A long night passed; the storm was rising. Mary – like the boys, many of whom were barefoot and in pyjamas – was inadequately dressed in a short-sleeved silk blouse, a skirt, a jacket, stockings and sandals. When dawn broke over grey foam-crested waves, the occupants of lifeboat number 12 realised they were alone in the middle of the Atlantic.
Meanwhile, in West Sussex, Mary Cornish’s beloved younger sister Eileen Paterson and her husband received a letter from CORB informing them, as her next of kin, of the sinking of the City of Benares, explaining that Miss Cornish had not been reported rescued, and conveying the Board’s ‘very deep sympathy in your grievous loss’. Their daughter Elizabeth still remembers ‘finding my mother weeping in my father’s arms in the garage at the bottom of the garden … he was trying to comfort her’. Letters of sympathy poured into the Paterson family, who tried to take consolation in the thought of a valiant sister and aunt who had died carrying out her duty to the children in her care.
Far from any communication, the ordeal that played out on the cold waters of the Atlantic ocean is a tale of almost incredible endurance. The few British officers took charge, organising crew members to crank the propeller, rigging a sail and a tarpaulin to shelter the stern of the boat, distributing rations. The food they had was carefully eked out, as was the water, which was in much shorter supply. On two small beakers of water a day, everyone suffered from terrible thirst. It was cold too: September was not a time to be afloat on the Atlantic in an open boat dressed in cotton pyjamas. Mary, the only woman on board, now demonstrated unexpected fortitude, stamina and imagination. She herself was suffering as badly as the rest of them from thirst and exposure; in addition sanitary arrangements were a particular trial for her, since there was no possibility of concealing her occasional need to use the one and only bucket on board. But as day followed day, and their plight became worse, Mary’s relationship with the six young boys became the key to their survival. They relied on her not only for her kindness – she would massage the circulation back into their frostbitten feet, wrapping anything she could find round them to ease the pain – but, crucially, for her ability to raise morale. At first, while the boys were still lively enough to believe they were having a great adventure, she got them singing. ‘There’ll Always be an England’ and ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ were favourites. She invented games and boosted their sense that they were brave and plucky. But before long they came to rely on her to distract them from their misery. When spirits dropped, it was Mary who rebuked them: ‘Don’t you realise that you’re the heroes of a real adventure story? There isn’t a boy in England who wouldn’t give his eyes to be in your shoes! Did you ever hear of a hero who snivelled?’ Something in the schoolboy psyche craved such reminders, and the schoolmistress in Mary understood this. From the depths, she dredged up memories of adventure tales like The Thirty-Nine Steps and Bulldog Drummond. Every night, before the children settled for a few hours’ sleep, Mary’s tales of Captain Drummond’s exploits persuaded them to forget, for a little while, how hungry, thirsty, cold and cramped they were. Because her memory of the original stories was a little faulty, she embroidered. With his lean jaw and fearless demeanour, Captain Drummond soon found himself in danger from a Nazi spy ring, braving submarines, parachutes and fighter planes. There were hair-raising escapes and dramatic rescues from the edges of precipices. The boys loved it. Nothing else came near in giving them what they now most wanted: forgetfulness. ‘Aunty, Aunty, please go on,’ they begged, as each instalment came to an end. So, like all the best storytellers, she promised more for the next day.
On Sunday, after five days at sea, hopes of rescue suddenly soared when the crew sighted a steamer. Mary’s petticoat was commandeered, and they ran it up the mast to signal distress. With wonderful certainty now, they watched as the outline of the steamer became more distinct and swung around, growing closer till they could see the sailors on board – only to turn to shocked dismay at the last moment as the vessel slowly and decisively resumed its course in the opposite direction. Later it appeared that the ship’s skipper must have feared that the lifeboat was a German submarine decoy; this sometimes happened, luring unwary ships to their doom.
By now the occupants of lifeboat number 12 were near to exhaustion. With their water ration down to half a beaker a day, their lips and tongues were cracked and distended. On the eighth day everyone was becoming lethargic, and even Mary was too depleted to tell stories. Hopes were beginning to die; there had been disappointments and false alarms. So when one of the boys cried out ‘There’s an aeroplane!’ nobody took much notice. But this time it wasn’t a freak. The plane was a Sunderland, it had seen them, and a signal was immediately sent that it was going for help. Within an hour another Sunderland appeared and let down supplies. They were still feasting on tinned fruit when HMS Anthony was sighted. One by one, more dead than alive, the survivors were helped on to the rescue ship. Mary was almost past reason. They settled her in; her throat was so badly swollen she could barely eat, and she could not imbibe hot drinks. She was dazed, dizzy, couldn’t stand and couldn’t remember how to undress. She was obsessed with one thing: her responsibility towards the boys. What had happened to them, and were they all right?
Thirty-six hours later HMS Anthony docked in the Firth of Clyde. On 27 September, in their country home near Midhurst, the Patersons received a telegram. It read simply: MISS M C CORNISH SAFE AND WELL.
CORB looked after Mary when they arrived and brought her to a hotel, where WVS ladies arrived bearing clothes. Even in her confused state, she was aware that the garments were peculiarly ill-assorted: a pink petticoat, a purple dress, yellow gloves. Almost immediately she was surrounded by journalists desperate for her story. When they interviewed her, there was the shock of hearing that many of the children and most of her fellow escorts on board the City of Benares had not survived. She ate a little, slept a little, drank and drank again. A dozen times in the night she woke convulsed with fear lest the glass of water by her bed had been removed. Beneath her, lifeboat 12 seemed still to roll and pitch, heave and drop; as she dipped in and out of sleep, her only thought was ‘the boys – were they all right?’
Two hundred and eighty-five people died after the torpedo hit the City of Benares. Seventy-seven of the ninety children on board drowned. From then on, parents who wanted to send their children to safety had to make their own arrangements, as the operations of CORB were suspended soon afterwards. This island was becoming an ever more dangerous place to live.
Battleground
On 1 August 1940 Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of Hitler’s air force, had outlined the aims of the Battle of Britain to his generals: ‘The Führer has ordered me to crush Britain with my Luftwaffe. By means of hard blows I plan to have this enemy, who has already suffered a crushing moral defeat, down on his knees in the nearest future, so that an occupation of the island by our troops can proceed without any risk!’
Throughout that summer the blue skies of southern England were criss-crossed with smoke and fire from swarms of German bombers and Spitfires. Joan Tagg, aged fifteen at the time, remembers watching them from her garden in Kingston-on-Thames: ‘They were over Kent I expect – but you can see for miles in the sky. I’d always been interested in aeroplanes, and there would be the fighters in the sky, with all their vapour trails. You can’t imagine what it was like seeing all these planes looping the loop and doing figures of eight … every movement they made there was a vapour trail. It was just so exciting – like a cinema show really.’ In London, Sheila Hails remembered the men on Primrose Hill who cashed in on this thrilling spectator sport by hiring out telescopes: ‘Penny to see the Messerschmitts come down!’
In her diary on 16 August Virginia Woolf described the experience of being underneath during an air fight. She and her husband Leonard were in their Sussex garden: ‘They came very close. We lay down under the tree. The sound was like someone sawing in the air just above us. We lay flat on our faces, hands behind head … Will
it drop I asked? If so, we shall be broken together.’ The following week an enemy plane flew over the Ouse water meadows beyond their garden, low enough for Virginia to distinguish the swastika on its tail, and was shot down by British fighters. ‘They side slipped glided swooped and roared for about 5 minutes round the fallen plane as if identifying and making sure – then made off towards London … It wd have been a peaceful matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny August evening.’
On the same day Frances Faviell and her fiancé, Richard Parker, were walking a bridle path on the Surrey downs near Guildford; for her, it was a week’s break from months of FAP and refugee duties. The view from the Hog’s Back was panoramic, with the land spread out below them like a map. Above, in the blue August sky, the unreal aeronautical displays held them spellbound – a bravura stunt show of twisting, turning, swooping, diving planes which from time to time shimmered to earth in a cascade of fire, concluding with the silent, releasing vision of a tiny parachute slipping gently towards the ground – ‘like a toy umbrella preceding the final crash’. Frances shook herself as she recalled that what she was witnessing was ‘the real thing … WAR … I was glad Richard was with me … I thought then – nothing matters if you are with the person you want to be with.’ The fights were ferocious and went on all that day. The planes had machine-guns. Richard suddenly dragged Frances into the shelter of some bushes as with a furious popping one enemy pilot swooped, firing directly at them, spattering bullets in all directions. They were unharmed, unnerved, but – in Frances’s case – seething with rage and indignation. The anger increased that night as they were wakened by sirens. Fire bombs had been dropped near by. Richard led a party to extinguish them with sand and stirrup pumps, and Frances joined in, stumbling among the flames that had caught the heathland. Nearby Croydon appeared to be blazing. They stayed another day, watching more and more dogfights. One after another, planes plummeted to earth out of the clear sky; at night, again, the sirens, and the hornet-like drone of engines signalled air raids on London, some 30 miles away. The Blitz was beginning.
On the afternoon of 7 September Frances heard the sirens from her flat in Cheyne Place, but by early evening Chelsea still seemed to be clear of bombs. The sun set – but darkness didn’t fall. Instead, a curious pale orange glow lit up the sky ‘almost like sunrise’. London’s docklands were on fire. Frances and Richard climbed up to the roof of her building and watched in stricken silence as the inferno devoured Rotherhithe, Limehouse, Wapping, Woolwich, Bermondsey, its flames fully visible 7 miles down river. All night the East End burned; 900 aircraft had attacked. From then on, for the next seventy-six nights (with only one exception, 2 November), the city was blitzed.
During the Battle of Britain, Virginia Woolf had written an essay entitled Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid. The experiences of a myriad women during the next six months of German bombardment are worth looking at in the context of her reflections:
Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young German men are fighting each other. The defenders are men, the attackers are men. Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy or to defend herself. She must lie weaponless tonight. Yet if she believes that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the English to protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom, she must fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English. How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes, or food. But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind.
Virginia Woolf’s essay pursues the notion that men’s and women’s deepest instincts prevail in times of war. The Second World War seemed to her an embodiment of ‘the subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men … the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave’. Her theme is that, just as womankind is motivated at the deepest level by her maternal instinct, so man has been propelled since the dawn of time by the power of his aggressive desires, his love of military glory:
We must help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.
One may not agree with Woolf’s allocation of apparently stereo-typical sex characteristics. There are plenty of examples of timidity among men, and we hear much today about women’s aggressiveness. It may even seem surprising to hear Virginia Woolf, a childless feminist, refer to the maternal instinct as ‘women’s glory’. But one has to remember that seventy years ago in Britain the attributes she ascribes as being innate among men and women would have been entirely accepted – indeed taken for granted – not only by the vast majority of the population but also by her intellectual readers. And if the pre-war iconography of the maternal angel endures even for Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury, how much more so for Clara Milburn in the Midlands, Nella Last in Barrow, the Noble family in Lewisham, the Chadwyck-Healeys in their Somerset gentlemen’s residence? Looked at in the light of Woolf’s dissection, women’s experiences of, and writings about, the Blitz illustrate an extreme moment in history – a moment when the weaponless woman was completely at the mercy of men. But perhaps it was a moment, too, when women revealed how far the pre-war stereotype fell short. The men did not surrender their guns, and Woolf’s hope that the mind would triumph was perhaps overly optimistic. But, in 1940 and ’41, in fear of their lives, women demonstrated that they were cleverer, braver, angrier, more articulate, more enterprising, more robust and altogether more complex than even they themselves had ever guessed.
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Charles Graves, the historian of the Women’s Voluntary Service, saw the Blitz as the moment when the great organisation created by Lady Reading fulfilled its potential: ‘Here at last was the emergency for which WVS was originally formed.’ He quoted one of their volunteers who had narrowly escaped death after an explosion had flattened an entire terrace of houses – ‘I’m so glad,’ she said, ‘now we’ve had a real bomb to show that we have not wasted time on our practices.’ There were many more examples, such as the WVS canteen crew who sheltered under their vehicle while an aerodrome was being bombed, emerging ‘dusty but undaunted’ to serve hot drinks to the RAF; the fearless WVS bicycle messengers maintaining communications by pedal-power after an army telephone service was destroyed by a falling aircraft; or the indefatigable volunteer who from her own tiny kitchen fed a crowd of 1,200 bombed-out citizens in Barnes, west London. These dauntless ladies, who had once poured their surplus energies into baking macaroons for church teas, now gave their all to help casualties: distributing clothing, running Rest Centres for the homeless and support systems for ARP workers and, above all, serving tea and buns. ‘Tea became the common healer in all our disaster,’ wrote one reporter of the Blitz. It was served, not as before the war, in china cups with lemon, but watery and beige from an urn, in hefty mugs stained with tannin.
Most of the ‘tea-ladies’ didn’t make the headlines. One who did – Yorkshire farmer’s wife Eveline Cardwell – became a news sensation by single-handedly capturing a German airman who had baled out by parachute over her fields. She accosted the intruder, signed to him to put his hands in the air and surrender his pistol (which he did), before delivering him to the Local Defence Volunteers. (The incident may have provided the inspiration for the film version of Jan Struther’s pre-war Times column Mrs Miniver. In the American movie, Greer Garson finds a wounded German pilot in her back garden and gives him breakfast before, with superb cool, handing him over to the police.)
Heroines cheered everyone up, and Mrs Cardwell was promptly presented with the British Empire Medal amid a blaze of publicity, ‘pour encourager les autres’.
Throughout the Blitz, women plugged gaps left by absent men: as fire-watchers, ARP workers, first-aiders, ambulance drivers, police officers, messengers, transport, demolition and repair workers. At th
is point in the war there was, however, no question of women taking up arms against the invading enemy. Churchill was adamantly opposed to the idea of women with guns, which would have implied a failure on the part of his sex to protect them. The Blitz, however, overturned the rules obtaining to male chivalry. It exposed the idea that the ‘weaker sex’ could be protected by the ‘stronger’ as a cruel myth. Aerial bombardment does not discriminate. There were countless examples of husbands and so-called ‘protectors’, called to relatively safe postings in outlying counties, leaving wives and children vulnerable. Albert Powell from Lewisham was one, sent with the RAF to Yorkshire. ‘I was left in London in the front line with three children,’ recalled his wife, Margaret. The civilian death toll of women and children under sixteen was 33,135, 55 per cent of the total.
Phyllis Noble decided that the only way to get through being bombed was to live for the day. Lewisham, where the Noble family lived, was on the rat-run taken by German bombers coming in over the Kentish coast towards London; the train marshalling yards at nearby Hither Green station were a frequent target for their loads. However, the acute fear that Phyllis had felt a year earlier had abated, to be replaced by a spirit of adaptation to circumstances.
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