In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Tidworth.
    What kind of town could be named “Tidworth?”
    A very small town, indeed.

Wartime England
JANUARY I944-JANUARY I945
    Surely music (along with ordinary language) is as profound a problem for human biology as can be thought of and I would like to see something done about it. A few years ago the German government set a large advisory committee to work on the question of what the Max Planck Institute should be taking on as its next scientific mission. The committee worked for a very long time and emerged with the recommendation that the new M.P.I. should be dedicated to the problem of music—what music is, why it is indispensable for human existence, what music really means—hard questions like that.
    — L EWIS T HOMAS
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s
Ninth Symphony

 
7
Tidworth, England
January 1944
    A BOUT HALF THE time I spent in England was during cold weather. Coal was rationed. Pub owners were terribly embarrassed that they didn’t have the means to keep beer warm in winter. They never really believed that Yanks preferred cold beer. “It’s the war. Can’t do anything about it; can’t heat the basement.”
    We were living just outside of Tidworth, a village of a couple hundred. Lugershall was two miles away; county of Wiltshire. We could go to Andover, ten miles away or to Winchester, twenty-three miles to the south toward the coast. These were the nearest big towns with movies and dance halls. We’d take the Wilts and Dorset bus to Andover, go to the railroad station, and buy a ticket to London for a modest fare. It was about ninety miles—or may have been sixty. Anyway, it was a three-hour trip.
    Our first barracks in Tidworth was a big corrugated gymnasium with a seventy-five-foot ceiling. There were a few windows up high. It was pretty dark; if you wanted to read in a bunk you had to use a flashlight.
    We rented bunks from the Brits, double-deckers with a two-by-four frame and chicken wire on the bottom of the bunk. You got a cotton sack you filled with straw. The second time you got straw you were careful—you didn’t move the first night so that it formed around your body and was then reasonably comfortable.
    The gymnasium was turned into a field hospital for the invasion. They treated the lightly wounded there until they got better; then they were put in the repple depple, the replacement depot. Those men didn’t return to their original company. Instead, they were slotted in wherever needed. This was an unpopular system.
    We got evicted to a bunch of Quonset huts. They were attached by corridors so you could go between them. We stayed under cover for days. The fighter planes were looking for soldiers to strafe. The Army was a big proponent of the adage that “idle hands make idle people and idle people get into trouble.” In the States, we’d spent hours in close order drill or doing calisthenics. All that stuff was off the books in England. At Tidworth, early in the war, a company performing calisthenics got severely strafed and suffered high casualties.
    As soon as our equipment rolled in our work schedule jumped to twelve hours a day, six days a week. Sunday was a day of rest: we worked only eight hours. W. and I set up a battery shop, a fuel handling shop, shops to work on spark plugs, air cleaners, all kinds of welding equipment, gas and electric, for chassis repairs. The idea was to get equipment ready and to turn it around fast if it was out of duty.
    We received all radar equipment that was used at that time. My main job was to take delivery of M-9 Directors. A crew uncrated and assembled the components of the M-9, as well as the four-wheeled trailer. They bolted the computer to the trailer, put the housing on top, and sent it up to us. We would plug it into an electric source, fire it up, and check out.
    Test settings were built in. You turned it on and everything would go wild inside, revolve, settle down to humming radio tubes and lights. In eight to ten