‘The Girl from Station X: My Mother’s Unknown Life‘
Interview by Shula Subramaniam.
When Elisa Segrave discovered her mother Anne’s diaries dating from the 1930s through to the 1950s, she faced an unprecedented insight into the personality of a woman from whom she had experienced much emotional distance.
After the accidental death of Elisa Segrave’s brother when he was five and she herself only seven, Elisa’s mother descended into alcoholism and later suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. The diaries chart Anne’s life from a daughter of privilege to wife and mother via a career in naval surveillance at Bletchley Park, and revealed a woman that her daughter had not truly known.
Did you know about your mother’s work at Bletchley Park before finding her diaries?
I knew vaguely that my mother had worked at Bletchley Park but had no idea what part of the war it was, in which hut, and what she had done there.
What role did your mother have when she was stationed at Bletchley?
My mother was first in Hut 3, as an indexer, starting on 12 August 1941. Soon after that, on 6 September, Churchill secretly visited Bletchley, going inside only two Huts, 6 and 3. My mother’s diary describes him with `the proverbial cigar’ sitting at the desk of her boss. Group Captain Humphries, looking at the Middle East reports and declaring: `Well, if we don’t win the war with information like that I don’t know how we shall win it!’ Naturally she was very excited.
In early May 1942, Hut 3 was taken over by the Navy, and Lieutenant Commander Lavers became Anne’s boss. It was shortly after that, during the period leading up to Operation Torch – the Allied invasion of French North Africa on 8 November – that my mother was given an important job, Fourth Naval Duty Officer. She was expected to check and forward signals drafted by the Naval Section and she also had to draft signals from scratch based on new information coming in from elsewhere in the hut – intelligence gathered from Enigma decrypts – and send them directly to commands in the Mediterranean. My mother realised what a responsible job she had and on 13 November 1942, five days after the Operation Torch landings, she wrote, `Friday 13th again and so ends my week of being NDO, perhaps the most momentous week in the history of the navy yet in this war. Certainly the most responsible position I am ever likely to hold in my whole life again…’.
What did you learn about life at Bletchley through your mother’s diaries?
My mother found day-to-day life at Bletchley often monotonous and dispiriting. She compared it to the exciting jobs she had had while working on various bomber command stations, closer to the planes, which fascinated her, and to the pilots, whose daring she admired. She had not been used to male academics and found some of these men at Bletchley rather conceited. However she was constantly gripped by the work itself and was later very proud of having been there.
Your relationship with your mother was rather distant; did learning about her past change that?
Yes it did. For the first time I saw her as an active and intelligent young woman, doing her best. I have a favourite quote, written in October 1930, when she was 16. `No one knows me, no one will ever know me…very few people know what I am like inside’. When i first read these defiant words I saw them as a challenge, to me, to find out more about my mother. But there is also something poignant in that declaration; a lonely girl is crying out to be discovered and understood.
What was her life like after Bletchley?
She enjoyed the first years of marriage to my father (they married in June 1948) and then having four children, rather late compared to most women of her generation. (She did not have me, her first baby, until she was 35.) Until I was two, my father had an interesting job, as naval attaché in Madrid, and my mother loved this period of their marriage. She was always curious about other countries, their culture and their politics and she made many life-long friends with Spaniards and other non-Brits she met then. She also used it as an opportunity to travel around Spain, still very poor and untouched by tourism, and wrote diaries about it.
Did you come to admire your mother after discovering more about her?
Yes because I then realised that, despite having been in some ways a spoiled only child (but her only sibling had died when she was very young, a little brother born disabled, and her father died when she was one), she made a great effort during the war to use her intelligence and ability and work hard on behalf of her country.
Did you have any concern in releasing your mother’s diaries?
I have the impression that my mother did write the war diaries, if not for an audience, as a serious historical record of the time. The titles of two of the diaries, War and Still More War, made me conclude that she realised she was living in a fascinating period, and guessed that others might want to read her accounts later. She probably would not have wanted to publicise her doubts about her sexuality but, once I had started on the project of writing about my mother, I felt compelled to describe the whole woman as truthfully as I could, though I did leave certain very intimate passages out.
Have you visited Bletchley Park since you discovered the diaries>
Yes, I have visited it twice. The second time I accompanied the daughter of Anne Paget who worked with my mother in Hut 3.
Have you had any contact from Veterans who knew your mother since the book’s release?|
No, I have not – but would like to.
`The Girl from Station X – My Mother’s Unknown Life’ is published by Aurum Press in paperback on March 15 2014.
Elisa Segrave 