Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [28]
This may have been quite a common problem for male Bletchley recruits. If a young man was not in uniform, and was still roaming around the place, then how was he to explain exactly what he was doing?
The experience of his wife Mavis, billeted on a local farm, was a little different. ‘I looked after children, I babysat, I helped on the farm, I did my own washing,’ she says. ‘We did as much as we could and were always doing things with the children. But the landlady would insist on bringing us up a cup of tea in the morning. One day, she suddenly said: “I shan’t be here next week, my aunt will be coming to look after you. Actually, I’m having a baby.” We felt so awful that we had let her wait on us and we had no idea. She just laughed and said: “You know, you’re not the only ones who can keep a secret.”’
Keith Batey moved on to a rather more agreeable billet, as he recalls: ‘I stayed at the house of Mrs Bidwell, much later. She was admirable. The widow of a metropolitan police sergeant – who knew how to feed men.’
Mr Batey adds: ‘Tell you who was billeted with me: Howard Smith. He became ambassador in Moscow and head of MI5. But the billet was a scandal really, in the sense of the strain that it put on Mrs Bidwell. As well as us, Mrs Bidwell had her mother living with her, and some invalid in a back room, and I suspect we had half their ration.’
For some lucky chaps at the start of the war, one’s billet could also mean highly congenial access to beer and billiards. This certainly was the case for Stuart Milner-Barry. He wrote that he found himself installed ‘at the Shoulder of Mutton Inn, Old Bletchley, about a mile from the entrance to Bletch ley Park. Here Hugh [Alexander] and I were most comfortably looked after by an amiable landlady, Mrs Bowden. As an innkeeper, she did not seem to be unduly burdened by rationing, and we were able (among other privileges) to invite selected colleagues to supper on Sunday nights, which was a great boon.’2
Jane Fawcett MBE, who was later to head the Royal Institute of British Architects, was a little taken aback by the aesthetic prospect that awaited her in Bletchley. She says: ‘I lived in a council house under the chimneys of the London Brick Company. It was a young family with two noisy boys. I couldn’t sleep, especially after night shifts. And after about a year of this, my parents … became aware of the situation. Our family had friends who were at Liscombe Park. I was invited to stay there, in the staff wing.’
Angus Wilson, who worked at the British Museum with his friend and lover Bentley Bridgewater, had a head start; in 1939, he had removed himself from London to live in the relative bucolic peace of Bishop’s Stortford. When he was recruited to Bletchley, he was billeted two miles away from the Park in a village called Simpson. He lived in a council house occupied by the local milkman and his wife, who would emit little coughs in order to try and discourage Wilson’s enormous consumption of cigarettes. She was also on hand to save him from embarrassment when one day, he set off to work at Bletchley in his pyjamas.
But not everyone’s domestic arrangements were quite so stable. Sheila Lawn, who had never before left her native Scotland, recalls that throughout the war, she found herself being shifted around between homes quite a bit.
‘When I first got to Bletchley, I was supposed to be put up in Newport Pagnell, which was eight miles away,’ Mrs Lawn says. ‘But when I arrived, they hadn’t got a billet for me, and for three weeks, I was in the hostel. I met some charming girls there, delightful girls, a lot of them were secretarial, and they were so nice to me and they would come out with us in the evening. And then I was moved to my first billet, with people called Hobbs.
‘It was delightful. They had a boy, Michael, bright as a bee, he was about twelve. And I was there for five very happy months.