World War II Remembered

The War Comes to Vermont

310 The War Comes to Vermont • Betsy Bankart Sylvester In Lynn, on the Massachusetts Coast,the early spring mornings in 1939 were chilly and dark at the hour when the shortwave broadcasts came from Europe, but it was the news that was truly chilling . Already Germany had annexed Austria and now Hitler wanted to take over the industrial fringe of Czechoslovakia, where a few Germans lived. I remember the angry voice, clearly threatening even before the translator put the words into English. We lived with foreboding, the heaviness of problems beyond control. Hitler got his way in exchange for his promise of no further territorial acquisitions; Chamberlain’s tired voice told us of “peace in our time.” Six months later the Nazis invaded Poland. England and France bestirred themselves in the country ’s defense, and the War began. Badly. My father had come at the age of four with his family, including seven brothers and sisters, from Bradford, England, to Rochester, New Hampshire, where his father hoped his skills with woolen textiles would provide a better life for his family. The Bankarts held anything English in high esteem. England lay at the family’s emotional core. The War Comes to Vermont: Betsy Bankart Sylvester 311 Then bombs began to fall on London. Residents slept every night in the subways, not knowing whether they would have a home to return to in the morning. I remember a newsreel of Princess Elizabeth, nearly four years younger than I, and her little sister Margaret, standing staunchly, symbolically, with their parents. So when the Boston Evening Transcript announced a plan to bring over 500 children to be evacuated from London and its nightly air attacks, it was entirely natural for my parents to volunteer to host two children. The Transcript offered to check on family background and circumstances, endeavoring to match the life style of sending and receiving families in order to help smooth the evacuees’ adaptation. A group of children arrived in Boston on July 25, 1940. They all were housed for a time at Wellesley College, while the Wellesley president wrote all the parents about their safe arrival and the host families were notified. Just before Labor Day my parents picked up two brothers , Alan and Graham Ardouin, aged nine and eleven, who stayed with us until shortly after V-E Day in 1945. They were picture-book British schoolboys in gray flannel jackets and shorts. There was barely time in the excitement of newness to enroll them for the opening of the Swampscott Public School. After one day of classes, my mother sensed something wrong. Graham was hiding his embarrassment at being the only boy in his grade wearing shorts. She took him immediately to the local department stores and hemmed new trousers overnight, and all was well thereafter. I do not know whether the boys suffered homesickness, for they settled into our lives quickly. They turned out to be fun, interesting, exasperating, wonderful, normal kids. The Ardouins’ arrival precipitated a number of changes. First, the two young women from Nova Scotia who, as our housekeepers, were receiving room, board, wages, and training from us, quit; my mother then had to deal with meals and running a rambling five-bedroom house. We all had to take hold of any job, indoors or out—or else. Second , my parents sold that house, rented a more manageable place, and, as they had previously planned, began looking for a place to retire. My father, a loyal Dartmouth alumnus and college football star, wanted to return to the scene of happy youthful days. He and my mother found a “handyman’s special” on a narrow dirt road, a short 312 World War II Remembered walk from the Norwich Inn; we moved in, and some local handymen put in rudimentary plumbing, wiring, and heat. My mother, my sister Debbie, and I painted most of the inside and furnished it from nearby auctions, where the merchandise was well broken in, not attractive to dealers. The house was a great place between school and camp for the English boys, and for me as well, during vacations from school and college. When the Pearl Harbor attack came, it unified the nation. Isolationism was no longer a possible stance. Airplane factories and shipyards expanded, and automobile factories changed their assembly lines to build the countless war machines needed. A shortage of workmen to fill all the new jobs...