Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  Afterwards, when the euphoria had died down, she tried to weigh up her sensations. Normally terrified of heights, she was astonished to find herself unafraid. Above all, she reflected, that short hour in the air had given her a feeling of total liberty – ‘the extraordinary sensation of being free of earth – of exploring this new dimension, the sky – and the immense freedom of space, sunlight, cloud … sixty minutes of wonders’.

  Pip met airgunner Ron Atkinson at a dance in the sergeants’ mess. Ron was twenty-one, tall, grey-eyed with dark hair and a youthful moustache. His teasing forthrightness disarmed her, as he explained that he had had a drink too many, but would call a halt if she agreed to dance with him. The band was beating as they whirled on to the thronging floor:

  We fell in love – what else would we do?

  Soon after Ron asked her to marry him. But Pip wasn’t yet twenty; it was too soon to look to the future. She knew, too, how short the life expectancy was for aircrews. Overall in Bomber Command, 44 was third-highest in the roll call for casualties. She turned Ron down, and they quarrelled. Three days later she ran into him on her way to her shift. She recognised immediately from his battle-kit and the lucky charm dangling from his breast pocket that he was ‘on’ tonight. ‘Phyl – I’m so glad to have seen you … Phone me tomorrow afternoon in the Mess – I must talk to you … Listen out for me tonight, won’t you?’ And he was off for briefing – the target was Le Havre.

  Pip’s shift took her right through till dawn. It was a long night. The hours dragged as Pip waited and watched. In breaks, she eased her cramped limbs on the flat roof adjoining the watch office. Nothing was visible as she stared into the starless sky across the blacked-out expanse of Lincolnshire farmland. Somewhere in that dark and limitless vault Ron’s aircraft – ‘H-Harry’ – was still flying. ‘Of course it was.’ The mission was scheduled to return at 6 a.m. Towards dawn WAAFs and ground crew started to gather on the landing strip and on the control tower roof, watching out for the returning aircraft. One after another contact was made. Pip was logging, fighting her anxiety:

  No H-Harry yet. I began to get a cold, shrinking feeling in the pit of my stomach …

  By 8 a.m. they were all safely down – all except for H-Harry. Pip went off duty. As the new operators came on she hung back, willing his plane to appear, a spot in the white morning sky. But nothing. The tears came, and she ran for her billet. By afternoon all hope was gone.

  Losing Ron at the age of eighteen was Pip’s first experience of an air fatality. There would be many more. Though, as she herself said, ‘one recovers quickly’ at that age, she soon learned to live with sorrow. Working on a bomber base meant being in almost daily contact with the tragedy of young lives cut short. Pip Beck and her WAAF friends were giving their all professionally, but emotionally the constant presence of death drew on all their powers of female sympathy. ‘Men must work and women must weep’ ran the old song; but here at Waddington and at many other air bases, hospitals and service stations of all kinds across the country, women were working with barely time to wipe away the tears. And yet these girls’ identification with everything healing, caring and nurturing could not be so lightly discarded. Every day they were subjected to the men’s suffering. It plucked at their heart strings. One morning Pip observed a couple of aircrew limping back to their billet. One had his arm in a sling, another had his foot so heavily bandaged he could not walk without support. Indignant that they had not been provided with transport, she and her friend Rita impulsively sought out the men and offered to do what they could – ‘perhaps we could help by doing the odd bit of ironing, mending or washing for them some time? … Removing the creases from a shirt seemed little enough to do after what I’d seen that morning.’ Pip and Rita mothered their new friends Terry and Dick for a few weeks, until one morning the lads didn’t come back.

  In December the squadron’s wing commander was shot down. ‘We were all shocked by the news.’ Not long after that Pip was on duty in control one night when a ‘Darky’ call came across the R/T. The codeword ‘Darky’ meant that an aircraft was lost or urgently needed help. Pip did her best to talk the Wimpy down, while the crash crew were put on immediate alert. As the plane wheeled around out of control the crew was able to communicate that one engine was unserviceable. Pip spoke to them again. This time the voice that replied was high-pitched and frantic. Seconds later the Wimpy appeared low over the airfield and crashed with a spurt of flame beyond the runway.

  I felt shaken and sick. It had all happened in moments, and in that short space five young men had died in the smoking pyre of their aircraft; mine had been the last voice they had heard – would ever hear. I felt related to them in a strange hollow intimacy.

  In April ’42 six bombers from 44 Squadron took part in a daylight op over a diesel-engine factory at Augsburg. Pip knew all the pilots who took part in this fateful raid, but that day she was not on duty, so it was not till the following day that she heard of the dreadful toll it had taken. The entire camp was in shock: only one had returned safely:

  Thirty-five men missing – thirty-five empty bunks, thirty-five empty places at table … Many of us wondered if it was worth it.*

  Pip was far from being the only WAAF to lose her true love. One of the prettiest was eighteen-year-old Jean. Her boyfriend, Peter, was among the Rhodesian aircrew members. Jean had the sweetest singing voice too, and the other WAAFs would gather round the fire in the evenings as she crooned that year’s hit love song, ‘Not a Cloud in the Sky’:

  I looked in your eyes

  And then at the skies

  Darling you know what I saw:

  Not a cloud in the sky,

  Not an ache in my heart,

  Not a cloud in the sky,

  For I knew you were mine

  Right from the start …

  That spring Jean and Peter got married. Less than two months later he went on an op to Dusseldorf and didn’t come back. After that, though nobody saw her cry, Jean’s beautiful dark eyes took on the look of someone stunned. And she never sang again.

  But Pip was in love once more. The Rhodesians at Waddington were defiantly un-English, tough, bronzed and sexy, with informal manners and an air of having lived under wider horizons. Cecil was one of them, awaiting aircrew training. He had known Ron and comforted Pip after she lost him. At the next dance he singled her out, producing from somewhere a glass of champagne and sweeping her on to the floor amid a swirl of paper streamers and popping balloons. From then on, life became full of wonder. For her birthday he bought her a gold and turquoise ring, and the understanding grew between them that after the war they would be married. But Cecil’s training included being posted on lengthy courses; when he was away, her world lost its lustre, and the weeks dragged by. She lived for the times they could spend together. Their snatched dates glowed in the memory: dreamlike evenings in the dark of a cinema or the cosy anonymity of a Lyons Corner House, precious hours rescued from an imploding world.

  With Cecil away, Pip joined a choir formed by WAAFs and ground crew. With duties and choral rehearsals she was kept busy. A concert was arranged at the camp. Pip sang a solo of ‘The Eriskay Love Lilt’:

  When I’m lonely, dear white heart

  Black the night and wild the sea

  By love’s light, my foot finds

  The old pathway to thee.

  If only Cecil could have been there to hear her pour her love into the words. And then a letter arrived from him – he was about to go on leave. Overjoyed, Pip confided her excitement to Pattie, her motherly room-mate. Pattie listened in silence, before speaking:

  ‘Pip – I can’t stand it any longer, seeing you throw yourself away on him – I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you have to know – he is married.’

  I stared dumbly at Pattie. ‘It’s not true,’ I said. How could it be? ‘It is,’ she answered, more gently. ‘My friend Marjorie works in Accounts, and she told me some time ago. He does have a wife … Oh Pip, I am sorry.’<
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  How had he managed to deceive her? She wrote to him. There was no reply. Finally he arrived; one look told her it was true. ‘I didn’t want to lose you,’ he said. He wouldn’t take back his turquoise ring; she returned it to its box and put it away. ‘The dream was over.’

  Pip expected to feel heartbroken. It came as a surprise to experience, almost reluctantly, a different sensation – an unmistakable sense of freedom. ‘How could it all disappear like morning mist on the airfield? Well, it had.’

  And the death toll continued. One after another, friends, men she danced with, men she knew and other men she hardly knew at all set out and didn’t come back. She and her friends went on with their work, but the sadness built up, and one day it tipped over. It was at evening choir practice, when Joan – one of the more elegant and composed among the WAAFs – suddenly fled from the room crying. Pip’s best friend, Sally, ran out to comfort her, and soon they returned. But then it was her turn to collapse: ‘tears began to trickle from Sally’s face. She ran out.’ Pip followed her, and after a few minutes with Sally weeping uncontrollably on her shoulder, they went back to the rehearsal. But before long Pip herself broke down:

  A piercing sense of sadness flooded through me, causing my voice to break and my eyes to fill. Oh, God, what was the matter with us all! I too made for the corridor, where I sobbed my heart out.

  It was an isolated collapse. Very soon after Pip’s young spirits revived, as a new and heady relationship got under way with Mike, the Australian flying control officer – ‘I was deeply attracted to him.’

  For girls like Joan, Sally and Pip, war work in the WAAFs had an intoxicating, almost addictive quality. They were very young, very vulnerable; pitched out of their parental nests and left to fly on their own, they quickly discovered the euphoria of being airborne – literally, in Pip’s case. Wings – whether throbbing skywards on course for Berlin or Dusseldorf or jauntily affixed above the left breast pocket of a tanned and weather-beaten pilot – had the power to seduce and mesmerise. And when they fell in love (‘what else could we do?’) that world above the clouds was their world too. Emotionally, the WAAFs shared the turbulence and the dives; they skimmed the rooftops and they crash-landed. But the freedom, too, was theirs – for a space.

  Don’t Die for Me

  Some women, like Jean McFadyen, barely asked themselves what their war work was for. But most women in the forces accepted that their efforts were helping men to win the war by killing and hurting Britain’s aggressors in every way possible. Conscription, however, forced people to examine their attitudes. And some women came to the conclusion that killing and hurting was antithetical to their most deeply held beliefs.

  Frances Partridge’s small corner of Wiltshire stayed true to the pacifist cause. From 1939 to 1945 Ham Spray was like a little fortress occupied by dissenters reading the New Statesman. In fact, Frances, at forty-one, was not at risk from conscription, and her five-year-old son was one of 9 million children under fourteen who the government considered needed their mothers. Nevertheless, her stance against the war was an articulate and representative one. State-endorsed murder filled her with horror, fear and disgust. She and Ralph firmly believed that wars never lead to peace, but only to the next war, and that the only lesson to be learned from winning one was that superior force brings victory. Despite her servant Joan’s departure for the aircraft factory, Frances’s mind was constantly occupied with the challenge to her own intellectual position:

  As I clean basins, sweep stairs and dust tables, I often find my thoughts congealing into pacifist configurations, and wondering how so many intelligent people fail to accept the supporting arguments.

  She argued and agonised about the morality of her convictions – it was wrong and horrible, she conceded, to require other women’s sons to be killed in order to achieve a desirable life for oneself – but despite such qualms they were convictions that, throughout her long life, she never abandoned.

  Sheila Hails was born in 1915 and has lived through almost a century of war. Another unrepentant pacifist, she now finds herself forced to accept that she has signed up to a lost cause. ‘I’m still a pacifist, in my childish way, in fact I think I must almost have been born a pacifist, but pacifism never did win, never has won, never will win really.’ Sheila, buoyed up by her father’s support, was an eager intellectual who had come down from the north-east to take up a place at Newnham College, Cambridge. It opened up a whole new life to her – ‘My world just exploded.’ In 1940 she married her doctor boyfriend Philip Hugh-Jones and espoused pacifism with fervour:

  I cannot believe that grown men should be trained to kill one another, and then be sent out to do it. And I’m very sceptical about the way we go on about our ‘heroic’ young men who go out to die for their country. I think – well, they are professional soldiers, they are trained to be brutal. They could have chosen to leave, but they didn’t. So personally, I reserve judgement about our ‘gallant heroes’.

  I just find it quite unbelievable that governments think anything can be solved by war. There has got to be another way. But I’ve never been able to find out what that other way is.

  Around her in 1941 and ’42, other young women were ‘enlisting like mad’:

  I thought at the time: I’m not going to do anything about it, so I didn’t register, and I thought – when they get to me I’ll make my stand, go to prison if need be! But by the time they tracked me down I was heavily pregnant.

  Not all female conscientious objectors got off so lightly. Two hundred and fifty-seven such women were imprisoned during the Second World War. The first of these was a parlour maid from Newcastle-on-Tyne named Constance Bolam. As an ‘absolutionist’, she refused to undertake any kind of work that might release someone for active service. Her submission was treated with extraordinary contempt: ‘You must recognise that we on the Tribunal have some commonsense, and you have none,’ she was told. ‘It is no good talking rubbish to us like that.’ She was sentenced by the Newcastle magistrates to a month in Durham jail. The same chairman was quite public in his view that the women COs were bogus, that they were no better than deserters and had far less credibility than their male equivalents. There was abuse and scepticism about their claims. One woman was told she was a humbug. Another young woman – a hairdresser – must have doubted the seriousness of the cross-examining panel. Questioning her about her objection to taking life in any form, the panel pressed her: ‘Cannot you take insect life?’ ‘No,’ she replied. ‘And you a hairdresser!’ was the startling response.

  Other women were mercilessly harried by the authorities. Alice Stubbings, a Staffordshire woman, was directed to work as a hospital cleaner but objected on grounds of conscience. The police pursued her, imposing fines which, when they were not paid, were commuted to three months in prison. A nineteen-year-old Quaker, Mary Cockroft, made a conscientious objection to working in industry as it would aid the killing. She was fined £10 and directed to do war work. When she refused to go, the fine was increased to £20, plus a two-month prison sentence.

  It could reasonably be argued that, as pacifists, women are in no way distinct from men; certainly far more men were registered as COs, so it might appear that their consciences were more engaged than those of the women. But men had a great deal more to fear from active participation in the war, as well as a great deal more to object to. Thus, in a sense, the statement that a woman makes when she embraces pacifism is a stronger one than that of a man. The man who rejects war rejects the taking of human life, because he is personally implicated: in war he is expected to kill. But a woman has been exempted from the killing from the outset; society already regards her as fundamentally ‘pacific’. So her rejection of war may well be something more profound, in that she challenges the entire framework of violence constructed by men around her. Her conscientious objection goes beyond the objection to taking life and enters a realm of dissension from all violence and hostility perpetrated on her behalf. Her very passivity an
d impotence against the killing rouses her to declare: ‘Don’t fight for me. Don’t die for me. Don’t treat me as a victim.’

  Although only 1,072 women had appeared before tribunals by the end of the war, that figure bore little relation to the actual numbers of women COs. The Tribunals only saw women who had refused to work in a civil capacity; they didn’t see the large numbers of others who objected to conscription in the forces but reluctantly caved in and agreed to work on the land, industry or civil defence. As with the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, started forty years later by thirty-six protesters and a few children, radicals prepared to stand up and be counted are always less numerous than inarticulate sympathisers. It took boldness to make a stand, and on the whole women were not used to behaving defiantly in public; the artist Mary Fedden felt herself to be a coward for not sticking her neck out. ‘If I’d had the courage I think I’d have been a conscientious objector. But I was rather young … I went to court for several of my men friends and spoke up for them as conscientious objectors.’

  Greenham Common’s slogan was ‘Not In Our Name’ – again, a direct challenge to the idea that men go off to fight on behalf of the women and children they leave behind, who owe them gratitude. Sheila Hails would certainly have agreed with the debunking of the gallant hero myth, just as Frances Partridge saw no reason to acquiesce with militarism just because it was the official line.