Journal of a trilogy: beginnings
Displayed in the window of Blackwell’s in Charing Cross Road, Sinclair Mackay’s The Secret Life of Bletchley drew me in to to the shop. When I opened it, I felt chills passing up and down my body. In spite of the extra weight in my luggage, I had to buy it. I soon realized why. Instead of Orford Ness, Bletchley Park will be my setting for Habit of Secrecy.
I’d read only a few pages when a London friend called and we agreed to visit to Bletchley Park. It proved an inspiring and fascinating day.
I was staying at my usual London home, the Penn Club in Bedford Place. Queuing for the public telephone in its alcove, I met a man called Peter. In our brief conversation he shared some insights and information about the thousands of illegitimate children fathered by North Americans in WWII Britain. This was also related to the story I wanted to tell.
A huge cultural gap existed between British and North American couples who met in war time. As Peter explained, British women thought if a man slept with you, he was honour bound to marry you. Canadians and Americans, who did not share this view, left many thousands of illegitimate children behind them, including Peter’s grandfather, who was born after WWI. Peter’s biological father’s name was not on his birth certificate. Under the law of the times, if a man could refuse to acknowledge the child, either at the time of birth, or afterwards. Thus, at the time we spoke, Peter had been unable to trace the identity of his Canadian grandfather, though he had made great efforts to do so.
In the following days, I met two people at the Penn Club who lived through the blitz as children. One was miraculously saved when a bomb that struck the roof of his home didn’t explode. The other’s life was spared due to her mother’s intuition, which, in spite of neighbours’s urgings, would not allow her to put her children in the root cellar to protect them from approaching bombers. She was proved right when a bomb struck the root cellar and killed all the other children, while hers survived.
As a friend predicted, in preparing to write this novel, I have embarked on a magical mystery tour. Oddly enough, I have just remembered that many years ago, a psychic predicted something similar for me.