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other boys played football and made paper aeroplanes in lessons while Billy dreamed of a new life far away. He later told a friend that, much as he loved his family, especially his mother Mabel, he felt he did not have any really close friends as a child. Towards the end of his life, Billy said:
    I was different, definitely. All the boys at my school loved football and Airfix models, or they played in the street as most kids did at that time. I used to play occasionally but my heart wasn’t in it. I suppose it was rather odd that my only interest pretty much was the royal family, but you have to remember that for me they represented a wonderful, exotic world that I wanted to be part of. There wasn’t much that was glamorous about Coventry then. Nobody ever seemed to do anythinginteresting. Frankly, I couldn’t wait to get away. But how was it to be done? That’s what troubled me.
    Barker’s Butts did put many children in for what used to be called CSE exams. CSE stood for Certificate of Secondary Education, a well-intentioned attempt to find some way to recognise the achievements of children who were deemed non-academic. CSE passes were really worth little more than the paper they were written on. Employers knew straight away that an applicant for a job with CSEs rather than O-levels was a child who had failed so far as education was concerned. Billy knew they were worthless and never sat for them.
    Though not academic in the conventional sense, Billy was intelligent enough to know that the school could not give him the start in life he wanted, so the letter writing to Buckingham Palace – he always addressed his letters to the palace – continued as he moved toward his fifteenth year when he could leave school.
    As luck would have it, around this time one of his letters struck a chord with someone in the royal household. Instead of the usual reply, something new and exciting arrived in the post. Billy himself said on several occasions in later life that he had written to the royals so often partly because he really did hope to get a job but also because he loved the thick embossed envelopes that came back carrying each reply.
    The early letters had all thanked him for his interest but regretfully informed him that there were no vacancies. These repliesand their envelopes were carefully added to his collection of royal memorabilia. Billy never regarded them as depressing rejections; they were simply part of a delightful link to a world he longed to be part of.
    But then that very different letter arrived.
    It asked Billy to present himself to the Comptroller of the Royal Household as soon as he could. Clearly the endless series of letters had paid off because the interview, as Billy later recalled, turned out to be a mere formality.
    He had been terrified he would get lost so he deliberately caught a very early train and then wandered about for more than two hours in Green Park, with Buckingham Palace always in view, until it was time to approach a policeman, show his letter and be taken to the side of the palace and in through the servants’ door.
    Having had his duties explained to him – opening doors, general fetching and carrying and being obedient to the senior footmen – Billy was sent on his way.
    Billy’s mother was delighted when his return to Coventry was quickly followed by a letter confirming that they really had decided to give her son a job. She too saw royal service as a cut above the rest. She was part of a generation that almost venerated the royals and from having been doubtful that Billy would ever be taken on, she was as astonished as Billy himself when the invitation to the interview and then the acceptance letter landed on the doorstep. She was a proud woman and quickly let it be known among the neighbours that Billy was off to London to the royal household. Her son would not be working in the local factories after all.
    Mabel coughed up the cost of the train fare and a short while after the