Tuning into Station X

‘Enigma traffic is silent now, as silent as memory will be for nearly thirty years, and still is for great gaps unreleased or burnt, lost for ever. Bletchley Park is half-empty, people have scattered. […] The lights go up all over England, the black-out curtains vanish […] The war just fought suddenly seems quaint, archaic […] it means the end of Bletchley, the end of supposedly official history’
(Christine Brooke-Rose, Remake, p. 125).

There were ways of knowing that lay hidden for decades. How can a site emerge from its past when it is lodged in the shadowy systems of information exchange? Bletchley Park, a country estate on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, was at the centre of a web of intercept sites that received, recorded, decrypted and analysed German signals intelligence during World War II. At the height of the hostilities, the German war machine was sending well over two thousand signals a day into the air. The tickering of the teleprinters, the quavering of radio signals, the thundering of the Bombe machines, all formed a sonic barrage that did not halt at any moment, day or night, for the duration of the war.

This paper will present some elements from a work-in-progress that explores the challenges of interception, the ways that visitations are made upon texts, and the ephemerality of knowledge. It will look to the early poetry of the writer Christine Brooke-Rose to explore a growing suspicion of language, record, and meaning in post-war Britain. In the same way that traces still exist of previously standing wartime structures, of old teleprinter huts and listening posts, what vibrations remain in the atmosphere of Bletchley Park?