The elevated rates of crime and industrial action of early 1944 were symptoms of the deep malaise into which the nation had descended in the fifth year of war. Despite the official Italian surrender less than six months before, in September 1943, the conflict now seemed to drag on endlessly, and the bleakness of austerity measures seeped into the fabric of day-to-day life, leaving many desperately dangling at the end of their tether.
Chapter Ten: Can You Beat That?
1 ‘Lady Bountiful Fraud Charge’, Daily Mirror, 5 February 1944.
2 ‘Jekyll–Hyde Mind of Lady Bountiful’, Daily Mirror, 17 March 1944.
3 Herbert Morrison, Hansard Oral Answers to Questions, 16 December 1943.
4 Calder, The People’s War, p. 407.
5 Edward Smithies, Crime in Wartime: A Social History of Crime in World War Two (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982), p. 62.
6 Ibid., p. 74.
7 ‘Rescue Squad Men Guilty of Looting’, The Times, 13 February 1941, p. 2 col. D.
8 Quoted in Calder, The People’s War, pp. 178–9.
9 ‘Bombs in Cargo of Oranges’, The Times, 15 January 1944, p. 2 col. D.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WORST RAID EVER LAST NIGHT
Helen Mitchell lay awake cursing the German bombers buzzing over her Kent home on 22 January 1944, as a ‘foul raid’ raged well into the morning. After the raiders cleared out, there was still no sleep to be had, with RAF bombers en route to the Continent for retribution humming and growling overhead, shaking the windows and foundations of Helen’s home. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and an enervating cold, which made her temporarily deaf in one ear, she switched on the radio. Helen caught the morning news just in time to hear the BBC ‘gloat’ over the damage that those very same British bombers, which had kept her awake earlier, had wrought over Germany. The BBC’s behaviour was no better than Germany’s vicious crowing in the early years of war, Mitchell thought angrily.
At least Helen had someone with whom to endure the raids, and to whom she could grouse about what she called the BBC’s ‘childishness’. Helen normally lived alone since her husband, Peter, worked closer to London, and usually slept at a flat near his work. But recently, a houseguest had come to stay for a few days. A week before the ‘foul raid’ on the 22nd, Peter had arranged for a friend of his sister’s to stay with Helen for company and to help with household chores during his wife’s illness. Caroline would also help keep Helen’s mind off the renewed blitz, Peter reasoned.
Since the beginning of the year, the raids over Kent had once again assumed the familiar drumbeat of the 1940–1 blitz. In early 1944, Hitler embarked upon a new bombing offensive, entitled Operation Steinbock, aimed at the capital. London and the south-east would now endure the so-called ‘baby blitz’, a four-month onslaught that would stretch nerves to breaking point.
After a relative period of peace, Londoners once again descended underground to the safety of the Tube. Although new deep shelters had been constructed in the capital since 1941, none was ready in 1944, and once again the Tube reopened and old bunks were reconstructed to accommodate the nightly migration of nervous city dwellers. In the countryside, people stole away to the protection of their outdoor Andersons, indoor Morrisons or other makeshift precautions. Helen usually sheltered downstairs on a divan placed beneath a doorframe. When she had company over, Helen heaved a heavy kitchen table into the living room, ‘amalgamating it with grand piano as air-shelter’.
As the raids increased, Helen was initially happy that Peter had arranged for Caroline to come; however, it was not long before Helen tired of her guest. Certainly, it was a comfort to have someone nearby, but Caroline had a penchant for sleeping late, leaving the ailing Helen to wake early to start fires throughout the draughty ‘medieval’ home. After early chores were completed, Helen would tumble into bed, utterly exhausted, fed up and muttering at the laziness of her houseguest. Mitchell quickly wrote off Caroline as thoroughly useless: Helen complained to M-O that Caroline’s idea of ‘“Nursing” consists of sitting on her bottom and sending out “healing vibrations”’. ‘Feel a spot of dusting would be more useful,’ she quipped. Conversation was hardly sparkling either. ‘Have rather forgotten what a dreadful bore a really unintelligent woman who makes vapid remarks can be, but have so far managed to be polite,’ Helen caustically remarked. Within a week, Helen was bored and Caroline was disappointed at the lack of things to do in the village; Helen was glad to see her guest off at the train station.
The renewed bombing campaign strained nerves in Helen’s village, yet people pulled together the best they could to provide comfort during the tense nights. Husbands living and working away from home – like Peter and the husband of another friend of Helen’s, Joan – did their best to be home when they could. When no help was forthcoming from husbands or others from the outside, the women in Helen’s circle sometimes visited each other at night. They brought along bedding and a few rations, offering conversation and companionship, hoping to sleep through the night, but often huddling together as bombs crashed to the earth all around them.
Margaret, the owner of a local cafe with whom Helen had become friendly as a frequent customer, seemed the most wits-shattered of Helen’s tiny village circle. In late January, Helen visited the cafe to find Margaret in an ‘awful state about raids’. Helen offered Margaret a place to stay if she needed comfort from the raids. The easily flappable Helen, however, soon regretted her kind gesture. ‘Alas!’ she told M-O, Margaret showed up that very night, with cat in tow, no rations and then proceeded to blither non-stop the entire night.
Though the raid was only a ‘minor’ one and did not last long, Margaret failed to leave when the All Clear siren sounded. With each passing moment of Margaret’s unwanted presence, Helen’s silent rage increased, but she could hardly move herself to ask her guest explicitly to leave. Instead, fearing a future imposition on her already strained hospitality, and hoping Margaret would get the hint that she’d outstayed her welcome, Helen steadfastly refused to offer her guest tea. ‘Was tough about tea’, Helen told M-O, ‘as I fear there will be much of this.’ Later in the day, Margaret came back to announce that she had offered boarding to a Canadian soldier and, much to Helen’s pleasant surprise, would not need to come in the night.
That evening, 29 January, with Peter just returned home for the weekend, the village had yet another ‘foul raid’. It was so fierce that the blackout boards in the windows were blown out. The two tried to brave the raid by playing card games. Helen tried valiantly at stoicism, but she failed: her hands shook uncontrollably. Deeply disappointed with herself, she told M-O, ‘Am becoming more and more cowardly!’
The next morning, a Sunday, Peter woke early and went to his weekly Home Guard drill. The Home Guard was created in 1940 under the Secretary of War, Anthony Eden. Originally named the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), the Home Guard mobilized (mostly) male citizens to defend the country against a possible German invasion. Peter joined the Home Guard early, as did Tom Grant (Irene’s husband) and thousands of other men after the call was made for volunteers in the spring of 1940. Between the initial announcement on 10 May and the end of June, over one million men had heeded the call.
In January 1944, when Peter went to drill, the threat of a German invasion on British soil was decidedly minuscule, but the Home Guard had by then been mostly absorbed into Civil Defence and Anti-Aircraft (AA) duties. Other than preening his equipment for ‘ridiculous inspection’, Helen never revealed the details of her husband’s involvement in the Home Guard. Considering the number of heated air raids in the area, however, it seems reasonable to assume that Peter was involved in either AA work or recovery and other defence duties.
Typically, Helen awoke early to prepare breakfast on mornings when Peter was on Home Guard duty. However, that morning she slept late and left her husband to ‘turn the knobs’ on the cooker himself for breakfast. Though she needed the sleep, she confided that she ‘felt like a pig’ for being so la
zy. When Peter came home after the Home Guard that day, the two took a walk together and enjoyed the waning sunlight of a crisp January afternoon. Later, Helen played card games with Peter and read P.G. Wodehouse aloud (possibly The Code of the Woosters, her favourite Wodehouse, which she’d picked up ‘prewar paper and print’ in London only two months before). In an otherwise stormy relationship and during a particularly fearful period of the ‘baby blitz’, where Helen reported raids almost every night, it seemed a refreshingly tranquil moment.
The next day, Peter went back to work, and after morning chores Helen retired in the early afternoon, drifting off to sleep as she listened to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility on the radio, ‘alone again’. Margaret visited a day later, and though she was still boarding the Canadian soldier, offered to stay with Helen during air raids. Despite feeling desperately lonely, Helen turned Margaret down flat.
The next morning, with an ‘excellent gale blowing’, Helen dragged old clothes out of storage to air and inspect for the telltale signs of moth damage that often plagued her wardrobe. ‘No moth casualties’, she happily informed M-O. As she sifted through the garments, she stopped to eye the old costumes and party clothes of bygone theatre productions and social evenings strewn about the room, nostalgic tears dropped gently off the edge of her lashes. ‘Am glad I did not know ten years ago what “life” would be like now,’ Helen thought miserably.
Later, she was stirred awake at 5 a.m. as German planes visited her village, bringing ‘new and terrible bangs and house shaking including self’. When she stumbled into the kitchen, fatigued from lack of sleep and too much living in the past, Helen discovered that one of the pipes had burst in the raid. Day and night, Helen emptied buckets in a relentless battle against the water torture that sprang from her ‘dear old house’. ‘Too much of water hast thou poor Ophelia,’ the former Shakespearean actor and producer lamented as she recalled the drowning of Ophelia in Hamlet.
In between the rattling raids that winter, Mitchell continued her daily grind and grouse of housework. In addition to the bombing, the house and the routine were, if possible, even more debilitating than ever for Helen. ‘Drooled through the day in usual manner,’ summed up her day’s experience in one terse January diary entry. Throughout the long winter, a variety of repairmen appeared to patch windows blown out from raids, fix plumbing, remedy the dreadful dampness that seeped from the walls of the old place and tune her piano (which, in addition to Mitchell, was also suffering from the damp). All agreed with her: the old wreck of a home should be condemned. Even the doctor, who came to treat her cold, said it ‘was the most depressing place he’d ever been in!’
In the beginning of February, the raids over Helen’s village slackened off a bit. She was even able to sleep one night in her upstairs bedroom with the blackout down and windows wide open. Though it was a ‘pleasant change’, it didn’t last long: she was woken by machine-gun fire early in the morning. That morning, when she switched on the radio, she learned of a ‘new form of horror’. The BBC now spewed forth casualty statistics and ‘calculations’ of the damage that Allied bombing had wrought upon Germany. This ‘new entertainment with endless possibilities’ churned her stomach all the more as planes passed overhead. Helen understood the fear of bombing too deeply to glean any satisfaction from the BBC’s tales of RAF successes. And she knew all too well that Allied bombing sparked German retribution, which meant that her village would inevitably become a target once again.
Indeed, on Valentine’s Day, Helen and Peter experienced ‘the worst raid ever’. The two lay on the floor, shaking in terror while plaster and dust fell down all around them. Helen trembled uncontrollably as she heard the unmistakable clack-clack of incendiaries and the chilling rip of the air as high-explosive bombs fell to the ground. When morning came, Peter left for the week, leaving Helen distraught and worried about enduring the next horrible raid alone.
Five days later, on 19 February, London had its heaviest raid since the monstrous bomber’s moon bombing of 10 May 1941. Luckily for Mitchell, the raid wasn’t too bad in Kent. Still, the siren went early that night, and – fully expecting a repeat of the Valentine’s Day raid – Helen cowered beneath her kitchen table, waiting for the worst. The raids were taking their toll; ‘Have descended to lowest depths and took bromide,’ Helen confessed.
As the raiders continued their bombing runs – flying west to London or east in revenge – Mitchell’s friend Joan stopped in one cold February morning and invited her to come to her house for the evening. For the remainder of the month, Helen divided her time between Joan’s home and her own, pulling together rations for an evening away and tidying up in the morning before heading home to do her chores. On occasion, Margaret would appear during the day, complain about the raids and announce that she was staying the night. Helen much preferred spending the evenings at Joan’s, since she seemed to get a restful sleep and found Joan ‘very nice to be with, as doesn’t grumble like Margaret’. But, with Helen’s seeming inability to refuse anything that smacked of ‘duty’ or sacrifice, this invariably kept her at home, with the attendant cleaning and airing of a room that having a guest necessitated. Much as she hated the imposition, Helen could not refuse Margaret when she appeared at her door.
After a nice evening at Joan’s, and an invitation to stay again that night, Margaret stopped by to tell Helen that her boarder would be late and she couldn’t possibly get through the night alone. Helen felt obliged to cancel with Joan when she learned of Margaret’s misfortune and, predictably, the night was spent in agony: Helen proclaiming to M-O that her houseguest was ‘most upsetting, grousing and reiterating interminably’.
By the end of February, Helen stepped up efforts to flee the torment of the ‘baby blitz’ and made plans to stay with friends near Oxford in March. She had been planning an escape from Kent for quite a while. In fact, she spent a great deal of the war trying to break free either of the old house or from the constant bombing that plagued the south-east. On numerous occasions, Helen went on short breaks to friends in Tunbridge Wells, Epsom or London, or took a train to the west for the tranquillity of Minehead and the Quantock Hills. But on this occasion, if she thought she was going to also escape the noisome Margaret, she was sadly mistaken. Once Margaret got wind of Helen’s plan, she asked to accompany Mitchell to the greener pastures beyond the capital, out of harm’s way. ‘Blimey!’ exclaimed Helen when Margaret elbowed her way in to Helen’s plans; nonetheless, she made arrangements for them both.
To judge by the numerous renters and boarders that showed up at Helen’s own door, many people lived peripatetic lives during the war. In the periods when she was in Kent, one of the (many) banes of Helen’s existence was the numerous callers wanting to rent or buy her house. From men and women moving jobs voluntarily or through government compulsion, to bombed-out families searching for accommodation, to evacuees and individuals like Helen and Margaret trying to escape the terrifying pounding of enemy bombs, hundreds of thousands of Britons were on the move during the war.
On 28 February 1944, as Helen prepared to move to Oxfordshire, her friend from Tunbridge Wells appeared, ‘to talk over taking half of house’. ‘Says they may have to go back to their flat in London, as tenants have fled, and they may not be able to let it, but wants to come here,’ Helen recorded in her diary. Since she was on her way to Oxford, this was less of a problem for Helen than the interminable interruptions of expected and unexpected enquiries that plagued her during the months when she was determined to stay in Kent.
On 6 March, Helen caught a train to London, where she and Margaret then switched to the ‘slow train’ at Paddington. Later that day, the two were finally installed at Francine’s, Helen being thoroughly fed up with Margaret and hoping her tagalong would soon disappear. Perhaps Margaret had also tired of Helen, for she did indeed move along with surprising rapidity. Within two days, Margaret had found a job and began to move her belongings to Oxford. ‘Devoutly thankful’, Helen wrote in her di
ary to mark the occasion. Margaret ‘has fed on me emotionally for the past month and am fed to the teeth’, she complained to M-O.
Without Margaret, the Oxfordshire countryside was a pleasant getaway from the continual air operations over Kent. The village where she now lived was much more lively than her home in Kent, and, though she felt compelled to do housework to earn her keep at Francine’s, the stay was enjoyable. Nonetheless, Helen could still hear the air-raid sirens of London at night, and it sent her into ‘much vicarious suffering, as know London was getting it’. As she lay in bed, listening to the sirens and distant gunfire, she thought of her husband and felt pangs of concern, knowing he was in the midst of the raid, worrying he was working too hard (as she thought he often did) and wondering if he was getting enough sleep.
Although the distant sound of raids cut into her own sleep, she bitterly contrasted those around town who looked ‘so full of sleep’ with the ‘drawn tired faces in Kent and London’. The next day, she took advantage of the quiet and wallowed in the ‘1st really quiet afternoon I’ve known since I left Scotland 6½ years ago.’ Still, Helen felt unsettled: Francine’s family was descending on the farm for the Easter holidays and, although her friend insisted she stay, Helen couldn’t bear the thought of being a burden. So, once again, she made arrangements to flee – this time to her beloved Minehead.
Domestic Soldiers Page 22
