Bertram Smith

“ My wife attributes our success (so far) in the entertainment of Belgian Refugees solely to the fact that we have not, and never have had, a vestige of a committee. We all work along in the jolliest possible way, and we have no meetings, or agenda, or minutes, or co-opting of additional members, or remitting to executives or anything of that kind. We just bring along anything that we think will be useful. ”

“ We have three large families of Belgians and we have already got to the stage where the men are at work and the children at school—though no one really has the least idea what they do there.
But although I admit that it is magnificent to be without a committee—we escaped from that by the simple plan of getting the Belgians first and trusting to the goodwill of the Parish to take care of them afterwards—there are other important factors in our success. There is our extraordinary foresight—of course it was a pure fluke really—in obtaining among them a real Belgian policeman. ”

“ Of course we all have pocket-dictionaries, but even they don't always help us out. I found my wife once engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand encounter with the one who does the cooking about some household necessity that was sadly lacking. She was completely baffled. It was pure stalemate, a deadlock. I pulled out my dictionary and suggested to the cook (by illuminative signs) that she should look it up and point to the English word. ”