You don't know what it's like

I am enjoying White Heat more than M, who was the same generation (more or less) as the protagonists, and is therefore jarred by the inconsistencies in a way that I’m not. The scene between Charlotte and Jack after Thatcher was elected, for example, where she was claiming it was a milestone for feminism and he was arguing that the new Prime Minister’s vagina was irrelevant in the wider context of her evil political agenda.

Now, I remember being greatly cheered, as a nine year old girl, by the fact that our new Prime Minister was a woman. It was made a big deal of in my primary school, where we debated what it might mean for us when we grew up, and whether or not she would be called the Prime Mistress. M, on the other hand, already married and a father by 1979, can only remember the despair which flooded the left, with the feminists as gloomed as the men who still expected them to make the tea.

In a similar way, I remember the Falklands conflict very differently to anyone who was an adult at the time. I can remember it, but I was 12. My mum worked nights and I used to go shopping for her in the holidays while she was in bed – I remember holding my shopping list at the Booths meat counter and quizzing the staff over the provenance of the corned beef. They assured me that it was form Uruguay, but I remember not really believing them. I remember sitting on a beanbag in my nightie in front of the TV, watching Brian Hanrahan as he ‘counted them all out and counted them all back’. I remember yomping, and Goose Green, and Gotcha. I remember being absolutely amazed that there were still actual foreign wars where actual soldiers from Britain actually died. (There was Northern Ireland, of course, but nobody understood that).

And then it was over. When it was actually announced on the news I had already gone to bed, but my mum came and woke me up and gave me a Kit Kat. I remember wondering if she’d got them in specially, anticipating the inevitable supremacy of our Paras. I also remember learning that most of the Argentinian soldiers were conscripts, and that some of them were begging for food from the islanders, some of whom fed them. I didn’t understand how a government could send soldiers somewhere without sending plenty of food with them. I was so young.

Thinking about it now, I probably have a worse understanding of that war than someone either older or younger – the former had a sense of context and nuance, the latter have the benefit of hindsight and history teachers. I hadn’t lived through any wars, hot or cold, and the axis of evil hadn’t been invented yet.

So I am finding out about it all over again as a grown up with the 30^th anniversary commemorations, and it’s quite a revelation. Over 250 British soldiers killed in 74 days – that’s astonishing. And I cried into the pan as I was cooking dinner yesterday while listening to Fathers and Sons: From the Falklands to Helmand on Radio 4 – the story of two men from very different backgrounds who fought in the Falklands conflict whose sons both followed them into the army and ended up in Afghanistan. It’s worth a listen.

This all makes me think about the newest word in my vocabulary: Umwelt – which arrived on 1 April courtesy of xkcd. The definition is in the image text (what you see when you hover over the image). The joke may still elude you (it did me), but a good explanation can be found on reddit. But it’s a great word. We are each the sum of all our parts, and only the sum of all our parts.

joella

The hidden stories of Bletchley Park

Photo: bletchley park decoding goodness by insert_user_name, on Flickr. Shared under Creative Commons: click photo for more info.

Taking a little break from writing long posts about leaving Oxford to write a short one about Bletchley Park. If you haven't seen Codebreakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes then (at time of writing) you still have six days to watch it, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

A few years ago, there was a special Cambridge alumni day at Bletchley Park which included a talk from Turing's biographer, someone who explained how the Bombe actually worked, a social historian who talked about life there, a demonstration of the Bombe in action, a look at the Colossus, and some other things I forget. I thought I'd take M as a birthday present, him being a mathematician and all. When I first tried to book it was completely sold out, but I put my name on the reserve list and when someone cancelled at the last minute we were offered their places.

It was generally a pretty weird day, as the majority of my fellow alumni present were of the elderly imperious entitled variety (I am very uncomfortable belonging to a club that has people like that as members), and their wives. I did not enjoy the smalltalk. But the big talk blew my mind.

I came away thinking why isn't visiting this place part of the National Curriculum? Why is it falling down? Why don't kids study Turing like they study Hitler?

What I didn't properly realise till I saw the Codebreakers documentary though was that the reason Bletchley was left to moulder away for so long -- and still struggles with funding -- is that so much of what went on there was so super top secret (and carried on being used in the Cold War) that even today we don't know the whole story. We did know about Turing -- and the government recently acknowledged that the fact that a grateful free world saw fit to persecute him to death after the war for his homosexuality is a source of national shame -- but there are others whose work was never recognised, who went on to live in postwar obscurity.

This documentary is an important part of beginning to recognise their incredible contribution, and the fact that a large part of what won the war was maths. It's all fascinating stuff, but what brought a lump to my throat was a bit near the end where someone explained why there was no German equivalent of Bletchley Park.

Firstly, the Allies weren't so reliant on codes, because there was more trust and less fear in the command structure, so messages could be carried and transmitted in different ways. And secondly, a lot of the best codebreakers were Jews or gays or wildly eccentric misfits. The Nazis were busy exterminating those minds, not valuing them. So it was recognition of the value of (or at least tolerance of) diversity that won the war too. We need to remember that.

joella