Dear Mary | 23 November 2017

Q. I was recently at an informal dinner given by two dear friends, but returned home seething with rage against one of their two guests. The odd thing was that for at least half of the dinner I had liked her; she had seemed soothing and articulate and had a pretty face. Her true colours emerged only when our warm-hearted hostess suddenly remembered that both of our mothers (like thousands of others) had worked at Bletchley Park during the war. She kindly tried to find the book I wrote about my mother but I reminded her that she had lent it to a friend. I had not said a word about my mother but the guest then started boasting that her mother had been in the most important hut with Alan Turing et al. She claimed her mum had inside knowledge of the bombing of Coventry and had been round 35 Women’s Institutes talking about her Bletchley experience.