Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  For the first time in her life, people recognized her, and with each attempt to contribute to the nation’s fight she found herself more confident and more independent. Her health improved, and the woman who could not, or would not, leave the house without her husband now had an excuse – and a patriotic one at that – to strike out on her own. With each step forward, she found a voice and camaraderie never before experienced. After Will commented on her energy, she thought to herself,

  He never realizes – and never could – that the years when I had to be quiet and always do everything he liked, and never the things he did not, were slavery years of mind and body.

  The war gave her an excuse to break free from living within the boundaries of her husband’s expectations, moods, whims and desires. More and more, Nella stood up to Will instead of giving in ‘for the sake of peace’. His ‘petulant moods’ that previously had made her ‘run round trying to get him in a good humour and worry and worry for days’ now only elicited ‘indiffer-ence’ or sharp responses. As a domestic soldier, she was careful to make sure her husband’s morale didn’t falter, but once she ensured his relative comfort she did not have to sit at home and watch him mope. Called out on national service, she lived according to the motto, ‘The WVS never says no,’ and found herself involved in a number of rewarding projects, meeting a wide variety of people she would have never had the opportunity to know in the past.

  Will, on the other hand, seemed content to sit by the fire, vacantly staring at the flames, ageing while she flourished. In December 1941, as the family gathered at home, the table laid with a festive embroidered tablecloth and chrysanthemums, enjoying her expertly engineered delectable Christmas fare that made the rationing scheme fade to the corners of their minds, Last was uneasy. The war weighed heavy on her mind. She thought of the ‘evil’ Hitler had let loose in the world, and tried to assuage her anxiety with thoughts of nearby Coniston Water: the peaceful finger-like lake cutting gracefully through the ruggedly green Furness Fells in the southern Lake District always spoke a placid incantation to Nella’s spirit. But it wasn’t just the war that nagged her.

  She watched her husband sitting quietly in front of the fire, knowing that nothing she could do would stir him or move him to discuss anything of consequence, and had to remind herself that he was ‘only fifty-three and not eighty-three’. She longed to be back at work, where she had made friends who chatted with her, appreciated her and responded to her efforts to cheer them when the blues descended. As the New Year approached, however, she decided not to grumble about her temporary hiatus. The holiday was almost over and she would soon go back to her wartime routine. She counted her blessings: ‘I’ve broken loose and am free now.’

  In total war, everyone was a soldier on the home front, and this fact could be empowering. On the radio, in magazines and newspapers, the British people were constantly reminded that their individual efforts added up to a massive contribution. Novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley argued in his popular Sunday evening Postscript radio broadcasts, which aired after the 9 o’clock evening news, that there were ‘postmen soldiers, housewife and mother soldiers’, and not to leave himself out, even ‘broadcasting soldiers’.6 One Woman’s Own magazine article urged women to be careful when they filled their lamps, as one drop of paraffin wasted by each individual in England alone would add up to 37 million drops wasted (or roughly 600 gallons). A simple act such as saving kitchen scraps could, according to one Ministry of Food jingle, eventually save the empire. The most mundane activities of peacetime were infused with patriotism and value during wartime.

  Women became the vanguard in the People’s War. They controlled their families’ consumption, fed and comforted them, and helped fill the ranks of workers and volunteers as men went off to fight. To underline the importance of women’s domestic contributions, Lord Woolton, the Minister of Food, went on air in 1940 to rally women to the war effort. ‘It is to you, the housewives of Britain that I want to talk tonight,’ he said in a stern, authoritative voice:

  We have a job to do, together you and I, an immensely important war job. No uniforms, no parades, no drills, but a job wanting a lot of thinking and a lot of knowledge, too. We are the army that guards the Kitchen Front in this war.

  Without women, and their wise domestic management, many of the nation’s home front policies would fail. It was up to them to ‘translate national economy into domestic practice’.7

  The success of the home front rested on women’s willingness to scrimp and save on everything, from food to clothes, to fuel. As much coal as possible had to be saved for munitions, as a soldier in a Ministry of Fuel advertisement in Good Housekeeping informed housewives: ‘Without it, our factories could not operate; not a ‘plane, gun, tank or ship could be turned out, and Britain would lie open to the enemy.’8 Practically anything lying around the house could be used for military purposes. Aluminum pots and pans, paper and even bones from the evening joint could be recycled into weapons.

  Without this effort, Britain would have to divert military resources such as ships and raw materials to feed the nation. ‘Save bread and you save lives,’ the Ministry of Food exhorted.9 Other advertisements stressed that lives would be lost bringing unnecessary domestic goods to Britain. ‘Food wasted is another ship lost,’ announced one such advertisement, which illustrated its point with a ship labelled ‘food’ going down into the murky waters of a wasted meal.10 Another advertisement in Good Housekeeping was more blunt: ‘A sailor’s blood is on your head if you waste a scrap of bread.’11 Such imagery and rhetoric was powerful for women who worried over the safety of the armed forces and merchant marine. Having lived on the coast for most of her life – her husband worked in the navy in the First World War, and Barrow was a hub for sailors, and home to the large shipbuilder, Vickers – Nella’s sleep was often punctuated by nightmares of sailors drowning in rough frigid seas.

  By no means did the messages of individual effort end with these entreaties. Wartime Britain was bursting with ways in which people – from soldier to pensioner, housewife to factory worker – could, or should, be useful to their country. Almost every aspect of a person’s life had the potential to affect the war effort, from the amount of water and its temperature in their baths (as well as the amount of soap used) to their leisure time and employment, and the government (as well as consumer manufacturers) was sure to remind the people to keep vigilant. Aside from the death and destruction of war, Britons had much to worry about: they were supposed to ‘Dig for victory’, ‘Keep your eye on your fuel target’ and ‘Save fuel for factories’, mind the ‘Squander Bug’ and ‘Spend less on yourself – Lend more to your country’, ‘Travel between 10 & 4 and don’t crowd the war workers’, ‘Keep mum’ and remember that ‘Careless talk costs lives’, ‘Stuff the salvage sacks and starve the dust-bin’, ‘Mend and make-do to save buying new’, ‘Lend a hand on the land’ and ‘Come into the factories’.12 The constant barrage of messages may have elevated a personal sense of investment in the national cause and importance in the war effort, but it could also lead to feelings of guilt that one simply wasn’t doing enough. It was difficult to keep the nagging question of the level of personal commitment to the cause at bay. An advertisement in Good Housekeeping encapsulated this predicament of wartime guilt perfectly when it asked: ‘Is your conscience clear? There’s war work waiting.’13 One’s conscience could hardly be entirely clear. There was just so much to do.

  Nella Last generally reconciled this problem by rationalizing that she was doing as much as a woman her age (she was forty-nine when the war started) in her position could do, and she was doing it well, at that. She judged others’ efforts similarly: when an elderly neighbour felt he wasn’t doing enough for the war effort, she pointed out that he was doing as much as he possibly could. Indeed, she believed that with an arthritic shoulder he was going well beyond what might be expected of him in planting and maintaining a prolific garden. With a garden like that, she argued, ‘Whethe
r he wore khaki or not, he was a soldier.’ Still, when confronted with the incredibly diverse problems of the war effort, she sometimes felt she could do more. Forgetting for a moment that she felt everyone could be a soldier in their own way, she once dismissed the importance of her efforts, writing, ‘I wish I’d the chance – and strength – to do something worthwhile to help.’

  The idea that everyone and every action was crucial to the survival of the nation was so pervasive and powerful that it seeped into the fabric of everyday life. Whether they contributed positively to the war effort or not, most were aware that they should be doing so. There was, as Helen Mitchell once told M-O, ‘always some arrière pensée [concealed thought] behind every action’. If every action was important, every action must be scrutinized. For some, like Helen, this fact of the People’s War was overwhelming.

  Though she too wanted to make a difference to the war effort, Helen Mitchell could barely muster a shred of enthusiasm for the task she was given at the Red Cross depot in Minehead. Her unwilling hands slowly stitched slippers for the wounded in hospital; a feeling of futility settled deeply into the grooves of her mind as she watched the needle passing in and out of the fabric. Surely the task was useless; in all likelihood, she felt, ‘They are never used, or … one hospital has thousands of them, and others none.’

  During the war, she maintained a virulent scepticism of the ‘everyday soldier’ messages percolating throughout the British media, questioning not only the value of individual efforts to the war effort, but also the government’s ability to capitalize on them. Although she couldn’t quite buy the rhetoric of the People’s War, she nevertheless felt compelled to pitch in. A few days after stitching the slippers, Mitchell wandered along one of the hills overlooking Minehead, perhaps enjoying the view out to the Bristol Channel or, looking up the coast, admiring the patchwork of light and dark greens stretching across the rolling Quantock Hills. She may have turned her attention south and gazed at the brilliant heather and wild beauty of Exmoor. Minehead was her sanctuary. Yet, as she reached the top of the hill, her peace was shattered by the sight of people gathering bracken. ‘Always feel embarrassed when I meet people working,’ Mitchell confessed to M-O, ‘and think I ought to be doing something – would do so, if I knew what.’

  Soon after this, Mitchell left Minehead to return to her home in Kent, which tenants had recently vacated. ‘Bitter thought,’ she wrote, ‘exchanging Somerset for Kent.’ She enjoyed the company and the surroundings of Minehead, but loneliness and interminable housework was all she could look forward to in Kent. For weeks after she arrived home, Mitchell set to exorcizing the ex-tenants’ filth. But in wartime personal concerns had to be balanced by the continual calls of the nation, and soon Mitchell felt she must find a way to be useful. The rhetoric of the People’s War and the non-stop government directives nagged her to do something, anything, but there seemed so little she wanted to do. She had her own talents, her own unique gifts – she loved theatre, enjoyed directing and taught elocution – but, to her, these seemed to lack the necessary gravitas in the middle of all-out war. Instead, she struggled for years, searching for work worthy of the sacrifice of war.

  In 1941, she worked for a stint registering prisoners of war in London. Then, in Minehead, she did various tasks for the Red Cross: sewing or collecting items to finance relief efforts. By December 1941, a month after arriving home from Somerset, she agreed to firewatching duty. She shivered on a few sleepless nights, watching the skies, but Helen soon learned that the mismanagement she suspected in the distribution of hospital slippers extended to include fire watching, rendering her efforts ineffectual. One night, as she prepared to go on duty, she was informed that, ‘No one is expected to fire watch on Friday nights!!’ She learned later that it was commonplace for people to shirk their duty: her butcher, for example, simply stayed in bed on his appointed nights. It hardly seemed worth the effort or lack of sleep, so Mitchell left.

  In March 1942, only a few months after she left firewatching duty, Helen was seized by a ‘filthy temper’ as she travelled to London for a lunch date with her husband. It wasn’t that she was seeing her husband – usually a loathsome affair accompanied by a foul mood. This time it was the overwhelming feeling that she did little more than take up space. ‘Felt I’d no right to travel, or to take someone’s place in a restaurant; in fact,’ she confided to M-O, ‘unless I can be useful, no right to exist.’ In order to justify her existence, once again Mitchell searched about for another way to be active on the home front.

  She applied to the local WVS for work, and anxiously awaited their reply. She dreaded, above all, that they would stick her with evacuees – a prospect that conjured up memories of a bad experience at the beginning of the war when she took in two mothers and their babies. Two weeks after she posted the letter to the WVS, she was overjoyed to learn that her village was no longer a reception area for evacuees and, instead, she was asked to collect for the Red Cross – a task she took up with great gusto, as one who gratefully serves penance upon receiving a reprieve. Later, Helen found herself ‘roped into’ joining the organization and was given work at a children’s canteen.

  Unlike Nella Last, who found confidence and acceptance in the WVS and who looked forward to working in the town canteen, Helen could not ‘imagine anything I should hate more’. To her, the WVS centre was a ‘haggery’ full of housewives who were uninteresting and boorish and only thought of food or cinema. To ‘get straight again’, and to shake off the mental exhaustion of the centre, she often felt the need to play a Bach fugue on her piano afterwards. And to prepare for her work at the canteen, she required a day of rest and quiet. She spent two weeks ‘flinging food’ at the children until, much to her surprise, Helen encountered a woman who ‘lamented’ it was her last day at the canteen. She could hardly believe her luck. Seizing the opportunity, Mitchell happily offered the woman her place and the WVS quickly receded from her life.

  By June 1942, Mitchell had found volunteering at a London office a little less insufferable, but still only stayed in the job for the summer. And for all of 1942, she allowed the local constables to meet in her home a er their office had been destroyed during an air raid. Even this was not without its sacrifices, since the men were ‘never very accurate’ in their use of the lavatory, but she nonetheless ‘held her nose and said “It was for England”!’

  After 1943, it seemed Helen had given up on finding active war work, though she was never free from the guilt of the People’s War. She did, however, periodically collect for the Red Cross, take in boarders who had lost their homes, and tried to manage what seemed to her to be an ever-expanding slag heap of government regulations, urgings and exhortations. Helen did her best to heed these messages: she cut apples for drying according to the Ministry of Food, she was conscientious with the soap ration (even if, much to her chagrin, her servants were not), she minded salvage controls, she monitored the household use of fuel and did her best to dig for victory. But it was exhausting. She always felt ‘very tired of always being accosted about this or that’, and her keen eye for hypocrisy and inconsistencies made it all the more trying.

  When a woman showed up at Helen’s home and informed her that the eighteenth-century wrought-iron gates protecting her manicured lawn were to be taken down for salvage, she thought, ‘Nice job driving round the country snooping for iron. Petrol has to be imported for the job, so why not iron instead?’ And in contrast to the many advertisements equating waste of imported goods with sailors’ lives lost, she wondered, ‘Why are shops bursting with cigarettes if we are losing ships?’ She refused to give up smoking if the government continued to allow huge quantities of cigarettes to flood the market. After the war in Europe was over, Mitchell looked back at her efforts and summed up her experience thus: ‘It’s all been very futile looking back, have done nothing useful as far as I can see.’

  * * *

  People’s War messages could work positively and negatively. They could offer some
a feeling of inclusion and worth, while for others it seemed there was always something more ‘spectacular’ one could do, and for still others the People’s War could fuel a debilitating guilt. Nella Last found she had skills that had thus far been ignored, but were now appreciated at both a local and a national level, and her self-confidence increased accordingly. Even she had moments of doubt about the level of her contribution to the war effort, and this doubt spurred her to take on more work. It could be physically taxing, but she fought through their fatigue and seemed to have a genuine feeling that what she did was nonetheless useful.

  Helen Mitchell, on the other hand, could never quite get comfortable in the everyday heroism of the war. There was always evidence of infuriating bungling and the sense that individual efforts, contrary to the propaganda, actually added up to nothing more than personal aggravation. One had to feel useful, but in one’s own way. The messages had to align with one’s identity and talents. For Mitchell, this was impossible, since she felt her talents unworthy of wartime service; yet the unrelenting calls to duty forced her into a maddening Sisyphean search for purpose in the People’s War.