Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  I was conscious that this was a turning-point in my life: a solemn and welcome one. I had been impressed with England and the English way of doing things ever since my arrival in 1939. Now, in formally committing myself to the country, I felt that I was also committing myself to repaying all the generosity that English people had shown me: to living a life that was worthy of their kindness.

  I was, in other words, committing myself to making a success of my life as Stephanie Brook, Englishwoman.

  5: The Awkward Age

  FINDING EMPLOYMENT was surprisingly easy. Young, numerate people were in demand, as Britain’s budding technology industries broadened their ambitions and their markets. Within weeks of leaving school, I had two interviews, both in north-west London, and, shortly afterwards, two job offers. Both involved being a junior research assistant. One was for the General Electrical Company (GEC) in Wembley; the other was at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill. GEC paid slightly better, but they said plainly that they had no interest in helping me to pursue further studies - whereas the Post Office research station was interested in my further development and was prepared to arrange my hours to allow further study. So I signed up with the Post Office and, shortly afterwards, enrolled for evening classes in applied mathematics - and, later, physics - at Sir John Cass College in Moorgate (now the Sir John Cass School of Science and Technology).

  So began a strange period in my life: a time of development and turmoil in which I didn’t really seem to go anywhere and yet in some important sense was metamorphosing into my true adult self. Now that I look back on them, those ostensibly becalmed years - in my late teens and early twenties - seem faintly surreal. Yet they were critical to the shaping of my career. I suspect that such directionless periods form part of most working lives: what determines our future is how we respond to the frustrations.

  I began by living with my mother. Shortly after we were naturalised, she had bought a small house in Colindale, also in north-west London, borrowing the money for a deposit from some German émigré friends and taking in lodgers to help pay for it. (One of the lodgers had helped me to get my two job interviews.). She was now working as a teacher and, with her marriage behind her, was reclaiming control of her life. But we constantly rubbed each other up the wrong way, and so, as soon as I could, I began to rent a bedsit of my own, in Cricklewood.

  It was an attic room in a tall Victorian house in a wide, tree-lined road called Walm Lane, with a bustling, bossy, very Jewish landlady called Mrs Cohen; five other lodgers; and a shared bathroom. Even by the standards of the day, it was far from luxurious, yet it felt wonderfully independent. I used to leave early, six mornings a week, to catch the bus to Dollis Hill (Saturday was a half-day) and often wouldn’t get home until 10pm, if I had had an evening class, which generally happened three times a week. There was also studying to be done at weekends. So there wasn’t much time to worry about my living conditions.

  I learnt to look after myself; to cook (after a fashion, in an oven without a thermostat); to make and mend things; and, above all, to be organised. Long-term existence in a bedsit is tolerable when all the surfaces are clear, but the space closes in on you horribly if you let it get cluttered. Luckily, I didn’t have many possessions to keep tidy.

  My annual salary - £215 - seemed enough for my needs: I had grown used to living carefully. The monthly pay packet (about £14 after tax) included one crisp white £5 note, which I always tried, in vain, not to spend. Most of the money went on rent and travel, and - a stupid habit that I had for some reason decided to acquire - smoking. I was careful: I would walk part of the way to work rather than pay an extra stage of the bus fare. I often ran out of money before payday - and on one occasion I went without food for so long that I passed out. But I wasn’t conscious of being poor in the way that we had been in Oswestry - not least because, for the first time in years, I wasn’t dependent on anyone else’s charity.

  Cricklewood seemed a cheerful place, with lots of Jewish and Irish people and a few early Jamaicans. It felt lively but safe - unless you walked down Cricklewood Broadway at pub throwing-out time - and I was glad to live there. Compared with the rural England I had known thus far, north-west London buzzed with cosmopolitan sophistication.

  My work at the Post Office was menial. As a research assistant, I was there to perform routine or tiresome tasks for proper researchers. A lot of it was mere arithmetic - drawing graphs, or slogging through repetitive calculations or tables to try out ideas, or banging figures through a comptometer (a kind of electromechanical adding machine that was effectively a primitive calculator) to make statistical inferences or to work out probabilities. The subject matter varied. One day we’d be helping some near-genius with pioneering work on, say, telephony; the next we’d be doing tedious sums connected with the postal service. I remember once having to analyse the number of strands in a piece of string from a ball found in a suspected thief’s shed, to see if it, statistically, there was a match with the string of a stolen parcel.

  It was unexciting but strangely satisfying. You knew exactly what your work was, and whether or not it was done, and whether or not it had been done well (which it had to be). And I, at least, felt that there was some purpose to it.

  There were four of us, all in our late teens, all working on similar tasks on the same little block of desks. For about a year we called each other “Miss Brook”, “Miss French”, “Mr Hodges”, and so on. Then, daringly, someone suggested: “When nobody’s here, shall we use first names?” So we did. But we never really became good friends: the nature of the work wasn’t conducive to casual chat. One of the highest priorities was to have a completely clear desk at the end of each day. Apparently this was for security reasons.

  Our immediate boss was very staid, buttoned-up Scotsman called Ettrick Thomson, who shared an office with three other senior people, one of whom was his boss: a bad-tempered, reclusive man called H J Josephs, who had a chip on his shoulder about being self-taught and who dealt with his insecurities by trying to make his junior employees cry. He never quite succeeded with me but came close several times. What saved me was the discovery that, as my evening classes expanded my mathematical education, I was beginning to understand many concepts better than he did - and could make him back off simply by speaking confidently about whatever subject he was picking us up on. Yet for all his unpleasantness he had a passion for his subject - a sense of its beauty - and a genuine yearning for excellence. It was hard not to be inspired by this, and, in a strange way, I think he was a good influence on me.

  I also had a more distant boss - Mr Joseph’s superior, Doc Jarvis - who was notable for having appalling handwriting, like a doctor’s. No one dared go back and ask him what his scrawled memos meant, and so one of my tasks was to decipher them by sheer force of logic. (For example: “This must be a ‘D’, because he always starts with ‘Dear’, and so this must be a ‘D’ too... while that must be another ‘e’...”; and so on.) In a sense this was fitting. Deciphering had an honoured place in Dollis Hill’s intellectual traditions. Workers at the research station (which had opened in 1933) had built the world’s first programmable electronic computer, the Colossus 1, in 1943. This was used, along with nine Colossus 2s built the following year, by the code-breaking team at Bletchley Park that cracked the Nazis’ supposedly indecipherable Enigma code - and it’s even more opaque successor, the teleprinter code known as Lorenz or FISH.

  There were people still working at Dollis Hill in the early 1950s - Tommy Flowers and Allen “Doc” Coombs were the most senior - who had played a pivotal role in the wartime work of Bletchley Park, which in turn had been crucial to the Allied victory. The Colossus 2, Tommy Flowers’s brainchild, provided vital decrypt information on the eve of D-Day, days after its delivery from Dollis Hill to Bletchley Park.

  No one spoke about this at the time. People still took the Official Secrets Acts very seriously.
(Even Tommy Flowers’s family didn’t learn about his war work until 1970.) But I think we had a vague sense that this unassuming man had done something important. And, in the meantime, it was clear that his area of expertise - essentially, the development of very early computers into recognisably modern computers through the pioneering use of thermionic valves (tubes) rather than electro-mechanical switches - was close to some of the wildest frontiers of human knowledge.

  The current aims were relatively mundane: developing the first electronic telephone exchanges for the Joint Electronic Research Council; or - something I would later be involved in - developing ERNIE, the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment used to pick Premium Bond numbers. But there was still an exciting sense of being at the forefront of new technology - especially at those points where our work edged into territory that would nowadays be known as computing.

  At some stage, after a year or so of evening classes, it began to dawn on me that, while I loved the beauty of maths, and could master it to a fairly high level - and began to study for a bachelor’s degree in mathematics as soon as I had obtained the matriculation requirements - I was never going to become the world’s greatest mathematician. This might have been disillusioning had I not more or less simultaneously fallen in love with computers.

  It was a good time to do so. On the one hand, some of the most brilliant minds of the day were developing the field. On the other, the technology was still sufficiently basic for a mind like mine - clever but not genius material - to be able to grasp the problems involved, if not to deduce the solutions. The mechanical calculator on which I churned out my boring calculations was so basic that it hardly deserves to be called a precursor of the modern computer. Yet even I could sense - intuitively - that, with sufficient brainpower, this simple concept could evolve into an unimaginably powerful computing device.

  It was a bit like being in at the birth of, say, American democracy. First principles were being laid down and tested, as the twin streams of automated calculation and programming converged to make what had hitherto been a boffins’ fantasy - high-powered artificial intelligence - a tantalisingly achievable possibility.

  I had no idea how the next breakthroughs would be achieved, but the evolution of technologies to date - punched tape, punched cards, thermionic valves, transistors - was perfectly comprehensible to me, and I sensed, correctly, that when the history of computing came to be written, several of its early chapters would be set in Dollis Hill, in the early 1950s.

  All this made my work seem rather less banal than many first jobs. I was growing used to the disciplines of work - doing things in an orderly, reliable way, keeping records, putting personal moods and problems to one side - and I could see the value of doing so. The calculations entrusted to me were growing gradually more challenging. And if I did sometimes balk at remaining an insignificant drone in the great scheme of things, well, I was also young, and there were other things in my life.

  I might, however, have been pushed to say honestly what those other things were. Yes, there were my studies, in which I took a keen or arguably excessive interest (partly because they were inherently interesting but also because of a neurotic obsession with doing as well as I possibly could in exams). I enjoyed those early evening journeys across London, eagerly anticipating each evening class (although I never quite adjusted to the fact that some colleges had no women’s toilets); and, heading back to Cricklewood later on, I would feel my eyes drooping with satisfied exhaustion.

  But even the most serious-minded young woman cannot work all the time, and gradually, as London grew less strange, I became aware of empty spaces in my life. Some were filled simply with loneliness; others by staying in fairly frequent touch with Auntie and Uncle. I also made occasional weekend visits to some friends of my mother’s, the Samsons, who had known my parents from Dortmund but had got out with their wealth intact in 1933. They lived in Edgware, and were kind in a very serious sort of way. Helen Samson was a dentist; I still have the gold fillings she gave me as birthday presents.

  The Samsons introduced me to the refugee circles in which they moved, for which I should have been grateful; but I felt stiflingly bored in the company of people who talked only of what they had left behind. I also had a phase - also suggested by the Samsons, I think - of working as a volunteer serving drinks on a charity barge on the Regent’s Canal: not from any altruistic motives but as a way of meeting people.

  Then, as I developed a sense of myself as an independent adult, I began to feel that I was too grown-up for that sort of thing. The result was that I spent less time with the Samsons and their contacts, without meeting anyone else. Sometimes I went all the way from Saturday lunchtime to Monday morning without speaking to another human being.

  At other times the emptiness was filled with a series of rather pointless love affairs with a succession of not very suitable young men - whom I had met, usually, via work or college. I look back today on this period of promiscuity with a combination of embarrassment - all those floorboard-creaking tiptoed departures late at night - and pity for my former self. I suppose it was a fairly predictable response to the lack of human warmth in my life - and a not uncommon way for an insecure young woman to create a sense of identity and self-worth. In a sense, I was discovering who I was. It is interesting, in this context, that on one occasion in this period my father sent me a letter using my old name. “Do you know anyone called Buchthal?” Mrs Cohen asked me when I came home. “No,” I said - and had climbed two flights of stairs before I realised my mistake.

  The cumulative effect of these experiences was neither escape nor self-confidence but, instead, increasing misery. I became jumpy and anxiety-prone, and I often felt paralysed with terror on my late-night walks back from the bus-stop. Such fears were not entirely unreasonable, especially in those impenetrable “pea-souper” autumn fogs that still plagued London before the 1956 Clean Air Act. There was almost an assumption, in those days, that an unaccompanied woman who bumped into a man in such conditions would be raped. I dealt with this by learning some basic self-defence skills, which boosted my confidence a little. (It’s always reassuring to know how to knee a man in the groin.) But a broader, less specific anxiety continued to gnaw away at my life. Everyone else seemed to have roots, whereas I was just an exile, an outsider. The sound of Viennese music would reduce me to tears; but then so, increasingly, would all sorts of things, including the most mundane setbacks in everyday life. I began to fear that I would never be at peace again.

  Eventually, I sought medical help. The doctor, a Jewish émigré, prescribed me dexamyl, the notorious amphetamine-based antidepressant better known (especially by US servicemen) as Purple Hearts. At first I would take one only when I felt especially bad; then, whenever I felt I needed help to get through a particularly difficult day; and then to get me through just about any day, in case it was difficult. Eventually I was taking them most evenings as well - just to get me through the night.

  These were bleak times - and of course there was no question of sharing my troubles with either my colleagues or my family. At least once I seriously contemplated putting my head in the oven. If the oven hadn’t been so filthy I think I might have gone through with it - but it seemed ridiculous to clean the oven just in order to commit suicide.

  Instead, I finally told a little of what I was going through to one of my ex-lovers, who was perceptive enough to suggest that there was an underlying cause to all this insecurity and all these failed affairs: that I was, in effect, choosing unsuitable partners in order to set myself up for rejection, for reasons that probably lay buried in my past. He also persuaded me, with difficulty, to sign up for some psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic - the pioneering therapeutic unit in Marylebone that had recently begun to specialise in family dynamics. Some people sneer when this kind of thing is mentioned. They are welcome to their cynicism. For me it was a godsend. A few tentative sessions with a Jungian thera
pist called Dr Ezriel turned into a sustained course of regular analysis lasting six years, in the course of which I became aware of various issues that now seem so obvious to me that I cannot imagine how I ever managed to bury them. For example: I felt rejected by my mother, who had not only sent me away on the Kindertransport but had also chosen to be reunited with Renate in preference to me; I felt rejected by my father, who had not only sent me away but had subsequently abandoned me, along with the rest of his family, a second time; and I felt devalued by the chronic sense, going back to my very earliest memories, that I was displeasing to my mother. The fact that the Nazis had wanted to kill me hadn’t done wonders for my self-esteem either.

  I had known all this for years, of course. What I had buried was the pain. My conscious mind had focused on the positive side of my story: how lucky I had been to escape the Nazis, and to be shown such kindness by my foster family and my adoptive country (whose NHS, I noted with grateful amazement, was now providing me with this psychoanalysis). Perhaps as a result, I had never thought clearly about how much certain things had hurt me. I had resented my mother’s constant criticisms and disapproved of my father’s undutiful conduct towards his family. But I had never focused on what these things had done to me and to the unhealed child within me.

  Now that I was finally doing so, I was able to consider my feelings rationally. I could see, on the one hand, that there was nothing to be ashamed of in having been hurt, but also, on the other, that most of these rejections were no reflection on me. I had been sent away because of Hitler’s cruelty, not because of my own failings; and if I irritated and disappointed my mother, that was largely because of the failure of her marriage rather than my shortcomings as a child. I still felt pain - of course I did. But I also had a choice, now, between letting this pain control my life and leaving it behind.