Beth is their age, but so totally cowed by her Bible-spouting mother, they feel obliged to bring her out of her shell. Mab and Osla are billeted in the spare bedroom of a house in nearby Bletchley village, where they meet the shy family daughter, Beth Finch. The two women, among the many summoned to Buckinghamshire’s Government Code and Cypher School, are meant to help the male ‘brains of the outfit’ with administrative and secretarial duties. The Bletchley boffins obtain her name because of her top ranking in secretarial school.
Mabel Churt has none of these advantages, living in Shoreditch with her mum and younger sister, but she’s bright and hard-working. Lest you think this is a fictional bridge too far, the character Osla is modeled on the real-life Osla Benning, whom Quinn describes in an afterword as ‘a beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and Hut 4 translator who was Prince Philip’s long-term wartime girlfriend.’ Her knowledge of German and French gets her the assignment at Bletchley Park. She’s a goddaughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten and, as it happens, the wartime girlfriend of Prince Philip. She returns to London and takes up work at a Hawker Siddeley airplane factory in Colnbrook. Osla Kendall’s socialite mother hopes to stash her in Canada to wait out World War II, but the sidelines are never a place for Osla. Quinn’s detailed construction of that world is riveting, not just her descriptions of technical matters, but also the human interactions in that intense and desperate enterprise.
Most people today know the story of Bletchley Park – how bright young things learned to decode messages generated by the German Enigma machines and, along with a collection of genius misfits and military leaders, put together an enormous decryption enterprise. Chapters from the later time period, November 1947, are a day-by-day countdown to the royal wedding of Prince Philip of Greece, retitled as the Duke of Edinburgh, and Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, the future Queen of England. They’ve been recruited for jobs that haven’t been well-defined-though we readers know the challenges they’ll face-and arrive displaying a mixture of youthful high spirits, enthusiasm, and uncertainty. Most of it happens in December 1939, when three young women converge on Bletchley Park.
Kate Quinn’s engrossing new espionage thriller takes place in two time periods.
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