Fred was still involved with Alice in November 1943, when they celebrated his birthday. She bought him a pipe and a birthday card. By now, she told M-O, he knew her rules of engagement: the only form of affection she allowed was kissing. But even that was too much for Fred, who exclaimed, ‘Good God, your kisses thrill me!’ after he thanked her for his gifts. ‘What would you be like if—’ he contemplated aloud, and then sighed, ‘Oh skip it, what’s the use?’
Beyond some saucy stories to recount to M-O, there were a number of fringe benefits to these trysts. For one, Alice told M-O, they made her more affectionate with her husband. All the pent-up sexual tension of her daytime adventures was apparently saved for Les when he came home and ‘went all romantic’, as she called it. She also made new friends, went out more and became more empowered than she’d ever felt before. The men she met flattered her, and told her how beautiful and intelligent she was. But it was also clear that Alice held a certain power over the men: seeking them out, enticing them and creating boundaries that she seems to have policed with relish.
Her shameless flirting, though, had a particular edge to it, a fact that came to light when she confided to M-O that as a teenager she was nearly raped. The power to police those boundaries that had once only narrowly escaped being violently shattered remained intact as long as Alice didn’t fall for her partners. She enjoyed Fred and Vic’s company, but she didn’t love them. She appreciated Les’ trust in her, as ‘He knew I would never do the unsporting thing.’ But at the same time, Alice confessed to her diary, ‘What a blessing I never have fallen really in love with another man.’ What if she did fall for someone?
Chapter Six: A Few Hours of Happiness
1 Quoted in Claire Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post-War England’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 62 (2006), p. 103
2 Ibid., p. 100.
3 Rosita Forbes, ‘Be a Success’, Woman’s Own, 22 June 1940, p. 28.
4 Quoted in Phil Goodman, ‘“Patriotic Femininity”: Women’s Morals and Men’s Morale During the Second World War’, Gender and History, vol. 10, no. 2 (August 1998), p. 282.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE SUN NEVER SETS
Edie pounded the typewriter keys with ferocity. The nerve. Of all the ‘dirty low down tricks’, she fumed. Well, she reckoned, he was growing old. He had done some good in his time, but now, he was increasingly becoming a ‘nuisance’. The British Empire would be better off without him. Best to let him die rather than give in to him, she thought.
It was 23 February 1943. Gandhi had been on hunger strike for thirteen days, but with eight days left in his twenty-one-day protest against his imprisonment and the rough treatment of prisoners throughout India, his kidneys failed. The crowds assembled outside the palace of Aga Khan in Poona, Gandhi’s prison since August 1942, were allowed inside, and reverently filed past the ailing seventy-three-year-old. All were convinced this was the end. While his family and supporters steeled themselves against the inevitable, Rutherford’s office mates in Sheffield were of the opinion that, ‘He should be allowed to die if he persists in his fast.’ Edie told M-O that, although she felt the British could not afford dissent during the war, and Gandhi’s death would almost certainly unleash chaos, mass protest and the ‘attendant killing’ in India, she was nonetheless convinced, ‘In the long run to be rid of Gandhi would be a good thing.’
Winston Churchill agreed. When Gandhi had been imprisoned six months earlier, in August, the Prime Minister was so jubilant to learn that the Indian leader was in custody and out of the way that his doctor overheard him singing gleefully in the bath. Churchill told Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India and Burma, ‘If [Gandhi] likes to starve himself to death, we cannot help that.’1 With Japanese forces at the gates of India and British losses everywhere mounting, Gandhi had given Churchill cause for much concern, for he led a movement of Indian nationalists who felt that the time was ripe to break away from Britain.
Gandhi’s Quit India Movement erupted in 1942, a moment when Allied fortunes across the globe looked particularly grim. The Russians, who were now Britain’s allies after the Germans attacked the USSR in June 1941, had suffered grievously in the first six months of the German invasion: at least four million Soviet troops had been killed or captured. By the summer of 1942, as Gandhi’s independence movement gathered momentum, most Britons watched anxiously as the Soviets engaged in a desperate battle to defend Stalingrad. The Americans, drawn into war in December 1941, had yet to find their stride, and British interests were everywhere being rolled back by seemingly invincible Japanese and German forces.
On 7 December 1941, the same day that Japan launched its attack against the Americans at Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces were also moving on British territory in Hong Kong and Burma. In the early hours of the morning, even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces landed in northern Malaya and began their trek south through supposedly impenetrable jungle towards an apparently indomitable ‘Fortress Singapore’.2 That evening, Singapore received its first air raids. It was an easy target: unlike the darkened cities of Europe, there was no blackout and the lights of Singapore glittered, creating an irresistible target for the night-time attackers.
A few days after Pearl Harbor, Britons were stunned to learn of their own naval disaster. Enemy aircraft patrolling the Gulf of Siam in the South China Sea had sunk two British ships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, sent to thwart the Japanese landings in Malaya. The ships were the pride of the Royal Navy – one, Prince of Wales, had recently hosted a meeting between the Prime Minister and President Roosevelt – and the commanding admiral was a personal favourite of Churchill. The incident was a significant turning point – one that signalled that Britain no longer ruled the waves. Japan reigned supreme in the east; the empire was now, according to Churchill, ‘weak and naked’. Churchill later recalled, ‘In all the war I never received a more direct shock’ than when the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, rang him with the news.3
Not long afterwards, Britain would lose its oldest possession in Malaya, the island of Penang. Under severe Japanese bombardment, European inhabitants of the island were given strict orders to leave behind local staff and servants and evacuate. Some were disgusted at the ignominy of the orders, but nonetheless they obeyed and boarded the ferries to leave the island, some of which were manned by the survivors of Prince of Wales. It fell to the Indian editor of the local English-language newspaper to lower the Union Jack; no British officer had stayed to formally surrender. One woman who had tried to stay but was forced out recalled soon after that the evacuation was ‘a thing which I am sure will never be forgo en or forgiven’.4
For Edie Rutherford, a native South African and proud supporter of empire, the imperial losses pointed out the ‘farcical muddles’ of the government, both at home and abroad. The loss of Repulse and Prince of Wales, for instance, constituted what Edie called a ‘double blow’ to the war effort. On the same day Britons learned the fate of the two ships, she reported that many women received an additional ‘blow’ – to their chances of lending their support to the war effort back home. The government had advertised important work for typists, yet by noon that day, Rutherford noted, it was announced that all positions were taken, leaving ‘thousands’ of women ‘disappointed’. From her perspective, this proved that, although Britain was fighting on its heels, the government nonetheless refused to make use of the millions of eager women, like Edie, waiting to take a crack at Hitler, and now the Japanese.
As Edie nervously watched the empire unravel in the titanic struggles across the globe, she was plunged into her own battle to find meaningful war work. Back on the first day of war, 3 September 1939, Rutherford had resolved that she would do whatever was necessary to help ‘push the ship along’. She seemed closer than ever to achieving that goal in March 1941, when the government decided that all women between the ages of twenty and forty (the requirements would eventually expand to include women between eighteen and fifty-one) had to register fo
r war work. When she heard about the order, Edie thought that the government should extend the law to include women in their fifties and sixties. Many of them, she thought, could run circles around her because they were through the ‘change in life’ and were more healthy and energetic than someone like her, who ‘still endure monthlies, getting faint indications of what goes with the change, and cannot help at times feeling under the weather, what with one thing and another’.
Like Nella Last, Edie was a skilled domestic manager, a master of rationing and ever vigilant in the battle against waste. But while she was serious about the domestic soldier’s mission to keep her family and community ‘fighting fit’, she felt equally compelled to take on what she considered to be useful war work. Indeed, for her (and many others), paid employment was the most effective way to participate in the war effort and Edie, who was thirty-nine at the time, would now be officially required to register for work in 1942.
She did not, however, wait for the government to find her a job of national importance and instead immediately launched her own search. An occasional freelance writer for newspapers in her native South Africa and, therefore, a skilled typist, Edie felt certain that her talents would be needed by the government. But, as so many women found out, the job hunt was eminently frustrating, especially if one insisted that the job matched one’s experience and skills, as Rutherford did.
Edie went to interview after interview and was sometimes offered work, but the wages were so paltry or the work so unsuited to her talents that she flatly refused. Despite the shock expressed by these employers at her seemingly unpatriotic rejection, she was steadfast, insisting that she was indeed patriotic, but would not be exploited, nor dispirited. ‘I WON’T lose hope, nor believe my time wasted,’ she resolutely told M-O. Still, it was difficult to be offered such low wages or, as often happened to Rutherford, to realize that her problems often had little to do with her qualifications.
The ‘condescension’ that interviewers took towards her when they learned she had not worked for ten years and had never worked for – nor had references from – a Sheffield employer, was, according to her, ‘pitiful’. Nor did her age help matters. As she left one interview, she saw a long line of women – all much younger than herself – waiting. ‘That’s another job I don’t get,’ she thought bitterly.
The one bright light at the time was the American entrance into the war. Although Churchill fervently desired US help in Europe, many Americans were initially reluctant to go to war there. They much preferred to focus their efforts where they’d been hit: in the Pacific. Four days after Pearl Harbor, however, Hitler and Mussolini gave them no choice when both declared war against the US. Churchill was ecstatic. With the Americans in the war on both fronts, he later wrote, ‘We had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live.’5
On Boxing Day 1941, Churchill addressed a joint session of the United States Congress. The Prime Minister charmed the chamber with his humour, as well as his sense of the historical gravity of the moment, and made multiple references to the newly forged ties between the two countries. One New York Times commentator pointed out that it was the first time that Churchill could speak of the two countries as ‘“We” – linked openly and irrevocably together in common struggle’.6 As for the members of Congress, many thought it the ‘greatest speech’ they had ever heard.7 The recent setbacks caught up with Churchill, however. No one but his personal doctor knew – until the truth came out after Churchill’s death in the 1960s – but the Prime Minister suffered a heart attack that night.
The speech was broadcast back home on the BBC, and marked the first time the British public heard a prime minister address the American Congress over the wireless. Most back home cheered Churchill’s speech. Irene Grant exclaimed with delight, ‘Grand old boy!’ and worried over his safe return. Edie Rutherford thought it a ‘good speech’ and believed it wise that Churchill exploited the ‘emotional’ connection he had with the US through his mother’s American ancestry. But what Edie enjoyed most about the speech was that ‘WC’ delivered some nice jabs at the isolationists who had, until recently, refused to become involved in what they saw as European infighting. Although she knew the erstwhile American isolationists would now deny their past, she hoped, nonetheless, that Churchill’s barbs made them squirm.
Natalie Tanner didn’t mention the Prime Minister’s speech that day. Her main concern was the surrender of Hong Kong, which had occurred the day before. As stories of Japanese atrocities filtered into the British press, and those around her waxed indignantly about them, Natalie remembered how apathetic people had been when the Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931. Back then, she had protested against Japanese aggression in China, but she was told to ‘mind my own business’ and was labelled a ‘war monger’. Now, at least, she felt vindicated.
The triumph was hollow indeed, and Natalie could do little more than shake her head sadly at the devastation brought down upon the garrison at Hong Kong. Newspapers reported that lack of food and water forced the troops to give in, leading Natalie to worry that her beloved Gibraltar (where she’d been married nearly twenty years before) might also suffer the same fate. But there was more to the siege of Hong Kong than the official line. The Japanese had been casing the colony since at least 1934, sending in numerous plainclothes spies – such as the naval commander who worked as a barber for seven years, listening carefully to the conversations of the high-ranking British officers who patronized his shop. Japan had an intimate knowledge of the colony, its defence and the behaviour of the defenders before it began its concerted attack in December 1941.
Japan had also succeeded in winning over many locals to its cause and these fifth columnists created devastating unrest, especially in the first days of the invasion. Still, the defenders of Hong Kong – both the British and Chinese Nationalist forces loyal to Chiang Kai-shek – acquitted themselves better than can be said for their compatriots in other parts of the Far East, such as Penang. The British had been tasked with holding on as long as they possibly could, and this they did, as isolated islands of soldiers and volunteers fought off larger Japanese forces until their ammunition ran out. They were wholly outnumbered and outgunned on land, sea and in the air. On Christmas Day 1941, the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Mark Young, became the first British governor to surrender a colony since the American War of Independence.
* * *
The news from the east made for a solemn New Year. Each year, Nella Last always suffered from what she called ‘Hogmanay blues’, but this year was particularly depressing. The stories of young British soldiers desperately retreating in the wake of swift Japanese action dredged up painful memories of Dunkirk, and Nella and her neighbour, Mrs Atkinson, were tearfully reminded of the loss of friends who had perished on the beaches at the beginning of the war. Their friend, Dorothy, whose husband had gone missing and was ‘presumed dead’, had spent the last eighteen months searching out anyone – even fortune-tellers – who could offer any shred of news.
In the sadness that pervaded that dark holiday season, Nella felt her resolve falter. She wondered if the soldiers were suffering the same malaise that seemed to permeate Barrow and descend over the entire country. As midnight approached on 31 December, the New Year ‘blues’ seized hold of her mind and set her thinking. Was it the food situation that made her so gloomy? Or the news in Asia? Was it that her husband Will continued to ‘stop in’ and stare dumbly into the fire? ‘Is it the tension’ of wartime, she wrote in her diary that night, ‘the ceaseless undercurrent of conjecture if not real worry?’ Perhaps her war work was becoming too overwhelming – ‘the constant “keeping on” with no little break?’ – she wondered. Whatever the cause, she confessed that she felt a ‘curious “sapping of vitality”, of stagnation’.
As the bad news kept streaming in, the cold chill of winter gripped the nation: pipes froze and snow and freezing rain snarled traffic. In Sheffield, Edie Rutherfo
rd picked her way through iced-over, muddy, ‘black pudding’ streets. Days like these made her long for the sun and warmth of her native South Africa – the letters she received from family and friends in Durban and Johannesburg hardly helped, since they complained endlessly about the scorching African heat! Amid the falling snow and freezing temperatures, Edie wondered how Russians and Germans could possibly wage war in such conditions. ‘All my instincts are to hibernate when it is like this,’ she told M-O. ‘I can’t summon up enthusiasm for sociable meetings let alone hostile ones!’
Coping with the cold in Barrow-in-Furness, Nella Last’s thoughts were also of Russia. On 22 January, she reported that it was 19 degrees (-7 °C) in Barrow. Milk froze if it was left in the garage for an hour, but the Russians ‘have thirty degrees below freezing [-17 °C]. I cannot imagine it twice as cold,’ Nella admitted. It made her ‘shudder’ when she thought of bombed-out Russians with no shelter in such conditions. The next morning it rained, and Barrow’s streets were nightmarish with rivers of rain and puddles of slush, ‘traffic skidded and slithered and piled up… What a day!’
For Helen Mitchell at home in Kent, the snow and cold simply meant more work. Day after day, she ‘lugged coal, coke and anthracite’ from her stores into the house to stoke up the three fires necessary to warm her son and husband. Usually, the house in Kent was fairly empty – her husband, Peter, spent most of his time nearer his work in London and her son, William, was in the army. Except for the servants, Helen spent most of her time alone. But, much to her chagrin, Peter was home more than usual that January. Furthermore, William came home on leave unannounced at the end of the month. On the day he arrived, the pipes had frozen, there was no water and the plumber was nowhere to be found. But, despite the cold and its attendant problems, events in the east were never far from anyone’s thoughts. Caught up as she was in her domestic drudgery, even Mitchell stopped to joke with an acquaintance that she had no idea how to keep her stockings up now that the Japanese had ‘pinched all the rubber’.
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