Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [29]
‘And then,’ Mrs Lawn continues, ‘I went on to an elderly lady and her little dog. Quite obviously she wanted someone who would sit with her, and perhaps share in a little bit of knitting and that sort of thing. But we got on very well. In the end, though, she had to let the authorities know that she really thought it was too much. I was on shifts, a lot of them running from four p.m. to midnight, and midnight to eight a.m. And this lady was finding the pattern of the shifts difficult, in terms of me going in and out.’
The tough and rigid shift patterns of the Park caused problems in a great many households. Imagine, if you are the landlord, perhaps with small children, and your tenant is either coming back in well after midnight, or coming in just after 8 a.m. and needing to sleep throughout the day. Added to this, your tenant also requires food and drink. In a small, cramped house, and at all hours of day and night, such demands are not always easily met.
Sheila Lawn remembers her last billet. ‘It was a very simple billet – outside loo, which most of us had, you know – but they were very pleasant people indeed, never asked me any questions. And they had a daughter of fifteen. She was a little bit of a tearaway. But they were so kind to me. I stayed there for the last eighteen months of the war.’
A fellow Scot, Irene Young, found billeted life rather more of a trial. In some ways, it appeared to have been rather a shock. Her landlady, a Mrs Webster, had ‘a sharp nose’ and ‘a thin mouth’ and her day-to-day clothing always involved ‘a crossover apron’. Conditions in the small house were every bit as spartan as those encountered by Sheila Lawn. ‘The WC … was outside,’ wrote Irene, ‘and I used to indulge in a small secret smile when, having crept out on a freezing night to the little “necessary house”, I must needs sit facing an outdated calendar showing a picture of “A Sunny Haven.”’
And if that wasn’t bad enough, life indoors apparently verged on the Dickensian:
I had a room to myself, but because fuel was rationed, there was no heating in it, and so in my time off I was forced to sit with Mr and Mrs Webster. He was a gentle man, happily dominated by his competent wife. I used to find my bed set at an angle from the wall and though I straightened it, it was always moved back into this odd position. Eventually Mrs Webster explained that she had had an evacuee before me who had ‘breathed on the wall’, and she did not want me to do likewise.3
For Captain Jerry Roberts, who joined the Park later to work on Colossus, the successor to Alan Turing’s bombe machine, life in a billet meant that any romantic possibilities were frequently smothered with a cold, damp towel: ‘It was difficult to be too social. In my billet, I had half the house. There were two bedrooms, and Mr and Mrs Wells had one and I had the other. There were two sitting rooms. They had the kitchen, if you like. And I had the parlour. Which they would normally never have used, they lived in the kitchen. Now it was not too easy to develop romances in that sort of situation. Not that that bothered me at that time, I have to say.’
*
In March 1940, the Bletchley Park authorities felt obliged to send out a stern memo on the subject of billeting:
Any amenities provided by the householder are purely voluntary. The householder is not bound by law to do more than provide breakfast, an evening meal, sleeping accommodation, and reasonable facilities for personal cleanliness.
There is, for instance, no obligation to provide baths, fires, or allow those billeted to use the householder’s sitting room. Nor is it at all certain that those billeted could insist on having their bedrooms cleaned, beds made, etc.
A great many householders are, in fact, providing such amenities without extra payment and it is therefore incumbent on persons billeted to do what they can in these circumstances to make the householder feel