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surrounding villages to be billeted with people who had no warning that we were coming. We watched dubiously from the billeting officer’s farm truck as each door was opened and the earnest talking got under way. One or two must have put up a good case, because we moved on without leaving anyone behind. I was getting hungry.
    We’d exhausted every possibility in Frome by late morning. There were two of us still without billets: a fat boy known as Belcher Hughes, whose glasses were held together with Elastoplast, and me. A telephone call was made at a post office and we were told that we would be the guests of Shepton Mallet. From the way it was put to us I got the impression that Belcher and I had struck lucky. Mr. Mallet, I confidently decided, must live in one of the large stone mansions we’d seen along the route.
    We were handed over at a crossroads, where another billeting officer met us. My hopes of high living were dashed when I saw the names on the signpost. Belcher was allocated to an old lady in a terraced cottage, and I was taken several miles on, to Gifford Farm, in the hamlet of Christian Gifford, between Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury.
    There I lost contact with the people I knew, apart from a couple of visits from Mr. Lillicrap. He seemed well satisfied with the instruction I was getting with the local children in the schoolhouse up the lane.
    In justice to the Lockwood family, they hadn’t volunteered to be billeters. They had to be reminded of the government’s evacuation order. It was well known locally that they had a spare bedroom because their son, Bernard, had moved out, so they were obliged to take me.
    My first contact was with Mrs. Lockwood, and my first impression was that she was a worried woman. She did a lot of head shaking and muttering in a dialect I couldn’t understand. Thinking back, I suppose she was perturbed at the likely reaction of her husband to having me foisted on them. Much to her credit, so far as I was concerned, she started by taking me into the farmhouse kitchen and feeding me. I was given two slices of bread generously spread with dripping and gravy. The bread was fresher and less gritty than the national loaf we had at home.
    Mrs. Lockwood would do me no active harm, I decided as I watched her across the wooden table nipping the stalks and stones out of victoria plums for a pie. Stout, with glossy black hair fastened with grips, and a broad face almost as dark as the plum skins, she was obviously older than my own mother, but she looked to be in better health. There were no dark crescents under her eyes from lack of sleep.
    The inconvenient thing about Mrs. Lockwood was her voice, which was so soft that I had to ask her to repeat almost everything. Even then she didn’t raise it a semitone. And as I had to repeat every utterance silently to myself to unravel the complexities of the dialect, communication was slow. It took the rest of the morning to establish who else was in the family and what they did.
    Mr. Lockwood, I learned, had recently bought a smaller, adjoining farm called Lower Gifford for his twenty-one-year-old son, Bernard, who had moved out to the farmhouse a mile down the lane. The plan was for Bernard ultimately to manage both farms, when the work got too much for his father. The parents would see out their lives in the main farmhouse, looked after by their daughter, Barbara.
    I’d already spotted one or two items of female apparel drying over the range that even to my inexpert eye would have looked skimpy, not to say silly, on Mrs. Lockwood. Barbara, I gleaned by degrees, was nineteen and worked on the farm.
    She came in for lunch and captivated me without even noticing that I was there. This is pure Mills & Boon, but true. It was the impression she made on a nine-year-old who had shed silent tears in his camp bed the night before. Dark like her mother, though with softer skin and more delicate features, Barbara stood in the doorway and untied the green