Soft-spoken, petite octogenarian, Pamela Skillington Darrell, hardly looks like a woman who would eavesdrop on a fascist dictator.

But during the Second World WarI, Mrs. Darrell was selected by the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRENS) to work at Bletchley Park in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire.

This was a top secret decoding centre in the middle of England where Britain's best scientific minds worked to break German ciphers, including the Enigma Code.

She was just 17-years-old.

Because of the hush-hush nature of the work, Mrs. Darrell only last year received official recognition of her wartime work.

This week, with The Royal Gazette, Mrs. Darrell spoke about her work at Bletchley Park publicly for the first time.

Disappointment was Mrs. Darrell's first reaction when she learned she was being sent to work at Bletchley Park.

"I wanted to go to sea," she said. "Bletchley Park was right in the middle of England."

She was from Oakham, Leicestershire.

At that time she had no idea that she and almost 300 other women from the HMS Pembroke V WRENS were being sent to a crucial war post.

Bletchley Park was kept so secret during the war, that she wasn't told the nature of her work, until she arrived.

After two weeks of training and some testing, she was assigned to the the Newmanry at Bletchley Park.

This department worked to decode transmissions sent out by German Tunny machines, cipher attachments for teleprinters.

Considering her desire to go to sea, it was ironic that the machine was unofficially known as "fish".

Fish was also called Geheimschreiber (secret writer machine), and later officially the Lorenz machine.

It was considered more sophisticated than the German Enigma coding machine, because unlike the Enigma machine, it did not use Morse Code, but a series of pulse and no-pulses transmitted to the airwaves.

At the heart of the machine were 12 wheels. The machine worked by masking a message with a stream of obscuring letters.

When the machine decoded a transmission it was printed out on sticky tape that was stuck onto paper to form sentences.

The result could also be punched onto tape. The wheels could be set and reset in an endless number of configurations.

Hitler had Tunny machines all over Europe, and used them to communicate with the various German military departments.

The Tunny machine was eventually cracked by the British through the use of a supercomputer at Bletchley Park called Collosus, and also by exploiting key errors made by Germans operating the Tunny machines.

Cracking the code has since been called one of the greatest feats of British intellectualism.

Mrs. Darrell said her small stature prevented her from working on Collosus.

"I wasn't quite tall enough, because you had to put the tapes in the wheel," she said. "So there was a height restriction and I was on the short side."

"With the Tunny Machine, with any luck, messages would come out of the machine in reasonable German, which would then be passed on to another department," she said.

Unfortunately, the Germans kept changing the key to the code.

At first they did this once a month, but eventually they did it daily. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park struggled to keep up with the Germans.

"When they changed it, you had to work like blazes to figure out what the new code was," Mrs. Darrell said.

The codebreakers at Bletchley Park were sometimes assisted in their efforts by the capture of German U-boats bearing Enigma machines and code books.

In June 1944, the German U-boat U505 was captured and towed into Bermuda.

The British were elated to find that the U-Boat contained an up-to-date enigma machine, code books, and signal equipment. It was towed to Bermuda to protect the knowledge of the capture from the Germans.

Had the Axis powers known that the Allies had the up-to-date code information, it could have spoiled the Normandy Invasion.

What went on at Bletchley Park was kept under intense secrecy. "We weren't supposed to tell anyone what we were doing," said Mrs. Darrell.

When she went home on leave she resisted attempts by her mother to ferret out what she was doing.

"I wasn't able to tell my family for a long time," she said. "I just told my husband that I did secret work.

"I didn't really understand why we couldn't talk about our work after the war. I think they were concerned about the Russians. Finally, they did start releasing information in the 1970s, and that's when I told him."

But despite the secrecy and importance of the work, Mrs. Darrell said, in actual fact, she found it very dull work.

"We worked twenty-four seven on watches," she said.

During the war, huts were set up at Bletchley Park to contain the various departments and machines.

"There were many people working there by the end of the war," said Mrs. Darrell. "Part of the main building was used as a club house that we could go and have coffee when we were off duty."

She was billeted in nearby Woburn Abbey, another stately home.

"It was beautiful," she said. "It had a great big deer park and rhododendrons. It was very nice when you were off duty. We had transportation running us in and out to Bletchley Park."

When the war ended, they were told to forget about it.

Some of the machines continued to be used for Cold War purposes.

Mrs. Darrell went on to study geography in university. She met her husband, Owen Darrell, a Bermudian, while visiting Switzerland. They have now been married for 62 years.

"He was lost, saw me with a map, and came over and asked if he could have a look at my map," she said. "It was a great pick up line."

Mr. Darrell is also a war veteran and served on HMS Bulldog. In 1942, this ship was one of the first to capture a German U-boat with an enigma machine aboard. However, Mr. Darrell served on HMS Bulldog after this event.

Ten years ago, the Darrells visited Bletchley Park, now a museum.

"After it was no longer a secret, they rebuilt two machines," she said. "There were still people who were around who could remember how to build them."

She was sad to learn that the museum was underfunded.

"They were trying to keep it going," she said. "That's sad because things like that should be preserved."

Last year, she received a citation for her wartime work signed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"I also have a nice little badge that goes with it," she said. "It is a broach. I think maybe I will wear it on Remembrance Day."

For more about Bletchley Park, go to their website at www.bletchleypark.org.uk