‘Our familiar world seemed to be disintegrating round us,’ recalled Phyllis Noble. Phyllis was still travelling from Lewisham to her ‘business girl’ job at the National Provincial Bank in Bishopsgate, but her days were haunted by the fear of air raids. She envisaged skies blackened with bombers, the city toppling in ruins around her. ‘I was terrified … more afraid during that first week of the war than I ever was later.’ Stress made her family quarrelsome, and rows broke out with unnerving frequency.
In the early days of the Second World War the unchanging world of the pre-war woman was being slowly eroded. Community, family, routine, order, stability and plenty were still evident, but no longer carried any certainty. Nella Last recorded in her diary that her younger son, Cliff, would leave for the Army on 15 September: ‘I have a cold feeling inside.’ After his departure she noticed a crop of white hairs springing from her dark temples, and inexplicable lumpy ridges appeared on her fingernails – from shock, the doctor said. By the 25th she was writing:
I miss my Cliff more every day … I miss his cheeky ways …
It’s no use making ginger-bread or new rolls or pies now, for my husband does not care for them … I smelled ginger-bread baking in a confectioner’s, and it brought back memories of two hungry schoolboys who would insist on a piece of ginger-bread before tea if it was hot out of the oven. I’ve always had rather a narrow life and my joys have been so simple. I seem to have built a house like a jackdaw – straw by straw – and now my straws are all blowing away!
The known landscape of life, with all its comforts, its knitting needles and gingerbread, was taking on a new face: a face of necessity. Early in 1939 the newly formed Ministry of Information had devised a ‘Careless Talk’ campaign, specifically targeting housewives who were seen as the purveyors of harmful tittle-tattle. In late August the government took on powers to issue hundreds of new regulations to ensure public safety, order, supplies and services, and now instructions flooded in: Make Your Room Gas-proof, Always Carry Your Gas-mask, Protect Your Home against Air-Raids, Mask Your Windows, First Aid Advice, Safety in the Blackout, What You Must KNOW, What You Must DO …
How to look stylish in a gas-mask. The advertisers of this necessity promoted it alarmingly: ‘The ravages of gas can be frightful, especially to women.’
Abiding by the new rules meant never going anywhere without a gas-mask. The masks came in compact cardboard containers, but a brisk business was done in cases and straps to render them more portable – and stylish. A woman spotted carrying hers in a satchel of violet velvet decked out with artificial roses caused a stir, as reported by the Daily Telegraph. Nella Last was very struck by the sight of a string of courting couples smooching in her local lovers’ lane, all of them virtuously kitted out with the mandatory gear – ‘a sign of the times’.
The blackout rules favoured such intimate activities. In this time before the bombs, many people rejoiced in the romance of moonlit nights, visible for the first time without garish sodium lighting. In cities lovers took advantage of the sandbagged doorways and the enveloping darkness for their pleasures. One young woman literally bumped into a soldier who had lost his way in the pitch darkness; two years later they were married. Other accidents were less happy, as one stumbled over fire hydrants, parked bicycles, letter boxes and cats; blood and bruises were often the result. The blackout was initially imposed strictly from sunset to sunrise; the nightly task of covering windows with heavy black curtains or, in many cases, thick black paper attached with drawing pins being a tedious but compulsory chore. In Balsall Common near Coventry, the housewife Clara Milburn spent the first week of the war alternately helping to billet several hundred Coventry children with their teachers in the locality, and making up blackout curtains for her windows. With heavy demand the price of blackout fabric had rocketed by over a shilling a yard, and it was, as Mrs Milburn noted with a housewifely eye, ‘of decidedly inferior quality’. In the hot September weather the new curtains made the house stifling, ‘but it is wonderful how one can conform to an order when it is absolutely necessary to do so’. Doing one’s duty brought satisfaction.
There was a sense of the world shutting down. By common consent the social season was suspended entirely. Though they were to reopen within weeks, orders were issued for all theatres, cinemas and dance-halls to close. Three weeks after the declaration of war petrol rationing came in. Throughout the war the writer and journalist Mollie Panter-Downes indefatigably reported on Londoners’ doings to the American press. On 17 September her weekly bulletin informed the readers of the New Yorker that nearly everything the British enjoyed was now banned:
Happy accidents in the blackout.
With, on the whole, astounding good humor and an obedience remarkable in an effete democracy, they have accepted a new troglodyte existence in which there are few places of entertainment, no good radio programs, little war news, and nothing to do after dark except stay in the cave … ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving so late into the night’ has taken on a significance that Byron never intended.
The characteristics of good humour and stoicism were to be tested to the full, but at this time cheerfulness still came easily to teenagers like Joan Wyndham. ‘This war really isn’t at all bad,’ she wrote in her diary during the second week of September. ‘We make the best of things.’ However, she noticed her own tendency to say ‘bugger’ when beaten at ping-pong and to crave French books ‘of an immoral nature’. A fortnight in, very little had happened, but stresses were starting to show.
By October Clara Milburn noted: ‘The paralysing effect of the first few weeks of war [have begun] to wear off …’ But a shocking reminder of war’s reality came on 14 October with the loss of another British ship. The Royal Oak was sunk, lying at anchor in Scapa Flow, with the loss of 800 lives. But the promised enemy air raids had failed to materialise. During this so-called ‘phoney war’ fears of disaster were allayed, but were replaced by endless inconveniences and intrusions. You couldn’t get a seat on the train, or a cup of tea; you might twist your ankle falling off a pavement in the blackout; and with petrol rationing came the imposition of a 20 mph speed limit. Housewives oiled their old bicycles and pedalled out to do the shopping; in the country pensioned-off ponies were rehabilitated and ancient carts and traps refurbished. Income tax went up, and so did the price of many basic groceries. War and its fearsome realities loured in the background like an incipient headache. The majority of wives and mothers continued their primary activities. In the circumstances of the blackout people stayed in. Everything associated with home assumed increased importance: its safety, its cosiness and its guiding deity – ‘Mum’ – all took on the roseate glow of something loved, and something under threat.
Though two months into the war not a bomb had been dropped, women listening to a speech broadcast on the wireless by the Queen on 11 November, Armistice Day, would have felt boosted by Her Majesty’s acknowledgement of the part they would play in the imminent conflict:
War has at all times called for the fortitude of women … we, no less than men, have real and vital work to do. To us also is given the proud privilege of serving our country in her hour of need. The call has come, and from my heart I thank you, the women of our great Empire, for the way in which you have answered it …
Women of all lands yearn for the day when it will be possible to set about building a new and better world, where peace and goodwill shall abide. That day must come. We all have a part to play. I know you will not fail in yours.
But while playing that part would surely involve unimagined adventures and hazards, right now the requirement appeared for the most part to be more prosaic.
Mum kept house, looked after her children, got her hair done and occasionally (when it reopened) braved the blackout to go to the cinema. She also went shopping – with a cautious eye on cost and durability. Fish was dear, bacon scarce. West End stores reported buoyant sales in indestructible tweed suits and tough but colourful housecoats. The factories
that made them would soon switch to making uniforms, and those who had bought their tweeds early felt smug as woollen goods began to disappear from the shops. Trivial annoyances loomed large. There was a run on number 8 torch batteries, and queues formed wherever they appeared. Orders were issued regarding paper salvage, and a packet of paper handkerchiefs which had once contained fifty now only contained forty. In a St Albans store the shop assistants – once prohibited from being rude to their customers – were told by their managers that the rule had been relaxed; from now on it was all right to answer back to selfish shoppers who grumbled when they couldn’t get swansdown powder puffs.
For downtrodden women in underpaid jobs like this, the scenery was beginning to change. Some found themselves redundant when firms producing unnecessary goods were forced to scale down. In 1939 the government took a laissez-faire attitude to women’s employment. The frenzy to get women into war work was still to come, but in that first autumn of the war there were already openings for women in engineering, in the vehicle industries, in metals and chemicals, utilities and even ship-building.
Those openings were to siphon off almost half of all those working in domestic service over the course of the Second World War. Now, in 1939, the servants were already starting to leave, causing upheavals for their mistresses, and for many middle- and upper-class women it was a question of starve or learn to cook. How did one set about it? One approach was to ignore economy altogether, still possible in the early days before rationing turned cheese and chocolate into scarce luxuries. In September Woman’s Own was still publishing recipes that needed three eggs, six ounces of margarine and twelve ounces of icing sugar. If making breakfast proved too challenging, there were still croissants to be bought from the Chelsea patisseries, as Joan Wyndham’s mother found out after their cook deserted them. She also discovered how to make hot chocolate by melting down a bar of Cadbury’s and adding cream. For dinner they had baked oysters in cheese sauce. ‘Everybody was sick,’ recorded Joan in her diary. ‘Maybe somebody should give Mummy a pep talk about wartime austerity.’
‘Women are busier than ever before,’ claimed Woman’s Own that autumn. ‘And if there are any who aren’t busy, I’m sorry for them! There is nothing like a definite job, and now there is no excuse for moping at home.’ Skilled and non-skilled found niches, some obvious, others obscure. Young and old took on fire-watching duties – one of these was music teacher Mary Cornish, who sternly applied herself to her nightly vigil in the vicinity of her Baker Street flat. Telephonists and drivers adapted to work in exchanges and ambulance units; for others the outbreak of war shifted their career on to unexpected paths. The daughter of a plumber, Vera Welch’s career as a popular vocalist was just getting off the ground when war was declared. She had chosen the stage surname Lynn, her grandmother’s maiden name. Vera remembers how she and her parents had been sitting in the garden when the announcement came over the air, dashing her hopes of a successful singing future. ‘I thought, that’s the end of my career … There won’t be any call for frivolities and entertainment with a war going on.’ Happily for everyone, radio broadcasts remained an outlet for the singer’s silvery, heart-stopping vocals, and before long parted families were sending in requests for Vera to sing what was to become the Second World War’s best-loved refrain, ‘We’ll Meet Again’. At the same time up in the north of England Marguerite Eave found herself promoted to a job as senior home economist demonstrating kitchen appliances in the Lincoln area. Marguerite, then as now, had confidence, charisma and aplomb. With food shortages already starting to have an impact, the Council hired her to go out to remote villages and educate the local housewives about how to cope with limited ingredients. Setting herself up in disused schoolrooms with archaic equipment, Marguerite now started out on a career that – after her marriage to RAF officer Bob Patten – was to bring her nationwide acclaim on the radio show The Kitchen Front.
Meanwhile, many women who had got left behind in the pre-war rush to join training schemes joined the war effort in droves. If they weren’t in the WVS washing nits out of evacuees’ hair, learning to cook, knitting cot blankets or obeying orders with the FANY or ATS, they were doing jobs with new status. Office workers had to adapt to new surroundings as their firms evacuated to country locations away from the bomb threat. Schoolteachers, workers in food production and supply, nurses and certain clerical jobs – all of which employed large numbers of women - were on the schedule of reserved occupations.
Uncharted Territory
Helen Forrester was one of these; she did not volunteer. Her existence was so hand-to-mouth that she could not afford to give up her job as a social worker in Bootle; even then she walked daily to work to save the twopenny bus fare. When her shorthand pupil was evacuated to Southport money became even tighter. In the long, dull autumn evenings Helen sat in silence with her bullying, unresponsive mother over cups of tea. An envious, unfeeling woman, Mrs Forrester kept her daughter on a tight rein. What money Helen earned, she pilfered. What clothes she owned, she pawned. And any independence that she had, she resented. At twenty, she was drained, physically and mentally.
The nights drew in, blackout came earlier, but as the fear of being bombed receded that autumn, Helen Forrester’s depression deepened. Finally there was a crisis. It came after she had to spend twopence on a phone call for work and as a result found herself without the tram fare to get home. At intervals on the long trudge down Stanley Road she sat down on a wall or on the steps of a church. She was completely exhausted. The future seemed an abyss. Finally at home her last reserves gave out; leaning over the kitchen sink she gasped out her misery in shuddering sobs. The suppressed anguish from years of neglect broke out of her in uncontrollable howls of unhappiness – ‘the revolt of a human creature nearly pressed out of existence’.
They put her to bed. As Helen lay weeping in the dark, her parents quarrelled downstairs. She confided in her sister Fiona: how penurious she was, how she could never make any headway in her job without a proper education, and how frightened and crushed she felt. How their mother pocketed everything she earned. How she had no clothes and never went out – ‘I want to have fun, and go dancing.’ Fiona had seen her sister as ‘the clever one’, with no desires in that direction. ‘I didn’t think you were interested in clothes and things like that.’ But Helen’s collapse had frightened the family, and soon it was established that a financial compromise would have to be agreed. Her mother couldn’t provide love, which was all Helen really wanted, but now she was offering a modest gift of second-hand clothes from the pawn shop, weekly pocket money and a three-and-sixpenny hairdo.
A week later, still sodden with weeping, Helen was sitting with her head studded with metal curlers and her hair doused in chemicals as Betty at ‘Lady Fayre’ plugged her into an electrical contraption hanging from the ceiling. There was a strong smell of burning, and smoke rose up as the perm took effect. Betty took pride in giving Helen her first make-over: ‘Yer know, yer could do quite well for yourself – if yer wanted. If you like, luv, I’ll make your face up too. Just so you can see what a difference it can make.’
The result was striking; as Betty said, tweezering a few stray hairs from between her brows, ‘proper pretty’. The salon girls gathered round to admire Helen’s new halo of soft curls, her lightly pinked-up cheeks and touch of lipstick. ‘You’ve missed your vocation – you could do real well for yourself. Why, Nick was only saying the other day, you got style – only needs bringing out.’ Nick? It dawned on Helen, as the girls grinned admiringly, who he was. She passed his beat most evenings on her walk home past the Rialto cinema – he was a well-known pimp.
‘Sure. He’s set up a lot of girls in his time. Buys ’em clothes. Finds them flats. He’s fair … Yer should get to know him better – you’d do fine with him. He moves his girls into real good districts.’
I was shocked. ‘Oh, Betty. I’m not that kind.’
Betty’s face lost its smile, and hardened. ‘We’re all that k
ind, luv, when times are like they are. Better’n slaving in service or standing on your feet in a factory all day – or being so clemmed in like you are.’
Betty meant well. From her perspective there weren’t that many options for girls without an education. There was a sadness in her voice as she took Helen’s three-and-sixpence: ‘Don’t be offended. Some nice lad’ll know a good thing when he sees it – and take proper care of you.’
Poor as she was, Helen’s background was profoundly middle-class, her values fundamentally respectable. Prostitution could not be, for her, an escape route; she knew too, from her work with the unemployed, that the reality of that profession was often far from pretty clothes and nice flats, and that there was a price to pay. But what else did life have to offer in wartime Liverpool? If poverty didn’t get you first, the bombs surely would. Ultimately Betty and Helen were in the same boat, with a three-and-sixpenny permanent wave and a splash of lipstick spelling the difference between hope and a dead end. The future was bleak unless you were pretty enough to make a man want to care for you, one way or another.
*
The future in any case had little meaning in those early days of the war. Over by Christmas? Over in three months? Three years was being predicted by some as the worst possible scenario. Each day was measured out with BBC bulletins, beyond which lay uncharted territory. But the nation stepped up its readiness, and partings and upheavals started to become the norm. Male conscription proceeded slowly; by the end of 1939 the army numbered 1,128,000 men. Smaller numbers joined the navy and the RAF. The streets were full of young people in uniforms, and the trains were clogged up with troops. By December five regular divisions had been sent out to France to help man the allegedly impregnable Maginot line. For Frances Faviell in Chelsea ‘life resembled a transit camp’, with friends using the camp-bed in her studio for a couple of nights before leaving en route to unknown destinations.
Millions Like Us Page 5
