Before I had an inkling of The Enigma Girl, I wondered if I could set a story in the newly elevated City of Milton Keynes, which contains Bletchley Park, the Government Code breaking centre during World War II. When I went to see it in the winter of 21, the trees dripped, nobody and nothing moved, and whichever way you looked the perspective of the city’s boulevards dissolved in fog. For me, it had a kind of Stanley Kubrick/Stephen King appeal. So odd and linear for provincial Britain; mysterious, too.
That day I visited Bletchley Park Museum which has just re-opened after Lockdown and found I had the place to myself. As I walked round, a story began to form in my head about the descendants of the people who worked as codebreakers and engineers at Bletchley Park during the war. I imagined them meeting up at one of the anniversary celebrations and forging an immediate bond.
Bletchley and The Polish story
Bletchley is still hallowed ground for the British, especially members of the Intelligence Services, which is why PM Rishi Sunak held an international AI conference there last year when world leaders signed up to an AI safety protocol. Everything we see now in computing and AI comes from the extraordinary work done at Bletchley during the war. The first computer was built there by Tommy Flowers, based on designs of a mathematician named Max Newman. And from Bletchley’s most famous son – Alan Turing – we have the Turing Test (1950) which assesses a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour that’s indistinguishable from human intelligence. In the book, Slim sits beside Callum, one of the techno-gifted journos of Middle Kingdom, in her first encounter with an AI called Lovelock. She asks Callum what it’s like being in the presence of Lovelock. Callum glances at her, eyes lit up, foot jigging. ‘Like swimming beside a whale in a dark ocean without being able to see how big the creature is.’
What I found so moving at Bletchley is that this enormous leap forward in technology and human understanding began in a few scruffy sheds around Bletchley Manor, which, initially, were equipped with little more than tables and chairs, typewriters and pens and paper but which, soon after the start of the war, housed the Bombe, and electro-mechanical machine, which, like the Polish Bombe, speeded up the decryption and was the precursor of the Colossus, the world’s first computer.
That was an extraordinary gift to humanity, and it would also be true to say that the Polish Intelligence service played a vital role because the Poles cracked enigma when they tackled a commercial version of the machine in the mid 1930s. Just before the outbreak of war a team from the Government Code and Cipher School, including the erratic genius Dilly Knox, visited Poland for a secret conference at a facility at Pyry. Along with a French delegation, they were shown how the Polish team had devised machinery to determine the change in cipher. They called their machine the Bombe after a popular ice cream dessert. Later, as the Germans developed Enigma for military use, it became infinitely more complicated to break Enigma ciphers, but the Poles had helped to enable the British to decode Enigma in the first years of the war. Today, there’s a memorial to the three Polish mathematicians in the stable yard of Bletchley Park.
The Polish contribution is one of the reasons I gave Slim Polish ancestry. The secret work that Poles had conducted before the war would have been worthless if a team from the retreating Polish army had not gone behind Nazi lines during the invasion in 1939 and made sure there was nothing at the secret facility of Pyry for the Germans to discover. As I have it, Slim’s great grandfather – also an intelligence officer – was responsible for the raid. The miracle of what happened at Bletchley Park would never have occurred without that raid.
Media and Middle Kingdom
So, once I had thought of the descendants meeting and bonding at an anniversary event at BP, I asked myself – what would these members of Bletchley’s special gene pool be doing in contemporary Britain? They would, of course, be defending democracy and freedom from malign forces, but forces within the UK and not outside, and they’d do it using the media, in fact an obscure local website called Middle Kingdom, founded by one of their number Abigail Exton-White. And their secret weapon would be an AI helper named Lovelock, developed by Yoni Ross and Sara Kiln, “the descendants” of the people who worked on Colossus the first computer. And they’d use the AI helper to reach into Government systems and snatch incontestable proof of corruption.
One of the themes of the book is about media freedom and the need to hold governments to account, though I hope I don’t make heavy weather of it. Much of the official pressure experienced by the founders of Middle Kingdom, as they start to publish evidence of government waste and inefficiency, was derived from my inside track at a national paper during publication of the Edward Snowden files in the summer of 2013, when the paper was menaced by the government and civil service over a period of weeks. Through late August of that year, I acted as one of the editor’s proxies, going on TV to defend the principle of publication and attack the government for its mass surveillance. From 2006 to 2011 I had campaigned on civil liberties and against mass surveillance and had done a lot of events, and I was firmly on the side of publication and during that time and witnessed how menacing the British state can be. So, in the Enigma Girl, bullying by the Cabinet Secretary, the brandishing of the Official Secrets Act (OSA) and the tactics of the journalists (the threat of a data dump, in which unmediated/ unedited material is released into the public domain to counter injunctions and OSA, as well as the Fleet Street practice of holding back a killer revelation ) all come from this experience 11 years ago.
The Middle Kingdom site is a kind of ideal for me. As a general reporter in Liverpool during my early 20s I covered everything from Inquests, the courts, industrial disputes to drugs gangs, the far Left and the back-alley murder of a prostitute named Scotch Pat. It was an amazing three years. I came to value the training as well as the lessons in life I received in what was a pretty rough, broken-down city at the time. I also appreciated the importance of good local news coverage to a community. That mostly vanished with the decline of the provincial press, but at Middle Kingdom it has been revived in a punchy, fearless modern news site, where young people are trained in the fundamentals of the job. I wish that Middle Kingdom existed. There’s a place for it.
Slavery
Slim spends much of her time undercover at Middle Kingdom being sent on no-hope stories because editor Dan Halladay and his colleagues suspect she may be a spy. She comes across the story of a missing Romanian national named Andrei Botezatu and eventually uncovers a vast slave network operating in this part of the United Kingdom – the no man’s land which is neither properly the Midlands nor East Anglia. There are many such networks in the UK. I studied two cases, one that operated in Evesham, near where I was brought up, and another in the West Midlands towns of Smethwick and Walsall. I remembered an interview with a man named Miroslaw Lehmann, a Pole who was held by the second gang. He inspired me to write the character of Andrei. Here ( half-way down) there is an interview with Mirsolaw. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-48881327
What’s horrifying is the ease with which slavery gangs operate in plain sight. In the book, when Middle Kingdom publishes the exposé of the slave network, the accompanying editorial says, ‘‘Behind the mindboggling statistics of this story there is a landscape of suffering and tragedy that existed alongside us all – at the end of our street and in the fields, farms, and workplaces we pass every day – stories of isolation, despair, helplessness, separation, and the deliberate crushing of the individual spirit.” Those are pretty much my feelings and I think they are an accurate representation of what goes on around us, especially in the countryside and small provincial towns where there are fewer opportunities to escape and it’s easier to isolate vulnerable migrants. The fact that they are almost always undocumented and unknown to the British authorities means that they can disappear without trace. The West Midlands network – run by a Polish gang – in one instance stripped a victim naked in front of other slaves, doused him in surgical chemical iodine, and told him that they would remove his kidneys if he did not keep quiet.
Of course, the slavery story serves a purpose in the plot. Slim is obsessed about her vanished brother Matt and makes the connection between Andrei’s plight and her brother’s disappearance. Eventually, the Romanian becomes a substitute for her dead brother. I consciously drew a line between the skeleton of the young man discovered at the Alder Fen archaeological dig, Andrei’s plight, and Matt’s murder. All of them are young men killed or about to be. It’s an important theme of the book because her desperate need to find Matt – to get closure for her mother – is what propels her until the point when she is told he has been murdered then that drive is replaced by a need for revenge. That’s the hinge point.
Characters
All the main characters in the Enigma Girl are women. Slim Parsons, her cranky, amusing mother, Diana, Slim’s great friend the MI6 serving officer, Bridie Hansen, the news editor of Middle Kingdom and Goth beauty Abigail Exton-White, Nurse Helen Meiklejohn who offers Slim “a hug on the NHS” ( as happened to me in hospital when I was dealing with my mother) and the centenarian and former Bletchley girl Delphi Buchanan.
Oddly enough, this was not something I planned. These five strong female characters emerged as the book began to take shape. In all, there are eight or nine, if you include the two MI5 officers, Rita Bauer, and Corinna Stone, as well Shazi Kalash, the deputy News Editor at Middle Kingdom, and Annette Raines, a lawyer from Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a book, where, except for the villain Ivan Guest, the people who make things happen are all women.
Where Slim came from
Slim is 35, the age group of my daughters and their friends, who are all now well into their careers. She is part of generation that has achieved much more independence than my female contemporaries 35 years ago.
It was surprising how quickly Slim started doing her own thing as a character, propelled, I suppose, by a few short sketches I’d made on her character in the notebooks I fill before settling down to write. This was lucky because I spent two years in her company, being amused by her wit, her Tomboy sexiness, daring, cunning and humanity. She was good company, and I was smitten. I couldn’t have done that time with anyone less lively and amusing. And now the book is done, I miss her.
The key part of drawing her was that I wanted a bright, fearless young woman, who also had deep emotional attachments to her family. The death of her father Toby has had a big impact on her, and the disappearance of her brother and her mother’s resultant alcoholism are an important part of her back story. I enjoyed writing the relationship with Diana, because so much of it is drawn from my mother’s last three years. Looking after an addict is all consuming and grim, yet my mother, like Diana, was very funny and sharp, even in the dire moments. I wanted to capture that ambivalence of being simultaneously both child and parent.
Despite Slim’s fluid sexuality, she likes and gets on with men, particularly two characters I’m fond of, the archaeologist Dr Dougal Hass, the veteran reporter and videographer J.J. Skelpick, who has something of two war reporters I knew (David Blundy and Tim Hetherington, both of whom were killed while reporting). If I ever write another Slim volume these two will make a return. They are both very alive in my mind and have not faded with the completion of the book, which is what normally happens. In fact, that’s true of all the characters.
Another important part of her is the legacy of all those Polish spies, first of all her great grandfather ( who blew up Pyry) then her grandfather, who having emerged from Siberia half-way through the war, grows up to become a key asset of the British during the Cold war. Then comes Slim’s mother who has brief spell at MI5 and, finally, Slim. Genes matter in this story.
Ivan Guest
A lot of Guest is based on Harrods boss Mohammed Al Fayed (now dead). Fayed wasn’t a money launderer, but he was a profoundly corrupt and abusive individual, who dominated my life for a spell because, I was the lead investigator in the defence of a libel suit brought by him against Vanity Fair in 1995. That lasted two years. That is why Guest pushes Slim to be examined and why MI5 go along with the request and provide a doctor to give her a clean bill of health. A small detail, perhaps, but it’s drawn from life.
In Guest there’s something clownish, which I also took from Fayed. The key point about Fayed is that he was hard for members of the British establishment to read. They saw the buffoonish character, his absurd social ambition, appalling taste in clothes and interior decoration and generosity to charities, and never took him seriously. Then, suddenly, they found themselves ensnared and compromised. That’s exactly how Guest operates.
But Guest works on a bigger canvas than Fayed did. He is one of those characters with one foot in the West and the other planted in the underbelly of the Russian Republic. What people in the West never understand is that the thugs from the East don’t change their business methods when they move to the West. Guest has a plausible, public school boy manner and a British passport and so is able to fool and manipulate the British Establishment, which, as we have seen, is so often bought for very little money.
Tender Wick Business Park
Tender Wick, the old wartime Polish refugee camp. where Middle Kingdom has its secret facility, is modelled on Northwick Business Park in the Cotswolds, a sprawling, shabby trading estate which was built as a POW camp in the war and later became the home for hundreds of Polish refugees in 1945. It’s contemporary with the rushed, wartime construction at Bletchley, so it gave me a good idea of the original buildings there. But the important thing about Northwick, which housed Polish soldiers and their families right into the Sixties, was that it put me onto the extraordinary story of how Polish General Wladyslaw Anders led an army and thousands of civilian across Russia and into British-controlled Iran and freedom.
As I have it in the book, Slim’s great grandfather, his wife and their son are part of that miraculous Exodus in 1942. The story of how the Polish Corps, under Anders, left the Soviet Union, crossed Iran to Palestine and then fought their way up to Monte Casino is a book of its own, and I wanted it in Slim’s background, to explain her fearlessness.
The Enigma Girl by Henry Porter to be published by Quercus in hardback at £22 on 7th November 2024
‘Enjoyable, beautifully written, surprising and engrossing, with a blazing moral energy’ RORY STEWART
‘This ingenious spy thriller, delving into the heart of contemporary espionage, had me gripped throughout. Henry Porter is a master of the modern spy thriller but In Slim Parsons he has created a female agent for our times; tough, clever, resourceful and damaged. The action packed storyline is taut with tension. A tour de force!’ JANE THYNNE
With thanks to Sophie Ransom sophie@ransompr.com for organising this feature, and to Henry for writing it.
