S2.6: The backstory
“This is what I heard and so what I told Alcock.” Masongill interrupts, cautiously: “Let’s be clear, though keep in mind the customs of the ‘Short’. You don’t now need to tell me the truth if a little embroidery will help the story along. But let me ask as a member of the audience : is what you are now going to say what you heard, more or less word for word, or what you reconstructed, having eavesdropped on a private conversation at the very far corner of the breakfast area?” Lottie pauses to give this question some thought. When Hipparchus tells tall tales, he likes to lower the lights, let the stove fall to embers and speak softly (much as she’d seen Masongill do, in imitation, a week or three before). Everyone knows that only half of what he says on such occasions is true. His anecdotes about working at Bletchley, while seemingly ludicrously improbable, are generally regarded as true while his apparently more feasible but much funnier stories are probably mainly ma...
