I'm Ann Bocock, and welcome to "Between the Covers".

Who isn't intrigued by codebreakers?

Think 1940, World War II, and the codes to be broken are German military codes.

Now, add three women from totally different walks of life, put them in a mysterious English country house full of eccentric, brainy, quirky people.

And did I mention the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip?

Well, all of this is the backdrop for master storyteller, Kate Quinn's latest book, "The Rose Code".

Kate is a "New York Times" and "USA Today" bestselling author, and has been dubbed the reigning queen of historical fiction.

Please welcome Kate Quinn.

Hi, Kate.

Hi, Ann, it's so lovely to be here with you today.

I am so glad you're here.

Now, what you do is you search generally for women's stories, and these are courageous women, and usually never before told stories.

So I have to know, how did you come to write this one, "The Rose Code"?

It was partly my existing fascination with Bletchley Park, you know, the hub of code breaking activity during World War II in Britain, which was such a huge part of why that war was won.

And the thing that really fascinated me the more I looked into Bletchley Park was just how female dominated it was.

Because I'd already heard the story, but I had not heard that at its peak in 1945, of the 8,988 people working at Bletchley Park, 6,757 of them were women.

That seemed like that was a lot of women's stories that really deserved to be told.

And I could barely manage, you know, in 600 plus pages to tell maybe three of them.

I think you were sold at that point.

You knew that was gonna be a Kate Quinn's story.

Now, when you're talking about research, in this particular case, there is so much information available.

How do you know when to stop and when to start writing?

Generally speaking, when your agent, or your spouse, or both stage an intervention and tell you that the deadline is coming whether you like it or not, and maybe it's time to stop researching and start writing.

I am assuming you did research at Bletchley Park, and this is, it's a mysterious estate, the way you wrote about it.

This is where the code breaking takes place.

You use this Lewis Carroll "Wonderland" reference.

So let's get into Bletchley for a moment.

It's importance, and, to me, Bletchley Park itself rather evolved during the story, just as your characters were evolving.

So can you step back for a moment and talk about your experience there, and how it is a character in the book?

I was lucky enough in 2018, well before lockdown, to go to Bletchley Park in person.

And I really encourage anyone who is, you know, able to plan some trip to the United Kingdom, take an afternoon, take a day trip to Bletchley.

It is like walking into the past, because you see this beautiful Victorian mansion, and the copper domes, and this wedding cake brick work, and it is mocked up, as are some of the green Nissen huts all around it where the early code breaking was done, to look the way it would have looked during Bletchley's heyday.

So you walk into these little huts, and you can see, you know, the Enigma machines and the Typex machines, 1940s, there are lipsticks, and pencils, and coats strewn around, and a note on the machine that says, you know, "Off to the canteen, back in a jiff."

And it really does feel as if any one of the Bletchley Park codebreakers just stepped out for a moment, and they're gonna come right back any moment, and start again on this critical war work.

How much time did you actually spend there?

It was about four or five days, I was in the middle of a driving trip in the UK, and, you know, four or five days, I could've spent four or five weeks, I was there long enough to take pictures of everything, and to more or less buy every single book in the gift shop.

You know, Kate, when I've been to London, the Churchill bunker has always been like one of the top things for me.

This will have to be on a bucket list, because I think this is just as interesting.

So that, I will definitely do that.

And it is open to the public, you did say that.

Yes it is, and, you know, it's part of the Royal Trust now.

There's the wonderful Bletchley Park Trust that does a lot of work with the veterans too.

And it's just beautifully preserved, and it's, you know, absolutely something that belongs on anyone's bucket list.

All right, I wanna get to the book.

We have three characters.

They couldn't be more different from each other.

There's Osla who is the debutante, and Mab who is escaping poverty on the East End of London, really any way she can, and then there's Beth.

So that's my cliff notes version.

I want you to tell me who they are, and were they based on actual people?

All three of my heroines are fictionalized to some degree, but Osla is based very much on one real woman, who was a Bletchley Park translator, and an exdebutante, and a girlfriend of Prince Philip before Princess Elizabeth came onto the scene.

Beth is a composite of two real women whose names or existence I found during my research of Bletchley Park.

And Mab is a bit more of a component of a number of the different worker bee women who filled a variety of roles in the park.

Because my goal here in having three heroines was to show not just the work that they did, but to give the reader an idea, as you say, Bletchley Park itself is a character, of how it is that it works overall, how it is that, you know, this massive encrypted information moves through those gates and then sort of goes on a conveyor belt around the park, hitting all these different stations of people who all work on various stages of it.

And then it comes out again as intelligence that can be used in the field.

And so I knew I would need three women, all with different jobs, and also because I knew this was a book about female friendship, three very different women, the whole idea that, you know, without the war and without this call to arms, these three women who have nothing in common, not family, not education level, not societal background, not economic background, they would never have even met, much less become friends.

But in the course of the book, because of Bletchley Park, they do meet, they do become friends, and that friendship is going to have profound effects, not just on their own life, but on the course of history.

They never would have met, their lives were totally different, and that could have been any number of women who were codebreakers, or were working at Bletchley Park in any capacity.

This is a Kate Quinn book, "The Rose Code" has it all.

It has intrigue, it has love stories, but there's also a war going on.

And you talk about PTSD in this book.

For instance, Mab has a romance with a World War I vet, and there is a letter that he writes to her that is so beautiful, and honest, and raw, and full of pain.

And I read this letter twice, at least, and I kept going back to it and I would love it if you could set this up and read just a small section from this particular letter, could you do that?

I would love to.

And for the setup, Mab was my East End London heroine, whose goal has been to find a gentleman husband, and she's found one.

And in classic wartime fashion, they have not known each other for very long.

They marry, but, you know, they still are getting to know each other.

And because of the fact that they're both in this important war work, she's a codebreaker, he works at the foreign office, they can't spend much time together, they live apart.

So they write letters, and I loved the idea that she will get to know her really very closed off husband, who is still fighting the wounds that he took in World War I, emotional wounds.

And he writes her a letter at some point where she has been immensely curious that, you know, what was he like at that age?

And how was it, what kind of damage did he take, and why is he the way he is, so quiet and closed down?

And she finds a note where he refers to her as the girl in the hat, and she wonders what is that?

Who's the girl in the hat?

And so he writes her a letter to explain, and this explains a lot more about him than just the nickname that he assigned her.

"As for the girl in the hat, "she's you, or rather she's become you.

"I was 16 and I'd been in the trenches for months, "quite long enough to lose every ideal I'd had.

"You've read the wretched poetry, "I won't repeat anything trite "about barbed wire or flying bullets.

"I had 48 hours leave coming with my friend Kit.

"In the photograph, he's the towhead on the end.

"The other two had already died.

"Arthur, two weeks before of peritonitis.

"George, three weeks before that of a scrape gone septic.

"It was just Kit and me left, "and he was hauling me to Paris on our next leave.

"Only he was killed six hours beforehand, "gun shot in a pointless skirmish.

"I listened to him scream for an hour "before a sniper on our own side finally finished him.

"So I went to Paris on my own.

"The Eiffel Tower, the SacreCoeur, "I wandered around in an utter daze, "looking at all the things we said we'd see.

"I don't remember any of it.

"A sort of veil had dropped over the whole world, "and I stumbled along behind it, peering through the fog.

"The world had simply gone gray.

"There was a hat shop on Rue de Lappe, "and for some reason I stopped in front of it.

"I wasn't looking at the hats in the window, "I wasn't looking at anything.

"I wasn't thinking anything.

"But slowly I became aware "there was a girl inside trying on hats.

"I don't remember what she looked like.

"I know she was tall and had a pale blue dress.

"For the Rue de Lappe, she looked rather shabby.

"She'd clearly saved up to buy a hat "at this very expensive shop.

"And by God, she was not going to be sniffed at "by any of those quaffed vandozers.

"She was scrutinizing those hats "like Napoleon inspecting his artillery.

"Clearly the perfect hat "was going to seal her fate in some way.

"And she was determined to find it.

"I stood there dumbly staring through the window, "as she tried on one after the other "until she found the one.

"I remember it was pale straw "with a cornflower blue ribbon round the crown, "and some wafty sort of netting.

"She stood before the mirror smiling, "and I realized I was seeing her as if in a bright light, "as if she had stepped out from behind that veil "that was bleaching all the color out of the world.

"A pretty girl in a pretty hat in the middle of an ugly war.

"I nearly wept.

"Instead, I stood transfixed.

"I could have watched her forever."

Kate, I've read this passage, I don't know how many times, but I still get chills.

So thank you for reading it.

A couple of things jumped out at me, and one, why did you feel talking about PTSD was important for this story?

Well, it's one of those things that is really quite important to me, just simply because my husband is active duty Navy, I have a lot of military personnel, both men and women, who are friends through him.

And, you know, I've known a number of people with PTSD, and it manifests itself in so many different ways, different and unique to every person.

And it is something that has been a problem for, since war was even invented.

And it continues to change as war changes.

But the fact is, is that people pay a price for being involved in combat.

And that price is, could be physical, that price can be mental.

And even the Bletchley Park codebreakers who physically had a very safe war, they suffered tremendous mental strains, and emotional strains, and breakdown, and paranoia, and almost anything you can think of, because the price of the work that they do, even if it's not work that places your body in harm's way, can still be a heavy price to pay.

War always has a cost.

And so it seems to me irresponsible not to address that cost whenever you are writing a war novel.

The other thing that jumped out at me is what have we lost by not having letter writing anymore?

I mean, it doesn't say the same thing in a tweet or a text.

So that's pretty apparent.

Something else in this story, this is a story of secrets, real life secrets that so many of these people, so many of these women took with them to the grave.

Now, we know the war ends.

In your story, the war ends, and these women go home with a pretty much, well, thank you very much.

But that was it.

There was no recognition at the time.

Why were they not recognized then?

Well, the thing about intelligence work is that intelligence work goes on, even when there isn't a war.

And there were plenty of people who were already looking ahead as World War II was winding up toward the coming Cold War, and they certainly did not want any of the secrets of the intelligence work that they had done to become public knowledge, because you had no idea who you might have to use it against going forward.

So with so much of this stuff still tremendously secret, the Official Secrets Act, which was the act that all Bletchley Park codebreakers signed before they were even allowed to sniff at the work.

It continued to go on, everyone was told more or less go home, thank you very much for your service, please never talk about this to anyone.

And, you know, they took that tremendously seriously.

And that's the kind of thing I think it's just as remarkable to us in a modern world as the work that they did, because, you know, we live in a world of a 24hour news cycle, and, you know, we all know those people who, you know, update every single thing that they do on social media, so the idea that thousands of people were simply handed one of the biggest secrets of the war, and told, well, just don't tell anybody, not your kids, not your friends, not your husbands, your wives, your parents, no one.

And all these thousands of people more or less said, "Well, all right."

And they did, it was a tremendous secret.

It was kept tremendously.

And it was not until the mid 70s when, you know, the 30 year period had come to an end that tentatively information about Bletchley Park started to come out, and thank goodness recognition for the achievements of the codebreakers started to be forthcoming.

They certainly could keep a secret.

One thing that is challenging, may be the most challenging thing in writing historical fiction, is weaving real life characters in the story.

And probably one of the most famous Bletchley Park characters is Alan Turing.

We know Turing from academy award winning movie, but he was only in briefly in your story.

He's not the only famous person.

What I loved is that here is Prince Philip of Greece, before he marries Princess Elizabeth, who was going to become Queen Elizabeth.

Now, talk about putting this dashing young prince right in the heart of the story.

Well, that's not the kind of thing I would have done on my own, but history handed it to me on a silver platter.

I was just gobsmacked in the middle of my research when I realized in my reading that Prince Philip, in the days, he was only about 18, you know, a young Navy midshipman, you know, far more concerned with fighting for his country than he was in any kind of thought about who he might marry one day, and certainly not in the discussion for a partner for Princess Elizabeth who was still in the school room at this point.

Well, Prince Philip was, as a young Naval officer, involved very seriously for almost the entire war with a young Canadian exdebutante, and Bletchley Park codebreaker named Osla.

And the two of them really have this fantastically, you know, moving little romance scene that they met when they were young, they were passionate about, you know, fighting for their country, they were, you know, head up and caught up in the, you know, that heady sensation of not only being young, but being in danger, every time we'd meet might be our last.

And there were great stories about how, you know, he would come into town, you know, she would write to him when he was at sea.

When he came into town, she'd come into London, and they would just dance the night away in nightclubs, and, you know, then he would put her on the dawn train so she could get back to Bletchley, and start her morning shift on time, probably still in her cocktail dress.

And so I thought, what a wonderful story.

And so I, you know, fictionalized the character of Osla slightly because, you know, she was not a public figure like Prince Phillips, so I did want to be respectful of that.

But the romance was, you know, in its broad strokes about as, you know, real as history could give it to me, and I really did enjoy bringing that to life, 'cause it's sort of a little known early episode of Phillip's life, you know, before he became Duke of Edinburgh, and the consort, and everything else associated with the queen.

You tell the story in two timelines, there's the war years, and then there's these two weeks before the royal wedding.

And I can't even imagine you telling it any other way than going back and forth in time.

Did you know from the first sentence that this is how you were going to tell this story?

Yes, I did want to tell this as a dual timeline, partly because, you know, if I just told the warriors, well, as you said, that would've meant the end of the book would have been, "Well, thank you very much for your service, ladies, "please go home and never speak about this again," and they would've said, "Oh, okay."

And that's the end of the book.

And that's really not the most exciting way to finish a novel.

So I thought I would introduce a secondary mystery that doesn't unravel until some years after the war, which would help, you know, add a little bit of tension and excitement toward the climax of the book.

And also it allows me to explore one of my, the things that really fascinates me, which is aftermath, you know, because as human beings, we are wired when we're in crisis or during war time, the entire viewpoint is very tunnel vision, you know, like just get through it, if we can just get through the war to the other side.

But there are a lot of questions to be asked when you do get to the other side, what does my life look like?

I've acquired all these skills, will I ever use them again?

You know, how is it that I went from doing critical, important intelligence work to organizing ladies' luncheons and folding napkins into swans?

As one of my heroine says in the course of the book.

So I wanted to talk about the aftermath as well, is like, how did these women make new lives after the things that they have seen?

And all of that came together to make the second timeline, which I did put against the backdrop of the royal wedding, because who doesn't love a royal wedding as a backdrop?

[ann] Well, I want everybody who reads "The Rose Code" to make sure they read your author's notes, because there are some really famous people that made history here, including Kate Middleton's grandmother.

She was part of this.

Yes, that was another thing.

History just handed it to me on a silver platter.

It was the really wonderful little snippet that the former Duchess of Cambridge's grandmother and great aunt were teenage codebreakers, who were working in Hut 16 during the war.

And as soon as I learned that, I thought, well, there's no way that's not going in the book.

So yes, you will see Kate Middleton's grandmother in the background.

And that really was a tremendous amount of fun.

And it really has been great for Bletchley Park as well, because the Duchess has been quite involved as a royal patron, doing one of the reopenings after they had a really quite massive facelift to do some of that, you know, historical setup that they have done on the mansion, and a great many of the huts.

And also she has worn on the last Remembrance Day, I think it was what they call the codebreaker poppy brooch, which is a brooch specifically designed for Bletchley Park veterans, their families, and to honor them.

And I have a teeny, little replicate of it right here, because you better believe I grabbed one as soon as I realized that it was nicely priced for people who do not have a Duchess's budget.

Okay.

There, you know, there's something that you add in this book that readers are going to love, and that's the fact that you put in a book club in Bletchley Park, which is the Mad Hatters Book Club.

This is, what I found so interesting is that as hard as they're working, they did have these moments of diversion.

So it was like work hard and play equally hard.

There really was a dual life.

I'm assuming that's true.

Well, it's one of the things I really loved about Bletchley Park, it's society was that it was full of these young people, who did work very hard and they needed to blow off steam.

And you saw this incredible social life popup, and there's these extracurricular clubs that people took part in after their shift was done.

You know, there was Highland dancing taking place in the lawn, there were chess societies, there was amateur dramatics, and a Christmas review every year, there was sunbathing, and tennis, and cinema clubs.

And so given all of that, I thought, well, certainly a literary society is not out of the question.

So I gave my heroines the idea to open a literary society for Bletchley Park codebreakers, and, you know, so they have a great deal of fun reading books, you know, together, the book of the month.

And it also gave my women something that they could talk about, because I realized, you know, when these ladies first meet, they have nothing in common, as I said, you know, their life experiences could not be more different, and they can't even talk about work, because at Bletchley Park you were not allowed to talk about your work with anyone, even your coworkers.

So they needed to have something to bond over.

And the thing is about bookworms is that we can always bond about books, even if we have nothing else in common, we can talk books.

So that is how the ladies meet, is when on their very first day they realize they're all reading the same book, which is Thackeray's "Vanity Fair", also about young women making their way in the world, and trying to make a life for themselves.

And that's when they have the idea that they can make a literary society, which will be definitely an outlet for the stress of their work.

Kate, this book is 600 pages, and guess what?

I didn't want it to end at 600 pages.

Was there anything you had to leave on the cutting room floor that pains you to do it?

I would've loved to get in a little bit more with Ian Fleming.

And yes, that Iam Fleming, the creator of James Bond was back and forth out of Bletchley Park, 'cause he was part of British intelligence.

And I have, I think, a oneline reference to him, but it would have been fun to do more with him, because I always did think that was a fantastically fun connection to Bletchley Park, 'cause I am always convinced he wrote James Bond as an antidote to Bletchley Park, because he looked around and he said, a lot of book nerds and language nerds, you know, scribbling with pencils on sheets of paper in little, claustrophobic, green huts, spying has got to be more exciting than this.

So therefore he, you know, decided to write a spy world in which there were a whole lot more martinis and women in fabulous, slinky dresses.

And I'm convinced he did so because he thought Bletchley Park needed a little bit of pepping up.

Ian Fleming, who would have thought?

As long as there are courageous women in history for you to uncover, there undoubtedly are gonna be more great books like "The Rose Code".

Kate Quinn, this has been such a pleasure.

I'm happy to have met you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you again for having me.

I'm Ann Bocock, please connect with us.

You can find our podcast, "Go Between the Covers" wherever you get your podcast.

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