Dolly's War

by Dorothy Scannell

  Jimmy, Amy’s husband, was very worried about Amy and her son and daughter being near London now that the war had started so with her children and my babe we travelled down to Wales to Winifred’s in-laws, where, because I had spent happy childhood hours, I imagined all would be the same. Of course disillusion was in store for us. The parents were dead, and the youngest son had married. They welcomed us in their own way but were very busy, having made the inn, in which they lived, very popular. It was full to capacity in the evenings with army and air force personnel and salesmen, and amongst the salesmen was a young man who seemed to have a penchant for Amy’s young son, by now a boy of twelve, a good-looking and extremely charming lad. This worried us both; we had no man to turn to for advice. Food was sparse, but Susan was all right for we had purchased enough baby food to last her for a whole year. Amy worked hard there for mine host would purchase furniture at auctions as the inn had many bedrooms, and Amy would scrub and polish this second-hand furniture for him. Then she would help get the bedrooms ready for more residents. John, our host, belonged to the local volunteer force and one night Amy was woken up by the sound of stones being thrown against her bedroom window. John was needed for an emergency which had arisen in an outlying village. His bedroom was at the back of the inn down a maze of narrow corridors, all pitch dark because heavy curtains had been fixed up because of the blackout and there was no lighting above stairs in the inn. She found his bedroom by the light of matches but on the way back, having used her last match, lost her way in the terrible blackness. She was afraid to call out in case she woke the children and frightened them and stayed lost in the utter darkness until dawn.

  Hungry and more worried and miserable each day Amy said to me, ‘Oh, Dolly, you are the one with ideas, can’t you think of a solution for us now?’ This rare compliment from a member of my family I accepted as a real challenge and visited shops and houses enquiring for rooms to let. I discovered that up in the hills was a small farm where they might be prepared to let rooms. We hadn’t cottoned on to the propaganda that ‘careless talk costs lives’ and ‘don’t talk to a stranger’ and when we got outside the village we found all the signposts had been removed. We asked a group of children which way to go. They just stared and then decided to follow us. We went up the mountain like the Pied Piper, for children seemed to come from nowhere to join our first ‘admirers’. We came to the gates of a large mansion and decided to enter and ask directions there. This caused much giggling amongst the crowd of children and I wondered who the large house belonged to. The owners were away and a rosy cheeked parlour-maid must have seen nothing sinister in us, or like us hadn’t heard about fifth columns, for she gave us directions immediately adding, ‘It’s very lonely up there.’ The ascent to the farm was so steep we all clung on to Susan’s pram and I was pleased when we reached the farm where the farmer’s wife, who could talk only Welsh-English, showed us the rooms she was prepared to let to us. They were quite nice but my mind and eyes were on the strange animal tied up outside the farm. I supposed it was a dog but it wasn’t like any dog I had seen before. Its fur was a sort of dark mauvy brown, its face was heart shaped, it was extremely low to the ground and running down its back was a dirty white stripe. Seeing the puzzlement on my face the farmer’s wife said, ‘I’ve chained him up today as he is a bit sassy with childer, it’s the nineener in him.’ We arranged to take the rooms but half way down the steep and dangerous incline, it hit me like a bomb. ‘Nineener’ was, of course, ‘hyena’. So the dog was part hyena; and the ‘sassy’ meant he’d have the baby. We all knew we couldn’t take the rooms then. Well, they were isolated.

  In desperation I went to the local Town Clerk, a charming man. He understood our problems perfectly, fell in love with the baby and the other two children and took us straight across the road to a lovely house to visit his mother. She too was enamoured of the baby and offered us a suite of rooms. There was no rent, or heat or light to pay for, the billeting allowance would be sufficient. All we need do was to feed ourselves. Until rationing proper came in and we were issued with ration-books, although things were not yet short, we had great difficulty in obtaining certain commodities in the village, and the next town was about seventeen miles away! We were the first people there so early on in the war and we stuck out like a sore thumb as ‘foreigners’. It mattered not that we had a sister who had married a local boy. We were Londoners. It mattered not that we bought all our other goods there, sugar, flour, tea and coffee was denied to us. Naturally the shopkeepers felt they should keep any stocks, which might become scarce, for their own people. So of course we had to get parcels ‘from home’.

  The village doctor was quite a character, very ancient and a ‘teat-hater’. He would roam the village like a vampire, almost dressed for the part, and carrying a long unrolled umbrella would search ‘his’ babies’ prams. With the long pointed end of his umbrella crammed with ‘dummies’, he would return gleefully to his surgery and cast them on to his fiery furnace. At his approach mothers could always be seen ‘tidying’ prams so that it seemed babies would suddenly yell when the doctor was only just ‘sighted’.

  So followed some very happy months, apart from the fact that we were away from our menfolk. Susan was an ideal baby, Rodney, Amy’s son, went to the local grammar school and made a good friend. Angela was unhappy at starting a new school with children who spoke differently from her and I felt very sorry for her, but gradually she appeared to settle down. After the noisy inn it seemed like paradise and our hostess even put her store of preserved fruits and jams at our disposal. She was a small aristocratic looking old lady, and had obviously been used to commanding people all her life. She possessed a ‘daily’, a young strong healthy girl who attended from early morning until late evening, cycling in from one of the outlying villages. This girl’s first duty was to light the old-fashioned kitchen-range-stove in the enormous stone-floored kitchen. Our hostess called the girl ‘the domestic’ and Amy, like my father always on the side of the under-dog, was upset at the mundane life the girl led. She seemed to imagine that the girl, who lived with her grandparents, might have been born illegitimately and felt that the old lady used the girl and was in some way punishing her for the circumstances of her birth. But if this was so, I either ignored it, or stilled my conscience, for the old lady couldn’t have been kinder or gentler to Susan and the older children. The house was lovely and I couldn’t see much sense, from my selfish point of view, in being a crusader at such a time and educating ‘the domestic’ to discover that there was a brighter and easier life somewhere else. She had been content and happy before we arrived and I hardly felt it was up to us to sow in her the seeds of revolt.

  The gardener had been ‘called to the colours’ and so we decided, by taking over the care of the large garden, that we would be repaying in some measure our hostess’s kindness to us. She was absolutely delighted and told us to throw the grass cuttings over the hedge into the field which backed on to our garden. We worked hard and happily all day and as we tossed the last of the garden rubbish over the tall hedge, over the top of it climbed a large black creature – the local coal merchant. He was screaming and shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Bloody hoo, bloody hoo, there’s hoo in it, hoo in it.’ Out marched the old lady and in a voice of command ordered the coal merchant to be off, but he was in a fearful rage and when we understood why we felt very sorry for him. He had no need of subservience to the old lady. He owned his own business and apparently there was a feud between them, for in the old lady’s garden rubbish were yew-tree clippings and of course yew was poison to his horses which grazed in the field where the lady disposed of garden refuse. We climbed into the field and cleared it of any danger to the horses and he calmed down, pacified to know that while we were in residence his horses would be safe.

  My elder sister Winifred was in Australia. At the age of 40 she became pregnant for the first time after longing for a baby all her married life. This meant they would both have to leave their j
obs as it was a joint appointment. War had broken out and they decided to come home and live in Wales with Syd’s people. They had a tortuous journey, having to take to the boats and it was feared Winnie’s baby would be born at sea, but she arrived in Wales a week or so before her daughter was born. She must have felt very frightened in an open boat with lurking German submarines. Certainly there were better places (and a better audience) one could wish for as a maternity unit, although the ‘Lots and lots of water’ requested by those in charge on such occasions, would have been fulfilled. We were excited for her because of the baby and thrilled to think she would be living in a cottage in the village. It seemed as though we were building up a little Cheggie community in Wales, even though the three of us now possessed different surnames.

  Winifred hurried to visit us after her arrival and we listened avidly to her experiences in the Australian bush. The loss of all her possessions in a bush fire, the hard slog to start their wheat farm, the near misses with poisonous snakes, the shooting of dingoes for which she received one shilling per head from the Australian authorities. We didn’t like the part where she shot the pretty little pink and grey birds making a long string of the heads for which she also received payment because they were a pest to the crops. It seemed hardly possible this was Winifred the ex-bank clerk with the dainty hands. The life she had led was tough and raw and I knew that within me was no pioneer for I would have returned on the next boat. Winnie the fearless I thought her.

  She had literally taken the doctor’s advice to put her feet up as much as possible and had taken her shoes off and was resting them on a dining-room chair as a footstool when the old lady came in to say ‘hallo’ to the wanderer. Winnie was charming but spoke to the old lady as though she was an equal. Had it been me I would have jumped up in a more respectful stance but Winnie and Amy just laughed at my humility.

  Amy received money regularly from her husband but it was a struggle for Chas to send me much, having to keep two homes going in a manner of speaking, as he hadn’t been at his job for long, so that when the old lady’s son, having become Food Officer, asked me if I would like to open the Food Office proper I jumped at the idea. My wages would be 25s. per week. An empty building in the village was put at my disposal, a carpenter was provided to make what shelves and cupboards I needed and Amy said she would take care of Susan. I worked from nine a.m. to five p.m. from then on. Forms of all numbers, sizes and colours arrived and I worked so conscientiously that soon all was shipshape and Bristol fashion, and I could find in a split second any form required. We took in the outlying districts and as there was an influx of people because of the war, it was decided as I was overworked that a young local girl should be employed to ‘assist’ me. My assistant had never worked in an office before but she felt, although she never said it in so many words, that as she was a ‘national’ and me a ‘furiner’ the town was hers by birthright, and very soon the whole office routine was altered. Ever after it was difficult to find an appropriate form and people were forced to wait ages for attention, but I wondered if she was not brighter psychologically than I was, because we appeared to be so busy dashing about from cupboard to cupboard and room to room searching for a certain form or regulation it was said, ‘Those two gels are doing a grand job for the war, look you.’

  Amy missed her husband so much (and he missed her even more) that she was persuaded to go up to London for the weekend where she had a happy time. We had a fine time in Wales too for we paddled in the little Welsh streams and picnicked in the beautiful countryside and the people were so welcoming and warm. We pretended there was no war, that we were on an extended holiday. When I had put the children to bed the old lady invited me to take supper with her and we supped and dined on beautiful china, silver and linen, afterwards going through her marvellous family albums. Children on ponies, men in wigs and gowns or officers’ uniforms, children with nannies, young people in Switzerland. It really was another world, yet in spite of everything, I felt the old lady was just a granny at heart and she really did treat me as a respected guest. Too, I felt her loneliness and I knew why she loved our children.

  However, the rot began to set in, the ‘domestic’ really did wonder ‘how green is my valley’ and decide things were brighter beyond it. With the ‘domestic’ gone the old lady fell ill. Amy took charge and became a hard-working and compassionate nurse to her, but because of Amy’s willingness the old lady perhaps began to see her as a replacement for the girl and began to ring for Amy each morning with a, ‘Now for my breakfast this morning I will have a little...’ This early morning confrontation was a comical sight, although I couldn’t expect either Amy or the old lady to find any humour in it. The old lady wore fabulous boudoir caps of satin, laced and be-ribboned, but by dawn the cap was always askew and the two little lace ear-pieces were not in their proper place, but one on the forehead and one on the back of her head. She could not have observed Amy’s demeanour whilst she ‘chose’ her menu for I thought Amy looked as though she should be wearing the pointed striped tricolour cap of the French revolution, listening for tumbril-wheels and shouting, ‘To the Bastille.’

  Of course I was at work and there was the difficult task first thing in the morning of igniting the kitchen monster before even a kettle could be boiled. Of all the family Amy had the most modern home, yet she didn’t mind the hard work and inconvenience. It was the old lady’s commanding manner which finally wore down Amy’s patience and caused her fiery nature to erupt.

  The old lady had one fidgety habit. Her front doorstep must always be pristinely pure in its snowy whiteness, never must a human footfall despoil its virgin appearance, and rather than tempt providence we had, all of us, always used the back entrance down a long stone passage, through the wood-cellar and into the kitchen. When we emerged out of this darkness into light I would notice that the pupils on Susan’s eyes were enormous. However, one morning when Amy was rushed off her feet, the stove bad tempered and smoky, the children dashing about to be in time for school, me getting ready for work, there came a haughty muttering from the old lady in the hall. ‘Someone’ had trodden on the freshly cleaned doorstep. The old lady’s continued ill-timed complaints were the tinder sparks which lit the furious fire which followed. A noisy argument broke out between her and Amy which, continuing into the lounge, became a fierce and frightening row. I listened at the door. How could I go in and try to pour oil on troubled water? Amy would naturally expect me to be on her side and I could understand this. But the old lady was ‘eightyish’; how could two younger women be against her? It was her house, her step which had been despoiled, and she had been exceptionally kind to the children. I didn’t know which way to turn and when I heard the old lady say to Amy, ‘You are so different from your sister. I could have lived with her peaceably,’ I knew this would be the final straw and I went upstairs to pack. Amy came upstairs, still flushed and said to me, ‘You are a hypocrite, Dolly. The old lady says if we are not out by the morning she will call the police.’

  Five refugees left, at dawn, the following day. It was cold with a biting Welsh mist. I had been so modern in my care of Susan she had never worn a bonnet and I vaguely remember worrying because her forehead had a sort of mauve tinge.

  Amy and I were silent until we had to change trains. There had been some trouble on the line and the platform was crowded with women, children, prams and babies. Standing near us was a lady, clad in furs, and carrying a small dog. They seemed, both of them, to be sniffing in a superior manner. It was obvious she would not get a seat for herself and her companion on the next train due in and she said in a haughty manner, ‘Just look at them all, it’s typical of the lower classes, they run at the first sign of danger.’ ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘To you we may be the great unwashed, but if the working man, our husbands and sons, were not so bravely fighting Hitler, you wouldn’t be standing on an English station worrying about getting a seat for that sniffing creature.’ Poor little doggie, he’d done no one any harm, he wasn’t even
responsible for his haughty mistress. But my outburst pleased Amy mightily and she half forgave me my cowardice in Wales.

  My eldest sister Agnes was with Chas to meet us at Paddington. They looked pale and tired but were delighted to see us again. Agnes took Susan on her lap and was so intent on listening to Amy’s excited news that she really wasn’t concentrating on holding baby and Susan had somehow fallen forward in the crook of Agnes’s arm and looked helpless and dribbling. Chas inspected her worriedly and enquired, ‘Is she all right mentally?’

  This infuriated Amy and she said to Chas, ‘Well, that’s a kind remark to greet your wife with.’ I knew then that she and I were friends again, but I understood my husband. Had there been anything wrong with his daughter that I hadn’t discovered, he wanted to bring it to my notice so that anything amiss might be put right with the appropriate and speedy treatment. He really does possess the critical eye. He couldn’t know then that he had nothing to fear in that direction. Susan was to become exceptionally bright and top of the school.

  Chapter 7

  The Woman from the Pru

  At home, what a sight met my eyes. The house smelt musty and damp, and seemed to be filled to capacity with strange bits of shabby furniture. Chas, unable to stand the loneliness of the large house without Susan and me, had gone to live with my eldest sister Agnes who had a house near by, and sure I was away for the duration of the war, had allowed people to store their bits and pieces, free of charge, in our large rooms, the men being in the forces and the women and children evacuated. In this way they were able to relinquish their houses without worrying about their furniture for they would have been unable to pay rent on the houses whilst their men were away and they had to support themselves and their children in the country. To add to the dismal appearance of the house the curtains were hanging in tatters. Chas, always careless I felt where lighted matches were concerned, had blown a match ‘out’ and dropped it into the waste-paper-basket, and the curtains being cheap muslin were alight in a matter of seconds.