family that had fallen on hard times. Her father was an unsuccessful architect who wasn’t good with his money relying on the charity and goodwill of family and friends. Mum recalls living on a Middlesex farm and paying a peppercorn rent of one pound a year. With Grandpa it was all about appearances. Mum was shipped off to boarding school at the age of eight to learn the basics. Embroidery and flower arranging apparently. She was presented with an engraved cigarette case at twenty one by her father.

But I don’t smoke !

You’ll have to learn to be accepted in society !

During the war, she left school at seventeen to join the Women’s Royal Navy Service (Wrens) and was stationed at HMS Pembroke V. Not a ship but the code name for the Bletchley Park Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) working with the  Bombe code breaker machines used to decode German Enigma messages.

“Women were first brought into Bletchley Park after being approached at university or because of trusted family connections; debutantes especially were prized, as they were considered the most trustworthy due to their upper class backgrounds.”

I don’t think you would call my Mum a debutante of the the upper classes although she did sound a bit plummy. My school mate thought she sounded like the queen but I couldn’t hear it. I suspect because her father was in the signals and intelligence that she was recruited.

* I recommend you watch the film The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch for a better understanding of the importance of Alan Turing and the breaking of the code.*

In 1943 she found herself one of sixty Wrens on a troop ship to Colombo, Ceylon to focus on breaking Japanese codes. Among the 5,000 male soldiers aboard, she met my father.

My wife once asked her why she married him.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Whether it was said in jest or some regret I’ll never know. I felt my parents were on different trajectories. Dad, working class lad, university graduate and self declared intellect on the up and Mum from a down at heel family trying to uphold the family hyphenated name. I’m not trying to say there wasn’t love maybe just a tinge of deception.

Having signed the official secrets act, my stoic Mum never spoke of her work for over thirty years. When she finally did in the seventies she dismissed her own contribution as being just a ‘lowly secretary’ as she had done when she worked for MI 5 post war.

Now for a teenage boy growing up in the seventies and brought up on a TV diet of The Man From Uncle and The Avengers this sent my imagination running.

What did she really do ? Was she more than just my mild mannered Mum ?

I’d sneak into her bedroom and look for the hidden leather cat suit at the back of the wardrobe or the compact aluminium case containing all the gun parts, telescopic sights and silencer awaiting assembly.

No she was cleverer than that. She was a professional.

I’d check all the lamp shades for listening devices. I’d heat up discarded bits of paper to see if she’d written any secret messages in lemon juice.

God, she was good. I recently binge watched all the Spooks series and Slow Horses. Even they couldn’t hold a torch to my mother. To her dying day she never broke, taking her secrets to the grave.

In reality she brought up three sons, put herself through night school then teacher training college and was a successful primary school teacher for the next quarter of a century. I’m immensely proud of her.

I do remember her once picking up a neighbour’s cat, gently stroking it saying…….

We meet at last, Mr Bond.

(Post by John Allan, from Bridgetowm, Western Australia – September 2026)