Mary Wesley’s wartime novels such as The Camomile Lawn (1984) give form to her stated view that ‘war is very erotic, people had love affairs they would not otherwise have had.’ In 1940 the then Mary Swinfen, married to Charles Eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen, was doing just that with an exiled Czech politician, a British soldier and an attractive Jewish-French barrister who had escaped from the Nazi invasion of France. There were to be many others – pilots, paratroopers, officers, commandos, French, Poles, Americans, flames old and new. For women like Mary, with the audacity to disobey the rules, there seemed nothing to be lost. ‘We had been brought up so repressed,’ wrote Wesley. ‘War freed us. We felt that if we didn’t do it now, we might never get another chance.’ Being a passive, docile instrument of men’s desires was not Mary’s style; the shriek of bombs released explosive energies in her.
With death raining down, sex was a way to challenge extinction. Phyllis Noble noticed that the Blitz had reinvigorated her parents’ sex life – she could hardly fail to, walking in from work one day to find them making love in the sitting room armchair in broad daylight. In the London Underground shelters, one might catch an occasional glimpse of a couple having intercourse in the darker recesses beyond the tracks. ‘I had seen a couple locked together during the most terrible bombing, absolutely oblivious of anything except each other,’ remembered Frances Faviell. At moments of the most terrible bombing, expressing love physically was an act of defiance against the ruptured bones, the crushed guts – the living urgency of sex a kind of triumph over the gory imperatives of war. The available evidence suggests that fear, loss and destruction seem (to some extent) to have precipitated the sexual liberation of both men and women. Compared to the years before the war, in 1939–45 more women were having sex both before marriage and with men other than their husbands, more of them were contracting sexually transmitted diseases, more were using contraceptives, and women’s knowledge of the facts of life increased. The divorce rate also increased at this time.
The extremes of Blitzkrieg exploded our cities, our factories and our infrastructure. Now, as violent death sabotaged family life, as everything dear and familiar to women was smashed to tatters and fragments, it was exploding the sexual contract.
4 ‘Ready to Win the War’
White Alert
The unwritten contract between men and women was questioned as never before in 1941. That year, British civilians continued to endure intense bombing raids, while their forces were beleaguered in the Balkans, North Africa and the Atlantic. It was during these dark days that people began to see that the war could not be won without the active involvement of women.
Most histories of the Second World War trace its narrative from conflict to conflict. The timeline of 1941 pinpoints naval losses, the escalating North African campaign, sea battles off Greece, the evacuation of Crete. This is history experienced by men. For most women it was a different story.
In the summer of 1941 Kaye Bastin’s husband was thousands of miles away, and she was pregnant. Born Kathleen Emery in 1921, she, like so many girls of her generation, had grown up believing that she had no opportunities in the world. Though middle-class, her family had lost money in the Depression. One-time owners of a hotel outside Brighton, the Emerys were reduced to living in three rooms above a sweetshop. The best cards in Kaye’s hand were her looks and her educated speaking voice. A personable blonde with a tidy taste in clothes, she was also intelligent and straightforward in manner. But she was forced to leave school at fourteen, and life lacked promise:
I had no ambitions. I just got on with what I had to do. I never thought I’d get married, because we hadn’t any money.
Kaye got a job in the accountancy office of Plum & Roddis’s department store in Brighton. On seventeen shillings a week she could afford to go dancing with a girlfriend, so long as she did her own dressmaking and never went to the hairdresser. Nothing in this limited life had given her any foretaste of the licence and self-determination that war would bring with it. That summer, from the window of her office overlooking the coast, Kaye was able to watch dogfights between German bombers and Spitfires launched from RAF Tangmere just twenty-five miles away. In August 100 Stukas dive-bombed the airbase, flattening it and killing twenty people. Brian Bastin, a ground-based engineer with the RAF, was one of those who had a narrow escape; that night he slept in the fields. A few months later Kaye and Brian met on the dance floor:
They had a ‘Paul Jones’ – you know, when the music stops the boys keep moving, and you get a change of partner. But Brian wasn’t dancing, he was hiding behind a pillar – and he came forward and took me. And that’s how I met my husband-to-be.
Afterwards, he asked if he could walk me home, and he saved my life. He had heard some German aircraft unloading their spare bombs. He grabbed me, and pushed me against the wall.
Kaye found Brian irresistible. Not only was he her saviour, but he also turned out to be musical and well educated. And as if that weren’t enough, Brian Bastin had the dash and glamorous good looks of a young Clark Gable, pencil moustache and all. The pair got married in April 1941. Kaye was twenty.
The wedding was a very simple affair. I had a piece of nice blue material and a friend made up my dress for me, with a hat to match. And it was lovely, getting married.
Afterwards we were going to live in Rustington, near where Brian was stationed. Well, on our wedding night there was bombing. And we hadn’t gone to the shelter – one didn’t, always – and the ceiling fell in on our bed, the first night.
But then we were together, and we enjoyed being with each other so much, and that was the main thing.
The idyll was all too brief. Four months after Kaye’s wedding, the RAF posted her perfect young husband to South Africa for pilot training; he was away for the birth of his daughter and was not to return for another three years.
*
War for the majority at home, like Kaye, meant waiting, enduring and more waiting. It meant managing, coping and doing without. At the lower end of the social scale, there might be considerable hardship, since ordinary soldiers were expected to support their wives out of their pay. Until 1944, the wife of a private with two children could receive as little as twenty-five shillings a week.* In 1941 shortages of food and consumer goods started to penetrate daily life. War was often dangerous and frightening – women were more likely to be the victims of domestic air raids than their menfolk, stationed abroad – but it was also depressing, gruelling and tedious.
Feeling useful was not enough; even vital functions like ARP work (one in six ARP wardens was female) were boring and wearisome, until an alert sounded. Keen to do her bit for the war effort, and lying that she was really eighteen, Pip Beck joined the ARP Report and Control Centre in Buckingham, where she soon became familiar with the various levels of alert: white for no enemy activity, yellow for ‘a precautionary state’, purple for ‘prospect of enemy aircraft’, and red for ‘imminent attack: sirens to be sounded’. She was also trained to operate telephones and take important messages. ‘We never had to put our skills to the test though.’ The rota required her to show up once a week at the centre, but once there, there was little to do apart from gossip round the fire with the other wardens. Pip – mainly, at this time, preoccupied with her love life – did her embroidery, while Miss Southerden, her partner, knitted. They sipped Horlicks and ate biscuits. In two hours the phone rang three times – all ‘purples’. The high point of Pip’s ARP career was when a ‘red’ came through and Pip was allowed to sound the siren. ‘No bombs fell though.’
Essentially – though this would soon change – most women were still passive: they were the bystanders, not the players; the victims, not the perpetrators.
In The People’s War (1969), his comprehensive social history of the home front, Angus Calder describes the public mood at the beginning of 1941. Government directives to stay at home, wear white in the blackout, carry gas-masks, save for victory and so on were increasingly being shunned.
The British were growing grumpy and dispirited. A year after the German invasion of northern Europe, fewer people in Britain were interested in the bigger picture of the war beyond our shores. Women in particular had little mental space to do other than carry on, as arduous day followed arduous day. A survey taken by Mass Observation at that time also showed that the people whose lives were most directly affected by bombs were those who were least interested in the macro events of the war.
Mass Observation offered the case-history of a sailor’s wife in Plymouth who in March 1941 had been blitzed out of her home in a working-class area. This woman’s husband was at sea. One of her three small children had been killed, another slightly injured, and she had no money. Before the family could even eat she had to find a feeding centre. Her next problem was shelter. The principal rest centre had been destroyed by bombs, so she made her way to another and left her children there, but more bureaucratic hurdles would have to be surmounted before she could find long-term accommodation. Then she had to get new ration books for her family and somehow find clothes for them. Next she had problems dealing with the dead child; the body had to be found, the death reported. And what about her belongings, now buried beneath rubble? She applied to the Assistance Board for compensation, to the Mayor’s Relief Fund for a cash advance and to the local office for new identity cards. The children would need new gas-masks … Small wonder if this grief-stricken young wife, with all the troubles of the world laden upon her narrow shoulders, took little interest in the Battle of Keren in Eritrea, despite its decisive impact on Mussolini’s East African forces, or paused to consider the effect the Belgrade–Berlin negotiations might have on Hitler’s advance in the Balkans.
Even if you weren’t blitzed and bereaved, mundane things loomed large: ‘Sometimes it is the small irritations of a war which irk the most,’ remembered Helen Forrester. Barbara Cartland put in a plea for her kind: ‘Women who once had six servants now cleaned and cooked and looked after their own children … Try to run a home without saucepans, frying-pans, dishcloths, floorcloths, toilet paper, brushes, vim, fuel of any sort, and, of course, soap! We never had enough.’
Morale was low. As often as not in those dreary days, housewife Nella Last reached for the ‘off’ button – ‘the wireless was dreadful.’ Nella’s diaries from the early months of that year give a picture of how cheerless and crushing life could be, as absences, shortages, unhappiness and fear worked their harm on her community. She wrote of her distress prompted by the sight of a young woman who came into her WVS Centre; this girl’s soldier husband was going abroad for two years. ‘Today her beauty was clouded and dimmed … My heart ached so for her, and for all the other unhappy girls like her.’ A few days later she tells of an encounter with Ruth, another young friend; this time the topic was what to do if the Germans won. Women would be at obvious risk from the victors, but Ruth was calm. She always carried a razor-blade, and would not hesitate to open her veins ‘if the worst came to the worst’. ‘A shadow seemed to fall on my heart as fresh problems rose in my mind, and a pity for mothers of girls crowded out the feeling I always have for mothers of boys.’ Musing, Nella got on with her tasks. But on 14 February Nella was worrying again, this time about famine: the men were too busy killing each other to farm, or fish – ‘such senseless, useless waste … so wrong and twisted’.
*
In London that spring, there was at last a lull in the bombing. Frances Faviell (now Parker) went to the hairdresser to have her short unruly hair permed. There had been no call for perms during the worst of the bombing, for who would want to be caught with their hair stuck in a waving machine when the sirens went off? There were celebrations, too, when Anne, the daughter of Frances’s upstairs neighbour Kathleen Marshman, married Cecil, a good-looking Canadian soldier. Then, just before Easter, Frances found that she was pregnant: no more FAP duties for her. ‘Yes, we all felt cheerful!’
On 16 April Anne and Cecil returned from their honeymoon in the Midlands, radiant and in love. At nine o’clock that night – ‘to our astonishment’ – the sirens went.
That night 685 German bombers attacked London; as the furious noise doubled and redoubled the Parkers took shelter in the ground-floor dining room, which had one wall of reinforced concrete. Frances telephoned Kathleen upstairs, but she declined their offer of a safe corner; as for Anne and Cecil, the only place they wanted to be was their own bed upstairs. Bombs were raining down; flares and shells lit the sky. That night, one of the worst of the entire Blitz, over 1,000 people were killed. And at 11 p.m. a parachute mine reduced 33 Cheyne Place to an enormous pile of rubble and debris.
Underneath it, protected by their ferro-concrete wall, Richard, Frances, their unborn child and Vicki the dachshund survived. They were unhurt and they were homeless. But Kathleen and the newlyweds Anne and Cecil died sickeningly pointless deaths.
*
Barrow-in-Furness had so far been spared. Nella Last’s reflections at this point in the war are worth quoting fully:
I’m tired to my soul-case tonight …
So much dying: family unity, peace to live one’s own life, the ordinary decencies of everyday life, hopes and ambitions, aims and endeavours. It gives me a fear of the future sometimes, a fear of the aftermath of things, and a wonder about how all the boys and men that are left will begin again. Women are different – as long as there are babies to tend and care for and hungry, tired men to feed and tend, a woman will be a woman, and make a wee corner into a home. It’s the men I think of.
Nella Last’s view that tending, caring and feeding were women’s natural role was one shared by the authorities. But there were still plenty of women who lacked hungry babies or weary husbands. Their capacities extended beyond the homely embellishment of wee corners. Over the course of the war women’s responsibilities ranged from driving three-ton trucks to operating anti-aircraft batteries, from spying to code-breaking, from engineering to ship-building. And yet the conviction that ‘a woman will be a woman’ – that women were essentially handmaidens, auxiliaries, a back-up force – ran very deep.
Nella’s own town was heavily bombed in May 1941. She and her husband cowered in the indoor shelter as plaster showered around them, thinking their last hour had come. After the all-clear she emerged to view the damage: ‘My loved little house … will never be the same again.’
Red Alert
War has its own imperatives. It was beginning to dawn on the government that enormous numbers of servicemen who ought to be out there fighting for King and country were tied to desk jobs and petty duties. This posed a knotty problem.
The requirements of the army seemed bottomless. That year, the army was calling for another 1.75 million men. Meeting this demand meant raiding the factories for army recruits and yet, to equip this number of soldiers, the munitions industries would have to expand by an extra 1.5 million workers. The sums just didn’t add up. Where were these recruits and workers to come from? The Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, was a keen advocate of the voluntary principle. But now, reluctantly, the government was forced to accept the only logical solution: women would have to make up the shortfall, and compulsion was the only answer.
This decision would quickly affect the lives of every available woman in the country between the ages of eighteen and fifty. Early in 1941 Bevin proposed to start the registration of women aged twenty and twenty-one, who, provided they were not pregnant and had no children under fourteen living at home, would be regarded as ‘mobile’ and eligible for direction into ‘essential’ work. By the end of the year women up to the age of thirty would be required to register.
What, swap fur coats for overalls? Bevin’s task is to persuade women to accept conscription.
Bevin’s hand was forced to make this Essential Work Order, but his heart was not in the legislation, and he continued to appeal for volunteers. Uncertainty sharpened the inevitable controversy over women’s conscription. ‘We all feel very strongly,’ wrote a soldier to the Daily Sketch, �
�against the conscription of our wives and sweethearts, who are the very people we are fighting to protect from Nazism and all it stands for.’ The Labour Party conference came down against the measures, with one MP claiming that servicemen felt ‘tremendous resentment about the women left behind in the home being turned out to do tasks for which they were not fitted’. In any case, how could women be turned into industrial workers overnight? Serious social problems would surely result, wreaking havoc on our national life.
The controversy struck at the very heart of the relationship between the sexes. The effect of women’s conscription on men in the services abroad was only part of it. The army had a sleazy reputation; parents, fearful that their daughters would be seen as ‘camp followers’, needed reassurances that their virtue would be carefully safeguarded. Images of housewife snipers and grannies with machine-guns haunted the public consciousness. Surely a woman couldn’t be expected to kill Germans, like a man? To counter this, a clause was carefully drafted into the Act: ‘No woman should be liable to make use of a lethal weapon unless she signifies in writing her willingness to undertake such service.’ Feminists, meanwhile, welcomed the measures – women’s energies had been wasted long enough; it was time to put them to work. But other worries surfaced. Would there be a conscience clause for pacifists? (There would.) Some concerns were the precursors of perennially familiar themes, such as: how would working wives cope with housework, shopping, children, elderly relatives? And after their taste of life in the services, would conscripted women willingly return to their primary job – in the home?
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