How Britain's top secret heroes found true romance

THEY called it Station X - one of the best-kept secrets of the Second World War. A team of young men and women worked to break Nazi codes, including the famous Enigma machine.

Churchill said their work cut the war by two years, and saved millions of lives.

Now, the film Enigma focuses on their achievements. DONNA WHITE speaks to a couple who met and fell in love in a shroud of secrecy they can only now begin to describe.

IT was a dark summer night when the train pulled into the tiny village station.

A young woman stepped off with a small suitcase and scurried to a nearby phone box, looking suspiciously around her.

Looking at a tiny note, on which there was a number, the young Scot dialled.

"Ah yes, Miss Mackenzie," came the reply. "We've been expecting you."

That was all it took for Sheila Mackenzie to become part of one of the most covert operations of the Second World War.

She was then a naive 20-year-old from Inverness, who had never been out of Scotland.

But she was set to become a vital code-cracker at the top secret location immortalised in the new movie Enigma, starring Kate Winslet and Dougray Scott. Sheila, now 78, had no idea what her part in the conflict was to be. After an interview with the War Office, she was sent instructions to report to Bletchley Park, 50 miles north of London.

A car collected her on that night in 1943 and she entered a world in which there was only one rule - forget everything.

Sheila explains: "Everything was on a need-to-know basis. I was told what my work involved - cracking codes - but not how those codes would be used.

"The area in which I worked was the only part of the site in which I was allowed to roam. I couldn't snoop around.

"Nor could I discuss my work with anyone outside of my team, or ask anyone else what they were doing. I literally had to do my work, then go home and forget all about it."

It's hard to believe in this day and age, when information is everything and the words "freedom of speech" are a well-used part of our language, but Sheila and the thousands of workers at Bletchley Park kept silent for almost 50 years. Even those who married colleagues at the secret base never discussed the war work they did - not even with their spouse

Sheila says: "It was drummed into us that we'd signed the Official Secrets Act and our silence was imperative.

"So until everything started to go public, almost 40 years later, my husband had no idea what I did at Bletchley, and I had no idea what he did."

Sheila's husband, Oliver Lawn, now 82, was one of around 30 mathematicians recruited to crack the Enigma code.

He worked in Hut 6, the area in which Kate Winslet works in the movie Enigma.

Originally from Walsall, he studied maths at Cambridge, and was recruited by one of the university dons who had gone on to work at Bletchley.

He met Sheila at a Scottish country dance club, one of many social events at Bletchley Park, aimed at raising morale.

Sheila spent her days in Block B, in a small office with windows so high you had to stand on tiptoes to look out on to a beautiful lake. But there was little time to enjoy the view, or to make small talk with her two colleagues.

Sheila had to buckle down to crack a never-ending stream of three-letter codes, picked up from coastal batteries and raider stations on the Dutch, Belgian and French borders.

The work was monotonous, and often headache-inducing, but the determined young woman never complained.

Sheila had so wanted to do her part for the war effort, she dropped out of teacher-training in order to increase her chances of conscription.

She explained: "I was studying languages at Aberdeen University, and had put my name down for teaching when I left. This meant I went on a reserve list and could not be called up."

But by her second year of study, Sheila felt uneasy. She had cousins in the ATS and the Royal Army Medical Corps and she envied them.

So she had her name taken off the teaching list and the War Office soon invited her to London for an interview.

Shiela found some of the Nazi morse code messages easy to crack but the patterns changed frequently and she could not afford to be complacent. Shiela, now a retired management consultant, said: "We were always told to forget our work - 'don't think about it', they kept saying.

"It wasn't until the 1980s, when books began to come out about Bletchley Park, that my husband and I sat down and discussed what we had done.

"Everyone had signed the Official Secrets Act. We'd kept our silence for so many years during the war, it was no hardship to maintain it."

Sheila was amazed to learn Oliver had been involved in cracking Enigma codes, which provided the British with vital information about Nazi plans.

Oliver, a retired civil servant, said: "We knew how important our job was. We were shown an Enigma machine, which was like a typewriter, but every time you pressed a key, a different one would light up."

The couple are pleased that the new film, Enigma - based on a novel by Robert Harris - will show the public what they did.

Shiela added: "Harris's book captures the atmosphere of that time. We are looking forward to seeing the film.

"At last, our children and grandchildren will get a taste of what life was like for us."

Source: Sunday Mail