Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  From chintz curtains to quilts, tables to teacups, every eau-de-nil interior in the land was a temple to that revered household deity, the British wife. And now her ritual objects lay scattered, exposed, broken. Could she ever be the same again?

  Resilience kicked in. When Hilde Marchant’s own flat was bombed, she was able to reflect ruefully on the fate of her possessions. She had many books, but she had read them all. Her clothes had gone, but by good fortune she had gone out wearing her fur coat, so that at least was saved. Her cupboard full of clippings, photographs and souvenirs was to be regretted – ‘but all that had been important was remembered’. She was able to retrieve only a sponge bag, a dressing gown, stockings, a blouse and a pair of shoes. As she packed them, she had an insight: ‘Really, the essentials of living were very few.’ Divested of all she held dear, all that had once contributed to her composite female identity, wartime woman was having to learn a new kind of survival.

  As the bombs smashed up the fabric of everyday life, so notions of property morphed and at times dissolved altogether. The scattering of belongings could seem like a gift from the gods. A woman working as a driver in London regarded perishable and damaged goods as fair game. She was called to help out at a bomb site which had once been the premises of a beautician; among all the muck and muddle and smashed beams, the demolition men salvaged some 200 boxes of high-quality face powder, ‘in good shades too’. They dug out the boxes with great eagerness, and it would have seemed churlish to refuse such largesse, just because the labels were stained.

  Social distinctions seemed equally irrelevant under the falling masonry and shrapnel. Sheila Hails was coming home from a dinner party when a raid began. ‘I took shelter under a porch, only to find there was already a man in this particular doorway; however we just crouched down and threw our arms around each other. At the time it just seemed ordinary … we sort of smiled at each other. He was a milkman I think.’

  What did it feel like to be faced with extinction? A nurse who survived being buried alive recalled how she began, slowly, to suffocate. Realising her end was near, she put her trust in Christ. ‘I was perfectly peaceful as I thought about death … [and] confident that very soon I would be in the presence of God.’ When rescuers arrived, she felt they had cheated her of her heavenly salvation.

  There are accounts, too, of a kind of euphoria experienced during air raids; it drew, perhaps, from that realisation noted by Hilde Marchant, that one could find happiness and meaning without the accretions of cutlery and furniture, and that just being alive was enough. Mass Observation interviewed a woman whose block was hit, with her underneath. Miraculously, this woman was almost unhurt, though the ceiling was collapsing above her. Streaked with plaster dust, she emerged into the street:

  ‘I’ve been bombed!’ I kept saying to myself … ‘I’ve been bombed! I’ve been bombed – me!’

  It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people must have been killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I experienced such pure and flawless happiness.

  Some bomb victims managed to draw from even deeper within themselves, finding wells of self-belief that transcended the fear of death. As Barbara Cartland said, war could bring moments of wonder, even glory. She cited the example of a friend of hers who was buried under the ruins of her house for five hours, trapped by her legs. At first she felt terror, and desperation to get free. Time passed, and rescue didn’t arrive.

  Suddenly my brain seemed to clear, and I knew that it was all unimportant. It didn’t matter – the shattered house, my imprisoned body – I was still there. I myself and alive, with a new sort of inward aliveness I can’t explain. It seems ridiculous to say it, but I was happy – happier than I’ve ever been in my life before.

  This woman seemed to be discovering autonomy for the first time. As they smashed up her home, was this sense of release, of ‘inward aliveness’, the truest kind of emancipation the bombs could bring?

  Nights of Fire

  Transcendent moments aside, there were few compensations for the danger and anxiety that were now an inevitable part of war on the home front. Everyday life for the majority of women was now becoming a question of endurance, of simply coping. As the Blitz became ‘normal’, the sense of shock abated, leaving them bored, passive, sickened, above all deeply tired.

  Throughout autumn 1940 twenty-four-year-old Anne Popham was writing to her artist lover, Graham Bell, who was training with the RAF in Blackpool. Graham, alienated and lonely among his new colleagues, was hungry for details of their ‘old’ life, but that life had changed; destruction had visited.

  In September Anne and her flatmate, Ruth, were bombed out of their Brunswick Square flat. They moved in with Anne’s brother in Islington; meanwhile, Ruth’s father was killed in a raid which destroyed the government office where he worked. Anne was an educated, aware young woman, but her letters aren’t about the progress of the war, the fight against Nazism, or even her hopes for the future. They dwell instead on the minutiae of how, one at a time, she got through the difficult, dreary days, with an immediacy which helps to show what life must have been like for thousands of independent women at that time:

  14th October 1940.

  Darling – I must say I am having a terrible time. Bombs have been raining down ever since I got home at about quarter to eight. It is only 9 now, but it has been whizz whizz whizz all the time. Even I feel quite alarmed & unhappy for several moments at a time as I am all alone … I suppose there has been nothing very near, as the house has rattled only twice, but there must have been over 15 whistles, and there are several fires, the guns going whang all the time making the shutters shake.

  23rd October.

  My dearest darling Graham … I dismantled our little home with the aid of the boys … I managed to get everything out but the jam jars, one pot of my marrow jam without a lid, some shredded wheat, & the bookcases … I spent the rest of Sunday as you can imagine. Sweeping. Putting down carpets. Lifting heavy weights, arranging rooms etc etc … trudge off in the miserable rain with a dusty headache to the bank and to re-direct letters at the Post Office. Raiders overhead, shut … Rang Ruth … Her father’s body hadn’t yet been found, as more debris had fallen …

  Ordered ½ ton of coke for the boiler 30/- down. Spent hours waiting in the Town Hall to register change of address &c … Came home & pushed furniture about again. Did a week’s washing up … Lay down utterly exhausted to rest my aching back, meaning to write to you any minute. Tris [her brother] had to wake me up to get me to go to bed.

  Darling I suppose you have made one of your vows not to write till you hear from me. I do hope you haven’t. I depend on your being better than me & I’m sure your life is easier …

  Very much love sweetheart.

  The everyday misery of war came home to many that autumn. A year in, the gnawing fear and apprehension that had accompanied the prospect of invasion had receded, to be replaced by the sheer weary difficulty of putting up with things. In 1940 women’s entire way of life was under aggressive assault. In the face of this, the average woman demonstrated the qualities of endurance and submission that had been bred into her sex over centuries. She was used to being a second-class citizen, used to being patient and passive. Seventy years ago most women felt that world events were something out of their control. War, and bombs, were foisted on them by men; they had no choice but to accept what they couldn’t challenge. Conversations with women who lived through the Second World War run to a refrain of stoical acceptance:

  ‘We all had miserable days … but we weren’t allowed to be miserable. It was a case of ‘Get on with it. You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.’

  ‘We were much more accepting in those days. We didn’t fight life like they do today.’

  ‘You just got on with your life, like … You had to live through it, and if you survived, well, good luck to you.’

  Living in Britain in 1940 meant enduring a barrage of hardships ranging from death, i
njury, bereavement, homelessness and poverty to lesser annoyances such as exhaustion, electricity cuts, high food prices, queues, shortages of eggs, kippers and Cutex nail varnish.

  ‘You just grin and bear it – that’s all you can do.’

  But such passivity was being put to the test as never before. This last comment came from a woman who survived one of the most horrifying nights of the war, 14 November 1940, the date of the Coventry Blitz. The catastrophe visited upon this small city was the pattern for the subsequent bombings of other compact town centres – Southampton, Birmingham, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Leicester, Bristol, Clydeside – all of which had the heart knocked out of their close-knit communities. The German strategy was to set fire to the city centre with incendiaries. Thirty thousand of these were dropped on Coventry that night. Guided by the blaze, whose light could be seen from the south of England, heavy bombers then gutted what was left at a rate of at least one bomb every minute for over ten hours, pulverising the medieval centre, including Coventry’s beautiful cathedral.

  It is now estimated that up to a thousand people may have lost their lives that night; more than 1,200 were seriously wounded. In Coventry and Warwickshire hospital matron Joyce Burton and sister Emma Horne drew on all their reserves of courage and training to maintain morale and care not only for their existing patients but also for the numerous wounded and dying citizens brought in by ambulance during the course of that terrifying night. The sick were in danger from fire, flying glass and debris; the nurses had to move these people out of harm’s way, placing them on mattresses under the beds and protecting them from flying fragments with bowls placed over their heads. They reassured and comforted them. Casualties were arriving every few minutes; often, they were firemen injured and burned by incendiaries, many with scalding shrapnel buried in their flesh. For the dying, morphia was administered. By a miracle, the nurses’ home had just been completely evacuated, minutes before a high-explosive bomb reduced it to ruins. Bombs shattered the water mains, and nothing could be sterilised with boiling water; in the middle of the night the emergency generator failed, and doctors had to operate by battery lights. Smashed windows let in the chill winter air, and the dead lay among the dying. Without exception, everyone in that hospital worked through till the all-clear, and – that November night – every member of staff survived.

  Joan Kelsall still lives in Coventry in a modest but cosy semi-detached house not far from the M6 motorway. In 1940 she was nineteen, living with her family near the city centre, with a good job working at the Scotch Wool and Hosiery store. Her memories of 14 November are more typical:

  It was a bright moonlight night. The sirens went off. They’d been going off for quite a while. ‘It can’t be anything,’ we thought. Then all of a sudden we heard this awful drone, so of course we just got straight out of the house into the shelter. And that bombing didn’t stop till it got daylight. It was one continual drone, and bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp. But it never entered my head that I might die.

  In the morning I got up, and the smell was dreadful – burning wood and everything – we were only ten minutes out of the town centre, and just up the road was the Daimler factory, which was a target. ‘Well,’ I said to Mother, ‘I’ll have to go to work,’ not realising how bad it was, so I got my bike out and got as far as Bishop Street, and I couldn’t get any further. There were firemen and hosepipes everywhere, and the wardens wouldn’t let you through … It was then it dawned on me. The city was flattened – there was just nothing left. And I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve lost me job.’ So I came home. And the familiar area I’d grown up in had just all gone … But our house had been spared. There were people wandering around – and there was no water on, so they were all trying to get water from somewhere. They looked dazed. But they didn’t moan a lot; you know, it was amazing how cheerful people were. I think they thought, you know, ‘We’ve got to get on with it.’ There was police and the WVS giving them assistance, with canteens and so on.

  But I started to cry – ‘I haven’t got a job! I’ve lost me job!’ I was only a teenager. And me mother was very cross. ‘You’ve got your life,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about your job.’

  The citizens of Coventry picked their way among the remains of their city, each with their own tragedy to deal with. Alma Merritt and her family broke out of their shelter; heat had warped the structure and they had to get free with a mallet. ‘We came out to find our home had gone.’ Twenty-one-year-old Alma went to her job at the Gas Department, but most of her office block was destroyed. ‘I walked into the city centre. In the Cathedral the heaps of stones were still steaming. I don’t remember eating at all that day.’ Joyce Hoffman’s family escaped from the cellar of their burning house and found safety in a public shelter. They emerged next day to find their home a shell, everything they possessed destroyed. ‘All we had were the clothes we were wearing, and my mum and gran had their handbags.’ The Wall family were forbidden from taking their dog Skip into the shelter by an over-zealous ARP; poor Skip was tied to a lamp-post outside, never to be seen again.

  Eight miles away to the west, Clara Milburn arose after a sleepless night and listened to the radio reports of the destruction over breakfast. She had lain awake in the shelter, listening to the bombardment. The sound – ‘like old sheets being ripped up’ according to one woman quaking in her Stratford shelter – could be heard across the Midlands. ‘I feel numb with the pain of it all,’ wrote Mrs Milburn. Shocked and dispossessed people from the city were making their way to the country villages. Clara immediately offered up her spare rooms and donated rugs and deckchairs to the ‘trekkers’ who had straggled out to Balsall Common.

  Atrocity on this scale left the habitually gentle sex struggling to express their sense of violation. Where a man might react to massacres inflicted by such raids through physical reprisals, women were often left helplessly venting their fear, grief and sense of wrong. ‘I coped by getting angry,’ says Joan Kelsall. ‘You sort of think to yourself, “I’ll get them,” and that helps you through.’

  Rage against all things German spilled out in some cases into an intensely ‘unfeminine’ hatred. Cora Styles was sixteen when a piece of red-hot shrapnel whistled three inches from her head and nearly killed her. To this day she feels Germans are the enemy. ‘Perhaps this is a terrible thing to say, but I HATE the Germans. GOD, I hate the Germans. I said then, if I get my hands on a German I’ll … I’ll batter him with a saucepan!’

  Marguerite Patten reserves her saucepans for the kitchen, but also still finds it hard to temper her profound sense of outrage:

  People were terribly killed. I defy anybody not to feel hatred. My God, we thought, let us get up and at them … I agree with my husband who used to say, ‘The only good German is a dead German.’ Oh, yes, we DID hate them. And it wasn’t hatred of the actual pilot who did it, it was hatred of the people who organised them … Oh, yes, definitely – we hated, hated, hated them.

  Mrs Milburn went out into her garden and exterminated the pests, meting out a horrible revenge on the vermin that killed her vegetables:

  I kill all the wireworms, calling them first Hitler, then Goering, Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Himmler. One by one they are destroyed, having eaten the life out of some living thing, and so they pay the penalty.

  A Bristol woman working in an aircraft factory told herself that every rivet she hammered into a Spitfire was another nail in Hitler’s coffin; in one week she broke three hammers. In such reactions one can begin to see the breakdown and collapse of familiar models of womanhood. Tender-hearted passivity and stoicism had their limits; stress found outlets where it could.

  *

  Hatred, anger, aggression: by 1940 the stereotype of the soothing, neutral, deferential woman was starting to erode. The constant nearness of death awakened violent passions, emotional and physical.

  The aphrodisiac effect of war on men has often been commented on, brought about by a combination of frustration, excitement and a subconscious desire, perh
aps, to compensate for loss of life through the regenerative urge. But women were also touched with a heady mix of impulses: elation, tenderness, impetuosity, arousal. By the time the Blitz started Joan Wyndham had fallen decisively for gorgeous Rupert Darrow, who, with his dark hair, aquiline nose and all-over tan blended the looks of a Hebrew king and those of a Greek god (‘bronzed all over … Oh boy, oh boy!’), though her decisiveness failed her when it came to losing her virginity. Rupert was very persuasive:

  ‘Would you rather I raped you in the proper he-man fashion, or will you tell me when you’re ready?’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  … Inside me I could feel every moral code I had ever believed in since childhood begin to crumble away …

  Eventually, following much discussion of cocks, orgasms and contraceptives, Joan made her decision sitting in an air-raid shelter with the London streets on fire around her. The flashes, booms and flaming skies had ignited her desires. ‘The bombs are lovely, I think it is all thrilling,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Nevertheless, as the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow.’ That night 430 people were killed, and 1,600 injured. The following day it was Sunday and Joan put on her best black-and-white checked trousers and went to church. Afterwards she went to Rupert’s studio in Redcliffe Road and they had lunch. The hour was approaching. In the event, Joan’s deflowering was an anti-climax, for her anyway: it combined unpleasant pain with a sense of disappointment and the absurdity of the whole thing. Afterwards, exhausted with stress and over-excitement, she slept through a heavy air raid. Two nights later Redcliffe Road was hit. Joan raced round, faint with fear. Number 34 had caught it. Partly crushed beneath blocks of collapsed wall, the very bed on which she had been seduced hung over the street, balanced precariously on the remains of Rupert’s bedroom floor. Blindly she fled to search for him; could he have gone to her studio? There, propped on the landing, was a note from him, along with his guitar, his cat (in a basket) and his gas-mask. He had, it turned out, been saved by pure luck, having chosen the very moment when the bomb went off to go to the shelter and borrow sixpence for the gas meter. Days later, Joan was still delirious with relief at Rupert’s narrow escape – ‘It took that bomb on number 34 to make me realise how much I love him … this is the happiest time of my life.’