Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. The My castaway this week is Pamela Rose, she was a Bletchley girl. One of the women who spent the

war years working in total secrecy, painstakingly indexing snippets of information

that would prove vital to beating the Nazis, a clandestine role that's recently made its way from the historical shadows of Britain's wartime past

to the megawatt glade of the silver screen in movies like Enigma and The Imitation Game.

But my guest today has no truck with the glamorizing of her wartime work. The truth is, she says, it was often boring and something of a disappointment to a young woman who herself had early ambitions to be an actress. A half-hearted debutante,

she abandoned the season to spend time in Paris and Munich, going on to drama school in London later.

Yet she gave up dreams of her name in lights on Shaftesbury Avenue for the

indexing section of Hut 4, turning down her first chance to appear in the West End and opting instead

for the undercover job at Bletchley. She would finally achieve her dream nearly 60 years later,

making her West End acting debut at the age of 83.

She says, I think when you're as old as I am, you feel as if you're walking alongside

yourself, watching yourself with great interest, wondering what you're going to do next. so Pamela Rose at 97 now I wonder what's on your

to-do list.

Desert Island is.

I think.

Good I'm glad you've made the time.

Many of us have seen the movies Enigma and The Imitation

game. Those films about Bletchley Park. How realistic a picture do they paint?

Myself, I haven't seen them because I'm very blind and I can't see in the

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