In her hungry, sad life, Helen had never known such happiness. She met Harry the next day at Norm and Doris’s, and there they waltzed to the old wind-up gramophone. Her steps were as light as her heart, and when the music stopped it seemed far too soon. Harry took her back in his arms, and they swayed in gentle rhythm down the pavement; halfway along the avenue he stopped and kissed her, passionately.
Love, I know this is too quick. But I want to marry you, if you’ll have me – soon as I can get a house ready to put you in safe and sound. Be my girl – I’ll never let you down, I promise.
The Liverpool mist was swirling about them. Helen barely knew him, they were from different classes, different religions too; but even with the short time they had had together, she knew that Harry’s offer meant the chance of something she had never dared hope for: a future. And she loved him. There and then, afloat in gratitude, Helen agreed. ‘I’ll try to be a good wife – I know how to keep house – and, oh, Harry, I want to make you happy.’
*
Love was in the air in 1940, and war often favoured romance in the most unexpected quarters.
Perhaps it was something in the water in Liverpool that year. Sonia Wilcox, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of an amiable Merseyside shipping pilot, might have been doomed to remain at home for all her adult life had it not been for the outbreak of war. Sonia was squashed by her recalcitrant and unloving mother, who stamped on all her ambitions. But in 1939 Mrs Wilcox ran out of excuses. Sonia went to work for an all-female team of censors who examined the documents and papers of travellers who might be suspected of passing information to the enemy – everything from personal correspondence to bibles, maps and recipe books. One morning a set of marine engravings came under Sonia’s scrutiny, the property of a man claiming to be a Jewish refugee travelling to New York. Something about these engravings made Sonia linger over them – surely, between the cross-hatchings, she could detect minute lines of text? She took them up to the intelligence officers and asked for a second opinion. Lieutenant Keates, a handsome, educated-sounding young man, was dismissive. ‘Nothing there. Waste of my time,’ he said. Sonia, however, believed in her hunch and told the lieutenant that she would not go away until he had examined the engravings under an ultra-violet lamp. This time he was away for a considerable time, returning eventually to inform her that the cross-hatchings had, indeed, concealed information, in German, regarding shipping movements in and out of British ports, and that the so-called ‘refugee’ had been detained for questioning. ‘You’re rather a clever girl, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Patronising so-and-so’ was Sonia’s private reaction, before returning to her office. An hour later she found Lieutenant Keates waiting for her outside, with tickets for a performance at the Liverpool Playhouse.
After that Sonia met Basil Keates every night for a week, saying nothing to her parents, who were accustomed to her working long hours and catching the late ferry home across the Mersey. Love blossomed. Basil Keates turned out not only to have a captivating sense of humour, but also beautiful ankles. On the sixth day Basil appeared long-faced and told her that he was about to be posted to Iceland. They passed the evening together and he saw her to the quay. As the ferry gates clanked back and Sonia turned to depart he stopped her: ‘Will you marry me, darling?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered, and stepped aboard. The ferry pulled out into the great river, and suddenly Sonia realised that another vessel was churning up the water beside them, with none other than her father, its pilot, up on the top deck. Perhaps it was the radiance of her expression, or perhaps it was simply extraordinary fatherly intuition, but William Wilcox immediately guessed that his daughter had met the love of her life.
In February 1940 Basil managed to get leave, and the pair were married.*
Shirley Hook’s wedding plans dominate her Mass Observation diary towards the end of the year. At that time she was working in the office of an engineering works. There was the excitement of showing off her engagement ring to her colleagues, followed by the announcement that she was leaving to get married. It was, however, a low-key wedding, in keeping with the times. On the day, she and Jack Goodhart were married in Leicester, ‘most informally by an agreeable registrar’, then went for a ‘very good’ two-and-sixpenny lunch at the Empire Café. It poured with rain, so they decided not to go away for the weekend. Shirley proudly headed her next diary entry ‘Mrs Goodhart, Housewife, age 25’.
Marriage gave a sense of direction to Verily Bruce’s otherwise meandering existence. The Sussex rector’s daughter had always wanted to be a writer, but it would take another twenty years for her name to appear on a published book. Insouciant, funny and loveable, she found herself adrift in her early twenties.
Joining the FANYs in 1938 had helped. ‘Somebody else does your thinking for you in the army, and even your feeling.’ But despite being under orders she didn’t find enough to keep her occupied. A dance band tune popular in spring 1940 seemed to reflect her sense of futility: ‘I’m nothing but a nothing. I’m not a thing at all’. And work in the Corps held few attractions by comparison with the charming and debonair love of her life, writer Donald Anderson, whom she had met playing ping-pong with friends in 1936. More than seventy years later, Verily sighs romantically as she recalls their momentous first encounter:
Ah, God sent him I think.
On that occasion the sight of a large hole in his otherwise smart socks stirred something deep inside her:
I just yearned to mend it. And I knew that we’d fallen in love.
By 1940 Donald was working in London in the Ministry of Information. Verily, now aged twenty-five, was based at a FANY depot in the Midlands. One afternoon that July her sergeant called her to the telephone, telling her to keep it quick. It was Donald, calling to ask her size in wedding rings.
‘I don’t know, darling. Why? Are we going to be married?’
‘That’s what I should like. Can you get leave?’
‘Of course, darling.’
‘What about tomorrow?’
It was time to hang up.
‘All right, darling. Of course.’
Duty called. So much for leave and browsing round ring shops. Verily was promptly detailed to pick up a captain at the depot and drive him to Birmingham. She drove the 30 miles in dreamy silence; once there, she took the first opportunity to park the vehicle outside a jeweller’s. Courteously and quickly the assistant measured her wedding finger. It was P. Verily hastened to the nearest post office and drafted a telegram: ‘P DARLING STOP YOUR ADORING V’.
Back at the depot she requested forty-eight hours’ leave. It was refused, but, noting that Verily’s fluffy blonde hair was infringing the ‘not-below-the-collar’ regulations, the CO granted permission for two hours’ grace to buy a hair-net. Barely pausing, she jumped on a bus to her Aunt Evie’s, who lived near by. Aunt Evie took one look at her niece’s excited, nervous pallor, banned her from returning to spend the night in a camp-bed, and that was the end of her association with the FANYs. Would she be shot at dawn for desertion? Unlikely. Next morning cousin Beryl dropped her at the railway station. She was still in uniform, and here the real difficulties started. A single ticket to London? Didn’t she realise there was a state of emergency? No unauthorised travel was permitted to members of the services. She went to a nearby hotel to think things over. At that moment a young man climbed out of a large sports car and strolled into the bar looking for a cocktail. Verily took a calculated risk – ‘Weren’t you at school with my brother?’ – and pulled it off. Extraordinarily, it turned out that he had been and soon he had agreed to drive her to London, leaving the next morning. She took a room in the hotel and telephoned Donald. He was prepared, with the ring bought, the licence secured and honeymoon booked.
The next day her suave chauffeur arrived at the agreed hour. The sports car, it turned out, was entirely unreliable. Gasping, exploding and coughing smoke, it needed regular stops to replenish oil and have the engine tinkered with. At 8 o’clock that evening they arri
ved in Piccadilly in a cloud of blue fumes. ‘ “Hallo, darling,” said Donald, kissing me as though I had just got off a number 9 bus.’
The marriage would take place at two o’clock the following day. At the last minute Verily decided to telephone her parents and invite them. Donald, impoverished and far older than his bride-to-be, was not a popular choice, and the news didn’t go down well with Mrs Bruce, who, having threatened to stop her daughter’s pocket money, banged down the receiver. ‘Yes, this was love all right,’ concluded Verily.
And so, in August 1940, at Christ Church, Mayfair, as the Battle of Britain was getting under way, Verily Bruce became Verily Anderson. It was in every way a consummation:
That was when I looked back. Selfish, frivolous, and unreliable, I vowed to do better now that I had some real aim in life.
Their daughter Marian was to be born exactly nine months and three days later, closely followed by Rachel, Eddie, Janie and Alexandra. Not for a moment did Verily consider that her contribution as a FANY might have had more value to the war effort than cooking shepherd’s pie for a Ministry official and having his babies. The possible penalties of her desertion from the army held no fears for her. Marriage and motherhood made sense of things. And it is reasonable to assume that countless wives would have viewed things in the same light. The Andersons honeymooned at a quaint Sussex inn, unruffled by fighter planes sparring in the blue skies above. Lounging in the pub garden, Verily had no qualms. Everything added up. Being a good wife was more than a subsidiary condition, it was a form of national service in itself. There was no irony in her emphatic defence of the married state:
If I can make you happy, you’ll do your job at the Ministry better. Then we’ll win the war.
As for the FANYs – they didn’t really want her back, but to keep the bureaucrats happy she was required to produce a medical certificate stating that she was unfit for service. This was easily procured through a doctor friend of a friend, and the deed was done. Then as now, it helped to have influential contacts.
The Sad Atlantic
Helen Forrester and Harry O’Dwyer kept their engagement secret from their families. Harry’s mother had still not forgiven him for abandoning his priestly vocation. And, despite the fact that the Forresters had fallen on hard times and were living in a slum, the class divisions ran deep. They retained their cultured accents. Harry was unquestionably ‘beneath’ Helen; also, he was a Catholic. Helen knew she would never gain her parents’ approval of such a match. The couple decided to marry as soon as possible after she was twenty-one, once the little house Harry had bought was ready, and when their consent would no longer be required. Throughout spring 1940 they lived for their reunions. Harry’s short spells on shore were times of joy and intimacy, as Harry coaxed and reassured his fearful young fiancée that she really was his girl, his one and only. For her part, she loved him with all her being.
But the fear never entirely left her. She knew that while he was at sea he was in constant danger. And in August 1940 she received the news that he was lost.
Cruelly, she only found out through the unluckiest of circumstances. Employed by a small social work charity in Bootle, Helen’s job was to assist bereaved wives and the relatives of missing or drowned sailors claiming pensions. That morning there was the usual queue of widows in the waiting room, and Helen saw them one by one. Eventually it was the turn of an older woman, who explained her business; her son Harry, a merchant seaman, had gone missing with his ship in the Atlantic, and she now wished to make a claim so that at least she would benefit by his death. She gave her name as Mrs Maureen O’Dwyer.
I thought I would faint …
Helen quickly referred Mrs O’Dwyer to a colleague and fled to the building’s basement.
In the clammy grime of a disused coal cellar, I stood shivering helplessly, so filled with shock that I hardly knew where I was.
Convulsed, but as yet dry-eyed, Helen was still just sufficiently composed to be sickened by the woman who could throw out her own son, yet still try to gain financially by his death. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that would make sense of her loss, or bring reconciliation. To have held out a hand to Mrs O’Dwyer would have seemed a betrayal, while to speak to her own parents would have subjected her to outright derision. How could she bear to have Harry scorned by them? He was a sailor, but he was the man she had loved. She stayed silent.
It took Helen superhuman efforts to contain the grief which now threatened to overwhelm her; unarticulated, it worked away like a poison, ravaging her from within. Ill health, hunger, parental neglect, poverty and fear had already wrought great damage; now the blow of Harry’s death took away the one prospect of happiness in this lonely life. Out of her mind with sorrow, she sobbed through the night, her sister Fiona sleeping in tranquil contentment beside her. Walking home from work after dark, she cried in the blackout when nobody could see her tears. At her office, Helen realised she was not alone in her suffering. Death had come to Merseyside. Day after day she sat at her desk, working her way through the rows and rows of weeping wives clutching tear-stained children. Often it was her job to break the news to them. Sometimes a seaman would come to her, sobbing, sent ashore on compassionate leave to discover that his family had been killed in an air raid. Consumed by her own pain, the distress of these others was almost too great to bear. One dreadful Saturday Helen’s controls collapsed: tears sprang to her eyes as she cried out, full of pity and anger, ‘It’s madness to send men to certain death like this!’ Rage possessed her. What right did Harry have to die? Why had he left her? Why had he got himself killed? ‘We could have been married by now.’
Part of Helen Forrester’s terrible anger stemmed from the feeling that Harry’s death had robbed her not just of love, but of the chance to escape from her home, and from her mother. Marrying Harry would have meant trading the thankless task of cleaning up after her own family for more of the same work – but at least under his roof it would have been done with love. Now, at the age of twenty-one, Helen saw her youth, her happiness stolen from her. She felt trapped for ever in her loneliness. ‘I wanted to die.’
*
Between September 1939 and May 1943 over 30,000 Allied servicemen and merchant seamen would be engulfed by the grey waves of the Atlantic. Helen Forrester’s premonition of Harry’s horrible death, of his struggle and choking by icy water, was true for thousands of individuals, forgotten among the tally of losses. For the women of the SecondWorld War, torpedoes were the intangible agents of grief and bereavement. But a few experienced them at first hand.
This is not primarily a book about heroines, but it is a book about women who rose to the demands of history, and in 1940 those demands were becoming increasingly extortionate. The story of Mary Cornish is only one example of an ordinary, frightened and unprepared woman who, at a time of extremity, responded gallantly to the calls of duty and responsibility.
As the danger of enemy attacks intensified, so did the importance of sending children to safety, and the government decided to extend its evacuation plans to enable school-age children to be received overseas as well as in far-flung areas of Britain. The Children’s Overseas Reception Board (‘CORB’) was formed, and anxious parents applied by the thousand to send their children to safety in South Africa, Australia, Canada and the USA. Known as the ‘seavacuees’, the children would be travelling without their parents, under the care of appointed guardians.
The piano teacher Mary Cornish was one woman who volunteered to work in this capacity. Mary was now forty-one, an intelligent, confident, self-sufficient spinster; until the war her job, her friends and music had been her life. She volunteered; but the summons to sail to Canada was slow in coming. While waiting to depart, Mary spent the summer holiday haymaking and fruit-picking on a Sussex farm. Finally, in late August, her instructions arrived.
On Friday 13 September 1940 a convoy of ships including the SS City of Benares set sail from Liverpool with ninety excited child evacuees and a n
umber of such escorts on board. It was crewed by British officers and lascar seamen. Mary, along with her allocated batch of girls, was familiar with the emergency drill. After their departure the children settled into enjoying themselves. There was delicious food to eat, and a party atmosphere; the girls had started a choir and were learning to sing ‘In an English Country Garden’ for their Canadian hosts. Four days out to sea the convoy of destroyers, required elsewhere, returned to British waters. The liner was now accompanied by a motley fleet of merchant ships, incapable of giving naval protection. A storm blew up, and that day a lot of the passengers were suffering from sea-sickness, but by evening the ship was tossing less, so after dinner Mary and two of the other escorts took a stroll on the deck. They were in good spirits, and Mary – perhaps with the girls’ choir in mind – led the group singing Christmas carols and verses from ‘Greensleeves’. At about 10 o’clock she decided to go below. It was then that the torpedo struck. Aboard U-48, Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Bleichrodt had no idea that he had fired it at a liner carrying children.
It took just fifteen minutes for the SS City of Benares to sink. The missile had ripped a giant hole in the stern. The U-boat also sank the two ships that flanked the City of Benares, and the rest of the small fleet dispersed to avoid being sunk in their turn.
The engines died, the ship filled with the acrid smell of cordite, alarm bells rang. The children got dressed and hurried to their muster stations. Mary knew it was her job to get her group of girls into a lifeboat, but when she tried to reach their quarters she found the corridor blocked by debris; lacerating her hands, she pushed a gap through the mound, struggled through and got help to pull the children out of their cabins and up on deck. The only soothing words she could find to say to them were: ‘It’s all right, it’s only a torpedo.’ The crew started loading children into the boats. Mary returned below to see if any had been overlooked, but an officer ordered her back on deck. Having now become separated from her group of girls, she was hastily told to join a boatload of thirty lascar crewmen, a couple of British officers and six small boys; she never saw the girls again.
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