WAGBAI: BILLETEES

          The billetees started to arrive in the Rectory before the refugees, soon after the war started and before the Blitz. That’s World War II, with Great Britain and its allies fighting Nazi Germany and Italy (and Japan, of course, but in Aspley Guise we were immediately affected only by the war in Europe). It felt close by. There was the sound of Big Ben every evening on the wireless, announcing the start of the BBC Evening News, with the family and guests gathered anxiously around the receiver. There were, on occasion, the solemn words of Prime Minister Churchill and once a year at least, at Christmas, the hesitant, weary voice of King George himself. Those news reports were always at the center of the grown-ups’ lives.

            The billettees were posted at the Rectory by the War Office. My father was ineligible for active service even as a military chaplain because of his intractable health problems, but he and my mother were determined we must do what we could to support the war effort, and one thing we could do was offer shelter to those in need in our big old house.

I’m not sure if they were the first to arrive, but the Bletchley girls soon occupied an important place in our household. There were three of them. Vivian and Fiona slept in the room at the end of the upstairs corridor, the one with the yellow and orange counterpanes. The third was my mother’s younger sister, Gabrielle, whom everyone called Gay. I can’t remember where she slept. We all knew that the Bletchley girls’ work was “very hush-hush”, and not to ask them questions. They seemed very glamorous to me, these mysteriously seductive young women, with their scarlet lipstick and the sweet aura of heady perfume that followed them everywhere they went. They traveled back and forth to the Rectory on bicycles, morning and evening, and joined in all our family events. It was only fifty years later that I learned, with the rest of the world, about the captured “Enigma” machine and the German codes the Bletchley Park team worked so hard to break. Their efforts, we now know, contributed significantly to the eventual Allied victory in Europe.

And there were others, sometimes merely transient guests. There was Edward, a naval captain, who was with us for only a few days, and whose ship was later sunk in the Atlantic. There was Frank Hodgkinson, the artist with the bushy ginger mustache, who was stationed down the hill at the Cranfield RAF station and who later married Lilian in my father’s church. My sister and I gathered rose petals to scatter in their path. There was Miss Thomas, the WREN, a woman’s naval officer, who had some military duties during the war and later, in some mysterious way, became the teacher in the kindergarten school my parents started in our home.

The billettees were a part of the fabric of life at the Rectory, a ubiquitous adult presence unfailingly kind to the children of the house. The contribution of their ration books, along with fruits and vegetables from the garden, made it possible for my mother to keep the household well fed throughout the years of food shortages that left so many others hungry. The only deprivation I recall was sweets. The shelves at Mrs. T’s sweet shop down on the village square were most often empty, with candy and chocolate the lowest priority in the diet of an isolated island nation.

Despite the hardships imposed on us by the war, however, my parents never failed to make Christmas a time of merriment and feasting for both us children and our extended family of guests. Father Christmas (our name for Santa Claus) always arrived in style in his red and white-trimmed suit and hat on Christmas Eve—and always in a different guise. No secretive overnight visitor, our Santa was a fun-filled shape-shifter, arriving once on stilts, once driving a sleigh (a long-unused, old-fashined baby carriage) filled with gifts and hauled along the upstairs corridor by two prancing reindeer (Vivian and Fiona dressed in fur coats, on their hands and knees) and once with a familiar voice (Frank’s, we thought) which turned out not to be Frank’s at all but his twin brother, Doug’s, a surprise visitor for the holiday. For my sister and I, once tucked away upstairs in our beds, the general jollity down below—fuelled, certainly, by whatever alcohol was available to the adults in those war years—was a sign that all was well in our home at Christmas time. We feel asleep excited at the prospect of well-stuffed stockings at the end of our beds the following morning.

I’m pretty sure that our billetees must have counted themselves among the lucky ones, at the Rectory in Aspley Guise. No matter their worries about the war raging across the channel—and at times over our heads—they seemed to me an always cheerful, always enthusiastic company of family friends, always willing to lend a hand, always ready with warmth and comfort when they were needed. We, too, were fortunate to have them in our lives.