Wendy Billington
Shaped today by the experiences of yesterday. This is the theme that is clearly yet sensitively portrayed throughout the book . We meet a shy, sensitive youngster enjoying all that life has to offer her when at the age of eight everything changes. Holidaying with her family on the Isle of Wight and sitting in rows on the beach alongside other holidaymakers, she hears the voice of the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announcing that the country had declared war on Nazi Germany. Over the following six years with its disruptions and fears of the unknown it is no wonder that emerging in 1945 was a confused, withdrawn, disgruntled yet seemingly independent teenager. Wendy’s adventurous spirit was evident and only nine years after the war’s end saw her in the British Zone of Occupied Germany appointed and employed by the War Office to teach the youngsters of British personnel stationed throughout the Zone in a comprehensive co-educational boarding school. Its modern buildings and extensive grounds had been a former German naval training base. Beautifully located on a lake water sport was high on the pupils’ agenda. Security was strict since the Russian Zone was only a short distance away. Subsequently employed by the Air Ministry where for five years she taught the children of NATO personnel working in Fontainebleau near Paris for five years. Travel is in her blood and she has used opportunities that came her way to visit many places across Europe and beyond. Wendy’s life is action packed from its start and engrossing to read. Now in her early nineties she is able to look back on her journey of life and write with honesty and openness, not flinching from the ups and downs of her life including early bereavement. Without these experiences and inherent gifts which came to the fore in later years, she might not have been identified nor reached her true potential through the people-centred life she led, grippingly described in Part 2 of the book. That same honesty is evident in the epilogues at the end of chapters in Part 1 in which she describes her journey of faith hanging at times by a thread but finds its fulfilment in the ’here and now’.
